The Sportswriter (18 page)

And I feel exactly what at this debarking moment?

At least a hundred things at once, all competing to take the moment and make it their own, reduce undramatic life to a gritty, knowable kernel.

This, of course, is a minor but pernicious lie of literature, that at times like these, after significant or disappointing divulgences, at arrivals or departures of obvious importance, when touchdowns are scored, knock-outs recorded, loved ones buried, orgasms notched, that at such times we are any of us altogether
in
an emotion, that we are within ourselves and not able to detect other emotions we might also be feeling, or be about to feel, or prefer to feel. If it’s literature’s job to tell the truth about these moments, it usually fails, in my opinion, and it’s the writer’s fault for falling into such conventions. (I tried to explain all of this to my students at Berkshire College, using Joyce’s epiphanies as a good example of falsehood. But none of them understood the first thing I was talking about, and I began to feel that if they didn’t already know most of what I wanted to tell them, they were doomed anyway—a pretty good reason to get out of the teaching business.)

What I feel, in truth, as I swing these two suitcases off the wet concrete and our blue bus sighs and rumbles from the curbside toward its other routed hotels, and bellboys lurk behind thick glass intent on selling us assistance, is, in a word: a
disturbance
. As though I were relinquishing something venerable but in need of relinquishing. I feel a quickening in my pulse. I feel a strong sense of lurking evil (the modern experience of pleasure coupled with the certainty that it will end). I feel a conviction that I have no ethics at all and little consistency. I sense the possibility of terrible regret in the brash air. I feel the need suddenly to confide (though not in Vicki or anyone else I know). I feel as literal as I’ve ever felt—stranded, uncomplicated as an immigrant. All these I feel at once. And I feel the urge—which I suppress—to cry, the way a man would, for these same reasons, and more.

That is the truth of what I feel and think. To expect anything less or different is idiotic. Bad sportswriters are always wanting to know such things, though they never want to know the truth, never have a place for that in their stories. Athletes probably think and feel the fewest things of anyone at important times—their training sees to that—though even they can be counted on to have more than one thing in their mind at a time.

“I’ll carry my own bag,” Vicki says, pressed against me like my shadow, sniffing away a final tear of arrival happiness. “It’s light as a feather duster.”

“You’re not going to do anything from now on out but have fun,” I say, both bags up and moving. “You just let me see a smile.”

And she smiles a smile as big as Texas. “Look, I ain’t p.g., you know,” she says as the pneumatic hotel doors glide away. “I always carry what’s mine.”

 
    It is four-thirty by the time we get to our room, a tidy rectangle of pretentious midwestern pseudo-luxury—a prearranged fruit basket, a bottle of domestic champagne, blue bachelor buttons in a Chinese vase, red-flocked whorehouse wall décor and a big bed. There is an eleventh-story fisheye view upriver toward the gaunt Ren-Cen and gray pseudopodial Belle Isle in the middle distance—the shimmer-lights of suburbs reaching north and west out of sight.

Vicki takes a supervisory look in all spaces—closets, shower, bureau drawers—makes ooo’s and oh’s over what’s here free of charge by way of toiletries and toweling, then establishes herself in an armchair at the window, pops the champagne and begins to take everything in. It is exactly as I’d hoped: pleased to respectful silence by the splendor of things—a vote that I have done things the way they were meant to be.

I take the opportunity for some necessary phoning.

First, a “touch base” call to Herb to firm up tomorrow’s plans. He is in laughing good spirits and invites us to have dinner with him and Clarice at a steak place in Novi, but I plead fatigue and prior commitments, and Herb says that’s great. He has become decidedly upbeat and shaken his glumness of the morning. (He is on pretty serious mood stabilizers, is my guess. Who wouldn’t be?) We hang up, but in two minutes Herb calls back to check whether he’s given me right directions for the special shortcut once we leave I–96. Since his injury, he says, he’s suffered mild dyslexia and gets numbers turned around half the time with some pretty hilarious results. “I do the same thing, Herb,” I say, “only I call it normal.” But Herb hangs up without saying anything.

