The Sportswriter

8

A suspicious light shines in my living room. A strange car sits at the curb. On the third floor Bosobolo’s desk lamp is lit, though it is after midnight. Easter undoubtedly means special preparations for him, possibly a sermon at one of the Institute’s satellite churches which he services now and then to fine-tune his evangelizing techniques. He has put up a wreath on the front door, a decision we have discussed earlier that won my approval. All the houses on Hoving Road are silent and dark, odd for a Saturday night, when there is usually entertaining going on and windows brightened. In the clear sky above the button woods and tulip trees, I can see only the lemony glitter of Gotham lighting the heavens fifty miles away, as though a great event was going on there — a state fair, say, or a firestorm. And I am happy to see it, happy to be this far from the action, on the leeward side of what the wider world deems important.

In my house stands Walter Luckett.

More accurately, waiting in the room I now use as a cozy study, an old side porch with French doors, overstuffed summerish furniture, brass lamps with maps for shades (bought from a catalog), bookshelves to the ceiling and a purplish Persian rug that came with the house. It is the room I normally consider mine, though I am not hard-nosed about it. But even Bosobolo, who has the run of everything, stays clear without having to be asked. It is the room where I finally gave up work on Tangier, where I do most of my sportswriting, where my typewriter sits on my desk. And when X left me, it was in this room that I slept every night until I could face going back upstairs. Most people have such comfortable, significant places if they own a home, and Walter Luckett is standing in the middle of mine with a wry self-derisive smirk that probably caused a certain kind of brainy, pock-marked girl back in Coshocton to think, “Well, now. Here’s something new to the planet…. More’s here than meets the eye,” and later to put up with hell and foolishness to be his date.

Though I can’t say it makes me glad to see him, since I’m tired, and as recently as twelve hours ago was in faraway Walled Lake, having a conversation with a crazy man out of which I won’t get a story to write. What I want to do is put that behind me and hit the hay. Tomorrow like all tomorrows could still be a banner day.

Walter is holding a copy of a canvas luggage catalog, and, upon seeing me, has rolled it into a tight little megaphone. “Frank. Your butler let me in, or I wouldn’t be here at this hour. You have my word on that.”

“It’s okay, Walter. He’s not my butler, though, he’s my roomer. What’s up?”

I set down my one-suiter bought from the very catalog he is now spindling. I like this room very much, its brassy, honeyed glow, paint peeling insignificantly off its moldings, the couches and leather chairs and hatchcover table all arranged in a careless, unpretentious way that is immensely inviting. I would like nothing more than to curl up anywhere here and doze off for seven or eight unmolested hours.

Walter is wearing the same blue tennis shirt and walking shorts he wore in the Manasquan two nights ago, a pair of sockless loafers and a Barracuda jacket with a plaid lining (referred to as a jerk’s suit in my fraternity). In all likelihood it is the same suit-of-casual-clothes Walter has worn since Grinnell days. Only behind his tortoise-shells, his eyes look vanquished, and his slick bond-salesman’s hair could stand a washing. Walter looks, in other words, like private death, though I have a feeling he is here to share some of it with me.

“Frank, I haven’t slept for three days,” Walter blurts and takes two tentative steps forward. “Not since I talked to you over at the shore.” He squeezes the Gokey catalog into the tightest tube possible.

“Let’s make you a drink, Walter,” I say. “And let me have that catalog before you tear it apart.”

“No thanks, Frank. I’m not staying.”

“How about a beer?”

“No beer.” Walter sits down in a big armchair across from my chair, and leans up, forearms to knees: the posture of the confessional, something we Presbyterians know little about.

Walter is sitting under a framed map of Block Island, where X and I once sailed. I gave the map to her as a birthday present, but laid claim to it in the divorce. X complained until I said the map meant something to me, which caused her to relent instantly — and it does. It is a link to palmier times when life was simple and un-grieved. It is a museum piece of a kind, and I’m sorry to see Walter Luckett’s beleaguered visage beneath it now.

“Frank, this is a helluva house. I mean, when I thought you had a colored butler with a British accent, it didn’t surprise me at all.” Walter looks around wide-eyed and approving. “Say about how long you’ve owned it.” Walter smiles a big first-bike kid’s grin.

“Fourteen years, Walter.” I pour myself a good level of warm gin from a bottle I keep behind the children’s World Books and drink it down with a gulp.

“Now that’s old dollars. Plus location. Plus the interest rates from that era. That adds up. I have clients over here, old man Nat Far-querson for one. I live over in The Presidents now, Coolidge Street. Not a bad part of town, don’t you think?”

“My wife lives on Cleveland. My former wife, I guess I should say.”

“My wife’s in Bimini, of course, with Eddie Pitcock. Of all things.”

“I remember you said.”

Walter’s eyes go slitted, and he frowns up at me as if what I’d just said deserved nothing better than a damn good whipping. A silence envelops the room, and I cannot suppress an impolite yawn.

