The Sportswriter (50 page)

But I am right.

Out of the burly-bushy steel darkness down the line comes the clatter of the night’s last arrival from Philadelphia, on its way back to New York. Trainmen lean out the silver vestibules, eyeing the passing station, taking notice of the two waiting cars with workmanlike uninterest. Theirs is another life I wouldn’t like, though I’m ready to believe it has moments of real satisfaction. I’m sure I would pay undue attention to my passengers, would stand around hearing what they had on their minds, learning where they were off to, conversing with them on train travel in general, picking up a phone number here and there, and never get my tickets clipped on time and end up being let go—no better at that than I’d be at arc welding.

The local squeezes to a halt beside the station. The trainmen are down on the concrete, swinging their tiny flashes like police even before the last cars are bucked stopped. The lone taxi switches on its orange dome light and the two waiter cars rev engines in unison.

Within the yellow-lit coaches, pale dreamy faces stare out into the Easter night.
Where are we now
, they seem to ask.
Who lives here? Is this a safe place? Or what?
Their features are glassy and smooth with drowse.

I stroll to the platform and up under the awning, hands in pockets, stepping lively on my toes as if I’m expecting—a loved one, a girlfriend, a best friend from college long out of touch. The two trainmen give me the mackerel eye and begin some exclusive talk they’ve been putting off. But I don’t feel the least excluded, since I enjoy this closeness to trains and the great moment they exude, their implacable hissing noise and purpose. I read somewhere it is psychologically beneficial to stand near things greater and more powerful than you yourself, so as to dwarf yourself (and your piddlyass bothers) by comparison. To do so, the writer said, released the spirit from its everyday moorings, and accounted for why Montanans and Sherpas, who live near daunting mountains, aren’t much at complaining or nettlesome introspection. He was writing about better “uses” to be made of skyscrapers, and if you ask me the guy was right on the money. All alone now beside the humming train cars, I actually do feel my moorings slacken, and I will say it again, perhaps for the last time: there is mystery everywhere, even in a vulgar, urine-scented, suburban depot such as this. You have only to let yourself in for it. You can never know what’s coming next. Always there is the chance it will be—miraculous to say—something you want.

Off the train steps a buxom young nun, in the blackest, most orthodox habit, carrying a slick attaché case and a storky umbrella. She is bright-eyed, round-faced, smiling, and passes a teasing “thanks, goodbye” to the trainmen, who touch their hats and smile, but also give her a swarthy look the instant her back is turned. She is met by no one, and trudges past me cheerfully, heading, I’m sure, up to the seminary on some ecclesiastical business with the Presbyterians. As she passes me by I give her a smile, for she will encounter no dangers on our streets, I can assure her. No would-be rapists or scroungy types. Though she seems like someone to look danger in the eye and call its bluff.

Next, two business types with loose ties, single-suiters and expensive briefcases—lawyers, without doubt, up from Philadelphia or the nation’s capital, come to do business with one or another of the world headquarters that dot the local landscape. Both are Jews, and both look dog-tired, ready for a martini, a bath, a set of clean sheets and a made-for-TV movie. They crawl into the taxi. I hear one say “The August,” and in no time they go murmuring up the hill, the taxi’s taillights red as smudged roses.

Two blond women scurry out, give each other big phony hugs, then jump in the two waiting cars—each driven by a man—and disappear. For an instant, I thought one of them was familiar, someone I might’ve met at a cocktail party in the old days. A spiky married Laura or Suzannah with boyish hips, red silk pants and leathery skin: someone of my own rough age, whom I more than likely bored the nose off of but was too bored back by to stop. Possibly a friend of X’s, who knows the truth about me. One blonde indeed did give me a lashing, feral half-glance before stepping into her waiting Grand Prix and delivering Mr. Inside a big well-rehearsed kiss, but she seemed not to recognize me. A big problem of being divorced in a town this size is that all the women immediately become your wife’s friends whether they know her or not. And that’s not just paranoia. Being a man gets harder all the time.

The trainmen part company and sidle back toward their vestibules. The wig-wag headlight careers over the open rails. The inside passengers have all gone back to sleep. It is time, almost, to turn to home. And do what?

