The Sportswriter

9

A gray, silvermane mist inhabits my room. I lie on the floor of the upstairs sleeping porch, fully clothed, my head cushioned by the boards, which are cold and morning-slicked by mist. In this posture I would often wake up in the months after X left. I would go to sleep reading catalogs, out like a light on the couch as I was last night, or in my bed or in the breakfast nook — but wake up on these same cold deals, still dressed and stiff as a mummy, with no memory of moving. I do not yet know what to make of it. Back then it didn’t necessarily seem a bad sign, and it doesn’t now. And though a longing permeates the cool morning, it is familiar enough, and I’m happy to lie still and listen to my heart harmlessly thump. It is Easter.

What I hear are typical Sunday sounds. Someone raking spring leaves in a nearby yard, finishing a chore begun months ago; a single horn blat from the first train down — moms and dads early for services at the Institute. A fat paper slaps the pavement. A rustle of voices next door at the Deffeyes’ as they putter in the early dark. I hear the squeeze-squeak of Bosobolo in his room, his radio tuned low for all-night gospel. I hear a jogger on my street heading toward town. And far away in the stillness of predawn — as far away, even, as the next sleeping town — I hear bells chiming a companionable Easter call. And I hear also: weeping. The low susurrus of a real grief being grieved somewhere in the cemetery, close by in the dark.

I go stand at the window and peer down into the early dawn, through the leafing copper beech and the tulip tree, but I can see nothing beneath the pale clouds-and-stars sky — only the low profiled shadows of white monuments and trees. No deer look up at me.

I have heard such sounds before. Early is the suburban hour for grieving — midway of a two mile run; a stop-off on the way to work or the 7-11. I have never seen a figure there, yet each one sounds the same, a woman almost always, crying tears of loneliness and remorse. (Actually, I once stood and listened, and after a while someone — a man — began to laugh and talk Chinese.)

I lie back on the bed and listen to the sounds of Easter — the optimist’s holiday, the holiday with the suburbs in mind, the day for all those with sunny dispositions and a staunch belief in the middle view, a tiny, tidy holiday to remember sweetly and indistinctly as the very same day through all your life. I cannot remember a rainy Easter, or one when the sun didn’t shine its heart out. Death, after all, is a mystery Christians can’t get cozy with. It is too severe and unequivocal, a mistake in adding, we think. And we raise a clamor against it, call on the sun to stay cheery, preach the most rousing of sermons. “Well, now, let’s us just hunker down to a real miracle, while we’re putting two and two together.” (A knowing, homiletic grin.) “Let’s just let plasma physics and bubble chambers and quarks try and explain this one,” (Grinning, nodding parishioners; sun beaming to beat the band through modern, abstract-ecumenical, permanently sunny window glass. Organ oratorio. Hearts expanding to victory.)

My only wish is that my sweet boy Ralph Bascombe could wake up from his sleep-out and come in the house for a good Easter tussle like we used to, then be off to once-a-year services. What a day that would be! What a boy! Many things would be different. Many things would never have changed.

X, I know, is not taking Paul and Clarissa to church, a fact which worries me — not because they will turn out godless (I couldn’t care less) but because she is bringing them up to be perfect little factualists and information accumulators with no particular reverence or speculative interest for what’s not known. Easter will soon seem like nothing more than a lurid folk custom, one they’ll forget before they’re past puberty, A myth. Naturally, there was no time for religion in the Dykstra household, where facts and figures reigned, though Irma tells me she has begun “experimenting” with Orange County Holy Rollerism, which makes me worry that the scales might tip for my own two once they get to the end of what can be sensibly, literally disclosed — which is where extremism lurks. You can, after all, know too damn much and end up with a big thumping loss you can’t replenish. (Paul’s mission for his pigeon three nights ago is an encouraging, countervailing sign.)

They may already know too much about their mother and father — nothing being more factual than divorce, where so much has to be explained and worked through intelligently (though they have tried to stay equable). I’ve noticed this is often the time when children begin calling their parents by their first names, becoming little ironists after their parents’ faults. What could be lonelier for a parent than to be criticized by his child on a first-name basis? What if they were mean children, or by knowing too much, became mean? The plain facts of my alone life could make them tear me apart like maenads.

I am of a generation that did not know their parents as just plain folks — as Tom and Agnes. Eddie and Wanda. Ted and Dorie — as democratically undifferentiable from their children as ballots in a box. I never once thought to call my parents by their first names, never thought of their lives — remote as they were — as being like mine, their fears the equal of my fears, their smallest desires mirrors of everyone else’s. They were my parents — higher in terms absolute and unknowable. I didn’t know how they financed their cars. When they made love or how they liked it. Who they had their insurance with. What their doctor told them privately (though they must’ve both heard bad news eventually). They simply loved me, and I them. The rest, they didn’t feel the need to blab about. That there should always be something important I wouldn’t know, but could wonder at, wander near, yet never be certain about was, as far as I’m concerned, their greatest gift and lesson. “You don’t need to know that” was something I was told all the time. I have no idea what they had in mind by not telling me. Probably nothing. Possibly they thought I would come to truths (and facts) on my own; or maybe — and this is my real guess — they thought I’d never know and be happier for it, and that not knowing would itself be pretty significant and satisfying.

And how right they were! And how hopeful to think my own surviving children could enjoy some confident mysteries in life, and not fall prey to idiotic factualism or the indignity of endless explanation. I would protect them from it if I could. Divorce and dreary parenting have, of course, made that next to impossible, though day to day I give it my most honest effort.

To get a divorce in a town this size, I should say, is not the least bit pleasant — though it is easy, and in so many ways the town is made for it, appreciates it, and knows how to act by way of supplying “support groups” (a woman’s counseling unit called X the day of our settlement and invited her to a brown bag lunch at the library). Still, it is troubling to be a litigant in the building where you have gone to pay parking fines or retrieved stolen bikes, been supposed a solid citizen by stenos and beat cops. It leaves you with a bankrupt feeling, since the law here is not made to notice you or even to be noticed, only to give you respectable, disinterested sway. From what I hear, Las Vegas divorces are much better since no one notices anything.

Ours was the most amicable of partings. We could’ve stayed married, of course, and waited until things got better, but that was not what happened. Alan, X’s little lawyer with fragrant dreams of a rich entertainment practice — XKEs awaiting him on tarmacs, chorus girls with giant tits — huddled up with my big, slope-shouldered, bearded, ex-Peace Corps, ex-alcoholic Middlebury guy and, across a mahogany table in Alan’s office, struck a bargain in an hour. In principle I surrendered everything, though X didn’t want much. I kept this house in exchange for helping her buy hers with my half of the savings. I laid claim to the Block Island map and three or four other treasures. We agreed on “irreconcilable differences” as the theme for our appearance in court, then all trooped across the street together and sat chatting uncomfortably in the back until our case was called. And in less than another hour we were “done,” as they say in Michigan. X flew off with the children to a golf-and-swim holiday on Mackinac Island, to “open some space.” I drove home, got drunk as a monkey and cried until dark.

What else could I do? The cleansing ritual of strong fluids and hot, balming tears is all we have native to us. I looked around for some Rupert Brooke poems or a copy of The Prophet but couldn’t find them. Around eight, I stretched out on the couch, put a taped NBA slam-dunk contest on television, ate a pimento cheese sandwich, began to feel better and went to sleep watching Johnny. And my sleep, I remember, was one of the most sound and dreamless sleeps of my life — till eight-thirty the next day when I woke up hungry as a lion and as trusting to the future as a blind sky-diver.

