Richard Ford - The Sportswriter

In the bathroom mirror I resemble a wretched sex-offender — cigarette dangling in my fingers, blue-piped pajamas rumpled, my face gaunt from gasping, the stern light pinching my eyes narrow as Everett’s. I am not a pretty sight, and I’m not a bit happy to see myself here. I should have gone out in the streets alone and figured out something to figure out. Certain situations dictate to you how they should be used to advantage. And you should always follow the conventional wisdom in those cases — in fact, in all cases. Always go up on deck to watch the sun come up. Always take a late-night swim after your hosts are in bed. Always take a hike in the woods near your friends’ cabin and try to find a new route to the waterfall or an old barn to explore. If nothing else you save yourself giving in to a more personal curiosity and the trouble that always seems to cause. I have gone poking around after full disclosure before my disavowal of it is barely out of my mouth — a disappointing testimony to self-delusion, even more disappointing than finding dagger-head Everett’s picture in Vicki’s pocketbook where, after all, it had every right to be and I had none.

When I exit the bathroom Vicki is seated at the dressing table, smoking one of her own Merits, elbow on the chair back, the TV off, looking sultry and alien as a dancehall girl. She is wearing a black crepe de Chine “push up” nightgown and matching toeless mules. I don’t like the spiky looks of this (though it’s conceivable I might’ve liked it earlier in the evening) since it looks like something Everett would like, might even have bought himself as a final, fragrant memento. I would not stand for it one minute if I was calling the shots, which I’m not.

“I didn’t mean to wake you up,” I say balefully and slink to the end of the big granddaddy bed, two feet from her sovereign knees, where I take a seat. Evil has begun to lurk the room, ready to grip with its cold literal claws. My heart begins pounding the way it was when I woke up this morning, and I feel as if my voice may become inaudible.

I am caught. Though I would save the moment, save us from anger and regret and even more disclosure, the enemy of intimacy. I wish I could blurt out a new truth; that I suffer from a secret brain tumor and sometimes do inexplicable things I afterwards can’t discuss; or that I’m writing a piece on pro basketball and need to see the end of the Seattle game where Seattle throws up a zone and everything comes down to one shot the way it always does. The saved moment is the true art of love.

Staring, though, at Vicki’s sculptured, vaguely padded knees, I now am clearly lost and feel the ultimate slipping away again, bereavement threatening like thunder to roll in and take its place.

“So what is it you were lookin for in my bag?” she says. Hers is a frown of focused disdain. I am the least favorite student caught looking for the gradebook in the teacher’s desk. She is the friendly substitute there for one day only (though we all wish she were the regular one) but who knows a sneak when she sees him.

“I wasn’t looking for anything, really. I wasn’t looking.” I was looking, of course. And this is the wrong lie, though a lie is absolutely what’s needed. My first tiny skirmish with the facts goes into the debit column. My voice falls ten full decibels. This has happened before.

“I don’t keep secrets,” she says now in a flat voice. “I suppose you do though.”

“Sometimes I do.” I lose nothing admitting that.

“And you lie about things, too.”

“Only if it’s completely necessary. Otherwise never.” (It is better than confiding.)

“And like lovin me, too, I guess?”

A sweet girl’s heart only speaks truths. Evil suddenly takes an unexpected rebuke. “You’re wrong there,” I say, and nothing could be truer.

“Humph,” she says. Her brow gathers over small prosecutorial eyes. “And I’m s’pose to believe that now, right? With you ram-maging around my things and smokin cigarettes and me dreaming away?”

“You don’t have to believe it for it to be true.” I put my elbows on my knees, honest-injun style.

“I hate a snake,” she says, looking coldly around at the ashtray beside her as if a dead snake were coiled right there. “I just swear I do. I stay way clear of ’em. Cause I seen plenty. Right? They’re not hard to recognize, either.” She cuts her eyes away at the door to the hall and sniffs a little mirthless laugh. “That was just a lie on me, wadn’t it?”

“The only way you’ll find that out, I guess, is just to stay put.” Out in the chilly streets I hear a police siren wail down the wide, dark avenue and drawl off into the traffic. Some poor soul is having it worse than I am.

“So what about getting married?” she says archly.

“That, too.”

She smirks her mouth into a look of disillusionment and shakes her head. She stubs out her cigarette carefully in the ashtray. She has seen this all before. Motel rooms. Two A.M. Strange sights. The sounds of strange cities and sirens. Lying boys out for the fun and a short trip home. Empty moments. The least of us has seen a hundred. It is no wonder mystery and its frail muted beauties have such a son-of-a-bitching hard time of it. They’re way outnumbered and ill-equipped in the best of times.

“Well-o-well,” she says and shrugs, hands down between her knees in a fated way.

But still, something has been won back, some aspirant tragedy averted. I am not even sure what it is, since evil still floods the room up to the cornices. The Lebanese woman I knew at Berkshire College would never have let this happen, no matter what I had done to provoke it, since she was steeled for such things by a life of Muslim disinterest. X wouldn’t either, though for other, even better reasons (she expected more). Vicki is hopeful, but not of much, and so is never far from disappointment.

Still, the worst reconciliation with a woman is better than the best one you work out with yourself.

“There’s nothing in this bag worth stealin, or even finding out about,” Vicki says wearily, everting her lips at her weekender as if it were a wreckage that has washed ashore after years of not being missed. “Money,” she says languidly, “I keep hid in a special place. That’s one secret I keep. You won’t get that.”

I want to hug her knees, though this is clearly hands-to-yourself time. The slightest wrong move will see me on the phone locating another room on another floor, possibly in the Sheraton, four cold and lonely blocks away, and no coat to keep out the slick Canadian damp.

Vicki peers over at the glass desktop, at her wallet open alongside her cigarettes. The snapshot of brain-dead Everett leers upwards (it may in fact be hard to tell my somber, earnest face from his).

“I really believe there’s only six people in the world,” she says in a softened voice, staring down at Everett’s mug. “I’d been thinking you might be one. An important one. But I think you had too many girlfriends already. Maybe you’re somebody else’s one.”

“You might be wrong. I could still make the line-up.”

She looks at me distrustfully. “Eyes are important to me, okay? They’re windows to your soul. And your eyes … I used to think I could see your soul back in there. But now….” She shakes her head in doubt.

“What do you see?” I don’t want to hear the answer. It is a question I would never even ask Mrs. Miller, and one she’d never take it upon herself to speculate about. We do not, after all, deal in truths, only potentialities. Too much truth can be worse than death, and last longer.

“I don’t know,” Vicki says, in a thin wispy way, which means I had better not pursue it or she’ll decide. “What’re you so interested in my stepbrother for?” She looks at me oddly.