We Are Still Married (28 page)

(THE TWINS WON THE SERIES IN SEVEN GAMES. A YEAR LATER, I STILL COULDN'T BRING MYSELF TO GET A NEW YORK DRIVER'S LICENSES

I
GREW UP FAST as a kid and got tall before the others, a long sad boy poking up like a milkweed out of the range of normal children, and when adults met me, they often looked up and asked, “Do you play basketball?” I did, but not very well, because I was too tall: my family lived out in the country, twelve miles from the high school, and when I tried to hitchhike home in the winter twilight after basketball practice, bundled up in a parka I looked too huge and ominous and nobody would stop and pick me up. So I quit basketball. Except for a few hundred afternoons sliding around on gravel driveways and a couple thousand games of Horse, my career stopped for thirty years until a morning in late March when I took a cab up to a gym on East 54th Street to tape a little piece for CBS. According to the script, I'd stand on the court—at the side of the free-throw circle, where I used to have a good jump shot—and talk (holding a ball) for about two minutes and a half about the fun of the game, and then turn and take my shot. CBS wanted to use that piece just before one of the NCAA tournament games they were televising. I didn't ask why. I'm forty-five and I no longer worry about the motives of people who invite me to do something I want to do. I just wanted to make the shot. The truth is, the shot was my idea, and Doug the producer was cool to it at first and preferred to tape the piece in a studio with me behind a desk. He was polite and never said that he thought I'd look funny with a basketball in my hand, he only said, “You're a writer, you'll feel more comfortable at a desk,” but it meant the same thing, so I held out for the gym. I wore black tuxedo pants, a white tux shirt, and old sneakers. The CBS crew was set up at mid-court when I got there at 10:00: Doug, two cameramen, a video engineer, and an audio man who was trying to eliminate a hum in the works, which gave me the chance to practice the shot about thirty times until I was drilling it, bang, bang, bang, and sank six in a row and was all set. It took an hour to shoot the piece, four takes in which I stood and talked about the fun of basketball and then turned and jumped and shot, and I made three of four shots, no lie, which is pretty good work with the camera running and a producer watching. Between takes I even made one backward, over the shoulder, without looking, swish, from twenty feet. No lie either. And then I went home and forgot about the whole thing until the middle of April, when the piece appeared before the Kansas-Oklahoma game. I didn't see it but a lot of other people did and mentioned to me that they'd seen it and every one asked the same question:
Did you really make that shot?
My Uncle Don asked, “How many shots did you take to get your swisher?” He assumed the shot had been spliced in, and so did everyone else, television being the sleaze hole that it is. A man stopped me on the street and said, “That was neat how they did that shot, it really looked like it was you.” He was young, early thirties, and seemed to think a twenty-foot jumper is beyond a man my age and requires technical assistance. His remark stung, and so did six more the same day and eight or ten the next week. Despite what had appeared to be me, their friend, turning and shooting and making the shot, everyone was dubious, except the poet Roland Flint, who wrote, “I was impressed with the luck and ease of your one-hander.” My Aunt Eleanor, a scrappy player herself years ago with an excellent two-handed set shot, wrote, “I saw the opening of the NCAA basketball finals. It was a nice shot but did you make the first one?” Not one person said to me what they would've said if they'd actually seen the shot: “Nice shot.” And it was a nice shot. It felt so good after reciting my piece and trying to smile and project warmth into the lens and not squint under the lights—it felt good to turn away, see the rim, jump, reach high with the ball, push it off with the fingertips, and know the instant it left, while it was in the air, that it was good.

D
ULL, MORBID THOUGHTS ARE ON MY MIND these days: the usual ones—disease, decrepitude, and the big “D” down in the basement. Monday morning, I walked my wife to her job near Union Square, kissed her goodbye, and headed up Park Avenue toward my office. It was a bright cold day. I was okay until I looked up at 24th and saw, in stone, a man's head in the mouth of a lion. At 27th, I ducked into the New York Life building and down a subway passage marked “UP AND DOWN TOWN” as a herd of passengers came pouring through two revolving doors revolving so steadily that the doors looked like a machine that stamps out office workers—
whump
whump
whump.
That and the herd getting off the uptown local with me at Grand Central made me want to duck out, and, for no reason except that I hadn't done this sort of thing for much too long, I ducked across the platform and got on the No. 4 Woodlawn-Jerome Ave. express just to see where it goes. Owing to the specialized nature of my work, my company doesn't miss me if I arrive a few hours late. Nobody there knows what I do.

