The Sportswriter (28 page)

“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.