The Sportswriter (3 page)

In a little while X came outside, with all the lights in the house left shining and her hope chest going up the chimney in smoke—it was June—and sat in a lawn chair in another part of the dark yard from where I was standing and cried loudly. Lurking behind a large rhododendron in the dark, I spoke some hopeful and unconsoling words to her, but I don’t think she heard me. My voice had gotten so soft by then as to be inaudible to anyone but myself. I looked up at the smoke of what I found out was her hope chest, full of all those precious things: menus, ticket stubs, photographs, hotel room receipts, place cards, her wedding veil, and wondered what it was, what in the world it
could’ve been
drifting off into the clear spiritless New Jersey nighttime. It reminded me of the smoke that announced a new Pope—
a new Pope!
—if that is believable now, under those circumstances. And in four months I was divorced. All this seems odd now, and far away, as if it had happened to someone else and I had only read about it. But that was my life then, and it is my life now, and I am in relatively good spirits about it. If there’s another thing that sportswriting teaches you, it is that there are no transcendent themes in life. In all cases things are here and they’re over, and that has to be enough. The other view is a lie of literature and the liberal arts, which is why I did not succeed as a teacher, and another reason I put my novel away in the drawer and have not taken it out.

“Yes, of course,” X says and sniffs. She has almost stopped crying, though I have not tried to comfort her (a privilege I no longer hold). She raises her eyes up to the milky sky and sniffs again. She is still holding the nibbled egg. “When I cried in the dark, I thought about what a big nice boy Ralph Bascombe should be right now, and that I was thirty-seven no matter what. I wondered about what we should all be doing.” She shakes her head and squeezes her arms tight against her stomach in a way I have not seen her do in a long time. “It’s not your fault, Frank. I just thought it would be all right if you saw me cry. That’s my idea of grief. Isn’t that womanish?”

She is waiting for me to say a word now, to liberate us from that old misery of memory and life. It’s pretty obvious she feels something is odd today, some freshening in the air to augur a permanent change in things. And I am her boy, happy to do that very thing—let my optimism win back a day or at least the morning or a moment when it all seems lost to grief. My one redeeming strength of character may be that I am good when the chips are down. With success I am worse.

“Why don’t I read a poem,” I say, and smile a happy old rejected suitor’s smile.

“I guess I was supposed to bring it, wasn’t I?” X says, wiping her eyes. “I cried instead of bringing a poem.” She has become girlish in her tears.

“Well, that’s okay,” I say and go down into my pants pockets for the poem I have Xeroxed at the office and brought along in case X forgot. Last year I brought Housman’s “To An Athlete Dying Young” and made the mistake of not reading it over beforehand. I had not read it since I was in college, but the title made me remember it as something that would be good to read. Which it wasn’t. If anything, it was much too literal and dreamily so about real athletes, a subject I have strong feelings about. Ralph in fact had not been much of an athlete. I barely got past “townsman of a stiller town,” before I had to stop and just sit staring at the little headstone of red marble, incised with the little words RALPH BASCOMBE.

“Housman hated women, you know,” X had said into the awful silence while I sat. “That’s nothing against you. I just remembered if from some class. I think he was an old pederast who would’ve loved Ralph and hated us. Next year I’ll bring a poem if that’s okay.”

“Fine,” I had answered miserably. It was after that that she told me about my writing a novel and being a loner, and having wanted to join the LPGA back in the sixties. I think she felt sorry for me—I’m sure of it, in fact—though I also felt sorry for myself.

“Did you bring another Housman poem?” she says now and smirks at me, then turns and throws her nibbled egg as far as she can off into the gravestones and elms of the old part, where it hits soundlessly. She throws as a catcher would, snapping it by her ear in a gainly way, on a tape-line into the shadows. I admire her positive form. To mourn the loss of one child when you have two others is a hard business. And we are not very practiced, though we treat it as a matter of personal dignity and affection so that Ralph’s death and our loss will not get entrapped by time and events and ruin our lives in a secret way. In a sense, we can do no wrong here.