“Frank, let me get right to this. I’m sorry. Since this Americana business I’ve just been dead in my tracks. My whole life is just agonizing around this one goddamn event. Christ. I’ve done so much worse in my life, Frank. Believe me. I once screwed a thirteen-year-old girl when I was twenty and married, and bragged about it to friends. I slept like a baby. Like a baby! And there’s worse than that, too. But I can’t get this one out of my mind. I’m thirty-six, Frank. And everything seems very bad to me. I’ve quit becoming, is what it feels like. Only I stopped at the wrong time.” A smile of wonder passes over Walter’s dazed face, and he shakes his head. His is the face of a haunted war veteran with wounds. Only to my thinking it’s a private matter, which no one but him should be required to care a wink about. “What’re you thinking right now, Frank,” Walter asks hopefully.

“I wasn’t thinking anything, really.” I give my own head a shake to let Walter know I’m an earnest war veteran myself, though in fact I’m lost in a kind of fog about Vicki. Wondering if she’s expecting me to call and for us to make up, wondering for some reason if I’ll ever see her again.

Walter leans up hard on his knees, looking more grim than earnest. “What did you think when I said what I said two nights ago? When I originally told you? Pretty idiotic, huh?”

“It didn’t seem idiotic, Walter. Things happen. That’s all I thought.”

“I’m not putting babies in freezers, am I, Frank?”

“I didn’t think so.”

Walter’s face sinks solemner still, in the manner of a man considering new frontiers. He would like me to ask him a good telling question, something that will then let him tell me a lot of things I don’t want to know. But if I have agreed to listen, I have also agreed not to ask. This is the only badge of true friendship I’m sure of: not to be curious. Whatever Walter is up to may be as novel as teaching chickens to drive cars, but I don’t want the whole lowdown. It’s too late in the night. I’m ready for bed. And besides, I have no exact experience in these matters. I’m not sure what anyone — including trained experts — ought to say except, “All right now, son, let’s get you on over to the state hospital and let those boys give you a shot of something that’ll bring you back to the right side of things.”

“What do you worry about, Frank, if you don’t mind my asking?” Walter is still ghost-solemn.

“Really not that much, Walter. Sometimes at night my heart pounds. But it goes back to normal when I turn on the light.”

“You’re a man with rules, Frank. You don’t mind, do you, if I say that? You have ethics about a lot of important things.”

“I don’t mind, Walter, but I don’t think I have any ethics at all, really. I just do as little harm as I can. Anything else seems too hard.” I smile at Walter in a bland way.

“Do you think I’ve done harm, Frank? Do you think you’re better than I am?”

“I think it doesn’t matter, Walter, to tell you the truth. We’re all the same.”

“That’s evading me, Frank, because I admire codes, myself. In everything.” Walter sits back, folds his arms, and looks at me appraisingly. It’s possible Walter and I will end up in a fistfight before this is over. Though I would run out the door to avoid it. In fact, I feel a nice snugged wooziness rising in me from the gin. And I would be happy to take this right up to bed.

“Good, Walter.” I stare fervently at Block Island, trying to find X’s and my first landfall from all those years ago. Sandy Point. I scan the bookshelves behind Walter’s head as if I expected to see those very words on a friendly spine.

“But let me ask you, Frank, what do you do when something worries you and you can’t make it stop. You try and try and it won’t.” Walter’s eyes become exhilarated, as if he’d just willed into being something that was furious and snapping and threatening to swirl him away.

“Well, I take a hot bath sometimes. Or a midnight walk. Or I read a catalog. Get drunk. Sometimes, I guess, I get in bed and think dirty thoughts about women. That always makes me feel better. Or I’ll listen to the short-wave. Or watch Johnny Carson. I don’t usually get in such a bad state, Walter.” I smile to let him know I’m at least half-serious. “Maybe I should more often.”

Upstairs, I hear Bosobolo walk down his hall to his bathroom, hear his door close and his toilet flush. It’s a nice homey sound — as always — his last office before turning in. A long, satisfying leak. I envy him more than anyone could know.

“You know what I think, Frank?”

“What, Walter.”

“You don’t seem to be somebody who knows he’s going to die, that’s what.” Walter suddenly ducks his head, like a man someone has menaced and who has barely gotten out of the way.

“I guess you’re right.” I smile a smile of failed tolerance. Though Walter’s words deliver a cold blue impact on me — the first clump of loamy dirt thrumping off the pine box, mourners climbing back into their Buicks, doors slamming in unison. Who the hell wants to think about that now? It’s one A.M. on a day of resurrection and renewal the world over. I want to talk about dying now as much as I want to play a tune out my behind.

“Maybe you just need a good laugh, Walter. I try to laugh every day. What did the brassiere say to the hat?”

“I don’t know. What did it say, Frank?” Walter is not much amused, but then I am not much amused by Walter.

“‘You go on ahead, I’ll give these two a lift.’” I stare at him. He smirks but doesn’t laugh. “If you don’t think that’s hilarious, Walter, you should. It’s really funny.” In fact I have a hard time suppressing a big guffaw myself, though we’re at basement-level seriousness now. No jokes.

“Maybe you think I need a hobby or something. Right?” Walter’s still smirking, though not in a friendly way.

“You just need to see things from another angle, Walter. That’s all. You aren’t giving yourself much of a break.” Maybe a hundred dollar whore would be a good new angle. Or an evening course in astronomy. I was thirty-seven before I knew that more than one star could be the North Star; it was a huge surprise and still has the aura of a genuine wonder for me.

