The Sportswriter

5

The air in Detroit Metro is bright crackling factory air. New cars revolve glitteringly down every concourse. Paul Anka sings tonight at Cobo Hall, a flashing billboard tells us. All the hotels are palaces, all the residents our best friends. Even Negroes look different here — healthy, smiling, prosperous, expensive-suited, going places with briefcases.

Our fellow passengers are all meeting people, it turns out, and are not resident Michiganders at all, though they all have come from here originally, and their relatives are their mirror-image: the women ash-blond, hippy, smiling; the men blow-dried and silent-mouthed, secretive, wearing modern versions of old-time car coats and Tyroleans, earnest beefsteak handshakes extended. This is a car coat place, a place of wintry snuggle-up, a place I’m glad to have landed. If you seek a beautiful peninsula, look around you.

Barb and Sue walk us down the concourse. They have bags-on-wheels, snazzy red blazers and shoulder purses, and they are both in jolly moods. They are looking forward to “fun weekends,” they say, and Sue gives Vicki a big lascivious wink. Barb says that Sue is married to a “major hunk” from Lake Orion who owns a bump shop, and that she may quit flying soon to get the oven warmed up. She and Ron, her own husband, she says, “are still ‘dining out.’”

“Don’t let this old gal fool ya,” Sue sings out with a big grin. “She’s a party doll. The things I could tell you would fill a book. Some of the trips we go on. Whoa.” Sue rolls her eyes and snaps her blond head famously.

“Just don’t pay any attention to all that,” Barb says. “Just enjoy yourselves, you two, and hev a seef trip home.”

“We surely will,” Vicki boasts, smiling her newcomer’s smile. “And you have a nice night, too, okay?”

“No stopping us,” Sue calls back, and off the two go toward the crew check-in, gabbing like college girls with the handsomest boys on campus waiting at the curb in big convertibles and the housemother already hoodwinked.

“Weren’t they just nice?” Vicki says, looking sentimentally detached in the midst of the mile-long Detroit bustle. She has grown momentarily pensive, though I suspect this is also from too much anticipation, and she will be herself in a jiffy. She is a great anticipator, as much as I am and maybe more. “I didn’t realize those gals were that nice and all.”

“They sure were,” I say, thinking of all the cheerleaders Sue and Barb are the spitting image of. Put a bulky letter-sweater on either of them, a flippy pleated skirt and bobby sox, and my heart would swell for them. “They were wonderful.”

“How wonderful?” Vicki says, giving me a suspicious frown.

“About one half as wonderful as you.” I grab her close to me high up under her tender arm. We are awash in shuffling Detroiters, a rock in a stream.

“Lilacs are pretty, too, but they make an ugly bush,” Vicki says, her eyes knowledgeable and small. “You’ve got the wander-eye, mister. No wonder your wife signed them papers on you.”

“That’s in the past, though,” I say. “I’m all yours, if you want me. We could get married right now.”

“I had one forever already that didn’t last,” Vicki says, meanly. “You’re talking like a nut now. I just came here to see the sights, so let’s go see ’em.” She beetles her brows as if something had briefly confused her, then the shiny smile breaks through once again and she reclaims the moment. I am, of course, talking like a nut, though I’d marry her in a flash, in the airport nondenominational chaplain’s office, with a United skycap as my best man, Barb and Sue as cosmetologically perfect bridesmaids. “Let’s get the bags, what d’ya say, boy?” she says, perky now, and on the move. “I want to get a look at that big tire ’fore they tear the sucker down.” She arches her brows at me and there’s a secret fragrant promise embedded, a sex code known only to nurses. How can I say no? “You sure have got a case of the dismal stares, all of a suddenly,” she says, ten yards away now. “Let’s get going.”

Anything can happen in another city. I had forgotten that, though it takes a real country girl to bring it home. Then I’m away, catching up, smiling, trundling on eager feet toward the baggage carrousels.

Detroit, city of lost industrial dreams, floats out around us like a mirage of some sane and glaciated life. Skies are gray as a tarn, the winds up and gusting. Flying papers and cellophane skirmish over the Ford Expressway and whap the sides of our suburban Flxible like flak as we lug our way toward Center City. Flat, dormered houses and new, brick-mansard condos run side by side in the complicated urban-industrial mix. And, as always, there is the expectation of new “weather” around the corner. Batten down the hatches. A useful pessimism abounds here and awaits.

I have read that with enough time American civilization will make the midwest of any place, New York included. And from here that seems not at all bad. Here is a great place to be in love; to get a land-grant education; to own a mortgage; to see a game under the lights as the old dusky daylight falls to blue-black, a backdrop of stars and stony buildings, while friendly Negroes and Polacks roll their pants legs up, sit side by side, feeling the cool Canadian breeze off the lake. So much that is explicable in American life is made in Detroit.

And I could be a perfect native if I wasn’t settled in New Jersey. I could move here, join the Michigan alums and buy a new car every year right at the factory door. Nothing would suit me better in middle life than to set up in a little cedar-shake builder’s-design in Royal Oak or Dearborn and have a try at another Michigan girl (or possibly even the same one, since we would have all that ready-made to build on). My magazine could install me as the midwest office. It might even spark me to try my hand at something more adventurous — a guiding service to the northern lakes, for example. A change to pleasant surroundings is always a tonic for creativity.

· · ·

“It’s just like it’s still winter here.” Vicki’s nose is to the bus’s tinted window. We have passed the big tire miles back. She peered at it silently as we drifted by, a tourist seeing a lesser pyramid. “Well,” she said as a big fenced-in Ford plant, flat and wide as Nebraska, hauled next into view, “I got that all behind me.”

“If you don’t like the weather, wait ten minutes. That’s an expression we used to say in college.”

She fattens her cheeks as Walter Reuther Boulevard flashes by, then the Fisher Building and the lumpish Olympia rises in the furred, gray distance. “They say that in Texas all the time. They prob’ly say it everywhere.” She looks back at the cityscape. “You know what my daddy says about Detroit?”

“He must not’ve liked it very much.”

“When I told him I was coming out today with you, he just said, ‘If Detroit was ever a state, it’d be New Jersey.’” She smiles at me cunningly.

“Detroit doesn’t have the diversity, though I really like both places.”

