The Sportswriter

12

It is the bottom of the day, the deep well of shadows and springy half-light when late afternoon becomes early evening and we all want to sit down in a leather chair by an open window, have a drink near someone we love or like, read the sports and possibly doze for a while, then wake before the day is gone all the way, walk our cool yards and hear the birds chirp in the trees their sweet eventide songs. It is for such dewy interludes that our suburbs were built. And entered cautiously, they can serve us well no matter what our stations in life, no matter we have the aforementioned liberty or don’t. At times I can long so for that simple measure of day and place — when, say, I’m alone in misty Spokane or chilly Boston — that an unreasonable tear nearly comes to my eye. It is a pastoral kind of longing, of course, but we can all have it.

Things seem to move faster now.

I buzz through Freehold, turn east at the trotter track, then wrangle toward Route 1, past Pheasant Run & Meadow. A Good Life Is Affordable Here, reads the other side of the sign.

On the Trenton station the announcer has a sports quiz going to which I do not know one answer, though I take educated guesses. Whose record did Babe Ruth break when he hit sixty in 1921? Harry Heilmann is my guess, though the answer was, “His own.” Who was the MVP in the Junior Circuit in ’41? George Kell, the Newport Flash, is my choice. Phil Rizutto, the Glendale Spaghetti, is the answer. In most ways I am content not to know such information, and to think of sportswriting not as a real profession but more as an agreeable frame of mind, a way of going about things rather than things you exactly do or know. A reasonable guess is a source of pleasure, since it makes me feel like one of the crowd rather than a human FORTRAN spitting our stats and reducing sports to unsavory accountancy. When sports stops being a matter for speculation, even idle, aimless, misinformed speculation, something’s gone haywire — no matter what Mutt Greene thinks — and it’ll be time to get out of the business and for the cliometricians and computer whizzes from Price Waterhouse to take over the show.

At the intersection of Routes 1 and 533, I head south toward Mrs. Miller’s. I would like the consultation I missed on Thursday, possibly even a full reading. If, for instance, Mrs. Miller were to tell me I was risking a severe emotional breakdown if I identified Walter in the morgue and would possibly never see my children as long as I lived, I’d start thinking about Alaska king crab and a night of HBO in a Philadelphia-area Travel-Lodge, and a new look at things in the morning. Why sneer in the face of unhappy prophecy?

Unfortunately, however, Mrs. Miller’s little brick-and-asphalt ranchette looks locked up tighter than Dick’s hatband. No dusty Buicks sit in the drive. No sign of the usual snarling Doberman in the fenced-in back. The Millers (what could their name really be?) are gone for the holiday, and I have now missed consultations two times running — not a good sign in itself.

I pull into the drive and sit as I did three nights ago, staring at an opening in the heavy drawdrapes as if I could will someone to be there. I give my horn an “accidental” toot. I’d be happy to see the opening widen, a door inched back behind the dusty metal screen, as it did the last time. A nice niece would do. I’d pay ten bucks to make small talk with a dark-skinned female in-law. She wouldn’t need divining powers. I’d still come away better.

But that is not to be. Cars beat the highway behind me, and no niece comes to signal. No door cracks. The future, at least my part in it, remains unassured, and I will need to take extra care of myself. I pull back out onto Route 1 toward home, just missing a big honking tractor-trailer headed south, and my jaw still throbbing from Vicki’s knuckle sandwich, now two hours old.

I take the front way into Haddam, curling up King George Road and Bank Street, along the north lawns of the Institute and through the Square. Though once in the village limits I am at a loss for what to do first, and am struck by an unfriendliness of the town, the smallish way it offers no clue for how to go about things — no priority established, no monumental structures to determine a true middle, no Main Street to organize things. And I see again it can be a sad town, a silent, nothing-happening, keep-to-yourself Sunday town — the library closed and green-shaded. Frenchy’s abandoned. The Coffee Spot empty (Sunday Times scattered from the breakfast crowd). The Institute lies remote and tree-shadowed, a remaining family from the morning services, standing on the Square with their son. It is unexpectedly a foreign place, as strange as Moline or Oslo, its usual informal welcomeness reefed in as if some terror was about, a crusty death’s smell, a different bouquet from the swimming pool odor I trust.

I park in my drive and go in to put on new clothes. Hoving Road is somnolent, as blue-shaded and leaden as a Bonnard. The Deffeyes’ sprinkler hisses, and up a few houses the Justice has set a badminton net onto his long lawn. An old Ford Woody sits in his drive. Somewhere near abouts I hear the sounds of light chatter-talk and glasses clinking in our cozy local backyard fashion — an Easter Egg hunt finished, the children asleep, the sound of a single swimmer diving in. But this is the day’s extent. A private stay-home with the family till past dark. Wreaths are off all doors. The world once more a place we know well.

Inside, my house has a strange public smell to it, a smell I would like on any other day but that today seems unwholesome. Upstairs, I put Merthiolate and a big band-aid on my knee, and change to chinos and a faded red madras shirt I bought at Brooks Brothers the year my book was published. A casual look can sometimes keep you remote from events.

I haven’t thought much about Walter. Occasionally his face has plunged into my thinking, an expectant sad-eyed face, the sober, impractical fellow I stood railside with on the Mantoloking Belle speculating about the lives ashore we were both embedded in, how we tended to see the world from two pretty distinct angles, but that on balance it didn’t matter much.

Which was all I needed! I didn’t need to know about Yolanda and Eddie Pitcock. Certainly not about his monkeyshines at the Americana. We didn’t need to become established. That is not my long suit.

No one answers when I call up to Bosobolo. He and his Miss Right, D.D., are no doubt being entertained “in the home” by some old chicken-necked Christology professor, and at this very moment he is probably backed into a bookshelved corner, clutching his ebony elbow and a glass of chablis, while Dr. So-and-so prattles about the hermeneutics of getting the goods on that old radical Paul the Apostle. Bosobolo, I’m sure, has other goods on his mind but is learning to be a first-class American. Though he could have it worse. He could still be running around in the jungle, dressed in a palm tutu. Or he could be me, morgue-bound and fighting a willowy despair.

My plan, which I’ve come to momentarily, is to call X, go do what I have to at the police, possibly see X — at her house (a remote chance to see my children) — then do what I haven’t a clue. The plan doesn’t reach far, though the literal possibilities might be just a source of worry.

