The Sportswriter (49 page)

“I was just wondering how Walter rigged up the switch. He was probably an expert.”

“Do you think you understand all this?”

“I think so.”

“Then tell me, would you?”

“Walter gave himself up to the here and now, but got stranded. Then I think he got excited, and all he knew how to do was sentimentalize his life, which made him regret everything. If he’d made it past today he’d have been fine, I think.” I pick up an Americana matchbook off the kitchen counter, and read the address and phone number to myself. Below it is a copy of
Bimini Today
with a photograph on the cover of a long silver beach. I put the matchbook down.

“Do you think you were supposed to help him?” X says, still smiling. “He seems so conventional. Just seeing in here.”

“He should’ve helped himself” is my answer, and in fact it is what I believe. “You can’t be too conventional. That’s what’ll save you.” And for a moment a sudden unwanted grief sweeps up in me; a grief, I suppose, for possibilities misconstrued, for consolation not taken (which is what grief is all about). I share, I know, and only for a moment, the grief poor Walter must’ve felt alone here but shouldn’t have. This is not a perfectly good room. There’s little here for small mystery and hope and anticipation to flicker on—yet there’s nothing so corrupting or so lonely here as to be unworkable. I could hang in here until I got myself headed right, though I’d see that I did it in a hurry.

“You look like your best friend died, sweetheart,” X says.

I smile at her and she stands up in the shadowy, death-smelling room, taller than I usually think of her, her shadow rising to the nubbly ceiling.

“Let’s leave,” she says and smiles back in a friendly way.

I think a moment about the drinking glasses Walter probably owned, that I’m sure I was right about them, though I won’t bother looking. “You know,” I say, “I suddenly had this feeling we should make love. Let’s close the door there and get in bed.”

X stares at me in sudden and fierce disbelief. (I can see she is horrified by this idea, and I wish I could take the words back right away, since it was a preposterous thing to say, and I didn’t mean a word of it.) “That’s something we don’t do anymore. Don’t you remember?” X says, bitterly. “That’s what divorce means. You’re really a terrible man.”

“I’m sorry,” I say. Sergeant Benivalle would understand this and have a strategy for getting it straightened out. It has not been the best day of either of our lives, after all.

“I remember why I divorced you now.” X turns away, reaching the door in three unexpectedly long steps, “You’ve really
become
awful. You weren’t always awful. But now you are. I don’t like you very much at all.”

“I guess I am,” I say and try to smile. “But you don’t have to be afraid.”

“I’m not afraid,” she says, and laughs a hard little laugh, turning through the doorway just as a small man in a white shirt arrives into it. It stops her cold to see him.

The man’s eyes look wide behind thick glasses, and he blocks X’s way without intending to. He leans around her to look at me. “Are you the sister and brother?” he says.

I lean exactly as he does, trying to see him and look pleasant. “No,” I say. “I’m a friend of Walter’s.” This is the only explanation I have, and I can see from his expression that it isn’t enough. He is a youngish Frank Sinatra type with pale, knobby cheeks and curly hair (possibly he’s not as young as he looks, since he has a dry librarian’s air about him). He suspects something’s up, though, and means to get to the bottom of it pronto using this very air. His presence makes me realize how little I have to do with anything here, and that X was right. It’s just lucky we were not getting into bed.

“You don’t belong here,” the young man says. He is for some reason flustered and trying to decide whether to get damn good and mad about everything. Conceivably I could show him Sergeant Benivalle’s card.

“Are you the manager?”

“Yes. What are you stealing? You can’t take anything.”

“We’re not taking anything.”

“Excuse me,” X says, and shoulders past the man into the dark. She has nothing more to say to me. I listen to her footsteps down the sidewalk and feel awful.

The man blinks at me in the living room’s light. “What the hell
are
you doing here? I’m going to call the police about it. We’ll get—”

“They know about it already,” I say wearily. Here without a doubt is where I should present Sergeant Benivalle’s card, but I do not have the heart.

“What do you want here?” the man says painfully, stranded in the doorway.

“I don’t know. I forgot.”

“Are you some kind of newspaperman?”

