The Sportswriter

  Her moist blue eyes are large with effrontery. (Her hair is the precise blue color of her eyes.) “Well, they’re mining all the ports down there, in, let’s see,” she takes a quick peek, “Nicaragua.” She crushes the open paper down in front of her and blinks at me. Delia is small and brown and wrinkled as an iguana, but has plenty of strong opinions about world affairs and how they ought to work out. “Caspar’s extremely discouraged about it. He thinks it’ll be another Vietnam. He’s in the house right now calling up all his people in Washington trying to find out what’s really going on. He may still have some influence, he thinks, though I don’t see how he could.”

  “I’ve been out of town a couple of days, Dee.” I stand and admire Dee and Caspar’s pair of pink pottery flamingos which they bought in Mexico.

  “Well, I don’t see why we should mine each other’s ports, Frank. Do you? Honestly?” She shakes her head in private disappointment with our entire government, as though it had been one of her very favorites but suddenly become incomprehensible. For the moment, though, my mind’s as empty as a jug, captured by the belling at the seminary carillon. “Come my soul, thou must be waking; now is breaking o’er the earth another day.” I find I cannot bring up the name or the face of the man who is president, and instead I see, unaccountably, the actor Richard Chamberlain, wearing a burnoose and a nicely trimmed Edwardian beard.

  “I guess it would depend on what the cause was. But it doesn’t sound good to me.” I smile across the flat-trimmed hedge. I have to work at being a full adult around Delia, since if I’m not careful our age difference—roughly forty-five years—can have the effect of making me feel like I’m ten.

  “We’re hypocrites, Frank, if that’s our policy. You should bear in mind Disraeli’s warning about the conservative governments.”

  “I don’t remember that, I guess.”

  “That they’re organized hypocrisy, and he wasn’t wrong about that.”

  “I remember Thomas Wolfe wrote about making the world safe for hypocrisy. But that’s not the same.”

  “Caspar and I think that the States should build a wall all along the Mexican frontier, as large as the Great Wall, and man it with armed men, and make it clear to those countries that we have problems of our own up here.”

  “That’s a good idea.”

  “Then we could at least solve our own problem with the black man.” I don’t exactly know what Delia and Caspar think about Bosobolo, but I do not intend asking. For being anti-colonial, Delia has some pretty strong colonial instincts. “You writers, Frank. Always ready to set sail with any wind that blows.”

  “The wind can blow you interesting places, Dee.” I say this with only mock seriousness, since Delia knows my heart.

  “I see your wife at the grocery, and she doesn’t seem very happy to me, Frank. And those two sweet babies.”

  “They’re all fine, Dee. Maybe you caught her on a bad day. Her golf game gets her down sometimes. She really didn’t get a fair start on a real career. I think she’s trying to make up for lost time.”

  “I do too, Frank.” Delia nods, her face like lean old glove leather, then folds her paper in a neat paperboy’s fold that’s wonderful to see. I’m ready to dawdle away back to the roses and crab apples. Delia and I are sympathetic to each other’s private causes, and both realize it, and that is good enough for me. For a moment I spy Frisker, her seal-point, sleuthing around the hibiscus below Caspar’s flag pole, staring up at the bird feeder where a junco’s perched. Frisker has been known to prowl my roof at night and wake me up, and I’ve thought about getting a slingshot, but so far haven’t. “Man wasn’t meant to live alone, Frank,” Delia says significantly, eyeing me closely all of a sudden.

  “It has its plusses, Delia. I’ve adjusted pretty well now.”

  “How long has it been since you read The Sun Also Rises, Frank?”

  “It’s probably been a while now.”

  “You should reread it,” Delia says. “There’re important lessons there. That man knew something. Caspar met him in Paris once.”

  “He was always one of my favorites.” Not true, though a lie’s what’s asked for. It’s not surprising that Delia’s view of the complex world dates from about 1925. In fact it might have been a better time back then.

  “Caspar and I were married in our sixties, you know.”

  “I didn’t realize that.”