“You know what’s true, Frank?”

“What, Walter.”

“What’s true, Frank, is that when we get to be adults we all of a sudden become the thing viewed, not the viewer anymore. Do you know what I mean?”

“I guess so.” And I do know what he means, and with a marksman’s clarity. Divorce has plenty of these little encounter-group lessons to teach. Only I’ll be goddamned if I’m going to trade epiphanies with Walter. We don’t even go in for that stuff at the Divorced Men’s Club. “Walter, I’m pretty beat, I’ve had a long day.”

“And I’ll tell you something else, Frank, even though you didn’t ask me. I’m not going to be cynical enough to ignore that fact. I’m not going to find a hobby or be a goddamn jokemaster. Cynicism makes you feel smart, I know it, even when you aren’t smart.”

“Maybe so. I wasn’t suggesting you take up fly-tying.”

“Frank, I don’t know what the hell I’ve gotten myself into, and there’s no use acting like I’m smart. I wouldn’t be in this if I was. I just feel on display in this mess, and I’m scared to death.” Walter shakes his head in contrite bafflement. “I’m sorry about all this, Frank. I wanted to keep improving myself, by myself.”

“It’s all right, Walter. I’m not sure, though, if you can improve yourself much. Why don’t I fix us both a drink.” Unexpectedly, though, my heart suddenly goes out to Walter the self-improver, trying to go it alone. Walter is the real New-Ager, and in truth, he and I are not much different. I’ve made discoveries he’ll make when he calms down, though the days when I could stay up all night, riled up about some point d’honneur or a new novel or bracing up a boon pal through some rough seas are long gone. I am too old for all that without even being very old. A next day — any new day — means too much to me. I am too much anticipator, my eye on the future of things. The best I can offer is a nightcap, and a room for the night where Walter can sleep with the light on.

“Frank, I’ll have a drink. That’s white of you. Then I’ll get the hell out of here.”

“Why don’t you just bed down here tonight. You can claim the couch, or there’s an extra bed in the kids’ room. That’d be fine.” I pour us both a glass of gin, and hand one to Walter. I’ve stashed away some roly-poly Baltimore Colts glasses I bought from a Balfour catalog when I was in college, in the days when Unitas and Raymond Berry were the big stars. And now seems to me the perfect time to crack them out. Sports are always a good distraction from life at its dreariest.

“This is nice of you, Franko,” Walter says, looking strangely at the little rearing blue Colt, shiny and decaled into the nubbly glass from years ago. “Great glasses.” He smiles up in wonderment. There is a part of me Walter absolutely cannot fathom, though he doesn’t really want to fathom it. In fact he is not interested in me at all. He might even sense that I am in no way interested in him, that I’m simply performing a Samaritan’s duty I would perform for anyone (preferably a woman) I didn’t think was going to kill me. Still, some basic elements of my character keep breaking into his train of thought. Like my Colts glasses. At his house he has leaded Waterfords, crystals etched with salmon, and sterling goblets — unless, of course, Yolanda got it all, which I doubt since Walter is cagier than that.

“Salud,” Walter says in a craven way.

“Cheers, Walter.”

He puts the glass down immediately and drums his fingers on the chair arm, then stares a hole right into me.

“He’s just a guy, Frank.” Walter sniffs and gives his head a hard shake. “A monies analyst right on the Street with me. Two kids. Wife named Priscilla up in Newfoundland.”

“What the hell are they doing way up there?”

“New Jersey, Frank. Newfoundland, New Jersey. Passaic County.” A place where X and I used to drive on Sundays and eat in a tur key-with-all-the-trimmings restaurant. Perfect little bucolic America set in the New Jersey reservoir district, an hour’s commute from Gotham. “I don’t know what you’d want to say about either of us,” Walter says.

“Nothing might be enough.”

“He’s an okay guy is what I’m saying. Okay?” Walter clasps his hands in his lap and gives me a semi-hurt look. “I went over to his firm to cash some certificates for a customer, and somehow we just started talking. He follows the same no-loads I do. And you know you can just talk. I was late already, and we decided to go down to the Funicular and drink till the traffic cleared. And one conversation just led to another. I mean, we talked about everything from petrochemicals in the liquid container industry to small-college football. He’s a Dickinson grad, it turns out. But the first thing I knew it was nine-thirty and we’d talked for three hours!” Walter rubs his hands over his small handsome face, right up under his glasses and into his eye sockets.

“That doesn’t seem strange, Walter. You could’ve just shaken hands and headed on home. It’s what you and I do. It’s what most people do.” (And ought to do!)

“Frank, I know it.” He resettles his tortoise-shells using both sets of fingers. There’s nothing for me to say. Walter acts like a man in a trance and waking him, I’m afraid, will only confuse things and make them go on forever. With any luck this will all end soon, and I can hop into bed. “Do you want to hear it, Frank?”

“I don’t want to hear anything that’ll embarrass me, Walter. Not in any way. I don’t know you well enough.”

“This isn’t embarrassing. Not a bit.” Walter swivels to the side and reaches for his glass, looking at me hopefully.

“It’s right there.” I point to the gin.

