The Sportswriter (25 page)

Back in the room, the TV is on without sound. The drapery is drawn and two trays of dishes are set outside. Vicki lies naked as a jaybird on the rumpled bed, drinking a 7-Up and reading the in flight magazine. Air in the room is hot and close, changed from the sleep-soft night smell. Only the sad old familiarity from the dreamy days after Ralph died is left: lost in strangerville with a girl I don’t know well enough and can’t figure how to revive an interest in (or, for her sake, an interest in me that would compensate). It is a tinny, minor-key feeling, a far-flung longing for conviction among the convictionless.

“I’m sure glad to
set you”
she says, giving me a happy smile in the blinky TV light. I stand in the little dark entryway, my two feet heavy as anchors, and I can’t help thinking of my life as a scene in some steamy bus station novel.
Big Sledge moved toward the girl cat-quick, trapping her where he’d wanted her, between his cheap drifter’s suitcase and the pile of greasy tire chains against the back of the lube bay. Now she would see what’s what. They both would
. “How’d everything work out with your old football guy?”

“Dandy.” I go to the window, pull back the heavy curtain and look out. Snow is dazzling an inch from my face, falling in burly flakes onto Jefferson Avenue. The river is lost in white, as is Cobo. In the street, flashing yellow beacons signal the first snowplows. I feel I can hear their skid and clatter, but I’m sure I do not. “I don’t like the looks of this weather. We might have to change our plans.”

“A-Okay,” she says. “I’m just happy to be here today with you. I can go to the aquarium someplace else. They must be alike.” She sets her 7-Up on her bare belly and stares at it, thinking.

“I wanted this to be a nice vacation for you, though. I had a lot of plans.”

“Well, keep ’em, cause I’ve had a plenty good time. I ordered beer-batter shrimp up here, which was a meal in itself. I put on my clothes and went downstairs and looked in the shops which’re nice, though they’re like Dallas’s in a lot of similar ways. I think I might’ve seen Paul Anka, but I’m not sure. He’s about half the size I thought he’d be if it was him, and I already knew he was tiny.”

I sit in the chair beside the coffee table. Her uncovered beauty is unexpectedly what I need to make the transition back (the familiar can still surprise and should). Hers is an altogether ordinary nakedness, a sleek curve of bust, a plump darkening thigh tapered to a dainty ankle, a willing smile of no particular intention—all in all, a nice bundle for a lonely fellow to call his in a strange city when time’s to kill.

On television the face of a pallid newsman is working dramatically without sound.
Believe!
his eyes say.
This stuff is the God’s truth. It’s what you want
.

“Do you believe women and men can just be friends,” Vicki says.

“I guess so,” I say, “once the razzle-dazzle’s over. I like the razzle-dazzle though.”

“Yeah, me too.” Her smile broadens and she crosses her arms over her soft breasts. She has, I can tell, been captured by a thought, an event she likes and wants to share. At heart she could not be kinder and could make someone the most rewarding wife. Only for some reason it does not seem as likely to be me as it once did. She may have caught this very mood in the wind today and be as puzzled by it as I am. Though she is nobody’s fool.

“I called Everett on the phone,” she says, and looks down at her knees, which are bent upwards. “I used
my
charge number.”

“You could’ve used this one.”

“Well. I used mine, anyway.”

“How
is
old Everett?” Of course I have never seen ole Everett and can be as chummy as a barber with the far-off idea of him.

“He’s okay. He’s into Alaska now. He said people need carpets up there. He also said he’s shaved his head bald as a cue ball. I told him I was in a big suite, looking out at a renaissance center. I didn’t say where.”

“What’d he think about that.”

“‘As the world turns,’ is what he said, which is about standard. He wanted to know would I send him back his stereo I got in the divorce. Everything’s sky high up there, I guess, and if you come with all you need, you start ahead.”

“Did he want you to go with him?”

“No, he did not. And I wouldn’t either. You don’t have to marry somebody like Everett but once in a lifetime. Twice’ll kill you. He’s got some ole gal with him, anyway, I’m sure.”