Was I not alienated? Depressed? Ashamed? In need of violent cheering up? Schitzy? On the edge? My answer is, not much. Dreamy as Tarzan, perhaps. Lonely. Though in a way that I got over after while. But not chance’s victim. I got myself busy after breakfast, finishing up work on a six-pronged analysis of major-leaguers’ base stealing styles, and before I knew it I was back in the thick of things. Which is how it’s stayed. Bert Brisker told me that after his divorce he went crazy, broke into his ex-wife’s house while she was gone on vacation, threw bricks through the TV screen, slept in her bed and emptied cat shit in all her drawers. But that is not the way I felt. We can make too much of our misfortunes.

Ever since I was in the Marines (I was only in six months) I’ve been an early riser, and have done my best thinking then. I used to lie nervously in my bunk, wide awake, waiting for the reveille record, my mind thrumming, mapping out how I could do better that day, make the Marine Corps take notice and be proud of me; make myself less a victim of the funks and incongruities my fellow officer candidates were wrestling with, rise to rank quickly, and as a result help protect the lives of my men once we got situated over in Vietnam, where I felt they’d have a lot on their minds (like getting blown to smithereens). I had the advantage of an education, I thought, and I’d need to be their eyes and ears over and above the level they themselves could see and hear. I was an idiot, of course, but we’ve almost always wrong when we are young.

What I’d like to do as I lie here, and before the day burgeons into a glowing Easter, is put together some useful ideas about Herb, just a detail or two to act as magnets for what else will occur to me in the next days, which is the way good sportswriting gets done. You hardly ever just sit down and write it cold, staring at an empty yellow sheet expecting yourself to summon up every good idea you’ll have ready at the first moment. That can be the scariest thing in the world. Instead, what you try to do is honor your random instincts, catch yourself off guard, and write a sentence or an unexpected descriptive line — the way the air smelled one day, or how the wind lifted and tricked off the lake surface in a peculiar way that might later make the story inevitable. Once those notes are on record, you put them away and let them draw up an agenda of their own that you can discover later when you’re sorting through things just before the deadline, and it’s time to write.

Herb, though, is no easy nut to crack, since he’s obviously as alienated as Camus. It would’ve helped if I’d filed away one perception or recorded a quote, but I didn’t know what to say or think anymore than I know now. The way the air smelled or the wind shifted or what song was playing on the radio as we drove out, don’t seem to figure. Simple, declarative sentences just don’t exactly flock to big Herb’s aid. Everything is minor key, subjunctive and contingent. Herb Wallagher’s got his eye on the future these days (at least until his mood stabilizer wears through). Herb Wallagher has seen life from both sides (and doesn’t think much of either one). It would be easy for Herb Wallagher to take a dim view of life (if he wasn’t already as crazy as a road lizard).

The cheap-drama artists of my profession would, of course, make quick work of Herb. They’re specialists at nosing out failure: hinting a fighter’s legs as suspect once he’s over thirty and finally in his prime; reporting a hitter’s wrists are stiff just when he’s learned to go the opposite way and can help the team by advancing runners. They see only the germs of defeat in victory, venality in all human endeavor.

Sportswriters are sometimes damned bad men, and create a life of lies and false tragedies. In Herb’s case, they’d order up a grainy black-and-white fisheye of Herb in his wheelchair, wearing his BIONIC shirt and running shoes, looking like a caged child molester; take in enough of his crummy neighborhood to get the “flavor;” stand Clarice somewhere in the background looking haggard and lost like somebody’s abandoned slave out of the dustbowl, then start things off with: “Quo Vadis Herb Wallagher?” The idea being to make us feel sorry enough for Herb, or some idea of Herb, to convince us we’re all really like him and tragically involved, when in fact nothing of the kind is true, since Herb isn’t even a very likable guy and most of us aren’t in wheelchairs. (If I were paying salaries, those guys would be on the street looking for a living where they couldn’t do any harm.)

Though what can I write that’s better? I’m not certain. Some life does not give in to a sportswriter’s point of view. It ought to be possible to take a rear-guard approach, to look for drama in the concept of retrenchment, to find the grit of the survivor in Herb — something several hundred thousand people would be glad to read with a stiff martini on a Sunday afternoon before dinner (we all have our optimal readers and times), something that draws the weave of lived life tighter. It’s what’s next that I have to work on. Though in the end, this is all I ask for: to participate briefly in the lives of others at a low level; to speak in a plain, truth-telling voice; to not take myself too seriously; and then to have done with it. Since after all, it is one thing to write sports, but another thing entirely to live a life.

By nine I am up, dressed in my work clothes and out in the side yard nosing around the flower beds like a porch hound. Following my speculations about Herb, I went back to sleep and woke up happy and alert — my mind empty, the sun speckling through the beech leaves and not a hint of ugly Detroit weather on the horizon. My trip to the Arcenaults, however, is still two hours off, and as is sometimes the case these days, I do not have quite enough to do. One of the down-side factors to living alone is that you sometimes get overly absorbed with how exact segments of time are consumed, and can begin to feel a pleasure with life that is hopelessly tinged with longing.

Beyond my hemlock hedge Delia Deffeyes is out in her yard in tennis whites, reading the newspaper, something I’ve seen her do a hundred times. She and Caspar have had their morning game, and now he has gone in for a nap. The Deffeyes and I have a policy which says that simply seeing each other in our yards is no reason to have a conversation, and normally we pass polite offhand waves and smiling nods and go about our business. Though I never mind an impromptu conversation. I am not a man who hoards his privacy, and if I am out in my yard spreading Vigaro or inspecting my crocuses, I am per se available for an encounter. Delia and I do occasionally engage in nuts and bolts publishing talk with reference to a book she’s writing for the historical society on European traditions in New Jersey architecture. My experience is years old, but I maintain a kind of plain-talk, common-sense expertise about matters: “Any editor worth his or her salt ought to appreciate the hell out of the kind of attention to detail you’re willing to give. You can’t take that for granted, that’s all I know.” It is all I know, but Delia seems willing to take a word to the wise. She is eighty-two, born to a storied American business family in Morocco during the Protectorate, and has seen a wide world. Caspar has retired out of the diplomatic corps and came to the seminary afterward to teach ethics. Neither of them has too many years left on earth. (It is, in fact, a revelation to live in a town with a seminary, since like Caspar, seminarians are not a bit what you’d think. Most of them are not pious Bible-pounders at all, but sharp-eyed liberal Ivy League types with bony, tanned-leg second wives, and who’ll stand with you toe to toe at a cocktail party, drink scotch and talk about their time-share condos in Telluride.)

Delia spies me down behind the children’s jungle gym, fingering a rose bud that’s ready to bloom, and wanders over to the hemlock hedge shaking her head, though apparently still reading. It is her signal and the premise of our neighborliness — all our conversations are just extensions of the last one, even though they are often on different subjects and months apart.

“Now here, Frank, look at this.” Delia holds up the front page of the Times to show me something. Church bells have begun clamoring and gonging across town. On all streets families are off to Sunday school in spanking new Easter get-ups — cars washed and polished to look like new, all arguments suspended. “What do you think about what our government’s doing to the poor people in Central America?”

“I haven’t kept very close tabs on that, Delia,” I say from the roses. “What’s going on down there now?” I give her a sunny smile and walk over to the hedge.

Her moist blue eyes are large with effrontery. (Her hair is the precise blue color of her eyes.) “Well, they’re mining all the ports down there, in, let’s see,” she takes a quick peek, “Nicaragua.” She crushes the open paper down in front of her and blinks at me. Delia is small and brown and wrinkled as an iguana, but has plenty of strong opinions about world affairs and how they ought to work out. “Caspar’s extremely discouraged about it. He thinks it’ll be another Vietnam. He’s in the house right now calling up all his people in Washington trying to find out what’s really going on. He may still have some influence, he thinks, though I don’t see how he could.”

“I’ve been out of town a couple of days, Dee.” I stand and admire Dee and Caspar’s pair of pink pottery flamingos which they bought in Mexico.

