The Sportswriter

4

On the plane we are in the midwest from the first moment we take our seats. The entire tourist cabin of our 727 virtually vibrates with its grave ying-yangy appeal. Hefty stewardesses with smiles that say “Hey, I could love you once we’re down and safe” stow away our carry-ons. Vicki folds her weekender strap inside and hands it up. “Gaish, now is that ever neat,” says a big blond one named Sue and puts her hands on her hips in horsey admiration. “I wanta show Barb that. We’ve got the pits with our luggage. Where’re you guys headed?” Sue’s smile shows a big canine that is vaguely tan-colored, but she is full of welcome and good spirits. Her father was in the Air Force and she has a lot of athletic younger brothers, I would stake my life on it. She’s seen plenty.

“Detroit,” Vicki announces proudly, taking a secret peek at me.

Sue cocks her blond head to the side with pride. “You gyz’ll love Detroit.”

“Well, I’m really lookin forward to it,” Vicki says with a grin.

“Greet, reelly greet,” Sue says and sways off to start the coffee around. All about me, almost immediately, people begin to converse in the soft nasalish voices and mildish sentiments familiar from my college days. Everyone seems to be a native Detroiter heading home for the holidays, and no one coming west just to visit but us. Someone nearby claims to have stayed up and watched an entire telethon and missed two days of work. Someone else headed up to “the thumb” on a fishing trip but had motor trouble and ended up marooned in Bad Axe for a weekend. Someone had started Wayne State and pledged Sigma Nu but by last Christmas was back to work at his dad’s sheet metal business. It might be said, of course, that the interiors of all up-to-date conveyances of travel put one in mind of the midwest. The snug-fitted overhead bins, the comfy pastel recliners, disappearing tray-tables and smorgasbord air of anything-you-want-within-sensible-limits. All products of mid western ingenuity, as surely as a waltz is Viennese.

In a little while Barb and Sue circulate back and conduct a serious Q&A with Vicki about her weekender bag, which neither of them has seen the exact likes of, they say, and Vicki is only too happy to discuss. Barb is a squat little strawberry blondie with too much powder makeup and slightly heavy hands. She is interested in something called “price points” and “mean value mark-up,” and whether or not an identical bag couldn’t be bought at Hudson’s boutique in a mall near her own condo in Royal Oak; it turns out she studied retailing in college. Vicki says hers came from Joske’s, but that’s all she knows, and the girls talk about Dallas for a while (Barb and Sue have both been based there at different times) and Vicki says she likes a store called Spivey’s and a rib place in Cockrell Hill called Atomic Ribs. They all three like each other a lot. Then all at once we’re in the air rising out over the cloud-shaded Watchungs and a bright blue-green industrial river, toward Pennsylvania, making for Lake Erie, and the girls slide off to other duties. Vicki picks up the arm rest and shoves close to me on our three-across seats, her shiny, encased thigh as hard as a saucepan, her breath drowsy with excitement. We are well above the morning’s storminess now.

“What’re you thinking about, old Mr. Man?” She has attached her pair of pink earphones around her neck.

“About what a sweet thigh you’ve got and how much I’d like to pull it my way.”

“Well you surely can. Won’t nobody see you but Suzie and little Barbara, and they don’t care long as no clothes come off. That wasn’t what you were thinking anyway. I know about you, old tricky.”

“I was thinking about Candid Camera. The talking mailbox. I think that’s about the funniest thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”

“I like ’em, too. Ole Allen Funk. I thought I saw him one day in the hospital. I’d heard he lived someplace around. But then it wasn’t. A lot of people look alike now, you know it? But that still isn’t it. I’ll just let you run on.”

“You’re a smart girl.”

“I got a good memory, which you need to nurse. But I’m not really smart. I wouldn’t have married Everett if I had been.” She fattens her cheeks and smiles at me. “Are you not gonna tell me what you’re sitting there worrying?” She takes a good two-armed hold on my arm and squeezes it. She is a girl who likes squeezing. “Or am I gon have to squeeze you till you talk.” She is strong, which I think would also be a requirement for a nurse, though I am sure she doesn’t really care what’s on my mind.

In truth, of course, I have nothing to answer. Undoubtedly I was thinking something, but most things I find myself thinking seem to fly right out of my mind and I can’t remember them at all. It is a trait of character which made being a writer hard and often downright tedious. I either had to sit down and write out whatever I happened to be thinking about at any time of the day or night I happened to think it, or else just forget it all, which is what happened at the end of the time I was working on my novel. Finally I became happy to forget everything and let it all lapse. Real writers have to be more attentive, of course, and attentive was what I wasn’t much interested in being.

I do not think, in any event, it’s a good idea to want to know what people are thinking (that would disqualify you as a writer right there, since what else is literature but somebody telling us what somebody else is thinking). For my money there are at least a hundred good reasons not to want to know such things. People never tell the truth anyway. And most people’s minds, like mine, never contain much worth reporting, in which case they just make something up that’s patently ridiculous instead of saying the truth — namely, I was thinking nothing. The other side, of course, is that you will run the risk of being told the very truth of what someone is thinking, which can turn out to be something you don’t want to hear, or that makes you mad, and ought to be kept private anyway. I remember when I was a boy in Mississippi, maybe fifteen years old — just before I left for Lonesome Pines — a friend of mine got killed in a hunting accident. The very night after, Charlieboy Neblett and I (he was one of my few friends in Biloxi) sat out in Charlieboy’s car drinking beer and complaining about our having thought, then forgiving each other for thinking, that we were glad Teddy Twiford got killed. If Teddy’s mother had come by just then and asked us what we were thinking, she would’ve been flabbergasted to find out what lousy friends of Teddy’s we were. Though in fact we weren’t lousy friends at all. Things just come into your mind on their own and aren’t your fault. So I learned this all those years ago — that you don’t need to be held responsible for what you think, and that by and large you don’t have any business knowing what other people think. Full disclosure never does anybody any favors, and in any event there are few enough people in the world who are sufficiently within themselves to make such disclosure pretty unreliable right from the start. All added to the fact that this constitutes intrusion where you least need to be intruded upon, and where telling can actually do harm to everyone involved.

I remember, in fact, the Lebanese woman I knew at Berkshire College saying to me, after I told her how much I loved her: “I’ll always tell you the truth, unless of course I’m lying to you.” Which at first I didn’t think was a very good idea; though stewing over it after a while I realized that it was actually a piece of great luck. I was being promised truth and mystery — not an easy combination. There would be important things I would and wouldn’t know, and I could count on it, could look forward to it, muse on it, worry about it if I was idiot enough, which I wasn’t, and all I had to do was agree, and be forever freed.

She was a literary deconstructionist and had a mind trained for that kind of distinction. And she managed to make a policy out of a fact of life: how much of someone you can actually get to know about. Very little. Though I don’t think in the three vertiginous months we spent together she ever lied to me. There was never a reason to! I saw to that by never asking a question whose answer wasn’t already obvious. X and I might in fact have made a better go of it if she could’ve tried that strategy out on me by not asking me to explain anything that night I stood out in the rhododendrons marveling at Gemini and Cassiopeia, while her hope chest was fast going up the chimney. She might Ve understood my predicament for what it was — an expression of love and inevitability, instead of just love’s failure. Though I will not complain about it. She is fine now, I think, in most ways. And if she is not as certain about things as she once was, that is not a tragedy, and I think she will be better as time goes on.

By the time the copilot pokes his head through the tourist class curtain and gives us all the high sign, Vicki has drifted off to sleep, her head on a tiny pillow, her mouth slightly ajar. I intended to show her Lake Erie, which we’re now passing high above, green and shimmering, with gray Ontario out ahead. She is tired from too much anticipation, and I want her full of energy for our whirlwind trip. She can see the lake on the flight home, and be a slug-a-bed on Sunday night when we return from her parents.

An odd thing happened to me last night, and I would like to say something about it because it touches on the whole business of full disclosure, and because it has stayed on my mind ever since. It is, of course, what I wasn’t prepared to tell Vicki.

