The Sportswriter (34 page)

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.

A
t 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.