The Sportswriter (53 page)

She gives me her best eye-twinkling smile, long Beantown teeth catching the light like opals. We’re all alone here now. Empty cubicles stretch in empty rows all the way to the empty reception arca and the empty elevator banks—a perfect place for love to blossom. We’ve got things in hand and plenty to share—her admiration for me, my advice about her future, my admiration for her, her respect for my opinion (which may rival even her old man). Forget that I’m twice her age, possibly older. Too much gets made of age in this country. Europeans smirk behind our backs, while looking forward to what good might be between now and death. Catherine Flaherty and I are just two people here, with plenty in common, plenty on our minds and a yen for a real give-and-take.

“You’re really
great,”
she volunteers. “You’re just a real optimist. Like my father. All my worries just seem like little tiny things that’ll work out.” Her smile says she means every word of it, and I can’t wait to start passing more wisdom her way.

“I like to think of myself as pretty much a literalist,” I say. “Whatever happens to us is going to be literal when it happens. I just try to arrange things the best way I know how according to my abilities.” I glance around behind at my desk as if I’d just remembered and wanted to refer to something important—a phantom copy of
Leaves of Grass
or a thumbed-up Ayn Rand hardback. But there’s only my empty yellow legal pad with false starts jotted down like an old grocery list. “Unless you’re a real Calvinist, of course, the possibilities really aren’t limited one bit,” I say, pursing my lips.

“My family’s Presbyterian,” Catherine Flaherty says, and perfectly mimics my own tight-lipped expression. (I’d have given racetrack odds she was on the Pope’s team.)

“That’s my bunch, too. But I’ve let my lines go a little slack. I think that’s probably okay, though. My hands are pretty full these days.”

“I’ve got a lot to learn, too. I guess.”

And for a long moment sober silence reigns while the lights hum softly above us.

“What’ve they got you doing around here to soak up experience,” I ask expansively. Whatever idea is dawning on me is still below the horizon, and I don’t intend to seem calculating, which would send her out of here in a hurry. (I realize at this moment how much I would hate to meet her father, though I assume he’s a great guy.)

“Well, I’ve just done some telephone interviewing, and that’s sort of interesting. The retired crew coach at Princeton was a Russian defector in the fifties and smuggled out information about H-bombs during athletic meets. That was all hushed up, I guess, and the government had his job at Princeton all ready for him.”

“Sounds good,” I say. And it does. A low-grade intrigue, something to get your teeth in.

“But I have a hard time asking good questions.” She wrinkles her brow to show genuine concern with her craft. “Mine are too complicated, and no one says much.”

“That isn’t surprising,” I say. “You just have to keep questions simple and remember to ask the same ones over and over again, sometimes in different words. Most athletes are really dying to tell you the whole truth. You just need to get out of their way. That’s exactly why a lot of sportswriters get cynical as hell. Their role’s a lot smaller than they thought, and that turns them sour. All they’ve done, though, is learn how to be good at their business.”

Catherine Flaherty leans against the aluminum door jamb, eyes gleaming, mouth uncertain, and says exactly nothing at this important moment, merely nods her pretty head. Yes. Yes.

It’s all up to me.

The clear moon on this night has posted a smooth silver hump above my dark horizon, and I have only to stand up, put my hands firmly on my chest like St. Stephen and suggest we stroll out into the cool air of Park Avenue, maybe veer over to Second for a sandwich and a beer at someplace I will have to know about (but don’t yet), then let the dreamy night take care of itself and us from there on. A couple. Regulation city-dwellers, arm-in-arm under that dog moon, familiars strolling the easy streets, old hands at the new business of romance.

I take a peek at the clock above Eddie Frieder’s cubicle, see through his office window, in fact, and out through the bright night at the building across the street. The windows there are yellow with old-fashioned light. A heavy man in a vest stands looking down toward the avenue. Toward what? What is on his mind, I cannot help wondering. A set of alternatives that don’t appeal to him? A dilemma that could consume his night in calculating? A future blacker than the night itself? Behind him, someone I cannot see speaks to him or calls his name, and he turns away, raises his hands in a gesture of acceptance and steps from view.

