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“Because he is so bland and dispassionate, [his] exponential progress strikes some as sinister; it seems like self-aware artificial intelligence. ‘Crosby sucks’ is chanted in Philadelphia, Washington, and New York even when those teams aren’t playing Pittsburgh. Most everywhere else he is simply booed. Being so young, so good, and so equanimous has made it difficult for Crosby to appear fully human.”
Kent Russell, “Sid/Ovie,” n+1, 2011
**
Even before he played his first NHL game, Ilya expected his career would involve bearing the brunt of some dislike. Hockey was entertainment, a spectacle; somebody had to play the heel. He didn’t mind that. He’d been hated plenty at home, by other boys who resented him for always beating them, as if it were his fault that he was talented and they weren’t, or for having Svetlana’s attention when they wanted it, as if she would have bothered with them anyway. Eventually, he’d started inviting it, needling and provoking just to see what would happen, and that reputation had arrived in North America before him. He could ham it up, play the bad Russian, if that’s what people wanted. Vitriol from a crowd was better than silence.
He expected also to be contrasted with Hollander from the start, and he was, but he thought that meant that Hollander would be the universal golden boy. He didn’t expect people to dislike Hollander. There was nothing to dislike about Hollander. He was good, extremely good, the kind of good that made grown men treat a teenager like some kind of cross between a god and a sacrificial animal, but he wasn’t like Ilya. Other players looked at Ilya’s success and sensed that he didn’t deserve it. They saw the part of himself he hadn’t given to hockey and wanted to tear it out of him with their teeth, but Hollander did give all of himself. That was obvious. No one worked harder than him. In public, he was unfailingly humble and personally unremarkable to the point of blandness, and perfect with the press, a master of the fine Canadian art of flatly and politely communicating jack shit. He didn’t even appear to have any idea how handsome he was. Hollander the player was a smooth surface on which it was hard for Ilya to believe any real animosity could find purchase.
In the locker room after a narrow loss to Montreal in Boston where Hollander had scored in OT, Burdick came up and slung his arm around Ilya’s shoulder, still smelling of the game.
“Do you think he fucks like that too?” he said, too loudly for how close he was to Ilya’s ear.
“Who fucks like what?” Ilya was only half paying attention. He looked back down at his phone, where his last text to Hollander, lucky shot, still sat with no reply.
Burdick moved his hips in a mechanical thrusting motion, his face set into a blank thousand-yard stare. He only managed it for a second or two before he couldn’t continue and broke into laughter.
“Then he tells the girl ‘good game,’” Linsky added. Half the room was laughing. For a long moment, Ilya had no idea who they were talking about. He’d seen Hollander have sex. The image of tears clinging to his dark eyelashes as he opened his eyes, pupils dilated in the half-lit room, his body relaxed and open because Ilya had opened it, felt so fundamental that anything else was hard to picture. It occurred to him belatedly that Burdick might be trying to accuse Hollander of being gay, but no, that didn't make any sense. Anyway, for all Ilya knew, Hollander was just as beautiful and blissed-out when he fucked girls. If he fucked girls. Ilya didn’t know.
Hollander’s reply pinged in on his phone. Yeah, well, I’m a lucky guy.
Even when fans hated Ilya, they usually didn’t hate Ilya. They enjoyed him, for what Ilya imagined were some of the same reasons Hollander enjoyed him so much in private— getting recreationally pissed off made people feel alive. Ilya encouraged it. When people hated Hollander, though, it often seemed unrelated to what Hollander was actually doing, and there was an undercurrent of dismissiveness to it, of pettiness that baffled Ilya. He understood why they booed him in Boston, but beyond that, why?
Canadian hockey players were supposed to be boring. Everyone said so. Hollander showed up, played the game with complete focus and selflessness, responded to no provocation, and gave the press absolutely nothing. He was doing exactly what he was supposed to do.
“Fucking son of a bitch! At least look like you’re fucking trying,” a man in a reflective vest slurred at the television in a bar in Southie that Marlow had dragged Ilya to. On the screen, Hollander skated in a wide arc while the commentator said something along the lines of this guy is a stone-cold machine.