  “Oh, yes. Caspar had a nice fat wife who died. I even met her once. Of course, my own poor husband died years before. Caspar and I went out of wedlock in Fez, in 1942, and kept aware of each other’s whereabouts afterwards. When I heard Alma, his fat wife, had died, I called him up. I was with a niece in Maine by then, and in two months Caspar and I were married and living just below Mount Reconnaissance in Guam, which was his last posting. I certainly didn’t expect what I got from life, Frank. But I didn’t waste time either.” She smiles fiercely, as if she can see my future and the certainty that it will not be quite as wonderful.

  “It’s a beautiful day, isn’t it, Dee?”

  “It is, yes. It’s quite lovely. I believe it’s Easter.”

  “I can’t remember a prettier one.”

  “I can’t either, Frank. Why don’t you come over this week and have a scotch with Caspar. He’d love for you to come talk men’s talk. I think he’s pretty upset by all this mining.” In the fourteen years I’ve lived here, I have been in the Deffeyes’ house only two times (both times to fix something), and Delia means no harm by one more insincere invitation. We have reached the natural end of our neighborliness, though she’s too polite to admit the inevitability of it, a quality I like in her. I gaze up from the yard into the still blue Easter morning and, to my surprise, see a balloon, large upon the currents of a gleaming atmosphere, its mooring lines adangle, a big red moon with a smiling face on its bloated bag. Two tiny stick-figure heads peer down from the basket, point arms at us, pull a chain which produces a far-off gasping.

  Where did they leave earth, I wonder? The grounds of a nearby world headquarters? A rich man’s mansion on the Delaware? How far can they see on a clear day? Are they safe? Do they feel safe?

  Delia does not seem to notice, and awaits my answer to her invitation.

  “I’ll do that, Dee.” I smile. “Tell Cap I’ll stop by this week. I’ve got a joke to tell him.”

  “Any day but Tuesday.” She smiles a prissy smile. This is the usual complication. “He misses men, I’m afraid.”

  Delia strays away now with her paper to her sunny lawn and tennis court, me to my barbecue pit and roses and day, upward-tending in most all ways, one I’ll be happy to put into the file of Easters spent richly and forgotten.

  Gong, go the bells in town. Gong, gong, gong, gong, gong.

  Just before ten I put in a call to X, to wish the children happy Easter. It is now a holiday we “trade,” and this the first one when I haven’t been around. Though no one’s home on Cleveland Street. X’s answer message says that if I’m interested in golf lessons I should leave my name and number. In the background I hear Clary say “Later, bird brain,” and break up laughing. There is an edge in X’s voice now, something strange to me, an all-business, money-in-the-bank brassiness that reminds me of her father. It makes me wonder if my family is off smorging in Bucks County with one of X’s software or realtor friends, some big hairy-armed guy in a green sports jacket, with everything on the company cuff.

  I decide not to leave a message (though I’d like to).

  For some reason I call Walter Luckett’s number and let the phone ring a long time without an answer while I stare out on the paisley Easter street. Where would I be if I were Walter? In some bully bar in the West Village? Cruising the elmy streets of insular Newfoundland in a devil’s own fury? Hitting some backboard balls at the high school before taking in The Robe at Lost Bridge Mall? I’m not even certain I care to know. Some people were not made to have best friends, and I might be one. Walter might be another, tho
ugh for different reasons. Acquaintanceship usually suffices for me, which was more or less the one important lesson learned from my Lebanese girfriend, Selma Jassim, at Berkshire College, since if anything, she believed mutual confidences of almost any kind were just a lot of baloney.

  I decided to go teach at Berkshire College—I know now—to deflect the pain of terrible regret—the same reason I quit writing my novel, years ago, and began to write sports; the same reason most of us make our dramatic turns to the right and left about midway, and the same reason some people drive right off the course and into the ditch.