Next I call Henry Dykstra, X’s father, out in Birmingham. I have made it my policy to keep in touch with him since the divorce. And though things were strained and extremely formal between us while X’s and my affairs were in the lawyers’ hands, we have settled back since then into an even better, more frank relationship than we ever had. Henry believes it was Ralph’s death pure and simple that caused our marriage to go kaput, and feels a good measure of sympathy for me—something I don’t mind having, even if my own beliefs about these matters are a good deal more complex. I have also stayed an intermediary message-carrier between Henry and his wife, Irma, out in Mission Viejo, since she writes to me regularly, and I have let him know that I can be trusted to keep a confidence and to relay timely information which is often something surprisingly intimate and personal. “The old plow still works,” he once asked me to tell her, and I did, though she never answered that I know of. Families are very hard to break apart forever. I know that.

Henry is a robust seventy-one and, like me, has not remarried, though he often makes veiled but conspicuous references to women’s names without explanation. My personal belief—seconded by X—is that he’s as happy as a ram living on his estate by himself and would’ve had it that way from the day X was born if he could’ve negotiated Irma. He is an industrialist of the old school, who worked his way up in the Thirties and has never really understood the concept of an intimate life, which I contend is not his fault, though X thinks otherwise and sometimes claims to dislike him.

“We’re going broke, Franky,” Henry says, in a bad temper. “The whole damn country has its pants around its ankles to the unions. And we elected the S.O.B.s who’re doing it to us. Isn’t that something? Republicans? I wouldn’t give you a goddamned nickel for the first one they ever made. I stand somewhere to the right of Attila the Hun, I guess is what that means.”

“I’m not much up on it, Henry. It sounds tricky to me.”

“Tricky! It isn’t tricky. If I wanted to steal and lay off everybody at my plant I could live for a hundred years, exactly the way I live now. Never leave the house. Never leave the chair! I came up a Reuther man, you know that, Frank. Lifelong. It’s these gangsters in Washington. All of them. They’re all goddamn criminals, want to run me in the ground. Retire me out of the gasket business. What’s going on at home, anyway? You still divorced?”

“Things’re great, Henry. Today’s Ralph’s birthday.”

“Is that so?” Henry does not like to talk about this, I know, but for me it is a day of some importance, and I don’t mind mentioning it.

“I think he would’ve made a fine adult, Henry. I’m sure of that.”

For a moment then there is stupefied emptiness in our connection while we think over lost chances.

“Why don’t you come out here and we’ll get drunk,” Henry says abruptly. “I’ll have Lula fix duck en brochette. I killed the sons-of-bitches myself. We can call up some whores. I’ve got their private phone numbers right here. Don’t think I don’t call them, either.”

“That’d be great, Henry. But I’m not alone.”

“Got a shady lady with you yourself?” Henry guffaws.

“No, a nice girl.”

“Where’re you staying?”

“Downtown. I have to go back tomorrow. I’m on business today.”

“Okay, okay. Tell me why you think our golfing friend left you, Frank? Tell the truth. I can’t get it off my mind today, for some damn reason.”

“I think she wanted her life put back in her own hands, Henry. There’s not much else to it.”

“She always thought I ruined her life for men. It’s a hell of a thing to hear. I never ruined anybody’s life. And neither did you.”

“I don’t really think she thinks that now.”

“She
told
me she did last week! As late as that. I’m glad I’m old. It’s enough life. You’re here, then you’re not.”

“I wasn’t always such a great guy, Henry. I tried hard but sometimes you can just fool yourself about yourself.”

“Forget all that,” Henry says. “God forgave Noah. You can forgive yourself. Who’s your shady lady?”

“You’d like her. Her name’s Vicki.” Vicki swings her smiling head around and holds up a glass of champagne to toast me.

“Bring her out here, I’ll meet her. What a name. Vicki.”

“Another visit, Henry. We’re on a short schedule this time.” Vicki goes back to watching the night fall.

“I don’t blame you,” Henry says brashly. “You know, Frank, sometimes the fact of living with somebody makes living with them impossible. Irma and I were just like that. I sent her to California one January, and that was twenty years ago. She’s a lot happier. So you stay down there with Vicki whatever.”