Walter goes and pours himself a drink, then slumps back in his easy chair and drinks it down. Bolting, we used to call it at Michigan. Walter just bolted his drink. It occurs to me, in fact, that I could be in Michigan at this very moment, that Vicki and I might’ve driven out to Ann Arbor and be eating a late supper at the Pretzel Bell. Flank steak and hot mustard with a side of red cabbage. I have made an error in my critical choices. “Do you know who Ida Simms is, Frank?” Walter looks at me judiciously, his lower lip pressed tightly above his upper. He means to imply an icy logic’s being applied — the rest from here on out will deal only in the bedrock and provable facts. No gushy sentiment for this boy.

“It sounds familiar, Walter. But I don’t know why.”

“Her picture was in all the papers last year, Frank. An older lady with a Nineteen-forties hairdo. It looked like some kind of advertisement, which in a way it was. The woman who just disappeared? Got out of a cab at Penn Station, with two little poodles on a leash, and nobody’s seen her since? The family ran the ads with her picture, asking for calls if anybody knew anything. Somebody dear to them who walked right out of the world. Boom.” Walter shakes his head, both comforted and astonished by what a strange world it is. “She’d had mental problems, Frank, been in hospitals. All that came out. You’d have to figure the signs weren’t too good for her if you were the family. The impulse to do away with yourself must get pretty strong in those circumstances.

Walter looks at me with his blue eyes shining significantly, and I’m forced to look up squarely at Block Island again. “You never can tell, Walter. People are gone ten years, then one day they wake up in St. Petersburg on the Sunshine Skyway, and everything’s fine.”

“I know it. That’s true.” Walter stares down at his loafers. “We talked about the whole business, Frank. Yolanda and I. She thought the picture was some kind of a fake, a massage parlor or something phony. But I couldn’t. I didn’t know anymore than she did. Except here was a picture of this woman, Frank, looking like somebody’s mother somewhere, yours or mine, her hair all done up like the Forties, and a scared smile on her face like she knew she was in trouble, and I just was not ready to think fake. I told Yolanda she ought to believe it wasn’t a fake just because it might not be. You know what I mean?”

“I guess.” I saw the picture, in fact, twenty times at least. Whoever was running it had had the bright idea of putting it on the sports page of the Times, which I read just before the obits. I’d wondered myself if Ida Simms wasn’t a unisex barber shop or an erotic catering service, and sombody’d just thought of using a picture of his mother as an ad. I finally forgot about it and got interested in the spring trades.

“Now one day,” Walter says, “I was looking at the paper, and I said, ‘I really wonder where this poor woman is.’ And Yolanda, which was typical of her actually, said, ‘There isn’t any woman, Walter. It’s just a come-on for some damn thing. If you don’t believe me, I’ll call and you can listen in on the extension.’ I said I wouldn’t listen in on anything because even if she was right, she ought to be wrong. I wouldn’t want somebody giving up on me, would you?”

“What happened next?”

“She called, Frank. And a man answered. Yolanda said, ‘Who’s this?’ And the man I guess said, ‘This is Mr. Simms speaking. Do you have any word about my wife?’ It was a special line, of course. And Yolanda said, ‘No, I don’t. But I’d like to know if this is on the level.’ And the man said, ‘Yes, on the level. My wife’s been missing since February and we’re crazy out of our minds worrying. We can offer a reward.’ Yolanda just said, ‘Sorry. I don’t know anything.’ And she hung up. This was about six weeks before she left with this Pitcock character.” Walter’s eyes grow narrow as if he can see Pitcock in the cross hairs of a high-powered rifle.

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“It’s just cynical, is my point. That’s all.”

“I think you’re way too finicky on this, Walter.”

“Maybe so. Though I couldn’t get it out of my mind. That poor woman wandering around God knows where — lost, maybe. Crazy. And everybody thinking her picture was an ad for something filthy, just a dirty joke. The helplessness of it got to me.”

“Anything’s possible, Walter.” I can’t suppress another yawn.

Walter suddenly presses his hands together between his bald knees, and fixes on me an odd supplicant’s look. “I know anything’s possible, Frank. But when I mentioned it to Warren, he said he thought it was a tragedy, the whole thing, and a shame nobody had called up with some news to put her family at ease. Even that she was dead would’ve been a relief.”

“I doubt that.”

“Okay, that’s a point. We all have to die. That’s not going to be any goddamn tragedy. The bad thing is a shitty, cynical, insensitive life, somebody like Yolanda calling those poor people up and making their lives miserable for an extra five minutes just because she couldn’t stand not to make a joke out of dying. Something that’s all around us.…”

“Oh, for Christ sake.”

“That’s okay, Frank. Never mind. I still want to tell you the rest, at least the part that won’t embarrass you.”

Though how could hearing about Walter’s moment of magic do anything but bore me the same as watching an industrial training film, or hearing a lecture on the physics of the three-point stance. What could I hear that I couldn’t figure out already if I was interested? The private parts of man are no amusement to me (only the public).

“It was like a friendship, Frank.” Walter is suddenly as sorry-eyed as a pallbearer. “If you can believe that.” (What is there for me to say?) “I guess I can’t really explain my feelings, can I? All I know is what he said. ‘Death’s no tragedy,’ something strange, I don’t know. And then I said, ‘Let’s get out of here.’ Just like you would with a woman you thought you were in love with. Neither of us was shocked. We just got up, walked out of the Funicular onto Bowling Green, got in a cab and headed uptown.”