  One afternoon a year after Ralph died, I was at home on one of the week-long breaks that occur at the magazine between large assignments, and when we are supposed to rest up and re-establish a semblance of regular life. I was sitting in the breakfast nook—it was in May—reading some piled-up copies of Life when the phone rang. The man calling said his name was Arthur Winston and he was married to Beth Winston, who was the sister of my former literary agent, Sid Fleisher, whom I had not heard from since he had written us a condolence card. Arthur Winston said he was the chairman of the English Department at Berkshire College in Massachusetts, and he had been talking to Sid in Sid’s house in Katonah, and Sid had mentioned a writer he had once represented who had written one good book of short stories, but then quit writing entirely. One thing led to another, Arthur said, and he had ended up with the book, which he claimed to have read and admired. He asked if I had been writing any other short stories since then, and for some reason I gave him an evasive answer which could’ve made him think I had, and that with a little coaxing I could actually be induced to write plenty more (though none of this was true). He said to me then that he was over a pretty big barrel. The usual writer at Berkshire, an older man whose name I didn’t know, had suddenly gone berserk at the end of the spring semester and started vicious fist fights with several people—one of them a woman—and had begun carrying a gun under his coat, so that he had been institutionalized and would not be back in the fall. Arthur Winston said he knew it was a long shot, but that Sid Fleisher had said I was a “pretty interesting” fellow who’d lived a “pretty unusual” life since quitting writing, and he—Arthur—thought maybe a semester of teaching would be just the thing to get my work fired up again, and if I wanted to do it he would consider it a personal favor to him and would see to it I taught anything I pleased. And I simply said “Yes, that’s fine,” and that I would be there in the fall.

  I do not exactly know what got into my thinking. I had never thought about such a thing in my life, and in one way it couldn’t have been crazier. The magazine, of course, is always happy to extend leaves for what it considers widening experiences. But when I told X she just stood there in the kitchen and stared out the window at the Deffeyes’ tennis court where Paul and Clary were watching Caspar play with one of his octogenarian friends—each old man wearing a crisp white sweater and hitting bright orange balls in high looping volleys—and said “What about us? We can’t move to Massachusetts. I don’t want to go there.”

  “That’s fine,” I said, actually for a moment seeing myself leading a graduation day exercise at some tiny Gothic-looking campus, wearing a floppy cap and crimson gown, carrying a scepter, and being the soul of everyone’s admiration. “I’ll commute,” I said. “The three of you can come up odd weekends. We’ll go stay in country inns with cider mills. We’ll have a wonderful time. It’ll be easy.” I was suddenly eager to get up there.

  “Have you lost your mind?” X turned and looked at me as if she could in fact see that I’d lost my mind. She smiled at me in an odd way then, and it seemed she knew something bad was happening but was powerless to help. (This was during the worst of the time with the other women, and she had been doing a lot of holding her peace.)

  “No. I haven’t lost my mind,” I said, smiling guiltily. “This is something I’ve always wanted to do.” (Which was a total lie.) “There’s no time like the present if you ask me. What do you think?” I went over to give her a pat on the arm, and she just turned and went out into the yard. And that was the last time we ever talked about it. I started making arrangements with the college to provide me a house. I asked for and received my leave from the magazine (a Breadth Fellowship was what they called it). My texts were mailed down midway through the summer, and I did what I felt like was proper preparation. Then at the first of September I packed the Chevy and drove up.

  What I found, of course, when I got my feet under me was that I had about as much business teaching in college as a duck has riding a bicycle, since what was true was that in spite of my very best efforts I had nothing to teach.

  It’s rare, when you think about it, that anyone ever would, given that the world is as complicated as a microchip and we all learn it slowly. I knew plenty of things, a whole lifetime’s collection. But it was all just about myself, and significant only to me (love is transferable; location isn’t actually everything). But I didn’t care to reduce any of it to fifty minute intervals, to words and a voice ideal for any eighteen-year-old to understand. That’s dangerous as a snake and runs the risk of discouraging and baffling students—whom I didn’t even like—though more crucially of reducing yourself, your emotions, your own value system—your life—to an interesting syllabus topic. Obviously this has a lot to do with “seeing around,” which I was in the grip of then but trying my best to get out of. When you are not seeing around, you’re likely to speak in your own voice and tell the truth as you know it and not for public approval. When you are seeing around, you’re pretty damn willing to say anything—the most sinister lie or the most clownish idiocy known to man—if you think it might make someone happy. Teachers, I should say, are highly susceptible to seeing around, and can practice it to the worst possible consequence.