By Eddie Frieder’s clock it is the eleventh hour exactly. Easter night. The office is silent and still, but for a faraway computer’s hum and for the clock itself, which snakes to its next minute station. There is a sweet smell on the odorless air—the smell of Catherine Flaherty, a smell of full closets, of secret private-school shenanigans, of dark (but not too dark) rendezvous. And for a moment I am stopped from speech and motion, and imagine precisely how she will take on the duty of loving me. It is, of course, a way I know already, cannot help but know, all things considered (that’s one subject that does not surprise you once you’re an adult). It will be the most semi-serious of ways. Not the way she would love Dartmouth Dan, nor the way she will love the lucky man she is likely to marry—some wide-eyed Columbia grad with a family law practice all in place. But something in the middle of those, a way that means to say: This is pretty serious, though only for experience sake; I’d be the most surprised little girl in Boston if this turns out to be important at all; it’ll be interesting, you bet, and I’ll look back on it someday and feel sure I did the right thing and all, but not be sure exactly why I think so; full steam ahead.

And what’s my attitude? At some point nothing else really matters
but
your attitude—your hopes, your risks, your sacrifices, your potential islands of regret and reward—as you enter what is no more than rote experience upon the earth.

Mine, I’m happy to say, is the best possible.

“Well, hey,” I say in a stirring voice, hands upon my breast. “What say we get out of here and take a walk? I haven’t eaten since lunch, and I could pretty much eat a lug wrench right now. I’ll buy you a sandwich.”

Catherine Flaherty bites a piece of her lip as she smiles a smile even bigger than mine and colors flower in her tulip cheeks. This is a pretty good idea, she means to say, full of sentiment. (Though she is already nodding a business woman’s agreement before she speaks.) “Sounds really
great
.” She flips her hair in a definitive way. “I guess I’m pretty hungry too. Just let me get my coat, and we’ll go for it.”

“It’s a deal,” I say.

I hear her feet slip-skip down the carpeted corridor, hear the door to the ladies’ sigh open, sigh back, bump shut (always the practical girl). And there is no nicer time on earth than now—everything in the offing, nothing gone wrong, all potential—the very polar opposite of how I felt driving home the other night, when everything was on the skids and nothing within a thousand kilometers worth anticipating. This is really all life is worth, when you come down to it.

The light across the street is off now. Though as I stand watching (my bum knee good as new), waiting for this irresistible, sentimental girl’s return, I can’t be certain that the man I saw there—the heavy man in his vest and tie, surprised by the sudden sound of a voice and his own name, a sound he didn’t expect—I can’t be certain he’s not there still, looking out over the night streets of a friendly town, alone. And I step closer to the glass and try to find him through the dark, stare hard, hoping for even an illusion of a face, of someone there watching me here. Far below I can sense the sound of cars and life in motion. Behind me I hear the door sigh closed again and footsteps coming. And I sense that it’s not possible to see there anymore, though my guess is no one’s watching me. No one’s noticed me standing here at all.

THE END

Life will always be without a natural, convincing closure. Except one.

Walter was buried in Coshocton, Ohio, on the very day I sounded the horns of my thirty-ninth birthday. I didn’t go to his funeral, though I almost did. (Carter Knott went.) In spite of everything, I could not feel that I had a place there. For a day or two he was kept over in Mangum & Gayden’s on Winthrop Street, where Ralph was four years ago, and then was driven back to the midwest by long-haul truck. It turns out it wasn’t his sister I saw on the train platform in Haddam that night, but some other woman. Walter’s sister, Joyce Ellen, is a heavy-set, bespectacled, YWCA-type who has never married and wears mannish suits and ties, is as nice a person as you will ever meet, and has never read Teddy Roosevelt’s
Life
. She and I had a long, friendly visit at a coffee shop in New York, where we talked about the letter Walter had left and about Walter in general. Joyce said he was a kind of enigma to her and her entire family, and that he hadn’t been in close touch with them for some time. Only in the last week of his life, she said, Walter had called up several times to talk about hunting and the possibility of moving back there and setting up a business and even about me, whom he described as his best friend. Joyce said she thought there was something very strange about her brother, and she wasn’t all that surprised when the call came in. “You can feel these things coming,” she said (though I do not agree). She said she hoped Yolanda wouldn’t come to the funeral, and I have a suspicion she got her wish.

