The Sportswriter

3

By a quarter to ten I have surrendered to the day and am in my Malibu and down Hoving Road, headed for the Great Woods Road and the Pheasant Run & Meadow condos where Vicki lives — really nearer to Hightstown than to Haddam proper.

Something brief should be said, I think, about Haddam, where I’ve lived these fourteen years and could live forever.

It is not a hard town to understand. Picture in your mind a small Connecticut village, say Redding Ridge or Easton, or one of the nicer fieldstone-wall suburbs back of the Merritt Parkway, and Haddam is like these, more so than a typical town in the Garden State.

Settled in 1795 by a wool merchant from Long Island named Wallace Haddam, the town is a largely wooded community of twelve thousand souls set in the low and roily hills of the New Jersey central section, east of the Delaware. It is on the train line midway between New York and Philadelphia, and for that reason it’s not so easy to say what we’re a suburb of — commuters go both ways. Though as a result, a small-town, out-of-the-mainstream feeling exists here, as engrossed as any in New Hampshire, but retaining the best of what New Jersey offers: assurance that mystery is never longed for, nor meaningful mystery shunned. This is the reason a town like New Orleans defeats itself. It longs for a mystery it doesn’t have and never will, if it ever did. New Orleans should take my advice and take after Haddam, where it is not at all hard for a literalist to contemplate the world.

It is not a churchy town, though there are enough around because of the tiny Theological Institute that’s here (a bequest from Wallace Haddam). They have their own brick and copper Scottish Reform Assembly with a choir and organ that raises the roof three days a week. But it is a village with its business in the world.

There is a small, white-painted, colonial Square in the center of town facing north, but no real main street. Most people who live here work elsewhere, often at one of the corporate think-tanks out in the countryside. Otherwise they are seminarians or rich retirees or faculty of De Tocqueville Academy out Highway 160. There are a few high-priced shops behind mullioned windows — men’s stores and franchised women’s undergarments salons are in ascendance. Book stores are down. Aggressive, sometimes bad-tempered divorcées (some of them seminarians’ ex-wives) own most of the shops, and they have given the Square a fussy, homespun air that reminds you of life pictured in catalogs (a view I rather like). It is not a town that seems very busy.

The Post Office holds high ground, since we’re a town of mailers and home shoppers. It’s no chore to get a walkin haircut, or if you’re out alone at night — which I often was after my divorce — it isn’t hard to get a drink bought for you up at the August Inn by some old plaid-pantser watching the ball game, happy to hear a kind word about Ike instead of heading home to his wife. Sometimes for the price of a few daiquiris and some ardent chitchat, it’s even possible to coax a languid insurance broker’s secretary to drive with you out to a madhouse up the Delaware, and to take in the warm evening of springtime. Such nights often don’t turn out badly, and in the first few months, I spent several in that way without regrets.

There is a small, monied New England émigré contingent, mostly commuters down to Philadelphia with summer houses on the Cape and on Lake Winnepesaukee. And also a smaller southern crowd — mostly Carolinians attached to the seminary — with their own winter places on Beaufort Island and Monteagle. I never fitted exactly into either bunch (even when X and I first got here), but am part of the other, largest group who’re happy to be residents year-round, and who act as if we were onto something fundamental that’s not a matter of money, I don’t think, but of a certain awareness: living in a place is one thing we all went to college to learn how to do properly, and now that we’re adults and the time has arrived, we’re holding on.

Republicans run the local show, which is not as bad as it might seem. Either they’re tall, white-haired, razor-jawed old galoots from Yale with moist blue eyes and aromatic OSS backgrounds; or else retired chamber of commerce boosters, little guys raised in town, with their own circle of local friends, and a conservator’s clear view about property values and private enterprise know-how. A handful of narrow-eyed Italians run the police — descendants of the immigrants who were brought over in the twenties to build the seminary library, and who settled The Presidents, where X lives. Between them, the Republicans and Italians, the rule that location is everything gets taken seriously, and things run as quietly as anyone could want — which makes you wonder why that combination doesn’t run the country better. (I am lucky to be here with my pre-1975 dollars.)

On the down side, taxes are sky high. The sewage system could use a bond issue, particularly in X’s neighborhood. But there are hardly any crimes against persons. There are doctors aplenty and a fair hospital. And because of the southerly winds, the climate’s as balmy as Baltimore’s.

Editors, publishers, Time and Newsweek writers, CIA agents, entertainment lawyers, business analysts, plus the presidents of a number of great corporations that mold opinion, all live along these curving roads or out in the country in big secluded houses, and take the train to Gotham or Philadelphia. Even the servant classes, who are mostly Negroes, seem fulfilled in their summery, keyboard-awning side streets down Wallace Hill behind the hospital, where they own their own homes.

All in all it is not an interesting town to live in. But that’s the way we like it.

Because of that, the movie theater is never noisy after the previews and the thanks-for-not-smoking notices. The weekly paper has mostly realty ads, and small interest in big news. The seminary and boarding school students are rarely in evidence and seem satisfied to stay put behind their iron gates. Both liquor stores, the Gulf station and the book stores are happy to extend credit. The Coffee Spot, where I sometimes ride up early on Ralph’s old Schwinn, opens at five A.M. with free coffee. The three banks don’t bounce your checks (an officer calls). Black boys and white boys — Ralph was one — play on the same sports teams, study together nights for the SATs and attend the small brick school. And if you lose your wallet, as I have, on some elm-shaded street of historical reproductions — my Tudor is kitty-cornered from a big Second Empire owned by a former Justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court — you can count on getting a call by dinner just before someone’s teenage son brings it over with all the credit cards untouched and no mention of a reward.

