The Sportswriter (26 page)

“I’m not really dressed for this, I don’t think,” she said beneath my arm, and smiled a daunted smile. “I’d settle for a Tuna Alladin at the coffee shop, if that’s okay with you.”

“I guess they’ve moved the steak place,” I said and gazed up weekend-empty Woodward toward the Grand Circus where, when I was a college boy, Eddy Loukinen, Golfball Kirkland and I cruised the burlesque houses and the schooner bars, then drove the forty miles back to campus full of the mystique of soldiers on a last leave before shipping out to fates you wouldn’t smile about It was incongruous to me, in fact, that the year could’ve been 1963. Not ’73 or ’53. Sometimes I can even forget my own age and the year I’m living in, and think I am twenty, a kid starting new in the world—a greener, confused by life at its beginning.

“Towns aren’t even towns anymore,” Vicki said, sensing my distraction with this sad evolution, and giving me a hug around my middle. “Dallas wasn’t
ever
one, when you get right down to it. It’s just a suburb looking for a place to light.”

“I remember they had a first class wine list there,” I said, still gazing up Woodward toward the phantom steakhouse, past the old Sheraton and into the abandonment and dazzle of sex clubs and White Castles and
bibliothèques sensuelles
stretching to where snow made a backdrop.

“I can taste the cheddar cheese already,” she said in reference to her Tuna Alladin, trying to be upbeat. “I bet they’ve got just as good a wine for half the price back at the hotel. You’re just looking for someplace else to spend your money again.” And she was right, and wheeled me around and set us off back to the Pontch, watching our toes on the snowy pavement, taking long, slew-footed strides and laughing like conventioneers turned loose on the old town.

Though by five we are room-bound here, driven in by unseasonable weather and the forbidding streets of this city. We have tried to make the most of everything that’s come our way: a belly-buster lunch in the Frontenac Grill complete with a bottle of Michigan beaujolais. A long nap in a fresh bed, after which I have stood at the window and watched another ore barge down from Lake Superior ply the snowy river, headed, like the one last night, for Cleveland or Ashtabula. It’s possible I should put in a call to Herb, or even to Clarice, though I don’t know what I’d say and finally lack the courage. I might also call Rhonda Matuzak to report I’ve found out nothing usable for the Pigskin Preview. People are in the office this weekend, though it’s doubtful anyone’s counting on me. Mine, for the moment, is not the best sportswriter’s attitude.

“I’ll tell you what let’s do,” Vicki says suddenly. She is seated at the vanity twisting in some Navajo earrings she has bought with her money at the gift shop. They are tiny as pin-heads, lovely and blue as hyacinths.

“You just name it,” I say, looking up from the
Out on the Town
, which I’ve read cover to cover without finding one local attraction I have the heart for—including Paul Anka, who’s already left town. Even a cab ride to Tiger Stadium and a Mexican dinner seem somehow second rate.

“Let’s go on out to the airport and stand-by for a flight. Nobody goes any place on Saturday. I remember from when I used to watch planes for fun, they used to let people on with tickets for other days. They’re good about that.”

“I thought we’d make a festive night of it,” I say half-heartedly. “I was planning on Greek Town. There’s still plenty to do here.”

“Sometimes, you know, you just get the bug to sleep in your own bed, don’t you think that’s so? We’re s’posed to be at Daddy’s tomorrow before noon anyway. This’ll make it easier.”

“Aren’t you going to be disappointed to miss souvlaki and bak-lava?”

“I don’t even know where they’re located so how could I miss ’em? I bet you have to drive through some snow to get there though.”

“I haven’t been much of a high-flier this trip. I don’t really know what happened.”

“Nothing did.” Looking in the mirror, Vicki pulls back her dark curls to model the Navajos, pinched in behind her plump cheeks. She turns to the side to see and gives me a reassuring smile via the mirror. “I don’t have to ride the merry-go-round to have fun. I take mine from who I’m with, not what I do. I’ve had the best time I could, just being with you, and you’re a clubfoot not to know it.”

