The Sportswriter (44 page)

Suddenly, in two dreadful minutes, I make an inventory of
everything
that could possibly turn out better in the next twenty-four to thirty-six hours, and come up with nothing except a wavering mirage memory of Selma Jassim from years ago and our late-night hours, half-asleep and half-drunk and in a high state of excitement, with her moaning in unintelligible Arabic and me in animal anticipation (all this when I should’ve been reading student essays). Of course I can’t remember one thing we could’ve said, or how we kept each other interested very long with the little we had to offer from the fringes of our upturned lives, Though anything is possible, any amount of rapturous transport, when you’re lonely enough and at the nubbins end of your rope. Mutinous freedom awaits there for those who can bear it.

What I actually remember are long sinuous sighs in the night and the intermittent tinkle of ice cubes from glasses, her cigarette smoke in the dark of the dance-lady’s house and the still October air turned electric with longing. And then, the next day, the long fog of having been up and awake all night, and a sense of accomplishment for having gotten through the night at all.

I don’t regret a moment of it, the way you wouldn’t regret wolfing down the last crumbly morsel of, say, the blackberry cobbler you had when you were snowbound in December on a rural highway in Wyoming and no one knew you were there, and the sun setting on you for the last time. Regret is not part of that, I’ll tell you (even though knowing her absolutely lengthened the distance between X and me at the time, and made me dreamy and untalkative at the wrong crucial moment).

But I am no martyr to a past. And halfway through the town of Adelphia, New Jersey, on Business 524, I pull into an empty Acme lot and put in a call to Providence, where I think she might be. A voice could help. Better than four hundred-dollar prostitutes and a free trip to Coeur d’Alene.

In the phone booth I lean heavily on the cool plexiglass, staring at a wire shopping cart stranded in the empty parking lot, while the operator in faraway 401 runs through her listings. At a distance across the blacktop, a burger joint is open on Easter. Ground Zero Burg—a relic of the old low-slung Forties places with sliding screens, windows all around and striped awnings. A lone black car sits nosed under the awning, a carhop leaned in talking to the driver. The sky is white and skating toward the ocean at top speed. Things can happen to you. I know that. Evil lurks most everywhere, and death is too severe for most ordinary remedies. I have dealt with them before.

A ring and then an answer straightaway.

“Halloo.”

“Selma?” An inexplicable name, I know, but it’s pronounced differently in Arabic.

“Yes?”

“Hi Selma, it’s Frank. Frank Bascombe.”

Silence. Puzzlement. “Oh. Yes. Of course. And how are you?” Cigarette smoke in the receiver. Nothing surprising here.

“Fine. I’m fine.” I couldn’t be worse, though I won’t admit it. And what next? I have nothing else to say. What do we expect other people can do for us? One of my problems is that I am
not
a problem-solver. I rely on others, even though I like to think I don’t.

“So. How long has it been?” It’s damn good of her to try and make conversation with me, since I seem incapable of it.

“Three years, Selma. Seems like a long time.”

“Ah, yes. And you still write … what was it you wrote that I thought so amusing?”

“Sports.”

“Sports. Yes indeed. I remember now.” She laughs. “Not novels.”

“No.”

“Good. It made you so happy.”

I watch the stoplight on Route 524 as it changes from yellow to red, and try to picture the room where she is sitting. A Queen Anne-style house, white or blue, on College Hill. Angeli Street or Brown Street. The view from the window: a nice prospect of elms and streets running down to the old factory piles with the big bay far in the hazy afterground. If only I could be there instead of a parking lot in Adelphia. I would be miles happier. New prospects. Real possibilities rising like new mountains. I could be convinced in no time flat that things weren’t so bad. “Frank?” Selma says into the musing silence at my end. I am putting a sail in on the bay, calculating winds and seas. Populating a different world.

“What.”

“Are you sure you’re feeling well? You sound quite strange. I’m always very happy to hear from you. But you don’t sound particularly as if you’re all right. Exactly where are you now?”

