The Sportswriter

7

Mr. Smallwood is the best possible confederate for my circumstances.

“You look like you could use a pick-me-up,” he says, once we are going, and hands back a bottle half out of its flimsy paper bag. I drink down a good gulp that makes me flubber my lips — it is peppermint and sweet as cough syrup, but I’m happy to have it in me, and take a second big gulp. “You musta had you a time,” Mr. Smallwood says as we hiss past the remnants of a long, charred building on the landward side of the lakefront road. A dismembered line of cabins stands opposite. The big building was once a Quonset hut with a barn built on behind, though snow is piled on its blackened interior timbers, one of which is a long bar. Grass has grown up. No one, apparently, has thought to find a new use for the land. My past in decomposition and trivial disarray.

“These peoples out here’re crazy,” Mr. Smallwood announces widely, steering chauffer-style with one huge hand on the plastic steering knob, the other stretched over the seat back. “Sur-burban peoples, I’m tellin you. Houses full of guns, everybody mad all the time. Oughta cool out, if you ask me. I ain’t been out here in years, couldn’t even figure out which street was which. I used to come out here all the time.” We pull up onto the expressway back toward Big D, invisible now in mossy green clouds that tell of snow and possibly a marooning storm. “Look here now.” Mr. Smallwood catches my eye in the rearview and leans backwards in his driver’s seat for a speculative stretch. “How much money you got?”

“Why?”

“Well, for a hundred dollars I could make a phone call up here at a gas station and the first thing you know, somebody be done made you feel a whole lot better.” Mr. Smallwood grins a big happy grin at the back seat, and I think for a moment about a hundred dollar whore, the kindness she might bring, like the pharmacy sending over an expensive prescription to get you through a rough night. A trip to the hot springs. Something wordless to patch the tissue of innocent words that holds life in its most positive attitude. Too much serious talk and self-explanation and you’re a goner.

What Herb needs, of course, and can’t have, is to strap on a set of pads and beat the daylights out of somebody and quit worrying about theories of art. He is a man without a sport, when a sport is exactly what he needs. With better luck we might’ve summoned up a vi vider memory of his playing days, seen the game films. Herb could get back within himself, shake off alienation and dreary doubt, and play through pain — be the inspiration he was put on earth to be.

I tell Mr. Smallwood no thanks, and he chuckles in a mirthful-derisive way. Then for a while we wind back toward town without speaking, taking the Lodge this time since the snow is off and the traffic gone north, leaving the expressway gray and wintry.

Across from Tiger Stadium, Mr. Smallwood stops at a liquor store owned, he says, by his brother-in-law, a little Fort Knox of steel mesh and heavy bullet-proof glass. Across the avenue the big stadium hulks up white and lifeless. A message on its marquee says simply, “Sorry Folks. Have a Good One.”

Mr. Smallwood ambles across and buys another pint bottle of schnapps, which I insist on paying for, and he and I treat ourselves to a warm elevation of spirits on the short trip down to the Pontchartrain. He says he is a Tiger fan and that he believes it’s time for a dynasty. He also tells me that his parents moved up from Magnolia, Arkansas, in the Forties, and that for a while he attended Wayne State before he got married and went to work at Dodge Main. He quit that last year, he says, a jump ahead of the lay-offs, and bought his taxi. And he is happy to name his own hours now and to go home every day at noon for lunch with his wife and to rest an hour before getting back onto the street for the afternoon rush. Someday he hopes to retire to Arkansas. He doesn’t ask me about myself, either too courteous or too engaged in his own interesting life of work and discretionary time. His is a nice life, a life that would be easy to envy if you didn’t have one just as good. I calculate him to be not much older than I am.

At the hotel Mr. Smallwood leans across the seat to where he can see me out on the windy pavement putting money back in my wallet. For an instant I think he means to shake my hand, but that is not on his mind at all. I have already paid him our agreed fare, and the schnapps bottle is on the floor beside his considerable leg. My gift to him.

“There’s a good chop house down on Larned,” he says in a tour guide’s voice and with a grin that makes me wonder if he isn’t making fun of me. “Steaks big as this.” He holds two big chunky fingers two full inches apart. “You can walk from here. It’s safe. I take the wife now and then. You can drink some wine, have a good time.” For some reason Mr. Smallwood has started talking like a second generation Swede, and I understand he isn’t making fun of me at all, only trying to be a good ambassador for his city, putting on the voice he has learned for it.

