The Sportswriter (27 page)

“It’s okay, Walter. He’s not my butler, though, he’s my roomer. What’s up?”

I set down my one-suiter bought from the very catalog he is now spindling. I like this room very much, its brassy, honeyed glow, paint peeling insignificantly off its moldings, the couches and leather chairs and hatchcover table all arranged in a careless, unpretentious way that is immensely inviting. I would like nothing more than to curl up anywhere here and doze off for seven or eight unmolested hours.

Walter is wearing the same blue tennis shirt and walking shorts he wore in the Manasquan two nights ago, a pair of sockless loafers and a Barracuda jacket with a plaid lining (referred to as a
jerk’s suit
in my fraternity). In all likelihood it is the same suit-of-casual-clothes Walter has worn since Grinnell days. Only behind his tortoise-shells, his eyes look vanquished, and his slick bond-salesman’s hair could stand a washing. Walter looks, in other words, like private death, though I have a feeling he is here to share some of it with me.

“Frank, I haven’t slept for three days,” Walter blurts and takes two tentative steps forward. “Not since I talked to you over at the shore.” He squeezes the Gokey catalog into the tightest tube possible.

“Let’s make you a drink, Walter,” I say. “And let me have that catalog before you tear it apart.”

“No thanks, Frank. I’m not staying.”

“How about a beer?”

“No beer.” Walter sits down in a big armchair across from my chair, and leans up, forearms to knees: the posture of the confessional, something we Presbyterians know little about.

Walter is sitting under a framed map of Block Island, where X and I once sailed. I gave the map to her as a birthday present, but laid claim to it in the divorce. X complained until I said the map meant something to me, which caused her to relent instantly—and it does. It is a link to palmier times when life was simple and un-grieved. It is a museum piece of a kind, and I’m sorry to see Walter Luckett’s beleaguered visage beneath it now.

“Frank, this is a helluva house. I mean, when I thought you had a colored butler with a British accent, it didn’t surprise me at all.” Walter looks around wide-eyed and approving. “Say about how long you’ve owned it.” Walter smiles a big first-bike kid’s grin.

“Fourteen years, Walter.” I pour myself a good level of warm gin from a bottle I keep behind the children’s
World Books
and drink it down with a gulp.

“Now that’s old dollars. Plus location. Plus the interest rates from that era. That adds up. I have clients over here, old man Nat Far-querson for one. I live over in The Presidents now, Coolidge Street. Not a bad part of town, don’t you think?”

“My wife lives on Cleveland. My former wife, I guess I should say.”

“My wife’s in Bimini, of course, with Eddie Pitcock. Of all things.”

“I remember you said.”

Walter’s eyes go slitted, and he frowns up at me as if what I’d just said deserved nothing better than a damn good whipping. A silence envelops the room, and I cannot suppress an impolite yawn.

“Frank, let me get right to this. I’m sorry. Since this Americana business I’ve just been dead in my tracks. My whole life is just agonizing around this one goddamn event. Christ. I’ve done so much worse in my life, Frank. Believe me. I once screwed a thirteen-year-old girl when I was twenty and married, and bragged about it to friends. I slept like a baby. Like a baby! And there’s worse than that, too. But I can’t get this one out of my mind. I’m thirty-six, Frank. And everything seems very bad to me. I’ve quit
becoming
, is what it feels like. Only I stopped at the wrong time.” A smile of wonder passes over Walter’s dazed face, and he shakes his head. His is the face of a haunted war veteran with wounds. Only to my thinking it’s a private matter, which no one but him should be required to care a wink about. “What’re you thinking right now, Frank,” Walter asks hopefully.

“I wasn’t thinking anything, really.” I give my own head a shake to let Walter know I’m an earnest war veteran myself, though in fact I’m lost in a kind of fog about Vicki. Wondering if she’s expecting me to call and for us to make up, wondering for some reason if I’ll ever see her again.

Walter leans up hard on his knees, looking more grim than earnest. “What did you think when I said what I said two nights ago? When I originally told you? Pretty idiotic, huh?”

“It didn’t seem idiotic, Walter. Things happen. That’s all I thought.”

“I’m not putting babies in freezers, am I, Frank?”

“I didn’t think so.”