“He likes New Jersey, but he didn’t like this place.” We swerve into the long concrete trench of the Lodge freeway, headed to midtown. “He hasn’t ever liked a place much, which I always thought was kind of a shame. This place doesn’t look so bad, though. Lots of colored, but that’s all right with me. They gotta live, too.” She nods seriously to herself, then takes my hand and squeezes it as we enter a vapor-lit freeway tunnel which takes us to the riverfront and the Pontchartrain.

“This was the first city I ever knew. We used to come into town when I was in college and go to burlesque shows and smoke cigars. It seemed like the first American city to me.”

“That’s the way Dallas is to me. I’m not upset to be gone from it, though. Not a little teensy.” She purses her lips hard and turns loose of my hand. “My life’s lots better now, I’ll tell you that.”

“Where would you rather be?” I ask as the milky light of Jefferson Avenue dawns into our dark bus and passengers begin to murmur and clutch belongings up and down the aisle. Someone asks the driver about another stop farther along the hotel loop. We are all of us itchy to be there.

Vicki looks at me solemnly, as if the gravity of this city had entered her, making all lightheartedness seem sham. She is a girl who knows how to be serious. I had hoped, of course, she’d say there’s no place she’d rather than with m-e me. But I cannot mold all her wishes to my model for them, fulfill her every dream as I do my own. Yet she is as unguarded to this Detroit chill as I am, and secretly it makes me proud of her.

“Didn’t you say you went to college around here somewhere?” She’s thinking of something hard for her to come to, a glimmering of a thought.

“About forty miles away.”

“Well, what was that like?”

“It was a nice town with trees all around. A nice park for spring afternoons, decent profs.”

“Do you miss it? I bet you do. I bet it was the best time in your life and you wish you had it back. Tell the truth.”

“No ma’am,” I say. And it’s true. “I wouldn’t change from right this moment.”

“Ahhh,” Vicki says skeptically, then turns toward me in her seat, suddenly intense. “Do you swear to it?”

“I swear to it.”

She fastens her lips together again and smacks them, her eyes cast to the side for thinking power. “Well, it idn’t true with me. This is to answer where would I rather be.”

“Oh.”

Our Flxible comes hiss to a lumbering stop in front of our hotel. Doors up front fold open. Passengers move into the aisle. Behind Vicki out the tinted glass I see Jefferson Avenue, gray cars moiling by and beyond it Cobo, where Paul Anka is singing tonight. And far away across the river, the skyline of Windsor — glum, low, retrograde, benumbed reflection of the U.S. (The very first thing I did after Ralph was buried was buy a Harley-Davidson motorcycle and take off driving west. I got as far as Buffalo, halfway across the Peace Bridge, then lost my heart and turned back. Something in Canada had taken the breath of spirit out of me, and I promised never to go back, though of course I have.)

“When I think about where would I rather be,” Vicki says dreamily, “what I think about is my first day of nursing school out in Waco. All of us were lined up in the girls’ dorm lobby, clear from the reception desk out to the Coke machine between the double doors. Fifty girls. And across from where I was standing was this bulletin board behind a little glass window. And I could see myself in it. And written on that bulletin board in white letters on black was ‘We’re glad you’re here’ with an exclamation. And I remember thinking to myself, ‘You’re here to help people and you’re the prettiest one, and you’re going to have a wonderful life.’ I remember that so clearly, you know? A very wonderful life.” She shakes her head. “I always think of that.” We are last to leave the bus now, and other passengers are ready to depart. The driver is folding closed the baggage doors, our two sit on the damp and crowded sidewalk. “I don’t mean to be ole gloomy-doomy.”

“You’re not a bit of gloomy-doomy,” I say. “I don’t think that for a minute.”

“And I don’t want you to think I’m not glad to be here with you, because I am. It’s the happiest day of my life in a long time, ’cause I just love all of this so much. This big ole town. I just love it so much. I didn’t need to answer that right now, that’s all. It’s one of my failings. I always answer questions I don’t need to. I’d do better just going along.”

“It’s me that shouldn’t ask it. But you’re going to let me make you happy, aren’t you?” I smile hopefully at her. What business do I have wanting to know any of this? I’m my own worst enemy.

“I’m happy. God, I’m real happy.” And she throws her arms around me and cries a tiny tear on my cheek (a tear, I want to believe, of happiness) just as the driver cranes his neck in and waves us out. “I’d marry you,” she whispers. “I didn’t mean to make fun of you asking me. I’ll marry you any time.”

“We’ll try to fit it into our agenda, then,” I say and touch her moist soft cheek as she smiles through another fugitive tear.

And then we are up and out and down and into the dashing wet wind of Detroit, and the squabbly street where our suitcases sit in a sop of old melted snow like cast-off smudges. A lone policeman stands watching, ready to chart their destination from this moment on. Vicki squeezes my arm, her cheek on my shoulder, as I heft the two cases. Her plaid canvas is airy; mine, full of sportswriter paraphernalia, is a brick.

And I feel exactly what at this debarking moment?

At least a hundred things at once, all competing to take the moment and make it their own, reduce undramatic life to a gritty, knowable kernel.

This, of course, is a minor but pernicious lie of literature, that at times like these, after significant or disappointing divulgences, at arrivals or departures of obvious importance, when touchdowns are scored, knock-outs recorded, loved ones buried, orgasms notched, that at such times we are any of us altogether in an emotion, that we are within ourselves and not able to detect other emotions we might also be feeling, or be about to feel, or prefer to feel. If it’s literature’s job to tell the truth about these moments, it usually fails, in my opinion, and it’s the writer’s fault for falling into such conventions. (I tried to explain all of this to my students at Berkshire College, using Joyce’s epiphanies as a good example of falsehood. But none of them understood the first thing I was talking about, and I began to feel that if they didn’t already know most of what I wanted to tell them, they were doomed anyway — a pretty good reason to get out of the teaching business.)

What I feel, in truth, as I swing these two suitcases off the wet concrete and our blue bus sighs and rumbles from the curbside toward its other routed hotels, and bellboys lurk behind thick glass intent on selling us assistance, is, in a word: a disturbance. As though I were relinquishing something venerable but in need of relinquishing. I feel a quickening in my pulse. I feel a strong sense of lurking evil (the modern experience of pleasure coupled with the certainty that it will end). I feel a conviction that I have no ethics at all and little consistency. I sense the possibility of terrible regret in the brash air. I feel the need suddenly to confide (though not in Vicki or anyone else I know). I feel as literal as I’ve ever felt — stranded, uncomplicated as an immigrant. All these I feel at once. And I feel the urge — which I suppress — to cry, the way a man would, for these same reasons, and more.