A silent red “3” blinks on the answering machine, when I go to call X. “1” is in all likelihood Vicki wondering if I made it home safely and wanting to set up a powwow somewhere in the public domain where we can end love like grownups — less stridency and fewer lefts to the chin — a final half-turn of the old gem.

And she is right, of course, and smart to be. We don’t really share enough of the “big” interests. I am merely mad for her. And at best she is unclear about me, which leaves us where in six months time? I would never be enough for a Texas girl, anyway. Fascination has its virtuous limits. She needs attention to more than I could give mine to: to Walter Scott’s column, to being a New-Ager, to setting up a love nest, to a hundred things I really don’t care that much about but that grip her imagination. Consequently I’ll cut loose without complaining (though I’d be willing to spend one more happy night in Pheasant Meadow and then call it quits).

I punch the message button.

Beep. Frank, it’s Carter Knott.

I’m sneaking off to the Vet

tomorrow for the Cardinals

game. I guess I can’t get

enough of you guys. I’m

calling Walter too. It’s

Sunday morning. Call me at

home. Click.

Beep. Hey you ole rascal-thing.

I thought you were comin at

eleven-thirty. We’re all mad

at you down here so you better

not show your face. You know

who this is, dontcha? Click.

Beep. Frank, this is Walter

Luckett, Jr., speaking. It’s twelve

o’clock sharp here, Frank. I

was just throwing away some

old Newsweeks, and I found

this photograph of that DC-10

that went down a year or so

ago out in Chicago. O’Hare.

You might remember that,

Frank, you can see all those

people’s heads in the windows

looking out. It’s really

something. And I just can’t

help wondering what they

must’ve been thinking about,

since they are riding a bomb.

A big, silver bomb. That’s

about all I had in mind now.

Uhhmm. So long. Click.

Is this what he’d have told me if I’d been here to answer? What an Easter greeting! A chummy slice o’ life to pass along while you’re rigging your own blast-off into the next world. A while you were out from the grave! What else can happen?

I still cannot think a long thought about Walter. Though what I do think about is poor Ralph Bascombe, in his last hours on earth, only four blocks from here in Doctors Hospital and a lifetime away now. In his last days Ralph changed. Even in his features, he looked to me like a bird, a strangely straining gooney bird, and not like a nine-year-old boy sick to death and weary of unfinished life. Once he barked out loud at me like a dog, sharp and distinct, then he flopped up and down in his bed and laughed. Then his eyes shot open and burned at me, as if he knew me better than I knew myself and could see all my faults. I was in my chair beside his bed, holding his water cup and his terrible bendable straw. X was at the window, musing out at a sunny parking lot (and probably the cemetery). Ralph said loudly at me, “Oh, you son of a bitch, what are you doing holding that stupid glass? I could kill you for that.” And then he fell asleep again. And X and I just stared at each other and laughed. It’s true, we laughed and laughed until we cried with laughter. Not with fear or pain. What else was there to do, we must’ve said silently, and agreed that a good laugh was all right this time. No one would mind. It was at no one’s expense, and no one but the two of us would hear it — not even Ralph. It may seem callous, but we had that between ourselves, and who’s to be the judge when intimacy’s at work? It was one of our last moments of unalloyed tenderness in the world.

Though I suppose that in this memory of bereavement there is some for poor Walter, as wrongly and surely dead as my son, and just as absurd. I have tried not to be part of it. But why shouldn’t I? We all deserve mankind’s pity, his grief. And maybe never more than when we go outside its usual reaches and can’t get back.

No one answers at X’s house. She may be taking the children to a friend’s. Are we going to have to have another heart-to-heart, I wonder. Am I going to be the recipient of other unhappy news? Is Fincher Barksdale leaving Dusty and getting X knee-deep in mink-ranching in Memphis? On what thin strand does all equilibrium dangle?

I leave a message saying I’ll be by soon, then I’m off to the police, to have a look at Walter, though I have hope that a responsible citizen — possibly one of the Divorced Men with a police scanner — will already have come forward and performed this service for me.

The police station occupies part of the new brick-and-glass car-dealerish Village Hall where I rode out the heart-sore days of my divorce. The Hall is located near some of our nicer, more established residences, and it is closed now except for the brightly lighted cubicles in the back where the police hang out. From the outside where you drive around the circular entry, the last drowsy hours of Easter have softened its staunch Republican look. But it remains a house of hazards to me, a place where I’m uneasy each time I set my foot indoors.

Sergeant Beni valle, it turns out, is still on duty when I give my name to the watch officer, a young Italian-looking brushcut fellow wearing an enormous pistol and a gold name plate that says, PATRIARCA. He is in wry spirits, I can tell, and smiles a secret smile that implies some pretty good off-color jokes have been going the rounds all day, and were we a jot better friends he’d let me in on the whole hilarious business. My own smile, though, is not in tune for jokes, and after writing down my name he wanders off to find the sergeant.

I sit down on the public bench beside a big framed town map, breathing in the floor-mop smell of waiting rooms, leaning on my knees and peering out the glass doors through the lobby and across the lawn of elms and ginkgoes and spring maples. Outside is all almond light now, and in an hour a dreamy celestial darkness will return and one more day find its end. And what a day! Not a typical one at all. And yet it ends as softly, in as velvet a hush and airish a calm as any. Death is not a compatible presence hereabouts, and everything is in connivance — forces municipal and private — to say it isn’t so; it’s only a misreading, a wrong rumor to be forgotten. No harm done. This is not the place to die and be noticed, though it isn’t a bad place to live, all things considered.

Two cyclists glide across my view. A man ahead, a woman behind; a child in a child’s secure-seat strapped snug to Papa. All three are white-helmeted. Red pennants wag on spars in the dusk. All three are on their way home from an informal prayer get-together somewhere down some street, at some Danish-modern Unitarian hug-a-friend church where cider’s on tap and damn and hell are permissible — life on the continual upswing week after week. (It is the effect of a seminary in your town.) Now they’re headed homeward, fresh and nuclear, their frail magneto lights whispering a gangway to old darkness. Here come the Jamiesons. Mark, Pat and baby Jeff. Here comes life. All clear. Nothing can stop us now.

But they are wrong, wrong these Jamiesons. I should tell them. Life-forever is a lie of the suburbs — its worst lie — and a fact worth knowing before you get caught in its fragrant silly dream. Just ask Walter Luckett. He’d tell you, if he could.