You could complain that such a town doesn’t fit with the way the world works now. That the real world’s a worse and devious and complicated place to lead a life in, and I should get out in it with the Rhonda Matuzaks of life.

Though in the two years since my divorce I’ve sometimes walked out in these winding, bowery streets after dark on some ruminative errand or other and looked in at these same houses, windows lit with bronzy cheer, dark cars hove to the curbs, the sound of laughing and glasses tinking and spirited chatter floating out, and thought to myself: what good rooms these are. What complete life is here, audible — the Justice’s is the one I’m thinking of. And though I myself wasn’t part of it and wouldn’t much like it if I were, I was stirred to think all of us were living steadfast and accountable lives.

Who can say? Perhaps the Justice himself might have his own dark hours on the streets. Maybe some poor man’s life has hung in the balance down in sad Yardville, and the lights in my house — I usually leave them blazing — have given the Justice solace, moved him to think that we all deserve another chance. I may only be inside working over some batting-average charts, or reading Ring or poring through a catalog in the breakfast nook, hopeful of nothing more than a good dream. But it is for just such uses that suburban streets are ideal, and the only way neighbors here can be neighborly.

Certainly it’s true that since there is so much in the world now, it’s harder to judge what is and isn’t essential, all the way down to where you should live. That’s another reason I quit real writing and got a real job in the reliable business of sports. I didn’t know with certainty what to say about the large world, and didn’t care to risk speculating. And I still don’t. That we all look at it from someplace, and in some hopeful-useful way, is about all I found I could say — my best, most honest effort. And that isn’t enough for literature, though it didn’t bother me much. Nowadays, I’m willing to say yes to as much as I can: yes to my town, my neighborhood, my neighbor, yes to his car, her lawn and hedge and rain gutters. Let things be the best they can be. Give us all a good night’s sleep until it’s over.

Hoving Road this morning is as sun-dappled and vernal as any privet lane in England. Across town the bells of St. Leo the Great chime a brisk call to worship, which explains why no Italian gardeners are working on any neighbors’ lawns, clearing out under the forsythias and cutting back the fire thorns. Some of the houses have sunny Easter-lily decorations on their doors, whereas some still abide by the old Episcopal practice of Christmas wreaths up till Easter morning. There is a nice ecumenical feel of holiday to every street.

The Square this morning is filled up with Easter buyers, and to avoid tie-ups I take the “back door” down Wallace Hill through the little one-ways behind the hospital Emergency entrance and the train station. And soon I am out onto the Great Woods Road, which leads to U.S. 1 and across the main train line into the suave and caressing literalness of the New Jersey coastal shelf. It is the very route I took yesterday afternoon when I drove to Brielle. And whereas then my spirits were tentative — I still had this morning’s duties ahead — today they are rising and soaring.

Six miles out, Route 33 is astream with cars, though a remnant fog from early morning has clung to the roadway as it sways and swerves toward Asbury Park. A light rain draws in a soughing curtain of apple greens from the south and across the accompanying landscape, softening the edges of empty out-of-season vegetable stands, farmettes, putt-putts and cheerless Ditch Witch dealers. Though I am not displeased by New Jersey. Far from it. Vice implies virtue to me, even in landscape, and virtue value. An American would be crazy to reject such a place, since it is the most diverting and readable of landscapes, and the language is always American.

‘An Attractive Retirement Waits Just Ahead’

Better to come to earth ih New Jersey than not to come at all. Or worse, to come to your senses in some spectral place like Colorado or California, or to remain up in the dubious airs searching for some right place that never existed and never will. Stop searching. Face the earth where you can. Literally speaking, it’s all you have to go on. Indeed, in its homeliest precincts and turn-outs, the state feels as unpretentious as Cape Cod once might’ve, and its bustling suburban-with-good-neighbor-industry mix of life makes it the quintessence of the town-and-country spirit. Illusion will never be your adversary here.

An attractive retirement is Pheasant Run & Meadow. I make the turn up the winding asphalt access that passes beneath a great water tower of sleek space-age blue, then divides toward one end or the other of a wide, unused cornfield. Far ahead — amile, easy — billowing green basswoods stand poised against a platinum sky and behind them the long, girdered “Y” stanchions of a high-voltage line, orange balls strung to its wires to warn away low-flying planes.

Pheasant Run to the left is a theme-organized housing development where all the streets are culs-de-sac with “Hedgerow Place” and “The Thistles” painted onto fake Andrew Wyeth barnboard signs. All the plantings are young, but fancy cars already sit in the driveways. Vicki and I drove through once like tourists, admiring the farm-shingled and old-brick homesteads with price tags bigger than I paid for my three-story in town fourteen years ago. Vicki’s father and stepmother live in the same sort of place down in Barnegat Pines, and I have a feeling she would like nothing better than for herself and some prospective hubby to move right in.

Pheasant Meadow sits at the other lower end of the stubble field — a boxy, unscenic complex of low brown-shake buildings overlooking a shallow man-made mud pond, a yellow bulldozer, and some other apartments already half-built. In the ideal plan of things, these are for the younger people just starting in the world and on the way up — secretaries, car salesmen, nurses, who will someday live to buy the complete houses over in Pheasant Run on resale. Starter people, I call them.

Vicki’s aqua Dart sits out front in slot 31, still with black and white Texas plates, and shining with polish. The last hiss of rain squall thrums off north into the Brunswicks as I pull in beside her, and the air is thick with a silvery, chemical smell. But before I can get out, and to my surprise, I see Vicki in the front seat of her car, nearly hidden by its big head rest. I roll down the passenger window and she sits peeking out at me from the driver’s seat, her black hair orchestrated Loretta Lynn style, two thick swags taken toward the back of her head and ears, then straight down in sausage curls to her shoulders.

