The Sportswriter (36 page)

The Arcenaults
—the swaying plaque out front says—and I wheel in just ahead of unkind weather and come to rest beside Vicki’s Dart.

 
    “Lynette just had to have ole Jesus hung out there,” Vicki whispers, when we’re only half in the door, where she has met me looking put out. “I think he’s the tackiest thing in the entire world and
I’m
a Catholic. You’re thirty minutes late, anyway.” She is a vision in a pink jersey dress, serious rose-colored heels, snapping stockings and crimson fingernails, her black hair uncurled and simplified for home.

Everybody, she says, is scattered through the house on all levels at once, and I am only able to meet Elvis Presley, a tiny white poodle wearing a diamond collar, and Lynette, Vicki’s stepmother, who comes to the kitchen door in a chef’s apron, holding a spoon and sings out “Hi, hi.” She is a pert and pretty little second wife with bright red hair and bunchy hips descending to ankletted ankles. Vicki whispers that she hails from Lodi, West Virginia, and is a thick-as-rock hillbilly, though I have the feeling we could be friendly if Vicki’d allow it. She is cooking meat and the house airs smell warm and thick. “Hope you like your lamb well, well,
well
done, Franky,” Lynette says, disappearing back into the kitchen. “That’s the way Wade Arcenault likes his.”

“Great. That’s exactly how I like mine,” I lie, and am suddenly aware that not only am I late but I haven’t brought a gift for anybody, not a flower, a greeting card, or an Easter bonbon. I am certain Vicki has noticed.

“You better put plenty of mint jelly on my plate.” Vicki rolls her eyes, then says to my ear, “You don’t either like it well done.”

Vicki and I sit on a big salmon-colored couch, with our backs to a picture window that faces Arctic Spruce Drive. The drapes are open and an amber storm light colors the room, which has old-master prints on the walls—a Van Gogh, a Constable seascape, and “The Blue Boy.” A plush blue carpet (a hunch tells me Everett had a hand here) covers the floor wall to wall. The house has exactly the feel of Vicki’s apartment, but its effect on me—in my youthful seersucker—is that I am the teacher who has given Vicki a bad mark at midterm and who has been invited to Sunday dinner to prove the family’s a solid one before finals. It isn’t a bad way to feel, and when dinner is over I’m sure I can leave in a hurry.

The television, a cabinet model the size of a large doghouse, is showing another NBA game without sound. I would be happy to watch it the rest of the afternoon, while Vicki reads
Love’s Last Journey
, and forget all about dinner.

“I’m hot, aren’t you hot?” Vicki says, and she suddenly jumps up, crosses the room and twists the thermostat drastically. Cooling, forced air hits me almost immediately from a high wall louver. She switches around, showing her nice fanny and gives me a witchy smile. This is a different girl at home, there’s no doubting that. “No need us smotherin indoors, is it?”

We sit for a while and silently watch the Knicks beat hell out of the Cavaliers. Cleveland plays its regular leggy, agitating garage-ball game while the Knicks seem club-footed and awkward as giraffes but inexplicably score more points, which makes the Cleveland crowd good and mad. Two giant Negroes start to scuffle after a loose ball, and a vicious fight breaks out almost instantly. Players, black and white, fall all over the floor like trees, and the game quickly becomes a free-for-all the referees can’t handle. Police come onto the floor and begin grabbing people, smiles on their big Slovak faces, and things seem likely to get worse. It is a usual Cleveland tactic.

Vicki clicks off the picture with a remote box hidden between the couch cushions, leaving me wide-eyed and silent. She jerks her dress down around her sleek knees and sits up high like a job applicant. I can see the broad, all-business outline of her brassiere (she needs a good-sized one) through the stretchy pink fabric. I would like to snake a hand round to one of those breasts and pull her back for an Easter kiss, which I still have not been given. Meat smell is everywhere.

“Did you read that
Parade
today,” she asks, giving her jersey another tug and staring across the room at an electric organ sitting against the wall underneath the flat and florid Van Gogh.

“I guess not,” I say, though I can’t remember actually what I have been doing. Waiting to be here. My sole occupation for the day.

“Ole Walter Scott’s said that a woman washed her hair with a honey shampoo and walked out in the backyard with a wet head and got stung to death by bees.” She casts a fishy eye around at me. “Does that sound like the truth?”

“What happened to the woman who washed her hair with beer? Did she end up marrying a Polack?”