Sergeant Benivalle appears through a back office door, and he’s exactly the fellow I expected, the chesty, flat-top, sad-eyed man with bad acne scars and mitts the size of work gloves. His mother must not have been a spaghetti-bender, since his eyes are pale and his square head stolid and Nordic. (His stomach, though, is firmly Italian and envelopes his belt buckle, squeezing the little silver snub-nose strapped above his wallet.) He is not a man to shake hands, but looks at the red EXIT sign above our heads when we meet. “We can just sit here, Mr. Bascombe,” he says. His voice is hoarse, wearier than earlier in the day.

We sit on the shiny bench while he fingers through a manila file. Officer Patriarca takes his seat behind the watch desk window, props up his feet and begins glancing through a Road & Track with a black drag-strip hero-turned-TV-personality smiling on the front.

Sergeant Benivalle sighs deeply and shuffles sheets of paper. Silent as a prisoner, I await him.

“Ahhh. Okay now. We’ve been in touch with family … a sister … in … Ohio, I guess. So …” He lifts a stapled page briefly to reveal a bright photograph of a man’s feet clad in a pair of rope sandals, toes pointed upward. Absolutely these are Walter’s feet, which I hope will be identification enough. Bascombe identifies deceased from picture of feet. “So that,” Sergeant Benivalle says slowly, “should eliminate your need to identify the, uh, deceased.”

“I didn’t really feel that need, anyway,” I say.

Sergeant Benivalle glances at me dismissively. “We have fingerprints coming, of course. But it’s just easier to get a positive this way.”

“I understand.”

“Now,” he says, flipping more pages. It’s surprising how much paper work has already been compiled. (Was Walter in some other kind of trouble?) “Now,” he says again and looks at me. “You’re the sportswriter, aren’t you?”

“Right.” I smile weakly.

Sergeant Benivalle glances back into his papers. “Who’s taking the AL East this year?”

“Detroit. They’re pretty good.”

He sighs. “Yep. Prolly so. I wish I had time to see a game. But I’m busy.” He protrudes his bottom lip, looking down. “I play a little golf, once in a blue moon.”

“My wife’s the teaching pro over at Cranbury Hills,” I say, though I add quickly, “my ex-wife, I mean.”

“That right?” Benivalle says, forgetting golf entirely. “I’ve got grass asthma,” he says, and since I can add nothing to that, I say nothing. “Do you,” he pauses, “have any idea why this Mr., uh, Luckett would take his own life, Mr. Bascombe, just off the top of your head?”

“No. I guess he gave up hope. That’s all.”

“Um-huh, um-huh.” Sergeant Benivalle reads down his folder. Inside, a form has been typed: HOMICIDEREPORT. “That usually happens at Christmas a lot more. Not that many people do it on Easter.”

“I never thought much about it.”

Sergeant Benivalle wheezes when he breathes, a small peeping noise down inside his chest. He fingers toward the back of the file. “I could never write,” he says thoughtfully. “I wouldn’t know what to say. That must be hard.”

“It’s really not too hard.”

“Um-huh. Well. I’ve got this, uh, copy of this letter for you.” He slides a slick Thermofax sheet out the back of his sheaf, holding it out daintily by a corner. “We keep the original, which you can claim in three months if the estate agrees to release it to you.” He looks at me.

“Okay.” I take the page by another of its greasy corners. It is badly copied in gray with a nasty embalming-fluid odor all over it. I see the script is a neat, very small longhand, with a signature near the bottom.

“Be careful with that stuff, it gets in your clothes. Cops smell like it all the time, it’s how you know we’re in the neighborhood.” He closes his folder, reaches in his pocket and takes out a pack of Kools.

“I’ll read it later,” I say and fold the letter in thirds, then sit holding it, waiting for whatever is supposed to happen next to happen. We are both of us immobilized by how simple all this has been.

Sergeant Benivalle lights his cigarette and inserts the burnt match into the book behind the others. The two of us sit then and stare at the yellow street map of the town we live in — each probably looking at the street where his own house sits. They couldn’t be far apart. Prolly he lives in The Presidents.

“Where’d you say this guy’s wife was again?” Benivalle says, breathing smoke hugely into his lungs. Though he looks at least fifty, he is no older than I am. His life cannot have been an easy one so far.

“She went to Bimini with another man.”

He blows smoke, then sniffs loudly two times. “That’s the shits.” He braces against the curved back of the bench, clenching his cigarette in his teeth, thinking about Bimini. “There’s gotta be better things to do about it than kill yourself, though. It isn’t that bad. Wouldn’t you think?” He turns his big head and fixes me with eyes blue as fjords. He hasn’t liked this business with Walter one bit better than I have, and he’d like somebody to say a word to help him out of worrying about it.

“I sure would think so,” I say and nod.

“Boy-o-boy. Mmmmph. What a mess.” He extends both his legs and crosses them at the ankles. It is his way of inviting conversation between menfolk, though I’m stumped for what to say. It’s possible he would understand if I said nothing.

“Do you think it would be all right if I went over to Walter’s house?” I actually surprise myself by saying this.

Sergeant Benivalle looks at me strangely. “What do you want to do that for?”

“Just to have a look. I wouldn’t stay long. It’s just probably the only way I’m going to get grips on this whole business. He gave me a key.”

Sergeant Benivalle grunts, thinking about this request. He smokes his cigarette and stares at the smoke he exhales. “Sure,” he says almost indifferently. “Just don’t take anything out. The family has claims on everything. Okay?”

“I won’t.” Everyone trusts everyone here. And why not? No one’s ever up to anything that could cause harm to anyone but themselves. “Are you married, Sergeant,” I ask.

“Divorced.” He throws a narrow, flinty look my way, his eyes piggy with suspicion. “Why?”

“Well. Some of us, we’re all of us divorced men — there’s a lot of us in town these days — we get together now and then. It’s nothing serious. We just gang up for a beer at the August once a month. Go to a ball game or two. We went fishing last week, in fact. I thought if you’d like to, I’d give you a call. It’s a pretty good group. Everything’s informal.”

Sergeant Benivalle holds his Kool between his big thumb and his crooked forefinger, like a movie Frenchman, and flicks off an ash toward the polished floor. “Busy,” he says and sniffs. “Police work….” He starts to say more, then stops. “I forget what I was going to say.” He stares at the marble floor.