“In New Jersey. In a phone booth in a town called Adelphia. I’m not as good as I could be. But that’s all right. I just wanted to hear your voice and think about you.”

“Well, that’s very nice. Why don’t you tell me what’s wrong.” The familiar tinkle of a single ice cube (some things remain the same). I wonder if she is wearing her Al Fatah burnoose right now, which drove our Jewish colleagues crazy. (In private, of course, they loved it.)

“What are you doing right now,” I say, staring across the Acme lot. The name “Shelby” has been scratched on the glass in front of my eyes. A cool urine scent hangs around me. At Ground Zero Burg the carhop suddenly stands back from the lone car, hands on her hips in what looks like disgust. Trouble may be brewing there. They don’t know how good they have it.

“Oh. Well. I’m reading today,” Selma says and sighs. “What else do I do?”

“Tell me what. I haven’t read a book in I don’t know when. I wish I had. The last one I read wasn’t very good.”

“Robert Frost. I’m meant to teach him in a week’s time.”

“That sounds great. I like Frost.”

“Great? I don’t know about that.” Tinkle, tinkle.

“It sounds great to me. I’ll tell you that. You’re going to take all the I’s out of it, aren’t you?”

“Yes, of course.” A laugh. “What silliness that was. He’s a bore, though, really. Just a mean child who wrote. Occasionally he’s amusing, I suppose. He’s short, leastways. I’ve read Jane Austen now.”

“She’s great, too.”

Angry blue-white smoke spews suddenly from underneath the tires of the black car, though there’s no sound. The carhop turns and steps languidly up onto the curb, unimpressed. The car bolts back, halts, then squeals forward directly at her, but she doesn’t even bother to move as the bumper bulls her way, stopping short and diving. She raises her arm and gives the driver the finger, and the car spurts back again with more white smoke, all the way into the Acme lot, and makes a one-eighty right out of TV. Whoever’s driving knows his business. Adelphia may be where race drivers live, for all I know.

“So, well. Are you married now, Frank?”

“No. Are you? Have you found an industrialist yet?”

“No.” Silence, followed by a cruel laugh. “People ask me to marry them … quite a number, in fact. But. They’re all idiots and very poor.”

“What about me?” I take another mental glimpse out her window into the atmospheric Narragansett town and bay. Plenty of sails. It’s all wonderful.

“What about you?” She laughs again and sips her drink. “Are you rich?”

“I’m still interested.”

“Are
you?”

“You’re damn right I am.”

“Well, that’s good.” She is amused—why shouldn’t she be? General amusement was always her position vis-à-vis the western world. There is no harm meant, really. Frost and I are just a couple of cutups. I don’t even mind admitting I feel a tiny bit better. And what has it cost anyone? Two minutes of palaver charged to my home phone.

For some reason the car in the Acme lot has stopped. It is a long Trans-Am, one of the sharky-looking GMs with a wind fin like a road racer. A small head rides low behind the wheel. Suddenly more white smoke blurts from underneath the raised tires, though the car doesn’t exactly move but seems to want to move—the driver is standing on the brake, is my guess. Then the car positively leaps forward ahead of all its tire-smoke and fishtails across the Acme lot (I’m sure the driver is having a devil of a time holding it straight), barely misses one of the light stanchions, achieves traction, flashes by a second stanchion, and whonks right into the empty grocery cart, sending it flying, end-over-end, casters rocketing, plastic handles splintered, red “Property of Acme” sign sailing up into the white sky, and the bulk of the basket atumble-and-whirligig right at the phone booth where I’m talking to Selma in Rhode Island, the Ocean State.

The shattered cart hits—BANG—into the phone booth, busts out a low pane of plexiglas and rocks the whole frame. “Christ,” I shout.

“What was that,” Selma says from Providence. “What’s happened, Frank? Has something gone wrong?”

“No it’s fine.”

“It sounded like an explosion in a war.”

Dust has been shaken all over me, and the Trans-Am has stopped just beyond where it hit the shopping cart, its motor throbbing,
ga-lug, ga-lug
.