It wasn’t like Hollander never expressed anything. Sometimes, after he scored a goal, he’d do an understated little hop that was downright adorable. If you got very lucky, he might make a mistake when he was frustrated. He did smile.
“Someday, you’ll get that bastard to throw a punch and give away that he has actual feelings,” Marly said.
Ilya made a face. “I have better things to do than care about Hollander’s boring feelings.”
As soon as Ilya could get him behind a closed door, Hollander gave away every feeling that he had. He whined, he argued, he moaned, he blushed. He laughed. When Ilya pushed him, he moved. Lately, Ilya had been nursing a shameful, perverted little desire to see if he could make him cry, really cry. They were texting more and more, nearly every day, mostly dirty stuff but also little comments like the weather in Chicago is gross or I hate team flights. Nothing too real. Both of them knew better than that.
He and Svetlana had been in an on period for a while, sexually, but now they were off again. They did see each other semi-regularly, but they mostly weren’t fucking. He didn’t tell her this, but there were days when he was so grateful for her he wanted to weep. It was a relief to be able to speak Russian with her, to fall back into their casual shorthand. Without her, he sometimes felt as if his childhood had not really happened, or that if it had, it had been witnessed, like a crime, by nobody but him.
There had been a time during their teenage years when this sense of shared experience had convinced him that he was in love with her, or at least that one day he would be, but that in-loveness, whatever it was supposed to feel like, had eluded them. They were too alike, too enmeshed from too young an age to really fascinate each other, not in that way. Once, Svetlana had told him that having sex with him basically felt like masturbating. They still had time, he supposed, to wake up one day and decide they were in love after all, but it was feeling more unlikely every day.
At her place in Boston, Ilya had once found a pair of women’s underwear in a style Svetlana never wore bunched up in her sheets. He didn’t bring it up. He wasn’t sure why he didn’t. He was certain she knew about him, and probably she knew that he knew about her, but there was an unspoken rule that kept them from ever talking about it directly. She would take him to clubs that he definitely should not have been at and be sure to be seen clinging to him and kissing him by as many people as possible before making herself scarce at just the right moment, and then in the morning they would meet back up for coffee and pretend she had not done that. He had almost said something once or twice, half in her lap on his couch, staring a hole into the television screen, thinking okay, so, I am and you are, but he didn’t want to be the one who broke first.
Anyway, they rarely talked about things that mattered. Somewhere along the line, they’d developed the same allergy to heaviness.
“Let’s go out, Ilyukha,” she would say, whenever the conversation got too dangerous. “What do you think of this dress with this belt?”
She liked Hollander, for some reason. Kept insisting on talking about what a good player Hollander was, just to annoy him.
“Hollander is boring,” he would say.
“Hollander is consistent,” she would reply, rolling her eyes.
He’d make a raspberry noise with his tongue. “‘Consistent’ is another word for ‘boring.’”
Usually, this was when she sighed and said, “Let’s go out.”
Hollander was consistent. He always wore the same brand of socks. No matter where he was sleeping, he used the bedside table on the lefthand side. He was the only person Ilya had ever met who folded his clothes before sex. The first time he saw Hollander’s image on a billboard, dressed up to make some new expensive watch look masculine and sexy, he thought of how uncomfortable Hollander must have been, not knowing exactly what he was expected to do, having his hair touched by strangers, and he sympathized at the same time that it made his dick hard. It was almost like missing him.
“I heard his tiger mom goes with him everywhere.” Linsky again, on the bus, early in the morning when Ilya just wanted to fucking sleep.
Somebody shoved Linsky into Ilya. “Dude, you can’t say that.”
“What is this, ‘tiger mom’?” Ilya asked, not bothering to open his eyes. He was pretty sure he had seen both of Hollander’s parents on multiple occasions, but nobody ever brought up Hollander’s father, who seemed to be so nondescript he was almost invisible.
“You know, she’s like, all over him,” Linsky said.
“Okay.” Ilya frowned. “Your mother is always at games.”