“How’d you choose the Americana?” I have absolutely no earthly reason to want to know that, of course. What I’d like to do is grab Walter by his Barracuda lapels and throw him out.

“His firm keeps some rooms blocked up there, Frank, for the fellas who work late. I guess that probably seems pretty ironic to you, doesn’t it?”

“I don’t know, Walter, you have to go somewhere, I guess.”

“It sounds silly, even to me. Two Wall Street guys going at it in the Americana. You get caught in your own silliness sometimes, Frank, don’t you?” He’s aching to tell me the whole miserable business.

“So what’s going to happen, Walter. Are you going to see Warren, or whatever his name is again?”

“Frank, who knows. I doubt it. He’s pretty happy up in Newfoundland, I guess. Marriage to me is founded on the myth of perpetuity, and I think I’m wedded pretty firmly to the here and now at this point in time.” Walter sniffs in a professional way, though I have no idea on earth what he could be talking about. He could as easily be reciting the Gettysburg Address in Swahili. “Warren doesn’t feel that way from all I can learn. Which is fine. I don’t think I’m made to be one of those guys anyway, Frank. Though I was never closer to anyone in my life. Not Yolanda. Not even my mom and dad, which is pretty scary for a farm kid from Ohio.” Walter offers me a big, scared, kid-from-Ohio-grin. “I gave up all that perpetuity business, which after all is just founded on a fear of death. You know that, of course. It’s the big business concept all over again. I’m not afraid of dying suddenly, Frank, and leaving everything in a mess. Are you?”

“I’m nervous about it, Walter, I’ll admit that.”

“Would you do what I did, Frank? Tell the truth.”

“I guess I’m still stuck on the perpetuity concept. I’m pretty conventional. I don’t mean to disapprove, Walter. Because I don’t.”

Walter cocks his head when he hears this. He has just heard some unexpected good news, and his blue, sad eyes narrow as if they saw down a long corridor where the light had gone dim as all past time. He holds me in this bespectacled gaze for a long moment, maybe a half-minute. And I know exactly what he is seeing, or trying to see, since from time to time I’ve assiduously tried to see the same thing — with X before she left me for good.

Himself is what Walter’s trying to see! If some old-fashioned, conventional Walter Luckettness is recognizable in conventional and forgiving Frank Bascombeness, maybe things won’t be so bad. Walter wants to know if he can save himself from being lost out in the sinister and uncharted waters he’s somehow gotten himself into. (For all his recklessness, Walter is basically a sound senator, and not much a seeker of the unknown.)

“Frank,” Walter says, cracking a big smile, wriggling back in his chair and giving his head an incongruous shake. (For the moment he has staunched badness.) “Did you ever wish somebody or something could just pick you up and move you way, way far off?”

“Plenty of times. That’s why I’m in the business I’m in. I can get on a plane and that happens. That’s what I was telling you about traveling the other night.”

“Well, that’s how I felt when I first came in here tonight, Frank — when your colored boy let me in and I was just wandering around here waiting. I didn’t feel like there was any place far away enough, and I was caught in the middle of a helluva big mess, and everything was just making it worse. Do you remember how we used to feel when we were kids? Everything out of bounds, just off the map, and we weren’t responsible.”

“It was great, Walter, wasn’t it.” What I’m thinking about is the fraternity, which was great. Splendid. Whiskey, card games, girls.

“Before I got here tonight everything seemed to count against me in some crappy way.”

“I’m glad you came, then, Walter.”

“I am too. I do feel better, thanks to you. Maybe it was us swapping some ideas back and forth. I feel like some new opportunity is just about to present itself. By the way, Frank, do you ever go duck hunting?” Walter smiles a big, generous smile.

“No.”

“Well, let’s go duck hunting, then. I’ve got all kinds of guns. I was just looking at them yesterday, cleaning them up. You can have one. I’d like you to come back to Coshocton with me, meet my family. Maybe next fall. That Ohio River country is really something. I used to go every single day of the season when I was a kid. You know, as far as Ohio seems, it’s not really that far. Just down the Penn Turnpike. I haven’t been going back lately, but I’m ready to start. My folks are getting old. What about your folks, Frank, where are they now?”

“They’re dead, Walter.”

“Ah well, sure. We lose ’em, Frank. What plans have you got?”

“When?”

“This summer, say.” Walter is veritably beaming. I wish he would go home.

“I’m going to take my kids up around Lake Erie.” What business is it of his what plans I have? Everything, to him, is pertinent now.

“Real good idea.”

“I’ve just about had it, Walter. It’s been a long day.”

“I was in despair when I came here, Frank. A lot of life seemed behind me. And now it doesn’t. What can I do? Do you want to go out and have some eggs? There’s a good place on Route 1. What d’ya say to a breakfast?” Walter is on his feet, hands in his pockets, rocking back on his heels.

“I think I’ll just hit the hay, Walter. The couch is your kingdom.”

Walter reaches down, picks up his Colts glass, admires it, then hands it over to me. “I think I’ll get in my car and drive around. That’ll settle me down.”