Across in the new units two hardhats sit grinning on unfinished Level Two. It’s clear they’ve been having a good time over something before I got here.

“I figured you probably wouldn’t show up,” Vicki says out her open window, as tentative as a school girl. “I was sitting up there waiting on the phone to ring for you to give me the bad news, and so I just came down here and listened to some tapes I like to hear when I’m sad.” She smiles out at me, a sweet-natured, chancy smile. “You’re not going to be hot at me are you?”

“If you don’t get over here in about two seconds I am,” I say.

“I knew it,” she says, running her window up quick and grabbing her bag, bouncing out of her Dart and into my life in a twinkling. “I told myself, I said, self, if you go out there he’ll come, and sure enough.”

All fears are put instantly to rest, leaving the two hardhats shaking their heads. I wouldn’t mind, as I back out, blinking my lights and wishing them just half the fun I’m expecting. But they’d probably get the wrong idea. As we back up, though, I give them a grin and we wheel out of Pheasant Meadow down the access road toward Route 33 and the NJTP, Vicki cleaving to me, squeezing my arm and sighing like a new cheerleader.

“Why’d you think I wouldn’t show up?” I say, as we weave through rain-drenched Hightstown, and I am thinking how glad I am to own a car with an old-fashioned bench seat.

“Oh it’s just old silly-milly. Seemed like too good a thing to happen, I guess.” Vicki is wearing black slacks that fit her tight but not too, a white, frilly-dressy blouse-and-scarf combination, a blue Ultrasuede jacket straight from Dallas and shoes with clear plastic heels. These are her dressy travel clothes, along with her nylon Le Sac weekender tossed in the back and her little black clutch where she keeps her diaphragm. She is a girl for every modern occasion, and I find I can be interested in the smallest particulars of her life. She stares out as the upright Federalist buildings of Hightstown slide past. “Plus. I had a patient kick out on me last night just right when I was talking to him, asking him questions about how he felt and everything, I wasn’t even s’posed to be workin, but a gal got sick. He was this colored man. And he was C-liver terminal, already way into uremia when he admitted, which is not that bad cause it usually starts ’em dreamin about their pasts and off their current problem.” (A tiny sigh of relief as to her whereabouts last night. I had called and found no one there, and my worst fears were loosed.) “Only you don’t really get that used to death, which is why I came down to ER from ONC. We’re supposed to be used to it and all, but I’m just not. I’d lot rather see a guy busted up and bleeding than some guy dying inside. I guess that was why I started worrying. I knew you went to the cemetery this morning.”

“That all went fine, though,” I say, and in most ways it did.

Vicki takes a Merit Light out of her little purse and lights up. She is not the kind of girl who smokes, but likes to smoke when she’s nervous. I reach a hand across her plump thighs and pull her closer to me, leg-side to leg-side. She lowers her window a crack and blows smoke that way. “When’s your birthday, anyway?”

“Next week.”

“Okay, that’s what you’re supposed to say. Now when is it really?”

“That’s the truth. I’m going to be thirty-nine.” I snake a glance down to see if there’s adverse reaction to this news. We have not discussed my age in the eight weeks I’ve known her. I assume she thinks I’m younger.

“You are not. Liar.”

“I’m afraid it’s true,” I say, and try to smile.

“Well, maybe I’ll make you a present of an eight-track, and tape you all my favorites. How’d you like that?” There is no more reaction to this news about my age. There are women I know who care about men’s ages, and women who don’t. X didn’t, and I have always counted that as a sign of good sense. Though where Vicki is concerned — her possible reasons for not caring are probably related to a bad first marriage and a wish to hook up with someone at least kind — it is another in a burgeoning number of happy surprises. Maybe we’ll get married in Detroit, fly back and move out to Pheasant Run, and live happily like the rest of our fellow Americans. What would be wrong with that?

“I’d like that fine,” I say.

“You weren’t mad at me for bein out in the car like a tart?”

“You’re too pretty to be mad at.”

“That’s about what them dimwits thought, too.”

We approach the Turnpike, take our ticket and start north, above the flat, featureless bedrenched Jersey flatlands — a landscape perfect for easy golf courses, valve plants and flea markets.

The reason Vicki is worried that I would be mad at not getting to come to her door is because she knows I love the tribal ritual of picking her up for our dates, even if I’m hoping to spend the night. Usually I am formal and bring a gift, something I quit doing long ago when X and I went on outings. Though it’s true that X and I lived together, and such things are easy to forget. But with Vicki, I usually bring something down from New York, where she has only been once and claims she can’t abide. For her part, she is always almost ready and pretends I hurry her, runs to the bedroom with straight pins in her mouth, or holding her hair up in back, needing to stitch a hem or iron a pleat. We are throwbacks in this, straight out of an earlier era, but I like this nervous and over-produced manner of things between us. We seem to know what each other wants without really knowing each other, which was a dilemma between X and me at the end. We didn’t seem to be tending the same ways. Though it may simply be that at my age I’m satisfied with less and with things less complicated.

Whatever the reason, I’m always happy when I am invited to spend the night or just an hour waiting in the pristine and nursey neatness of Vicki’s little 1-BR condo, on which her dad holds the note, and which the two of them furnished in a one-day whirlwind trip to the Miracle Furniture Mile in Paramus.

Vicki made all her own choices: pastel poof-drapes, sunburst mirror, bright area rugs with abstract designs, loveseat with a horse-and-buggy print, a maple mini-dining room suite, a China-black enamel coffee table, all brown appliances and a whopper Sony. All Wade Arcenault had to do was write a big check and set his little girl’s life back on track after the bad events with husband Everett.

