The Fan

The Fan

By Mark Brazaitis

“Welcome back to Sports Radio 88, The Fan. I’m here with Guardians color commentator Butch Starbuck, and since we’ve moaned and groaned enough about baseball’s work stoppage, I want to turn to another topic. For the last six months, Bobby Stephenson’s wife, Allison, known by her family and friends—and probably her lover, unless he calls her Snookums—as Allie, has been having an affair. Given the affair’s duration and apparent seriousness, Butch, does the marriage survive?”

“Stan, I’m going to say no. When your troubled marriage is a topic on Cleveland’s number one sports talk show, it’s a goner.”

Bobby Stephenson, five-feet, eight-and-a-half inches tall, 177 pounds buck naked on the scale at Silver’s Gym, where he runs on a treadmill and lifts 15-pound dumbbells three times a week, turns down the volume on his car radio. He doesn’t know what he feels in greater measure, shock or shame. It is preposterous that he is a subject of discussion on his favorite radio show. Bobby is a devoted sports fan, but he never played professional sports. He never played a sport in high school or college either. He quit his office softball team when the team’s captain, a recent hire named Brenda Blaze, relegated him to pinch-hitting duties. His trips to Silver’s Gym are a recent development, sparked by his wife’s comment that he could stand to lose fifteen pounds—“at least.” His wife’s affair is news to him.

He parks in the lot below his office building—he is an attorney in the firm of Jenkins, Jenkins, Peters, and Peterson—and waits until there is a commercial before he leaves the car. Wary of meeting a fan of The Fan, he bypasses the elevator and walks up the eight flights of stairs to his office. He closes and locks his door. He listens to The Fan on his computer, keeping the volume low.

“Listen, Butch, F. Scott Fitzpatrick—or F. Skip Fitzgerald—or whatever his name was—may have said there are no second acts in America, but we know the opposite is true. We’re a culture that loves comebacks. Bobby Stephenson may be on the ropes now, but the ballgame isn’t over.”

“I guess we’re going to have to agree to disagree on this, Stan. Let’s review the pertinent statistics, which your assistant, Matt the Stat, has conveniently put up on my screen. Bobby Stephenson’s rival, Rex Graver, is three inches taller and ten pounds lighter than Bobby is. He possesses enough hair to outfit Mr. Clean with home-and-away toupees and still have enough left over to look as virile as a caveman. He hits the gym at least five times a week. Oh—and here’s an irony. As a rising real estate developer, he recently bought the Taft Building—the very building where Bobby works.”

“But what about intangibles, Butch? Does he listen to her?”

“Listen to her scream in ecstasy, you mean? I bet he does!”

As the men laugh, Bobby wonders who else is listening to the broadcast. Half the men he knows, probably. He leaves his desk, opens his office door, and peaks into the reception area. Dominic, one of the firm’s administrative assistants, is, thankfully, listening to NPR.

Dominic’s love life can best be described as tumultuous. Bobby once saw him sobbing under a lamppost outside the Hope Theater at ten o’clock on a Wednesday night. His boyfriend had dumped him minutes before the film they’d planned to watch started and Dominic had gone ahead and seen the sad movie anyway. After Bobby invited him to have a drink at a nearby bar, Dominic told him his tale of romantic woe. At one point in the conversation, Dominic asked him what he’d been doing wandering around downtown on a weekday night. “Doesn’t your wife want you home?” It was Allie who didn’t want to be home. Her after-work coffee with “the girls” had gone into extra innings.  

Bobby slips back into his office, returns to his desk, and turns up the volume.

“Thanks for stopping by, Butch. We’ll see you next week.”

“You bet, buddy.”

“We’re taking your calls now. Mike, from Parma. Mike, you’re on The Fan.”

“Long-time listener, first-time caller. In regards to Bobby’s situation, there’s an additional factor at work. All of the parties involved attended high school together. Rex was the dude all the girls wanted, Allie included. She probably figured better late than never.”