I have embarrassed him without meaning to, and I’d just as soon leave now. It’s possible Sergeant Benivalle is nothing but Cade Arcenault years later, and I should leave him to his police work. Though it never hurts to show someone that their own monumental concerns and peculiar problems are really just like everybody else’s. We all have our own police work to do.

“I’ll still call you, okay?” I grin like a salesman.

“I doubt I’ll make it,” he says, suddenly distracted.

“Well. We’re pretty flexible. I don’t come myself, sometimes. But I like the idea of going.”

“Yeah,” Sergeant Benivalle says, and once again fattens his heavy lower lip.

“I guess I’ll take off,” I say.

He blinks at me as if waked up from a dream. “How come you have a key to that place?” He cannot not be a policeman, a fact I find satisfying. He is hard to imagine as anything else.

“Walter just gave it to me. I don’t know why. I don’t know if he had many friends.”

“People don’t usually give their keys to people.” He shakes his head and clicks back in his mouth.

“People do weird things, I guess.”

“All the time” he says and sniffs again. “Here,” he says. He reaches in his pocket behind his pack of Kools and pulls out a little blue plastic card case. “Keep this if you go over there.” He hands me a printed card with his name and title and the Haddam town seal printed on it. “Gene Benivalle. Sergeant of Detectives.” His no doubt unlisted home number is printed at the bottom. I could call him about the Divorced Men’s Club at this very number, as I’m sure he knows.

“Okay.” I stand up.

“Just don’t take anything, right?” he says hoarsely, sitting on the bench with his sheaf of papers in front of his stomach. “That’d be wrong.”

I stuff his card in my shirt pocket. “Maybe we’ll see you some night.”

“Nah,” he says, pushing his foot down hard on his cigarette and blowing smoke across his big knees.

“I’ll probably call you anyway.”

“Whatever,” he says, wearily. “I’m always here.”

“So long,” I say.

But he doesn’t like goodbyes. He’s not the type any more than he’s the handshake type. I leave him where he sits, under the red EXIT sign in the lobby, staring out the glass door at me as I go.

X’s car sits alongside mine in the deepening dusk in front of Village Hall. She herself sits on the front fender carrying on a coaxing conversation with our two children, who are performing cartwheels on the public lawn and giggling. Paul is unwilling to fling his legs high enough in the air to achieve perfect balance, but Clarissa is expert from hours of practice, and even in her gingham granny dress, which I gave her, she can “walk the clouds,” her cotton panties astonishing in the failed daylight. On the front bumper of X’s car is a sticker that says “I’d Rather Be Golfing.”

“I bought these two some ice cream, and this is the result,” X says, when I sit up on the warm fender beside her. She has not looked at me, merely taken my existence for granted from the evidence of my car. “It seems to have brought out the kid in them.”

“Dad,” Paul shouts from the grass. “Clary’s going in the circus.”

“Please scratch glass,” Clary says and immediately gets onto her hands again. They aren’t surprised to see me, though I notice they’ve passed a secret look between themselves. Their usual days are alive with secrets, and toward me they feel both secret humor and secret sympathy. They’d be happy for us to start a roughhouse on the lawn the way we do at home, but now we can’t. Paul probably has a new joke by now, better than the one from Thursday night.

“She’s pretty good, isn’t she?” I call out.

“I meant it as a compliment, all right?” Paul stands, hands on his hips in a girlish way. He and I suffer misunderstanding poorly. Clary lets herself fall on her bottom and laughs. She looks like her grandfather and has his almost silvery hair.

“I think it’s odd that a town like this could have a morgue, don’t you?” X says, musing. She’s wearing a bright green-and-red sailcloth wraparound and a mint-colored knitted Brooks’ shirt like the ones I wear, and looks coolly clubby. She smoothes the material over her knees and lets her heels kick against the tire wall. She is in a generous mood.

“I never thought about it,” I say, watching my children with admiration. “But I guess it’s surprising.”

“One of Paul’s friends is a pathologist’s son, and he says there’s a very modern facility in the basement in there.” She gazes at the brick-and-glass façade with placid interest. “No coroner, though. He drives down from New Brunswick on a circuit of some kind.” For the first time she looks at me eye to eye. “How are you?”

I am happy to hear this confiding voice again. “I’m all right. This day’ll be over with.”

“Sorry I had to call you at wherever that was.”

“It’s fine. Walter died. We can’t help that.”

“Did you have to view him?”

“No. His relatives are coming from Ohio.”

“Suicide is very Ohio, you know.”

“I guess.” Hers, as always, is a perfect Michigan attitude. No one there has any patience for Ohio.

“What about his wife?”

“They’re divorced.”

“Well. You poor old guy,” she says and pats me on my knee and gives me a quick and unexpected smile. “Want me to buy you a drink? The August is open. I’ll run these two Indians home.” She glances into the near dark, where our children are sitting in a private powwow on the grass. They are each other’s confidants in all crucial matters.

“I’m okay. Are you going to marry Fincher?”

She glances at me impassively then looks away. “I certainly am not. He’s married unless something’s changed in three days.”

“Vicki says you two are the hot topic in the Emergency Room.”

“Vicki-schmicky,” she says and sighs audibly through her nostrils. “Surely she’s mistaken. Surely you can’t be interested.”

“He’s an asshole and a change-jingler, that’s all. He’s down in Memphis starting an air-conditioned mink ranch at this very moment. That’s the kind of guy he is.”

“I’m aware.”

“It’s true.”

“True?” X looks at me heartlessly. I am the asshole here, of course, but I don’t care. Something seems at stake. The stability and sanctity of my divorce.

“I thought you were interested in software salesmen.”

“I’ll marry and fuck,” she whispers terribly, “whoever I choose.”

“Sorry,” I say, but I’m not. Out on Seminary Street I see the lights go on weakly, blink once, then stay on.

“Men always think other men are assholes,” X says, coldly. “It’s surprising how often they’re right.”

“Does Fincher think I’m an asshole?”

“He’s intimidated by you. And anyway, he isn’t so bad. He’s pretty certain about some things in his life. He just doesn’t show it.”

“How about Dusty?”

“Frank, I will take your children to Michigan and you’ll never see them again, except for two weeks every summer in the Huron Mountain Club with my father to chaperone. This if you don’t lay off me at this moment. How would you like that?” She isn’t serious about this, and it’s possible, I think now, that Vicki has made this whole business up for reasons of her own, though I would rather believe it was a mistake. X sighs again wearily. “I gave Fincher putting lessons, because he’s playing in a college reunion tournament in Memphis. He was embarrassed about it, so we went over to Bucks County to Idlegreen and putted for a few days. He needed to improve his confidence.”