That is the truth of what I feel and think. To expect anything less or different is idiotic. Bad sportswriters are always wanting to know such things, though they never want to know the truth, never have a place for that in their stories. Athletes probably think and feel the fewest things of anyone at important times — their training sees to that — though even they can be counted on to have more than one thing in their mind at a time.

“I’ll carry my own bag,” Vicki says, pressed against me like my shadow, sniffing away a final tear of arrival happiness. “It’s light as a feather duster.”

“You’re not going to do anything from now on out but have fun,” I say, both bags up and moving. “You just let me see a smile.”

And she smiles a smile as big as Texas. “Look, I ain’t p.g., you know,” she says as the pneumatic hotel doors glide away. “I always carry what’s mine.”

It is four-thirty by the time we get to our room, a tidy rectangle of pretentious midwestern pseudo-luxury — a prearranged fruit basket, a bottle of domestic champagne, blue bachelor buttons in a Chinese vase, red-flocked whorehouse wall décor and a big bed. There is an eleventh-story fisheye view upriver toward the gaunt Ren-Cen and gray pseudopodial Belle Isle in the middle distance — the shimmer-lights of suburbs reaching north and west out of sight.

Vicki takes a supervisory look in all spaces — closets, shower, bureau drawers — makes ooo’s and oh’s over what’s here free of charge by way of toiletries and toweling, then establishes herself in an armchair at the window, pops the champagne and begins to take everything in. It is exactly as I’d hoped: pleased to respectful silence by the splendor of things — a vote that I have done things the way they were meant to be.

I take the opportunity for some necessary phoning.

First, a “touch base” call to Herb to firm up tomorrow’s plans. He is in laughing good spirits and invites us to have dinner with him and Clarice at a steak place in Novi, but I plead fatigue and prior commitments, and Herb says that’s great. He has become decidedly upbeat and shaken his glumness of the morning. (He is on pretty serious mood stabilizers, is my guess. Who wouldn’t be?) We hang up, but in two minutes Herb calls back to check whether he’s given me right directions for the special shortcut once we leave I–96. Since his injury, he says, he’s suffered mild dyslexia and gets numbers turned around half the time with some pretty hilarious results. “I do the same thing, Herb,” I say, “only I call it normal.” But Herb hangs up without saying anything.

Next I call Henry Dykstra, X’s father, out in Birmingham. I have made it my policy to keep in touch with him since the divorce. And though things were strained and extremely formal between us while X’s and my affairs were in the lawyers’ hands, we have settled back since then into an even better, more frank relationship than we ever had. Henry believes it was Ralph’s death pure and simple that caused our marriage to go kaput, and feels a good measure of sympathy for me — something I don’t mind having, even if my own beliefs about these matters are a good deal more complex. I have also stayed an intermediary message-carrier between Henry and his wife, Irma, out in Mission Viejo, since she writes to me regularly, and I have let him know that I can be trusted to keep a confidence and to relay timely information which is often something surprisingly intimate and personal. “The old plow still works,” he once asked me to tell her, and I did, though she never answered that I know of. Families are very hard to break apart forever. I know that.

Henry is a robust seventy-one and, like me, has not remarried, though he often makes veiled but conspicuous references to women’s names without explanation. My personal belief — seconded by X — is that he’s as happy as a ram living on his estate by himself and would’ve had it that way from the day X was born if he could’ve negotiated Irma. He is an industrialist of the old school, who worked his way up in the Thirties and has never really understood the concept of an intimate life, which I contend is not his fault, though X thinks otherwise and sometimes claims to dislike him.

“We’re going broke, Franky,” Henry says, in a bad temper. “The whole damn country has its pants around its ankles to the unions. And we elected the S.O.B.s who’re doing it to us. Isn’t that something? Republicans? I wouldn’t give you a goddamned nickel for the first one they ever made. I stand somewhere to the right of Attila the Hun, I guess is what that means.”

“I’m not much up on it, Henry. It sounds tricky to me.”

“Tricky! It isn’t tricky. If I wanted to steal and lay off everybody at my plant I could live for a hundred years, exactly the way I live now. Never leave the house. Never leave the chair! I came up a Reuther man, you know that, Frank. Lifelong. It’s these gangsters in Washington. All of them. They’re all goddamn criminals, want to run me in the ground. Retire me out of the gasket business. What’s going on at home, anyway? You still divorced?”

“Things’re great, Henry. Today’s Ralph’s birthday.”

“Is that so?” Henry does not like to talk about this, I know, but for me it is a day of some importance, and I don’t mind mentioning it.

“I think he would’ve made a fine adult, Henry. I’m sure of that.”

For a moment then there is stupefied emptiness in our connection while we think over lost chances.

“Why don’t you come out here and we’ll get drunk,” Henry says abruptly. “I’ll have Lula fix duck en brochette. I killed the sons-of-bitches myself. We can call up some whores. I’ve got their private phone numbers right here. Don’t think I don’t call them, either.”

“That’d be great, Henry. But I’m not alone.”

“Got a shady lady with you yourself?” Henry guffaws.

“No, a nice girl.”

“Where’re you staying?”

“Downtown. I have to go back tomorrow. I’m on business today.”

“Okay, okay. Tell me why you think our golfing friend left you, Frank? Tell the truth. I can’t get it off my mind today, for some damn reason.”

“I think she wanted her life put back in her own hands, Henry. There’s not much else to it.”

“She always thought I ruined her life for men. It’s a hell of a thing to hear. I never ruined anybody’s life. And neither did you.”

“I don’t really think she thinks that now.”

“She told me she did last week! As late as that. I’m glad I’m old. It’s enough life. You’re here, then you’re not.”

“I wasn’t always such a great guy, Henry. I tried hard but sometimes you can just fool yourself about yourself.”

“Forget all that,” Henry says. “God forgave Noah. You can forgive yourself. Who’s your shady lady?”

“You’d like her. Her name’s Vicki.” Vicki swings her smiling head around and holds up a glass of champagne to toast me.

“Bring her out here, I’ll meet her. What a name. Vicki.”