“That’s great,” I say, not quite hearing all this insider’s dining advice, turning an ear instead into the windy sibilance of the city air. Snow flakes are falling now.

“Come on back when the weather’s nicer,” he says. “You’ll like it a whole lot better.”

“When will that be?” I smile, giving him the old Michigan straight line.

“Ten minutes maybe.” He cracks a big wisecracker’s grin, the same as his hundred-dollar-whore grin. And with the slap-shut of the yellow door, he shoots off down the street, leaving me at the hissing curbside as solitary as a lonely end.

Though not for long.

Back in the room, the TV is on without sound. The drapery is drawn and two trays of dishes are set outside. Vicki lies naked as a jaybird on the rumpled bed, drinking a 7-Up and reading the in flight magazine. Air in the room is hot and close, changed from the sleep-soft night smell. Only the sad old familiarity from the dreamy days after Ralph died is left: lost in strangerville with a girl I don’t know well enough and can’t figure how to revive an interest in (or, for her sake, an interest in me that would compensate). It is a tinny, minor-key feeling, a far-flung longing for conviction among the convictionless.

“I’m sure glad to set you” she says, giving me a happy smile in the blinky TV light. I stand in the little dark entryway, my two feet heavy as anchors, and I can’t help thinking of my life as a scene in some steamy bus station novel. Big Sledge moved toward the girl cat-quick, trapping her where he’d wanted her, between his cheap drifter’s suitcase and the pile of greasy tire chains against the back of the lube bay. Now she would see what’s what. They both would. “How’d everything work out with your old football guy?”

“Dandy.” I go to the window, pull back the heavy curtain and look out. Snow is dazzling an inch from my face, falling in burly flakes onto Jefferson Avenue. The river is lost in white, as is Cobo. In the street, flashing yellow beacons signal the first snowplows. I feel I can hear their skid and clatter, but I’m sure I do not. “I don’t like the looks of this weather. We might have to change our plans.”

“A-Okay,” she says. “I’m just happy to be here today with you. I can go to the aquarium someplace else. They must be alike.” She sets her 7-Up on her bare belly and stares at it, thinking.

“I wanted this to be a nice vacation for you, though. I had a lot of plans.”

“Well, keep ’em, cause I’ve had a plenty good time. I ordered beer-batter shrimp up here, which was a meal in itself. I put on my clothes and went downstairs and looked in the shops which’re nice, though they’re like Dallas’s in a lot of similar ways. I think I might’ve seen Paul Anka, but I’m not sure. He’s about half the size I thought he’d be if it was him, and I already knew he was tiny.”

I sit in the chair beside the coffee table. Her uncovered beauty is unexpectedly what I need to make the transition back (the familiar can still surprise and should). Hers is an altogether ordinary nakedness, a sleek curve of bust, a plump darkening thigh tapered to a dainty ankle, a willing smile of no particular intention — all in all, a nice bundle for a lonely fellow to call his in a strange city when time’s to kill.

On television the face of a pallid newsman is working dramatically without sound. Believe! his eyes say. This stuff is the God’s truth. It’s what you want.

“Do you believe women and men can just be friends,” Vicki says.

“I guess so,” I say, “once the razzle-dazzle’s over. I like the razzle-dazzle though.”

“Yeah, me too.” Her smile broadens and she crosses her arms over her soft breasts. She has, I can tell, been captured by a thought, an event she likes and wants to share. At heart she could not be kinder and could make someone the most rewarding wife. Only for some reason it does not seem as likely to be me as it once did. She may have caught this very mood in the wind today and be as puzzled by it as I am. Though she is nobody’s fool.

“I called Everett on the phone,” she says, and looks down at her knees, which are bent upwards. “I used my charge number.”

“You could’ve used this one.”

“Well. I used mine, anyway.”

“How is old Everett?” Of course I have never seen ole Everett and can be as chummy as a barber with the far-off idea of him.

“He’s okay. He’s into Alaska now. He said people need carpets up there. He also said he’s shaved his head bald as a cue ball. I told him I was in a big suite, looking out at a renaissance center. I didn’t say where.”

“What’d he think about that.”

“‘As the world turns,’ is what he said, which is about standard. He wanted to know would I send him back his stereo I got in the divorce. Everything’s sky high up there, I guess, and if you come with all you need, you start ahead.”

“Did he want you to go with him?”