For the past two years I have been a member of a small group in town which we got together and called — with admirable literalness — the Divorced Men’s Club. There are five of us in all, though the constituency has changed once or twice, since one fellow got married again and moved away from Haddam to Philadelphia, and another died of cancer. In both instances someone has come along at just the right time to fill in the space, and we have all been happy to have five since that number seems to strike a balance. There have been several times when I have nearly quit the club, if you can call it a club, since I don’t think of myself as a classic joiner and don’t feel, at least anymore, that I need the club’s support. In fact, almost all of it bores the crap out of me, and ever since I began to concentrate on becoming more within myself I’ve felt like I was over the shoals and headed back to the mainstream of my own lived life. But there have been good reasons to stay. I did not want to be the first to leave as a matter of choice. That seemed niggardly to me — gloating that I had “come through,” whereas maybe the others hadn’t, even though no one has ever admitted that we do anything to support one another. To start with, none of us is that kind of confessional, soulful type. We are all educated. One fellow is a banker. One works in a local think tank. One is a seminarian, and the last guy is a stocks analyst. Ours is much more a jocular towel-popping raffish-rogueishness than anything too serious. What we mostly do is head down to the August, puff cigars, talk in booming businessmen’s voices and yuk it up once a month. Or else we pile into Carter Knott’s old van and head down to a ball game in Philadelphia or go fishing over at the shore, where we get a special party deal at Ben Mouzakis’ Paramount Show Boat Dock.

Though there’s another reason I don’t leave the club. And that is that none of the five of us is the type to be in a club for divorced men — none of us in fact even seems to belong in a place like Haddam — given our particular circumstances. And yet we are there each time, as full of dread and timidness as conscripts to a firing squad, doing what we can to be as chatty and polite as Rotarians — ending nights, wherever we are, talking about life and sports and business, hunched over our solemn knees, some holding red-ended cigarettes as the boat heads into the lighted dock, or before last call at the Press Box Bar on Walnut Street, all doing our best for each other and for non-confessional personal expression. Actually we hardly know each other and sometimes can barely keep the ball moving before a drink arrives. Likewise there have been times when I couldn’t wait to get away and promised myself never to come back. But given our characters, I believe this is the most in friendship any of us can hope for. (X is dead right about me in this regard.) In any case the suburbs are not a place where friendships flourish. And even though I cannot say we like each other, I definitely can say that we don’t dislike each other, which may be exactly the quiddity of all friendships that have not begun with fellows you knew before your own life became known to you — which is the case with me, and, I suppose, for the others, though I truly don’t know them well enough to say.

We met — the original five — because we’d all signed up for the “Back in Action” courses at Haddam High School, courses designed expressly for people like us, who didn’t feel comfortable in service clubs. I was enrolled in “Twentieth-Century American Presidents and Their Foreign Policies.” A couple of the other fellows were in “Water-Color Foundations” or “Straight-Talking” and we used to stand round the coffee urn on our breaks keeping our eyes diverted from the poor, sad, skinny divorced women who wanted to go home with us and start crying at 4 A.M. One thing led to another, and by the time our courses were half over we’d started going over to the August, jawing about fishing trips to Alaska and baseball trades, singling out one another’s idiosyncracies, and assigning funny names for each other like “ole Knot-head” for Carter Knott, the banker; “ole Basset Hound” for Frank Bascombe; “ole Jay-Jay” for Jay Pilcher — who, inside of a year, died alone in his house with a brain tumor he never even knew about. Perfect Babbitts, really, all of us, even though to some extent we understood that.

In a way, I suppose you could say all of us were and are lost, and know it, and we simply try to settle into our lost-ness as comfortably and with as much good manners and little curiosity as we can. And perhaps the only reason we have not quit is that we can’t think of a compelling reason to. When we do think of a good reason we’ll all no doubt quit in an instant. And I may be getting close.

But that is not so much the point as a way of getting around to it.

Yesterday was the day of our spring fishing excursion for flukes and weakfish, out of Brielle. Knot-head Knott made all the arrangements, and while Ben Mouzakis does not give us one of his boats all to ourselves for the money we pay, he usually just books one other party of congenial fellows for the afternoon and takes us out at cost since he knows we’ll talk it up in Haddam and come back ourselves next year, and because I honestly think he enjoys our company. We are all good fellows for an afternoon.

I had left Haddam in the glum spirits I’ve fallen into each year on the day before Ralph’s birthday. It had rained early just the way it did today, but by the time I had come round the traffic rotary in Neptune and turned toward the south Shore Points, the rain had swept up into the Amboys leaving me drenched in the supra-real seashore sunshine and traffic hum of Shark River, as indistinguishable from my fellow Jerseyites as a druggist from Sea Girt.

It is of course an anonymity I desire. And New Jersey has plenty to spare. A passing glance down off the bridge-lock at Avon and along the day-trip docks where the plastic pennants flutter and shore breezes dance always assures me that any one of these burly Bermuda-shorts fellows waiting impatiently with their burly wives for the Sea Fox to weigh its anchor or the Jersey Lady to cast off, could just as well be me, heading out after monkfish off Mantoloking or Deauville. Such random identifications always strike me as good practice. Better to think that you’re like your fellow man than to think — like some professors I knew at Berkshire College — that no man could be you or take your place, which is crazy and leads straight to melancholy for a life that never existed, and to ridicule.

Anyone could be anyone else in most ways. Face the facts.

Though possibly because of my skittishness, yesterday the Bermuda-shorts guys on the docks didn’t seem altogether hopeful from my distance. They seemed to be wandering off bandy-legged from their spouses down the dock planks, arms folded, faces querulous in the mealy sunshine, their natural Jersey pessimism working up a fear that the day might go wrong — in fact couldn’t go right. Someone would charge them too much for an unwanted and insignificant service; the wife would get seasick and force the boat in early; there’d be no fish and the day would end with a sad chowder at a rueful chowder house a stone’s throw from home. In other words, all’s ahead to be regretted; better to start now. I could’ve yelled right out to them: Cheer up! Chances are better than you think Things could pan out. You could have a whale of a time, so climb aboard. Though I didn’t have quite the spirits for it.

But as it happened, I would not have been more right. Ben Mouzakis had chartered half the boat to a family of Greeks — the Spanelises — from his own home village near Parga on the Ionian, and the divorced men were all on best behavior, acting like good-will ambassadors on a fortunate posting, assisting the women with their stubby rods, baiting hooks with brown chub and untangling back-lashed reels. The Greek men had their own way of fixing on bait so that it was harder to pick clean, and a good deal of time was spent learning this procedure. Ben Mouzakis eventually broke out some retsina, and by six o’clock fishing was over, the few fluke caught off the “secret reef” were packed in ice, the radio was beamed into a Greek station in New Brunswick, and everyone — the divorced men and the Spanelises, two men, three pretty women and two children — were sitting inside the long gallery cabin, elbows on knees, nodding and cupping glasses of wine and talking solemnly with the best good-neighborly tolerance about the value of the drachma, Melina Mercouri and the trip to Yosemite the Spanelises were planning for June if their money held out.

I was contented with the way the day had turned out. Sometimes an awful sense of loss comes over me when I am with these men, as profound as a tropical low. Though it has been worse in the past than yesterday. Something about them — earnest, all good-hearted fellows — seems as dreamy to me as it’s possible to be, dreamier than I am by far. And dreamy people often do not mix well, no matter what you might believe. Dreamy people actually have little to offer one another, tend in fact to neutralize each other’s dreaminess into bleary nugatude. Misery does not want company — happiness does. Which is why I have learned to stay clear of other sportswriters when I’m not working — avoid them like piranhas — since sportswriters are often the dreamiest people of all. It is another reason I will not stay in Gotham after dark. More than one drink with the boys from the office at Wally’s, a popular Third Avenue watering hole, and the dreads come right down out of the fake tin ceiling and the Tiffany hanging lamps like cyanide. My knee starts to hop under the table, and in three minutes I’m emptied of all conviction and struck dumb as a shoe and want nothing but to sit and stare away at the pictures on the wall, or at how the moldings fit the ceiling or how the mirrors in the back bar reflect a different room from the one I’m in, and fantasize about how much I’m going to enjoy my trip home. A group of sportswriters together can narrow your view far beyond pessimism, since the worst of them tend to be cynics looking only for false drama in the germs of human defeat.

Beyond that, what is it that makes me back off from even the best like-minded small talk when there is no chance of the willies nor the least taint of cynicism, and when in principle at least I like the whole idea of comradeship (otherwise why would I go fishing with the Divorced Men)? Simply, that I hate for things to get finally pinned down, for possibilities to be narrowed by the shabby impingement of facts — even the simple fact of comradeship. I am always hoping for a great surprise to open in what has always been a possible place for it — comradeship among professionals; friendship among peers; passion and romance. Only when the facts are made clear, I can’t bear it, and run away as fast as I can — to Vicki, or to sitting up all night in the breakfast nook gazing at catalogs or to writing a good sports story or to some woman in a far-off city whom I know I’ll never see again. It’s exactly like when you were young and dreaming of your family’s vacation; only when the trip was over, you were left faced with the empty husks of your dreams and the fear that that’s what life will mostly be — the husks of your dreams lying around you. I suppose I will always fear that whatever this is, is it.