Out on Constitution Street an appliance repair truck has stopped at the light. Easler’s Philco Repair, driven by Sid (formerly of Sid’s Service, a bankrupt). He has worked on my house many times and is heading toward the village square to hav-a-cup at The Coffee Spot before plunging off into the day’s kitchens and basements and sump pumps. The day is starting in earnest. A lone pedestrian—a man—walks along the sidewalk, one of the few Negroes in town, walking toward the station in a light-colored, wash-and-wear suit. The sky is still milky, but possibly it will burn off before I leave for the Motor City with Vicki.

“No Housman today,” I say.

“Well,” X says and smiles, and seats herself on Craig’s stone to listen. “If you say so.” Lights are numerous and growing dim with the daylight along the backs of houses on my street. I feel warmer.

It is a “Meditation” by Theodore Roethke, who also attended the University of Michigan, something X will be wise to, and I start it in my best, most plausible voice, as if my dead son could hear it down below:

 
    “I have gone into the waste lonely places behind the eye….”

 
    X has already begun to shake her head before I am to the second line, and I stop and look to her to see where the trouble is.

She puches out her lower lip and sits her stone. “I don’t like that poem,” she says matter-of-factly.

I knew she would know it and have a strong opinion about it. She is still an opinionated Michigan girl, who thinks about things with certainty and is disappointed when the rest of the world doesn’t. Such a big strapping things-in-order girl should be in every man’s life. They alone are reason enough for the midwest’s existence, since that’s where most of them thrive. I feel tension rising off me like a fever now. It is possible that reading a poem over a little boy who never cared about poems is not a good idea.

“I thought you’d know it,” I say in a congenial voice.

“I shouldn’t really say I don’t like it,” X says coldly. “I just don’t believe it, is all.”

It is a poem about letting the everyday make you happy—insects, shadows, the color of a woman’s hair—something else I have some strong beliefs about. “When I read it, I always think it’s me talking,” I say.

“I don’t think those things in that poem would make anybody happy. They might not make you miserable. But that’s all,” X says and slips down off the stone. She smiles at me in a manner 1 do not like, tight-lipped and disparaging, as if she believes I’m wrong about everything and finds it amusing. “Sometimes I don’t think anyone can be happy anymore.” She puts her hands in her London Fog. She probably has a lesson at seven, or a follow-through seminar, and her mind is ready to be far, far away.

“I think we’re all released to the rest of our lives, is my way of looking at it,” I say hopefully. “Isn’t that true?”

She stares at our son’s grave as if he were listening and would be embarrassed to hear us. “I guess.”

“Are you really getting married?” I feel my eyes open wide as if I knew the answer already. We are like brother and sister suddenly, Hansel and Gretel, planning their escape to safety.

“I don’t know.” She wags her shoulders a little, like a girl again, but in resignation as much as anything else. “People want to marry me. I might’ve reached an age, though, when I don’t need men.”

“Maybe you
should
get married. Maybe it would make you happy.” I do not believe it for a minute, of course. I’m ready to marry her again myself, get life back on track. I miss the sweet specificity of marriage, its firm ballast and sail. X misses it too, I can tell. It’s the thing we both feel the lack of. We are having to make everything up now, since nothing is ours by right.

She shakes her head. “What did you and Pauly talk about last night? I felt like it was all men’s secrets and I wasn’t in on it. I hated it.”

“We talked about Ralph. Paul has a theory we can reach him by sending a carrier pigeon to Cape May. It was a good talk.”

X smiles at the idea of Paul, who is as dreamy in his own way as I ever was. I have never thought X much liked that in him, and preferred Ralph’s certainty since it was more like hers and, as such, admirable. When he was fiercely sick with Reye’s, he sat up in bed in the hospital one day, in a delirium, and said, “Marriage is a damnably serious business, particularly in Boston”—something he’d read in Bartlett’s, which he used to leaf through, memorizing and reciting. It took me six weeks to track the remark down to Marquand. And by then he was dead and lying right here. But X liked it, thought it proved his mind was working away well underneath the deep coma. Unfortunately it became a kind of motto for our marriage from then till the end, an unmeant malediction Ralph pronounced on us.