“No, he did not. And I wouldn’t either. You don’t have to marry somebody like Everett but once in a lifetime. Twice’ll kill you. He’s got some ole gal with him, anyway, I’m sure.”

“What did he want, then?”

“I called him, remember.” She frowns at me. “He didn’t want anything. Haven’t you ever got the phonies in your life?”

“Only when I’m lonesome, sweetheart. I didn’t think you were lonesome.”

“Right,” she says and looks at the silent television.

Detroit, I can see now, has not affected her exactly as I had hoped, and she has become wary. Of what? Possibly in the lobby she saw someone who reminded her too much of herself (that can happen to inexperienced travelers). Or worse. That no one there reminded her of anyone she ever knew. Both can be threatening to a good frame of mind and usher in a gloomy remoteness. Though calling up an old lover or husband can be the perfect antidote. They always remind you of where you’ve been and where you think you’re going. And if you’re lucky, wherever you are at the moment — in the Motor City, in a snowstorm — can seem like the right place on the planet. Though I’m not certain Vicki has been so lucky. She may have found an old flame burning and not know what to do about it.

“Do you feel like you wanted to be friends with Everett?” I start with the most innocent of questions and work toward the most sensitive.

“No-ho way.” She reaches down and pulls the sheet up over her. She is even warier now. It may be she wants to tell me something and can’t quite find the words. But if I’m to be relegated to the trash heap of friendship, I want to do a friend’s one duty: let her be herself. Though I’d be happier to snuggle up under the sheets and rassle around till plane time.

“Did you hang up feeling like you wanted to be friends with me?” I say, and smile at her.

Vicki turns over on the big bed and faces the other wall, the white sheet clutched up under her chin and the crisp hotel percale stretched over her like a winding. I have hit the tender spot. A day and a night with me has made even Everett look good. Something else is needed, and I don’t fit the bill even with champers, a demi-suite, bachelor buttons and a view of Canada. Maybe that isn’t even surprising when you come down to it, since by scaling down my own pleasures I may have sold short her hopes for herself. I, however, am an expert in taking things like this lying down. For writers — even sportswriters — bad news is always easier than good, since it is, after all, more familiar.

“I don’t want to be friends. Not just,” Vicki says in a tiny, mouse voice from a mound of white covers. “I really thought I was gettin a new start with you.”

“Well, what happened to make you think you weren’t? Just because you caught me going through your purse?”

“Shoot. That didn’t matter,” she says, smally. “Live and let die, I say. You can’t help yourself. Yesterday wasn’t the tiptop day for you in the year.”

“Then, what’s the matter?” I wonder, in fact, how many times I have said that or something equal to it to a woman passing palely through my life. What’re you thinking? What’s made you so quiet? You seem suddenly different. What’s the matter? Love me is what this means, of course. Or at least, second best: surrender. Or at the very least, take some time regaling me with why you won’t, and maybe by the end you will.

Outside a wind makes a sharp oceanic woo around the corner of the hotel, then off into the cold, paltry Detroit afternoon. By five it could as easily turn to rain, by six the stars could be out and by nighttime Vicki and I could be strolling down Larned for a steak or a chop. You can never completely count on things out here. Life is counterpoised against a mean wind that could suddenly cease.

“Well,” Vicki says, and turns over to face me out of a grotto of pillows and sheets. “When I went downstairs, you know, when you were gone? I just went to be a part of something. I didn’t need anything. And I went in the little newsstand down there, and I picked up this paperback. How To Take On The World, by Doctor Barton. Because I felt like I was starting over in one way, like I said. You and me. So I stood there at the rack and read one chapter called ‘Our New-Agers.’ Which was about these people who won’t eat potato chips and who join these self-discovery groups, and drink mineral water and have literary discussions every day. People that think it oughta be easy to express their feelings and be how you seem. And I just started cryin, cause I realized that that was you, and I was someplace way off the beam. Back with the potato chips and people who aren’t inner-looking. Here we’d come all the way out here, and all I could do was eat shrimp and watch TV and cry. And it wasn’t working out. So I thought maybe we could be friends if you wanted to. I called up Everett because I knew I could bring it off with him and quit crying. I knew I was better off than him.” A big handsome tear leaves her eye, goes off her nose and vanishes into the pillow. I have managed to make two different people cry inside of two hours. I am doing something wrong. Though what?

Cynicism.