Even so, I have been happy enough on the Divorced Men’s fishing trips. My habit is not to rent a rod and reel but to walk around and exchange a wry word with the men who are fishing like demons, go get their beers, sit in the passengers’ cabin and watch television, or go up top and stand beside Ben and watch the sonar on the pilot’s deck, where he finds the fish like clouds of white metal on the dark green baize. Ben never remembers my name, though after a while he recognizes me as someone named John, and we have diverse conversations about the economy or Russian fishing vessels or baseball, which Ben is a fanatic for, and which serves as a good man-to-man connection.

On yesterday’s excursion I finished the day doing what I like best, standing at the iron rail near the bow of the Mantoloking Belle staring off at the jeweled shore lights of New Jersey, brightening as dark fell, and feeling full of wonder and illusion — like a Columbus or a pilgrim seeing the continent of his dreams take shape in the dusk for the first time. My plans for the evening were to be at Vicki’s by eight, to surprise her with an intimate German dinner at Truegel’s Red Palace on the river at Lambertville — celebrating two months of love — then have her home early. Altogether it was not a bad bunch of prospects.

Down the railing from me, staring as I was into the sequined gloom, was Walter Luckett, pensive as a judge and quite possibly cold in the spring night, from the way he was hunched over his elbows.

Walter is the newest member of the Divorced Men. He took Rocko Ferguson’s place when Rocko got remarried and moved down to Philadelphia, and came in as an old acquaintance of Carter Knott’s from Harvard Business School. Walter is from Coshocton, Ohio, attended Grinnell, and pronounces Ohio as if it both begins and ends in a U. He is a special-industries analyst for Dexter & War-burton in New York and looks like it, with tortoise-shell glasses and short, slicked hair. Occasionally I spy him on the train platform going to work, but we rarely speak. In fact I know almost nothing else about him. Carter Knott told me Walter’s wife, Yolanda, left him and ran off to Bimini with a water ski instructor; that it’d been a big shock, but he seemed to be “handling things better now.” That could happen to any of us, of course, and the Divorced Men seemed like just the thing for him.

Occasionally, I’ve slipped out to the Weirkeeper’s Tavern after eleven — I do this sometimes to see the sports final on the big screen — and there was Walter, a little drunk and talkative. Once he yelled out, “Hey Frank! Where’re all the women?” after which I couldn’t wait to get out.

Another time I was in The Coffee Spot at dinnertime when Walter came in. He sat down in the booth across from me, and we talked about the Jaycees and what a bunch of phonies he thought they all were, and about the quality of silk underwear you can get out of most catalogs. Some, he said, were made in Korea, but the best ones came right from China; it was one of his industries. And then we just sat for a long time — a hundred years, it felt like — while our eyes tried to find a place to rest, until they finally settled on each other. And then we sat and stared at each other for four, maybe five horrible, horrible minutes, then Walter just got up and walked out without ordering anything or saying another word. Since then he has never mentioned that terrible moment, and I have frankly tried to duck him and on two occasions know that he walked in the door at the August, saw me and walked out again — something I respect him for. All together, I think I like Walter Luckett. He does not really belong in a divorced men’s club any more than I do, but he is willing to try it on for size, not because he thinks he’ll eventually like it, or that this is the thing he’s always missed, but because it’s in some ways the last thing in the world he can imagine doing, and probably feels he should do it for that reason alone. We should all know what’s at the end of our ropes and how it feels to be there.

“Do you happen to know what I like about standing here at the rail and looking out at the coast, Frank?” Walter said softly, after I had declined to speak a word.

“What’s that, Walter?” I was surprised he had even noticed me. Walter had caught one weakfish all afternoon, the biggest one caught, and after that he had quit fishing and curled up with a book on one of the bench seats.

“I like seeing things from an angle you don’t live them. You know what I mean?”

“Sure,” I said.

“I’m out there embedded in life every day. Then I come just a mile off shore, and it’s dark, and suddenly it’s all different. Better. Right?” Walter looks around at me. He is not a large man, and tonight he is wearing white walking shorts, a baggy blue tennis shirt and deck shoes, which makes him seem even smaller.

“It seems better. Probably that’s why we come out here.”

“Right,” Walter said, and stared for a time out at the darkly dazzling coast, the sound of water slapping the side of the boat. Far up I could see the glow of the Asbury Park ferris wheel, and due north the ice-box glow of Gotham. It was consoling to see those lights and know that lives were there, and mine was here. And for the moment I was glad to have come along, and considered the Divorced Men all pretty darn solid fellows. Most of them, in fact, were inside the main cabin yakking with the Spanelises, having the time of their lives. “It’s not the way I always see it though, Frank,” Walter said soberly, clasping his hands over the rail and leaning on his forearms.

“How do you usually see it, Walter?”

“Okay. It’s funny. When I was a kid in eastern Ohio, our whole family used to take these long trips. Fairly long, anyway. From Coshocton, in the east part of the state, all the way to Timewell, Illinois, which is in the west part of that state. All of it just flatland, you know. One county same with another one. And I used to ride in the car while my sister played hubcaps or lucky-lives-license or whatever, concentrating on remembering certain things — a house or maybe a silo or a swell of land, or just a bunch of pigs, something I’d be able to remember on the way back. So it would be the same to me, all part of the same experience, I guess. Probably everybody does that. I still do. Don’t you do it?” As Walter looked at me again, his glasses caught a glint of shore light and twinkled at me.

“I guess I’m your opposite here, Walter,” I said. “The highway never seems the same coming and going to me. I even think about meeting myself in the cars I pass. I actually forget it all pretty much right away, though I tend to forget a lot of things.”

“That’s a better way to be,” Walter said.

“To me, it makes the world more interesting.”

“I guess I’m having to learn that, Frank,” Walter said and shook his head.

“Is something bothering you, Walter,” I said — and shouldn’t have, since I broke the rules of the Divorced Men’s Club, which is that we’re none of us much interested in that kind of self-expression.

“No,” Walter said moodily. “Nothing’s bothering me.” And he stood for a while staring out at the jet coast of Jersey — the boxy beach house lights linking us to whatever hopeful life was proceeding there. “Let me just ask you something, Frank,” Walter said.

“All right.”

“Who do you have to confide in?” Walter did not look at me when he said this, though I somehow felt his smooth soft face was both sad and hopeful at the same moment.

“I guess I don’t, to tell the truth,” I said. “I mean I don’t have anyone.”

“Did you not even confide in your wife?”

“No,” I said. “We talked about things plenty of times. That’s for sure. Maybe we don’t mean the same thing by confiding. I’m not particularly a private person.”

“Good. That’s good,” Walter said. I could tell he was puzzled but also satisfied by my answer, and what’s more I had given him the best answer I could. “Frank, I’ll see you later,” Walter said unexpectedly and gave me a pat on the arm, and walked off down the deck into the dark where one of the Spanelis men was still fishing, though it was black on the water and the tart spring air was chilling enough that I went inside and watched a couple of innings of a Yankees game on the boat’s TV.

Once we got in, though, and all said our goodbyes, and the divorced men had given the few weakfish and fluke they’d caught to the Spanelis kids, I was walking across the gravel lot to my car, ready to head straight for Vicki’s and steal her away to Lambertville, and here was Walter Luckett scuffing his deck shoes alongside my car and looking, in the dark, strangely like a man who wanted to borrow some money.

“What-say now, Wally,” I said cheerfully, and went about putting the key in the door lock. I had an hour to get there, and I was for getting going. Vicki goes to bed early even when she doesn’t have to work the next day. She is damned serious about her nursing career, and likes being bright and cheerful, since she believes many of her patients have no one who understands their predicament. The result is I don’t drop in after eight, no matter what.

“This is a helluva life, isn’t it, Frank?” Walter said and leaned against my back fender, arms folded, staring off as if in amusement as the other divorced men and the Spanelises were barging out of the lot up toward Route 35, their lights brightly swaying. They were honking horns and yelling, and the Spanelis kids were squealing.

