The Sportswriter (31 page)

Sportswriters are sometimes damned bad men, and create a life of lies and false tragedies. In Herb’s case, they’d order up a grainy black-and-white fisheye of Herb in his wheelchair, wearing his BIONIC shirt and running shoes, looking like a caged child molester; take in enough of his crummy neighborhood to get the “flavor;” stand Clarice somewhere in the background looking haggard and lost like somebody’s abandoned slave out of the dustbowl, then start things off with: “Quo Vadis Herb Wallagher?” The idea being to make us feel sorry enough for Herb, or some
idea
of Herb, to convince us we’re all really like him and tragically involved, when in fact nothing of the kind is true, since Herb isn’t even a very likable guy and most of us aren’t in wheelchairs. (If I were paying salaries, those guys would be on the street looking for a living where they couldn’t do any harm.)

Though what can I write that’s better? I’m not certain. Some life does not give in to a sportswriter’s point of view. It ought to be possible to take a rear-guard approach, to look for drama in the concept of retrenchment, to find the grit of the survivor in Herb—something several hundred thousand people would be glad to read with a stiff martini on a Sunday afternoon before dinner (we all have our optimal readers and times), something that draws the weave of lived life tighter. It’s what’s next that I have to work on. Though in the end, this is all I ask for: to participate briefly in the lives of others at a low level; to speak in a plain, truth-telling voice; to not take myself too seriously; and then to have done with it. Since after all, it is one thing to write sports, but another thing entirely to live a life.

 
    By nine I am up, dressed in my work clothes and out in the side yard nosing around the flower beds like a porch hound. Following my speculations about Herb, I went back to sleep and woke up happy and alert—my mind empty, the sun speckling through the beech leaves and not a hint of ugly Detroit weather on the horizon. My trip to the Arcenaults, however, is still two hours off, and as is sometimes the case these days, I do not have quite enough to do. One of the down-side factors to living alone is that you sometimes get overly absorbed with how exact segments of time are consumed, and can begin to feel a pleasure with life that is hopelessly tinged with longing.

Beyond my hemlock hedge Delia Deffeyes is out in her yard in tennis whites, reading the newspaper, something I’ve seen her do a hundred times. She and Caspar have had their morning game, and now he has gone in for a nap. The Deffeyes and I have a policy which says that simply seeing each other in our yards is no reason to have a conversation, and normally we pass polite offhand waves and smiling nods and go about our business. Though I never mind an impromptu conversation. I am not a man who hoards his privacy, and if I am out in my yard spreading Vigaro or inspecting my crocuses, I am per se available for an encounter. Delia and I do occasionally engage in nuts and bolts publishing talk with reference to a book she’s writing for the historical society on European traditions in New Jersey architecture. My experience is years old, but I maintain a kind of plain-talk, common-sense expertise about matters: “Any editor worth his or her salt ought to appreciate the hell out of the kind of attention to detail you’re willing to give. You can’t take that for granted, that’s all I know.” It
is
all I know, but Delia seems willing to take a word to the wise. She is eighty-two, born to a storied American business family in Morocco during the Protectorate, and has seen a wide world. Caspar has retired out of the diplomatic corps and came to the seminary afterward to teach ethics. Neither of them has too many years left on earth. (It is, in fact, a revelation to live in a town with a seminary, since like Caspar, seminarians are not a bit what you’d think. Most of them are not pious Bible-pounders at all, but sharp-eyed liberal Ivy League types with bony, tanned-leg second wives, and who’ll stand with you toe to toe at a cocktail party, drink scotch and talk about their time-share condos in Telluride.)

Delia spies me down behind the children’s jungle gym, fingering a rose bud that’s ready to bloom, and wanders over to the hemlock hedge shaking her head, though apparently still reading. It is her signal and the premise of our neighborliness—all our conversations are just extensions of the last one, even though they are often on different subjects and months apart.

“Now here, Frank, look at this.” Delia holds up the front page of the
Times
to show me something. Church bells have begun clamoring and gonging across town. On all streets families are off to Sunday school in spanking new Easter get-ups—cars washed and polished to look like new, all arguments suspended. “What do you think about what our government’s doing to the poor people in Central America?”

“I haven’t kept very close tabs on that, Delia,” I say from the roses. “What’s going on down there now?” I give her a sunny smile and walk over to the hedge.