“Another visit, Henry. We’re on a short schedule this time.” Vicki goes back to watching the night fall.

“I don’t blame you,” Henry says brashly. “You know, Frank, sometimes the fact of living with somebody makes living with them impossible. Irma and I were just like that. I sent her to California one January, and that was twenty years ago. She’s a lot happier. So you stay down there with Vicki whatever.”

“It’s hard to know another person. I admit that.”

“You’re better off assuming anybody’ll do anything, anytime, than that they won’t. That way you’re safe. Even my own daughter.”

“I wish I could come out there and get drunk with you, Henry, that’s the truth. I’m glad we’re pals. Irma told me to tell you she’d seen a real good performance of The Fantasticks in Mission Viejo. And it made her think of you.”

“Irma did?” Henry says. “What’s the fantastics?”

“It’s a play.”

“Well, that’s good then, isn’t it?”

“Any messages to go back? I’ll probably write her next week. She sent me a birthday card. I could add something.”

“I never really knew Irma, Frank. Isn’t that something?”

“You were pretty busy making a living, though, Henry.”

“She could’ve had boyfriends and I wouldn’t have even noticed. I hope she did. I certainly did. All I wanted.”

“I wouldn’t worry about that. Irma’s happy. She’s seventy years old.”

“In July.”

“What about a message. Anything you want to say?”

“Tell her I have bladder cancer.”

“Is that true?”

“I will have, if I don’t have something else first. Who cares anyway?”

“I care. You have to think of something else, or I’ll think of something for you.”

“How’s Paul and how’s Clarissa?”

“They’re fine. We’re taking a car trip around Lake Erie this summer. And we’ll be stopping to see you. They’re already talking about it.”

“We’ll go up to the U.P.”

“There might not be time for that.” (I hope not.) “They just want to see you. They love you very much.”

“That’s great, though I don’t know how they could. What do you think about the Maize and Blue, Franky?”

“A powerhouse, is my guess, Henry. All the seniors are back, and the big Swede from Pellston’s in there again. I hear pretty awesome stories. It’s an impressive show out there.” This is the only ritual part of our conversations. I always check with the college football boys, particularly our new managing editor, a little neurasthenic, chain-smoking Bostonian named Eddie Frieder, so I can pass along some insider’s information to Henry, who never went to college, but is a fierce Wolverine fan nonetheless. It is the only use he can think to make of my profession, and I’m not at all sure he doesn’t concoct an interest just to please me, though I don’t much like football per se. (People have some big misunderstandings about sportswriters.) “You’re going to see some fancy alignments in the defensive backfield this fall, that’s all I’ll say, Henry.”

“All they need now is to fire that meathead who runs the whole show. He’s a loser, if you ask me. I don’t care how many games he wins.”

“The players all seem to like him, from what I hear.”

“What the hell do they know? Look. The means don’t always justify the end to me, Frank. That’s what’s wrong with this country. You ought to write about that. The abasement of life’s intrinsic qualities. That’s a story.”

“You’re probably right, Henry.”

“I feel hot about this whole issue, Frank. Sports is just a paradigm of life, right? Otherwise who’d care a goddamn thing about it?”

“I know people can see it that way.” (I try to avoid that idea, myself.) “But it’s pretty reductive. Life doesn’t need a metaphor in my opinion.”

“Whatever that means. Just get rid of that guy, Frank. He’s a Nazi.” Henry says this word to rhyme with snazzy in the old-fashioned way. “His popularity’s his biggest threat.” In fact, the coach in question is quite a good coach and will probably end up in the Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio. He and Henry are almost exactly alike as human beings.

“I’ll pass a word along, Henry. Why don’t you write a letter to The Readers Speak.”

“I don’t have time. You do it. I trust you that far.”

Light is falling outside the Pontchartrain now. Vicki sits in the shadows, her back to me, hugging her knees and staring out toward the Seagram’s sign upriver half a mile, red and gold in the twilight, while little Canuck houses light up like fireflies on a dark and faraway lake beach where I have been. I could want nothing more than to hug her now, feel her strong Texas back, and fall into a nestle we’d break off only when the room service waiter tapped at our door. But I can’t be sure she hasn’t lulled to sleep in the sheer relief of expectations met — one of life’s true blessings. In a hundred ways we could not be more alike, Vicki and I, and I miss her badly, though she is only twelve feet away and I could touch her shoulder in the dark with hardly a move (this is one of the prime evils of being an anticipator).

“Frank, we don’t amount to much. I don’t know why we go to the trouble of having opinions,” Henry says.

“It puts off the empty moment. That’s what I think.”

“What the hell’s that? I don’t know what that is.”

“Then you must’ve been pretty skillful all your life, Henry. That’s great, though. It’s what I strive for.”

“How old will you be next birthday? You said you had a birthday.” For some reason Henry is gruff about this subject.

“Thirty-nine, next week.”

“Thirty-nine’s young. Thirty-nine’s nothing. You’re a remarkable man, Frank.”

“I don’t think I’m that remarkable, Henry.”

“Well no, you’re not. But I advise you, though, to think you are. I’d be nowhere if I didn’t think I was perfect.”

“I’ll think of it as a birthday present, Henry. Advice for my later years.”

“I’ll send you out a leather wallet. Fill it up.”

“I’ve got some ideas that’ll do just as good as a fat wallet.”

“Is this this Vicki trick you’re talking about?”

“Right.”

“I agree wholeheartedly. Everybody ought to have a Vicki in his life. Two’d even be better. Just don’t marry her, Frank. In my experience these Vickis aren’t for marrying. They’re sporting only.”

“I’ve got to be going now, Henry.” Our conversations often tend this way, toward his being a nice old uncle and then, as if by policy, making me want to tell him to go to hell.

“Okay. You’re mad at me now, I know it. But I don’t give a goddamn if you are. I know what I think.”

“Fill your wallet up with that then, Henry, if you get my meaning.”

“I get it. I’m not an idiot like you are.”

“I thought you said I was pretty remarkable.”

“You are. You’re a pretty remarkable moron. And I love you like a son.”

“This is the point to hang up now, Henry. Thanks. I’m glad to hear that.”

“Marry my daughter again if you want to. You have my permission.”

“Good night, Henry. I feel the same way.” But like Herb Wallagher, Henry has already hung up on me, and never hears my parting words, which I sing off into the empty phone lines like a wilderness cry.

