The Sportswriter (19 page)

“Frank, we don’t amount to much. I don’t know why we go to the trouble of having opinions,” Henry says.

“It puts off the empty moment. That’s what I think.”

“What the hell’s that? I don’t know what that is.”

“Then you must’ve been pretty skillful all your life, Henry. That’s great, though. It’s what I strive for.”

“How old will you be next birthday? You said you had a birthday.” For some reason Henry is gruff about this subject.

“Thirty-nine, next week.”

“Thirty-nine’s young. Thirty-nine’s nothing. You’re a remarkable man, Frank.”

“I don’t think I’m that remarkable, Henry.”

“Well no, you’re not. But I advise you, though, to think you are. I’d be nowhere if I didn’t think I was perfect.”

“I’ll think of it as a birthday present, Henry. Advice for my later years.”

“I’ll send you out a leather wallet. Fill it up.”

“I’ve got some ideas that’ll do just as good as a fat wallet.”

“Is this this Vicki trick you’re talking about?”

“Right.”

“I agree wholeheartedly. Everybody ought to have a Vicki in his life. Two’d even be better. Just don’t marry her, Frank. In my experience these Vickis aren’t for marrying. They’re sporting only.”

“I’ve got to be going now, Henry.” Our conversations often tend this way, toward his being a nice old uncle and then, as if by policy, making me want to tell him to go to hell.

“Okay. You’re mad at me now, I know it. But I don’t give a goddamn if you are. I know what I think.”

“Fill your wallet up with that then, Henry, if you get my meaning.”

“I get it. I’m not an idiot like you are.”

“I thought you said I was pretty remarkable.”

“You are. You’re a pretty remarkable moron. And I love you like a son.”

“This is the point to hang up now, Henry. Thanks. I’m glad to hear that.”

“Marry my daughter again if you want to. You have my permission.”

“Good night, Henry. I feel the same way.” But like Herb Wallagher, Henry has already hung up on me, and never hears my parting words, which I sing off into the empty phone lines like a wilderness cry.

 
    Vicki has indeed gone to sleep in her chair, a cold stream of auto lights below, pouring up Jefferson toward the Grosse Pointes: Park, Farms, Shores, Woods, communities tidy and entrenched in midwestern surety.

I am hungry as an animal now, though when I rouse her with a hand on her soft shoulder, ready for a crab soufflé or a lobsteak, amenable to à la carte up on the revolving roof, she wakes with a different menu in mind—one a fellow would need to be ready for the old folks’ home to pass up. (She has drunk all the champagne, and is ready for some fun.)

She reaches and pulls me onto her chair so I’m across her lap and can smell the soft olive scent of her sleepy breath. Beyond the window glass in the starless drifting Detroit night an ore barge with red and green running lights aglow hangs on the current toward Lake Erie and the blast furnaces of Cleveland.

“Oh, you sweet old sweet man,” Vicki says to me, and wiggles herself comfortable. She gives me a moist soft kiss on the mouth, and hums down in her chest. “I read someplace that if the Taurus tells you he loves you, you’re s’posed to believe it. Is that so?”

“You’re a wonderful girl.”

“Hmmmm. But …” She smiles and hums.

I have a good handful of her excellent breast now, and what a wonderful bunch she is, a treasure trove for a man interested in romance. “Doesn’t that make you happy?”

“Oh, that does. You know that. You’re the only one for me.” She is no part a dreamer, I know it, but a literalist from the word go, happy to let the world please her in the small ways it can (true of fewer and fewer people, women especially). Though it is probably not an easy thing to be here with me, in a strange glassy hotel in a cold and sinister town, strange as man to a mandrill, and to believe you are in love.

“Oh, my my my,” she whispers.

“Tell me what’ll make you happiest. That’s what I’m here for, and that’s the truth” (or most of it).

“Well, don’t let’s sit on this ole chair all night and let that big ole granddaddy bed go to waste. I’m a firecracker just thinking about you. I didn’t think you’d
ever
get off that phone.”