“It sure is, Walter.” I opened my door and stopped to look at him in the dark. He stuffed his hands in his pockets and bunched his shoulders. He had on a pale sweater draped in the old lank, country club style. “I think it’s a pretty good life, though.”

“You couldn’t really plan it, could you?”

“You certainly couldn’t.”

“There’s so much you can’t foresee, yet it’s all laid out and clear.”

“You look cold, Walter.”

“Let me buy you a drink, Frank.”

“Can’t tonight. Got things to do.” I smiled at him conspiratorially.

“Just a bone warmer. We can sneak right over into the Manasquan.” Across the lot was the Manasquan Bar, a barny old hip-roofed fisherman’s madhouse with a red BAR sign on top. Ben Mouzakis had invested in it with his wife’s brother, Evangelis, as he told me once when we talked about tax shelters up on deck. “What d’ya say?” Walter said and started off. “Let’s drink one, Frank.”

I did not want to have a nightcap with Walter Luckett. I wanted to go speeding back toward Vicki and drowsy Lambertville while the last flickers of sunlight clung in the western sky. The memory of those awful centuries spent in The Coffee Spot rose up in my thoughts suddenly, and I almost jumped in the car and rammed out of the lot like a desperado. But I didn’t. I stood and looked at Walter, who by now had walked halfway across the empty lot in his walking shorts and sweater, and had turned toward me and assumed a posture I can only describe as heartbreaking. And I could not say no. Walter and I had something in common — something insignificant, but something that his heartbreaking posture made undeniable. Walter and I were both men, Vicki or no Vicki, Lambertville or no Lambertville.

“Only one,” I said into the parking lot darkness. “I’ve got a date.”

“You’ll make it,” Walter said, lost now in the bleary seaside lowlights of Brielle. “I’ll see to that myself.”

In the Manasquan Walter ordered a scotch and I ordered a gin, and for a while we sat in complete uncomfortable silence and stared at the old pictures behind the bar that showed record stripers caught off the dock. I thought I could detect Ben Mouzakis in several — a chesty young roughneck of the Fifties, a big immigrant’s crazy grin, no shirt, muscles bristling, standing beside some other taller men in khakis and two hundred dead fish strung along a rafter board.

The Manasquan is a dark, pine-board, tar-smelling pile of sticks inside and in truth it is one of my favorite places for small departures. Any other time I wouldn’t have minded being there one bit. It has a long teak bar with a quasi-nautical motif, and no one makes the first attempt to be friendly, though drinks are poured honestly and at a reasonable price for a touristy seaside area. Sometimes, arriving too early for our excursion, I have walked over, taken a seat at the bar and bought a good greasy hamburger and felt right at home reading a newspaper or watching TV alongside the few watchcap fishermen who huddle and mutter at the end of the bar, and the woman or two who float around speaking brashly to strangers. It is a place where you’d be happy to consider yourself a regular, though when all is said and done you have nothing at all in common with anyone there except some speechless tenor of spirit only you know a damn thing about.

“Frank, were you ever an athlete?” Walter said forthrightly after our long and studious staring.

“Just an athletic supporter, Walter,” I said and gave him a grin to set him at his ease. He obviously had something on his mind; and the sooner he got it out, the sooner I could be blazing a trail west.

Walter smiled back at me ironically, gave his nose a disapproving pinch, pushed up at his glasses. Walter, I realized, was actually a handsome man, and it made me like him. It isn’t easy for handsome people to be themselves, or even try to be. And I had a feeling Walter was trying to be himself for the moment, and I liked him for that reason, though I wished he’d get on with it.

“You were out at Michigan, is that right,” Walter asked.

“Right.”

“That’s Ann Arbor, not East Lansing.”

“Right.”

“I know that’s different.” Walter nodded thoughtfully and sniffed again. “You couldn’t be an athlete there, I comprehend that. That’s like a factory.”

“It wasn’t that bad.”

“I was an athlete out at Grinnell. Anybody could be one. It wasn’t a big thing, although I’m sure it’s gotten bigger now. I never go back anymore.”

“I don’t go back to Ann Arbor, either. What’d you do?”

“Wrestled. One forty-five. We wrestled against Carleton and Macalester and those places. I wasn’t very good.”

“Those are good schools, though.”

“They are good schools,” Walter said. “Though you don’t hear much about them. I guess everybody wants to talk about sports, right?” Walter looked at me seriously.

“Sometimes,” I said. “But I don’t mind it. Other people know a lot more about sports than I do, to tell you the truth. It’s a pretty innocent part of people, and talking has the effect of bringing us all together on a good level.” I don’t know why I started talking to Walter in this Grantland Rice after-dinner speech way, except that he seemed to want that and it was truthfully the only thing I could think of. (It’s also true that I believe every word of it, and it’s a lot better than talking about some pretentious book that only one person’s read.)

Walter moved the ice around in his drink using his finger. “What would you say’s the worst part about your job, Frank? I hate traveling myself, and I have to do it. I bet that’s it, right?”

“I don’t mind it,” I said. “There’re things about it I’m not sure I could live without anymore. In particular, now that I’m home alone.”

“Okay, sure.” Walter drank down his scotch in one gulp and signaled for another in one continuous finger-wiggle gesture. “So it’s not the travel. Okay, that’s good.”

“I think the hardest part about my job, Walter, since you asked, is that people expect me to make things better when I come. If I come to interview them or write about them or just call them up on the phone, they want to be enriched. I’m not talking about money. It’s just part of the natural illusion of my profession. The fact is, we can sometimes not make things worse, or we can make things worse. But we can’t usually make things better for individuals. Sometimes we can for groups. But then not always.”

“Interesting.” Walter Luckett nodded as though it was anything but interesting. “What do you mean, worse?”

“I mean sometimes things can seem worse just by not being better. I don’t know if I ever thought about it before,” I said. “But I think it’s right.”

“People don’t have any right to think you can make life better for them,” Walter said soberly. “But it’s what they want, all right. I agree.”

“I don’t know about rights,” I said. “It’d be nice if we could. I think I once thought I could.”

“Not me,” Walter said. “One lousy marriage proved that.”

“It’s a disappointment. I don’t mean marriage is a disappointment. Just ending it.”

“I guess.” Walter looked down at the fishermen at the dim-lit end of the bar, where they were huddling over some playing cards with fat Evangelis. One of the men laughed out loud, then another man put the cards in his coat pocket and smirked, and the talk got quiet. I would’ve given anything for a peek at those cards and to have had a good laugh with the fishermen instead of being land-locked with Walter. “Your marriage wasn’t disappointing to you, then?” Walter said in a way I found vaguely insulting. Walter had just the tips of his slender fingers touching the glass of scotch, and then he looked at me accusingly.

“No. It was really a wonderful marriage. What I remember of it.”

“My wife’s in Bimini,” Walter said. “My ex-wife, I need to say now. She went down there with a man named Eddie Pitcock, a man I’ve never seen and know nothing about except his name, which I know from a private detective I hired. I could find out a lot more. But who cares? Eddie Pitcock’s his name. Isn’t that a name for the guy who runs away with your wife?”

“It’s just a name, Walter.”

Walter pinched his nose again and sniffed.

“Right. You’re right about that. That isn’t what I want to talk about anyway, Frank.”

“Let talk about sports, then.”

Walter stared intently at the fish pictures behind the bar and breathed forcefully through his nose. “I feel pretty self-important hauling you over here like this, Frank. I’m sorry. I’m not usually self-important. I don’t want this to be the story of my life.” Walter had completely ignored my offer of a good sports conversation, which seemed to mean something more serious was on the way, something I was going to be sorry about. “It isn’t a very amusing life. I’m sure of that.”

“I understand,” I said. “Maybe you just wanted to have a drink and sit in a bar with someone you knew but didn’t have to confide in. That makes plenty of sense. I’ve done that.”

“Frank, I went in a bar in New York two nights ago, and I let a man pick me up. Then I went to a hotel with him — the Americana, as a matter of fact — and slept with him.” Walter stared furiously out into the fishing pictures. He stared so hard that I knew he would like nothing in the world better than to be one of those happy, proud khaki-clad fishermen displaying his fat stripers to the sun on a happy July day, say, in 1956, when we would have been, Walter and me, eleven years old — assuming we are the same age. I would’ve been doubly happy at the moment to be there myself.

“Is that what you wanted to tell me, Walter?”

“Yes.” Walter Luckett said this as if stunned, looking deadly serious.

“Well,” I said. “It doesn’t matter to me.”

