Richard Ford - The Sportswriter

She fattens her cheeks as Walter Reuther Boulevard flashes by, then the Fisher Building and the lumpish Olympia rises in the furred, gray distance. “They say that in Texas all the time. They prob’ly say it everywhere.” She looks back at the cityscape. “You know what my daddy says about Detroit?”

“He must not’ve liked it very much.”

“When I told him I was coming out today with you, he just said, ‘If Detroit was ever a state, it’d be New Jersey.’” She smiles at me cunningly.

“Detroit doesn’t have the diversity, though I really like both places.”

“He likes New Jersey, but he didn’t like this place.” We swerve into the long concrete trench of the Lodge freeway, headed to midtown. “He hasn’t ever liked a place much, which I always thought was kind of a shame. This place doesn’t look so bad, though. Lots of colored, but that’s all right with me. They gotta live, too.” She nods seriously to herself, then takes my hand and squeezes it as we enter a vapor-lit freeway tunnel which takes us to the riverfront and the Pontchartrain.

“This was the first city I ever knew. We used to come into town when I was in college and go to burlesque shows and smoke cigars. It seemed like the first American city to me.”

“That’s the way Dallas is to me. I’m not upset to be gone from it, though. Not a little teensy.” She purses her lips hard and turns loose of my hand. “My life’s lots better now, I’ll tell you that.”

“Where would you rather be?” I ask as the milky light of Jefferson Avenue dawns into our dark bus and passengers begin to murmur and clutch belongings up and down the aisle. Someone asks the driver about another stop farther along the hotel loop. We are all of us itchy to be there.

Vicki looks at me solemnly, as if the gravity of this city had entered her, making all lightheartedness seem sham. She is a girl who knows how to be serious. I had hoped, of course, she’d say there’s no place she’d rather than with m-e me. But I cannot mold all her wishes to my model for them, fulfill her every dream as I do my own. Yet she is as unguarded to this Detroit chill as I am, and secretly it makes me proud of her.

“Didn’t you say you went to college around here somewhere?” She’s thinking of something hard for her to come to, a glimmering of a thought.

“About forty miles away.”

“Well, what was that like?”

“It was a nice town with trees all around. A nice park for spring afternoons, decent profs.”

“Do you miss it? I bet you do. I bet it was the best time in your life and you wish you had it back. Tell the truth.”

“No ma’am,” I say. And it’s true. “I wouldn’t change from right this moment.”

“Ahhh,” Vicki says skeptically, then turns toward me in her seat, suddenly intense. “Do you swear to it?”

“I swear to it.”

She fastens her lips together again and smacks them, her eyes cast to the side for thinking power. “Well, it idn’t true with me. This is to answer where would I rather be.”

“Oh.”

Our Flxible comes hiss to a lumbering stop in front of our hotel. Doors up front fold open. Passengers move into the aisle. Behind Vicki out the tinted glass I see Jefferson Avenue, gray cars moiling by and beyond it Cobo, where Paul Anka is singing tonight. And far away across the river, the skyline of Windsor — glum, low, retrograde, benumbed reflection of the U.S. (The very first thing I did after Ralph was buried was buy a Harley-Davidson motorcycle and take off driving west. I got as far as Buffalo, halfway across the Peace Bridge, then lost my heart and turned back. Something in Canada had taken the breath of spirit out of me, and I promised never to go back, though of course I have.)

“When I think about where would I rather be,” Vicki says dreamily, “what I think about is my first day of nursing school out in Waco. All of us were lined up in the girls’ dorm lobby, clear from the reception desk out to the Coke machine between the double doors. Fifty girls. And across from where I was standing was this bulletin board behind a little glass window. And I could see myself in it. And written on that bulletin board in white letters on black was ‘We’re glad you’re here’ with an exclamation. And I remember thinking to myself, ‘You’re here to help people and you’re the prettiest one, and you’re going to have a wonderful life.’ I remember that so clearly, you know? A very wonderful life.” She shakes her head. “I always think of that.” We are last to leave the bus now, and other passengers are ready to depart. The driver is folding closed the baggage doors, our two sit on the damp and crowded sidewalk. “I don’t mean to be ole gloomy-doomy.”

“You’re not a bit of gloomy-doomy,” I say. “I don’t think that for a minute.”

“And I don’t want you to think I’m not glad to be here with you, because I am. It’s the happiest day of my life in a long time, ’cause I just love all of this so much. This big ole town. I just love it so much. I didn’t need to answer that right now, that’s all. It’s one of my failings. I always answer questions I don’t need to. I’d do better just going along.”

“It’s me that shouldn’t ask it. But you’re going to let me make you happy, aren’t you?” I smile hopefully at her. What business do I have wanting to know any of this? I’m my own worst enemy.

“I’m happy. God, I’m real happy.” And she throws her arms around me and cries a tiny tear on my cheek (a tear, I want to believe, of happiness) just as the driver cranes his neck in and waves us out. “I’d marry you,” she whispers. “I didn’t mean to make fun of you asking me. I’ll marry you any time.”

“We’ll try to fit it into our agenda, then,” I say and touch her moist soft cheek as she smiles through another fugitive tear.

And then we are up and out and down and into the dashing wet wind of Detroit, and the squabbly street where our suitcases sit in a sop of old melted snow like cast-off smudges. A lone policeman stands watching, ready to chart their destination from this moment on. Vicki squeezes my arm, her cheek on my shoulder, as I heft the two cases. Her plaid canvas is airy; mine, full of sportswriter paraphernalia, is a brick.

And I feel exactly what at this debarking moment?

At least a hundred things at once, all competing to take the moment and make it their own, reduce undramatic life to a gritty, knowable kernel.

This, of course, is a minor but pernicious lie of literature, that at times like these, after significant or disappointing divulgences, at arrivals or departures of obvious importance, when touchdowns are scored, knock-outs recorded, loved ones buried, orgasms notched, that at such times we are any of us altogether in an emotion, that we are within ourselves and not able to detect other emotions we might also be feeling, or be about to feel, or prefer to feel. If it’s literature’s job to tell the truth about these moments, it usually fails, in my opinion, and it’s the writer’s fault for falling into such conventions. (I tried to explain all of this to my students at Berkshire College, using Joyce’s epiphanies as a good example of falsehood. But none of them understood the first thing I was talking about, and I began to feel that if they didn’t already know most of what I wanted to tell them, they were doomed anyway — a pretty good reason to get out of the teaching business.)

What I feel, in truth, as I swing these two suitcases off the wet concrete and our blue bus sighs and rumbles from the curbside toward its other routed hotels, and bellboys lurk behind thick glass intent on selling us assistance, is, in a word: a disturbance . As though I were relinquishing something venerable but in need of relinquishing. I feel a quickening in my pulse. I feel a strong sense of lurking evil (the modern experience of pleasure coupled with the certainty that it will end). I feel a conviction that I have no ethics at all and little consistency. I sense the possibility of terrible regret in the brash air. I feel the need suddenly to confide (though not in Vicki or anyone else I know). I feel as literal as I’ve ever felt — stranded, uncomplicated as an immigrant. All these I feel at once. And I feel the urge — which I suppress — to cry, the way a man would, for these same reasons, and more.