“Well, I don’t see why we should mine each other’s ports, Frank. Do you? Honestly?” She shakes her head in private disappointment with our entire government, as though it had been one of her very favorites but suddenly become incomprehensible. For the moment, though, my mind’s as empty as a jug, captured by the belling at the seminary carillon. “Come my soul, thou must be waking; now is breaking o’er the earth another day.” I find I cannot bring up the name or the face of the man who is president, and instead I see, unaccountably, the actor Richard Chamberlain, wearing a burnoose and a nicely trimmed Edwardian beard.

“I guess it would depend on what the cause was. But it doesn’t sound good to me.” I smile across the flat-trimmed hedge. I have to work at being a full adult around Delia, since if I’m not careful our age difference — roughly forty-five years — can have the effect of making me feel like I’m ten.

“We’re hypocrites, Frank, if that’s our policy. You should bear in mind Disraeli’s warning about the conservative governments.”

“I don’t remember that, I guess.”

“That they’re organized hypocrisy, and he wasn’t wrong about that.”

“I remember Thomas Wolfe wrote about making the world safe for hypocrisy. But that’s not the same.”

“Caspar and I think that the States should build a wall all along the Mexican frontier, as large as the Great Wall, and man it with armed men, and make it clear to those countries that we have problems of our own up here.”

“That’s a good idea.”

“Then we could at least solve our own problem with the black man.” I don’t exactly know what Delia and Caspar think about Bosobolo, but I do not intend asking. For being anti-colonial, Delia has some pretty strong colonial instincts. “You writers, Frank. Always ready to set sail with any wind that blows.”

“The wind can blow you interesting places, Dee.” I say this with only mock seriousness, since Delia knows my heart.

“I see your wife at the grocery, and she doesn’t seem very happy to me, Frank. And those two sweet babies.”

“They’re all fine, Dee. Maybe you caught her on a bad day. Her golf game gets her down sometimes. She really didn’t get a fair start on a real career. I think she’s trying to make up for lost time.”

“I do too, Frank.” Delia nods, her face like lean old glove leather, then folds her paper in a neat paperboy’s fold that’s wonderful to see. I’m ready to dawdle away back to the roses and crab apples. Delia and I are sympathetic to each other’s private causes, and both realize it, and that is good enough for me. For a moment I spy Frisker, her seal-point, sleuthing around the hibiscus below Caspar’s flag pole, staring up at the bird feeder where a junco’s perched. Frisker has been known to prowl my roof at night and wake me up, and I’ve thought about getting a slingshot, but so far haven’t. “Man wasn’t meant to live alone, Frank,” Delia says significantly, eyeing me closely all of a sudden.

“It has its plusses, Delia. I’ve adjusted pretty well now.”

“How long has it been since you read The Sun Also Rises, Frank?”

“It’s probably been a while now.”

“You should reread it,” Delia says. “There’re important lessons there. That man knew something. Caspar met him in Paris once.”

“He was always one of my favorites.” Not true, though a lie’s what’s asked for. It’s not surprising that Delia’s view of the complex world dates from about 1925. In fact it might have been a better time back then.

“Caspar and I were married in our sixties, you know.”

“I didn’t realize that.”

“Oh, yes. Caspar had a nice fat wife who died. I even met her once. Of course, my own poor husband died years before. Caspar and I went out of wedlock in Fez, in 1942, and kept aware of each other’s whereabouts afterwards. When I heard Alma, his fat wife, had died, I called him up. I was with a niece in Maine by then, and in two months Caspar and I were married and living just below Mount Reconnaissance in Guam, which was his last posting. I certainly didn’t expect what I got from life, Frank. But I didn’t waste time either.” She smiles fiercely, as if she can see my future and the certainty that it will not be quite as wonderful.

“It’s a beautiful day, isn’t it, Dee?”

“It is, yes. It’s quite lovely. I believe it’s Easter.”

“I can’t remember a prettier one.”

“I can’t either, Frank. Why don’t you come over this week and have a scotch with Caspar. He’d love for you to come talk men’s talk. I think he’s pretty upset by all this mining.” In the fourteen years I’ve lived here, I have been in the Deffeyes’ house only two times (both times to fix something), and Delia means no harm by one more insincere invitation. We have reached the natural end of our neighborliness, though she’s too polite to admit the inevitability of it, a quality I like in her. I gaze up from the yard into the still blue Easter morning and, to my surprise, see a balloon, large upon the currents of a gleaming atmosphere, its mooring lines adangle, a big red moon with a smiling face on its bloated bag. Two tiny stick-figure heads peer down from the basket, point arms at us, pull a chain which produces a far-off gasping.

Where did they leave earth, I wonder? The grounds of a nearby world headquarters? A rich man’s mansion on the Delaware? How far can they see on a clear day? Are they safe? Do they feel safe?

Delia does not seem to notice, and awaits my answer to her invitation.

“I’ll do that, Dee.” I smile. “Tell Cap I’ll stop by this week. I’ve got a joke to tell him.”

“Any day but Tuesday.” She smiles a prissy smile. This is the usual complication. “He misses men, I’m afraid.”

Delia strays away now with her paper to her sunny lawn and tennis court, me to my barbecue pit and roses and day, upward-tending in most all ways, one I’ll be happy to put into the file of Easters spent richly and forgotten.

Gong, go the bells in town. Gong, gong, gong, gong, gong.

Just before ten I put in a call to X, to wish the children happy Easter. It is now a holiday we “trade,” and this the first one when I haven’t been around. Though no one’s home on Cleveland Street. X’s answer message says that if I’m interested in golf lessons I should leave my name and number. In the background I hear Clary say “Later, bird brain,” and break up laughing. There is an edge in X’s voice now, something strange to me, an all-business, money-in-the-bank brassiness that reminds me of her father. It makes me wonder if my family is off smorging in Bucks County with one of X’s software or realtor friends, some big hairy-armed guy in a green sports jacket, with everything on the company cuff.

I decide not to leave a message (though I’d like to).

For some reason I call Walter Luckett’s number and let the phone ring a long time without an answer while I stare out on the paisley Easter street. Where would I be if I were Walter? In some bully bar in the West Village? Cruising the elmy streets of insular Newfoundland in a devil’s own fury? Hitting some backboard balls at the high school before taking in The Robe at Lost Bridge Mall? I’m not even certain I care to know. Some people were not made to have best friends, and I might be one. Walter might be another, though for different reasons. Acquaintanceship usually suffices for me, which was more or less the one important lesson learned from my Lebanese girfriend, Selma Jassim, at Berkshire College, since if anything, she believed mutual confidences of almost any kind were just a lot of baloney.

I decided to go teach at Berkshire College — I know now — to deflect the pain of terrible regret — the same reason I quit writing my novel, years ago, and began to write sports; the same reason most of us make our dramatic turns to the right and left about midway, and the same reason some people drive right off the course and into the ditch.

One afternoon a year after Ralph died, I was at home on one of the week-long breaks that occur at the magazine between large assignments, and when we are supposed to rest up and re-establish a semblance of regular life. I was sitting in the breakfast nook — it was in May — reading some piled-up copies of Life when the phone rang. The man calling said his name was Arthur Winston and he was married to Beth Winston, who was the sister of my former literary agent, Sid Fleisher, whom I had not heard from since he had written us a condolence card. Arthur Winston said he was the chairman of the English Department at Berkshire College in Massachusetts, and he had been talking to Sid in Sid’s house in Katonah, and Sid had mentioned a writer he had once represented who had written one good book of short stories, but then quit writing entirely. One thing led to another, Arthur said, and he had ended up with the book, which he claimed to have read and admired. He asked if I had been writing any other short stories since then, and for some reason I gave him an evasive answer which could’ve made him think I had, and that with a little coaxing I could actually be induced to write plenty more (though none of this was true). He said to me then that he was over a pretty big barrel. The usual writer at Berkshire, an older man whose name I didn’t know, had suddenly gone berserk at the end of the spring semester and started vicious fist fights with several people — one of them a woman — and had begun carrying a gun under his coat, so that he had been institutionalized and would not be back in the fall. Arthur Winston said he knew it was a long shot, but that Sid Fleisher had said I was a “pretty interesting” fellow who’d lived a “pretty unusual” life since quitting writing, and he — Arthur — thought maybe a semester of teaching would be just the thing to get my work fired up again, and if I wanted to do it he would consider it a personal favor to him and would see to it I taught anything I pleased. And I simply said “Yes, that’s fine,” and that I would be there in the fall.