Walter’s face sinks solemner still, in the manner of a man considering new frontiers. He would like me to ask him a good telling question, something that will then let him tell me a lot of things I don’t want to know. But if I have agreed to listen, I have also agreed not to ask. This is the only badge of true friendship I’m sure of: not to be curious. Whatever Walter is up to may be as novel as teaching chickens to drive cars, but I don’t want the whole lowdown. It’s too late in the night. I’m ready for bed. And besides, I have no exact experience in these matters. I’m not sure what anyone—including trained experts—ought to say except, “All right now, son, let’s get you on over to the state hospital and let those boys give you a shot of something that’ll bring you back to the right side of things.”

“What do you worry about, Frank, if you don’t mind my asking?” Walter is still ghost-solemn.

“Really not that much, Walter. Sometimes at night my heart pounds. But it goes back to normal when I turn on the light.”

“You’re a man with rules, Frank. You don’t mind, do you, if I say that? You have ethics about a lot of important things.”

“I don’t mind, Walter, but I don’t think I have any ethics at all, really. I just do as little harm as I can. Anything else seems too hard.” I smile at Walter in a bland way.

“Do you think I’
ve
done harm, Frank? Do you think you’re better than I am?”

“I think it doesn’t matter, Walter, to tell you the truth. We’re all the same.”

“That’s evading me, Frank, because I admire codes, myself. In everything.” Walter sits back, folds his arms, and looks at me appraisingly. It’s possible Walter and I will end up in a fistfight before this is over. Though I would run out the door to avoid it. In fact, I feel a nice snugged wooziness rising in me from the gin. And I would be happy to take this right up to bed.

“Good, Walter.” I stare fervently at Block Island, trying to find X’s and my first landfall from all those years ago. Sandy Point. I scan the bookshelves behind Walter’s head as if I expected to see those very words on a friendly spine.

“But let me ask you, Frank, what do you do when something worries you and you can’t make it stop. You try and try and it won’t.” Walter’s eyes become exhilarated, as if he’d just willed into being something that was furious and snapping and threatening to swirl him away.

“Well, I take a hot bath sometimes. Or a midnight walk. Or I read a catalog. Get drunk. Sometimes, I guess, I get in bed and think dirty thoughts about women. That always makes me feel better. Or I’ll listen to the short-wave. Or watch Johnny Carson. I don’t usually get in such a bad state, Walter.” I smile to let him know I’m at least half-serious. “Maybe I should more often.”

Upstairs, I hear Bosobolo walk down his hall to his bathroom, hear his door close and his toilet flush. It’s a nice homey sound—as always—his last office before turning in. A long, satisfying leak. I envy him more than anyone could know.

“You know what I think, Frank?”

“What, Walter.”

“You don’t seem to be somebody who knows he’s going to die, that’s what.” Walter suddenly ducks his head, like a man someone has menaced and who has barely gotten out of the way.

“I guess you’re right.” I smile a smile of failed tolerance. Though Walter’s words deliver a cold blue impact on me—the first clump of loamy dirt thrumping off the pine box, mourners climbing back into their Buicks, doors slamming in unison. Who the hell wants to think about that now? It’s one A.M. on a day of resurrection and renewal the world over. I want to talk about dying now as much as I want to play a tune out my behind.

“Maybe you just need a good laugh, Walter. I try to laugh every day. What did the brassiere say to the hat?”

“I don’t know. What
did
it say, Frank?” Walter is not much amused, but then I am not much amused by Walter.

“‘You go on ahead, I’ll give these two a lift.’” I stare at him. He smirks but doesn’t laugh. “If you don’t think that’s hilarious, Walter, you should. It’s really funny.” In fact I have a hard time suppressing a big guffaw myself, though we’re at basement-level seriousness now. No jokes.

“Maybe you think I need a hobby or something. Right?” Walter’s still smirking, though not in a friendly way.

“You just need to see things from another angle, Walter. That’s all. You aren’t giving yourself much of a break.” Maybe a hundred dollar whore would be a good new angle. Or an evening course in astronomy. I was thirty-seven before I knew that more than one star could be the North Star; it was a huge surprise and still has the aura of a genuine wonder for me.

“You know what’s true, Frank?”

“What, Walter.”

“What’s true, Frank, is that when we get to be adults we all of a sudden become the thing viewed, not the viewer anymore. Do you know what I mean?”