She tosses her head around. “You’re a regular Red Skeleton, aren’t you?”

Out in the kitchen Lynette drops a pan with a loud bangety bang. “Scuze me, kids,” she calls out and laughs.

“You drop the set out of your ring?” Vicki says loudly.

“I coulda said something else,” Ly nette says, “but I won’t on Easter.”

“Small favors, please,” Vicki says.

“I
had
a ring that big once,” Lynette’s friendly voice says.

“So where’d
he
go?” Vicki says and gives me a hot look. She and Lynette are not the best of friends. I wish, though, that they could pretend to be for the afternoon.

“That poor man died of cancer before you were in the picture,” Lynette says light-heartedly.

“Was that about the time you converted over?”

Lynette’s beaming face pops around the kitchen door molding, her eyes sharpened. “Shortly after, sweetheart, that’s right.”

“I guess you needed help and guidance.”

“We all do, don’t we, Vicki sweet? Even Franky, I bet.”

“He’s Presbyterian.”

“Well-o-well.” Lynette is gone from the door back to her stove. “Back in the hills we called them the country club, though I understand they’ve gotten pious since Vatican II. The Catholics got easier and the others had to get harder.”

“I doubt the Catholics got any easier,” I say, though for this Vicki fires me a savage look of warning.

Lynette suddenly reappears, nodding seriously at me and pulling a curl of damp orange hair off her temple. She still seems someone a person could like. “We ought none of us to get lax the way this world is headed,” she says.

“Lynette works at the Catholic crisis center in Forked River,” Vicki says in a tired singsong.

“That’s mighty right, sweetheart,” Lynette smiles, then is gone again and begins making thick stirring noises in a bowl. Vicki looks as disgusted with everything as it’s possible to be.

“What it comes down to is she answers the phone,” Vicki whispers, but loud enough. “And they call that a crisis-line.” She flounces back on the couch and buries her chin over in her collarbone, staring at the wall. “I guess I’ve seen a crisis or two. Some guy came in one time down in Dallas with his entire
thing
sticking out of his friend’s pocket, and we had to sew that gentleman right back on.”

“Alienation didn’t work out, you see.” Lynette speaks energetically from the kitchen. “That’s what we’re finding out now from the colleges. A
lot
of people want to get back in the world now, so to speak. And I don’t try to force my religion onto them. I’ll stay on a line as much as eight straight hours with some individual and he won’t be Catholic at all. Course, I have to stay in bed two days after that. We all wear headphones.” Lynette walks into the doorway, cradling a big crockery bowl in her arms like a farm wife. Her smile is the most patient one in the world. But she has the look of a woman who wants to start something. “Some crises don’t bleed out in the open, Vicky hon.”

“Whoop-dee-do,” Vicki says and rolls her eyes.

“Now you’re a writer, right?” Lynette says.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Well, that’s awfully nice too.” Lynette gazes down lovingly into her bowl while she thinks this over. “Do you ever sometimes write religious tracts?”

“No ma’am, I never have. I’m a sportswriter.”

Vicki signals the TV to start again, and sighs. On the screen a tiny dark-skinned man is diving off a high cliff into a narrow inlet of surging white water. “Acapulco,” Vicki mutters.

Lynette is smiling at me now. My answer, whatever it was, has been enough for her, and she just wants to take this chance to look me over.

“Well, Lynette, why don’t you stare at Frank an hour or two,” Vicki nearly shouts and crosses her arms angrily.

“I just want to see him, hon. I like to have one time to see a whole person clearly. Then I know them. It doesn’t hurt a thing. Frank can tell I mean only good, can’t you, Frank?”

“Absolutely.” I smile.

“I’m glad I ain’t livin here,” Vicki snaps.

“That’s why you have a nice place all your own,” Lynette says amiably. “Of course, I’ve never been invited there.” She ambles into the steamy, meaty kitchen, leaving the two of us on the couch alone with the cliff-divers.

“You and me ought to have a talk,” Vicki says sternly, her eyes suddenly red and full of tears. The forced air comes on again and drums us both with a cool mechanical influx. Elvis Presley trots to the door and looks at us. “Get outa here, Elvis Presley,” Vicki says. Elvis Presley turns around and trots into the dining room.

“What about?” I smile hopefully.

“Just a bunch of things.” She wipes her eyes with her fingertips, which requires her to duck her head.

“About you and me?”