I do not exactly know what got into my thinking. I had never thought about such a thing in my life, and in one way it couldn’t have been crazier. The magazine, of course, is always happy to extend leaves for what it considers widening experiences. But when I told X she just stood there in the kitchen and stared out the window at the Deffeyes’ tennis court where Paul and Clary were watching Caspar play with one of his octogenarian friends — each old man wearing a crisp white sweater and hitting bright orange balls in high looping volleys — and said “What about us? We can’t move to Massachusetts. I don’t want to go there.”

“That’s fine,” I said, actually for a moment seeing myself leading a graduation day exercise at some tiny Gothic-looking campus, wearing a floppy cap and crimson gown, carrying a scepter, and being the soul of everyone’s admiration. “I’ll commute,” I said. “The three of you can come up odd weekends. We’ll go stay in country inns with cider mills. We’ll have a wonderful time. It’ll be easy.” I was suddenly eager to get up there.

“Have you lost your mind?” X turned and looked at me as if she could in fact see that I’d lost my mind. She smiled at me in an odd way then, and it seemed she knew something bad was happening but was powerless to help. (This was during the worst of the time with the other women, and she had been doing a lot of holding her peace.)

“No. I haven’t lost my mind,” I said, smiling guiltily. “This is something I’ve always wanted to do.” (Which was a total lie.) “There’s no time like the present if you ask me. What do you think?” I went over to give her a pat on the arm, and she just turned and went out into the yard. And that was the last time we ever talked about it. I started making arrangements with the college to provide me a house. I asked for and received my leave from the magazine (a Breadth Fellowship was what they called it). My texts were mailed down midway through the summer, and I did what I felt like was proper preparation. Then at the first of September I packed the Chevy and drove up.

What I found, of course, when I got my feet under me was that I had about as much business teaching in college as a duck has riding a bicycle, since what was true was that in spite of my very best efforts I had nothing to teach.

It’s rare, when you think about it, that anyone ever would, given that the world is as complicated as a microchip and we all learn it slowly. I knew plenty of things, a whole lifetime’s collection. But it was all just about myself, and significant only to me (love is transferable; location isn’t actually everything). But I didn’t care to reduce any of it to fifty minute intervals, to words and a voice ideal for any eighteen-year-old to understand. That’s dangerous as a snake and runs the risk of discouraging and baffling students — whom I didn’t even like — though more crucially of reducing yourself, your emotions, your own value system — your life — to an interesting syllabus topic. Obviously this has a lot to do with “seeing around,” which I was in the grip of then but trying my best to get out of. When you are not seeing around, you’re likely to speak in your own voice and tell the truth as you know it and not for public approval. When you are seeing around, you’re pretty damn willing to say anything — the most sinister lie or the most clownish idiocy known to man — if you think it might make someone happy. Teachers, I should say, are highly susceptible to seeing around, and can practice it to the worst possible consequence.

I could twine off sports anecdotes, Marine Corps stories, college jokes, occasionally vet an easy Williams poem to profit, tell a joke in Latin, wave my arms around like a poet to demonstrate enthusiasm. But that was all just to get through fifty minutes. When it came time to teach, literature seemed wide and undifferentiable — not at all distillable — and I did not know where to start. Mostly I would stand at the tall windows distracted as a camel while one of my students discussed an interesting short story he had found on his own, and I mused out at the dying elms and the green grass and the road to Boston, and wondered what the place might’ve looked like a hundred years ago, before the new library was put up and the student center, and before they added the biplane sculpture to the lawn to celebrate the age of flight. Before, in other words, it all got ruined by modernity gone haywire.

The fellows in my department, God knows, couldn’t have been a better bunch. To their way of thinking, I was a “mature writer” trying to get back on my feet after a “promising start” followed by a fallow period devoted to “pursuing other interests,” and they were willing to go to bat for me. To make them all feel better I claimed to be putting together a new collection based on my experiences as a sportswriter, but in truth any thought I had for such an enterprise fled like thunder the minute I set foot on campus. I’d see a copy of my book at a dozen different houses at a dozen different dinner parties (the same library copy that made its way around ahead of me). And though no one ever mentioned it, I was to understand that it had been read closely and remarked on admiringly and in private by people who mattered. One crisp October evening at the house of a Dickens scholar, I inconspicuously removed it off the coffee table, put it in the snappy autumn fire and stood and watched it burn (with the same satisfaction X must’ve felt when her hope chest billowed up our chimney), then went in to dinner, ate chicken Kiev and had a good time talking in a pseudo-English accent about departmental politics and anti-Semitism in T. S. Eliot. I ended up late that night in a bar across the New York line, with Selma, who had also been a guest, arguing the virtues of the American labor movement and the checkered career of Emil Mazey with a bunch of right-to-work conservatives, and afterward sleeping in a motel.

My colleagues, I should say, were all fiercely interested in sports, especially baseball, and could carry on informative brass-tacks conversations about how statistics lie, hitting zones and who the great all-time bench managers had been — bull sessions that could last half an evening. They often knew much more than I did and wanted to talk for hours about exotic rule applications, who covers what on a double-steal, and the “personalities” of ball parks. They would often alter their own English or urban accents to a vaguely southern, “athletic” accent and then talk that way for hours, which also happened at Haddam cocktail parties. I even had some confide wistfully that they wished they’d done what I did, but had never seen where the “gap” was in a young life that let you think about such a thing as being a sportswriter. All of them, of course, had gone right out of college, raced through graduate school, and as far as possible gotten jobs, tenure, and a life set for them. If they’d had any “gaps,” they didn’t acknowledge them, since that might’ve had something to do with a failure of some kind — a bad grade, a low board score or a wishy-washy recommendation by an important professor, something that had scared the bejesus out of them and that they wanted to forget all about now.

Still, I could tell it confused them that something had happened to me that hadn’t happened to them, and that here I was in their midst, and not such a bad guy after all, when their lives seemed both perfect and perfectly ordinary. They would smile at me and shake their heads, arms folded, pipes clenched tight, ties adjusted, and for some reason I didn’t and still can’t understand, listen to me talk! (whereas they wouldn’t listen to each other for a second). I was specimen-proof that life could be different from theirs and still be life, and they marveled at it.

Writing sports was, I think, inviting to them just the way it’s inviting to me, and also exotic, but because of its literalness it sometimes embarrassed and scared them and made them laugh and fold and refold their arms like Zulus.

They all seemed, however, extremely encouraging that I give another try at real writing. That was something they could understand a fellow wanting to do and then failing at nobly. They respected deeply the nobility of small failures since that was what they suspected of themselves. Though for my lights they thought too little of themselves, and didn’t realize how much all of us are in the very same boat, and how much it is an imperfect boat.

I do not hold to the old belief that professors like writers because they can see us fail in a grander and sillier and therefore more unequivocal way than they have. On the contrary, they like to see someone trying, giving it all up to set a permanent mark. They may also be absolutely expecting to watch you fail, but they aren’t really cynical types at all. And since I wasn’t trying to set any marks (they simply thought I was and had some admiration for me for that reason) I probably got the best the place had to offer.