Out of the far silver car comes a last departer. A small fawn-haired woman of the frail but vaguely pretty category, not of this town. That much is clear the moment her shoes—the kind with heels lower than the toes—touch ground. She is wearing a tent dress, though she is wire-thin, with a pleasant, scrubbed look on her wren’s features, and a self-orienting way of looking round about, which makes her turn her nose up testingly to the air. In one hand she is carrying some kind of deep Brazilian wicker basket as luggage, on top of which she’s strapped a bulky knitted sweater. And in the other there’s a fat copy of what I can make out as
The Life of Teddy Roosevelt
, with plenty of paper bookmarks sprouting from the pages.

She sniffs the air as if she’s just detrained in the Punjab, and turning her head with a scent, moves to say a word to the older of the two trainmen, who points her in the direction the nun has taken, up the hill into town and directly by me, leaned against a girder beside the phalanx of newspaper boxes, growing sleepy in the springtime evening.

The word “taxi” is spoken, and both of them look toward the empty parking spaces and shake heads. My Malibu sits alone across the street, angled into the murky Rose of Sharon hedge behind the regional playhouse—a dark and barely detectable blob. I see the two of them look toward me again, and I sense a connection being made. “Maybe that gentleman right there will give you a lift into town,” one of them is saying. “This is a town of gentle folk. Not one in ten thousand will murder you.”

I am unexpectedly visible!

The woman turns with her orienteering wren’s look. She and I are the same vintage. We have learned to trust strange people in the sixties, and it hasn’t yet dawned on us that it might’ve been a mistake (though one clue should’ve been our own perfidies).

Hands thrust in back pockets, though, I am ready to be used; to lend a hand, prove myself guileless as old Huck. There might, in fact, be a late-night cocktail invitation in the works as a “thankee,” an
intime
in the dark taproom of the August, alongside the bushed lawyers. After that, who knows? More? Less?

Deep in my pocket my fingers touch an inconclusive paper. Walter’s poor letter, folded in thirds and tucked behind my wallet, forgotten to this moment. And a sudden cheerless warmth rises out under my chin and stings my ears and scalp.

This is Walter’s sister, this woman! Wicker basket. Healthy shoes. Roosevelt bio. She has already arrived for her doleful duties, and with enough dry, grief-dispelling practicality to send a drowning man clambering for the bottom. She is some miserable Montessori teacher from Coshocton. A woman with a reading list and an agenda, friends in the Peace Corps, an NPR program log deep in her Brazil bag. A tidy, chestless Pat or Fran from Oberlin or Reed, with high board scores. My heart pounds a tomtom for the now disappeared blondie, whirling away in her Grand Prix to some out-of-the-way Italian snuggery with the nerve to stay open Easters. I ache to be along. Dinner could be on me. Drinks. The tip. Don’t leave me to sensible grief and a night of plain-talk. (Of course I’m not sure it’s her, but neither am I sure it isn’t.) This woman has the look to me of trouble’s sister, and I’d rather put my trust in my heart and my money where my mouth isn’t.

“Excuse me, please,” scratchy Fran/Pat says in her bony, businesslike voice as she comes toward me. She has an iron handshake, I’m sure, and knows death to be just one of life’s slow curves you have to stand in on, brother or no brother. I would hate to see what else she has in that basket. “I wonder if you’d mind terribly….” She speaks in a phony boarding school accent, nose up, seeing me—if at all—out the bottom third of her eyes.

The train discharges a loud hiss. A bell rings a last shrilling peel. “Boooard,” the trainman shouts from his dark vestibule. The train lurches, and in that sudden instant I am aboard, hurt knee and all, unexpectedly a passenger, and away. “I’m sorry,” I say, as my face slides past, “I’ve got to catch a train.”

The woman stands blinking as I recede, her mouth open for the next words I will not have to hear, words for which even a roll in the hay would not be antidote.