The express stopped at 59th and at 86th, then put its head down and raced up to 125th, and around 160th it came up out of the ground. Yankee Stadium slipped by—a slice of green field and the famous overhang—and a couple miles of Bronx, and at the last stop I got out and looked around.

It was magnificent, exactly how the end of the line should look: wide open, like the edge of town, where the buildings end and the woods and pasture begin—the Manhattan-Wisconsin border. Except the pasture turned out to be the Mosholu Golf Course, where some bulky guys on a nearby green were practicing their short putts, and the woods was a cemetery.

I crossed Jerome and walked in the gate. Woodlawn Cemetery. A man sat and eyed me from a guardhouse, and I tried to look purposeful: marched straight by and down one fork as if heading for my own crypt. It's a fabulous cemetery. The roads wind among ornamental groves and solemn granite temples to the dead—twelve-and fifteen-foot-high mausoleums spaced like tourist cabins in the trees and interspersed with stone catafalques and pedestals and obelisks the size of ICBMs. One temple contained Kresges, another some Woolworths guarded by a pair of sphinxes, and, farther on, a stone archangel with trumpet in hand gazed down upon eight members of the Martens family whom he had summoned, presumably to a rich reward. One temple boasted glass windows with actual draperies inside (bleached by years of sunlight); others had stained glass. A weeping female figure strewed flowers. A bronze maiden clutched at the door to a tomb. Figures sagged in grief, heads bowed at the immensity of the loss, and a girl with long hair sat pensively in front of the Oelsners' tomb as if waiting for them to come out and go to the movies.

The tasteless excess and gargantuan self-worship and ostentation of grief were making me silly. When I came around a bend and saw a line of black limousines parked on a crossroad and a crowd of people at the far end, I decided to go up and attend the funeral. I straightened my tie and shot my cuffs. Then I heard a squawk, and a kid with a walkie-talkie in his jacket pocket stepped out from behind the last car. He said, “Pardon me, sir. I'm sorry, but I can't let you come up this way. Thanks. Thanks a lot.”

I asked what was going on up the hill.

“Making a movie,” he said.

“Really? What's the name of it?”

“Sanctuary
. It's a feature picture.”

So I took the next road over, walked up the hill and cut around behind some temples, and ambled toward the movie-making—toward a bunch of men in blue-and-green parkas, their backs to me, watching a funeral. A mahogany-brown metal coffin decked with dozens of scarlet roses sat on a bier draped with green, a silver-haired Catholic priest at the head of it with a teen-age acolyte in a white smock, and forty-some mourners, all in black, stood in four rows to one side, a short woman in black to the other. She wore a long black veil. Uphill from the priest, in front of a ten-foot stone cross, sat an angel, hand over its heart as if reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. Nearby, a woman perched on a stepladder, holding a mike boom, and behind the veiled woman were a camera, on a dolly resting on a short steel-tube track, and two sheets of white fabric on steel frames, like two upright trampolines.

“Those are reflectors,” a man in a parka told me. “The light is good, so we don't need to bring in lights, anyway, thank goodness. Otherwise, we'd be even further behind than we are.” He was a makeup man. As a beautiful woman in a long black coat approached, he studied her, and when she sat down—in a canvas chair labeled “Michael”—he went over and touched up her left eyebrow with a pencil. Her coat almost concealed white running shoes and thick pink socks. Other chairs were labeled “Zena,” “Nuzo,” and “Don.” A man wearing earphones fiddled with a stack of recording gear near a pile of equipment boxes. He jumped a little when a man clapped his hands near the boom mike—a man in a blue baseball cap, faded blue jeans, white running shoes, and a gray sweater with a long red stripe down each arm. “Pay attention, folks,” this man said. “Let me give you some direction.” All the mourners stopped gabbing and listened. They wore black suits and coats, some had black hats. Most of them seemed to be young men with oiled black hair and good-sized beaks. I asked the makeup man if this was a gangster movie.

“You got it,” he said.

“Places! Places, everyone!” somebody yelled.