“So maybe there’s nostalgia at play here. You have Rex, the high school heartthrob, and Allison, the shrinking violet—”

“She wasn’t a shrinking violet!” Bobby snaps at Stan’s disembodied voice. “She was a smart girl who wore glasses. Glasses and intelligence don’t make her a shrinking violet!”

“Peter, from Sheridan, you’re on The Fan.”

“Thanks for taking my call, Stan. I love your show.”

“That makes two of us. Ha, ha. Thank you, Peter.”

“Sometimes marriages end before they end, if you know what I mean.”

“I think I do, Peter, but explain.”

“Sometimes a party in the marriage can’t bring himself—or herself, in this case—to say, ‘It’s over,’ even if his or her actions and attitudes clearly indicate this.”

“So what you’re saying is it ain’t over til the fat lady sings but sometimes she’s been singing and the other party just doesn’t hear her.”

“In this case, Stan, I bet she started singing even before Rex stepped in to help her hit the high notes, if you know what I mean.”

“Cue B.B. King: The thrill is gone. Thanks for the call, Pete.”

Bobby and Allie became a couple in his last year of law school at Ohio Eastern. She’d come back to Sherman after following a boyfriend to Texas. They’d bumped into each other at the Book and Brew, she in the Self-Help section, he in the adjacent Sports section. Over coffee, they talked for two hours. She couldn’t believe he was about to graduate from law school, as if this was a superhuman feat. Although it may simply have been a reflection of her low opinion of him in high school. She was broken up about her broken relationship. He listened. He comforted.

When, ten months later, he asked her to marry him, she cried. She assured him they were tears of joy.

“Mary Cabot over at The Plain Dealer just posted a column that makes a strong case that Bobby was Allie’s rebound lover. I quote: ‘She didn’t want him. She wanted the comfort, reassurance, and praise he offered her.’ Couldn’t have said it better myself! Francisco, you’re on The Fan. Hello? Francisco? Francisco from East Cleveland, go ahead.”

“Hello?”

“You’re on the air, Francisco.”

“Yes, thank you. I don’t think life is about winning and losing. In the end, we all lose.”

“I don’t follow you, Frank.”

“I’m speaking of impermanence. It’s not as if Bobby wins his wife back now and their marriage lasts forever.”

“So there could be another wife stealer waiting in the wings?”

“What I’m saying is that we are all cuckolds to time.”

“I don’t quite follow you, Aristotle. But I appreciate the call.”

Rex, Allie’s lover, isn’t a horrible person. While he dated the captain of the cheerleading team in high school, he didn’t otherwise fit the jock cliché. For one thing, he was the football team’s backup quarterback, not its starter. He was the starting right fielder on the baseball team, but he had a middling batting average and would be remembered forever for the playoff game in which he misjudged a fly ball and it bounced off his head and over the fence for a home run.

“Joe, from Sheridan, you’re on the Fan.”

“Hey, I want to say this: The best revenge is happiness. Sure, Bobby can spend his time at his desk, thinking about where his wife and Rex are now and in what geometrically inventive position. You run a family program, Stan, so I won’t be more explicit.”

“I appreciate your restraint, Joe.”

“But Bobby can’t focus on the failures of the past. He can’t think about what he might have said or done differently to keep her. It’s like you’re at the plate, and you’ve struck out the last three times up. Hell, maybe you’ve struck out the last forty times up. But if you let yourself think about your past failures, you’re going to strike out again. Guaranteed.”

“So think home run?”

“Think grand slam.”

“Thanks for the call, Joe.”

In his circumstances, Bobby doesn’t know what a home run, much less a grand slam, would mean. Maybe walking over to Don’s Underground, where Rex’s ex-girlfriend, Morgan, tends bar and seducing her would mean he has left his failures in the past and is ready to hit a home run or at least a broken-bat single. He barely knows Morgan. She supposedly makes a mean martini, but all Bobby has ever ordered from her is Bud Light.

“Doris! Doris from Akron! Welcome back to the show. Long time, no hear.”

“I’ve been sick, Stan. Got out of Akron General last night.”

“Your emphysema again?”