The only people whom I can say with certainty I didn’t get along with were the “junior people,” the sad, pencil-mouthed and wretched hopefuls. They hated the sight of me. I was, I think, too much like them — unprotected in the world — yet different in a way they found infuriating, incriminating and irrelevant. Nothing is more inciteful of disdain than somebody doing something other than what you’re doing, not doing it badly but not complaining about it (though at the moment I was as much at sea as a man can be). They looked on me with real disgust and usually wouldn’t even speak, as if certain human enterprise was synonymous with laughable failure, though at the same time as if something about me seemed familiar and might figure dimly in their futures if things did not work out. The gallows, I imagine, is less scary to the condemned man than to the one not yet sentenced.

I told them without rancor or the first wish to worry them that if they didn’t get tenure they might give sports writing a serious try, as other people in that situation had. Though they never appeared to like that advice. I think they didn’t appreciate the concept of interchangeability, and no one ever came by to apply for a job after they were let go.

Finally, though, what I couldn’t stand was not what you might think.

I didn’t mind the endless rounds of meetings, which I sat through wearing a smile and with nothing whatsoever in my mind. I didn’t care a mouse’s fart for “learning”—didn’t even feel I understood what it meant in their language — since I couldn’t begin to make my students see the world I saw. I ended up feeling an aching remorse for the boys, especially the poor athletes, and could only think of the girls in terms of what they looked like in their vivid underwear. But I was impressed with my colleagues’ professionalism: that they knew where all “their books” were in the library, knew the new acquisitions by heart, never had to waste time at the card catalog. I enjoyed bumping into them down in the lower level stacks, gossiping and elbowing one another about female faculty, tenure, sharing some joke they’d heard or whatever scandal had turned up in TLS that week. What they did, how they conducted life, was every bit as I would’ve done if I was them — treated the world like an irrelevant rib-tickler, and their own comfortable lives like an elite men’s club. I never once felt a sense of superiority, and would be surprised if they did. I didn’t object to the fisherman’s sweaters, the Wallabies, pipes, dictionary games, charades, the long dinner party palaver about “sibs” and “La Maz” and college boards and experimental treatments for autism, the frank talk about lesbianism and who was right in the Falklands (I liked Argentina). I even got used to the little, smirky, insider mailbox-talk passed between people I had just eaten dinner with the night before, but who, the next morning, would address me only in sly, crypto-ironic references from whatever we’d talked about last night: “… put this memo in The Cantos, right, Frank? See if Ole Ezra can translate that. Haw!” Live and let live is my motto. I’m at home with most interest groups, even in the speakers’ bureau at the magazine, for whom I occasionally journey into the country to talk to citizens about the philosophy of building-from-within, or to deliver canned sports anecdotes.

To the contrary. These eternally youthful, soft-handed, lank-shouldered, blameless fellows — along with a couple of wiry lesbians — were all right with me. They could always give in to their genuine boyishness around me, which was something their wives encouraged. They could quit playing at being serious and surrender to giggly silliness most any time after a few drinks, the same as real folks.

And deep down, I think, they liked me, since that’s how I treated them — like decent Joes, even the lesbians, who seemed to appreciate it. They’d have been happy to have me around longer, maybe forever, or else why would they have asked me to “stay on” when they could tell that something was wrong with me, with my life, something that made me melancholy, though all of them were careful enough never to say a word about it.

What I did hate, though, and what finally sent me at a run out of town after dark at the end of term, without saying goodbye or even turning in my grades, was that with the exception of Selma, the place was all anti-mystery types right to the core — men and women both — all expert in the arts of explaining, explicating and dissecting, and by these means promoting permanence. For me that made for the worst kind of despairs, and finally I couldn’t stand their grinning, hopeful teacher faces. Teachers, let me tell you, are born deceivers of the lowest sort, since what they want from life is impossible — time-freed, existential youth forever. It commits them to terrible deceptions and departures from the truth. And literature, being lasting, is their ticket.

Everything about the place was meant to be lasting — life no less than the bricks in the library and books of literature, especially when seen through the keyhole of their incumbent themes: eternal returns, the domination of man by the machine, the continuing saga of choosing middling life over zesty death, on and on to a wormy stupor. Real mystery — the very reason to read (and certainly write) any book — was to them a thing to dismantle, distill and mine out into rubble they could tyrannize into sorry but more permanent explanations; monuments to themselves, in other words. In my view all teachers should be required to stop teaching at age thirty-two and not allowed to resume until they’re sixty-five, so that they can live their lives, not teach them away — live lives full of ambiguity and transience and regret and wonder, be asked to explain nothing in public until very near the end when they can’t do anything else.

Explaining is where we all get into trouble.

What’s true, of course, is that they were doing exactly what I was doing — keeping regret at arm’s length, which is wise if you understand it exactly. But they had all decided they really didn’t have to regret anything ever again! Or be responsible to anything that wasn’t absolutely permanent and consoling. A blameless life. Which is not wise at all, since the very best you can do is try and keep the regret you can’t avoid from ruining your life until you can get a start on whatever’s coming.

Consequently, when these same people are suddenly faced with a real ambiguity or a real regret, say something as simple as telling a sensitive young colleague they probably like and have had dinner with a hundred times, to go and seek employment elsewhere; or as complicated as a full-bore, rollicking infidelity right in their own homes (colleges are lousy with it) — they couldn’t be more bungling, less ready, or more willing to fall to pieces because they can’t explain it to themselves, or wanting to, won’t; or worse yet, willing to deny the whole beeswax.

Some things can’t be explained. They just are. And after a while they disappear, usually forever, or become interesting in another way. Literature’s consolations are always temporary, while life is quick to begin again. It is better not even to look so hard, to leave off explaining. Nothing makes me more queasy than to spend time with people who don’t know that and who can’t forget, and for whom such knowledge isn’t a cornerstone of life.

Partly as a result, Selma Jassim and I gave ourselves up to the frothiest kind of impermanence — reveled in it, staved off regret and the memory of loss with it. (Muslims, let me tell you, are a race of people who understand impermanence. More so even than sportswriters.)

A person with a cold eye might say what happened between Selma and me — after our romantic dinner in the starchy fireplaced Vermont Yankee Inn the very night I put X and the children on the bus — was simply an example of the usual shabby little intrigues visiting firemen in small New England colleges are expected to get embroiled in, since there’s nothing else to do from bleary week to bleary week, and you’re not really into the swing of things. And my answer is that in the grip of desperate dreaminess even the most trivial of human connections can bear a witness, and sometimes can actually improve a life that’s stranded. (Beyond that, you can never successfully argue the case for your own passions.)

X had come up with the children the second weekend I was there (I’d just seen Mindy Levinson). She brought a pair of brass candlesticks for my little house, neatened the whole place up, sat in one of my classes, went with me to faculty parties two nights in a row and seemed to have a good time. She slept late and took a long autumnish walk with me along the Tuwoosic, during which we talked about a spring driving trip with the children down to the Big Bend Country, something she had been reading about. But as we were driving out to the Bay State Tavern for the three of them to catch the bus home Sunday morning, she looked across the seat at me and said “I really don’t have any idea what you’re doing up here, Frank. But it really all seems pretty extremely stupid to me, and I want you to resign and come home right now with us. It’s not so great being home without you.”

I told her, of course, that I couldn’t just leave. (Though if I had I might still be married, arid I had the feeling she was dead right about my staying; that another failed writer would crawl out of the woodwork and be in my place in less than twenty-four hours, and Arthur Winston would never think of my “interesting” face again.) I felt, however, that something had brought me up there and it may have been ridiculous, but I thought I needed to see what it was — which is what I told X. Plus, I’d given my word. I told her, lamely, that I wanted her to come up every weekend, and she could even take Paul out of school and move all three of them in with me (which was, needless to say, even more ridiculous).

When I said all this, X sat in the car staring out at the waiting bus, then sighed and said sadly “I’m not coming back up here anymore at all, Frank. Something’s in the air up here that makes me feel old and completely silly. So you’ll just have to go it alone.”