Each time I’m inside, all is precisely as it was the time before, as if riveted in place and clean as newsprint: a fresh Nurse magazine, a soap opera archive and TV Guide shingling the piecrust table. A shiny saxophone on its stand unused since high school band days. The guest bathroom spotless. Dishes washed and put away. Everything reliable as the newly-wed suite in the Holiday Inn.

My own house represents other aims, with its comfortable, overstuffed entities, full magazine racks, faded orientals, creaky sills and the general residue of mid-life eclecticism — artifacts of a prior life and goals (many unmet), yet evidence that does not announce a life’s real quality any more eloquently than a new Barca Lounger or a Kitchen Magician, no matter what you’ve heard. In fact, I have become a committed no-muss, no-fuss fellow. And the idea appeals to me of starting life over in such a new and genial place with an instant infusion of colorful, fresh and impersonal furnishings. I might’ve done the same if it hadn’t been for Paul and Clarissa, and if I hadn’t believed I wasn’t so much starting a new life as raising the ante on an old one. And if I hadn’t felt our house was still a sound investment. All of which has worked out well, and most nights I drift off to sleep (wherever I am — a St. Louis, an Atlanta, a Milwaukee or even a Pheasant Meadow) convinced I have come away, as they say, with the best of both worlds — the very thing we all crave.

Vicki has dowsed her cigarette and begun pinching at her sausage curls in the visor mirror. “Doesn’t it seem strange to you we’d be takin a trip together?” She squinches up her nose, first at her own face then at mine, as if she didn’t expect to hear a word she could believe.

“This is what grownups do — go on trips together, stay in hotels, have wonderful times.”

“Rilly?”

“Really.”

“Well. I guess.” She takes a bobby pin out of her blouse cuff and puts it in her mouth. “It just never seemed like anything I’d be doin. Everett and me went to Galveston sometimes. I been to Mexico, but just to cross over.” She removes the pin and buries it deep in her black hair. “What are you, anyway, by the way?”

“I’m a sportswriter.”

“Yes, I know that. I read things you wrote.” (This is news to me! What things?) “I mean, are you Libra or the Twins. You said your birthday wasn’t but less than a month from now. I want to figure you out.”

“I’m the Taurus.”

“What does that one mean?” She watches me keenly now out the side of her eye while she finishes with her hair.

“I’m pretty intelligent. I’m not cynical, but I’m intuitive about people, and that might make me seem cynical.” All this comes straight from Mrs. Miller, my palmist. It is part of her service to give information like this if I ask her for it, in addition to speculating on the future. I try to see her at least every two weeks. “I’m also pretty generous.”

“I’ll admit that, at least you been that with me. I wonder if that stuff’ll make your dreams come true. I don’t know much about it. I guess I could learn more.”

“What dreams of yours have come true?”

She folds her arms under her breasts like a high school girlfriend and stares straight ahead for miles. It is possible to think of her as being sixteen and chaste instead of thirty and divorced; as never having witnessed a single bad or unhappy thing, despite the fact she attends death and mayhem nearly every day. “Well, look,” she says, staring up the Turnpike. “Did you know I always wanted to go to Detroit?” She pronounces Detroit so as to rhyme with knee-joint.

“No.”

“Well then all right. I did though. I almost fell over when you asked me.” She puts her chin down as though deep in serious thought and makes a little clucking sound with her tongue. “If you’d asked me to go to Washington, D.C., or Chicago, Illinois, or Timbuktu, I probably would’ve said no. But when I was a little girl my Daddy used to always say, ‘Detroit makes, the world takes.’ And that was just such a puzzle to me I figured I had to see it. It seemed so unusual, you know, to me. And romantic. He’d gone up there to work after the Korean War, and when he came back he had a picture postcard of a great big tire stood up on its tread. And that’s what I wanted to see, but I never got to. I got married instead on the way to no place special. Then I met you.”

She smiles up at me sweetly and puts her hand inside my thigh in a way she hasn’t quite done before, and I have to keep from swerving and causing a big pile-up. We are just now passing Exit 9, New Brunswick, and I take a secret look over along the line of glass booths, only two of which are lighted OPEN and have cars pulling through. Indistinct, gray figures lean out and lean back, give directions, make change, point toward surface roads for weary travelers. What could be more fortuitous or enticing than to pass the toll booth where the toll-taker’s only daughter is with you and creeping up on your big-boy with tender, skillful fingers?

“Do you like my name?” She keeps her hand close up on my leg, her built-on fingernails doing a little audible skip-dance.

“I think it’s great.”

“Is that right?” She squinches her nose again. “I never liked it, but thanks. I don’t mind Arcenault. I like that. But Vicki sounds like a name you’d see on a bracelet at Walgreen’s.” She glances at me, then back toward the wide estuary and wetlands of the Raritan, stretching like wheat to the tip of Staten Island and the Amboys. “Looks like someplace the world died out there, doesn’t it?”

“I like it out there,” I say. “Sometimes you can imagine you’re in Egypt. Sometimes you can even see the World Trade Center.”

She gives my leg a friendly pinch and turns me loose to sit up straight. “Egypt, huh? You probably would like that. You’re in from the nut department, too. Tell me what that little boy of yours died of?”

“Reye’s.”

She shakes her head as though mystified. “Boy-shoot. What’d you do when he died?”

This is a question I’m not interested in exploring, though I know she wouldn’t ask if she weren’t concerned about me and felt some good could come out of it. She is as much a literalist in these matters as I am, and much more savvy about men than I am about women.

“We were both sitting beside his bed. It was early in the morning. Before light. We may have been asleep, really. But a nurse camé in and said, ‘I’m sorry, Mr. Bascombe, Ralph has expired.’ We both just sat there a few minutes, stunned, though we knew it was going to happen. And then she cried a while and I did, too. And then I went home and cooked up some bacon and toast, and ended up watching television. I had a tape of great NBA championships, and I watched that until it got light.”

