The Most Important of the Unimportant Things
by Henry Stevens
She learns the cosmological significance of soccer on their third date. He is a Navy guy—that’s pretty much all there are in Norfolk. They are having dinner at that waterfront restaurant where she can see the destroyers in drydock across the river. The big white sheets they drape across the destroyers are tinged pink and amber. The sunset has broken into timorous gold bars on the water when he leans across the table and looks her in the eyes all romantic and she thinks, oh god is he going to say he loves me; he doesn’t even know me.
But he’s like, “I have an irrational belief that whenever the Arsenal Football Club wins a game, I’m going to be lucky until the next time they play.”
And she’s like, “Oh, well, that’s interesting.”
If he notices her disappointment, he doesn’t take the hint. He tells her how four years ago, during the pandemic, he started watching the English Premier League and how back then the biggest fan channel on YouTube was Arsenal Fan TV and they were famous for being toxic as hell but they were funny as hell too so he’d watch them just to see the Bri’ish geezers rant. And gradually, he learned who the players were and eventually he just started saying he was an Arsenal fan. At this point she’s like, how is this what you think we should talk about on our third date, but then he says something that actually interests her.
He’s like, “I know this is crazy, but I’ve noticed every time Arsenal wins, my life improves. Like if it’s a coin flip, if I’m in a fifty-fifty situation, things’ll just go my way. And if something goes wrong, it’ll inevitably go right for me later. I don’t understand.”
“It’s karma,” she says, “You’re looking at it the wrong way around.”
Now she can see it’s his turn to be confused. He asks her what she’s talking about and she takes a sip of her wine, just to buy herself some time to figure out how to explain this. The waiter arrives with their food. He’s eating gnocchi and chicken alfredo, she’s got scallops. The plating is exquisite, as it ought to be at a white tablecloth kind of restaurant. He wants to take a picture of the meal. She wants him to take a picture of her. They do the thing where they make the other one try their food. Finally, they’re ready to eat, and she’s figured out how to say this.
“When Arsenal win, it doesn’t make you lucky. It means that your karma made them win,” she explains, “And the rest of the week, you’re feeling good because your karma is good, or at least you think it is. But when you get to the next game, your karma might have changed. You find out when you watch them play. But it’s not their playing that makes you lucky, see?”
He is nodding, taking her very seriously now. It’s a heady feeling to look into another person’s eyes and see them thinking about what you’ve said. She doesn’t have a lot of people who really listen to her like that. Her principal certainly doesn’t listen to her. Her friends sometimes do, but often they don’t. And she doesn’t want her friends to approve of her the way she wants this man to approve of her, right now. She wants him to understand what she is saying. He does, and he says so.
He’s like, “Do you really believe in luck?”
She shakes her head.
“No. But I believe in karma. Didn’t you say you believe in luck?”
Kinda ashamed, he’s like, “I said it was an irrational belief. I know it isn’t real but, I dunno… you know what I mean?”
She knows exactly what he means. That’s faith. She knows that every religion is based on faith, even the religions of Logic and Reason. After all, she teaches high school geometry, and there isn't a single year when some smart-ass kid doesn’t ask, But Ms. Tanner, how do we know that an axiom is true, and she has to explain that an axiom is true because we say it’s true. Even logic needs to assume something. The belief that an axiom is true requires faith, which must come from some place deeper than logic. At least, this is how she sees the world. But these are just inchoate feelings to her, not yet forced into the shape of language.
So she’s like, “All belief is irrational.”
And he’s like, “Well there are some things that are more rational to believe in than others.”
She laughs and agrees. They clink their wine glasses and drink a toast to believing in things that are rational to believe in. Like democracy being better than autocracy, like stopping genocide, like paying for public health care and public schools and letting queer and trans kids read books that have queer and trans kids in them. She adds this last one thinking of a student in her class who came out to her. The principal had already gone after the traditional safe spaces—the art teachers or the English teachers and the band—so she tried to make her Geometry classroom one last refuge. The kid must have understood why she put up a poster of a rainbow and marked the arc segment length and area formulas across it. Secant, chord, and tangent too. He was in her calculus class, where she calls the rainbow a parabola and uses it to demonstrate integration. The student had said he understood what she meant.
“Do you really think it’s rational to believe in karma?”
“I do. I believe that everything I do comes back to me,” she says, “If I do good, then good will come back to me. If I do bad, then bad will come back to me. That’s all karma means.”
“So you think when Arsenal loses, it’s because I did something?”
“Perhaps…” she says, sipping her wine again, “But it would be complicated. Your actions matter most for you, so you watching and hoping for them to win would be affected by your karma. But then they all have their own karma too, and for them, that karma would be more impactful than your karma. And then there is the karma of the other team, and the coaches, and the fans all around the world. It would be impossible to know how much you actually impact it.”
“So what you’re saying,” he says, “is that Arsenal really has no relation to my life at all.”
She isn’t saying that, she says, “No for you, whether they win or lose is entirely dependent on the state of your karma.”
“But you just said it depended on everyone else’s karma too.”
“Yes, their victory depends on their karma, but you watching their victory depends on your karma.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” he laughs. “You’re crazy.”
She laughs too.
“You’re the one who said it was an irrational belief,” she says.