“What did he want, then?”

“I called him, remember.” She frowns at me. “He didn’t want anything. Haven’t you ever got the phonies in your life?”

“Only when I’m lonesome, sweetheart. I didn’t think you were lonesome.”

“Right,” she says and looks at the silent television.

Detroit, I can see now, has not affected her exactly as I had hoped, and she has become wary. Of what? Possibly in the lobby she saw someone who reminded her too much of herself (that can happen to inexperienced travelers). Or worse. That
no
one there reminded her of anyone she ever knew. Both can be threatening to a good frame of mind and usher in a gloomy remoteness. Though calling up an old lover or husband can be the perfect antidote. They always remind you of where you’ve been and where you think you’re going. And if you’re lucky, wherever you are at the moment—in the Motor City, in a snowstorm—can seem like
the
right place on the planet. Though I’m not certain Vicki has been so lucky. She may have found an old flame burning and not know what to do about it.

“Do you feel like you wanted to be friends with Everett?” I start with the most innocent of questions and work toward the most sensitive.

“No-ho way.” She reaches down and pulls the sheet up over her. She is even warier now. It may be she wants to tell me something and can’t quite find the words. But if I’m to be relegated to the trash heap of friendship, I want to do a friend’s one duty: let her be herself. Though I’d be happier to snuggle up under the sheets and rassle around till plane time.

“Did you hang up feeling like you wanted to be friends with
me?”
I say, and smile at her.

Vicki turns over on the big bed and faces the other wall, the white sheet clutched up under her chin and the crisp hotel percale stretched over her like a winding. I have hit the tender spot. A day and a night with me has made even Everett look good. Something else is needed, and I don’t fit the bill even with champers, a demi-suite, bachelor buttons and a view of Canada. Maybe that isn’t even surprising when you come down to it, since by scaling down my own pleasures I may have sold short her hopes for herself. I, however, am an expert in taking things like this lying down. For writers—even sportswriters—bad news is always easier than good, since it is, after all, more familiar.

“I don’t want to be friends. Not
just,”
Vicki says in a tiny, mouse voice from a mound of white covers. “I really thought I was gettin a new start with you.”

“Well, what happened to make you think you weren’t? Just because you caught me going through your purse?”

“Shoot. That didn’t matter,” she says, smally. “Live and let die, I say. You can’t help yourself. Yesterday wasn’t the tiptop day for you in the year.”

“Then, what’s the matter?” I wonder, in fact, how many times I have said that or something equal to it to a woman passing palely through my life.
What’re you thinking? What’s made you so quiet? You seem suddenly different. What’s the matter?
Love
me
is what this means, of course. Or at least, second best: surrender. Or at the
very
least, take some time regaling me with why you won’t, and maybe by the end you will.

Outside a wind makes a sharp oceanic
woo
around the corner of the hotel, then off into the cold, paltry Detroit afternoon. By five it could as easily turn to rain, by six the stars could be out and by nighttime Vicki and I could be strolling down Larned for a steak or a chop. You can never completely count on things out here. Life is counterpoised against a mean wind that could suddenly cease.

“Well,” Vicki says, and turns over to face me out of a grotto of pillows and sheets. “When I went downstairs, you know, when you were gone? I just went to be a part of something. I didn’t need anything. And I went in the little newsstand down there, and I picked up this paperback.
How To Take On The World
, by Doctor Barton. Because I felt like I was starting over in one way, like I said. You and me. So I stood there at the rack and read one chapter called ‘Our New-Agers.’ Which was about these people who won’t eat potato chips and who join these self-discovery groups, and drink mineral water and have literary discussions every day. People that think it oughta be easy to express their feelings and be how you seem. And I just started cryin, cause I realized that that was you, and I was someplace way off the beam. Back with the potato chips and people who aren’t inner-looking. Here we’d come all the way out here, and all I could do was eat shrimp and watch TV and cry. And it wasn’t working out. So I thought maybe we could be friends if you wanted to. I called up Everett because I knew I could bring it off with him and quit crying. I knew I was better off than him.” A big handsome tear leaves her eye, goes off her nose and vanishes into the pillow. I have managed to make two different people cry inside of two hours. I am doing something wrong. Though what?