Ilya did not like Linsky, who had spent the first six months they’d known each other trying to make him say lines from Rocky IV, because of his accent. Linsky was from Boston; his own accent could be impenetrable, and his explanations always seemed to make things more confusing, not less. Ilya often felt that conversations with Linsky were not something he was participating in but something that was happening to him. His laugh reminded Ilya of a barking dog.
“Good that Hollander has mother who loves him,” Ilya said, settling back into his seat. “To comfort him when we win.”
“Fuck yeah, Rozy.” Linsky punched him on the arm. Ilya felt vaguely guilty, but it wasn’t his job to defend Hollander. He didn’t really like Hollander. All things considered, he barely even knew Hollander.
It was clear Hollander was close to his parents, if the way he assumed Ilya must be close to his own family was any indication. Ilya didn’t ask him about it. He’d made that a rule for himself. There were other rules, too, of course. Don’t fall asleep at his place. It’s okay to kiss him after your shoes are on, but not after your coat is on. He knew how to keep it casual.
Once, Hollander had referred to his family in passing as pretty westernized. Hollander, who had been born in Canada to a mother who’d immigrated at five years old from a place a good ten thousand kilometers from Moscow, had nothing in common with him. Still, Ilya found himself in bed, still naked while Hollander pulled on his sweatshirt, thinking, okay, so, I am and you are. It made him feel crazy.
“You okay?” Hollander asked when his head emerged, his hair mussed and staticky. He had a very irritating tendency to ask this exactly when Ilya did not want him to.
Ilya made a show of surveying him. “Your face is still a little red. Maybe next time, we go easier.”
Hollander blushed. “Whatever.”
“I’m just saying, if I slap you as hard as you are asking me to slap you, it might bruise. There is limit, yes?“
“Fuck off.” Hollander sat down to tie his shoes. “Probably. Shut up.”
This was the easy part. Ilya poked at Hollander, teased him, exposed Hollander’s desire, while Hollander performed indignation or reticence. There was a playfulness to Hollander that Ilya never would have thought to imagine, and it made Ilya feel like a live wire.
In Montreal, it went without saying, Hollander was king, but in Philadelphia, they hated him almost as much as they hated Ilya. New York and San Francisco, about the same. In Ottawa, they were fond of him in spite of themselves. Despised him in Toronto. Burned him in effigy, of course, in Boston. Ilya found himself cataloging these things for no particular reason, like he might note Hollander’s stats.
Hating the opposing team a little was part of the fun of sports, and hockey people took it further than almost anybody else, but it wasn’t real. Real hatred didn’t have a referee and a mandatory handshake at the end of the night. The days of fights off the ice were long gone. People who liked to feel sentimental and noble about hockey always said that the game was about being part of something bigger than yourself– the team, the league, the sport. Sometimes, Ilya didn’t feel like he had a self anymore at all.
He was in one of his low periods. It was the middle of the season, which was good. The structure helped. But he knew the way nothing felt as it approached, the big fat nothing that made him drink more than he meant to, lie in bed half the day, start angling for a fight just to feel something, empty Ilya, restless Ilya, fucking stupid Ilya. It would pass or it wouldn’t. Svetlana was busy. He found he couldn’t stand the boys and made excuses not to go out with them. For the first time in months, he bought a pack of cigarettes, even though the Bruins team physician had just that morning handed him yet another pamphlet, this one saying in bold, clinical type, it is estimated that smoking increases the risk of developing dementia by 30-50%.
Winter in Boston was a cycle of chills and thaws that left everything covered in a thin layer of ice and dirt, like eyelid crust. His father was dying. He looked up “Shane Hollander top 10 plays” on YouTube on his phone in bed with the lights off without even trying to come up with an excuse other than just wanting to watch him skate. It felt as if his father had been dying for decades. He wanted him to just die already so it would be over.
Marlow, of all people, cornered him outside his hotel room in Montreal with weak coffee and two crullers, demanding to know what was going on with him.
Ilya shrugged. “My father is sick. It makes me busy.”
“You close with him?”
“Not really.”