“Kidney stones! At my age, if it isn’t one thing, it’s ten!”

“I hear you, Doris. What’s your take on Bobby’s situation?”

“Look, they’re both young. If they’ve hit thirty, I’d be surprised.”

“Close! They’re both thirty-one.”

“And they don’t have any children. So it’s not like they’re wrecking any fragile psyches.”

“I like that word, Doris. Psyches. No one wonder you’re a schoolteacher.”

“School bus driver. Anyway, divorce will be a lot harder on Bobby than it will be on Allie.”

“He’s the injured party.”

“It isn’t only that. He works all the time and doesn’t have any friends. Mostly because he works all the time. But also because, until she started disappearing from their house and making bizarre excuses about her whereabouts, he spent all of his free time with his wife.”

“Bizarre excuses?”

“Once she supposedly left town to help an aunt recover from hip-replacement surgery.”

“What’s bizarre about that?”

“She doesn’t have an aunt.”

“You heard it from Doris, Akron’s first lady of straight talk. She calls ’em the way she sees ’em.”

Bobby turns down the volume on The Fan and calls his wife. Her voice message alarms him with its sweetness and familiarity. He might say, as he often says when he leaves her a message, “Just wondering how your day is going, sweetheart.” But this, of course, isn’t an ordinary day. “I know about you and Rex. We need to talk.” He pauses and adds, “We also need milk and eggs. I’ll pick them up on the way home.”

He turns up the volume on the radio. A commercial for a pill promising to “revive a certain happiness below the belt” is finishing. A deep male voice intones the 800 number four times.

“It’s a mixed pleasure to introduce our next guest, and I say mixed because, as a lifelong dinosaur fan, I’ve always liked the name Rex, but I disapprove of the Tyrannosaurus-like way our guest is carving up Bobby’s and Allie’s marriage. Rex Graver, welcome to The Fan.”

“Thank you, Stan. I’m happy to be here. I think. I thought we were going to be talking about baseball?”

“Maybe over a beer later. Listen, you’ve known Bobby Stephenson since high school. Perhaps you weren’t best friends, but when you put the full-court press on his wife, did you give a single thought to him?”

“Let me correct your assumption, Stan. If anyone put on a full-court press, it was Allie.”

“She trapped you in a corner and you’d lost your dribble, so you had only one play and it was at home plate.”

“I don’t know what sports metaphor you’re using, Stan, but I want to be clear: I love Allie and she loves me. Neither of us wants to hurt Bobby. Frankly, I think that’s why Allie hasn’t left him yet.”

“Key word: yet. Thanks for being with us, Rex.”

As The Fan goes to another commercial break, Bobby tries to return to work. But the papers on his desk are a meaningless jumble. He stumbles over to his window, closed against the late fall day. His office faces the back of another building. Its windows are gray, as if tainted by smoke. With difficulty, he pulls his window open, leans over the ancient radiator, and stares at the brick alley eight stories beneath him.

Allie has always been a perfectionist. She once spent an hour removing a pinprick-sized oil stain from her blue jeans. He supposes he has always fallen short of whatever she expected of him. He has tried, however. He dresses in whatever she buys him, even if he doesn’t like purple golf shirts or argyle socks. He agrees to participate in whatever new diets she thinks would make him leaner, even if her most recent diet, centered on carrots and cantaloupe, gave his skin the garish glow of a fake tan. He faithfully calls her parents on their birthdays and wedding anniversary.

He thinks about spilling his problems onto Dominic’s desk. But he’s worried that Dominic wouldn’t believe his crazy story. His marriage a topic of debate on “The Fan”? He must be out of his mind.

On the radio he hears a familiar voice: “I don’t know why I’ve fallen out of love with Bobby. He’s a kind and decent man, and God knows he lifted me up when I was down. But being thankful for someone and having passion for someone are two different games.”

“Like golf and rugby.”

“More like tiddlywinks and nude mud wrestling.”