Vicki has indeed gone to sleep in her chair, a cold stream of auto lights below, pouring up Jefferson toward the Grosse Pointes: Park, Farms, Shores, Woods, communities tidy and entrenched in midwestern surety.

I am hungry as an animal now, though when I rouse her with a hand on her soft shoulder, ready for a crab soufflé or a lobsteak, amenable to à la carte up on the revolving roof, she wakes with a different menu in mind — one a fellow would need to be ready for the old folks’ home to pass up. (She has drunk all the champagne, and is ready for some fun.)

She reaches and pulls me onto her chair so I’m across her lap and can smell the soft olive scent of her sleepy breath. Beyond the window glass in the starless drifting Detroit night an ore barge with red and green running lights aglow hangs on the current toward Lake Erie and the blast furnaces of Cleveland.

“Oh, you sweet old sweet man,” Vicki says to me, and wiggles herself comfortable. She gives me a moist soft kiss on the mouth, and hums down in her chest. “I read someplace that if the Taurus tells you he loves you, you’re s’posed to believe it. Is that so?”

“You’re a wonderful girl.”

“Hmmmm. But …” She smiles and hums.

I have a good handful of her excellent breast now, and what a wonderful bunch she is, a treasure trove for a man interested in romance. “Doesn’t that make you happy?”

“Oh, that does. You know that. You’re the only one for me.” She is no part a dreamer, I know it, but a literalist from the word go, happy to let the world please her in the small ways it can (true of fewer and fewer people, women especially). Though it is probably not an easy thing to be here with me, in a strange glassy hotel in a cold and sinister town, strange as man to a mandrill, and to believe you are in love.

“Oh, my my my,” she whispers.

“Tell me what’ll make you happiest. That’s what I’m here for, and that’s the truth” (or most of it).

“Well, don’t let’s sit on this ole chair all night and let that big ole granddaddy bed go to waste. I’m a firecracker just thinking about you. I didn’t think you’d ever get off that phone.”

“I’m off now.”

“You better look out then.”

And then the cold room folds around us, and we become lost in simple nighttime love gloom, boats rafted together through a blear passage of small perils. A fair, tender Texas girl in a dark séance. Nothing could be better, more cordial than that. Nothing. Take this from a man who knows.

Before my marriage ended but after Ralph died, in that wandering two-year period when I bought a Harley-Davidson, drove to Buffalo, taught at a college, suffered that dreaminess I have only lately begun to come out from under, and began to lose my close moorings with X without even noticing the slippage, I must’ve slept with eighteen different women — a number I don’t consider high, or especially scandalous or surprising under the circumstances. X, I’m sure, knew it, and in retrospect I can see that she did her best to accommodate it, tried to make me feel not so miserable by not asking questions, not demanding a strict accounting of my days when I would be off working in some sports mecca — a Denver or a St. Louis — expecting, I feel sure, that one day or other I would wake up out of it, as she thought she already had (but probably at this moment would be willing to doubt, wherever she might be — safe I hope).

None of this would’ve been so terrible, I believe, if I hadn’t reached a point with the women I was “seeing,” at which I was trying to simulate complete immersion — something anyone who travels for a living knows is a bad idea. But when times got bad, I would, for example, find myself after a game alone in the pressbox of some concrete and steel American sports palace. Often as not there would be a girl reporter finishing up her late running story (my eyes were sharpened for just such stragglers), and we would end up having a few martinis in some atmospheric-panoramic bar, then driving out in my renter to some little suburban foot-lit lanai apartment with rattan carpets, where a daughter waited — a little Mandy or Gretchen — and no hubby, and where before I knew it the baby would be asleep, the music turned low, wine poured, and the reporter and I would be plopped in bed together. And bango! All at once I was longing with all my worth to be a part of that life, longing to enter completely into that little existence of hers as a full (if brief) participant, share her secret illusions, hopes. “I love you,” I’ve heard myself say more than once to a Becky, Sharon, Susie or Marge I hadn’t known longer than four hours and fifteen minutes! And being absolutely certain I did; and, to prove it, loosing a barrage of pryings, human-interest questions — demands, in other words, to know as many of the whys and whos and whats of her life as I could. All of it the better to get into her life, lose that terrible distance that separated us, for a few drifting hours close the door, simulate intimacy, interest, anticipation, then resolve them all in a night’s squiggly romance and closure. “Why did you go to Penn State when you could’ve gone to Bryn Mawr?” I see, “What year did your ex-husband actually get out of the service?” Hmmm. “Why did your sister get along better with your parents than you did?” Makes sense. (As if knowing anything could make any difference.)

This, of course, was the world’s worst, most craven cynicism. Not the invigorating little roll in the hay part, which shouldn’t bother anyone, but the demand for full-disclosure when I had nothing to disclose in return and could take no responsible interest in anything except the hope (laughable) that we could “stay friends,” and how early I could slip out the next morning and be about my business or head for home. It was also the worst kind of sentimentalizing — feeling sorry for someone in her lonely life (which is what I almost always felt, though I wouldn’t have admitted it), turning that into pathos, pathos into interest, and finally turning that into sex. It’s exactly what the worst sportswriters do when they push their noses into the face of someone who has just had his head beaten in and ask, “What were you thinking of, Mario, between the time your head began to look like a savage tomato and the moment they counted you out?”

What I was doing, though I didn’t figure it out until long after I’d spent three months at Berkshire College — living with Selma Jassim, who wasn’t interested in disclosure — was trying to be within myself by being as nearly as possible within somebody else. It is not a new approach to romance. And it doesn’t work. In fact, it leads to a terrible dreaminess and the worst kind of abstraction and un-reachableness.

How I expected to be within some little Elaine, Barb, Sue or Sharon I barely knew when I wasn’t even doing it with X in my own life is a good question. Though the answer is clear. I couldn’t.

Bert Brisker would probably say about me, that at that time I wasn’t “intellectually pliant” enough, since what I was after was illusion complete and on a short-term, closed-end basis. And what I should’ve been happy with was the plain, elementary rapture a woman — any woman I happened to like — could confer, no questions asked, after which I could’ve gone home and let life please me in the ways I’d always let it. Though it’s a rare man who can find real wonder in the familiar, once luck’s running against him — which it was.