Her moist blue eyes are large with effrontery. (Her hair is the precise blue color of her eyes.) “Well, they’re mining all the ports down there, in, let’s see,” she takes a quick peek, “Nicaragua.” She crushes the open paper down in front of her and blinks at me. Delia is small and brown and wrinkled as an iguana, but has plenty of strong opinions about world affairs and how they ought to work out. “Caspar’s extremely discouraged about it. He thinks it’ll be another Vietnam. He’s in the house right now calling up all his people in Washington trying to find out what’s really going on. He may still have some influence, he thinks, though I don’t see how he could.”

“I’ve been out of town a couple of days, Dee.” I stand and admire Dee and Caspar’s pair of pink pottery flamingos which they bought in Mexico.

“Well, I don’t see why we should mine each other’s ports, Frank. Do you? Honestly?” She shakes her head in private disappointment with our entire government, as though it had been one of her very favorites but suddenly become incomprehensible. For the moment, though, my mind’s as empty as a jug, captured by the belling at the seminary carillon. “Come my soul, thou must be waking; now is breaking o’er the earth another day.” I find I cannot bring up the name or the face of the man who is president, and instead I see, unaccountably, the actor Richard Chamberlain, wearing a burnoose and a nicely trimmed Edwardian beard.

“I guess it would depend on what the cause was. But it doesn’t sound good to me.” I smile across the flat-trimmed hedge. I have to work at being a full adult around Delia, since if I’m not careful our age difference—roughly forty-five years—can have the effect of making me feel like I’m ten.

“We’re hypocrites, Frank, if that’s our policy. You should bear in mind Disraeli’s warning about the conservative governments.”

“I don’t remember that, I guess.”

“That they’re organized hypocrisy, and he wasn’t wrong about that.”

“I remember Thomas Wolfe wrote about making the world safe for hypocrisy. But that’s not the same.”

“Caspar and I think that the States should build a wall all along the Mexican frontier, as large as the Great Wall, and man it with armed men, and make it clear to those countries that we have problems of our own up here.”

“That’s a good idea.”

“Then we could at least solve our own problem with the black man.” I don’t exactly know what Delia and Caspar think about Bosobolo, but I do not intend asking. For being anti-colonial, Delia has some pretty strong colonial instincts. “You writers, Frank. Always ready to set sail with any wind that blows.”

“The wind can blow you interesting places, Dee.” I say this with only mock seriousness, since Delia knows my heart.

“I see your wife at the grocery, and she doesn’t seem very happy to me, Frank. And those two sweet babies.”

“They’re all fine, Dee. Maybe you caught her on a bad day. Her golf game gets her down sometimes. She really didn’t get a fair start on a real career. I think she’s trying to make up for lost time.”

“I do too, Frank.” Delia nods, her face like lean old glove leather, then folds her paper in a neat paperboy’s fold that’s wonderful to see. I’m ready to dawdle away back to the roses and crab apples. Delia and I are sympathetic to each other’s private causes, and both realize it, and that is good enough for me. For a moment I spy Frisker, her seal-point, sleuthing around the hibiscus below Caspar’s flag pole, staring up at the bird feeder where a junco’s perched. Frisker has been known to prowl my roof at night and wake me up, and I’ve thought about getting a slingshot, but so far haven’t. “Man wasn’t meant to live alone, Frank,” Delia says significantly, eyeing me closely all of a sudden.

“It has its plusses, Delia. I’ve adjusted pretty well now.”

“How long has it been since you read
The Sun Also Rises
, Frank?”

“It’s probably been a while now.”

“You should reread it,” Delia says. “There’re important lessons there. That man knew something. Caspar met him in Paris once.”

“He was always one of my favorites.” Not true, though a lie’s what’s asked for. It’s not surprising that Delia’s view of the complex world dates from about 1925. In fact it might have been a better time back then.

“Caspar and I were married in our sixties, you know.”

“I didn’t realize that.”

“Oh, yes. Caspar had a nice fat wife who died. I even met her once. Of course, my own poor husband died years before. Caspar and I went out of wedlock in Fez, in 1942, and kept aware of each other’s whereabouts afterwards. When I heard Alma, his fat wife, had died, I called him up. I was with a niece in Maine by then, and in two months Caspar and I were married and living just below Mount Reconnaissance in Guam, which was his last posting. I certainly didn’t expect what I got from life, Frank. But I didn’t waste time either.” She smiles fiercely, as if she can see my future and the certainty that it will not be quite as wonderful.

“It’s a beautiful day, isn’t it, Dee?”

“It is, yes. It’s quite lovely. I believe it’s Easter.”

“I can’t remember a prettier one.”