Many men had called her crazy before, but she could forgive this man because she appreciates his good humor. The last man before him had, on the third date, revealed himself as an evangelical Christian. He asked her if she believed in God, and she said no. He asked her what she believed in, and she had tried to explain that she believed in karma. But the evangelical man had gotten upset. He told her that believing in something just because it felt true was stupid. That she was stupid. He had not understood why she ghosted him, and she had been forced to block his number. But Navy man doesn’t seem to mind that her beliefs don’t make sense. In fact, she almost feels like he thinks they do make sense, on some deeper level than he is willing to admit. But maybe she’s reading too much into it.
She is interested in talking about Arsenal and his luck for the rest of dinner. She wants to suss out if he has good karma or bad karma. It’s the third date and she’s pretty sure that when he tries to get her to go home with him she will agree, but she wants to make absolutely sure. From what she can gather about Arsenal, this season has been tough for them. But the season is only about a quarter of the way in, and they’ve played well in the face of adversity. They are still competitive, and seemingly back on the upswing. She considers these facts while the waiter discusses dessert. She orders tiramisu, and more wine.
“Honestly, I’ve never had the chance to talk about these things with anyone else before,” he says. “My buddies don’t watch soccer, and the guys who do would just laugh at me if I told them what I told you tonight.”
He reaches for her hand, and she lets him take it. The sunset glows in his eyes, on the rims of his glasses, in his dark, gelled hair and in the glimmer of metal around his neck. His dress shirt is a hazy shade of peach in the golden hour, and she can see the hard contours of his body under it.
He says, “I feel such a connection with you, unlike anything I’ve felt before.”
“That’s sweet,” she blushes, “I feel connected with you too.”
What an awkward thing to say, she thinks, but she doesn’t know how to just say what she feels, that she has felt this way before, but in different ways. He would take it the wrong way. Language is duplicitous. A phrase can mean itself and something completely unintended. But sometimes, when she knows the other person well, she can turn this duplicity to her advantage and say things without ever saying them at all.
Like when he inevitably asks “What’re you doing after this?”
So she says, vaguely, “Oh, I don’t know…What are you thinking?”
And he’s like, “You want to come back to my place and watch a show together? I’ve been meaning to watch this Turkish drama everyone’s been talking about.”
And she says, “I’d love to.”
She finishes the tiramisu. He takes care of the check.
He lives on the base in one half of a brick duplex. The house is sparsely decorated, with the bare walls and little furniture. His sailor’s hat hangs by the door. But he has a wide TV and a huge, comfy couch. He makes her chips and guacamole, and then they settle down to watch the show neither of them intend to watch. Only a few seconds in, she stretches across him and he puts his hands on her and they lock lips. She wraps herself around him, and they don’t let go of each other for another twenty minutes. Even after sex, she still cuddles with him. The drama is still playing in the background.
Reluctantly, though, she must get up and shower. His bathroom is sparse, but his toothpaste has SpongeBob on it. She likes this detail. It’s enough to make up for the fact that he has no lotion. When she returns, he’s sitting on the carpet in front of his couch, watching something on his phone. The TV is turned off. She squats behind him and looks over his shoulder. Little men in red and white shirts run this way and that, kicking the ball between little men in black shirts. The ball goes in the back of the net and the crowd roars. The bald referee blows his whistle and the crowd boos.
“Offsides,” he explains. “The goal doesn’t count.”
“Is this live?”
“No, this is the highlights. We win this game three two.”
“Oh,” she says, a bit disappointed that he’s watching an old highlight reel instead of talking to her, but he seems to anticipate her disappointment because he’s like, “This game was today but I didn’t watch it yet.”
“Why not?”
On the highlight reel, the red team scores a goal again and the crowd goes wild.
“I guess I was scared of what might happen if they lost. I thought, if I don’t watch, and I don't know what will happen,” he whispers like a confession, “then maybe I can be free to make my own luck.”
She kisses him. He kisses her. Slowly, their kisses become more passionate until he is back on top of her and they’re having sex a second time. Lying on his carpet with her legs wrapped around his hips and her nails digging into his back, she closes her eyes and imagines the roar of the crowd as the shot goes in, the relieved, victorious expression in the face of the man who scored it, the camera cutting to him as he points to heaven and looks up, glory to god! She feels like that soccer player. After years of men who made her think she was insane because they couldn’t seem to understand the part of her she most needed understood, there is finally one who understands. He is her vindication. He is her victory.
In three months, he is redeployed to San Diego. She stays in Norfolk. All that’s left of their relationship are some pictures together, mostly on the beach, and a Gabriel Jesus jersey that he bought her for Christmas. Jesus is her favorite player now. She likes how hard he tries, and the way his eyebrows scrunch together in an expression of perpetual concern. He also scored that first Arsenal goal she watched. When Jesus plays, she thinks of Navy man. But since their breakup, she has been worried about wearing Jesus’s shirt. The striker has been on poor form as of late, and she thinks there might be bad karma from the end of their relationship clinging to the shirt. She has thought about getting a Bukayo Saka shirt instead. But so far, even with the bad karma, she is still wearing Jesus’s shirt whenever she watches Arsenal play, which, these days, is pretty much every week.
Henry Stevens is a writer from Halifax County, Virginia. An MFA student at Old Dominion University, his fiction has previously appeared in The New Plains Review, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, and Constellate. Find him on Instagram @Abimapixsey.