They reached the elevator and stood waiting for it. Ilya stared at the potted plant next to the elevator door, hoping that the one-two punch of a sick father that Ilya didn’t even like would be enough to shut down any conversation past a stiff I’m sorry, man. He was aware of Marlow looking at him, making that concerned older brother face that these days made Ilya want to punch him in the nose.
“My dad sucked,” Marlow said. “But it still sucked when he got cancer. Because that was when it really hit me how much it sucked that he sucked, you know?”
Ilya raised his eyebrows. “Wow, Marly. Can you say ‘suck’ one more time?”
“Fuck you. I’m trying to– it’s not easy, is all I’m saying. Even if you don’t get along, you only get one father. No do-overs.”
“Is this supposed to make me feel better?”
“No–”
“This is why I give pre-game talk and you don’t.”
The elevator doors opened, and they were greeted by their reflections in the mirrored wall. Ilya tucked his cross into his shirt and drank some of the coffee Marlow had brought him, which had gone tepid. He looked fine. He looked normal.
“Look, go easy on yourself, is all I’m telling you,” Marlow said. “Have some fun. Call your Montreal girl. Or, you know what’s gonna make you feel better? Absolutely destroying Hollander tonight.”
To beat Montreal and then have Shane Hollander, face down, hands pinned underneath Ilya’s, begging for more of his cock, oh fuck, fuck yes, IloveitIloveitIloveit was an experience that never got less surreal. If Shane was turned on enough, he’d even say please sir. Usually, Ilya would waltz into the locker room feeling like a god every day for a week afterwards, but tonight he found himself barely an hour later biting the inside of his cheek in the back of the Uber, too aware of his own shallow breathing. He felt like calling Svetlana and telling her everything, then going back to Hollander’s place and asking to be let back in like a stray dog, but he wasn’t going to do either of those things.
It was what it was. Hollander wanted to feel dirty for a couple of hours; Ilya wanted to feel powerful. They filled a need for each other that would last as long as it lasted. Any day now, Hollander would meet a girl to marry and have nice Canadian babies with. Or he’d realize he could just be gay and that there was a whole world out there full of men who’d elbow each other out of the way for a chance with him. Ilya rested his forehead on the cold glass of the window.
“Tu vas vomir, mon gars?” said the driver, glancing at him in the rearview mirror. “I can’t have you throwing up in my car.”
He took the stairs back up to his hotel room and collapsed onto the bed in his clothes. Maybe he should call Svetlana, just to talk about the game. Or he could text the BU girl who’d put her number in his phone two weeks ago with a heart next to her name in the contact, Ashley <3. He tried to remember what she looked like, but her face wouldn’t come together in his mind. The boys would slap him on the back for that, Rozy’s got so much game he can’t even keep track of it all.
He looked at his phone. It was after midnight. Sveta would certainly be awake, but he wasn’t sure he could stand her inevitable gentle, amused, “Ilyusha, are you drunk?” when all he’d had was a single shot before he’d gone to Hollander’s. Liquid courage. The thrill of doing something forbidden had long ago worn away to a raw nub of fear in his stomach, like the pit of some terrible fruit. It was a good sign, he supposed, that he still cared enough to be afraid.
A lifetime ago, before World Juniors, Ilya’s father had made him sit down and watch all the footage of Hollander he could find. Hollander’s image was tiny on the desktop computer screen in Ilya’s father’s dark office, identifiable in the grainy sea of uniformed boys only by the way he controlled the puck, dangling everybody as if he’d been born on the ice. Hollander one-on-one into the offensive zone, Hollander cuts, waits, what a pass–
“Look,” Ilya’s father said, jamming his finger into the screen. “Look at that backhand. Perfect. You should be able to do that, but you don’t work hard enough.”
“Yes, sir,” Ilya said, looking at Hollander’s face in a rare close-up, handsome and utterly unreadable. He allowed himself the rebellious thought that he’d really like a pretty boy like Hollander to suck his dick.
“By December, he will not be better than you. Do you understand?”
“I understand.”
“Good. Watch it again.”