“I’ll leave the door unlocked.”

“Okay,” Walter says with a brash laugh. “Frank, let me give you an extra key to my place. You can’t tell when you’re going to want to disappear for a while. My place is yours.”

“Aren’t you going to be in it, Walter?”

“Sure, but it can’t hurt. Just so you’ll know you can always drop out of sight when you want to.” Walter hands me the key. I have no idea why Walter would think I’d ever need to drop out of sight.

“That’s nice of you,” I put the key in my pocket and give Walter a good-natured smile meant to make him leave.

“Frank,” Walter says. Then without my expecting it or being able to duck or run, Walter grabs my cheek and kisses me! And I am struck dumb. Though not for long. I shove him backwards and in one spasm of wretchedness shout, “Quit it, Walter, I don’t want to be kissed!”

Walter blushes red as Christmas and looks dazed. “Sure, sure,” he says. I know I have missed Walter’s point here, but I have not missed my own point, not on your life. I would kiss a camel rather than have Walter kiss me on the cheek again. He does not get to first base with me, no matter how much he feels at home.

Walter stands blinking behind his tortoise-shells. “We lose control by degrees, don’t we, Frank?”

“Go home, Walter.” I’m peevish now.

“Maybe I can, Frank. Thanks to you.” Walter smiles his somber war-vet’s smile and walks out the door.

In a moment I hear his car start. From the window I see the headlights on the street and the car — it is an MG — buzz sadly away. Walter gives me two quick honks and disappears around the curve. I am sure he will call when he gets home; he is that kind of High school Harry. And as 1 settle onto the couch as I used to in the old days when X was gone, fully clothed, a Gokey catalog for reading, I unplug my phone — a small, silent concession to the way lived life works. Don’t call, my silent message says, I’ll be sleeping. Dreaming sweet dreams. Don’t call. Friendship is a lie of life. Don’t call.

In the first six months after Ralph died, while I was in the deepest depths of my worst dreaminess, I began to order as many catalogs into the house as I could. At least forty, I’m sure, came every three months. I would, finally, have to throw a box away to let the others in. X didn’t seem to mind and, in fact, eventually became as interested as I was, so that quite a few of the catalogs came targeted for her. During that time — it was summer — we spent at least one evening a week couched in the sun room or sitting in the breakfast nook leafing through the colorful pages, making Magic Marker checks for the things we wanted, dogearing pages, filling out order blanks with our Bankcard numbers (most of which we never mailed) and jotting down important toll-free numbers for when we might want to call.

I had animal-call catalogs, which brought a recording of a dying baby rabbit. Dog-collar catalogs. Catalogs for canvas luggage that would stand up to Africa. Catalogs for expeditions to foreign lands with single women. Catalogs for all manner of outerwear for every possible occasion, in every climate. I had rare-book catalogs, record catalogs, exotic hand-tool catalogs, lawn-ornament catalogs from Italy, flower-seed catalogs, gun catalogs, sexual-implement catalogs, catalogs for hammocks, weathervanes, barbecue accessories, exotic animals, spurtles, slug catchers. I had all the catalogs you could have, and if I found out about another one I’d write or call up and ask for it.

X and I came to believe, for a time, that satisfying all our purchasing needs from catalogs was the very way of life that suited us and our circumstances; that we were the kind of people for whom catalog-buying was better than going out into the world and wasting time in shopping malls, or going to New York, or even going out into the shady business streets of Haddam to find what we needed. A lot of people we ktiew in town did the very same thing and believed that was where the best and most unusual merchandise came from. You can see the UPS truck on our street every day still, leaving off hammocks and smokers and God knows what all — packs of barbecue mitts and pirate chest mailboxes and entire gazebos.

For me, though, there was something other than the mere ease of purchase in all this, in the hours spent going through pages seeking the most virtuous screwdriver or the beer bottle cap rehabilitator obtainable nowhere else but from a PO box in Nebraska. It was that the life portrayed in these catalogs seemed irresistible. Something about my frame of mind made me love the abundance of the purely ordinary and pseudo-exotic (which always turns out ordinary if you go the distance and place your order). I loved the idea of merchandise, and I loved those ordinary good American faces pictured there, people wearing their asbestos welding aprons, holding their cane fishing rods, checking their generators with their new screwdriver lights, wearing their saddle oxfords, their same wool nighties, month after month, season after season. In me it fostered an odd assurance that some things outside my life were okay still; that the same men and women standing by the familiar brick fireplaces, or by the same comfortable canopy beds, holding these same shotguns or blow poles or boot warmers or boxes of kindling sticks could see a good day before their eyes right into perpetuity. Things were knowable, safe-and-sound. Everybody with exactly what they need or could get. A perfect illustration of how the literal can become the mildly mysterious.

More than once on a given night when X and I sat with nothing to say to each other (though we weren’t angry or disaffected), it proved just the thing to enter that glimpsed but perfectly commonplace life — where all that mattered was that you had that hounds-tooth sport coat by Halloween or owned the finest doormat money could buy, or that all your friends recognized “Jacques,” your Brittany, from a long distance away at night, and could call him by the name stitched on his collar and save him from the log truck bearing down on him just over the rise.