By the time I came back from teaching three months, which was near the end of this two years, I’d actually quit the whole business with women. But X had been home with Paul and Clary, and had not been communicating, and had begun reading The New Republic, The National Review and China Today, something she’d never done before, and seemed remote. I fell immediately into a kind of dreamy monogamy that did nothing but make X feel like a fool — she said so eventually — for putting up with me until her own uncertainty got aroused. I was around the house every day, but not around to do any good for anybody, just reading catalogs, lying charitably to avoid full disclosure, smiling at my children, feeling odd, visiting Mrs. Miller weekly, musing ironically about the number of different answers I could give to almost any question I was asked, watching sports and Johnny on television, wearing putter pants and plaid shirts I’d bought from L.L. Bean, going up to New York once a week and being a moderately good but committed sportswriter — all the while X’s face became indistinct, and my voice grew softer and softer until it was barely audible, even to me. Her belief — at least her way of putting things since then — was that I’d grown “untrustworthy,” which is not surprising, since I probably was, if what she wanted was to be made happy by my making life as certain as could be, which I could’ve sooner flown than do then. And when I couldn’t do that, she just began to suspect the worst about everything, for which I don’t blame her either, though I could tell that wasn’t a good idea. I contend that I felt pretty trustworthy then, in spite of everything — if she could’ve simply trusted just that I loved her, which I did. (Married life requires shared mystery even when all the facts are known.) I’d have come around before too long, I’m sure of that, and I’d have certainly been happy to have things stay the way they were while hoping for improvements. If you lose all hope, you can always find it again.

Only our house got broken into, hateful Polaroids scattered around, the letters from the woman in Kansas found, and X seemed suddenly to think we were too far gone, farther gone than we knew, and life just seemed unascendant and to break between us, not savagely or even tragically, just ineluctably, as the real writers say.

A lot happens to you in your life and comes to bear midway: your parents can die (mine, though, died years before), your marriage can change and even depart, a child can succumb, your profession can start to seem hollow. You can lose all hope. Any one thing would be enough to send you into a spin. And correspondingly it is hard to say what causes what, since in one important sense everything causes everything else.

So with all this true, how can I say I “love” Vicki Arcenault? How can I trust my instincts all over again?

A good question, but one I haven’t avoided asking myself, for fear of causing more chaos in everybody’s life.

And the answer like most other reliable answers is in parts.

I have relinquished a great deal. I’ve stopped worrying about being completely within someone else since you can’t be anyway — a pleasant unquestioning mystery has been the result. I’ve also become less sober-sided and “writerly serious,” and worry less about the complexities of things, looking at life in more simple and literal ways. I have also stopped looking around what I feel to something else I might be feeling. With all those eighteen women, I was so bound up creating and resolving a complicated illusion of life that I lost track of what I was up to — that I ought to be having a whale of a good time and forget about everything else.

When you are fully in your emotions, when they are simple and appealing enough to be in, and the distance is closed between what you feel and what you might also feel, then your instincts can be trusted. It is the difference between a man who quits his job to become a fishing guide on Lake Big Trout, and who one day as he is paddling his canoe into the dock at dusk, stops paddling to admire the sunset and realizes how much he wants to be a fishing guide on Lake Big Trout; and another man who has made the same decision, stopped paddling at the same time, felt how glad he was, but also thought he could probably be a guide on Windigo Lake if he decided to, and might also get a better deal on canoes.

Another way of describing this is that it’s the difference between being a literalist and a factualist. A literalist is a man who will enjoy an afternoon watching people while stranded in an airport in Chicago, while a factualist can’t stop wondering why his plane was late out of Salt Lake, and gauging whether they’ll still serve dinner or just a snack.

And finally, when I say to Vicki Arcenault, “I love you,” I’m not saying anything but the obvious. Who cares if I don’t love her forever? Or she me? Nothing persists. I love her now, and I’m not deluding myself or her. What else does truth have to hold?

At twelve-forty-five I am awake. Vicki sleeps beside me, breathing lightly with a soft clicking in her throat. In the room there is the dense dimensionless feeling of going to sleep in the dark though waking up still in the dark and wondering about the hours till dawn: how many will there be still? Will I suffer some unexpected despair? How am I likely to pass the time? I am usually — as I’ve said — such a first-rate sleeper that I’m not bothered by these questions. Though I’m certain part of my trouble is the ordinary thrill of being here, with this woman, free to do anything I please — that familiar old school’s out we all look and hope for. Tonight would be a good time to take a solo walk in the dark city streets, turn my collar up, get some things thought out. But I have nothing to think out.

I turn on the television with the sound off, something I often do when I’m on the road alone, while I browse a player roster or sharpen up some notes. I love the television in other cities, the assurance of looking up from my chair in some strange room to see a familiar newscaster talking in his familiar Nebraska accents, clad in a familiarly unappealing suit before a featureless civic backdrop (I can never remember the actual news); or to see an anonymous but completely engrossing athletic event acted out in a characterless domed arena, under the same lemony light, to the tune of the same faint zizzing, many miles from anywhere my face would be known. These comprise a comfort I would not like to do without.

On television the station reruns a pro basketball game I am only too happy to watch. Detroit plays Seattle. (Reruns, inciden tally, are where you learn a game inside and out. They’re far superior to the actual game in the actual place it’s played, where things are usually pretty boring and you often forget altogether about what you’re there for and find yourself getting interested in other things.)

I go get Vicki’s Le Sac bag, open it up and take out one of her Merits, and light it. I have not smoked a cigarette in at least twenty years. Not since I was a freshman in college and attended a fraternity smoker where older boys gave me Chesterfields and I stood against a wall, hands in pockets, and tried to look like the boy everyone would want to ask to join: the silent, slender southern boy with eyes older than his years, something already jaded and over-experienced about him. Just the one we need.

While I’m at it, I push down through the bag. Here is a rosary (predictable). The United inflight magazine (swiped). A card of extra pearlescent buttons (useful). Car keys to the Dart on a big brass ring with a V insignia. An open tube of Velamints. Two movie ticket stubs from a theater where Vicki and I saw part of an old Charlton Heston movie (until I fell asleep). The flight-insurance policy. A paperback copy of a novel, Love’s Last Journey, by someone named Simone La Noire. And a fat, brown leather wallet with a tooled western-motif of a big horse head on shiny grain.