I have become more cynical than old Iago, since there is no cynicism like lifelong self-love and the tunnel vision in which you yourself are all that’s visible at the tunnel’s end. It’s embarrassing. Likewise, there’s nothing guaranteed to make people feel more worthless than to think someone is trying to help them — even if you’re not. A cynical “New-Ager” is exactly me, a sad introspecter and potato chip avoider with a queasy heart-to-heart mentality — though I would give the crown jewels not to be, or at least not be thought to be.

My only hope now is to deny everything — friendship, disillusionment, embarrassment, the future, the past — and make my stand for the present. If I can hold her close in this cold-hot afternoon, kiss her and hug away her worries with ardor, so that when the sun is down and the wind stops and a spring evening draws us, maybe I will love her after all, and she me, and all this will just have been the result of too little sleep in a strange town, schnapps and Herb.

“I’m not really a New-Ager,” I say and take a seat on the bed shoulder, where I can touch her cheek, warm as a baby’s. “I’m just an old-fashioned Joe who’s been misunderstood. Let’s pretend we just got here and it’s late at night, and I had you in my old-fashioned arms to love.”

“Oh my.” She puts a tentative hand on my shoulder and gives it a friendly pat. “I bet you think I got it all wrong.” She gives a stout sniff. “That I can’t even make myself miserable and do it right.”

“You’re just no good at messin up.” I put a heavy hand on her soft breast. “You just have to let good things be good if they will. Don’t worry about more than you have to.”

“I shouldn’t read, is what it is. It always gets me in trouble.” She reaches both hands around my neck and pulls hard, so hard once again a crippling pain goes down my back clear to my buttocks.

“Oh,” I say, involuntarily. On TV a skier is just about to push out the timer gate onto a slope longer and higher than any I’ve ever seen. Snow is falling wherever he is. I wouldn’t do what he’s doing for a million dollars.

“Oh my,” she says, for I have found her in the lemony light. “My, my, my.”

“You sweet girl,” I say. “Who wouldn’t love you?”

Outside in the cold city the wind goes woo again and I can, I think, hear the tufted snow dashing against the window, sending shivers through every soul in Detroit who thinks he knows a thing or two and who is willing to bet his life on it. I leave the TV on, since even now, in its prying presence, I still find it consoling.

By five o’clock, we have taken a cab trip up Jefferson to the Belle Isle Botanical Garden, and are back in the room suffering a case of the wall-stare willies, something sportswriter’s know a lot about. We are like the family of a traveling salesman, come along for the adventure and diversion, but who find themselves with too much time to kill while business gets conducted; too many unfamiliar streets leading too far away; too little going on in the hotel lobby to make people-watching all that rewarding.

The Botanical Garden turned out to be cold and alien-feeling, though we trudged down aisles of ferns and succulents and passion flowers until Vicki announced a headache. The most interesting rooms all seemed to be closed — in particular a re-creation of an eighteenth-century French herb garden, which we could see through the glass door and that caught both our fancies. A sign hung in the window saying Detroit was not generous enough in its tax attitudes to support this century properly. And in less than an hour we were back out in the cold and snow of afternoon on the windy concrete steps. A muddy playing field stretched away from us toward the boat basin, with the big river invisible and low behind a crescent-line of poplar saplings. Public places can sometimes let you down no matter how promising they start out.

Delivered back outside our hotel, I offered a short walk down Larned to “a great little steak house I know about.” Though when we had gone as far as Woodward, everyone we saw had become black and vaguely menacing, the taxis and police all unexplainably disappeared, and Vicki clung to me ashiver from the wintry norther that’d dropped in on us from bland Canada.

“I’m not really dressed for this, I don’t think,” she said beneath my arm, and smiled a daunted smile. “I’d settle for a Tuna Alladin at the coffee shop, if that’s okay with you.”

“I guess they’ve moved the steak place,” I said and gazed up weekend-empty Woodward toward the Grand Circus where, when I was a college boy, Eddy Loukinen, Golfball Kirkland and I cruised the burlesque houses and the schooner bars, then drove the forty miles back to campus full of the mystique of soldiers on a last leave before shipping out to fates you wouldn’t smile about It was incongruous to me, in fact, that the year could’ve been 1963. Not ’73 or ’53. Sometimes I can even forget my own age and the year I’m living in, and think I am twenty, a kid starting new in the world — a greener, confused by life at its beginning.

“Towns aren’t even towns anymore,” Vicki said, sensing my distraction with this sad evolution, and giving me a hug around my middle. “Dallas wasn’t ever one, when you get right down to it. It’s just a suburb looking for a place to light.”