“I know that,” Walter said, his chin vaguely moving up and down in a kind of secret nod to himself. “I knew that ahead of time. Or I thought I did.”

“Well, that’s fine, then,” I said. “Isn’t it?”

“I feel pretty bad, Frank,” Walter said. “I don’t feel dirty or ashamed. It’s not a scandal. I probably ought to feel stupid, but I don’t even feel that way. I just feel bad. It’s like it’s loosed a bad feeling in me.”

“Do you think you want to do it again, Walter?”

“I doubt it. I hope not, anyway,” Walter said. “He was a nice guy, I’ll just say that. He wasn’t one of these leather bullies or what have you. And neither am I. He’s got a wife and kids up in north Jersey. Passaic County. I’ll probably never see him again. And I’ll never do that again, I hope. Though I could, I guess. I certainly don’t think anyone would care if I did. You know?” Walter drank down his scotch and quickly cut his eyes to me. I wondered if we were talking loud enough for the fishermen to hear us. They would probably have something to say about Walter’s experience if we wanted to include them.

“Why do you think you told me, Walter?”

“I think I wanted to tell you, Frank, because I knew you wouldn’t care. I felt like I knew the kind of guy you are. And if you did care, I could feel better because I’d know I was better than you. I have some real admiration for you, Frank. I got your book out of the library when I joined, the group, though I admit I haven’t read it. But I felt like you were a guy who didn’t hold opinions.”

“I’ve got a lot of opinions,” I said. “But I tend to keep them to myself, usually.”

“I know that. But not about something like this. Am I right?”

“It doesn’t matter to me. If I have an opinion about it, I’ll only know about it later.”

“I’d be happy if you wouldn’t tell me about it then, frankly, if you do. I don’t think it would do me any good. I don’t really think of this as a confession, Frank, because I don’t really want a response from you. And I know you don’t like confessions.”

“No, I don’t,” I said. “I think most things are better if you just let them be lonely facts.”

“I agree,” Walter said confidently.

“You did tell me, though, Walter.”

“Frank, I needed a context. I think that’s what friends are for.” Walter jiggled ice in his glass in a summary fashion, like a conventioneer.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Women are better at this kind of thing, I think,” Walter said.

“I never thought about it.”

“I think women, Frank, sleep together all the time and don’t really bother with it. I believe Yolanda did. They understand friendship better in the long run.”

“Do you think you and this fellow, whatever his name is, are friends?”

“Probably not, Frank. No. But you and I are. I can say that I don’t have a better friend in the world than you are right now.”

“Well that’s good, Walter. Do you feel better?”

Walter thumped the space between his brown eyes with his middle finger and let go a deep breath. “No. No. No, I don’t. I didn’t even think I would, to tell you the truth. I don’t think I told you to feel better. Like I said, I didn’t want anything back. I just didn’t want it to be my secret. I don’t like secrets.”

“So, how do you feel?”

“About what?” Walter stared at me strangely.

“About sleeping with this man. What else have we been talking about?” I darted a look down the long bar. One of the fishermen was sitting staring at us, apart from the others who were watching a TV above the cash register, watching the Yankees game. The fisherman looked drunk, and I suspected he wasn’t really listening to what we were saying, though that was no sign he couldn’t hear it by accident. “Or about telling me. I don’t know,” I said almost in a whisper. “Either one.”

“Have you ever been poor, Frank?” Walter glanced at the fisherman, then back at me.

“No. Not really.”

“Me, too. Or me either. I haven’t been. But that’s exactly how I feel now. Like I’m impoverished, just suddenly. Not that I want anything. Not that I even can lose anything. I just feel bad, though I’m probably not going to kill myself.”

“Do you think that’s what being poor’s like? Feeling bad?”

“Maybe,” Walter said. “It’s my version anyway. Maybe you’ve got a better one.”

“No. Not really. That’s fine.”

“Maybe we all need to be poor, Frank. Just once. Just to earn the right to live.”

“Maybe so, Walter. I hope not. I wouldn’t like it much.”

“But don’t you feel sometimes, Frank, like you’re living way up on the top of life, and not really living all of it, all the way down deep?”

“No. I never felt that way, Walter. I just always felt like I was living all the life I could.”

“Well, then you’re lucky,” Walter Luckett said bluntly. He tapped his glass on the bar. Evangelis looked around, but Walter waved him off. He let a couple of ice cubes wiggle around in his mouth a moment. “You’ve got a date, don’t you pal?” He tried to smile around the ice cubes and looked stupid.

“I did, anyway.”

“Oh, you’ll be fine,” Walter said. He laid a crisp five-dollar bill out on the bar. He probably had plenty of such bills in his pocket. He adjusted his sweater around his shoulders. “Let’s take a walk, Frank.”

We walked out of the bar, past the fishermen and Evangelis, standing under the TV looking up at the color screen and the game. The fishermen who’d been staring at us still sat staring at the space where we’d been. “Come back, fellas,” Evangelis said, smiling, though we were already out the door.

Awash down the boat channel and the dark Manasquan River, the night air was fresher than I could’ve imagined it, a cool, after-rain airishness, an evening to soothe away human troubles. Over the water, halyards were belling on the metal masts in the dark, a lonely elegiac sound. Lighted condos rose above the far river bank.

“Tell me something, would you.” Walter took a deep breath and let it out. Two young black men holding their own gear and plastic bait-buckets were loitering on the gangplank of the Mantoloking Belle, ready for an all-night adventure. Ben Mouzakis stood in his pilot’s house staring down at them from the dark.

“If I can.” I said.

Walter seemed to be feeling better in spite of himself. “Why’d you quit writing?”

“Oh that’s a long story, Walter.” I crammed my hands in my pockets and weasled away a step or two toward my car.

“I guess so, I guess so. Sure. They’re all long stories, aren’t they?”

“I’ll tell you sometime, since we’re friends, Walter. But not right now.”

“Frank, I’d like that. I really would. Sit down over a drink and hear it all out. We’ve all got our stories, don’t we?”

“Mine’s a pretty simple one.”

“Well, good. I like ’em simple.”

“Take care, Walter. You’ll feel better tomorrow.”

“You take care, Frank.”

Walter started toward his car at the far end of the gravel lot, though when he was twenty yards from me he started running for some reason, and ran until I couldn’t see him anymore, only his white shorts and his thin legs fading in the night.

Central Jersey dozed in a sweet spring somnolence. DJ’s as far south as Tom’s River crooned along the seaboard that it was after eight. Nighttime streets were clearing from Bangor to Cape Canaveral, and I was out of luck with Vicki, though I tried to make good time.

At Freehold I stopped for the hell of it and called her apartment where no one answered; she unplugged the phone after bedtime. I called the nurses’ private hospital number — a number I’m not supposed to know, reserved for loved ones in case of emergency; the regular hospital number with the last digit changed to zero. A woman answered in a startled voice and said her records showed Miss Arcenault wasn’t scheduled. Was it an emergency? No. Thanks, I said.

For some reason I called my house. The answering machine clicked on with my voice, cheerier than I could bear to hear myself. I beeped for a message and there was X’s managerial-professional voice saying she would meet me the next morning. I hung up before, she was finished.

Once, when our basset hound, Mr. Toby, was killed by a car that didn’t bother to stop — right on Hoving Road — X, in tears, said she wished that time could just be snatched back. Precious seconds and deeds retrieved for a better try at things. And I thought, while I dug the grave behind the forsythias along the cemetery fence, that it was like a woman to grieve over a simple fact in that hopeless-extravagant way. Maturity, as I conceived it, was recognizing what was bad or peculiar in life, admitting it has to stay that way, and going ahead with the best of things. Only that’s exactly what I craved now! A precious hour returned to me; a part of Walter’s sad disclosures held over till a later date — hardly the best of things.

What’s friendship’s realest measure?

I’ll tell you. The amount of precious time you’ll squander on someone else’s calamities and fuck-ups.

And as a consequence, zipping along the Jersey darkside past practical Hightstown, feeling ornery as a bunkhouse cook, the baddies suddenly swarmed my car like a charnel mist so dense that not even opening the window would rout them.

Nothing in the world is as hopeful as knowing a woman you like is somewhere thinking about only you. Conversely, there is no badness anywhere as acute as the badness of no woman out in the world thinking about you. Or worse. That one has quit because of some bone-headedness on your part. It is like looking out an airplane window and finding the earth has, disappeared. No loneliness can compete with that. And New Jersey, muted and adaptable, is the perfect landscape for that very loneliness, its other pleasures notwithstanding. Michigan comes close, with its long, sad vistas, its desolate sunsets over squatty frame houses, second-growth forests, flat interstates and dog-eared towns like Dowagiac and Munising. But only close. New Jersey’s is the purest loneliness of all.

