The Sportswriter (48 page)

“He said I could marry you again if I wanted to.”

X sniffs, then looks into her hands as if one might contain something she’s forgotten. “He can’t stop giving me away.”

“He’s a nice guy, isn’t he?”

“No, he’s not.” She casts a secret glance at me. “I’m sorry about your friend. Was he a nice, good friend?” The footlights that illumine the shubbery around Village Hall all go on at once. A Negro janitor steps to the glass door and peers out between his palms, then wanders back with a long dust mop in tow. It is cool now out of doors. A car horn blows briefly. The policemen’s taillights disappear down the dark streets.

“No. I didn’t know him very well.”

“What could’ve happened?” I hear my children giggle in the damp grass, sweet music of not-to-worry-in-this-world.

“He quit being interested in what’s next, I guess. I don’t know. I tend not to be much of an alarmist.”

“You don’t worry that it was your fault, do you?”

“I hadn’t thought about that. I don’t see how.”

“You have awfully odd relationships. I don’t know how you stand it.”

“I don’t have any relationships at all.”

“I know that. But it’s the way you like it.”

Clarissa calls out from the darkness haltingly, wanting to know the exact time. It is 7:36. She is beginning to feel a strangeness out of doors, as though she might suddenly be cut loose and abandoned. “It’s early,” Paul whispers.

“I’m going over to Walter’s house tonight. Would you like to come with me?”

X turns to me with a look of outlandish surprise. “What on earth? Did he have something of yours?”

“No. I just want to go by there. He gave me a key, and I want to use it. The police don’t mind if I don’t take anything.”

“It’s ghoulish.”

I sit in silence, then, and listen for meaningful sounds in the darkness—a train whistle far out on the main line, a long-haul trucker drumming up Route 1 from as far away as Arkansas, a small plane humming through the angelic night sky—anything to console us two in these last thin moments. Genuinely good conversations with your ex-wife are limited by the widening territories of intimacy from which you’re restricted. It is finally okay, I guess. “That’s fine,” I say.

“But you’re probably going anyway, aren’t you?” X looks at me, then stares out at the lighted foyer of Village Hall, through which is the tax assessor’s glassed-in office. We can both see the janitor with his dust mop moving in slow motion.

“I guess so,” I say. “It’s really all right.”

“Why?” She looks at me with narrow eyes, her look of skepticism at earthly uncertainties, entities she has never much liked.

“I don’t need to say. Men feel things women don’t. You don’t have to disapprove of it.”

“You do such odd things.” She smiles sympathetically, though magisterially also. “You’re so vague sometimes. Are you
really
all right? You looked pale when I could see you.”

“I’m not completely all right. But I will be.” I could tell her about Vicki knocking my block off, and being hit by a shopping cart. But what the hell good would it do? It would be in the way of full disclosure, and neither of us wants that again, now or ever. We have probably been here too long.

“We just see each other about deaths now,” X says, somberly. “Isn’t that sad?”

“Most divorced people don’t see each other at all. Walter’s wife went to Bimini, and he never saw her again. So I think we do pretty well. We have wonderful children. We don’t live very far apart.”

“Do you love me,” X says.

“Yes.”

“I was wondering about it. I haven’t asked you in a long time.”

“I’m always glad to tell you, though.”

“I haven’t really heard it in a long time, except from the children. I’m sure you’ve heard it several times.”

“No.” (Though it would be a lie to say I haven’t heard it at all.)

“Sometimes I think about you being involved with all different kinds of people I don’t know anything about, and it seems so odd. I don’t like the feeling.”

“I’m involved with fewer people all the time.”

“Does that make you lonely?”

“No. Not a bit.”

The fender of her Citation has grown cold in the darkness. Our two children—weary at last of each other’s secrets—have climbed to their feet and are standing out in the dark like shy ghosts of themselves, wanting to be pleased and made over. It is like old times in a way. They stand not far from us and stare, wondering what’s going on, saying nothing, exactly like their very ghosts might.

“Do you really want me to go over there with you?” X says, blinking but ready to give in.

“You don’t have to.”