“I remember they had a first class wine list there,” I said, still gazing up Woodward toward the phantom steakhouse, past the old Sheraton and into the abandonment and dazzle of sex clubs and White Castles and bibliothèques sensuelles stretching to where snow made a backdrop.

“I can taste the cheddar cheese already,” she said in reference to her Tuna Alladin, trying to be upbeat. “I bet they’ve got just as good a wine for half the price back at the hotel. You’re just looking for someplace else to spend your money again.” And she was right, and wheeled me around and set us off back to the Pontch, watching our toes on the snowy pavement, taking long, slew-footed strides and laughing like conventioneers turned loose on the old town.

Though by five we are room-bound here, driven in by unseasonable weather and the forbidding streets of this city. We have tried to make the most of everything that’s come our way: a belly-buster lunch in the Frontenac Grill complete with a bottle of Michigan beaujolais. A long nap in a fresh bed, after which I have stood at the window and watched another ore barge down from Lake Superior ply the snowy river, headed, like the one last night, for Cleveland or Ashtabula. It’s possible I should put in a call to Herb, or even to Clarice, though I don’t know what I’d say and finally lack the courage. I might also call Rhonda Matuzak to report I’ve found out nothing usable for the Pigskin Preview. People are in the office this weekend, though it’s doubtful anyone’s counting on me. Mine, for the moment, is not the best sportswriter’s attitude.

“I’ll tell you what let’s do,” Vicki says suddenly. She is seated at the vanity twisting in some Navajo earrings she has bought with her money at the gift shop. They are tiny as pin-heads, lovely and blue as hyacinths.

“You just name it,” I say, looking up from the Out on the Town, which I’ve read cover to cover without finding one local attraction I have the heart for — including Paul Anka, who’s already left town. Even a cab ride to Tiger Stadium and a Mexican dinner seem somehow second rate.

“Let’s go on out to the airport and stand-by for a flight. Nobody goes any place on Saturday. I remember from when I used to watch planes for fun, they used to let people on with tickets for other days. They’re good about that.”

“I thought we’d make a festive night of it,” I say half-heartedly. “I was planning on Greek Town. There’s still plenty to do here.”

“Sometimes, you know, you just get the bug to sleep in your own bed, don’t you think that’s so? We’re s’posed to be at Daddy’s tomorrow before noon anyway. This’ll make it easier.”

“Aren’t you going to be disappointed to miss souvlaki and bak-lava?”

“I don’t even know where they’re located so how could I miss ’em? I bet you have to drive through some snow to get there though.”

“I haven’t been much of a high-flier this trip. I don’t really know what happened.”

“Nothing did.” Looking in the mirror, Vicki pulls back her dark curls to model the Navajos, pinched in behind her plump cheeks. She turns to the side to see and gives me a reassuring smile via the mirror. “I don’t have to ride the merry-go-round to have fun. I take mine from who I’m with, not what I do. I’ve had the best time I could, just being with you, and you’re a clubfoot not to know it.”

“What if the airport’s closed?”

“Then I’ll sit and read stories to you out of movie magazines. There’s worse things than spending the night in the airport. Sometimes I’d rather be there than lots of places.”

“It wouldn’t be that bad, would it?”

“No sir. Put yourself in one of those little TV chairs, eat dinner in a good restaurant. Get your shoes shined. It’d take you all night to hit the high spots,”

“I’ll call us a bellman,” I say, and stand up.

“I don’t know why we waited this long.” She smiles at me.

“I guess I was waiting for something exciting and unusual to happen. I always hope for that. It’s my weakness.”

“You have to know, though, when what you’re waiting for says, ‘Smile, you’re on candid camera.’ Then you got to be ready to smile.”

And I do smile, at her, as I reach for the phone to ring the bell captain. A small future brightens, and not a bad one, but an ordinary good one. And, as I dial, I feel the sky of this long day lighten about me now for the first time, and the clouds begin at last to ascend.

By ten we are in New Jersey as if by miracle of time travel, returned from the flat midwest to the diverse seaboard. Vicki has slept across Lake Erie once again after reading to me several excerpts from Daytime Confidential, all of which made me laugh, but which she took more seriously and seemed to want to mull over, I read a good deal of Love’s Last Journey and found it not bad at all. There was no long flashback prologue to get past, and the writer proved pretty skillful at getting the ball rolling by page two. I woke her only when the pilot banked over what I estimated to be Red Bank, with bright Gotham (the Statue of Liberty tiny but distinct, like a Japanese doll of herself) and all of New Jersey spread out like a glittering diamond apron, the Atlantic and Pennsylvania looming dark as the Arctic.