We all take our solace where we can. And there seemed like a life — though we couldn’t just send to Vermont or Wisconsin or Seattle for it, but a life just the same — that was better than dreaminess and silence in a big old house where unprovoked death had taken its sad toll.

All of which passed in time, as I got more interested in women and X did whatever she did to accommodate her loss. Months later, when I had departed home to teach at Berkshire College, I found myself alone one night in the little dance professor’s house the college rented for me at the low end of the campus near the Tuwoosic River, doing what I did in those first couple of weeks to the exclusion of practically everything else — poring over a catalog. (The faculty lounge was full of them, leading me to be sure I was not alone.) In this instance I was going through the supplement of a pricey hunting outfitter based in West Ovid, New Hampshire, at the foot of the White Mountains, barely eighty miles from where I sat at that moment. Up the hillside that night, a group of students was holding a sing-along (I was meant to be in attendance), and a cool, crisp burnt-apple smell swam with the New England air and flooded my open window, making the possibility of going as remote as Neptune. I was deep in size comparisons of Swiss wicker-and-leather picnic baskets, and just flipping back toward clearance items on the black-and-white insert pages, my thoughts on a fumble-free flashlight, ankle warmers for the chilly nights ahead, a predator-pruf feeder, when suddenly what do I see but a familiar set of eyes.

After how many years? The narrow, half-squinty, mirthful sparkle I had seen a hundred times over — though only the eyes were visible behind a black silk balaclava worn by a woman modeling a pair of silk underwear from Formosa.

Off in the darkening surround, the sounds of “Scarborough Fair” drifted into the purple hills, and the smell of elm and apple wood floated lushly through my open window, but I couldn’t care less.

I flipped forward and back. And suddenly here was Mindy Levinson on almost every page: with long brown hair and a tentative smile, a Swedish Angora jacket over her shoulder (not looking the least bit Jewish); farther back, standing by a red Vermont barn, wearing a Harris Tweed casual jacket and appearing proud and arrogant; just inside the cover in an Austrian hat, but seeming repentant of some untold misdeed; elsewhere toward the back, ensconced in a comfy New Hampshire kitchen, starting a fire with a brass spark-igniter made in the shape of a duck’s head. And later still, coralling a bunch of munchkin kids all wearing rabbit’s fur puppet hats.

When she was my first college love interest, Mindy and I used to slip off campus, into her parents’ Royal Oak home and boink the daylights out of each other for days on end. It was Mindy who had traveled with me on a tour of Hemingway Country and stayed out on a beach at Walloon Lake while fireflies twinkled. She was the first girl I ever lied to a room clerk because of. Later, of course, she married a slimy land developer named Spencer Karp and settled down in the Detroit suburb of Hazel Park near her parents and had kids before I was even through with school.

But I could not have been more stupefied. Out of a disorderly and not especially welcome present came a friendly, charitable face from the past (not an experience I have that often). Here was Mindy Levinson smiling at me twenty times out of a shiny life I might’ve had if I’d just gone to law school, gotten bored with corporate practice, dropped it all, moved up to New Hampshire, hung out my shingle, and set up my wife in a town-and-country dress shop all her own — a pretty life, prizable and beckoning, apparently without a crumb of alienation or desperate midnight heart’s pounding. A fairy-tale life for real adults.

Where, I wondered, was Mindy? Where was Spencer Karp? Why did she not look Jewish now? What about Detroit?

What I did was immediately pick up the phone, dial the twenty-four-hour toll-free number and talk to a sleepy-sounding older woman whom I directed to the catalog page with the kids in the puppet hats and ordered three. As I was reading off my credit card number, I happened to say that the woman in that picture looked strangely familiar, like my sister from whom I was separated by the adoption agency. Did the company use local women for their models? I asked. “Yes,” came the stoical reply. Did she know who this particular woman might be? There was then a pause. “I don’t know nothin about that kind of thing,” the woman said suspiciously. “Is this all you want to buy?” She sighed with exasperation and lack of sleep. I admitted it was but that I had decided not to buy the puppet hats after all, after which the woman cut me off.

I sat for a while and gazed out my screenless window into the yellow-lit dale of Berkshire College, where the maples and oaks were still in summer leaf, listening to “Scarborough Fair” change to “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore,” and then to “Try to Remember,” trying indeed to remember as much as I could about Mindy and those long-ago days in Ann Arbor, sensing both mystery and coincidence, and considering the small stirring caused by the two brown eyes behind the black balaclava, and the non-Jewish smile in a popcorn sweater.

A certain kind of mystery requires investigation so that a better, more complicated mystery can open up like an exotic flower. Many mysteries are not that easy to wreck and will stand some basic inquiry.

Mine entailed getting up at the crack of dawn the next day and driving the eighty miles over to West Ovid, strolling into the store whose catalog I brought with me, and asking the clerk straight out who this woman in the moleskin ratcatchers was, since she looked like a woman I had gone to college with, and who had married my best friend in the service from whom I’d been separated in a Vietnamese POW camp and did not know the fate of to this very moment.