“Did you put some iron in his putter?” I would like to ask about the putative kiss, but the moment’s passed.

It is full dark now, and we are silent and alone in it. Cars murmur along Cromwell Lane, their headlights sweeping in the direction of the Institute, where an “Easter sing” is no doubt on for tonight. St. Leo the Great chimes out a last chance, admonitory call. Three uniformed policemen stroll outside laughing, heading off for a supper at home. I recognize officers Carnevale and Patriarca, whom I imagine, for some reason, to be distant cousins. They walk in lock step toward their personal cars and pay no attention to us. It is a dreamy, average, vertiginous evening in the suburbs — not too much on excitement, only the lives of isolated individuals in the harmonious secrecy of a somber age.

I can’t deny I’m relieved about Fincher Barksdale, though — a misunderstanding, that is what I’m ready to believe. “Your father sent a message,” I say.

“Oh?” Her face grows instantly skeptical.

“He told me to tell your mother he has bladder cancer.”

“She told him the same thing once when I was a little girl, and he forgot to ask her about it the next day and went away on business. Only now it’s different. It’s a way to make them feel passionate. She’ll think that’s hilarious.”

“He said I could marry you again if I wanted to.”

X sniffs, then looks into her hands as if one might contain something she’s forgotten. “He can’t stop giving me away.”

“He’s a nice guy, isn’t he?”

“No, he’s not.” She casts a secret glance at me. “I’m sorry about your friend. Was he a nice, good friend?” The footlights that illumine the shubbery around Village Hall all go on at once. A Negro janitor steps to the glass door and peers out between his palms, then wanders back with a long dust mop in tow. It is cool now out of doors. A car horn blows briefly. The policemen’s taillights disappear down the dark streets.

“No. I didn’t know him very well.”

“What could’ve happened?” I hear my children giggle in the damp grass, sweet music of not-to-worry-in-this-world.

“He quit being interested in what’s next, I guess. I don’t know. I tend not to be much of an alarmist.”

“You don’t worry that it was your fault, do you?”

“I hadn’t thought about that. I don’t see how.”

“You have awfully odd relationships. I don’t know how you stand it.”

“I don’t have any relationships at all.”

“I know that. But it’s the way you like it.”

Clarissa calls out from the darkness haltingly, wanting to know the exact time. It is 7:36. She is beginning to feel a strangeness out of doors, as though she might suddenly be cut loose and abandoned. “It’s early,” Paul whispers.

“I’m going over to Walter’s house tonight. Would you like to come with me?”

X turns to me with a look of outlandish surprise. “What on earth? Did he have something of yours?”

“No. I just want to go by there. He gave me a key, and I want to use it. The police don’t mind if I don’t take anything.”

“It’s ghoulish.”

I sit in silence, then, and listen for meaningful sounds in the darkness — a train whistle far out on the main line, a long-haul trucker drumming up Route 1 from as far away as Arkansas, a small plane humming through the angelic night sky — anything to console us two in these last thin moments. Genuinely good conversations with your ex-wife are limited by the widening territories of intimacy from which you’re restricted. It is finally okay, I guess. “That’s fine,” I say.

“But you’re probably going anyway, aren’t you?” X looks at me, then stares out at the lighted foyer of Village Hall, through which is the tax assessor’s glassed-in office. We can both see the janitor with his dust mop moving in slow motion.

“I guess so,” I say. “It’s really all right.”

“Why?” She looks at me with narrow eyes, her look of skepticism at earthly uncertainties, entities she has never much liked.

“I don’t need to say. Men feel things women don’t. You don’t have to disapprove of it.”

“You do such odd things.” She smiles sympathetically, though magisterially also. “You’re so vague sometimes. Are you really all right? You looked pale when I could see you.”

“I’m not completely all right. But I will be.” I could tell her about Vicki knocking my block off, and being hit by a shopping cart. But what the hell good would it do? It would be in the way of full disclosure, and neither of us wants that again, now or ever. We have probably been here too long.

“We just see each other about deaths now,” X says, somberly. “Isn’t that sad?”

“Most divorced people don’t see each other at all. Walter’s wife went to Bimini, and he never saw her again. So I think we do pretty well. We have wonderful children. We don’t live very far apart.”

“Do you love me,” X says.

“Yes.”

“I was wondering about it. I haven’t asked you in a long time.”

“I’m always glad to tell you, though.”

“I haven’t really heard it in a long time, except from the children. I’m sure you’ve heard it several times.”

“No.” (Though it would be a lie to say I haven’t heard it at all.)

“Sometimes I think about you being involved with all different kinds of people I don’t know anything about, and it seems so odd. I don’t like the feeling.”

“I’m involved with fewer people all the time.”

“Does that make you lonely?”

“No. Not a bit.”

The fender of her Citation has grown cold in the darkness. Our two children — weary at last of each other’s secrets — have climbed to their feet and are standing out in the dark like shy ghosts of themselves, wanting to be pleased and made over. It is like old times in a way. They stand not far from us and stare, wondering what’s going on, saying nothing, exactly like their very ghosts might.

“Do you really want me to go over there with you?” X says, blinking but ready to give in.

“You don’t have to.”

“Yes. Well,” she says and sniffs a little chuckle laugh. “I can drop these two at the Armentis’ for half a hour. They like it over there, anyway. I don’t know what might happen to you alone.”

“I’ll pay if it costs anything.”

X shakes her head and slides off the fender. “You’ll pay, huh?” The moon has appeared suddenly over the stalky elms — a bright, wide and ethereal world above us, illuminating trees and patches of empty street and the older white residences beyond. She glances at me in amusement. “Who did you think was going to pay?” She laughs.

“I just wanted to be a good sport.”

“What do you really care most about in the world? That’s the question of the hour, I think.”

“You. That’s all.”

X laughs again and opens the door wide. “You’re a sport, all right. You’re the original sport.”

I smile at her in the public darkness. My children pile past me inside. The car door closes. And once again we are off.