Ilya arrived at that first game in Saskatchewan with encyclopedic knowledge of Hollander’s stats, his history, his height and weight, the way his body moved, hating him, hating him, hating him. It was strange to see him in person after spending so much time with his image, but it was gratifying that Hollander seemed to be watching Ilya as much as Ilya was watching him. He sat high up in the empty stadium during Ilya’s warm-ups with his mother next to him like a shadow, occasionally exchanging comments behind their hands. Ilya was one of a team with two dozen players on it, but he told himself that Hollander was watching him, only him.
Hollander went out of his way to introduce himself to Ilya where no one could see them. At first, Ilya thought this must be some kind of strategy to psych him out, but then Hollander shook Ilya’s hand, and forty-five seconds later, shook it again. This close to him, Ilya could see that Hollander had freckles that hadn’t shown up on camera, and he didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands when he wasn’t holding a stick. Hollander out of skates reminded Ilya of a penguin on land. Graceless, vulnerable.
Ilya kept reminding himself of that, the first couple of times that he and Hollander fooled around. Hollander wanted so much but he didn’t know how to maneuver, and so if his first time doing this or that was not with Ilya, it might end up being with some other guy who was not so nice. Ilya was just doing him a favor.
Ilya emerged from his fog and found he was ahead in the scoring race. It would happen that way sometimes, like realizing at the end of a familiar stretch of road that you didn’t remember the drive. Ilya played best when he was awake, alive, on top of the world, but a lifetime of discipline had made him into a machine, and to play well, sometimes very well, barely required his presence at all.
He called Svetlana one day from the parking garage after practice, sitting in his car with his elbow resting on the edge of the open driver’s side window, smoke snaking up from his cigarette. He would quit again, soon, probably. At the end of this pack. It was raining, the half-sleet of late winter that hurt when it hit your skin. A pair of pigeons sheltered on the ledge in front of him, cooing.
“We’re friends, yes?” he said.
She laughed. “Of course we’re friends.” Even her laugh was pretty, like a bell ringing. Had it always been that way? Had she laughed differently when they were children— hiccuped and snorted? He couldn’t remember now, though he remembered the first time she’d worn makeup, a cherry red lipstick she’d stolen from her mother, and how he’d wanted to take it from her and throw it into the river because it meant that she was leaving their shared childhood and entering a world of adolescent girlness that he didn’t understand, where he couldn’t follow her. The things she had to do to survive were different than the things he had to do to survive.
He pulled on his cigarette. “Why do we fuck?”
“What, like, as a species?”
He considered saying yes, that’s what he meant. “No. Us. You and me.” In his rear view mirror, a bloated American pick-up truck labored up the ramp and around the corner out of sight.
“Because we’re both hot and it’s fun,” she said. “Anyway…” She seemed to hesitate. “We don’t, really, anymore.”
It had been a while, but it hadn’t occurred to him that they might have crossed the border into not anymore. Realizing that it was possible that there had already been a final time he had sex with Svetlana was like realizing that there had been, at some point, unremarked upon, a final time that his father had carried him. He felt dizzy.
“I guess not,” he said. He tried to laugh it off. “Sorry you’ve been too busy for the best dick in North America.” Fuck, how long had it been since he had touched anyone but Hollander? He hadn’t meant for that to happen.
“We don’t owe each other anything,” Svetlana said. “Not like that.”
“It’s just— I don’t want…” Ilya wiped his eye. He cleared his throat. “If you fall in love with some boring rich dick who buys a car from you, you have to invite me to the wedding so I can look good in the photos, make him jealous, sleep with a bridesmaid…”
“Ilyusha…”
“Maybe his sister, if he has one.”
“You know I don’t believe in that kind of thing,” she said.
Of course. Neither of them did. They were going to be free and sexy forever. He opened the car door to grind his cigarette butt into the concrete with his shoe.
In D.C., as his boys piled on him in celebration and the crowd booed like a hive of bees, Ilya’s eyes fell on someone in the crowd holding a sign that said HOLLANDER SUCKS. Montreal wasn’t even playing. What was the point? He thought: I am and you are.
He thought it again, on the couch at his place in the sun, Shane on top of him, until it stopped meaning anything except I’m here, and you’re here. Until it punched right out of him.