“What if the airport’s closed?”

“Then I’ll sit and read stories to you out of movie magazines. There’s worse things than spending the night in the airport. Sometimes I’d rather be there than lots of places.”

“It wouldn’t be that bad, would it?”

“No sir. Put yourself in one of those little TV chairs, eat dinner in a good restaurant. Get your shoes shined. It’d take you all night to hit the high spots,”

“I’ll call us a bellman,” I say, and stand up.

“I don’t know why we waited this long.” She smiles at me.

“I guess I was waiting for something exciting and unusual to happen. I always hope for that. It’s my weakness.”

“You have to know, though, when what you’re waiting for says, ‘Smile, you’re on candid camera.’ Then you got to be ready to smile.”

And I do smile, at her, as I reach for the phone to ring the bell captain. A small future brightens, and not a bad one, but an ordinary good one. And, as I dial, I feel the sky of this long day lighten about me now for the first time, and the clouds begin at last to ascend.

 
    By ten we are in New Jersey as if by miracle of time travel, returned from the flat midwest to the diverse seaboard. Vicki has slept across Lake Erie once again after reading to me several excerpts from
Daytime Confidential
, all of which made me laugh, but which she took more seriously and seemed to want to mull over, I read a good deal of
Love’s Last Journey
and found it not bad at all. There was no long flashback prologue to get past, and the writer proved pretty skillful at getting the ball rolling by page two. I woke her only when the pilot banked over what I estimated to be Red Bank, with bright Gotham (the Statue of Liberty tiny but distinct, like a Japanese doll of herself) and all of New Jersey spread out like a glittering diamond apron, the Atlantic and Pennsylvania looming dark as the Arctic.

“What’s
that
thing,” Vicki asked, staring and pointing below us into the distant carnival of civilized lights.

“That’s the Turnpike. You can see where it meets the Garden State at Woodbridge and heads to New York.”

“Hey-o,” she said.

“I think it’s beautiful from up here.”

“You prob’ly do,” she said. “No telling what you’ll think’s beautiful next. A junk yard I guess.”

“I think you’re beautiful.”

“More than a junk yard. A junk yard in New Jersey?”

“Almost.” I squeezed her strong little arm and held it to me.

“You said the wrong thing now.” Her eyes narrowed in mock pique. “I liked you to this point. But I don’t see how this can go on.”

“You’ll break my heart.”

“It won’t be the first one I broke, will it?”

“What if I’m better?”

“’Bout too late,” she said. “You should of considered all that before you were even born.” She shook her head as though she meant every word of it, then settled back and closed her eyes to sleep as our silver ship perfected its descent to earth.

 
    By eleven-fifteen I have delivered us to Pheasant Meadow. It has become a clear and intensely full-featured night, with the moon waning and tomorrow’s weather giving no sign of arriving from Detroit. It’s the very kind of night that used to make me disoriented and dizzy—the sort of night I stood out in the yard in, while X was inside burning her hope chest, and charted Cassiopeia and Gemini in the northern sky and felt vulnerable beside the rhododendrons. Since then, to be truthful, I have never felt all that easy with the clear night sky, as if I was seeing it from the top of a high building and afraid to look down. (I tend to prefer broken cirrus or mackerel clouds to a pure, starry vault.)

“Don’t bother walkin me,” Vicki says, already out the car door and with her head back inside the window. I have stopped behind her Dart. The hard-hat guys from yesterday have finished off a phony mansard across the lot, although none of the finished buildings have roofs like that. Naturally I was hoping for an invitation inside—a nightcap. But I see my hopes on that front are slim. She has become skittish now, as though someone else was waiting upstairs.

“Tomorrow’s the day he rolled back the stone and raised up from the dead,” she says in all seriousness, staring straight at me as if I was expected to recite a psalm. She has her Le Sac weekender looped over her shoulder and her Navajo earrings on. “I might go to early mass, just for keeping us safe, that and the insurance. Or I might go to the drive-in Methodists in Hightstown. One’s official as the other. I’m thinking twice about lapsin. I’d ask you to come, but I know you wouldn’t like it.”