And with that she got out with Paul and Clary, and lugged their big bag onto the bus. When they climbed aboard the children both cried (X didn’t), and they left me standing alone and dazed, waving at them from the Bay State parking lot.

What Selma and I did after that and for the next thirteen weeks before I went back home to New Jersey and divorce, was simply share a fitful existence. She was an acerbic cold-eyed Arab of dusky beauty, who was thirty-six at the time (exactly my age), but seemed older than I was. She had come to Berkshire College that fall from Paris only to obtain a visa (she said), so she could find a rich American “industrialist,” marry him, then settle down in a rich suburb for a happy life. (She knew a pleasant, easy existence staunched almost any kind of unhappiness.)

I never visited home again until the semester was over, and X never wrote me or even called. And what Selma and I did to amuse ourselves was stay inside my little faculty cottage lolling in bed, or else drive in my Malibu wherever we could go in the time we had away from campus, talking for hours about whatever interested us — conversations I actually remember as the most engrossing of my entire life — primarily, of course, because they were stolen. We drove to Boston, up to Maine, down into Westchester, far up into Vermont, and as far west as Binghamton. We stayed in small motels, ate in roadhouses, stopped for drinks in bars with names like The Mohawk, The Eagle and The Adams — dark, remote, millstone places where the outside world rarely entered, and where we knew no one and were cause for no notice: a tall, long-necked Arab woman in sleek black silks, smoking French cigarettes, and an ordinary-looking Joe in a crew-neck sweater, chinos and a John Deere Tractor cap I’d affected when I got to Berkshire. We were tourists headed to and from nowhere.

We hardly ever talked about literary subjects. She was a critical theorist and as far as I could tell had only the darkest, most ironic contempt for all of literature. (As a joke, she invented a scheme for taking all the “I” pronouns out of one of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novels and gave a seminar on it that all our colleagues said was “ingenious.”) What we talked about instead were small-talk things — why a particularly brilliant hillside of sugar maples changed their color at different schedules and what that might suggest of disease; why American highways ran though the places they did; what it was like to drive in London (where I have never been and she had been a student); her first husband, who was British; my only wife; an acting career she’d abandoned; how I felt about compulsory military service at various crucial stages in my life — nothing of great interest, though anything that came along and that we could chatter about without implying a future (we had no delusions about that). Yet it all served to make one day passable before we had to go back to teach, something I came to loathe. I found out a great deal about her in the course of things, though I never asked any of it, and it was always understood that I really knew nothing. There were other people in her life, I knew that, a good many of them, men and women both, people who lived in foreign countries — some possibly even in prison — others who were estranged for reasons that she simply wouldn’t go into. For a period of one week I felt extremely strongly about her, entertained all kinds of impractical and romantic notions, things I never went into, and then I abandoned them all. I told her I loved her a hundred times, usually in chuckling, dare-devilish ways we both understood was a lot of hooey, since she laughed at the idea of almost any kind of usual affection and claimed love was an emotion she had no interest in finding out about.

She had only one, I thought, strange attachment, which was the subject of altruism and which she lectured me about at length the first morning we woke up together, when she was standing around naked in my sunny little house smoking cigarettes and staring out the window at the Tuwoosic as if it were the Irrawaddy. She said altruism drove Arabs crazy because it was always “phony” (a word she liked). She grew furious when she talked about it, threw her head from side to side and shouted and laughed, while I simply sat in bed and admired her. It was not religion or economics that fueled the flames of world hatreds, she felt; it was altruism. She told me that first morning, with a grave look, that by the time she was eighteen she’d survived two drug addictions, a “profound” involvement with terrorists in which she hinted she’d killed people; been kidnaped, raped, imprisoned, had flirtations with a number of dark isms, all of which had galvanized her intellect and forged unassuage-ably her belief that she knew why people did things — to suit themselves and no other reason — which was why she preferred to stay as remote as possible. She said she disliked the Christian members of the faculty (not the Jews), and not because of the self-satisfied squalor of their collegiate lives which she made laughing, sneering reference to (though only because they weren’t rich), but because the Christians thought they were altruists and pretended to be generous and well-meaning. The only remedy for altruism, she felt, was either to be very poor or enormously rich. And she knew which of those she wanted.

What Selma thought about me I’m not exactly sure. I thought she was simply a knock-out, though I’m not certain she didn’t think of me as pathetic, despite expressing admiration for me of the kind every American would like to inspire when traveling to faraway, more advanced cultures. I would sometimes get into sudden states of agitation during which I would clam up and get somber as a mental patient or else begin directing vicious remarks toward something I knew nothing about — often, near the end of the term, it was some colleague I’d decided had slighted me, but whom I really had nothing against and usually had never even met. Selma would humor me at that point and say she’d never met anyone like me; that I was the savvy, hard-nosed realist she had heard real Americans were (puny academics fell far below), but that I also had a thoughtful, complicatedly whole-hearted and vulnerable side which made the whole mix of my character intellectually exotic and brilliant. She said it had been a positive step to quit real writing and become a sportswriter, which she knew practically nothing about, but saw just as a way of making a living that wasn’t hard. She thought my being at Berkshire College was as ridiculous as X did, and as her own presence there. Though in truth what I really think she thought of me was that we were alike, both of us displaced and distracted out of our brainpans and looking for ways to get along. “You might just as well have been a Muslim,” she said more than once and raised her long sharp nose in a way I knew she meant as estimable. “You should’ve been a sportswriter, too,” I said. (I didn’t know what I meant by that, though we both laughed about it like apes.)

From a distance it could seem that Selma and I existed on the most dallying edge of cynicism. Though that would be dead wrong, since to be truly cynical (such as when I romanced all those eighteen women in all those major sports venues of this nation) you have to hoodwink yourself about your feelings. And we knew exactly what we were doing and what we were existing on. No phony love, or sentimentality, or bogus interest. No pathos. But only on anticipation, which can be as good as anything else, including love. She understood perfectly that when the object of anticipation becomes paramount, trouble begins to lurk like a panther. And since she wanted nothing from me — I was not an industrialist and had many more problems than I needed; and since I wanted nothing from her but to have her in my car or in my bed, laughing and touring the quilted New England landscape like leaf-peepers, we thrived. (I figured this out later, since we never talked about it.)

What we anticipated no one of course could ever make a whole, free-standing life out of and expect it to last very long. A nighttime drive to get dinner at a state-line madhouse, in which you cruise through hills and autumn-smelling woods and feel almost too cold before you’re home. A phone’s sudden ringing on an Indian summer night when insects buzz but you have expected it. The sound of a car outside your house and a door swinging closed. The noise of what becomes a familiar deep breathing. The sound of cigarette smoke against a telephone, the tinkle-chink of ice cubes from a caressing silence. The Tuwoosic rilling in your sleep, and the slow positive feeling that all might not be entirely lost — followed by the old standard closure and sighs of intimacy. She gave in to the literal in life but almost nothing else, and for that reason mystery emanated from her like a fire alarm. And there isn’t much more to life without much more complication.

There was, I should say, no one thing that happened between us, nothing that either of us said that made a difference to our lives longer than a moment. The particulars would only seem as ordinary as they were. For the two of us, ours was just a version of life briefly perfected (though in a way that showed me something) and that ended.

In any case, what more did I have to look forward to? My semester? My bunch of smiling, explaining colleagues? Life without my first son? My diminishing life at home with X? The gradual numbly-crumbly toward the end stripe? I don’t know. I didn’t know then. I simply found out that you couldn’t know another person’s life, and might as well not even try. And when it was all over (we simply went out for a drink at the Bay State and said goodbye as if we’d just met each other), I left campus after dark and headed back to New Jersey without even reporting my grades (I mailed them in), eager but apprehensive as a pilgrim, but without a flicker of loss or remorse. All bets were off from the start and no one had his or her heart broken or suffered regret, or even had their feelings hurt much. And that does not happen often in a complex world, which is worth remembering.