Cynicism.

I have become more cynical than old Iago, since there is no cynicism like lifelong self-love and the tunnel vision in which you yourself are all that’s visible at the tunnel’s end. It’s embarrassing. Likewise, there’s nothing guaranteed to make people feel more worthless than to think someone is trying to help them—even if you’re not. A cynical “New-Ager” is exactly me, a sad introspecter and potato chip avoider with a queasy heart-to-heart mentality—though I would give the crown jewels not to be, or at least not be thought to be.

My only hope now is to deny everything—friendship, disillusionment, embarrassment, the future, the past—and make my stand for the present. If I can hold her close in this cold-hot afternoon, kiss her and hug away her worries with ardor, so that when the sun is down and the wind stops and a spring evening draws us, maybe I will love her after all, and she me, and all this will just have been the result of too little sleep in a strange town, schnapps and Herb.

“I’m not really a New-Ager,” I say and take a seat on the bed shoulder, where I can touch her cheek, warm as a baby’s. “I’m just an old-fashioned Joe who’s been misunderstood. Let’s pretend we just got here and it’s late at night, and I had you in my old-fashioned arms to love.”

“Oh my.” She puts a tentative hand on my shoulder and gives it a friendly pat. “I bet you think I got it all wrong.” She gives a stout sniff. “That I can’t even make myself miserable and do it right.”

“You’re just no good at messin up.” I put a heavy hand on her soft breast. “You just have to let good things be good if they will. Don’t worry about more than you have to.”

“I shouldn’t read, is what it is. It always gets me in trouble.” She reaches both hands around my neck and pulls hard, so hard once again a crippling pain goes down my back clear to my buttocks.

“Oh,” I say, involuntarily. On TV a skier is just about to push out the timer gate onto a slope longer and higher than any I’ve ever seen. Snow is falling wherever he is. I wouldn’t do what he’s doing for a million dollars.

“Oh my,” she says, for I have found her in the lemony light. “My, my, my.”

“You sweet girl,” I say. “Who wouldn’t love you?”

Outside in the cold city the wind goes
woo
again and I can, I think, hear the tufted snow dashing against the window, sending shivers through every soul in Detroit who thinks he knows a thing or two and who is willing to bet his life on it. I leave the TV on, since even now, in its prying presence, I still find it consoling.

 
    By five o’clock, we have taken a cab trip up Jefferson to the Belle Isle Botanical Garden, and are back in the room suffering a case of the wall-stare willies, something sportswriter’s know a lot about. We are like the family of a traveling salesman, come along for the adventure and diversion, but who find themselves with too much time to kill while business gets conducted; too many unfamiliar streets leading too far away; too little going on in the hotel lobby to make people-watching all that rewarding.

The Botanical Garden turned out to be cold and alien-feeling, though we trudged down aisles of ferns and succulents and passion flowers until Vicki announced a headache. The most interesting rooms all seemed to be closed—in particular a re-creation of an eighteenth-century French herb garden, which we could see through the glass door and that caught both our fancies. A sign hung in the window saying Detroit was not generous enough in its tax attitudes to support this century properly. And in less than an hour we were back out in the cold and snow of afternoon on the windy concrete steps. A muddy playing field stretched away from us toward the boat basin, with the big river invisible and low behind a crescent-line of poplar saplings. Public places can sometimes let you down no matter how promising they start out.

Delivered back outside our hotel, I offered a short walk down Larned to “a great little steak house I know about.” Though when we had gone as far as Woodward, everyone we saw had become black and vaguely menacing, the taxis and police all unexplainably disappeared, and Vicki clung to me ashiver from the wintry norther that’d dropped in on us from bland Canada.