Walter’s place at 118 Coolidge is a two-story cinderblock apartment row between two nicer older colonials whose young-couple-owners have sunk reasonable money into them, and are home tonight. I’ve never noticed the place, though there is a streetlight out front and it is only two streets over from X’s house, and a block exactly like hers in every way but for this very building. The windowless front has been decorated with aluminum strips made like Venetian blinds, with “The Catalina” painted in script across it and backed by a wan light. Exterior lights along the side-facing doors burn visibly to the street. It is a place for abject senior seminarians, confirmed bachelors and divorcées — people in transition — and it is not, I think, such a bad place. I wouldn’t have minded it in Ann Arbor in the middle sixties, say, or even today if I was fresh out of law school, trying to get my legs under me before starting life in earnest and annexing a little wife. Though it is not a place I’d be happy to end up, or even pass through as a way-station toward somewhere else in adult life. The Catalina would be too unpromising for those conditions. And it would certainly not be a place I’d choose to die. Seeing it makes me wonder exactly what kind of lovers’ nest Yolanda and Eddie Pitcock share in Bimini. I’m sure it’s nothing like this. I’m sure a blue ocean is nearby, and cooling breezes rattling banana palms, and wind chimes punctuating languorous afternoons. Better on all accounts.

X parks behind Walter’s MG, and we walk up the concrete to the mailboxes where a single buggy globe shines dimly. Walter’s business card has been pruned to fit the space marked 6-D, and we start down the lower row of doors where I hear the mutter of televisions.

“It’s dank here,” X says. “I’ve never been anyplace I could actually say was dank. Have you?”

“Locker rooms,” I say, “in some of the older stadiums.”

“I suppose that shouldn’t surprise me, should it?”

“I doubt if Walter liked it much either.”

“Well, he’s fixed that.”

6-D’s outside light is off, and a bright orange sticker masks the door saying POLICEINVESTIGATION, AUTHORIZEDENTRYONLY. I turn the key and open the door into darkness.

A small green light and the tiny numerals 7:53 shine from the black. I own the very same clock at home.

“This is very, very unpleasant,” X says. “I think this man would hate my coming in here.”

“You can go back,” I say.

A smell is in the room and seems not to belong there, a medical smell from a doctor’s office closed for vacation.

“Can’t we turn on a light?”

Though for a moment I can’t find a wall switch, and when I do it is out of service. “This doesn’t work.”

“Well, for God’s sake find a lamp. I don’t like his clock.”

I bump across the dark floor, the furniture around me thick as elephants. I brush what feels like a leather couch, scrape a leg on an end table, pat across the back of a chair, then somewhere in the middle of the room touch the neck of a hanging lamp and pull the chain.

X appears alone in the doorway, her face fixed in a frown. “Well, for God’s sake,” she says again.

“I just want to see it,” I say, standing in the middle of Walter’s living room, seeing spots.

The hanging lamp casts dishy yellow light everywhere, though it is, in truth, a perfectly nice room. There are varnished paneled walls and a doorway leading to a dark bedroom. A pullman kitchen is behind a counter-thru, everything there put away and straight. There is plenty of big comfortable, new-looking furniture — a red leather couch across from a big RCA 24 with bolt holes on top where Walter has attached his duck gun. A set of barbells leans in a corner, several tables hold lamps with interesting oriental shades. A small mahogany secretary sits against a wall with blank paper and pencils laid out neatly as though Walter had intended to do some serious writing.

On the wall outside the bedroom door is a gallery of framed photographs I am eager to see. Pictured is the ’66 Grinnell wrestling team in black and white with Walter, a rangy 145-er, kneeling in an old wire-window gym, arms folded thick, sober as an Indian. Under that is a pretty blond girl with a slightly heavy upper lip and wide-spaced eyes — no doubt Yolanda — taken in a row boat with the wind blowing. Here is the Delta Chi fraternity on risers; here is a picture of two stern-looking senior citizens, a man in a stiff wool suit, a woman in a flowered dress — Ma and Pa Luckettt in Coshocton, without doubt. Here is Walter in a full-traction leg-cast on a hospital bed beside a pretty nurse, both giving a big thumbs-up; and Walter in a convict’s suit and cap beside Yolanda in a dancehall getup, each sneering. Walter has framed his Harvard Business School acceptance letter, and to the side there is a picture of a younger Walter seated at a desk with a stack of businessy-looking papers, smoking a Meerschaum pipe. At the bottom, and to my surprise, is a photo of the Divorced Men’s Club ganged around our big circular table in the August. It is during one of our Thursday night sessions. I’m holding a huge beer mug and wearing an idiot grin, listening animatedly to something Knot-head Knott is spieling about and am undoubtedly bored blind. Knot-head is holding back a big guffaw, but I have no recollection of what we might’ve been talking about. I do not even remember the time’s happening, and seeing it makes me feel it all must’ve been in Walter’s imagination.

I poke my head back into the bedroom and snap on the ceiling light. Here it is sparer than out front, but still satisfactory in its own way. An aquarium sits on the dresser, its lurid light exposing floating, tiny black mollies. Walter’s bed has a geometric-design cover with three oversized pillows, and on the night table there is a copy of my book, Blue Autumn, with my author’s picture face-up, and myself looking remarkably lean and ironic. I am drinking a beer, elbowed-in to an open air bar in San Miguel Tehuantepec. I have a crewcut and am smoking a cigarette, and couldn’t look more ridiculous. “Mr. Bascombe,” my biography says, “is a young American living in Mexico. He was born at the end of World War II, served in the Marines, and has attended the University of Michigan.” I pick it up and see it is the Haddam Public Library copy, with the plastic cover taken off. (Walter has boosted it! He told me in the Manasquan that he had a library copy, but I didn’t believe him.) He has jotted small plusses and zeros by certain titles on the contents page. I’d like to see more about that, possibly take the book with me, though I know there’s an inventory inside Sergeant Benivalle’s folder. I set the book back, take a quick look around — shoes, shoetrees, a skinny closet of suits and shirts, a silent butler, a computer terminal on the floor in the corner, an air-conditioner built through from the outside, a Grinnell pennant — the unextraordinary remains of a life at loose ends.

X is seated on the edge of the leather couch, her wrists on her knees, looking at a red ceramic lobster peeking out over the rim of a large green “dip bowl” on the coffee table. “You know?” She stares closely at the lobster’s eyes. Her voice makes a hollow, echoey sound.

“What?”