“Death’ll make you nutty, won’t it?” Vicki rests her head on the seat back, pulls her feet up, and hugs her shiny black knees. Far ahead I see a plane — a great jet — floating earthward where I know Newark airport to be; it is a promising sign. “You know what we did when my Mama died?” She glances up, as if to see if I’m still here.

“No.”

“We all went out and ate Polynesian. It wasn’t a big surprise or anything, either. She had everything you can have and I was working right in Texas Shriners and knew everything from talking to the doctors, which I don’t think is really that good. Everett and Daddy, Cade and me, though, went out to the Garland Mall in the middle of the hot afternoon and ate poo-poo pork. We just wanted to eat. I think you want to eat when someone dies. Then we just went and spent money. I bought a gold add-a-bead necklace I didn’t need. Daddy bought a three-piece suit at Dillards’ and a new wristwatch. Cade bought something. And Everett bought a new-used red Corvette he probably still owns, I guess. He did have it.” She extends her lower lip over the other one and focuses down beetle-browed on the visible memory of Everett’s Corvette, which stands out now more than death. Her nature is to put her faith in objects more than essences. And in most ways that makes her the perfect companion.

Her story, however, has left me with an unexpected gloominess. Some aspects of hidden-life-revealed have a certain bedrock factuality I don’t like. I’d be a braver soldier if the story had someone discovering they had Lou Gehrig’s disease or a brain tumor on the eve of his last track meet, and deciding to run anyway. But in this I am unprotected from the emotions — vivid ones — of true death, and I suddenly feel, whipping along the girdered Turnpike, exactly as I did that morning I described: bereaved and in jeopardy of greater bereavement sweeping me up.

Women have always lightened my burdens, picked up my faltering spirits and exhilarated me with the old anything-goes feeling, though anything doesn’t go, of course, and never did.

Only this time the solace-spirit has been sucked out of the car by a vagrant boxcar wind, leaving my stomach twitching and my mouth grimmed as though the worst were happening. I have slipped for a moment out onto that plane where women can’t help in the age-old ways (this, of course, is something X said this morning and I passed off). Not that I’ve lost the old yen, just that the old yen seems suddenly defeatable by facts, the kind you can’t sidestep — the essence of a small empty moment.

Vicki eyes me in little threatening glances, her brows arched. “What’s the matter, did a bug bite you?”

If we were as far north as the Vince Lombardi Rest Area, I’d pull in and spend a half-hour admiring Vince’s memorabilia — the bronze bust, the picture of the Five Blocks of Granite, the famous gabardine overcoat. We have plenty of time today. But Vince’s Area is all the way past Giant’s Stadium, and we are here down among the flaming refineries, without a haven.

“Would you just give me a big hug,” I say. “You’re a wonderful girl.”

And instantly she throws an armlock around me with a neck-crunching ferocity. “Oh, oh, oh,” she sighs into my ear, and as easy as that (I was not wrong) rapture rises in me. “Does it make you happy to have me here?” She is patting my cheek softly and staring straight at it.

“We’re going to have us some fun, you better believe what I say.”

“Oh, boy blue,” she murmurs, “boy, boy blue.” She kisses my ear until my legs tingle, and I want to squeeze my eyes shut and give up control. This is enough to bring us back up to ground level, and send us to the airport with all my old hopes ascendant.

I am easily rescued, it’s true.

At this moment it may be of interest to say a word about athletes, whom I have always admired without feeling the need to be one or to take them at all seriously, and yet who seem to me as literal and within themselves as the ancient Greeks (though with their enterprises always hopeful).

Athletes, by and large, are people who are happy to let their actions speak for them, happy to be what they do. As a result, when you talk to an athlete, as I do all the time in locker rooms, in hotel coffee shops and hallways, standing beside expensive automobiles — even if he’s paying no attention to you at all, which is very often the case — he’s never likely to feel the least bit divided, or alienated, or one ounce of existential dread. He may be thinking about a case of beer, or a barbecue, or some man-made lake in Oklahoma he wishes he was waterskiing on, or some girl or a new Chevy shortbed, or a discothèque he owns as a tax shelter, or just simply himself. But you can bet he isn’t worried one bit about you and what you’re thinking. His is a rare selfishness that means he isn’t looking around the sides of his emotions to wonder about alternatives for what he’s saying or thinking about. In fact, athletes at the height of their powers make literalness into a mystery all its own simply by becoming absorbed in what they’re doing.

Years of athletic training teach this; the necessity of relinquishing doubt and ambiguity and self-inquiry in favor of a pleasant, self-championing one-dimensionality which has instant rewards in sports. You can even ruin everything with athletes simply by speaking to them in your own everyday voice, a voice possibly full of contingency and speculation. It will scare them to death by demonstrating that the world — where they often don’t do too well and sometimes fall into depressions and financial imbroglios and worse once their careers are over — is complexer than what their training has prepared them for. As a result, they much prefer their own voices and questions or the jabber of their teammates (even if it’s in Spanish), And if you are a sportswriter you have to tailor yourself to their voices and answers: “How are you going to beat this team, Stu?” Truth, of course, can still be the result—“We’re just going out and play our kind of game, Frank, since that’s what’s got us this far”—but it will be their simpler truth, not your complex one — unless, of course, you agree with them, which I often do. (Athletes, of course, are not always the dummies they’re sometimes portrayed as being, and will often talk intelligently about whatever interests them until your ears turn to cement.)

An athlete, for example, would never let a story like the one Vicki just told me get to him, even though the same feelings might strike him in the heart. He is trained not to let it bother him too much or, if it bothers him more than he can stand, to go outside and hit five hundred balls off the practice tee or run till he drops, or bash himself head-on into a piece of complicated machinery. I admire that quality more than almost any other I can think of. He knows what makes him happy, what makes him mad, and what to do about each. In this way he is a true adult. (Though for that, it’s all but impossible for him to be your friend.)