The day of the night of my sudden leaving, I was sitting in my office high in Old Mather Library daydreaming out the window while I should’ve been reading some final papers and figuring grades, when a knock came at my door. (I’d had my office changed to the remotest place possible so, I told them, I could work on my book, but actually it was so students wouldn’t be tempted to drop in, and so Selma and I could have some privacy.)

At the door was the wife of one of the young associate professors, a fellow I’d barely gotten to know and who I suspected didn’t much like me from the arrogant way he acted. His wife, though, was named Melody, and she and I had once had a long and friendly conversation at Arthur Winston’s first-of-the-year cocktail party (which X had attended) about The Firebird, which I had never seen performed and knew nothing about. Afterwards she always acted like she thought I was an interesting new addition to things, and always gave me a nice smile when she saw me. She was a small mouse-haired woman with brown teary-looking eyes and, I thought, a seductive mouth that her husband probably didn’t like, but I did.

At my door she seemed nervous and half-embarrassed, and seemed to want to get inside and shut us in. It was December and she was bundled up for the snow, and had on, I remember, a Peruvian cap with ear flaps that came to a peak, and some kind of woolly boots.

When I closed the door she sat down on the student’s chair and immediately took out a cigarette and began smoking. I sat down and smiled at her, with my back to the window.

“Frank,” she said suddenly, as if the words were simply colliding around inside her head and getting out only by accident, “I know we don’t know each other very well. But I’ve wanted to see you again ever since we had that wonderful talk at Arthur’s. That was an important talk for me. I hope you know that.”

“I enjoyed it myself, Melody.” (Though I didn’t remember much more about it than that Melody had said she’d once hoped to be a dancer, but that her father had always been against it, and much of her life after that had been in defiance of her old man and all men. I remember thinking that she possibly thought of me as something other than a man.)

“I’m starting a dance company right in town here,” Melody said. “I’ve gotten local backing. I think Berkshire students will probably be in it, and the school’s going to get involved. I’m taking lessons again, driving to Boston twice a week. Seth’s taking care of the children. It’s pretty hectic these days, but it’s made a big difference. None of it will really get off the ground till next fall at the earliest, but it all started the night we talked about The Firebird.” She smiled at me, full of pride for herself.

“That’s great to hear, Melody,” I said. “I have a lot of admiration for you. I know Seth’s proud of you. He’s mentioned it to me.” (A total lie.)

“Frank, my life’s really changed. With Seth particularly. I haven’t moved out on him. And I’m not going to — at least not right away. But I’ve demanded my freedom. Freedom to do anything I want with whoever I want to do it with.”

“That’s good,” I said. But I didn’t know really if it was that good. I swiveled and looked out the window at the snowy quadrangle below, where some idiot students were building a snow fortress, then looked at the clock on the wall as if I had an appointment. I didn’t.

“Frank. I don’t know how to say this, but I have to say it this way, because that’s the way it is. I want to have an affair. And I’d like to ask you to have it with me.” She smiled a cold little smile that didn’t make her plummy lips look the least bit kissable. “I know you’re involved with Selma. But you can be involved with me, too, can’t you?” She unbuttoned her heavy coat and let it slip behind her, and I could see she was wearing a leotard that was purple on one side and white on the other, the Berkshire College colors. “I can be appealing,” she said, and pulled down one shoulder of her leotard and exposed there in my office a very handsome breast, and began to take the other shoulder, the purple one, down.

But I said, “Melody, wait a minute. This is pretty unusual.”

“Everything I’ve done has been usual, Frank. I’m ready to get laid a lot now. Why shouldn’t I?”

“That’s a good idea,” I said. “But you just wait right here for me. I want to do one thing. Put your coat back on.” I picked up her coat off the floor where she’d dropped it, and put it around her shoulders where she sat now with both of her lovely breasts exposed, and her lips looking as full and beautiful as they probably ever would, and her purple and white leotard down to her waist. And I went out into the hall, closed the door behind me, picked up my coat off the coat rack at the bottom of the stairs and walked out into the quad, heading for my car. The students were putting the finishing touches to their snow fort and were already starting to pelt each other and yell. Classes were over. Exams were still too far away to worry. It is the best time to be on a college campus and to be leaving.

When I was halfway across the quadrangle, whom should I see but Seth Fairbanks, Melody’s husband, slogging toward the gym carrying a bag full of books and a squash racquet. He was a slender, wiry man with a thin black mustache who’d gone to NYU, and taught the 18th century but also some modern novels. We had once talked about some of my favorites, and it turned out he hated everything I had ever liked and had airtight arguments for why they were laughable.

“Where to, Professor Bascombe,” Seth Fairbanks said, with a derisory smile. “Heading to the library?” This was meant as some sort of joke I didn’t understand. But I put a grin on my face, thinking of his wife shivering up in my office at that moment, just beyond a window that was in sight of where we were walking (if she was still there). It was five o’clock, and the day was gray and nearly dark, and we probably couldn’t have been seen anyway.

“Going home to grade a set of essays, Seth,” I said in a jolly voice. “I’ve had them writing about Robbe-Grillet.” (Another lie. My students had made up their own assignments and also suggested what grade they thought they should get.) “He’s a pretty smart cookie.”

“I’d like to see how you phrased your questions. Drop it in my box in the morning. I might learn something. I’m teaching The Voyeur myself.” Seth could barely suppress a laugh.

“You bet,” I said. I could see my car, caked with snow, as we walked down the hill toward the lot. The old brown gymnasium was across the road, its lights burning yellow in the dusk. It was about to turn cold, and the winter would be a long one.

“I’m getting ready to teach a course in the uncanny, Frank, just for winter minisemester.” I could see Seth’s breath in the cold. “There’re a lot of books about the weird and unusual that aren’t cheap books, but real literature. I’ve got a little theory about it. Somebody needs to be reading those books.”

“I’d like to hear about it,” I said.

“I’ll put a syllabus in your box. We can have lunch next week.”

“That’d be great, Seth.”

“It’s the best of both worlds up here, Frank. I think you ought to stay on a semester. All this sportswriting can wait. You might decide you liked it up here and want to stay.” Seth smiled. I knew he meant nothing of the kind. But I was going to oblige him.

“It’s worth thinking about, Seth. I’ll do it.”

“Right.” Seth raised his racquet to gesture goodbye as we reached my car, and he turned toward the gym and down the hill. I stood and looked up at the dark window of my office where Seth’s wife had been, but was now in all likelihood gone home. And that seemed like the best idea to me. And I got in my car, started it up, and turned for home myself.

At ten-thirty I’m cleaned up, shaved and dressed in my Easter best — a two-piece seersucker Palm Beach I’ve had since college. On my way out the back, I see Bosobolo striding in through the front door. He has let Frisker slip inside and shoot down the hall past me to the kitchen.

I stop in the doorway and for a moment look him up and down in an arch, appraising way. He is a man I admire, a bony African with an austere face, almost certain the kind to have a long aboriginal penis. We believe we have the same off-beat, low-key sense of humor we’ve always thought as unique, and for that reason are shrewd and respectful toward each other. He likes it that I live alone with no apparent self-pity and that occasionally Vicki spends the night. I respect him for studying Hobbes as an antidote to over-spiritualizing over at the Institute.

He is dressed in his black missionary pants, white short-sleeves and sandals, but with a loudly ugly orange necktie he bought on 42nd Street the day he arrived from Gabon, and that makes him look like an old blues man. Two times lately, from my car window, I’ve seen him arm-in-arm with a dumpy white seminary girl half his age, the two of them strolling on the edge of the grounds. Obviously steamy romance is brewing up in her little garret or possibly even upstairs here.

What a piece of exoticism it must be! A savage old prince, old enough to be her father, whonking away on her like a frat boy.