In it — right up front — is a picture of a man I’ve never seen before, a swank-looking greaseball character, wearing an open-collared white shirt and a white big-knit shepherd’s roll cardigan. The fellow has thick, black eyebrows, a complicated but strict system of dark hair waves, narrow eyeslits and a knifey smile set in the pouting, mocking angle of swarthy self-congratulation. Around his pencil-neck is a gold cross on a chain. It is Everett.

The carpet king from the other Big D is a leering, hip-sprung lounge lizard in a fourth-rate Vegas motel; the kind of fellow who wears his cigarettes under his shirt sleeve, possesses long, skinny arms and steely fingers, and as a policy drinks huge amounts of cheap beer at all hours of the day and night. I would recognize him anywhere. Lonesome Pines was full of such types, from the best possible homes, and all capable of the sorriest depravities. I couldn’t be more disappointed to find his picture here. Nor more perplexed. It’s possible that he is a superior, good-natured yokel and were we ever to meet (which we won’t), we’d cement a sensible common ground from which to express earnestly our different opinions about the world. (Sports, in fact, is the perfect lingua franca for such crab-wise advances between successive boyfriends and husbands who might otherwise fall into vicious fistfights.)

But in truth I couldn’t give a damn about Everett’s selling points. And I am of a mind to flush his picture down the commode then stand my ground when the first complaint is offered.

I take a deep, annoyed drag on my cigarette and attempt a difficult French Inhale I once saw practiced in college. But the smoke gets started backwards in my throat and not up my nose, and suddenly I’m seized by a terrifying airlessness and have to suppress a horrible gagging. I make a swift stagger into the bathroom and close the door to keep from waking Vicki with a loud grunt-cough that purples my face.

In the bathroom mirror I resemble a wretched sex-offender — cigarette dangling in my fingers, blue-piped pajamas rumpled, my face gaunt from gasping, the stern light pinching my eyes narrow as Everett’s. I am not a pretty sight, and I’m not a bit happy to see myself here. I should have gone out in the streets alone and figured out something to figure out. Certain situations dictate to you how they should be used to advantage. And you should always follow the conventional wisdom in those cases — in fact, in all cases. Always go up on deck to watch the sun come up. Always take a late-night swim after your hosts are in bed. Always take a hike in the woods near your friends’ cabin and try to find a new route to the waterfall or an old barn to explore. If nothing else you save yourself giving in to a more personal curiosity and the trouble that always seems to cause. I have gone poking around after full disclosure before my disavowal of it is barely out of my mouth — a disappointing testimony to self-delusion, even more disappointing than finding dagger-head Everett’s picture in Vicki’s pocketbook where, after all, it had every right to be and I had none.

When I exit the bathroom Vicki is seated at the dressing table, smoking one of her own Merits, elbow on the chair back, the TV off, looking sultry and alien as a dancehall girl. She is wearing a black crepe de Chine “push up” nightgown and matching toeless mules. I don’t like the spiky looks of this (though it’s conceivable I might’ve liked it earlier in the evening) since it looks like something Everett would like, might even have bought himself as a final, fragrant memento. I would not stand for it one minute if I was calling the shots, which I’m not.

“I didn’t mean to wake you up,” I say balefully and slink to the end of the big granddaddy bed, two feet from her sovereign knees, where I take a seat. Evil has begun to lurk the room, ready to grip with its cold literal claws. My heart begins pounding the way it was when I woke up this morning, and I feel as if my voice may become inaudible.

I am caught. Though I would save the moment, save us from anger and regret and even more disclosure, the enemy of intimacy. I wish I could blurt out a new truth; that I suffer from a secret brain tumor and sometimes do inexplicable things I afterwards can’t discuss; or that I’m writing a piece on pro basketball and need to see the end of the Seattle game where Seattle throws up a zone and everything comes down to one shot the way it always does. The saved moment is the true art of love.

Staring, though, at Vicki’s sculptured, vaguely padded knees, I now am clearly lost and feel the ultimate slipping away again, bereavement threatening like thunder to roll in and take its place.

“So what is it you were lookin for in my bag?” she says. Hers is a frown of focused disdain. I am the least favorite student caught looking for the gradebook in the teacher’s desk. She is the friendly substitute there for one day only (though we all wish she were the regular one) but who knows a sneak when she sees him.

“I wasn’t looking for anything, really. I wasn’t looking.” I was looking, of course. And this is the wrong lie, though a lie is absolutely what’s needed. My first tiny skirmish with the facts goes into the debit column. My voice falls ten full decibels. This has happened before.

“I don’t keep secrets,” she says now in a flat voice. “I suppose you do though.”

“Sometimes I do.” I lose nothing admitting that.

“And you lie about things, too.”

“Only if it’s completely necessary. Otherwise never.” (It is better than confiding.)

“And like lovin me, too, I guess?”

A sweet girl’s heart only speaks truths. Evil suddenly takes an unexpected rebuke. “You’re wrong there,” I say, and nothing could be truer.

“Humph,” she says. Her brow gathers over small prosecutorial eyes. “And I’m s’pose to believe that now, right? With you ram-maging around my things and smokin cigarettes and me dreaming away?”

“You don’t have to believe it for it to be true.” I put my elbows on my knees, honest-injun style.

“I hate a snake,” she says, looking coldly around at the ashtray beside her as if a dead snake were coiled right there. “I just swear I do. I stay way clear of ’em. Cause I seen plenty. Right? They’re not hard to recognize, either.” She cuts her eyes away at the door to the hall and sniffs a little mirthless laugh. “That was just a lie on me, wadn’t it?”

“The only way you’ll find that out, I guess, is just to stay put.” Out in the chilly streets I hear a police siren wail down the wide, dark avenue and drawl off into the traffic. Some poor soul is having it worse than I am.

“So what about getting married?” she says archly.

“That, too.”

She smirks her mouth into a look of disillusionment and shakes her head. She stubs out her cigarette carefully in the ashtray. She has seen this all before. Motel rooms. Two A.M. Strange sights. The sounds of strange cities and sirens. Lying boys out for the fun and a short trip home. Empty moments. The least of us has seen a hundred. It is no wonder mystery and its frail muted beauties have such a son-of-a-bitching hard time of it. They’re way outnumbered and ill-equipped in the best of times.