“No. I was just Walter’s friend.”

“No one’s allowed in here but the family. So just get out.”

“Are you a friend of Walter’s, too?”

He blinks several times at this particular question. “I was,” the man says. “I certainly was.”

“Then why didn’t you go down and identify him?”

“Just get out,” the man says, and looks dazed.

“Okay.” I start to turn off the light, and remember my book in the dark bedroom. I would like to take it with me to return to the library. “I’m sorry,” I say.

“I’ll turn that off,” the man says abruptly. “You just leave.”

“Thanks.” I walk past the man, brushing his sleeve, then out where the air awaits me, sweet and thick and running full of fears.

 
    X sits in her Citation beneath the streetlight, motor idling, the dashboard lights green in her face. She has waited here for me.

I lean in the passenger window, where the air is warm and smells like X’s perfume. “I don’t see why we had to go in there,” she says stonily.

“I’m sorry about it. It’s my fault. I didn’t mean that in there.”

“You are
such
a cliché. God.” X shakes her head, though she is still angry.

This is perfectly true, of course. It is also true that I have tried for a kind of sneaky full disclosure, been caught at it, and am about to be left empty-handed.

“I don’t really see why I have to distinguish myself, though I’m a grown man. I don’t have to impress anybody now.”

“You just embarrass me. But that’s right.” She nods, staring unhappily straight into the night. “I was going to ask you to come home with me. Isn’t that funny? I left the kids at the Armentis’.”

“I’d go. That’s a great idea.”

“Well, no.” X reaches round and buckles her seat belt over her wonderfully skirted thighs, sets both hands on the steering wheel. “That little man in there just seemed so strange to me. Was he a friend of your friend’s?”

“I don’t know. He never mentioned him.” She is probably worrying that Walter and I were “romantically linked.”

“Maybe your friend was just meant to kill himself.” She smiles at me with too much irony, too much, anyway, for people who have known each other as long as we have, and slept together, had children, loved each other and been divorced. Irony ought to be outlawed from this kind of situation. It is a pain in the ass and doesn’t help anybody. Hers, regrettably, is a typical mid western response to the complicated human dilemma.

“Wajter didn’t understand his own resources. He didn’t have to do this. It seems to me you could stand to be more adaptable yourself. We could just go home right now. No one’s there.”

“I don’t think so.” She smiles still.

“I still want to,” I say. I grin through the window. I smell the exhaust flooding underneath me, feel the car shuddering behind its safe headlights. The change scoop between the bucket seats, I see, is filled with orange golf tees.

“You’re not a real bad man. I’m sorry. I don’t think divorce has worked wonders for you.” She puts the car into gear so that it lurches, yet doesn’t quite leave. “It was just a bad idea I had.”

“Your loved ones are the ones you’re supposed to trust,” I say. “Who’s after that?”

She smiles at me a sad, lonely smile out of the instrument panel twilight. “I don’t know.” I can see her eyes dancing in tears.

“I don’t know either. It’s getting to be a problem.”

X lets off on her brake and I step back in the grass. Her Citation hesitates, then hisses off from me up Coolidge and into the night. And I am left alone in the cool silence of dead Walter’s yard and MG, an unknown apartment house behind me, a neighborhood where I am not known, a man with no place to go in particular—out, for the moment, of any good ideas, at the sad end of a sad day that in a better world would never have occurred at all.

W
here, in fact, do you go if you’re me?

Where do sportswriters go when the day is, in every way, done, and the possibilities so limited that neither good nor bad seems a threat? (I’d be happy to go to sleep, but that doesn’t seem available.)

It is not, though, a genuine empty moment, and as such, war needn’t be waged against it. It need not even be avoided or faced up to with particular daring. It is not the prologue to terrible regret. An empty moment requires both real expectation and its eventual defeat by the forces of fate. And I have no such hopes to dash. For the moment, I’m beyond all hopes, much as I was on the night X burned her hope chest while I watched the stars.