  I could twine off sports anecdotes, Marine Corps stories, college jokes, occasionally vet an easy Williams poem to profit, tell a joke in Latin, wave my arms around like a poet to demonstrate enthusiasm. But that was all just to get through fifty minutes. When it came time to teach, literature seemed wide and undifferentiable—not at all distillable—and I did not know where to start. Mostly I would stand at the tall windows distracted as a camel while one of my students discussed an interesting short story he had found on his own, and I mused out at the dying elms and the green grass and the road to Boston, and wondered what the place might’ve looked like a hundred years ago, before the new library was put up and the student center, and before they added the biplane sculpture to the lawn to celebrate the age of flight. Before, in other words, it all got ruined by modernity gone haywire.

  The fellows in my department, God knows, couldn’t have been a better bunch. To their way of thinking, I was a “mature writer” trying to get back on my feet after a “promising start” followed by a fallow period devoted to “pursuing other interests,” and they were willing to go to bat for me. To make them all feel better I claimed to be putting together a new collection based on my experiences as a sportswriter, but in truth any thought I had for such an enterprise fled like thunder the minute I set foot on campus. I’d see a copy of my book at a dozen different houses at a dozen different dinner parties (the same library copy that made its way around ahead of me). And though no one ever mentioned it, I was to understand that it had been read closely and remarked on admiringly and in private by people who mattered. One crisp October evening at the house of a Dickens scholar, I inconspicuously removed it off the coffee table, put it in the snappy autumn fire and stood and watched it burn (with the same satisfaction X must’ve felt when her hope chest billowed up our chimney), then went in to dinner, ate chicken Kiev and had a good time talking in a pseudo-English accent about departmental politics and anti-Semitism in T. S. Eliot. I ended up late that night in a bar across the New York line, with Selma, who had also been a guest, arguing the virtues of the American labor movement and the checkered career of Emil Mazey with a bunch of right-to-work conservatives, and afterward sleeping in
a motel.

  My colleagues, I should say, were all fiercely interested in sports, especially baseball, and could carry on informative brass-tacks conversations about how statistics lie, hitting zones and who the great all-time bench managers had been—bull sessions that could last half an evening. They often knew much more than I did and wanted to talk for hours about exotic rule applications, who covers what on a double-steal, and the “personalities” of ball parks. They would often alter their own English or urban accents to a vaguely southern, “athletic” accent and then talk that way for hours, which also happened at Haddam cocktail parties. I even had some confide wistfully that they wished they’d done what I did, but had never seen where the “gap” was in a young life that let you think about such a thing as being a sportswriter. All of them, of course, had gone right out of college, raced through graduate school, and as far as possible gotten jobs, tenure, and a life set for them. If they’d had any “gaps,” they didn’t acknowledge them, since that might’ve had something to do with a failure of some kind—a bad grade, a low board score or a wishy-washy recommendation by an important professor, something that had scared the bejesus out of them and that they wanted to forget all about now.

  Still, I could tell it confused them that something had happened to me that hadn’t happened to them, and that here I was in their midst, and not such a bad guy after all, when their lives seemed both perfect and perfectly ordinary. They would smile at me and shake their heads, arms folded, pipes clenched tight, ties adjusted, and for some reason I didn’t and still can’t understand, listen to me talk! (whereas they wouldn’t listen to each other for a second). I was specimen-proof that life could be different from theirs and still be life, and they marveled at it.

  Writing sports was, I think, inviting to them just the way it’s inviting to me, and also exotic, but because of its literalness it sometimes embarrassed and scared them and made them laugh and fold and refold their arms like Zulus.