“What’s that thing,” Vicki asked, staring and pointing below us into the distant carnival of civilized lights.

“That’s the Turnpike. You can see where it meets the Garden State at Woodbridge and heads to New York.”

“Hey-o,” she said.

“I think it’s beautiful from up here.”

“You prob’ly do,” she said. “No telling what you’ll think’s beautiful next. A junk yard I guess.”

“I think you’re beautiful.”

“More than a junk yard. A junk yard in New Jersey?”

“Almost.” I squeezed her strong little arm and held it to me.

“You said the wrong thing now.” Her eyes narrowed in mock pique. “I liked you to this point. But I don’t see how this can go on.”

“You’ll break my heart.”

“It won’t be the first one I broke, will it?”

“What if I’m better?”

“’Bout too late,” she said. “You should of considered all that before you were even born.” She shook her head as though she meant every word of it, then settled back and closed her eyes to sleep as our silver ship perfected its descent to earth.

By eleven-fifteen I have delivered us to Pheasant Meadow. It has become a clear and intensely full-featured night, with the moon waning and tomorrow’s weather giving no sign of arriving from Detroit. It’s the very kind of night that used to make me disoriented and dizzy — the sort of night I stood out in the yard in, while X was inside burning her hope chest, and charted Cassiopeia and Gemini in the northern sky and felt vulnerable beside the rhododendrons. Since then, to be truthful, I have never felt all that easy with the clear night sky, as if I was seeing it from the top of a high building and afraid to look down. (I tend to prefer broken cirrus or mackerel clouds to a pure, starry vault.)

“Don’t bother walkin me,” Vicki says, already out the car door and with her head back inside the window. I have stopped behind her Dart. The hard-hat guys from yesterday have finished off a phony mansard across the lot, although none of the finished buildings have roofs like that. Naturally I was hoping for an invitation inside — a nightcap. But I see my hopes on that front are slim. She has become skittish now, as though someone else was waiting upstairs.

“Tomorrow’s the day he rolled back the stone and raised up from the dead,” she says in all seriousness, staring straight at me as if I was expected to recite a psalm. She has her Le Sac weekender looped over her shoulder and her Navajo earrings on. “I might go to early mass, just for keeping us safe, that and the insurance. Or I might go to the drive-in Methodists in Hightstown. One’s official as the other. I’m thinking twice about lapsin. I’d ask you to come, but I know you wouldn’t like it.”

“I’d like the music.”

“Whatever floats your boat, I guess,” she says. We have been together for two days now, shared another geography, slept in one bed, been quiet together and attended each other’s pleasures and courtesy like married folk. Only now the end is in sight, and neither of us can find the handle to a proper parting. Flippancy and a vague churlishness is her protocol. Unwitting politeness is mine. It is not a good mix.

“I’m going to see you tomorrow, aren’t I?” I am cheerful, bending to see her and seeing beyond her the big blue space-age water tank and beyond that the big Easter moon.

“You better be on time. Daddy’s picky ’bout when he eats. And it takes a whole hour to get there.”

“I’m looking forward to it a lot.” This is not entirely true, but it is my official attitude. This part of tomorrow is actually alive with fearsome ambiguity.

“You hadn’t even met him yet. Wait’ll you meet my stepmother. She’s a breed apart. If you like her you’ll like broccoli. But Daddy’s somethin. You better like him, only he probably won’t like you. Or least that’s how he’ll act. His true thoughts will come to light later. Not that it matters.”

“You love me, don’t you?” When I lean up to be kissed, she gazes down on me with a pert, appraising face. I cannot help wondering if she’s not considering Everett right now and an Alaskan adventure.

“Maybe. What if I do?”

“Then you’ll give me a kiss and ask me to spend the night.”

“No way on that,” she says, and gives her hand a big Dinah Shore kiss and smacks me hard across the cheek with it. “That’s what you got comin. Signed, sealed and delivered, ole Mister Smart.” And then she is off, skittering toward the darkened apartments, across the skimpy lawn and in the lighted outside door and out of sight. And I am left alone in my Malibu, staring at the glossy moon as if it were all of mystery and anticipation, all the things we are happy to leave and happier yet to see come toward us new again.