By disclosing an intimacy he absolutely didn’t have to disclose (he didn’t want advice, after all), Walter Luckett was guilty of both spoiling my superb anticipation and illuminating a set of facts-of-life I’d have been happy never to know about.

There are things in this world — plenty of them — we don’t need to know the facts about. The noisome fact of two men’s snuggle-buggle in some Seventh Avenue drummer’s hotel has no mystery to it — the way, say, an electric guitar or “the twist” or an old Stude-baker have no mystery either. Only facts. Walter and Mr. Whoever could live together twenty years, sell antiques, change to real estate, adopt a Korean child, change their wills, buy a summer house on Vinalhaven, fall out of love a dozen times and back again, go back to women more than once and finally find love together as senior citizens. And still not have it.

By now it seemed more than possible that Vicki had gotten bored and hied off with some oncologist from upstairs, in his dream machine Jag, and at that moment was whirling into the sunset, a thermos of mai tais on the console and Englebert Humperdinck groaning on the eight-track.

What, then, was left for me to do but make the best of things.

I drove to Route 1, then south to Mrs. Miller’s little brick ranchette on a long, grassy lot between an Exxon and a Rusty Jones, where a chiropractor once kept a practice. Several older, low-slung bomber cars were in the driveway, and the lights were lit behind drawn curtains, but her Reader-Adviser sign was dark. I was too late here, too, though the curtained lights certainly spoke of some secret, possibly exotic goings on inside; enough to excite my curiosity, and in fact enough to excite the curiosity of anyone driving south through the night toward Philadelphia with only glum prospects to consider.

Mrs. Miller and I have done business two years now, since just before X and I got divorced, and I’ve become a well-known face to all the aunts and uncles and cousins who lounge around inside in the tiny, overfurnished rooms, talking in secret, low voices and drinking coffee at all hours of the day and night. They were probably, I guessed, doing exactly that and no more now, and in fact if I had walked in I’d have been as welcome as a cousin to have an after-hours consultation, inquire about my prospects for the rest of the week. But I preferred to respect her privacy, since, like a writer, her place of business is also her home.

There is nothing complicated about how I began seeing Mrs. Miller. I was driving down Route 1 heading for the hardware store with Clary and Paul in the back seat — we were intent on buying a bicycle pump — and I simply saw her open-palm Reader-Adviser sign and pulled in. Probably I had passed it two hundred times over the years, and never noticed. I don’t remember feeling out of sorts, though it’s not always possible to remember. But I believe when it comes time to see a reader-adviser you know it, if, that is, you aren’t at full-scale war with your best instincts.

For a moment I paused at the end of the driveway. I cut my lights and sat a moment watching the windows, since Mrs. Miller, her house, her business, her relatives, her life, posed altogether a small but genuine source of pleasure and wonder. It was as much for that reason that I went to see her once a week, and so found it satisfying enough last night just to be there.

Mrs. Miller’s advice, indeed, is almost always just the standard reader-adviser advice and frequently completely wrong: “I see you are coming into much money soon” (not true). “I see a long life” (not likely, though I wouldn’t argue). “You are a good man at heart” (uncertain). And she gives me the same or similar advice almost every week, with provisory adjustments that have to do mostly with the weather: “Things will brighten for you” (on rainy days). “Your future is not completely clear” (on cloudy days). There are even days she doesn’t recognize me and gives me a puzzled look when I enter. Though she giggles like a schoolgirl when we’re finished and says “See you next time” (never using my name), and occasionally dispenses with giving me one of her cards, which has typed at the bottom, below the raised crystal ball emblem: A PLACE TO BRINGYOUR FRIENDS AND FEEL NO EMBARRASSMENT — I AM NOT A GYPSY.

I am certainly not embarrassed to go there, you can bet on that. Since for five dollars she will lead you into a dimly lit back bedroom of her sturdy suburban house, where there is plastic-brocade drapery over the window. (I wondered, first time through, if a little Levantine cousin or sister wouldn’t be waiting there. But no.) There the light is greenish-amber, and a tiny radio plays softly sinuous Greek-sounding flute music. There is an actual clouded crystal ball on the card table (she has never used this) and several stacks of oversized tarot cards. Once we’re in place she will hold my hand, trace its tender lines, wrinkle her brows as if my palm revealed hard matters, look puzzled or relieved and finally say hopeful, thoughtful things that no other strangers would ever think to say to me.

She is the stranger who takes your life seriously, the personage we all go into each day in hopes of meeting, the friend to the great mass of us not at odds with much; not disabled from anything; not “sick” in the strictest sense.

She herself is a handsome, dusky-skinned woman in her thirties or forties, a bit overweight and vaguely condescending, but completely agreeable down deep — so much so that at the end of our conferences she will almost always entertain a question or two as a bonus. I write these questions on scraps of paper during the week, though I almost always lose them and end up asking simple, factual-essential questions like: “Will Paul and Clarissa be safe from harm this week?” (a continued source of concern for anyone, especially me). Her answers, in turn, tend always to the bright side concerning my happiness, though toward the precautionary concerning my children: “No harm will come to them if you are a good father.” (I have told her about Ralph long ago.) Once, in a panic for a good question, I asked if the Tigers could possibly finish tied for the American League East, in which case a one-game, winner-take-all tie-breaker with Baltimore would’ve been the decider. And this made her angry. Betting advice, she said, was more expensive than five dollars, and then charged me ten without giving me an answer.

I have learned over time that when her answers to my questions have been wrong, the best thing to think is that somehow it’s my fault things didn’t turn out.

But where else can you get, on demand, hopeful, inspiring projections for the real future? Where else, on a windy day in January, can you drive out beset by blue devils and in five minutes be semi-reliably assured by a relative stranger that you are who you think you are, and that things aren’t going to turn out so crappy after all?

Would a Doctor Freud be so obliging, I’ve wondered? Would he be any more likely to know anything, and tell you? I doubt it. In fact, in the bad days after my divorce I met a girl in St. Louis who had by then — she was in her mid-twenties and a buxom looker — spent thousands of dollars and hours consulting the most highly respected psychiatrist in that shadowy bricktop town, until one day she bounced into the office, full of high spirits. “Oh, Dr. Fasnacht,” she proclaimed, “I woke up this morning and realized I’m cured! I’m ready to stop my visits and go out into the world on my own as a full-fledged citizen. You’ve cured me. You’ve made me so happy!” To which the old swindler replied: “Why, this is disastrous news. Your wish to end your therapy is the most distressing evidence of your terrible need to continue. You are much more ill than I ever thought. Now lie down.”

Mrs. Miller would never give anyone such mopish opinions. Her strategy would be to give a much more promising than usual reading for that day, shake your hand, (possibly) forgo the five dollars as a lucky sign and say with eyebrows raised, “Come back when things puzzle you.” Her philosophy is: A good day’s a good day. We get few enough of them in a lifetime. Go and enjoy it.

And that is only the literal part of Mrs. Miller’s — what can I call it best? Her service? Treatment? Poor words for mystery. Since for me, mystery is the crucial part, and in fact the only thing I find to have value at this stage in my life — midway around the track.

Mystery is the attractive condition a thing (an object, an action, a person) possesses which you know a little about but don’t know about completely. It is the twiney promise of unknown things (effects, inter workings, suspicions) which you must be wise enough to explore not too deeply, for fear you will dead-end in nothing but facts.

A typical mystery would be traveling to Cleveland, a town you have never liked, meeting a beautiful girl, going for a lobster dinner during which you talk about an island off of Maine where you have both been with former lovers and had terrific times, and which talking about now revivifies so much you run upstairs and woggle the bejesus out of each other. Next morning all is well. You fly off to another city, forget about the girl. But you also feel differently about Cleveland for the rest of your life, but can’t exactly remember why.

Mrs. Miller, when I come to her for a five-dollar consultation, does not disclose the world to me, nor my future in it. She merely encourages and assures me about it, admits me briefly to the mystery that surrounds her own life, which then sends me home with high hopes, aswarm with curiosities and wonder on the very lowest level: Who is this Mrs. Miller if she is not a Gypsy? A Jew? A Moroccan? Is “Miller” her real name? Who are those other people inside — relatives? Husbands? Are they citizens of this state? What enterprise are they up to? Are guns for sale? Passports? Foreign currency? On a slightly higher level: How do I seem? (Who has not wanted to ask his doctor that?) Though I am fierce to find out not one fleck more than is incidental to my visitis, since finding out more would only make me the loser, submerge me in dull facts, and require me to seek some other mystery or do without.