She grows small—gnawingly small and dim—in the powdery depot light, poised in a moment when certainty became confusion; confuseci among other things, that people do things so differently out here, that people are more abrupt, less willing to commit themselves, less schooled in old-fashioned manners; confused why the least of God’s children would do anyone a bad turn by not helping. Maybe Pat/Fran is right. It
is
confusing, though sometimes—let me say—it’s better not to take a chance. You can take too many chances and end up with nothing but regret to keep you company through a night that simply—for the life of you—won’t end.

13

Clatter-de-clack, we swagger and sway up through the bleak-lit corridor of evening Jersey. Mine is one of the old coaches with woven brown plastic seats and bilgy window glass. A cooked metal odor fills the aisles and clings to the luggage racks, as the old lights flicker and dim. It is another side to the public accommodation coin.

Still, it’s not bad to be moving. With the traveling seat turned toward me, it’s easy to make myself comfortable, feet up, and watch float past the sidereal townlets of Edison, Metuchen, Metropark, Rahway, and Elizabeth.

Of course, I have no earthly idea where I’m bound or what to do once I get there. Fast getaways from sinister forces are sometimes essential, though what follows can mean puzzlement. I haven’t ridden the night train
to
New York, I’m sure, since X and I rode up to see
Porgy and Bess
one winter night when it snowed. How long ago—five years? Eight? The specific past has a way of blending, an occurrence I don’t particularly mind. And tonight the prospect of detraining in Gotham seems less spooky than usual. It seems a more local-feeling place with a sweet air of the illicit, like a woman you barely know and barely want, but who lets you anyway. Things change. We have that to look forward to. In fact, climbing down tonight onto the streets of any of these little crypto-homey Jersey burgs could heave me into a panic worse than New York ever has.

Only a few solitary passengers share my coach. Most are sleeping, and I don’t recognize any as faces I saw from the platform. I wouldn’t even mind seeing someone I knew. Bert Brisker would be a welcome companion, full of some long, newsy ramble about the book he’s reviewing or some interview he’s conducted with a famous author. I’d be interested to hear his opinion about the future of the modern novel. (I miss this clubby in-crowd talk, the chance to make good on the conviction that your formal education hasn’t left you completely shipwrecked.) Usually Bert is deep in his own work, and I’m in mine. And once we leave the platform, where we chuckle and grouse in special code talk, we rarely utter another word. But I’d be glad now for some friendly jawboning, I haven’t done enough of that; it is a bad part of being in the company of athletes and people I don’t know well and will never know, people who have damned little of general interest to talk about. To be a sportswriter, sad to say it, is to live your life mostly with your thoughts, and only the edge of others’. That’s exactly why Bert got out of the business, and why he’s at home tonight with Penny and his girls and his sheepdogs, watching Shakespeare on HBO, or dozing off with a good book. And why I’m alone on an empty, bad-smelling milk train, headed into a dark kingdom I have always feared.

The young mackerel-eye trainman sways into my car and gives me a look of distrust as he processes my ticket money and dedicates a stub on my seatback. He does not like it that I have to buy my passage en route, or that I wouldn’t give a lift to Walter’s sister back up the line, or that I’m wearing a madras shirt and seem happy and so much his opposite when the rest of the world known to him—in his sheeny black conductor’s suit—is strictly where it belongs. He is not yet thirty, by my guess, and I give him a good customer’s no-sweat smile to let him know it’s really all right. I’m no threat to any of his beliefs. In fact, I probably share most of them. I can tell, though, by his fisheye that he doesn’t like the night and what it holds—inconstant, marauding, sinister, peaceless thing to be steered clear of here inside the thrumming tube of his professional obligation. And since I’ve come out of it, unexpectedly, I am suspect too. Quick as he can, he pockets his punch, scans the other passengers’ stubs down the aisle and abandons me for the bar car, where I see him begin talking to the Negro waiter.

When I paid for my ticket, I’ve once again fingered Walter’s letter, and under the circumstances there’s nothing to do but read it, which I do, starting in Rahway, with the aid of the pained little overhead light.

Dear Franko
,

I woke up today with the clearest idea of what I need to do. I’m absolutely certain about it. Write a novel! I don’t know what the hell it will be for or who’ll read it or any of that, but I’ve got the writer’s itch now and whoever wants to read it can or they can forget about it. I’ve gotten beyond everything, and that feels good!