The Metropolis Case_ A Novel - Matthew Gallaway [29]
“Is this because of the mask thing?” Hank asked. “Because being in the net is different, you know. You’re in the firing line—front and center—and those pucks can really sting.”
“So?” Martin responded with a level of disdain he knew—because of the implication that Hank felt otherwise about physical pain—would effectively transform the discussion into a dare. He referred to a practice a few weeks earlier when he had taken a turn in net. “You saw me—I was good.”
Hank did not admit or deny this. “Well, let me talk it over with your mother,” he said. “I have a feeling she’s not going to be too comfortable with you between the pipes.”
Martin shrugged, because he had already talked to Jane, and as expected, she expressed no preference about what position he wanted to play. Though he had yet to question the dynamic between his parents in which Hank—who had played at the University of Michigan, where they met—was as obsessed with the sport as Jane was ambivalent, much less how love could bring together such very different people without any consideration of what the union might look like fifteen or twenty years later, he was quite aware that they said things to him that they did not necessarily say to each other. When he took advantage of this discord to achieve his own objectives—or “goals,” as he would years later realize in a frisson of Jungian insight—he began for the first time to note within himself a certain disdain for his parents (although it was far too amorphous for him to identify as such, again until much later), as though their failure to communicate was an expression of their stupidity, and not their humanity.
Martin offered his opinion that Jane would not object.
“We’ll see,” said Hank. “But promise me one thing: no knitting, okay?”
Martin laughed. “Don’t worry—I’m not that crazy.”
WHATEVER THE UNDERLYING motivation for the switch—and there were probably several—the goal crease proved to be the best place for Martin. The on-and-off nature of the position gave him plenty of opportunity to daydream when the action went to the other end of the rink and even—to Hank’s chagrin—sometimes when it was in his own.
“What happened, Marty?” Hank liked to ask after a soft goal. “You were on another planet out there.”
“Entropy,” Martin stated succinctly, one of his stock answers to avoid explaining that a loss could not be avoided when the Zamboni had not circled the ice ten times. In an early and unconscious attempt to reconcile his conflicting affinities for art and logic, he spent a lot of time developing an intricate set of superstitions, which he liked to believe could dictate the outcome of a game far more than his performance, e.g., each of his pads had to go on and come off in the same order, he never allowed the bottom of his stick to touch anything but the ice—but if it did, he would have to tap it against the ceiling three times to “purify” it—and before the first face-off of each period he always skated back and forth between the goal pipes exactly seven times. He also preferred to be the last one on the ice at the beginning of a game (but the first one off at the end), and he was always careful not to touch any of the opposing players’ clammy hands during the traditional postgame handshake. None of this he divulged to his father. “Sometimes it’s inevitable,” he said.
“It didn’t seem too inevitable for the other goalie,” Hank noted. “He looked pretty sharp.”
“You mean my opposite?” Martin said, using a terminology he had likewise developed, albeit for a different—but equally unconscious—reason, namely to distance himself from his father.
“Yes, your opposite,” sighed Hank.
“He did look pretty good,” Martin admitted and softened a little before he continued. “Next game you can be sure that my opposite’s opposite will prevail.”
Any aggravation these tics caused Hank, however, was exceeded by the pleasure