“I guess so.” And I
do
know what he means, and with a marksman’s clarity. Divorce has plenty of these little encounter-group lessons to teach. Only I’ll be goddamned if I’m going to trade epiphanies with Walter. We don’t even go in for that stuff at the Divorced Men’s Club. “Walter, I’m pretty beat, I’ve had a long day.”

“And I’ll tell you something else, Frank, even though you didn’t ask me. I’m not going to be cynical enough to ignore that fact. I’m not going to find a hobby or be a goddamn jokemaster. Cynicism makes you feel smart, I know it, even when you aren’t smart.”

“Maybe so. I wasn’t suggesting you take up fly-tying.”

“Frank, I don’t know what the hell I’ve gotten myself into, and there’s no use acting like I’m smart. I wouldn’t be in this if I was. I just feel on display in this mess, and I’m scared to death.” Walter shakes his head in contrite bafflement. “I’m sorry about all this, Frank. I wanted to keep improving myself, by myself.”

“It’s all right, Walter. I’m not sure, though, if you
can
improve yourself much. Why don’t I fix us both a drink.” Unexpectedly, though, my heart suddenly goes out to Walter the self-improver, trying to go it alone. Walter is the real New-Ager, and in truth, he and I are not much different. I’ve made discoveries he’ll make when he calms down, though the days when I could stay up all night, riled up about some
point d’honneur
or a new novel or bracing up a boon pal through some rough seas are long gone. I am too old for all that without even being very old. A next day—any new day—means too much to me. I am too much anticipator, my eye on the future of things. The best I can offer is a nightcap, and a room for the night where Walter can sleep with the light on.

“Frank, I’ll have a drink. That’s white of you. Then I’ll get the hell out of here.”

“Why don’t you just bed down here tonight. You can claim the couch, or there’s an extra bed in the kids’ room. That’d be fine.” I pour us both a glass of gin, and hand one to Walter. I’ve stashed away some roly-poly Baltimore Colts glasses I bought from a Balfour catalog when I was in college, in the days when Unitas and Raymond Berry were the big stars. And now seems to me the perfect time to crack them out. Sports are always a good distraction from life at its dreariest.

“This is nice of you, Franko,” Walter says, looking strangely at the little rearing blue Colt, shiny and decaled into the nubbly glass from years ago. “Great glasses.” He smiles up in wonderment. There is a part of me Walter absolutely cannot fathom, though he doesn’t really want to fathom it. In fact he is not interested in me at all. He might even sense that I am in no way interested in him, that I’m simply performing a Samaritan’s duty I would perform for anyone (preferably a woman) I didn’t think was going to kill me. Still, some basic elements of my character keep breaking into his train of thought. Like my Colts glasses. At his house he has leaded Waterfords, crystals etched with salmon, and sterling goblets—unless, of course, Yolanda got it all, which I doubt since Walter is cagier than that.

“Salud,” Walter says in a craven way.

“Cheers, Walter.”

He puts the glass down immediately and drums his fingers on the chair arm, then stares a hole right into me.

“He’s just a guy, Frank.” Walter sniffs and gives his head a hard shake. “A monies analyst right on the Street with me. Two kids. Wife named Priscilla up in Newfoundland.”

“What the hell are they doing way up there?”

“New Jersey, Frank. Newfoundland, New Jersey. Passaic County.” A place where X and I used to drive on Sundays and eat in a tur key-with-all-the-trimmings restaurant. Perfect little bucolic America set in the New Jersey reservoir district, an hour’s commute from Gotham. “I don’t know what you’d want to say about either of us,” Walter says.

“Nothing might be enough.”

“He’s an okay guy is what I’m saying. Okay?” Walter clasps his hands in his lap and gives me a semi-hurt look. “I went over to his firm to cash some certificates for a customer, and somehow we just started talking. He follows the same no-loads I do. And you know you can just talk. I was late already, and we decided to go down to the Funicular and drink till the traffic cleared. And one conversation just led to another. I mean, we talked about everything from petrochemicals in the liquid container industry to small-college football. He’s a Dickinson grad, it turns out. But the first thing I knew it was nine-thirty and we’d talked for three hours!” Walter rubs his hands over his small handsome face, right up under his glasses and into his eye sockets.