“Yes.” She makes her pouty lips go sour. And once again my poor heart drums fast. Who knows why? To save me? I don’t have a liar’s clue to what needs to be said between us, but her mood is a mood with unhappy finality in it.

Why, though, can’t everything—just for today—wait? Wait a beat as the actor says. Just go on without change a bit longer? Why can’t every sweet untranscendent thing we know or think we know go on along a little longer without closure having to rear its practical head? Walter
Luckless
Luckett could not have been more right about me. I don’t like to think of this or that thing ending, or even changing. Death, the old streamliner, is not my friend, nor will he ever be.

Though I can’t put off whatever this is, and maybe I don’t even want to. She is a demon after changes today, her whole person exuding transition. Only there’s no real need for it, is there?
(Thunk-a, thunk-a thunk
, my heart’s pumping.) We haven’t even had dinner yet, not tasted the lamb cooked hard as a coaster. I have yet to meet her father and her brother. I had sheltered hope that her dad and I could become bosom buddies even if Vicki and I didn’t work things out. He and I could still be friends. If his tire went flat some rainy night in Haddam or Hightstown or anyplace within my area code, he could call me up, I’d drive out to get him, we’d have a drink while the tire was being fixed at Frenchy’s and he would go off into the Jersey darkness certain he had a friend worthy of his trust and who looked down life’s corridor more or less the way he did. Maybe we could take the brother fishing at Manasquan (no need to bring the women in on it). Vicki could be married to Sweet Lou Calcagno’s stepson over in Bamber, have a wonderful life as a beer distributor’s wife with all the hullygully of kids. And I could be the trusted family friend with a heart of gold. I’d renounce my failed suitor’s glower for the demeanor of a wise old uncle. That would be enough for me, just the natural playing out of the pleasing present.

Vicki stares out the window at the houses along Arctic Spruce, her arm on the couch back. Sometimes it is possible to see in her face the lineaments of the older woman she will be, when her features will take on dimension, weight around the chin, a character more serious than now. She will undoubtedly be stout in later life, which is not always a hopeful sign.

Amber light has turned the lawns as green as England. In driveways all up the curving curbless street sit bright new cars—Chryslers, Olds, Buicks—each one with a hefty, moneyed look. In the middle distance a great white RV sits in a side yard. Smoke curls from almost every white brick chimney, though it is not cold enough by a long shot. Some doors have wreaths up since Christmas. My trailing wind has arrived.

Someone, I see, has set white croquet wickets around the Arcenaults’ front lawn. Two striped stakes face each other at less than regulation distance. Games have been planned for the day, and here is how I will paint my trapdoor to escape the incoming empty moment I feel.

“Let’s play,” I say, giving Vicki’s arm an uncle’s squeeze. This is not a ruse I’m up to, only a break in the broody unfinished silence we’ve fallen victims to.

She looks amazed, though she isn’t. Her eyes round out like dimes. “In all this wind and the rain comin?”

“It isn’t raining yet.”

“Man-o-man-o-man,” Vicki says, and snaps her fingers in hot succession. “It’s your funeral.” But she is off the couch quick, and headed for some upstairs storage room for mallets.

On television, CBS is trying to get us settled back into basketball, now that things are under control again. However, each time they show what’s happening on the court, a short, bulb-nosed, red-faced man wearing a loud, checked sport coat comes into the picture shouting “Aw, fuck you” soundlessly at someone on the New York team, waving a stubby arm in disgust. This checked coat guy is one of my favorites. Mutt Greene, the Clevelands’ G.M. I interviewed him once just after I’d restarted life as a sportswriter. He was a coach in Chicago then, but by his own choice has since moved up to the front office in another city, where I’m sure life seems better. He said to me “People surprise you, Frank, with just how fuckin stupid they are.” He was smoking a big expensive cigar in a cramped coach’s office under the Chicago arena. “I mean, do you
actually
realize how much adult conversation is spent on this fuckin business? Facts treated like they were opinions just for the simple purpose of talking about it longer? Some people might think that’s interesting, bub, but I’ll tell you. It’s romanticizing a goddamn rock by calling it a mountain range to me. People waste a helluva lot of time they could be putting to useful purposes. This is a game. See it and forget about it.” Afterwards we got involved in a pretty lively conversation about grass seeds and the piss-poor choices you face when your trouble was a high water table and inadequate drainage, which was not my problem, but was the case at his home on Hilton Head.