“I like your new hair,” I say. The new way was a thatch along the back that is very becoming. We are past the end of things now, but I don’t want to leave.

X fingers a strand, pulls it straight away from her head and cuts her eyes over at it. “It’s dikey, don’t you think?”

“No.” And indeed I don’t.

“Well. It’d gotten to a funny length. I had to do something. They screamed at home when they saw it.” She smiles as if she’s realized this moment that children become our parents, and we just become children again. “You don’t feel old, do you, Frank?” She turns and stares away across the cemetery. “I don’t know why I’ve got all these shitty questions. I feel old today. I’m sure it’s because you’re going to be thirty-nine.”

The black man has come to the corner of Constitution Street and stands waiting as the traffic light flicks from red to green across from the new library. The appliance truck is gone, and a yellow minibus stops and lets black maids out onto the same corner. They are large women in white, tentish maid-dresses, talking and swinging big banger purses, waiting for their white ladies to come and pick them up. The man and women do not speak. “Oh, isn’t that the saddest thing you ever saw,” X says, staring at the women. “Something about that breaks my heart. I don’t know why.”

“I really don’t feel a bit old,” I say, happy to be able to answer a question honestly, and possibly slip in some good advice on the side. “I have to wash my hair a little more often. And sometimes I wake up and my heart’s pounding to beat the band—though Fincher Barksdale says it isn’t anything to worry about. I think it’s a good sign. I’d say it was some kind of urgency, wouldn’t you?”

X stares at the maids who are talking in a group of five, watching up the street where their rides will come from. Since our divorce she has developed the capability of complete distraction. She will be talking to you but be a thousand miles away. “You’re very adaptable,” she says airily.

“I am. I know you don’t have a sleeping porch in your house, but you should try sleeping with all your windows open and your clothes on. When you wake up, you’re ready to go. I’ve been doing it for a while now.”

X smiles at me again with a tight-lipped smile of condescension, a smile I don’t like. We are not Hansel and Gretel anymore. “Do you still see your palmist, what’s-her-name?”

“Mrs. Miller. No, less often.” I’m not about to admit I tried to see her last night.

“Do you feel like you’re at the point of understanding everything that’s happened—to us and our life?”

“Sometimes. Today I feel pretty normal about Ralph. It doesn’t seem like it’s going to make me crazy again.”

“You know,” X says, looking away. “Last night I lay in bed and thought bats were flying around my room, and when I closed my eyes I just saw a horizon line a long way off, with everything empty and flat like a long dinner table set for one. Isn’t that awful?” She shakes her head. “Maybe I should lead a life more like yours.”

A small resentment rises in me, though this is not the place for resentment. X’s view of my life is that it is a jollier, more close to the grain business than hers, and certainly more that way than I know it to be. She’d probably like to tell me again that I should’ve gone ahead and written a novel instead of quitting and being a sportswriter, and that she should’ve done some things differently herself. But that would not be right, at least about me—there were even plenty of times when she thought so herself. Everything looks old gloomy to her now. One strain in her character that our divorce has touched is that she is possibly less resilient than she has been before in her life, and worry about getting older is proof of it. I’d cheer her up if I could, but that is one of the talents I lost a long time ago.

“I’m sorry again,” she says. “I’m just feeling blue today. There’s something about your going away that makes me feel like you’re leaving for a new life and I’m not.”

“I hope I am,” I say, “though I doubt it. I hope you are.” Nothing, in fact, would I like better than to have a whole new colorful world open up to me today, though I like things pretty well as they are. I will settle for a nice room at the Pontchartrain, a steak Diane and a salad bar in the rotating rooftop restaurant, seeing the Tigers under the lights. I am not hard to make happy.