Richard Ford - The Sportswriter

It has the feeling of an odd morning, despite the friendly anonymity of the hotel. A distinct buzzing has begun in the pit of my stomach, a feeling that is not unpleasant but insistent. Several people I saw in the lobby have reminded me of other people I know, an indicator that something exceptional’s afoot. A man in the checkout line reminded me of — of all people — Walter Luckett. Even the black shop girl put me in mind of Peggy Connover, the woman I used to write in Kansas and whose letters caused X to leave me. Peggy, in fact, was Swedish and would laugh to think she looked a bit Negroid. Like all signs, these can be good or bad, and I choose to infer from them that life, anyone’s life, is not as disconnected and random as it might feel, and that down deep we’re all reaching out for a decent rewarding contact every chance we get.

Last night, after Vicki went to sleep, I experienced the strangest dream, a dream I’ve never had before and one I would rather not have again. I am not much of a dreamer to begin with, and almost never remember them past the moment just before my eyes open. When I do, I can usually ascribe everything to something I’ve eaten in the afternoon, or to a book I’d been reading. And for the most part there’s never much that’s familiar in them anyway.

But in this dream I was confronted by someone I knew — a man — but had forgotten — though not completely, because there were flashes of recollection I couldn’t quite organize into a firm picture-memory. This man mentions to me — so obliquely that now I can’t even remember what he said — something shameful about me, clearly shameful, and it scares me that he might know more and that I’ve forgotten it, but shouldn’t have. The effect of all this was to shock me roundly, though not to wake me up. When I did wake up at eight, I remembered the entire dream clear as a bell, though I could not fill in names or faces or the shame I might’ve incurred.

Besides not being a good collector of my dreams, I am not much a believer in them either or their supposed significance. Everyone I’ve ever talked to about dreams — and Mrs. Miller, I’m happy to say, feels exactly as I do, and will not listen to anyone’s dreams — everyone always interprets their dreams to mean something unpleasant, some lurid intention or ungenerous, guilty desire crammed back into the subconscious cave where its only chance is to cause trouble at a later time.

Whereas what I ama proponent of is forgetting. Forgetting dreams, grievances, old flaws in character — mine and others’. To me there is no hope unless we can forget what’s said and gone before, and forgive it.

Which is exactly why this particular dream is bothersome. It is about forgetting, and yet there seems to be a distinct thread of unforgiving in it, which is the source of the shock I felt even deep in sleep, in an old town where I feel as comfortable as a Cossack in Kiev, and where I want nothing more than that the present be happy and for the future — as it always does — to look after itself. I would prefer to think of all signs as good signs, or else to pay no attention to them at all. There are enough bad signs all around (read the New York Times) not to pick out any particular one for attention. In the case of my dream, I can’t even think of what I ought to be anxious about, since I am eager — even ascendant. And if it is that I’m anxious in the old mossy existential sense, it will have to stay news to me.

It is, of course, an irony of ironies that X should’ve left me because of Peggy Connover’s letters, since Peggy and I had never committed the least indiscretion.

She was a woman I met on a plane from Kansas City to Minneapolis, and whom in the space of an afternoon, a dinner, and an evening, I came to know as much about as you could know in that length of time. She was thirty-two and not at all an appealing woman. She was plump with large, white teeth and a perfectly pie-shaped face. She was leaving her family with four children, back in the town of Blanding, Kansas, where her husband sold insulation, to go live with her sister in northern Minnesota and become a poet. She was a good-natured woman, with a nice dimpled smile, and on the plane she began to tell me about her life — how she had gone to Antioch, studied history, played field hockey, marched in peace marches, written poems. She told me about her parents who were Swedish immigrants — a fact that had always embarrassed her; that she dreamed sometimes of huge trucks going over cliffs and woke up terrified; about writing poems that she showed to her husband, Van, then hearing him laugh at them, though he later told her he was proud of her. She told me she had been a sexpot in college, and had married Van, who was from Miami of Ohio, because she loved him, but that they weren’t on the same level educationally, which hadn’t mattered then, but did now, which was why she felt she was leaving him.

When we got off the plane she asked me, standing in the concourse, where I was staying, and when I told her the Ramada, she said she could just as easily stay there and that maybe we could have dinner together because she liked talking to me. And since I had nothing else to do, I said okay.

In the next five hours we had a buffet dinner, then after that went down to my room to drink a bottle of German wine she had bought for her sister, and she talked some more, with me just adding a word here and there. She told me about her break with Lutheranism, about her philosophy of child-rearing, about her theories of Abstract Expressionism, the global village, and a Great Books course she’d built up to teach somewhere if the chance ever came along.

At eleven-fifteen, she stopped talking, looked down at her pudgy hands and smiled. “Frank,” she said, “I just want to tell you that I’ve been thinking about sleeping with you this whole time. But I don’t really think I should.” She shook her head. “I know we’re supposed to do what our senses dictate, and I’m very attracted to you, but I just don’t think it would be right, do you?”

Her face looked troubled by this, but when she looked at me a big hopeful smile came on her lips. And what I felt for her then was a great and comprehending nostalgia, because for some reason I thought I knew just exactly how she felt, alone and at the world’s mercy, the same way I’d felt when I’d been in the Marines, suffering from an unknown disease with no one but unfriendly nurses and doctors to check on me, and I had had to think about dying when I didn’t want to. And what it made me feel about Peggy Connover was that I wanted to make love to her — more, in fact, than I’d wanted to do that in a long time. It’s possible, let me tell you, to become suddenly attracted to a woman you don’t really find attractive; a woman you’d never want to take to dinner, or pick up at a cocktail party, or look twice at in an elevator, only just suddenly it happens, which was the case with Peggy.

Though what I said was, “No, Peggy, I don’t think it would be right. I think it’d cause a lot of trouble.” I don’t know why I said this or said it in this way, since it wasn’t what my senses were dictating.

Peggy’s face lit up with pleasure, and also, I think, surprise. (This is always the most vulnerable time in such encounters. At the very moment you absolve yourself of any intention to do wrong, you often roll right into each other’s arms. Though we didn’t.) What happened was that Peggy came over to the bed where I was sitting, sat beside me, took my hand and squeezed it, gave me a big damp kiss on the cheek and sat smiling at me as if I were a man like no other. She told me how lucky she felt to meet me and not some “other type,” since she was vulnerable that night, she said, and probably “fair game.” We talked for a while about how she was probably going to feel in the morning after having drunk all that wine, and that we would probably want a lot of coffee. Then she said that if it was all right she’d like to find something I’d written and read it and write me about it. And I said I’d like that. Then as if by some secret signal she came around the bed, pulled back the covers, climbed in beside me and went immediately to snoring sleep. I slept beside her the rest of the night fully clothed, on top of the covers, and never touched her once. And in the morning I left before she woke up, to go interview a football coach, and never saw her again.