Walter would say that I have become neither the seer nor the thing seen—as invisible as Claude Rains in the movie, though I have no enemies to get back at, no debts to pay off. Invisibility, in truth, is not so bad. We should all try to know it better, use it to our advantage the way Claude Rains didn’t, since at one time or other—like it or not—we all become invisible, loosed from body and duty, left to drift on the night breeze, to do as we will, to cast about for what we would like to be when we next occur. That, let me promise you, is not an empty moment. And further yet from real regret. (Maybe Walter
was
interested in me, but who knows? Or cares?) Just to slide away like a whisper down the wind is no small freedom, and if we’re lucky enough to win such a setting-free, even if it’s bad events that cause it, we should use it, for it is the only naturally occurring consolation that comes to us, sole and sovereign, without props or the forbearance of others—among whom I mean to include God himself, who does not let us stay invisible long, since that is a state he reserves for himself.

God does not help those who are invisible too.

 
    I drive, an invisible man, through the slumberous, hilled, post-Easter streets of Haddam. And as I have already sensed, it is not a good place for death. Death’s a preposterous intruder. A breach. A building that won’t fit with the others. An enigma as complete as Sanskrit. Full-blown cities are much better at putting up with it. So much else finds a place there, a death as small as Walter’s would fit in cozy, receive its full sympathies and be forgotten.

Haddam is, however, a first-class place for invisibility—it is practically made for it. I cruise down Hoving Road past my own dark house set back in its beeches. Bosobolo has not returned (still away in the bramble bush with plain Jane). I could talk to him about invisibility, though it’s possible a true African would know less than one of our local Negroes, and I would end up explaining a lot to start with, though eventually he would catch on—committed as he is to the unseen.

I cruise through the dark cemetery where my son is put to rest, and where the invisible virtually screams at you, cries out for quiet, quiet and more quiet. I could go sit on Craig’s stone and be silent and invisible with Ralph in our old musing way. But I would soon be up against my own heavy factuality, and consolation would come to a standstill.

I drive by X’s house, where there is bright light from every window, and a feeling of bustle and things-on-tap behind closed doors, as if everyone were leaving. There’s nothing for me here. My only hope would be to make trouble, extenuate circumstances for everybody, do some shouting and break a lamp. And I—it should come as no surprise—lack the heart for that too. It’s nine P.M., and I know where my children are.

Where is there to go that’s fun, I wonder?

I drive past the August, where a red glow warms the side bar window, and where I’m sure a lifelong resident or a divorced man sits wanting company—a commodity I’m low on.

Down Cromwell Lane at Village Hall a light still burns in the glass lobby—in the tax office the janitor stands at the front door staring out, his mop at order arms. Somewhere far off a train whistles, then a siren sings through the heavy elms of the Institute grounds. I catch the wink of lights, hear the soft spring monotone of all hometown suburbs. Someone might say there’s nothing quite so lonely as a suburban street at night when you are all alone. But he would be dead wrong. For my money, there’re a lot of things worse. A seat on the New York Stock Exchange, for instance. A silent death at sea with no one to notice your going under. Herb Wallagher’s life. These would be worse. In fact, I could make a list as long as your arm.

I drive down the cobblestone hill to the depot, where, if I’m right, a train will soon be arriving. It is not bad to sit in some placeless dark and watch commuters step off into splashy car lights, striding toward the promise of bounteous hugs, cool wall-papered rooms, drinks mixed, ice in the bucket, a newspaper, a long undisturbed evening of national news and sleep. I began coming here soon after my divorce to watch people I knew come home from Gotham, watch them be met, hugged, kissed, patted, assisted with luggage, then driven away in cars. And you might believe I was envious, or heartsick, or angling some way to feel wronged. But I found it one of the most hopeful and worthwhile things, and after a time, when the train had gone and the station was empty again and the taxis had drifted back up to the center of town, I went home to bed almost always in rising spirits. To take pleasure in the consolations of others, even the small ones, is possible. And more than that: it sometimes becomes damned necessary when enough of the chips are down. It takes a depth of character as noble and enduring as willingness to come off the bench to play a great game knowing full well that you’ll never be a regular; or as one who chooses not to hop into bed with your best friend’s beautiful wife. Walter Luckett could be alive today if he’d known that.