“I’d like the music.”

“Whatever floats your boat, I guess,” she says. We have been together for two days now, shared another geography, slept in one bed, been quiet together and attended each other’s pleasures and courtesy like married folk. Only now the end is in sight, and neither of us can find the handle to a proper parting. Flippancy and a vague churlishness is her protocol. Unwitting politeness is mine. It is not a good mix.

“I’m going to see you tomorrow, aren’t I?” I am cheerful, bending to see her and seeing beyond her the big blue space-age water tank and beyond that the big Easter moon.

“You better be on time. Daddy’s picky ’bout when he eats. And it takes a whole hour to get there.”

“I’m looking forward to it a lot.” This is not entirely true, but it is my official attitude. This part of tomorrow is actually alive with fearsome ambiguity.

“You hadn’t even met him yet. Wait’ll you meet my stepmother. She’s a breed apart. If you like her you’ll like broccoli. But Daddy’s somethin. You
better
like him, only he probably won’t like you. Or least that’s how he’ll act. His true thoughts will come to light later. Not that it matters.”

“You love me, don’t you?” When I lean up to be kissed, she gazes down on me with a pert, appraising face. I cannot help wondering if she’s not considering Everett right now and an Alaskan adventure.

“Maybe. What if I do?”

“Then you’ll give me a kiss and ask me to spend the night.”

“No way on that,” she says, and gives her hand a big Dinah Shore kiss and smacks me hard across the cheek with it. “That’s what you got comin. Signed, sealed and delivered, ole Mister Smart.” And then she is off, skittering toward the darkened apartments, across the skimpy lawn and in the lighted outside door and out of sight. And I am left alone in my Malibu, staring at the glossy moon as if it were all of mystery and anticipation, all the things we are happy to leave and happier yet to see come toward us new again.

8

A suspicious light shines in my living room. A strange car sits at the curb. On the third floor Bosobolo’s desk lamp is lit, though it is after midnight. Easter undoubtedly means special preparations for him, possibly a sermon at one of the Institute’s satellite churches which he services now and then to fine-tune his evangelizing techniques. He has put up a wreath on the front door, a decision we have discussed earlier that won my approval. All the houses on Hoving Road are silent and dark, odd for a Saturday night, when there is usually entertaining going on and windows brightened. In the clear sky above the button woods and tulip trees, I can see only the lemony glitter of Gotham lighting the heavens fifty miles away, as though a great event was going on there—a state fair, say, or a firestorm. And I am happy to see it, happy to be this far from the action, on the leeward side of what the wider world deems important.

In my house stands Walter Luckett.

More accurately, waiting in the room I now use as a cozy study, an old side porch with French doors, overstuffed summerish furniture, brass lamps with maps for shades (bought from a catalog), bookshelves to the ceiling and a purplish Persian rug that came with the house. It is the room I normally consider
mine
, though I am not hard-nosed about it. But even Bosobolo, who has the run of everything, stays clear without having to be asked. It is the room where I finally gave up work on
Tangier
, where I do most of my sportswriting, where my typewriter sits on my desk. And when X left me, it was in this room that I slept every night until I could face going back upstairs. Most people have such comfortable, significant places if they own a home, and Walter Luckett is standing in the middle of mine with a wry self-derisive smirk that probably caused a certain kind of brainy, pock-marked girl back in Coshocton to think, “Well, now. Here’s something new to the planet…. More’s here than meets the eye,” and later to put up with hell and foolishness to be his date.

Though I can’t say it makes me glad to see him, since I’m tired, and as recently as twelve hours ago was in faraway Walled Lake, having a conversation with a crazy man out of which I won’t get a story to write. What I want to do is put that behind me and hit the hay. Tomorrow like all tomorrows could still be a banner day.

Walter is holding a copy of a canvas luggage catalog, and, upon seeing me, has rolled it into a tight little megaphone. “Frank. Your butler let me in, or I wouldn’t be here at this hour. You have my word on that.”