As I expected would happen, simply proximity to the glow through her warm curtains — like the antique light of another century — plucked my spirits up like a hitchhiker who catches a ride when all hope was lost. More seemed suddenly possible, and near, whereas before nothing did. Though as I glanced back nostalgically at Mrs. Miller’s squared ranchette, I sensed the front door had opened an inch. Someone there was watching me, wondering who I was, what I’d been up to. A love car? The police? A drunk sleeping it off? I was not even sure the door had opened, so that this was as much a riddle to me as I was to whomever I took to be there. A shared riddle, if he/she existed, a perfect give and take in the spirit of a marriage. And I slid off quickly into the south-bound traffic as renewed as a baby born to middle life.

I took the first jug-handle turn and zipped back up the Great Woods Road through the dark apple orchards, sod farms, beef alo barns, the playing fields of De Tocqueville Academy and the modern world-headquarters lawns, all of which keep Haddam sheltered from the dazzling hubcap emporia, dairy barns and swank Radio Shack hurdy-gurdy down Route 1 toward the sullen city of brotherly love. I was not ready for bed now. Far from it. Factuality and loneliness had been put in their places, and an anticipation awakened. The day, changed to a spring evening, held promise only an adventure would unearth.

I idled down Seminary Street, abstracted and empty in the lemony vapor of suburban eventide. (It could always be a sad town.) The two stoplights at either end were flashing yellow, and on the south side of the square only Officer Carnevale waited in his murmuring cruiser, lost in police-radio funk, ready to catch speeders and fleeing ten-speed thieves. Even the seminary was silent — Gothic solemnity and canary lights from the quarreled windows aglimmer through the elms and buttonwoods. Sermonizing midterms were soon, and everybody’d buckled down. Only Carnevale’s exhaust said a towny soul was breathing inside a hundred miles, where above the trees the gladlights of New York City paled the sky.

Nine o’clock on the Thursday before Easter far down the suburban train line. A town, almost any town, would seem to have secrets all its own. Though if you believed that you’d be wrong. Haddam in fact is as straightforward and plumb-literal as a fire hydrant, which more than anything else makes it the pleasant place it is.

None of us could stand it if every place were a grizzled Chicago or a bilgy Los Angeles — towns, like Gotham, of genuine woven intricacy. We all need our simple, unambiguous, even factitious townscapes like mine. Places without challenge or double-ranked complexity. Give me a little Anyplace, a grinning, toe-tapping Terre Haute or wide-eyed Bismarck, with stable property values, regular garbage pick-up, good drainage, ample parking, located not far from a major airport, and I’ll beat the birds up singing every morning.

I slowed to take a peek at the marquee of the First Presbyterian, at the edge of the seminary grounds. I occasionally pop in on a given Sunday just to see what they’re up to and lift my spirits with a hymn. X and I attended when we first moved here, but she eventually lost interest, and I began working Sundays. Years ago, when I was a senior and in need of an antidote to the puddling, laughless, guilty ironies of midwar Ann Arbor, I began attending a liberal and nondogmatic Westminster group on Maynard Street. The preacher, who referred to himself as a “moderator,” was a tall, acned, open-collared scarecrow who aimed his mumbled sermons toward world starvation, the UN and SEATO, and who seemed embarrassed when it came time to stand up and pray and always kept his darting eyes open. A skinny little anorexic wife was his assistant — they were both from Muskegon — and our congregation consisted mostly of elderly professors’ widows, a few confused and homely coeds and a homosexual or two just coming to grips with things.

I lasted five weeks, then put my Bible away and started staying up Saturday nights at the fraternity and getting good and drunk. Christianity, like everything else in the Ann Arbor of those times, was too factual and problem-solving-oriented. The spirit was made flesh too matter-of-factly. Small-scale rapture and ecstasy (what I’d come for) were out of the question given the mess the world was in. Consequently I loathed going.

But the First Presbyterians of Haddam offer a good, safe-and-sound approach to things. Their ardent hope is to bring you down to earth by causing your spirit to lift — a kind of complex spiritual orienteering. The regulars all have no doubts about what they’re there for; they’re there to be saved or give a damned good impression of it, and nobody’s pulling the wool over anybody else’s eyes.

What I could read off the marquee, however, seemed strange business, though it will probably turn out to be as ordinary as toast — a trick to lure the once-a-year guys into thinking church has changed.

“The Race To The Tomb”

The preacher will have some witty, eyebrow-arching joke to start off: “Now this fella, Jesus, he was really some heckuva peculiar kind of guy, wouldn’t you say so?” And we all would. Then straight away we’d get to the hard-nosed corroborating of the resurrection and suggesting how such a fate might be ours.

I slipped on by, gave Officer Carnevale the lucky thumbs-up, which he managed moodily to return, then drove straight over to The Presidents — up Tyler, down Pierce and winding a sinewy way to Cleveland Street, before stopping under a giant tupelo across from 116, X’s little white clapboard colonial. Her Citation sat in the narrow drive, an unknown blue car parked at the curb.

Quick as a ferret I left my car, crossed the street, crouched and laid my hand on the hood of the unknown blue car — a Thunderbird — then stole back to mine before anyone on Cleveland Street could see. As I had hoped, the Bird was as cold as a murderer’s heart, and I was relieved to believe it belonged to a neighbor, or to some relative visiting the Armentis next door. Though it could’ve been a suitor I knew nothing about — one of the fat-belly credit card boys from the country club, a thought which changed relief back to doubt.

My plan had been to pay an innocent visit. I hadn’t seen Paul and Clarissa in four days, a long interval in the normal course of our lives. The two of them usually waltz by after school, eat a sandwich, sit and chat together, rummage around their former rooms the way they used to, play Yahtzee or Clue, read books, all while I try by fervent misdirection to prove a continuity in their little lives with my presence. Periodically I quit the work I’m doing and clump upstairs to tease and flirt with them, answer their questions, challenge them and try to woo them back to me in some plain and forthright way, a strategy they’re wise to but don’t mind because they love me, know I love them, and have no choice, really. We are, all four of us in this, a solid and divided family, doing our level bests to see our duty clearly.

Last night I hoped to stay for a drink, see the kids to bed, yak with X for half an hour, then end up, possibly, spending the night on the couch, something I hadn’t done in some time (not, in fact, since I met Vicki) but felt a fierce urge to do suddenly.

Still if I’d gone hat-in-hand up to the door, on a mission of somber fatherhood, I couldn’t be sure I wouldn’t have interrupted an intime—the kids away on overnights at the Armentis, the lights turned up to facilitate the best atmosphere of grownup-bittersweet-excitement-since-so-much-has-gone-before, for the benefit of neighbors interested in seeing a proud woman make the best of a fractured life. I would’ve been thunderstruck to intercept some well-dressed corporate-level type with love in his eyes, athwart the precise couch I hoped to curl up on. X would’ve been in her rights to say I’d torpedoed her attempts at getting her feet on the ground, and the fellow would’ve been in his rights to run me out or punch me. And we’d have both ended up having to leave (the two men always have to trudge off into the night alone, though occasionally they become friends if they meet up later in a bar).

My whole scenario, in short, had lost its glow, and I was left in the dark understory, facing the blue intruder car with nothing to do more than breathe the plush air and endorse X’s neighborhood. The Presidents, with their precise fifty-foot frontages, their mature mulberries and straight sidewalks, are actually an excellent location for a young, divorced lady with children, steady means and an independent bent, to dig her heels in. Up and down the street are other young free-thinking people on the way someplace in the world, sharp-eyed, idealistic folks who spotted a good investment and acted fast, and now have some value to sit on. The immigrant Italians who built them (some chosen right out of Sears catalogs) now prefer Delray Beach and Fort Myers and citizens’ groups more their own age, and have left their neighborhoods to the young, though hardly ever their own young, who prefer the likes of Pheasant Run and Kendall Park. The banks have proved compassionate with mortgage points and variable rates, and as a result the young liberals — most of them prospering stockbrokers, corporate speech writers, and public defenders — have revived a proud, close-knit neighborhood and property-value ethic where everybody looks after everybody else’s kids and grinds their own espresso. Bright new façades and paint jobs. New footings dug. A reshingled weather stoop. Smart art-deco numerals and a pane of discreetly stained glass done at home. All of it promisingly modern.