For the last year I was married to X, I was always able to “see around the sides” of whatever I was feeling. If I was mad or ecstatic, I always realized I could just as easily feel or act another way if I wanted to — somber or resentful, ironic or generous — even though I might’ve been convinced that the way I was acting probably represented the way I really felt even if I hadn’t seen the other ways open. This can be an appealing way to live your life, since you can convince yourself you’re really just a tolerant generalist and kind toward other views.

I even had, in fact, a number of different voices, a voice that wanted to be persuasive, to promote good effects, to express love and be sincere, and make other people happy — even if what I was saying was a total lie and as distant from the truth as Athens is from Nome. It was a voice that totally lacked commitment, though it may well be this is as close as you can ever come to yourself, your own voice, especially with someone you love: mutual agreement with no significant irony.

This is what people mean when they say that so-and-so is “distanced from his feelings.” Only it’s my belief that when you reach adulthood that distance has to close until you no longer see those choices, but simply do what you do and feel what you feel — marriage you may have to relinquish, of course. “Seeing around” is exactly what I did in my stories (though I didn’t know it), and in the novel I abandoned, and one reason why I had to quit. I could always think of other ways I might be feeling about what I was writing, or other voices I might be speaking in. In fact, I could usually think of quite a number of things I might be doing at any moment! And what real writing requires, of course, is that you merge into the oneness of the writer’s vision—something I could never quite get the hang of, though I tried like hell and eventually sunk myself. X was always clear as spring water about how she felt and why she did everything. She was completely reliable and resistant to nuance and doubt, which made her a wonderful person for a fellow like me to be married to, though I’m not certain she’s so sure about things now.

Though about athletes, I want to say just one more thing: you can learn too much about them, even learn to dislike them, just as you can with anybody. When you look very closely, the more everybody seems just alike — unsurprising and factual. And for that reason I sometimes tell less than I know, and for my money the boys in my racket make a mistake with in-depth interviews.

I’d just as soon pull a good heartstring. Write about the skinny Negro kid from Bradenton, Florida, who can’t read, suffered rickets and had scrapes with the law, yet who later accepts a basketball scholarship to a major mid western university, becomes a star, learns to read and eventually majors in psychology, marries a white girl and later starts a consulting firm in Akron. That is a good story. Maybe the white girl would be of eastern European extraction. Her parents would oppose, but get won over.

If all this makes it seem that being a sportswriter is at best a superficial business, that’s because it is. And it is not for that reason a bad profession at all. Nor am I, I will admit, altogether imperfectly suited for it.

At Terminal A we become two veteran travelers. I stand in line at United while Vicki goes to powder her nose and buy flight insurance. As it turns out, she is as much a denizen of airports as I am. When everything turned bad with old dagger-head Everett, she informed me on the escalator, she used to drive out to the new airport in Dallas, watch planes leave, and pretend she was on all of them. “If you stayed in that airport for one year,” she said, beaming like a carhop as we headed up the glittering ticket concourse full of passengers and loved ones looking for partners, “you’d see everybody in the world. And you’d sure see Charley Pride a hundred times at least.”

Vicki also believes flight insurance to be the world’s best bargain, and who am I to say no, though I advise her not to make me her beneficiary.

“Well, I guess not” she says, with a vaguely disgusted look. “I always make the R.C. Church my heir in everything.”

“That’s fine then,” I say, though she and I have never discussed religion.

“I just went to Catholics when I married Everett, in case you’re wondering,” she says, and looks at me oddly. “They do a lot for the hospitals. And the Pope’s a good old guy I think. I wadn’t but a dirty Methodist before, like everybody else in Texas except the Baptists.”

“That’s great,” I say and give her arm a squeeze.

“Freedom to choose,” she says, then skitters away toward the insurance machines.

By wide degrees now I am better. Public places always work this curative on me, and if anything I suffer the opposite of agoraphobia. I enjoy the freely shared air of the public. It is, in a way, my element. Even the yellow-aired Greyhound terminals and murky subway stations make me feel a well-being, that a place has been provided for me and my fellow man together. When I was married to X, I hated the grinding summer weeks we’d spend first at the Huron Mountain Club, and, later, at Sumac Hills down in Birmingham, where her father was a founding member. I hated that still air of privilege and the hushed, nervous noises of mid western exclusivity. I thought it was bad for the children and kept stealing off with Ralph to the Detroit Zoo and the Belle Isle Botanical Garden, and once all the way out to the Arboretum in Ann Arbor. X’s had been an entire life of privilege — clubs and reserved tables and private boxes at the ball game — though I think all that means nothing if you have a sound enough character to weather it, which she has.

Across from me studying the departures board I spy a face I recognize but hope to get away without acknowledging. It is the long face of Fincher Barksdale. Fincher is holding his white United ticket folder and has a big TWA golf bag over his shoulder. Fincher is my internist, and I have visited him, as I said, to inquire about my pounding heart, and have heard from him that it is likely a matter of my age, and that many men approaching forty suffer from symptoms inexplicable to medical science, and that in a while they just go away by themselves.

Fincher is one of those lanky, hairy-handed, hip-thrown, vaguely womanish southerners who usually become bored lawyers or doctors, and whom I don’t like, though X and I were friendly with him and his wife, Dusty, when we first came to Haddam and I had a small celebrity with my picture in Newsweek. He is a Vanderbilt grad, and older than I am by at least three years though he looks younger. He took his medicine and a solid internist’s residency at Hopkins, and though I do not like him one bit, I am happy to have him be my doctor. I try to look away in a hurry, out the big window toward the spiritless skyline of Newark, but I’m sure Fincher has already seen me and is waiting to be sure I’ve seen him and absolutely don’t want to talk to him before he pipes up.