“I can’t either, Frank. Why don’t you come over this week and have a scotch with Caspar. He’d love for you to come talk men’s talk. I think he’s pretty upset by all this mining.” In the fourteen years I’ve lived here, I have been in the Deffeyes’ house only two times (both times to fix something), and Delia means no harm by one more insincere invitation. We have reached the natural end of our neighborliness, though she’s too polite to admit the inevitability of it, a quality I like in her. I gaze up from the yard into the still blue Easter morning and, to my surprise, see a balloon, large upon the currents of a gleaming atmosphere, its mooring lines adangle, a big red moon with a smiling face on its bloated bag. Two tiny stick-figure heads peer down from the basket, point arms at us, pull a chain which produces a far-off gasping.

Where did they leave earth, I wonder? The grounds of a nearby world headquarters? A rich man’s mansion on the Delaware? How far can they see on a clear day? Are they safe? Do they
feel
safe?

Delia does not seem to notice, and awaits my answer to her invitation.

“I’ll do that, Dee.” I smile. “Tell Cap I’ll stop by this week. I’ve got a joke to tell him.”

“Any day but Tuesday.” She smiles a prissy smile. This is the usual complication. “He misses men, I’m afraid.”

Delia strays away now with her paper to her sunny lawn and tennis court, me to my barbecue pit and roses and day, upward-tending in most all ways, one I’ll be happy to put into the file of Easters spent richly and forgotten.

Gong, go the bells in town. Gong, gong, gong, gong, gong.

 
    Just before ten I put in a call to X, to wish the children happy Easter. It is now a holiday we “trade,” and this the first one when I haven’t been around. Though no one’s home on Cleveland Street. X’s answer message says that if I’m interested in golf lessons I should leave my name and number. In the background I hear Clary say “Later, bird brain,” and break up laughing. There is an edge in X’s voice now, something strange to me, an all-business, money-in-the-bank brassiness that reminds me of her father. It makes me wonder if my family is off smorging in Bucks County with one of X’s software or realtor friends, some big hairy-armed guy in a green sports jacket, with everything on the company cuff.

I decide not to leave a message (though I’d like to).

For some reason I call Walter Luckett’s number and let the phone ring a long time without an answer while I stare out on the paisley Easter street. Where would I be if I were Walter? In some bully bar in the West Village? Cruising the elmy streets of insular Newfoundland in a devil’s own fury? Hitting some backboard balls at the high school before taking in
The Robe
at Lost Bridge Mall? I’m not even certain I care to know. Some people were not made to have best friends, and I might be one. Walter might be another, though for different reasons. Acquaintanceship usually suffices for me, which was more or less the one important lesson learned from my Lebanese girfriend, Selma Jassim, at Berkshire College, since if anything, she believed mutual confidences of almost any kind were just a lot of baloney.

I decided to go teach at Berkshire College—I know now—to deflect the pain of terrible regret—the same reason I quit writing my novel, years ago, and began to write sports; the same reason most of us make our dramatic turns to the right and left about midway, and the same reason some people drive right off the course and into the ditch.

One afternoon a year after Ralph died, I was at home on one of the week-long breaks that occur at the magazine between large assignments, and when we are supposed to rest up and re-establish a semblance of regular life. I was sitting in the breakfast nook—it was in May—reading some piled-up copies of
Life
when the phone rang. The man calling said his name was Arthur Winston and he was married to Beth Winston, who was the sister of my former literary agent, Sid Fleisher, whom I had not heard from since he had written us a condolence card. Arthur Winston said he was the chairman of the English Department at Berkshire College in Massachusetts, and he had been talking to Sid in Sid’s house in Katonah, and Sid had mentioned a writer he had once represented who had written one good book of short stories, but then quit writing entirely. One thing led to another, Arthur said, and he had ended up with the book, which he claimed to have read and admired. He asked if I had been writing any other short stories since then, and for some reason I gave him an evasive answer which could’ve made him think I had, and that with a little coaxing I could actually be induced to write plenty more (though none of this was true). He said to me then that he was over a pretty big barrel. The usual writer at Berkshire, an older man whose name I didn’t know, had suddenly gone berserk at the end of the spring semester and started vicious fist fights with several people—one of them a woman—and had begun carrying a gun under his coat, so that he had been institutionalized and would not be back in the fall. Arthur Winston said he knew it was a long shot, but that Sid Fleisher had said I was a “pretty interesting” fellow who’d lived a “pretty unusual” life since quitting writing, and he—Arthur—thought maybe a semester of teaching would be just the thing to get my work fired up again, and if I wanted to do it he would consider it a personal favor to him and would see to it I taught anything I pleased. And I simply said “Yes, that’s fine,” and that I would be there in the fall.