“Well-o-well,” she says and shrugs, hands down between her knees in a fated way.

But still, something has been won back, some aspirant tragedy averted. I am not even sure what it is, since evil still floods the room up to the cornices. The Lebanese woman I knew at Berkshire College would never have let this happen, no matter what I had done to provoke it, since she was steeled for such things by a life of Muslim disinterest. X wouldn’t either, though for other, even better reasons (she expected more). Vicki is hopeful, but not of much, and so is never far from disappointment.

Still, the worst reconciliation with a woman is better than the best one you work out with yourself.

“There’s nothing in this bag worth stealin, or even finding out about,” Vicki says wearily, everting her lips at her weekender as if it were a wreckage that has washed ashore after years of not being missed. “Money,” she says languidly, “I keep hid in a special place. That’s one secret I keep. You won’t get that.”

I want to hug her knees, though this is clearly hands-to-yourself time. The slightest wrong move will see me on the phone locating another room on another floor, possibly in the Sheraton, four cold and lonely blocks away, and no coat to keep out the slick Canadian damp.

Vicki peers over at the glass desktop, at her wallet open alongside her cigarettes. The snapshot of brain-dead Everett leers upwards (it may in fact be hard to tell my somber, earnest face from his).

“I really believe there’s only six people in the world,” she says in a softened voice, staring down at Everett’s mug. “I’d been thinking you might be one. An important one. But I think you had too many girlfriends already. Maybe you’re somebody else’s one.”

“You might be wrong. I could still make the line-up.”

She looks at me distrustfully. “Eyes are important to me, okay? They’re windows to your soul. And your eyes … I used to think I could see your soul back in there. But now….” She shakes her head in doubt.

“What do you see?” I don’t want to hear the answer. It is a question I would never even ask Mrs. Miller, and one she’d never take it upon herself to speculate about. We do not, after all, deal in truths, only potentialities. Too much truth can be worse than death, and last longer.

“I don’t know,” Vicki says, in a thin wispy way, which means I had better not pursue it or she’ll decide. “What’re you so interested in my stepbrother for?” She looks at me oddly.

“I don’t know your stepbrother,” I say.

She picks up the wallet and holds the snapshot up so I am looking directly into the swarthy smart-aleck’s face. “Him,” she says. “This poor old thing, here.”

So much of life can’t be foreseen. A hundred private explanations and exculpations come rushing up into my throat, and I have to swallow hard to hold them back. Though, of course, there is nothing to say. Like all needless excuses, the unraveling is not worth the time. However, I feel a swirling dreaminess, an old familiar bemusement, suddenly rise into my appreciation of everything around me. Irony is returned. I have a feeling that if I tried to speak now, my mouth would move, but no sound would occur. And it would scare us both to death. Why, in God’s name, isn’t it possible to let ignorance stay ignorance?

“That poor boy’s already dead and gone to heaven,” Vicki says. She turns the picture toward her and looks at it appraisingly. “He got killed at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. A Army truck hit him. He’s my Daddy’s wife’s son. Was. Bernard Twill. Beany Twill.” She pops the wallet closed and puts it on the table. “I didn’t even really know him. Lynette just gave me his picture for my wallet when he died. I don’t know how come I kept it.” She looks at me in a sweet way. “I’m not stayin mad. It’s just an old purse with nothin in it. Women’re strange on their purses.”

“I’m going to get back in bed,” I say in a voice that is hardly a whisper.

“Long as you’re happy, to hell with the rest. That’s a good motto, isn’t it?”

“Sure. It’s great,” I say, crawling into the big cold bed. “I’m sorry about all this.”

She smiles and sits looking at me as I pull the sheet up around my chin and begin to think that it is not a hard life to imagine, not at all, mine and Vicki Arcenault’s. In fact, I would like it as well as it’s possible to like any life: a life of small flourishes and clean napkins. A life where sex plays an ever-important nightly role — better than with any of the eighteen or so women I knew before and “loved.” A life appreciative of history and its generations. A life of possible fidelity, of going fishing with some best friend, of having a little Sheila or a little Matthew of our own, of buying a fifth-wheel travel trailer — a cruising brute — and from its tiny portholes seeing the country. Paul and Clarissa could come along and join our gang. I could sell my house and move not to Pheasant Run but to an old Quakerstone in Bucks County. Possibly when our work is done, a tour in the Peace Corps or Vista — of “doing something with our lives.” I wouldn’t need to sleep in my clothes or wake up on the floor. I could forget about being in my emotions and not be bothered by such things.

In short, a natural extension of almost all my current attitudes taken out beyond what I now know.

And what’s wrong with that? Isn’t it what we all want? To look out toward the horizon and see a bright, softened future awaiting us? An attractive retirement?

Vicki turns on the television and takes up a rapt stare at its flicking luminance. It’s ice skating at 2 A.M. (basketball’s a memory). Austria, by the looks of it. Cinzano and Rolex decorate the boards. Tai and Randy are skating under steely control. He is Mr. Elegance — flying camels, double Salchows, perfect splits and lofts. She is all in the world a man could want, vulnerable yet fiery, lithe as a swan, in this their once-in-a-lifetime, every thing-right for a flawless 10. Together they perform a perfect double axel, two soaring triple toe loops, a spinning Lutz jump, then come to rest with Tai in a death spiral on the white ice, Randy her goodly knight. And the Austrians cannot control it one more second. These two are as good as the Protopopovs, and they’re Americans. Who cares if they missed the Olympics? Who cares if rumors are true that they despise each other? Who cares if Tai is not so beautiful up close (who is, ever)? She is still exotic as a Berber with regal thighs and thunderous breasts. And what’s important is they have given it their everything, as they always do, and every Austrian wishes he could be an American for just one minute and can’t resist feeling right with the world.

“Oh, don’t you just love them two?” Vicki says, sitting cross-legged on her chair, smoking a cigarette and peering into the brightly lit screen as though staring into a colorful dream-life.

“It’s pretty wonderful,” I say.

“Sometimes I want to be her so much,” she says, blowing smoke out the corner of her mouth. “Really. Ole Randy….”

I turn and close my eyes and try to sleep as the applause goes on, and outside in the cold Detroit streets more sirens follow the first one into the night. And for a moment I find it is really quite easy and agreeable not to know what’s next, as if the sirens were going out into this night for no one but me.