“Now look out here. Where’re we slippin off to, brother Frank.” It is Fincher’s booming southern baritone, and without even looking I know he is stifling a white, toothy smile, tongue deep in his cheek, and having a wide look around to see who else might be listening in. He extends me his soft hand without actually noticing me. We are not old fraternity brothers. He was a Phi Delt, though he once suggested we might have a distant aunt in common, some Bascombe connection of his from Memphis. But I squelched it.

“Business, Fincher,” I say nonchalantly, shaking his long, bony hand, hoping Vicki doesn’t come back anytime soon. Fincher is a veteran lecher and would take pleasure in making me squirm on account of my traveling companion. One of the bad things about public places is that you sometimes see people you would pay money not to see.

Fincher is wearing green jackass pants with little crossed ensigns in red, a blue Augusta National pullover and black-tasseled spectator shoes. He looks like a fool, and is undoubtedly flying off on a golfing package somewhere — Kiawah Island, where he shares a condo, or San Diego, where he goes for doctors’ conventions six or eight times a year.

“What about you, Fincher?” I say, without the slightest interest.

“Just a hop down to Memphis, Frank, down to Memphis for the holiday.” Fincher rocks back on his heels and jingles change in his pockets. He makes no mention of his wife. “Since we lost Daddy, Frank, I go down more, of course. Mother’s doing real fine, I’m happy to say. Her friends have closed ranks around her.” Fincher is the kind of southerner who will only address you through a web of deep and antic southernness, and who assumes everybody in earshot knows all about his parents and history and wants to hear an update on them at every opportunity. He looks young, but still manages to act sixty-five.

“Glad to hear it, Fincher.” I take a peek down past Delta and Allegheny to see if Vicki’s coming this way. If Fincher and the two of us are flying the same flight, I’ll change airlines.

“Frank, I’ve got a little business venture I want to tell you about. I started to get into it in the office the other day, but things went right on and got ahead of me. It’s something you absolutely ought to consider. We’re past the venture capital stages, but you can still get in on the second floor.”

“We’re due out of here in a minute, Fincher. Maybe next week.”

“Now who’re we here with, Frank?” A definite mistake there. I have set Fincher nosing all around again like a bird dog.

“With a friend, Fincher.”

“I see. Now this is one minute to tell, Frank. Just while we’re standing here. See now, some boys and I are starting up a mink ranch right down in south Memphis, Frank. It’s always been my dream, for some damn reason.” Fincher smiles at me in stupid self-amazement. He is picturing his stupid farm at this moment, I can tell, his tiny lizard’s eyes dull with lusterless blue absorption. They are without question the peepers of a fool.

“It’d get hot for the minks, wouldn’t it?”

“Oh well, you have to air-condition, Frank. Definitely. No way around that mountain. The start-up’s sky high, too.” Fincher is nodding like a banker, his blond and grayed head a pleasant puzzle of fresh financial wranglings. He crams both hands in his pockets and gives whatever’s down there another stern jingle. Though just for the moment I am struck by Fincher’s hair, the thinning top of which sinks into view as he glances ritually at his spectators. His hair is barbered into the dopey-blond Tab Hunter brushcut circa 1959, crisp as a saltine and with just a soupçon of odorless colloid to hold it in place. He is the perfect southerner-in-exile, a slew-footed mainstreet change jingler in awful clothes — a breed known only outside the south. At Vandy he was the tallish, bookish Memphian meant for a wider world — brushcut, droopy suntans, white bucks, campaign belt and a baggy long-sleeved Oxford shirt, hands stuffed in his pockets, arrogantly bored yet supremely satisfied and accustomed to the view from his eyrie. (Essentially the very way he is now.) At Hopkins he met and married a girl from Goucher who couldn’t stand the South and craved the suburbs as if they were the Athens of Pericles, and Fincher has been free ever since to jingle his change and philander around the links with the other southern renegades of whom, as I’ve said, there is a handsome cadre. When the awful day of reckoning comes to Fincher, I want to be somewhere far away in a boat, I know that.

“Frank,” Fincher says, having gone on talking about mink farms while I rode up over the clouds, “now don’t you think it’d be a high-water mark for the New South? You care about all those things, don’t you?”

“Not much,” I say, and the truth is not at all.

“Well now, Frank, everybody thought old Tom Edison was crazy, didn’t they?” Fincher pulls his ticket folder out of his back pocket and whacks it across his palm and smirks.

“I’m pretty sure everybody thought Edison was smart, Fincher.”

“Okay. You know what I mean, son.”

“It’s forward thinking, Fincher, I’ll give it that much.”

And Fincher suddenly assumes an unexpected dazed look as if that was the signal he has been waiting for. And for a moment we stand in silence among hundreds of milling passengers, just the way we might stand together at the window up in the Petroleum Club in Memphis, brainstorming and conniving over next year’s tail-gate party at the Commodore-Ole Miss game. Somehow or other Fincher has managed to set himself at ease, despite my reservations with his mink farm, and I actually admire him for it.

“You know, Frank. I’ve probably never said this to you.” Fincher nods his head like a sage old trial judge. “But I admire the hell out of what you do and how you lead your life. There’s a lot of us would like to do that, but lack the nerve and the dedication.”

“What I do’s pretty easy, Fincher. You’d probably be as good at it as I am. You ought to give it a try.” I squeeze my toes inside my shoes.

“Now you’d need to tie me up in chains and beat me with a stick to get me to write, Frank. I get the ants nowadays just writing a scrip.” Fincher’s mouth mulls down in a mock-grimace. He secretly knows he could do it as well as I can and most likely better, but feels the need to pay me some kind of unfelt compliment. “There’s a whole lot of us would like to mouse off with a little nurse, too,” Fincher says with a big wink.

