The Sportswriter (15 page)

There are things in this world—plenty of them—we don’t need to know the facts about. The noisome fact of two men’s snuggle-buggle in some Seventh Avenue drummer’s hotel has
no
mystery to it—the way, say, an electric guitar or “the twist” or an old Stude-baker have no mystery either. Only facts. Walter and Mr. Whoever could live together twenty years, sell antiques, change to real estate, adopt a Korean child, change their wills, buy a summer house on Vinalhaven, fall out of love a dozen times and back again, go back to women more than once and finally find love together as senior citizens. And still not have it.

By now it seemed more than possible that Vicki had gotten bored and hied off with some oncologist from upstairs, in his dream machine Jag, and at that moment was whirling into the sunset, a thermos of mai tais on the console and Englebert Humperdinck groaning on the eight-track.

What, then, was left for me to do but make the best of things.

I drove to Route 1, then south to Mrs. Miller’s little brick ranchette on a long, grassy lot between an Exxon and a Rusty Jones, where a chiropractor once kept a practice. Several older, low-slung bomber cars were in the driveway, and the lights were lit behind drawn curtains, but her
Reader-Adviser
sign was dark. I was too late here, too, though the curtained lights certainly spoke of some secret, possibly exotic goings on inside; enough to excite my curiosity, and in fact enough to excite the curiosity of anyone driving south through the night toward Philadelphia with only glum prospects to consider.

Mrs. Miller and I have done business two years now, since just before X and I got divorced, and I’ve become a well-known face to all the aunts and uncles and cousins who lounge around inside in the tiny, overfurnished rooms, talking in secret, low voices and drinking coffee at all hours of the day and night. They were probably, I guessed, doing exactly that and no more now, and in fact if I had walked in I’d have been as welcome as a cousin to have an after-hours consultation, inquire about my prospects for the rest of the week. But I preferred to respect her privacy, since, like a writer, her place of business is also her home.

There is nothing complicated about how I began seeing Mrs. Miller. I was driving down Route 1 heading for the hardware store with Clary and Paul in the back seat—we were intent on buying a bicycle pump—and I simply saw her open-palm
Reader-Adviser
sign and pulled in. Probably I had passed it two hundred times over the years, and never noticed. I don’t remember feeling out of sorts, though it’s not always possible to remember. But I believe when it comes time to see a reader-adviser you know it, if, that is, you aren’t at full-scale war with your best instincts.

For a moment I paused at the end of the driveway. I cut my lights and sat a moment watching the windows, since Mrs. Miller, her house, her business, her relatives, her life, posed altogether a small but genuine source of pleasure and wonder. It was as much for that reason that I went to see her once a week, and so found it satisfying enough last night just to be there.

Mrs. Miller’s advice, indeed, is almost always just the standard reader-adviser advice and frequently completely wrong: “I see you are coming into much money soon” (not true). “I see a long life” (not likely, though I wouldn’t argue). “You are a good man at heart” (uncertain). And she gives me the same or similar advice almost every week, with provisory adjustments that have to do mostly with the weather: “Things will brighten for you” (on rainy days). “Your future is not completely clear” (on cloudy days). There are even days she doesn’t recognize me and gives me a puzzled look when I enter. Though she giggles like a schoolgirl when we’re finished and says “See you next time” (never using my name), and occasionally dispenses with giving me one of her cards, which has typed at the bottom, below the raised crystal ball emblem: A PLACE TO BRINGYOUR FRIENDS AND FEEL NO EMBARRASSMENT—I AM NOT A GYPSY.

I am certainly not embarrassed to go there, you can bet on that. Since for five dollars she will lead you into a dimly lit back bedroom of her sturdy suburban house, where there is plastic-brocade drapery over the window. (I wondered, first time through, if a little Levantine cousin or sister wouldn’t be waiting there. But no.) There the light is greenish-amber, and a tiny radio plays softly sinuous Greek-sounding flute music. There is an actual clouded crystal ball on the card table (she has never used this) and several stacks of oversized tarot cards. Once we’re in place she will hold my hand, trace its tender lines, wrinkle her brows as if my palm revealed hard matters, look puzzled or relieved and finally say hopeful, thoughtful things that no other strangers would ever think to say to me.