“It reminds me of a frat house in here, a Phi Delt’s room I used to go into. Ron something. Ron Kirk. It was fixed up exactly this way, like a dentist’s office somebody’d lived in. Just horrible boy’s stuff. I bet there’s a set of Playboys in here somewhere. I looked around for it a little.” She shakes her head in wonder. On the floor in front of the coffee table is more orange tape the police have laid around the chair Walter was sitting in, a chair that is missing. Two large dark brown stains have dried on one of the hooked rugs, and these have been covered with clear plastic, then taped. An area on the wall has also been covered and sealed. X has made no reference to either of them. “You’re just so strange, Frank, my God. I don’t see how any of you get along alone.” She blinks up at me, smiling, curious at who would kill himself, wishing for a common-sensical explanation for such a strange event. “You know?”

“I was just wondering how Walter rigged up the switch. He was probably an expert.”

“Do you think you understand all this?”

“I think so.”

“Then tell me, would you?”

“Walter gave himself up to the here and now, but got stranded. Then I think he got excited, and all he knew how to do was sentimentalize his life, which made him regret everything. If he’d made it past today he’d have been fine, I think.” I pick up an Americana matchbook off the kitchen counter, and read the address and phone number to myself. Below it is a copy of Bimini Today with a photograph on the cover of a long silver beach. I put the matchbook down.

“Do you think you were supposed to help him?” X says, still smiling. “He seems so conventional. Just seeing in here.”

“He should’ve helped himself” is my answer, and in fact it is what I believe. “You can’t be too conventional. That’s what’ll save you.” And for a moment a sudden unwanted grief sweeps up in me; a grief, I suppose, for possibilities misconstrued, for consolation not taken (which is what grief is all about). I share, I know, and only for a moment, the grief poor Walter must’ve felt alone here but shouldn’t have. This is not a perfectly good room. There’s little here for small mystery and hope and anticipation to flicker on — yet there’s nothing so corrupting or so lonely here as to be unworkable. I could hang in here until I got myself headed right, though I’d see that I did it in a hurry.

“You look like your best friend died, sweetheart,” X says.

I smile at her and she stands up in the shadowy, death-smelling room, taller than I usually think of her, her shadow rising to the nubbly ceiling.

“Let’s leave,” she says and smiles back in a friendly way.

I think a moment about the drinking glasses Walter probably owned, that I’m sure I was right about them, though I won’t bother looking. “You know,” I say, “I suddenly had this feeling we should make love. Let’s close the door there and get in bed.”

X stares at me in sudden and fierce disbelief. (I can see she is horrified by this idea, and I wish I could take the words back right away, since it was a preposterous thing to say, and I didn’t mean a word of it.) “That’s something we don’t do anymore. Don’t you remember?” X says, bitterly. “That’s what divorce means. You’re really a terrible man.”

“I’m sorry,” I say. Sergeant Benivalle would understand this and have a strategy for getting it straightened out. It has not been the best day of either of our lives, after all.

“I remember why I divorced you now.” X turns away, reaching the door in three unexpectedly long steps, “You’ve really become awful. You weren’t always awful. But now you are. I don’t like you very much at all.”

“I guess I am,” I say and try to smile. “But you don’t have to be afraid.”

“I’m not afraid,” she says, and laughs a hard little laugh, turning through the doorway just as a small man in a white shirt arrives into it. It stops her cold to see him.

The man’s eyes look wide behind thick glasses, and he blocks X’s way without intending to. He leans around her to look at me. “Are you the sister and brother?” he says.

I lean exactly as he does, trying to see him and look pleasant. “No,” I say. “I’m a friend of Walter’s.” This is the only explanation I have, and I can see from his expression that it isn’t enough. He is a youngish Frank Sinatra type with pale, knobby cheeks and curly hair (possibly he’s not as young as he looks, since he has a dry librarian’s air about him). He suspects something’s up, though, and means to get to the bottom of it pronto using this very air. His presence makes me realize how little I have to do with anything here, and that X was right. It’s just lucky we were not getting into bed.

“You don’t belong here,” the young man says. He is for some reason flustered and trying to decide whether to get damn good and mad about everything. Conceivably I could show him Sergeant Benivalle’s card.

“Are you the manager?”

“Yes. What are you stealing? You can’t take anything.”

“We’re not taking anything.”

“Excuse me,” X says, and shoulders past the man into the dark. She has nothing more to say to me. I listen to her footsteps down the sidewalk and feel awful.

The man blinks at me in the living room’s light. “What the hell are you doing here? I’m going to call the police about it. We’ll get—”

“They know about it already,” I say wearily. Here without a doubt is where I should present Sergeant Benivalle’s card, but I do not have the heart.

“What do you want here?” the man says painfully, stranded in the doorway.

“I don’t know. I forgot.”

“Are you some kind of newspaperman?”

“No. I was just Walter’s friend.”

“No one’s allowed in here but the family. So just get out.”

“Are you a friend of Walter’s, too?”

He blinks several times at this particular question. “I was,” the man says. “I certainly was.”

“Then why didn’t you go down and identify him?”

“Just get out,” the man says, and looks dazed.

“Okay.” I start to turn off the light, and remember my book in the dark bedroom. I would like to take it with me to return to the library. “I’m sorry,” I say.

“I’ll turn that off,” the man says abruptly. “You just leave.”

“Thanks.” I walk past the man, brushing his sleeve, then out where the air awaits me, sweet and thick and running full of fears.

X sits in her Citation beneath the streetlight, motor idling, the dashboard lights green in her face. She has waited here for me.

I lean in the passenger window, where the air is warm and smells like X’s perfume. “I don’t see why we had to go in there,” she says stonily.

“I’m sorry about it. It’s my fault. I didn’t mean that in there.”

“You are such a cliché. God.” X shakes her head, though she is still angry.

This is perfectly true, of course. It is also true that I have tried for a kind of sneaky full disclosure, been caught at it, and am about to be left empty-handed.

“I don’t really see why I have to distinguish myself, though I’m a grown man. I don’t have to impress anybody now.”

“You just embarrass me. But that’s right.” She nods, staring unhappily straight into the night. “I was going to ask you to come home with me. Isn’t that funny? I left the kids at the Armentis’.”

“I’d go. That’s a great idea.”

“Well, no.” X reaches round and buckles her seat belt over her wonderfully skirted thighs, sets both hands on the steering wheel. “That little man in there just seemed so strange to me. Was he a friend of your friend’s?”

“I don’t know. He never mentioned him.” She is probably worrying that Walter and I were “romantically linked.”