I turn and look off down the crowded concourse and see Vicki skittering back with her insurance papers, walking with difficulty on her plastic high heels. She looks like a secretary on an urgent trip to the copy machine, elbows thrown out for balance, her feet seemingly made of wood. Fincher has seen her and recognized her from the hospital halls, and I am caught.

Fincher has suddenly adopted the old dirty-leg innuendo he perfected in the Phi Delt house down at Vanderbilt, and means to reduce me to fun or force a briny confidence. A sinister uneasiness surrounds us both. He is more untrustworthy than I thought, and I am as on my guard as any man who has something worth defending — though wretched ever to have let him hold me in a conversation. Fincher is threatening to pull the plug on all anticipation, and I’ll be damned if I’ll let him do it.

“Why don’t you mind your own business, Fincher,” I say, and look him dead in the eyes. I could punch him in the nose, bloody up his jackass pants, and send him home to Memphis in stitches.

“Now-now-now.” Fincher raises his chin and saunters back a half step onto his heels, glancing up over my shoulder toward Vicki. “We’re white men, here, Frank.”

“I’m not married anymore,” I say fiercely. “Anything I do is all right.”

“Yes indeed.” Fincher flashes his big-tooth smile, but it is for Vicki, not me. I am defeated and cannot help wondering if Fincher hasn’t been on this very track before me.

“Well, look what you see when you aren’t properly armed,” Vicki says, fastening a good grip on my arm, and giving Fincher a nasty little smile to let me know she’s got his number. I love her more than I can say.

Fincher mumbles something like “mighty small world,” but he has become half-hearted at best. “I got the insurance,” Vicki says and flutters the papers up to me, ignoring Fincher completely. “You might see a name you know if you look. I changed religions, too.” Her sweet face is gone plain with seriousness. It is a face I did not even want to see two moments before, but that I welcome now as a friend of my heart. I unfold the thick onionskin sheaf from Mutual of Omaha, and see Vicki’s name here as Victory Wanda Arcenault — and mine partway down as beneficiary. The sum is $150,000.

“What about the Pope?” I say.

“He’s still a good ole bird. But I’ll never see him.” She blinks her eyes up at me as if a light had burst into view around my ears. “I’ll see you, though.”

I would like to hug her till she squeaked, but not in Fincher’s presence. It would give him something to think about, and I want to give him nothing. At the moment he is standing with his mouth formed into a small, perfect o. “Thanks,” I say.

“I liked the idea of you spending all that money and thinking about me. It’d make me happy then wherever I was. You could buy a Corvette — only you’d probably want a Cadillac.”

“I just want you,” I say. “Anyway we’ll be together if it crashes.”

She rolls her eyes up at the high crystal-lighted airport ceiling. “That’s true, isn’t it?” She takes the policy back and kneels down to put it in her Le Sac bag.

“I ’spec I’ll just steal on off,” Fincher says, eyes flashy-darty since something has taken place here outside his ken. He has bent himself slightly at the waist and is on the verge of embarrassment, an emotion he has not felt, in all likelihood, for twenty years.

The concourse has begun welling up around us with people wearing paper tags on their breasts that say “Get-Away.” They appear from nowhere and begin flowing in the direction of gates 36–51. The air suddenly smells sweet and peanutty. A plane has been held up for late-arrivers, and a feeling of relief circles us like a spring breeze.

“It’s good to see you, Fincher,” I say. Fincher, of course, is no more a lecher than the rest of us, and I am relieved to let him and his grave Ichabod’s features slip away.

“Uh-huh, you bet,” Vicki says and glances at Fincher with distaste, a look he seems to accept with gratitude.

“I guess they’re lettin us on a little early.” Fincher flashes a smile.

“You have a good trip,” I say.

“Yep, yep,” Fincher says and hoists his clubs onto his bony shoulder.

“Don’t do it in the lake,” Vicki says. But Fincher is already out of her range, and I watch him pick up his step with the other expectants, in from Buffalo, his clubs hitched high up, happy to be in with a new crowd, ready for some good earnest talk and arm-squeezing on their way south.

“You and Fincher have a falling out?” I say this in a chummy voice.

“I ’magine we did.” Vicki is kneeling, elbow-deep in her weekender bag, digging for something at the bottom. We are next up to have our tickets validated. “He’s some kinda joker. A real sneak-up-behind-you guy if you know what that means. A bad potato. We all watch out for him.”

“Did he sneak up behind you?”

“No sir.” She looks up at me in surpirse. “Nasty mind. I keep an eye on who’s back of me.”

“What do you think I think?”

“It’s on your face like eggs.”

“I’m just jealous,” I say. “Can’t you tell?”

“I wouldn’t know.” She finds a tiny perfume phial from her bag, uncaps it and takes it to her neck and arms while she kneels on the airport floor. She smiles up at me in a spicy way I know she knows I like. “You ain’t got nothin to worry about, lemme tell you, Mister. You’re numero uno and there’s no number two.”

“Tell me about Fincher, then.”

“One-a-these days. You won’t be surprised, though, I’ll tell you that.”

“You’d be surprised what surprises me.”

“And what don’t surprise me. Ever.” She stands to take my hand in the ticket line. Her hand’s moist, and the air smells of Chanel No. 5.

“You win.”

“Right. I’m a winner all the way,” she says airily. And if I could make the moment last — lost in the anticipation of a safe trip, a fatal crash, a howling success, a grinding bitter failure — I would, and never leave this airport, never gain on or rejoin myself, and never know what’s to come, the way you always have to know, though it’s only the same, the same you waiting.