The cash register woman — a dwarfish, ruby-faced little Hampshirewoman — was only too happy to tell me that the woman in question was Mrs. Mindy Strayhorn, wife of Dr. Pete Strayhorn, whose dental office was down in the middle of town, and that all I had to do was go down there, walk in the office and see if he was my long-lost friend. I was not the first person, she said, to recognize old friends in the catalog, but that most people, when they inquired, turned out to be mistaken.

I could not get out the door fast enough. And not to Doc Stray-horn’s, needless to say. But to the phone booth in front of the Jeep dealership across the road, where I looked up Stray horn on Raffles Road and dialed Mindy without catching a breath or blinking an eye.

“Frank Bascombe?” she said, and I would’ve known her playful voice in a crowded subway car. “My goodness. How in the world did you ever find us here?”

“You’re in the catalog,” I said.

“Oh, well sure.” She laughed in an embarrassed way. “Isn’t that funny. I do it for the clothes discount, but Pete thinks it isn’t quite nice.”

“You really look great.”

“Do I?”

“Darn right. You’re prettier than ever. A whole lot prettier.”

“Well, I had my nose fixed after I married Spencer. He hated my old one. I’m glad you like it.”

“Where is Spencer?”

“Oh, Spencer. I divorced him. He was a crumb, you know.” (I did know.) “I’ve lived here ten years now, Frank. I’m married to a nice man who’s a dentist. We have children with perfect teeth.”

“Great. It sounds like a great life. Plus you do the modeling.”

“Isn’t that a riot? How are you? What’s happened to you in seventeen years? A lot, I’ll bet.”

“Quite a bit,” I said. “I don’t want to talk about that, though.”

“Okay.”

Red and silver streamers were spinning outside down the front of the Jeep dealership’s lot. Two long lines of Cherokees and Apaches sat in the brisk New England sunlight. It soon would be winter, and the mountains at this latitude were already red and yellow higher up. In a day I would have to begin teaching students I already knew I wasn’t going to like, and everything seemed to be starting on a new and perilous course. I knew, though, I wanted to see Mindy Levinson Karp Strayhorn one last time. Many, many things would’ve changed, but if she was who she was, I would still be me.

“Mindy?”

“What?”

“I’d sure like to see you.” I felt myself grinning persuasively at the phone.

“When did you have in mind, Frank?”

“In ten minutes? I’m down the street right now. I was just passing through town.”

“Ten minutes. That’ll be great. It’s pretty easy to find our house. Let me give you directions.”

The rest of it was short but all I’d hoped for (though possibly not what you would think). I drove to her house, a rambling remodeled Moravian farmhouse with a barn, plenty of out-buildings and a pleasant pond that reflected the sky and the geese that swam on it. There was a golden dog and a housekeeper who looked at me suspiciously. Two children who might’ve been ten and eight, and a taller girl who might’ve been seventeen stood at the back end of the hall and smiled at me when their mother and I left. Mindy and I took a drive in my car with the top down toward Sunapee Lake and caught up on things. I told her about X and Ralph and my other children and my writing career and sportswriting and my plans to try teaching for a short while, all of which seemed not to interest her much, but in a pleasant way (I didn’t expect anything different). She told me about Spencer Karp and about her husband and her children and how much she appreciated “just the general mental attitude” of the people up here in the “north country,” and how in her mind the whole nation was changing not so much for the better as for the worse, and nobody could make her go back to Detroit now. At first she was guarded and skittish and talked like a travel agent as we skimmed along the highway, sitting over by the door as if she wasn’t sure I wasn’t some dark destroyer come to wreck her existence with out-of-date memories. After a while, though, when she saw how tame I really was, how enthusiastic, how all I wanted was to be near her life for a couple of hours, unquestioning and intending only to admire all from a distance and not to try and “go in” or to get her in the sack in some shabby motel on the way to Concord (exactly like I used to), then she liked me all over again and laughed and was happy the rest of the time. In fact, she eventually couldn’t help giving me a kiss and a hug every little while, and putting her head on my shoulder once we were far enough from West Ovid that no one she knew would see her. She even told me she didn’t intend to tell Pete about my visit, because that would make it all “the more delicious,” which made me kiss her again and embarrass her.

And then I simply drove her home. She was wearing a mint-colored cotton dirndl right out of the catalog and which she raised above her excellent knees when she was sitting in the car. And she looked as pretty as her picture, which is how I remember her, and how I think of her each time I see her, season onto season, wearing one set of bright traditional clothes after another, on and on into a perfect future.

And what I felt as I drove back the long, slow road that evening toward the little town where Berkshire College sits, crossed the Connecticut and plowed my way into picture postcard Vermont, was: better. Better in all the possible ways. X and I were finally too modern for this kind of perfect, crystalized life — no matter how ours was turning out at the moment. But I had glimpsed a nearly perfect life of a kind, as literally perfect as the catalog promised it could be. And I had done it in a casual, offhand way, which was why Mindy liked me again and could kiss and hug me shamelessly. I had taken nothing away with me, had ruined nothing (though with another kiss I could’ve gotten her to that motel in Concord). I had had, in essence, a brief love affair not-quite. And that was quite enough for me, or for any man trying to get on a better, straighter track, trying to see the brighter side of things and put an end to his dreaminess, which I hoped was on the run by then, though I was certainly wrong.