I watched them shoot one scene four times: The priest, who wore a pink skullcap, said, “Let us pray. Lord Jesus Christ, by the three days you lay in the tomb you made holy the graves of all those who believe in you.... Give our brother peaceful rest in this tomb,” and sprinkled the coffin with holy water, four shakes. The mourners crossed themselves, and he turned to them and said, consolingly, “It's nice to see the family pull together in this most tragic moment,” and a moment later, as the back row of black figures began to move down the slope toward the limos on the road (drivers standing at attention beside them), the woman in the black veil threw herself grief-stricken upon the coffin and wailed, “Gino! Gino! My
bambino!”
On each succeeding take, the mourners crossed themselves (top, bottom, left, right) a little more smoothly, and Gino's mom missed him more.

Before each shot, somebody yelled, “Places! Places everyone! Same shot!” and the mourners took their places, and the director said, “Rolling!”—the word relayed by outlying sentries (“Rolling!” ... “Rolling!” ... “Rolling!” ... “Rolling!”)—and then said, “Action!” and the priest prayed and sprinkled, the crowd of black coats crossed themselves, he consoled, they moved away down the slope, and she threw herself and wept. Every single time, she hit the grief right on the money: “Gino! Gino! My
bambino!”

“I'm getting an awful lot of rustling when they come down through the leaves,” the sound man said. “We gotta lay down some rubber mats. ”

I was the only bystander. Everyone else had a job to do. Some people wandered around between takes, but when the man yelled, “Places!” everyone jumped to attention, even the limo drivers in the background—everyone but me. I hung around and watched some closeup takes, including two more Gino-Gino-my-
bambinos
, and finally, feeling definitely out of place (and it was 11:30), I hiked out past the line of limos and then past the temples and fainting stone figures to the subway terminal and caught the No. 4 express downtown. I was alone in the next-to-last car until a bunch of teen-age girls got on at 183rd. They whooped it up and talked about parties and dancing and boys all the way to 42nd. I've never heard girls talk as dirty as that, and after the mausoleums it sounded wonderful. I'm telling you right now, I want to be cremated, and no tombstone, either. Just take what's left of me up to Trott Brook where my grandma and Uncle Jim are, make them scoot over, put me down in the middle, and put back the sod.

I
GOT INTO THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH one summer living in Copenhagen when I suddenly became lonely for English. I had gotten good enough in Danish to be able to say things like “Yes, thank you, I have it well to be the weather and we well shall enjoy to possess the summer here. It is delightful to me for speaking on Danish and find your wife extremely amusing,” but I missed English and often recited stuff as I hiked around that stately gray city, like Bible verses and sonnets and country songs, for the beauty of them, and one Sunday morning, hearing the bells, got dressed up and marched over to St. Alban's, at the opposite end of Langelinie park from the statue of the Little Mermaid, near the moat and the great star-shaped medieval earthworks called Kastellet. All the tour buses stop there. The museum of the Danish Resistance is just across the lawn, and next door is the fountain of Gefion, one of the most massive and exciting fountains in the world, in which the lady, having turned her four brothers into oxen, carves out the land of Denmark with a single-bottom plow. Most Americans walk right past this magnificent fountain and hardly see it, because they are intent on finding the famous Mermaid statue, which they know from their map is nearby and which they imagine to be as big as the Statue of Liberty but which turns out to be a small damp sad person in the midst of a personality crisis. Gefion, well armored, holding her whip high, getting the job done, is more like Danish women today.

I never went to an Episcopal church before in my life, but there I was in Denmark, and when it comes to worship, the English language has always been real important to me. We didn't speak in tongues in the Plymouth Brethren back in Minnesota, just English, same as our Lord and His Apostles, so in I went that Sunday and then every Sunday thereafter. A few Americans were there,
obviously
American, earnest, anxious to please, to befriend, to share, to be relevant, but most of the worshippers were Brits, including a bunch of tweed-clad couples in their early seventies who strode in like they'd just killed a fox that morning and knelt down, addressed the Lord, got the thing done and taken care of, and got up and went home to dine on beef. I liked them. They said, “Keillor, that's a Scottish name, isn't it?” “Uh, yes, it is.” “Mmmmmhmmm. Very good. But you're American.” “Yes.” “Mmmmhmmm.” And that satisfied their curiosity. They were stodgy and warbly and wonderful in every way, and I walked home from mass feeling rejuvenated, whistling a Fats Waller tune, and making up words to it.