Seeing me, Bosobolo stops under the hanging crystal lamp X inherited from her aunt, and peers at me down the hall as if I were far away. He would like, I already know, to get upstairs and turn on Brother Jimmy Waldrup from North Carolina, whom he deeply admires, though he’s complained he can’t understand how Brother Jimmy keeps so much in his head at once and cries so easily. He has pages of observer notes I’ve seen in his room. His education here is a complete one.

“How was Sunday school?” I say, unable to suppress a wry grin. Everything between us assumes the air of a complex irony.

“Yes, quite fine,” he says, keeping his distance but looking serious and vaguely fussy. “You’d’ve enjoyed yourself. I saw the Second Methodist Professional Advanced Men. I explained origins of the resurrection myth.” He smiles a haughty smile. “The Neanderthal thought the cave bear was dead, then found out it wasn’t.” I can, of course, guess exactly what the professional men — group insurance sharpshooters and branch bank veeps — thought about this particular news. I’m certain they’re having a few words about it now out at Howard Johnson’s.

“Sounds way too anthropomorphic to me, Gus.” Gus is what he’s called by the Institute professors, who can’t pronounce his actual first name which is full of combative consonants, though he actually seems to like being called Gus.

“Our aim is to reconcile,” he says and takes a step back. “The deity enters wherever he can. In other words.” His black eyes dart up the stairs and back. I would love to grill him about his little seminary squeeze, but he would be indignant. He is married with numerous children, and probably doesn’t take his new arrangement jokingly. There is not enough Fincher Barksdale in me.

I shake my head in mock seriousness. “I just don’t think you can make sense out of all that. Sorry.” We’re talking end to end in the hall, a distance in which no one can be too serious.

“Einstein believed in a God,” he says quickly. “There is a clear line of logic. You should come to the discussions.” He is carrying his big black gospel, though his bony fingers wrap across the front and obscure the title completely.

“I’d be afraid of using up mystery.”

“We are not listening to Bach,” he says. “Our faith’s involved. You’d have nothing to lose.” He smiles at me, proud of this reference to Bach, whom he knows I admire, and whom we both know is exhaustible.

“Do you have any doubters down at the Second Methodist?”

“Very many. I only offer what has been always available. Someday they’ll all die and find out.”

“That’s awful strict.”

Bosobolo’s eyes twinkle with mirth and firmness. He is the authority here. “When I am back home, I will be more compassionate.”

He raises his eyebrows and inches toward the stairs. He hasn’t mentioned Walter’s visit last night. He’d be amused, I’m sure, to know that Walter thought he was the butler. On the morning air-ishness down the middle of my house I smell his grainy sweat, a smell that goes deep in my nose and delivers a vague stinging warning: this man is no one to trifle with. Religion is not sports to him.

“How about Hobbes,” I say, ready to let him go. “Do you discuss him?”

“He was a Christian, too. Temporality interested him.” He is telling me in so many words, yes, he’s romancing the dumpy little seminary chicken, and no, he won’t repudiate it, and I should mind my own business. “You should probably come.”

“I’ve got too much worldly business.”

“Well then, today’s the day for it,” he says. He raises his empty hand in a wave and starts up the stairs two at a time. “God is smiling for you today,” he calls from the gloomy upper story.

“Good,” I say. “I’m smiling back at him.” I go back to the kitchen first to find Frisker, and then to be on my way.

On the way through town I cruise up Seminary Street, which dead-ends on the Institute grounds and the small First Presbyterian, its white steeple pointing at the clouds. The Square is church-empty (though plenty of cars are parked). A man in an orange jacket, seated in a wheelchair, peers into the closed ice cream shop, and our one black policeman stands on the curb, heavy with police gear. The De Tocqueville minibus rumbles out ahead of me and disappears down Wallace Road. Both traffic lights click to green in the watery sunlight. It is a perfect time for a robbery.

I turn south toward Barnegat Pines, but after a block I make a sweeping U-turn — what Ralph used to call a “hard left”—and pull back into the empty Disabled slot at the side of the Presbyterians.

Leaving the motor on, I duck in a side door at the back. Ushers are milling, holding sheafs of special deckle-edged vanilla Easter Service bulletins. They are local businessmen, in brown suits and tie clasps, ready to whisper a “gladjerhere” as if they’d known you all your life and had your pew picked out. No seating during prayers, doxologies and Holy Communion. Slip in during hymns, announcements and, of course, collection.

This is my favorite place in church, the very farthest back door. This is where my mother used to stand with me the few times we ever went in Biloxi. I cannot sit still in a pew, and always have to leave early, disturbing people and feeling embarrassed.

The fellow who greets me has on a name tag that says “Al.” Someone has written “Big” before it in a red marker. I recognize him from the hardware store and The Coffee Spot. He is in fact a big man in his fifties, who wears big clothes and smells of Aqua Velva and cigarettes. When I edge in close to his door, which is open revealing rows of praying heads, he eases over by me, puts a giant hand on my shoulder and whispers, “We’ll put you right in there in a minute. Plenty of good seats in front.” Aqua Velva washes over me. Big Al wears a big purple and gold Masonic knucklebuster, and his hairy hand is as wide as a stirrup. He slips me a bulletin and I hear him breathe down deep in his troubled lungs. The other ushers are all praying, staring ferociously at their toes and the bright red carpet, their eyes resolutely open.

“I’ll just stand a minute, if it’s all right,” I whisper. We are old friends after all, both lifelong Presbyterians.

“Sure-you-bet, Jim. Stay right there.” Big Al nods in complete assurance, then eases back with the other ushers and bows his head dramatically. (It is not surprising that he thinks of me as someone else, since nothing here could matter less than my own identity.)

The sanctuary is swimming in permanent, churchy light and jam-packed with heads and flowered hats bowed in beseechment. The minister, who seems a half-mile away, is a hale and serious barrel-chested, rambling-Jack type with a bushy beard and an Episcopal bib — without any doubt a seminary prof. He gives in to the old bafflement in a loud actor’s voice, his arms raised so his gown makes great black bat wings over the lilied altar. “And we take, Oh Lord, this day as a great, great gift. A promise that life begins again. Here we are on this earth … our day to day comings….” Predictably on and on. I listen wide-eyed, as if hearing a great new secret revealed, a promised message I must deliver to a faraway city. And I feel … what, exactly?

A good ecumenist’s question, for a well-grounded fellow like me. Though the answer is plain and simple, or I wouldn’t be here at all.

I feel just as I wanted to feel, and knew I would when I made that hard left and came barreling back to the parking lot — a sweet and expanding hieratic ardor and free elevation above low spirits, a swoony, hot tingle right down to my toe tips, something akin to what sailors in the brig must feel when the president visits their ship. Suddenly I’m home, without fear, anxiety, or for that matter even any burdensome reverence. I’m not even in jeopardy of being bested at religion here — it’s not that kind of place — and can feel damn pleased with both myself and my fellow man. A rare immanence is mine, things falling back and away in the promise that more’s around here than meets the eye, even though it is of course a sham and will last only as far as my car. Better this than nothing, though. Or worse. To have hollow sorrow. Or regret. Or to be derailed by the spiky fact of being alone.

Then suddenly: “Rise my soul and stretch thy wings, thy better portion trace; Rise from transitory things toward heaven, thy destined place….” My voice springs forth strong and unequivocal, with Big Al’s baritone behind me in the chorus of confident, repentant suburbanites. (I can never think what the words mean or even imply.) The organ rattles the windows, raises the roof, tickles the ribs, sends a stirring through all our bellies — Jim’s, the ushers’, the preacher’s.

And then I’m gone.

A secret high sign to big Al, who understands me and everything perfectly and clasps his big stirrupy hands in front of him in a Masonic one-man handshake. It is time for the “Race to the Tomb,” and I am in no need of messages, having taken in all I want and can use, am “saved” in the only way I can be (pro tempore), and am ready to march on toward dark temporality, my banners all aflutter.