Walter’s death, I suppose you could say, has had the effect on me that death means to have; of reminding me of my responsibility to a somewhat larger world. Though it came at a time when I didn’t much want to think about that, and I still don’t find it easy to accommodate and am not completely sure what I can do differently.

Walter’s story about a daughter born out of wedlock and grown up now in Florida was, it turns out, not true, but simply a gentle joke. He knew, I think, that I would never run the risk of letting him down, and he was right. I flew to Sarasota, did a good bit of sleuthing, including some calls about birth records in Coshocton, I called Joyce Ellen, even hired a detective who cost me a good bit of money but turned up nothing and no one. And I’ve decided that the whole goose chase was just his one last attempt at withholding full disclosure. A novelistic red herring. And I admire Walter for it, since for me such a gesture has the feel of secrecies, a quality Walter’s own life lacked, though he tried for it. I think that Walter might’ve even figured out something important before he turned the television on for the last time, though I wouldn’t want to try to speak for him. But you can easily believe that some private questions get answered—just in the nature of things—as you anticipate the hammer falling.

Coming to Florida has had a good effect on me, and I have stayed on these few months—it is now September—though I don’t think I will stay forever. Coming to the bottom of the country provokes a nice sensation, a tropical certainty that something will happen to you here. The whole place seems alive with modest hopes. People in Florida, I’ve discovered, are here to get away from things, to seek no end of life, and there is a crispness and a Tightness to most everyone I meet that I find likable. No one is trying to rook anybody else, as my mother used to say, and contrary to all reports. Many people are here from Michigan, the blue plates on their cars and pickups much in evidence. It is not like New Jersey, but it is not bad.

The time since last April has gone by fast, in an almost technicolor-telescopic way—much faster than I’m used to having it go—which may be Florida’s great virtue, instead of the warm weather: time goes by fast in a perfectly timeless way. Not a bit like Gotham, where you seem to feel every second you are alive, but somehow miss everything else.

With my bank savings, I have leased a sporty, sea-green Datsun on a closed-end basis and left my car and my house in Bosobolo’s care. This has allowed him—as he explained in a letter—to bring his wife over from Gabon and to live a real married life in America. I don’t know the fate of the dumpy white girl. Possibly he has put her aside, though possibly not. And neither do I know what my neighbors think of this new arrangement—seeing Bosobolo out in the yard, surveying the spirea and the hemlocks, stretching his long arms and yawning like a lord.

I have a furnished adults-only condo out on a pleasant enough beachy place called Longboat Key, and have taken a leave of indefinite absence from the magazine. And for these few months I’ve lived a life of agreeable miscellany. At night someone will often put on some Big Band or reggae records, and men and women will gather around the pool and mix up some drinks and dance and chitter-chat. There are, naturally, plenty of girls in bathing suits and sundresses, and once in a while one of them consents to spend a night with me, then drifts away the next day back to whatever interested her before: a job, another man, travel. A few agreeable homosexuals live here, as well as an abundance of retired Navy men—midwestern guys in most cases, some of them my age—with a lot of time and energy on their hands and not enough to do. The Navy men have stories about Vietnam and Korea that all together would make a good book. And one or two have asked me about writing their life stories once they learned I write for a living. Though when all that begins to bore me, or when I don’t feel up to it, I take a walk out to the water which is just beyond the retaining wall and hike a while in the late daylight, when the sky is truly high and white, and watch the horizon go dark toward Cuba, and the last tourist plane of the day angle up toward who knows where. I like the flat plexus of the Gulf, and the sensation that there is a vast, troubling landscape underwater all lost, with only the definite land remaining, a sad and flat and melancholy prairie that can be lonely but in an appealing way, I’ve even driven up to the Sunshine Skyway, where I have thought of Ida Simms, and of the night Walter and I talked about her and of how much she meant to him. I have wondered if she ever woke up there or in the Seychelles or some such place and went home to her family. Probably not.