“I’m off now.”

“You better look out then.”

And then the cold room folds around us, and we become lost in simple nighttime love gloom, boats rafted together through a blear passage of small perils. A fair, tender Texas girl in a dark séance. Nothing could be better, more cordial than that. Nothing. Take this from a man who knows.

B
efore my marriage ended but after Ralph died, in that wandering two-year period when I bought a Harley-Davidson, drove to Buffalo, taught at a college, suffered that dreaminess I have only lately begun to come out from under, and began to lose my close moorings with X without even noticing the slippage, I must’ve slept with eighteen different women—a number I don’t consider high, or especially scandalous or surprising under the circumstances. X, I’m sure, knew it, and in retrospect I can see that she did her best to accommodate it, tried to make me feel not so miserable by not asking questions, not demanding a strict accounting of my days when I would be off working in some sports mecca—a Denver or a St. Louis—expecting, I feel sure, that one day or other I would wake up out of it, as she thought she already had (but probably at this moment would be willing to doubt, wherever she might be—safe I hope).

None of this would’ve been so terrible, I believe, if I hadn’t reached a point with the women I was “seeing,” at which I was trying to simulate complete immersion—something anyone who travels for a living knows is a bad idea. But when times got bad, I would, for example, find myself after a game alone in the pressbox of some concrete and steel American sports palace. Often as not there would be a girl reporter finishing up her late running story (my eyes were sharpened for just such stragglers), and we would end up having a few martinis in some atmospheric-panoramic bar, then driving out in my renter to some little suburban foot-lit lanai apartment with rattan carpets, where a daughter waited—a little Mandy or Gretchen—and no hubby, and where before I knew it the baby would be asleep, the music turned low, wine poured, and the reporter and I would be plopped in bed together. And bango! All at once I was longing with all my worth to be a part of that life, longing to enter completely into that little existence of hers as a full (if brief) participant, share her secret illusions, hopes. “I love you,” I’ve heard myself say more than once to a Becky, Sharon, Susie or Marge I hadn’t known longer than
four hours and fifteen minutes
! And being absolutely certain I did; and, to prove it, loosing a barrage of pryings, human-interest questions—demands, in other words, to know as many of the whys and whos and whats of her life as I could. All of it the better to get
into
her life, lose that terrible distance that separated us, for a few drifting hours close the door, simulate intimacy, interest, anticipation, then resolve them all in a night’s squiggly romance and closure. “Why did you go to Penn State when you could’ve gone to Bryn Mawr?”
I see
, “What year did your ex-husband actually get out of the service?”
Hmmm
. “Why did your sister get along better with your parents than you did?”
Makes sense
. (As if knowing anything could make any difference.)

This, of course, was the world’s worst, most craven cynicism. Not the invigorating little roll in the hay part, which shouldn’t bother anyone, but the demand for full-disclosure when I had nothing to disclose in return and could take no responsible interest in anything except the hope (laughable) that we could “stay friends,” and how early I could slip out the next morning and be about my business or head for home. It was also the worst kind of sentimentalizing—feeling sorry for someone in her lonely life (which is what I almost always felt, though I wouldn’t have admitted it), turning that into pathos, pathos into interest, and finally turning that into sex. It’s exactly what the worst sportswriters do when they push their noses into the face of someone who has just had his head beaten in and ask, “What were you thinking of, Mario, between the time your head began to look like a savage tomato and the moment they counted you out?”

What I was doing, though I didn’t figure it out until long after I’d spent three months at Berkshire College—living with Selma Jassim, who wasn’t interested in disclosure—was trying to be within myself by being as nearly as possible
within
somebody else. It is not a new approach to romance. And it doesn’t work. In fact, it leads to a terrible dreaminess and the worst kind of abstraction and un-reachableness.

How I expected to be within some little Elaine, Barb, Sue or Sharon I barely knew when I wasn’t even doing it with X
in my own life
is a good question. Though the answer is clear. I couldn’t.