“Let me try another analogy: Bobby’s an adequate, hardworking utility player. He won’t hurt a team with his play, but he won’t lead it to victory either. But Rex…well, Rex is the kind of player who will swing for the fences. And while he might not always hit a home run, he’ll fire up a crowd with his effort.”

“Am I the crowd?”

“You bet.”

“Well, he definitely fires me up.”

“Before I let you go back to your flame, Allie, would you like to say anything to your soon-to-be ex-husband?”

“Is he listening?”

“He’s our next guest.”

“I should have prepared a statement. Something sensitive and apologetic. I guess I’ll say, in addition to the milk and eggs, honey, you might want to pick up a couple of six-packs and maybe a bottle of vodka. You’ll probably need to do some serious drinking tonight.”

“Thanks for your time, Allie. We’ll touch base in a couple of months to see how you and your new man are doing.”

“I look forward to it, Stan.”

“And now for the man of the hour—a man who is frankly too young to be called a cuckold—we’re pleased to welcome Bobby Stephenson to The Fan.”

Bobby’s cell phone rings. He picks it up and clicks on the call.

“Bobby, you would be well in your rights to consider the question ‘How are you?’ a micro-aggression, but—how the hell are you?”

“I feel like I just lost the World Series, Stan.”

“Understandable. What do you do now? Drink the beer and vodka Allie asked you to buy?”

“I don’t know.”

“Thanks for risking humiliation to be on my show. Godspeed, brother.”

Bobby leaves work, stops at the convenience store around the corner from his office to buy milk and eggs—he skips the alcohol—and drives home, where he finds a goodbye note from Allie: “I’ll always be your fan.”

He returns to his car and drives to the local mall. At the far end of its Diamond Wing, Bobby steps into Athlete’s Alley, which features a putt-putt golf course, an eight-lane bowling alley, half a dozen pool tables, and a batting cage. Bobby hasn’t swung a bat since he quit the firm’s softball team in the wake of his demotion, but he grabs an aluminum bat from a rack, pops his credit card in the designated slot, and steps into the batter’s box on the left side of the plate. From a radio within the dim and cavernous space comes a familiar voice. “After the break,” says Stan “The Fan” Cohen, “we’ll be talking free agency. Listen up, ladies: Bobby Stephenson is on the open market.”

In the batting cage, Bobby channels his anger, hurt, and sorrow into hitting like a big-leaguer chasing the triple crown.

As he leaves the batting cage, he hears Stan say, “I have a feeling our man Bobby Stephenson is going to be more than a singles hitter on the singles scene.”

After work the next afternoon, as he steps into the reception area of his law firm on his way out the door, Bobby sees Dominic at his desk, head buried in his palms, sobbing. From the radio next to Dominic’s computer comes the soothing voice of an NPR host: “I hate to be a prophet of doom, but I see little reason to think he won’t be a lovelorn loser forever, forgive my uncharacteristic bluntness. When we come back, I’ll be interviewing the founders of three new dating apps. Maybe they’ll be more optimistic than I am about his chances at romance. This is ‘Fresh Air.’”

Bobby steps over to Dominic’s desk. “What’s wrong, D?” He has never called him “D,” but he knows Dominic’s friends do.

Dominic looks up. His hair is a mess of brown curls, his dark eyes are dreary and downcast, his cheeks are slick with tears. “You won’t believe me,” he says. “But they’re talking about me on NPR.”

Bobby sits down beside his friend and puts his hand on his shoulder. “Believe me,” he says. “I believe you.”

Mark Brazaitis is the author of eight books, including The River of Lost Voices: Stories from Guatemala, winner of the 1998 Iowa Short Fiction Award, and The Incurables, winner of the 2012 Richard Sullivan Prize and the 2013 Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award in Prose. His stories, poems, and essays have appeared in Ploughshares, The Sun, Witness, Guernica, Michigan Quarterly Review, and other journals. A former Peace Corps Volunteer and technical trainer, he is a professor of English at West Virginia University.

Jason David Córdova lives in Puerto Rico as an illustrator and painter. Some of his art can be seen on Instagram at @jasoni72.

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