She is
the stranger who takes your life seriously
, the personage we all go into each day in hopes of meeting, the friend to the great mass of us not at odds with much; not disabled from anything; not “sick” in the strictest sense.

She herself is a handsome, dusky-skinned woman in her thirties or forties, a bit overweight and vaguely condescending, but completely agreeable down deep—so much so that at the end of our conferences she will almost always entertain a question or two as a bonus. I write these questions on scraps of paper during the week, though I almost always lose them and end up asking simple, factual-essential questions like: “Will Paul and Clarissa be safe from harm this week?” (a continued source of concern for anyone, especially me). Her answers, in turn, tend always to the bright side concerning my happiness, though toward the precautionary concerning my children: “No harm will come to them if you are a good father.” (I have told her about Ralph long ago.) Once, in a panic for a good question, I asked if the Tigers could possibly finish tied for the American League East, in which case a one-game, winner-take-all tie-breaker with Baltimore would’ve been the decider. And this made her angry. Betting advice, she said, was more expensive than five dollars, and then charged me ten without giving me an answer.

I have learned over time that when her answers to my questions have been wrong, the best thing to think is that somehow it’s my fault things didn’t turn out.

But where else can you get, on demand, hopeful, inspiring projections for the real future? Where else, on a windy day in January, can you drive out beset by blue devils and in five minutes be semi-reliably assured by a relative stranger that you are who you think you are, and that things aren’t going to turn out so crappy after all?

Would a Doctor Freud be so obliging, I’ve wondered? Would he be any more likely to know anything, and tell you? I doubt it. In fact, in the bad days after my divorce I met a girl in St. Louis who had by then—she was in her mid-twenties and a buxom looker—spent thousands of dollars and hours consulting the most highly respected psychiatrist in that shadowy bricktop town, until one day she bounced into the office, full of high spirits. “Oh, Dr. Fasnacht,” she proclaimed, “I woke up this morning and realized I’m cured! I’m ready to stop my visits and go out into the world on my own as a full-fledged citizen. You’ve cured me. You’ve made me so happy!” To which the old swindler replied: “Why, this is disastrous news. Your wish to end your therapy is the most distressing evidence of your terrible need to continue. You are much more ill than I ever thought. Now lie down.”

Mrs. Miller would never give anyone such mopish opinions. Her strategy would be to give a much more promising than usual reading for that day, shake your hand, (possibly) forgo the five dollars as a lucky sign and say with eyebrows raised, “Come back when things puzzle you.” Her philosophy is:
A good day’s a good day. We get few enough of them in a lifetime. Go and enjoy it
.

And that is only the literal part of Mrs. Miller’s—what can I call it best? Her service? Treatment? Poor words for mystery. Since for me, mystery is the crucial part, and in fact the
only
thing I find to have value at this stage in my life—midway around the track.

Mystery is the attractive condition a thing (an object, an action, a person) possesses which you know a little about but don’t know about completely. It is the twiney promise of unknown things (effects, inter workings, suspicions) which you must be wise enough to explore not too deeply, for fear you will dead-end in nothing but facts.

A typical mystery would be traveling to Cleveland, a town you have never liked, meeting a beautiful girl, going for a lobster dinner during which you talk about an island off of Maine where you have both been with former lovers and had terrific times, and which talking about now revivifies so much you run upstairs and woggle the bejesus out of each other. Next morning all is well. You fly off to another city, forget about the girl. But you also feel differently about Cleveland for the rest of your life, but can’t exactly remember why.

Mrs. Miller, when I come to her for a five-dollar consultation, does not disclose the world to me, nor my future in it. She merely encourages and assures me about it, admits me briefly to the mystery that surrounds her own life, which then sends me home with high hopes, aswarm with curiosities and wonder on the very lowest level: Who is this Mrs. Miller if she is not a Gypsy? A Jew? A Moroccan? Is “Miller” her real name? Who are those other people inside—relatives? Husbands? Are they citizens of this state? What enterprise are they up to? Are guns for sale? Passports? Foreign currency? On a slightly higher level: How do I seem? (Who has not wanted to ask his doctor that?) Though I am fierce to find out not one fleck more than is incidental to my visitis, since finding out more would only make me the loser, submerge me in dull facts, and require me to seek some other mystery or do without.