Bert Brisker would probably say about me, that at that time I wasn’t “intellectually pliant” enough, since what I was after was illusion complete and on a short-term, closed-end basis. And what I should’ve been happy with was the plain, elementary rapture a woman—any woman I happened to like—could confer, no questions asked, after which I could’ve gone home and let life please me in the ways I’d always let it. Though it’s a rare man who can find real wonder in the familiar, once luck’s running against him—which it was.

By the time I came back from teaching three months, which was near the end of this two years, I’d actually quit the whole business with women. But X had been home with Paul and Clary, and had not been communicating, and had begun reading
The New Republic, The National Review
and
China Today
, something she’d never done before, and seemed remote. I fell immediately into a kind of dreamy monogamy that did nothing but make X feel like a fool—she said so eventually—for putting up with me until her own uncertainty got aroused. I was around the house every day, but not around to do any good for anybody, just reading catalogs, lying charitably to avoid full disclosure, smiling at my children, feeling odd, visiting Mrs. Miller weekly, musing ironically about the number of different answers I could give to almost any question I was asked, watching sports and Johnny on television, wearing putter pants and plaid shirts I’d bought from L.L. Bean, going up to New York once a week and being a moderately good but committed sportswriter—all the while X’s face became indistinct, and my voice grew softer and softer until it was barely audible, even to me. Her belief—at least her way of putting things since then—was that I’d grown “untrustworthy,” which is not surprising, since I probably was, if what she wanted was to be made happy by my making life as certain as could be, which I could’ve sooner flown than do then. And when I couldn’t do that, she just began to suspect the worst about everything, for which I don’t blame her either, though I could tell that wasn’t a good idea. I contend that I felt pretty trustworthy then, in spite of everything—if she could’ve simply trusted just that I loved her, which I did. (Married life requires shared mystery even when all the facts are known.) I’d have come around before too long, I’m sure of that, and I’d have certainly been happy to have things stay the way they were while hoping for improvements. If you lose all hope, you can always find it again.

Only our house got broken into, hateful Polaroids scattered around, the letters from the woman in Kansas found, and X seemed suddenly to think we were too far gone, farther gone than we knew, and life just seemed unascendant and to break between us, not savagely or even tragically, just ineluctably, as the real writers say.

A lot happens to you in your life and comes to bear midway: your parents can die (mine, though, died years before), your marriage can change and even depart, a child can succumb, your profession can start to seem hollow. You can lose all hope. Any one thing would be enough to send you into a spin. And correspondingly it is hard to say what
causes
what, since in one important sense
everything
causes everything else.

So with all this true, how can I say I “love” Vicki Arcenault? How can I trust my instincts all over again?

A good question, but one I haven’t avoided asking myself, for fear of causing more chaos in everybody’s life.

And the answer like most other reliable answers is in parts.

I have relinquished a great deal. I’ve stopped worrying about being completely
within
someone else since you can’t be anyway—a pleasant unquestioning mystery has been the result. I’ve also become less sober-sided and “writerly serious,” and worry less about the complexities of things, looking at life in more simple and literal ways. I have also stopped looking around what I feel to something else I might be feeling. With all those eighteen women, I was so bound up creating and resolving a complicated illusion of life that I lost track of what I was up to—that I ought to be having a whale of a good time and forget about everything else.

When you are fully in your emotions, when they are simple and appealing enough to be in, and the distance is closed between what you feel and what you might
also
feel, then your instincts can be trusted. It is the difference between a man who quits his job to become a fishing guide on Lake Big Trout, and who one day as he is paddling his canoe into the dock at dusk, stops paddling to admire the sunset and realizes how much he wants to be a fishing guide on Lake Big Trout; and another man who has made the same decision, stopped paddling at the same time, felt how glad he was, but also thought he could probably be a guide on Windigo Lake if he decided to, and might also get a better deal on canoes.