“It’s hard to know another person. I admit that.”

“You’re better off assuming anybody’ll do anything, anytime, than that they won’t. That way you’re safe. Even my own daughter.”

“I wish I could come out there and get drunk with you, Henry, that’s the truth. I’m glad we’re pals. Irma told me to tell you she’d seen a real good performance of
The Fantasticks
in Mission Viejo. And it made her think of you.”

“Irma did?” Henry says. “What’s the fantastics?”

“It’s a play.”

“Well, that’s good then, isn’t it?”

“Any messages to go back? I’ll probably write her next week. She sent me a birthday card. I could add something.”

“I never really knew Irma, Frank. Isn’t that something?”

“You were pretty busy making a living, though, Henry.”

“She could’ve had boyfriends and I wouldn’t have even noticed. I hope she did. I certainly did. All I wanted.”

“I wouldn’t worry about that. Irma’s happy. She’s seventy years old.”

“In July.”

“What about a message. Anything you want to say?”

“Tell her I have bladder cancer.”

“Is that true?”

“I
will
have, if I don’t have something else first. Who cares anyway?”

“I care. You have to think of something else, or I’ll think of something for you.”

“How’s Paul and how’s Clarissa?”

“They’re fine. We’re taking a car trip around Lake Erie this summer. And we’ll be stopping to see you. They’re already talking about it.”

“We’ll go up to the U.P.”

“There might not be time for that.” (I hope not.) “They just want to see you. They love you very much.”

“That’s great, though I don’t know how they could. What do you think about the Maize and Blue, Franky?”

“A powerhouse, is my guess, Henry. All the seniors are back, and the big Swede from Pellston’s in there again. I hear pretty awesome stories. It’s an impressive show out there.” This is the only ritual part of our conversations. I always check with the college football boys, particularly our new managing editor, a little neurasthenic, chain-smoking Bostonian named Eddie Frieder, so I can pass along some insider’s information to Henry, who never went to college, but is a fierce Wolverine fan nonetheless. It is the only use he can think to make of my profession, and I’m not at all sure he doesn’t concoct an interest just to please me, though I don’t much like football per se. (People have some big misunderstandings about sportswriters.) “You’re going to see some fancy alignments in the defensive backfield this fall, that’s all I’ll say, Henry.”

“All they need now is to fire that meathead who runs the whole show. He’s a loser, if you ask me. I don’t care how many games he wins.”

“The players all seem to like him, from what I hear.”

“What the hell do they know? Look. The means don’t always justify the end to me, Frank. That’s what’s wrong with this country. You ought to write about that. The abasement of life’s intrinsic qualities. That’s a story.”

“You’re probably right, Henry.”

“I feel hot about this whole issue, Frank. Sports is just a paradigm of life, right? Otherwise who’d care a goddamn thing about it?”

“I know people can see it that way.” (I try to avoid that idea, myself.) “But it’s pretty reductive. Life doesn’t need a metaphor in my opinion.”

“Whatever that means. Just get rid of that guy, Frank. He’s a Nazi.” Henry says this word to rhyme with snazzy in the old-fashioned way. “His popularity’s his biggest threat.” In fact, the coach in question is quite a good coach and will probably end up in the Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio. He and Henry are almost exactly alike as human beings.

“I’ll pass a word along, Henry. Why don’t you write a letter to
The Readers Speak.
”

“I don’t have time. You do it. I trust you that far.”

Light is falling outside the Pontchartrain now. Vicki sits in the shadows, her back to me, hugging her knees and staring out toward the Seagram’s sign upriver half a mile, red and gold in the twilight, while little Canuck houses light up like fireflies on a dark and faraway lake beach where I have been. I could want nothing more than to hug her now, feel her strong Texas back, and fall into a nestle we’d break off only when the room service waiter tapped at our door. But I can’t be sure she hasn’t lulled to sleep in the sheer relief of expectations met—one of life’s true blessings. In a hundred ways we could not be more alike, Vicki and I, and I miss her badly, though she is only twelve feet away and I could touch her shoulder in the dark with hardly a move (this is one of the prime evils of being an anticipator).