As I expected would happen, simply proximity to the glow through her warm curtains—like the antique light of another century—plucked my spirits up like a hitchhiker who catches a ride when all hope was lost. More seemed suddenly possible, and near, whereas before nothing did. Though as I glanced back nostalgically at Mrs. Miller’s squared ranchette, I sensed the front door had opened an inch. Someone there was watching me, wondering who I was, what I’d been up to. A love car? The police? A drunk sleeping it off? I was not even sure the door had opened, so that this was as much a riddle to me as I was to whomever I took to be there. A shared riddle, if he/she existed, a perfect give and take in the spirit of a marriage. And I slid off quickly into the south-bound traffic as renewed as a baby born to middle life.

I took the first jug-handle turn and zipped back up the Great Woods Road through the dark apple orchards, sod farms, beef alo barns, the playing fields of De Tocqueville Academy and the modern world-headquarters lawns, all of which keep Haddam sheltered from the dazzling hubcap emporia, dairy barns and swank Radio Shack hurdy-gurdy down Route 1 toward the sullen city of brotherly love. I was not ready for bed now. Far from it. Factuality and loneliness had been put in their places, and an anticipation awakened. The day, changed to a spring evening, held promise only an adventure would unearth.

 
    I idled down Seminary Street, abstracted and empty in the lemony vapor of suburban eventide. (It could always be a sad town.) The two stoplights at either end were flashing yellow, and on the south side of the square only Officer Carnevale waited in his murmuring cruiser, lost in police-radio funk, ready to catch speeders and fleeing ten-speed thieves. Even the seminary was silent—Gothic solemnity and canary lights from the quarreled windows aglimmer through the elms and buttonwoods. Sermonizing midterms were soon, and everybody’d buckled down. Only Carnevale’s exhaust said a towny soul was breathing inside a hundred miles, where above the trees the gladlights of New York City paled the sky.

Nine o’clock on the Thursday before Easter far down the suburban train line. A town, almost any town, would seem to have secrets all its own. Though if you believed that you’d be wrong. Haddam in fact is as straightforward and plumb-literal as a fire hydrant, which more than anything else makes it the pleasant place it is.

None of us could stand it if every place were a grizzled Chicago or a bilgy Los Angeles—towns, like Gotham, of genuine woven intricacy. We all need our simple, unambiguous, even factitious townscapes like mine. Places without challenge or double-ranked complexity. Give me a little Anyplace, a grinning, toe-tapping Terre Haute or wide-eyed Bismarck, with stable property values, regular garbage pick-up, good drainage, ample parking, located not far from a major airport, and I’ll beat the birds up singing every morning.

I slowed to take a peek at the marquee of the First Presbyterian, at the edge of the seminary grounds. I occasionally pop in on a given Sunday just to see what they’re up to and lift my spirits with a hymn. X and I attended when we first moved here, but she eventually lost interest, and I began working Sundays. Years ago, when I was a senior and in need of an antidote to the puddling, laughless, guilty ironies of midwar Ann Arbor, I began attending a liberal and nondogmatic Westminster group on Maynard Street. The preacher, who referred to himself as a “moderator,” was a tall, acned, open-collared scarecrow who aimed his mumbled sermons toward world starvation, the UN and SEATO, and who seemed embarrassed when it came time to stand up and pray and always kept his darting eyes open. A skinny little anorexic wife was his assistant—they were both from Muskegon—and our congregation consisted mostly of elderly professors’ widows, a few confused and homely coeds and a homosexual or two just coming to grips with things.

I lasted five weeks, then put my Bible away and started staying up Saturday nights at the fraternity and getting good and drunk. Christianity, like everything else in the Ann Arbor of those times, was too factual and problem-solving-oriented. The spirit was made flesh too matter-of-factly. Small-scale rapture and ecstasy (what I’d come for) were out of the question given the mess the world was in. Consequently I loathed going.