“Maybe your friend was just meant to kill himself.” She smiles at me with too much irony, too much, anyway, for people who have known each other as long as we have, and slept together, had children, loved each other and been divorced. Irony ought to be outlawed from this kind of situation. It is a pain in the ass and doesn’t help anybody. Hers, regrettably, is a typical mid western response to the complicated human dilemma.

“Wajter didn’t understand his own resources. He didn’t have to do this. It seems to me you could stand to be more adaptable yourself. We could just go home right now. No one’s there.”

“I don’t think so.” She smiles still.

“I still want to,” I say. I grin through the window. I smell the exhaust flooding underneath me, feel the car shuddering behind its safe headlights. The change scoop between the bucket seats, I see, is filled with orange golf tees.

“You’re not a real bad man. I’m sorry. I don’t think divorce has worked wonders for you.” She puts the car into gear so that it lurches, yet doesn’t quite leave. “It was just a bad idea I had.”

“Your loved ones are the ones you’re supposed to trust,” I say. “Who’s after that?”

She smiles at me a sad, lonely smile out of the instrument panel twilight. “I don’t know.” I can see her eyes dancing in tears.

“I don’t know either. It’s getting to be a problem.”

X lets off on her brake and I step back in the grass. Her Citation hesitates, then hisses off from me up Coolidge and into the night. And I am left alone in the cool silence of dead Walter’s yard and MG, an unknown apartment house behind me, a neighborhood where I am not known, a man with no place to go in particular — out, for the moment, of any good ideas, at the sad end of a sad day that in a better world would never have occurred at all.

Where, in fact, do you go if you’re me?

Where do sportswriters go when the day is, in every way, done, and the possibilities so limited that neither good nor bad seems a threat? (I’d be happy to go to sleep, but that doesn’t seem available.)

It is not, though, a genuine empty moment, and as such, war needn’t be waged against it. It need not even be avoided or faced up to with particular daring. It is not the prologue to terrible regret. An empty moment requires both real expectation and its eventual defeat by the forces of fate. And I have no such hopes to dash. For the moment, I’m beyond all hopes, much as I was on the night X burned her hope chest while I watched the stars.

Walter would say that I have become neither the seer nor the thing seen — as invisible as Claude Rains in the movie, though I have no enemies to get back at, no debts to pay off. Invisibility, in truth, is not so bad. We should all try to know it better, use it to our advantage the way Claude Rains didn’t, since at one time or other — like it or not — we all become invisible, loosed from body and duty, left to drift on the night breeze, to do as we will, to cast about for what we would like to be when we next occur. That, let me promise you, is not an empty moment. And further yet from real regret. (Maybe Walter was interested in me, but who knows? Or cares?) Just to slide away like a whisper down the wind is no small freedom, and if we’re lucky enough to win such a setting-free, even if it’s bad events that cause it, we should use it, for it is the only naturally occurring consolation that comes to us, sole and sovereign, without props or the forbearance of others — among whom I mean to include God himself, who does not let us stay invisible long, since that is a state he reserves for himself.

God does not help those who are invisible too.

I drive, an invisible man, through the slumberous, hilled, post-Easter streets of Haddam. And as I have already sensed, it is not a good place for death. Death’s a preposterous intruder. A breach. A building that won’t fit with the others. An enigma as complete as Sanskrit. Full-blown cities are much better at putting up with it. So much else finds a place there, a death as small as Walter’s would fit in cozy, receive its full sympathies and be forgotten.

Haddam is, however, a first-class place for invisibility — it is practically made for it. I cruise down Hoving Road past my own dark house set back in its beeches. Bosobolo has not returned (still away in the bramble bush with plain Jane). I could talk to him about invisibility, though it’s possible a true African would know less than one of our local Negroes, and I would end up explaining a lot to start with, though eventually he would catch on — committed as he is to the unseen.

I cruise through the dark cemetery where my son is put to rest, and where the invisible virtually screams at you, cries out for quiet, quiet and more quiet. I could go sit on Craig’s stone and be silent and invisible with Ralph in our old musing way. But I would soon be up against my own heavy factuality, and consolation would come to a standstill.

I drive by X’s house, where there is bright light from every window, and a feeling of bustle and things-on-tap behind closed doors, as if everyone were leaving. There’s nothing for me here. My only hope would be to make trouble, extenuate circumstances for everybody, do some shouting and break a lamp. And I — it should come as no surprise — lack the heart for that too. It’s nine P.M., and I know where my children are.

Where is there to go that’s fun, I wonder?

I drive past the August, where a red glow warms the side bar window, and where I’m sure a lifelong resident or a divorced man sits wanting company — a commodity I’m low on.

Down Cromwell Lane at Village Hall a light still burns in the glass lobby — in the tax office the janitor stands at the front door staring out, his mop at order arms. Somewhere far off a train whistles, then a siren sings through the heavy elms of the Institute grounds. I catch the wink of lights, hear the soft spring monotone of all hometown suburbs. Someone might say there’s nothing quite so lonely as a suburban street at night when you are all alone. But he would be dead wrong. For my money, there’re a lot of things worse. A seat on the New York Stock Exchange, for instance. A silent death at sea with no one to notice your going under. Herb Wallagher’s life. These would be worse. In fact, I could make a list as long as your arm.

I drive down the cobblestone hill to the depot, where, if I’m right, a train will soon be arriving. It is not bad to sit in some placeless dark and watch commuters step off into splashy car lights, striding toward the promise of bounteous hugs, cool wall-papered rooms, drinks mixed, ice in the bucket, a newspaper, a long undisturbed evening of national news and sleep. I began coming here soon after my divorce to watch people I knew come home from Gotham, watch them be met, hugged, kissed, patted, assisted with luggage, then driven away in cars. And you might believe I was envious, or heartsick, or angling some way to feel wronged. But I found it one of the most hopeful and worthwhile things, and after a time, when the train had gone and the station was empty again and the taxis had drifted back up to the center of town, I went home to bed almost always in rising spirits. To take pleasure in the consolations of others, even the small ones, is possible. And more than that: it sometimes becomes damned necessary when enough of the chips are down. It takes a depth of character as noble and enduring as willingness to come off the bench to play a great game knowing full well that you’ll never be a regular; or as one who chooses not to hop into bed with your best friend’s beautiful wife. Walter Luckett could be alive today if he’d known that.

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.