“Yes. Well,” she says and sniffs a little chuckle laugh. “I can drop these two at the Armentis’ for half a hour. They like it over there, anyway. I don’t know what might happen to you alone.”

“I’ll pay if it costs anything.”

X shakes her head and slides off the fender. “You’ll pay, huh?” The moon has appeared suddenly over the stalky elms—a bright, wide and ethereal world above us, illuminating trees and patches of empty street and the older white residences beyond. She glances at me in amusement. “Who did you think was going to pay?” She laughs.

“I just wanted to be a good sport.”

“What do you really care most about in the world? That’s the question of the hour, I think.”

“You. That’s all.”

X laughs again and opens the door wide. “You’re a sport, all right. You’re the original sport.”

I smile at her in the public darkness. My children pile past me inside. The car door closes. And once again we are off.

 
    Walter’s place at 118 Coolidge is a two-story cinderblock apartment row between two nicer older colonials whose young-couple-owners have sunk reasonable money into them, and are home tonight. I’ve never noticed the place, though there is a streetlight out front and it is only two streets over from X’s house, and a block exactly like hers in every way but for this very building. The windowless front has been decorated with aluminum strips made like Venetian blinds, with “The Catalina” painted in script across it and backed by a wan light. Exterior lights along the side-facing doors burn visibly to the street. It is a place for abject senior seminarians, confirmed bachelors and divorcées—people in transition—and it is not, I think, such a bad place. I wouldn’t have minded it in Ann Arbor in the middle sixties, say, or even today if I was fresh out of law school, trying to get my legs under me before starting life in earnest and annexing a little wife. Though it is not a place I’d be happy to end up, or even pass through as a way-station toward somewhere else in adult life. The Catalina would be too unpromising for those conditions. And it would certainly not be a place I’d choose to die. Seeing it makes me wonder exactly what kind of lovers’ nest Yolanda and Eddie Pitcock share in Bimini. I’m sure it’s nothing like this. I’m sure a blue ocean is nearby, and cooling breezes rattling banana palms, and wind chimes punctuating languorous afternoons. Better on all
accounts
.

X parks behind Walter’s MG, and we walk up the concrete to the mailboxes where a single buggy globe shines dimly. Walter’s business card has been pruned to fit the space marked 6-D, and we start down the lower row of doors where I hear the mutter of televisions.

“It’s
dank
here,” X says. “I’ve never been anyplace I could actually say was dank. Have you?”

“Locker rooms,” I say, “in some of the older stadiums.”

“I suppose that shouldn’t surprise me, should it?”

“I doubt if Walter liked it much either.”

“Well, he’s fixed that.”

6-D’s outside light is off, and a bright orange sticker masks the door saying POLICEINVESTIGATION, AUTHORIZEDENTRYONLY. I turn the key and open the door into darkness.

A small green light and the tiny numerals 7:53 shine from the black. I own the very same clock at home.

“This
is
very,
very
unpleasant,” X says. “I think this man would hate my coming in here.”

“You can go back,” I say.

A smell is in the room and seems not to belong there, a medical smell from a doctor’s office closed for vacation.

“Can’t we turn on a light?”

Though for a moment I can’t find a wall switch, and when I do it is out of service. “This doesn’t work.”

“Well, for God’s sake find a lamp. I don’t like his clock.”

I bump across the dark floor, the furniture around me thick as elephants. I brush what feels like a leather couch, scrape a leg on an end table, pat across the back of a chair, then somewhere in the middle of the room touch the neck of a hanging lamp and pull the chain.

X appears alone in the doorway, her face fixed in a frown. “Well, for God’s sake,” she says again.

“I just want to see it,” I say, standing in the middle of Walter’s living room, seeing spots.

The hanging lamp casts dishy yellow light everywhere, though it is, in truth, a perfectly nice room. There are varnished paneled walls and a doorway leading to a dark bedroom. A pullman kitchen is behind a counter-thru, everything there put away and straight. There is plenty of big comfortable, new-looking furniture—a red leather couch across from a big RCA 24 with bolt holes on top where Walter has attached his duck gun. A set of barbells leans in a corner, several tables hold lamps with interesting oriental shades. A small mahogany secretary sits against a wall with blank paper and pencils laid out neatly as though Walter had intended to do some serious writing.