“A kid hit a shopping cart in his car and it flew over here and crashed into this phone booth. A pane of glass came out and broke. It’s strange.” The glass pane is now leaned against my knee.

“Well. I suppose I don’t understand.”

“It’s hard to understand, really.”

The driver’s door on the Trans-Am opens and a Negro boy in sunglasses gets out and stares at me, his head barely clearing the top of the window. He seems to be considering the distance between us. I don’t know if he’s thinking of going ahead and ramming the phone booth or not.

“Wait a minute.” I step out to where he can see me. I wave and he waves back, and then he gets back in his car and slowly backs up twenty yards—for no reason at all, since he’s in the middle of an empty lot—and drives slowly around toward the exit by Ground Zero. As he turns out into the street, he honks at the carhop, and once again she gives him the finger. She, of course, is white.

“What’s actually happening,” Selma asks. “Is someone hurting you?”

“No. They missed me.” With my foot I shove the corner of the shopping cart back out the broken window. A breeze flows in at knee level. Across the lot the carhop is talking to someone about what’s just happened. This would make a good Candid Camera segment, though it isn’t clear who the joke would be on. “I’m sorry to call you up and then have all this go crash.” The cart falls free out the window.

“It doesn’t matter,” Selma says, and laughs.

“It must seem like I live a life of chaos and confusion,” I say, thinking about Walter’s face for the first time all afternoon. I see it alive, then stone dead, and I can’t help thinking he has made a terrible mistake, something I might’ve warned him about, except I didn’t think of it in time.

“Well, yes. I suppose it does seem that way.” Selma sounds amused again. “But it doesn’t matter, either. It doesn’t seem to bother you.”

“Listen. How about if I took the train up to see you tonight? Or I could drive. How about it?”

“No. That wouldn’t work out too well.”

“Okay.” I am feeling light-headed now. “How about later in the week? I’m not very busy these days.”

“Maybe so. Yes.” (Scant enthusiasm for this plan, though who would want me as an after-midnight guest?) “It might not be that good an idea to come, really.” Her voice implies several things, a plethora of better choices.

“Okay,” I say, and find it possible to cheer up a little. “I’m glad to get to talk to you.”

“Yes, it’s very very nice. It’s always
very
nice to hear from you.”

What I’d like to say is:
Go to hell, there aren’t that many better choices in the world than me. Look around. Do yourself a favor
. But what kind of man would say that? “I should probably go. I have to drive home.”

“Yes. All right,” Selma says. “You should be careful.”

“Go to hell,” I say.

“Yes, goodbye,” Selma says—Queen Anne house, bright prospects, tidy faculty life, sailboats, leafy streets all spinning around every which way, and all suddenly gone.

I step out of the shambles into the breezy parking lot, my heart thumping like an outboard. A few slow cars cruise Route 524, though the town, here on its outer edge, lies sunk in the secular aimlessness of Sunday that Easter only worsens for the lonely of the world. And for some reason I feel stupid. The colored boy in the Trans-Am slides by, looks at me and registers no recognition, then heads on out to the nappy countryside, running the yellow light toward Point Pleasant and the beaches, more white girls on his mind. His dashboard, I can see, is covered with white fur.

How exactly did I get to here, is what I would like to know, since my usual need, when I find myself in unaccustomed environs, is to add things up, consider what forces have led me here, and to wonder if this course is typical of what I would call my life, or if it is only extraordinary and nothing to worry about.

Quo vadis
, in other words. No easy question. And at the moment I have no answers.

“Ahnnn, you aren’t dead, are ya?” A voice speaks to me.

I turn and am facing a thin, sallow-faced girl with vaguely spavinous hips. Her sleeveless T-shirt has a rock group’s name, THE BLOODCOUNTS, stenciled on its flat front, her pink jeans pronounce all out of happy proportion the bone-spread of her hips. She is the carhop from Ground Zero Burg, the girl who gives men the finger. She has come to get a first-hand look at me.