X, I think, is happy here. My children are close to their school, their friends and me. It is not the same as Hoving Road where we all once hung our hats, but things change in ways none of us can expect, no matter how damn much we know or how smart and good-intentioned each of us is or thinks he is. Who’d know that Ralph would die? Who’d know that certainty would grow rare as diamonds? Who’d know our home would be broken into and everything suddenly break apart? Did Walter Luckett know he’d meet Mr. Wrong two nights ago and alter his life again after his wife already had? No, you bet not. None of our lives is really ordinary; nothing humdrum in our delights or our disasters. Everything is as problematic as geometry when it’s affairs of the heart in question. A life can simply change the way a day changes — sunny to rain, like the song says. But it can also change again.

The clock at St. Leo the Great sounded ten, and something began happening at 116 Cleveland.

The yellow stoop light flashed on. Someone inside spoke in a tone of patient instruction, and the front door opened. My son, Paul, stepped out.

Paul in tennis shorts, and a Minnesota Twins shirt I brought him from a trip I took. He is ten, small and not overly clever yet, a serious, distractable boy with a good heart, and all the sweet qualities of second sons: patience, curiosity, some useful inventiveness, sentimentality, a building vocabulary, even though he is not much of a reader. I have tried to think that things will turn out well for him, though when we powwow up in his room, a place he keeps furnished with Sierra Club posters of eagles and large Audubon mergansers and grebes, he always seems to display a moody enthrallment, as if there is some sovereign event in his life he senses is important but cannot for some reason remember. Naturally I am very proud of him, and his sister, too. They both carry on like soldiers.

Paul had brought outside with him one of the birds from his dovecote. A mottled rock dove, a handsome winger. He toted it manfully to the curb, using the two-handed professional bird handler’s way he’s taught himself. I surveilled him like a spy, slumped behind the steering wheel, the shadow of the big túpelo making me not especially noticeable, though Paul was too intent on his own business to see me.

At the curb he took the pigeon in one small hand, slipped the hood and neatly pocketed it. The bird cocked its head peckishly at his new surroundings. The sight, though, of Paul’s familiar, serious face calmed it.

Paul studied the pigeon for a time, grappling it once again in both hands, and via the still darkness I could hear his boy’s voice talking. He was coaching the bird in some language he had practiced. “Remember this house.” “Fly this special route.” “Be careful of this hazard or that obstacle.” “Think of all we’ve worked on.” “Remember who your friends are”—all of it good advice. When he’d finished, he held the bird to his nose and sniffed behind its beaky head. I saw him close his eyes, and then it was up, pitched, the bird’s large bright wings seizing the night instantly, up and gone and out of sight like a thought, its wings white and then quickly small as it cleared the closure of trees — gone.

Paul looked up a moment, watching it. Then, as if he’d forgotten all about any loosed bird, he turned and stared at me across the street, slouched like Officer Carnevale in my cruiser car. He had seen me probably for quite some time, but had gone on with his business like a big boy who knows he’s watched and doesn’t care for it, but understands those are the rules.

Paul walked across the street in his little boy’s ungainly gait but with a gainly smile, a smile he’d give, I know, to a total stranger.

“Hi Dad,” he said through the window.

“Hi, Paul.”

“So what’s up?” He still smiled at me like an innocent boy.

“Just sort of sitting here now.”

“Is it all right?”

“It’s great. Whose car’s that out front there?”

Paul looked back behind him at the Thunderbird. “The Litzes.” (Neighbor, lawyer, no problem.) “Are you coming inside?”

“I just wanted to check up on you folks. Just being a patrol car.”

“Clary’s asleep. Mom’s watching news,” Paul said, adopting his mother’s way of dropping definite articles, a midwest mannerism. They went to market. She has flu. We bought tickets.

“Who was that you gave his freedom to?”

“Ole Vassar.” Paul looked up the street. Paul names his birds after hillbilly tunesters — Ernest, Chet, Loretta, Bobby, Jerry Lee — and had adopted his father’s partiality for oie as a term of pure endearment. I could’ve hauled him through the window and hugged him till we both cried out, so much did I love him at that moment. “I didn’t give him his freedom right off, though.”

“Old Vassar has a mission first, then?”

“Yes sir,” Paul said and looked down at the pavement. It was clear I was burdening his privacy, of which he has plenty. But I knew he felt he had to talk about Vassar now.

“What’s Vassar’s mission?” I asked bravely.

“To see Ralph.”

“Ralph. What’s he going to see Ralph for?”

Paul sighed a small boy’s put-on sigh, transformed back from a big boy. “To see if he’s all right. And tell him about us.”

“You mean it’s a report.”

“Yeah. I guess.” Head still down at the pavement.

“On all of us?”

“Yeah.”

“And how did it come out?”

“Good.” Paul avoided my eyes in another direction.

“My part okay, too?”

“Your part wasn’t too long. But it was good.”

“That’s all right. Just so I made it in. When’s Ole Vassar reporting back?”

“He isn’t. I told him he could live in Cape May.”

“Why is that?”

“Because Ralph’s dead. I think.”

I had taken him and his sister to Cape May only last fall, and I was interested now that he supposed the dead lived there. “It’s a one-way mission, then.”

“Right.”

Paul stared fiercely at the door of my car and not at me, and I could sense he was confused by all this talk of dead people. Kids are most at home with sincerity and the living (who could blame them?), unlike adults, who sometimes do not have an unironical bone in their bodies, even for things that are precisely in front of them and can threaten their existence. Paul’s and mine, though, has always been a friendship founded on sincerity’s rock.

“What do you know tonight to tickle me?” I said. Paul is a secret cataloger of corny jokes and can make anyone laugh out loud, even at a joke they’ve heard before, though he often chooses to withhold. I myself envy his memory.

For this question, though, he had to consider. He wagged his head backwards in pretend-thought, and stared into the tree boughs as if all the good jokes were up there. (What did I say about things always changing and surprising us? Who would’ve thought a drive down a dark street could produce a conversation with my own son! One in which I find out he’s in contact with his dead brother — a promising psychological indicator, though a bit unnerving — plus get to hear a joke as well.)

“Ummm, all right,” Paul said. He was all Johnny now. By the way he stuffed his hands in his pockets and averted his mouth I could tell he thought it was a pretty funny one.

“Ready?” I said. With anyone else this would spoil the joke. But with Paul it is protocol.

“Ready,” he said. “Who speaks Irish and lives in your back yard?”

“I don’t know.” I give in straight away.

“Paddy O’Furniture.” Paul could not hold back his laughter a second and neither could I. We both held our sides — he in the street, I in my car. We laughed like monkeys loud and long until tears rose in his eyes and mine, and I knew if we did not rein ourselves in, his mother would be out wondering (silently) about my “judgment.” Ethnics, though, are among our favorite joke topics.

“That’s a prize-winner,” I said, wiping a tear from my eye.

“I have another one, too. A better one,” he said, grinning and trying not to grin at the same time.

“I have to drive home now, sonny,” I said. “You’ll have to remember it for me.”

“Aren’t you coming inside?” Paul’s little eyes met mine. “You can sleep on the couch.”

“Not tonight,” I said, joy bounding in my heart for this sweet Uncle Milty. I would’ve accepted his invitation if I could, taken him up and tickled his ribs and put him in his bed. “Rain Czech.” (One of our oldest standbys.)

“Can I tell Mom?” He had sprung past the strange confusion of my not coming inside, and on to the next most important issue: disclosure, the reporting of what had happened. In this he is not at all like his father, but he may come to it in time.

“Say I was driving by, and saw you and we stopped and had a conversation like old-timers.”

“Even though it isn’t true?”

“Even though it isn’t true.”

Paul looked at me curiously. It was not the lie I had instructed him to tell — which he might or might not tell, depending on his own ethical considerations — but something else that had occurred to him.

“How long do you think it’ll take Ole Vassar to find Ralph?” he said very seriously.

“He’s probably almost there now.”

Paul’s face went somber as a churchman’s. “I wouldn’t like it to take forever,” he said. “That’d be too long.”

“Goodnight, son,” I said, suddenly full of anticipation of quite another kind. I started my motor.

“Goodnight, Dad.” He broke a smile for me. “Happy dreams.”

“You have happy dreams your own self.”

He walked back across Cleveland Street to his mother’s house, while I eased away into darkness toward home.