On the wall outside the bedroom door is a gallery of framed photographs I am eager to see. Pictured is the ’66 Grinnell wrestling team in black and white with Walter, a rangy 145-er, kneeling in an old wire-window gym, arms folded thick, sober as an Indian. Under that is a pretty blond girl with a slightly heavy upper lip and wide-spaced eyes—no doubt Yolanda—taken in a row boat with the wind blowing. Here is the Delta Chi fraternity on risers; here is a picture of two stern-looking senior citizens, a man in a stiff wool suit, a woman in a flowered dress—Ma and Pa Luckettt in Coshocton, without doubt. Here is Walter in a full-traction leg-cast on a hospital bed beside a pretty nurse, both giving a big thumbs-up; and Walter in a convict’s suit and cap beside Yolanda in a dancehall getup, each sneering. Walter has framed his Harvard Business School acceptance letter, and to the side there is a picture of a younger Walter seated at a desk with a stack of businessy-looking papers, smoking a Meerschaum pipe. At the bottom, and to my surprise, is a photo of the Divorced Men’s Club ganged around our big circular table in the August. It is during one of our Thursday night sessions. I’m holding a huge beer mug and wearing an idiot grin, listening animatedly to something Knot-head Knott is spieling about and am undoubtedly bored blind. Knot-head is holding back a big guffaw, but I have no recollection of what we might’ve been talking about. I do not even remember the time’s happening, and seeing it makes me feel it all must’ve been in Walter’s imagination.

I poke my head back into the bedroom and snap on the ceiling light. Here it is sparer than out front, but still satisfactory in its own way. An aquarium sits on the dresser, its lurid light exposing floating, tiny black mollies. Walter’s bed has a geometric-design cover with three oversized pillows, and on the night table there is a copy of my book,
Blue Autumn
, with my author’s picture face-up, and myself looking remarkably lean and ironic. I am drinking a beer, elbowed-in to an open air bar in San Miguel Tehuantepec. I have a crewcut and am smoking a cigarette, and couldn’t look more ridiculous. “Mr. Bascombe,” my biography says, “is a young American living in Mexico. He was born at the end of World War II, served in the Marines, and has attended the University of Michigan.” I pick it up and see it is the Haddam Public Library copy, with the plastic cover taken off. (Walter has boosted it! He told me in the Manasquan that he had a library copy, but I didn’t believe him.) He has jotted small plusses and zeros by certain titles on the contents page. I’d like to see more about that, possibly take the book with me, though I know there’s an inventory inside Sergeant Benivalle’s folder. I set the book back, take a quick look around—shoes, shoetrees, a skinny closet of suits and shirts, a silent butler, a computer terminal on the floor in the corner, an air-conditioner built through from the outside, a Grinnell pennant—the unextraordinary remains of a life at loose ends.

X is seated on the edge of the leather couch, her wrists on her knees, looking at a red ceramic lobster peeking out over the rim of a large green “dip bowl” on the coffee table. “You know?” She stares closely at the lobster’s eyes. Her voice makes a hollow, echoey sound.

“What?”

“It reminds me of a frat house in here, a Phi Delt’s room I used to go into. Ron something. Ron Kirk. It was fixed up exactly this way, like a dentist’s office somebody’d lived in. Just horrible boy’s stuff. I bet there’s a set of
Playboys
in here somewhere. I looked around for it a little.” She shakes her head in wonder. On the floor in front of the coffee table is more orange tape the police have laid around the chair Walter was sitting in, a chair that is missing. Two large dark brown stains have dried on one of the hooked rugs, and these have been covered with clear plastic, then taped. An area on the wall has also been covered and sealed. X has made no reference to either of them. “You’re just so strange, Frank, my God. I don’t see how any of you get along alone.” She blinks up at me, smiling, curious at who would kill himself, wishing for a common-sensical explanation for such a strange event. “You know?”