Richard Ford - The Sportswriter

“I guess they’ve moved the steak place,” I said and gazed up weekend-empty Woodward toward the Grand Circus where, when I was a college boy, Eddy Loukinen, Golfball Kirkland and I cruised the burlesque houses and the schooner bars, then drove the forty miles back to campus full of the mystique of soldiers on a last leave before shipping out to fates you wouldn’t smile about It was incongruous to me, in fact, that the year could’ve been 1963. Not ’73 or ’53. Sometimes I can even forget my own age and the year I’m living in, and think I am twenty, a kid starting new in the world — a greener, confused by life at its beginning.

“Towns aren’t even towns anymore,” Vicki said, sensing my distraction with this sad evolution, and giving me a hug around my middle. “Dallas wasn’t ever one, when you get right down to it. It’s just a suburb looking for a place to light.”

“I remember they had a first class wine list there,” I said, still gazing up Woodward toward the phantom steakhouse, past the old Sheraton and into the abandonment and dazzle of sex clubs and White Castles and bibliothèques sensuelles stretching to where snow made a backdrop.

“I can taste the cheddar cheese already,” she said in reference to her Tuna Alladin, trying to be upbeat. “I bet they’ve got just as good a wine for half the price back at the hotel. You’re just looking for someplace else to spend your money again.” And she was right, and wheeled me around and set us off back to the Pontch, watching our toes on the snowy pavement, taking long, slew-footed strides and laughing like conventioneers turned loose on the old town.

Though by five we are room-bound here, driven in by unseasonable weather and the forbidding streets of this city. We have tried to make the most of everything that’s come our way: a belly-buster lunch in the Frontenac Grill complete with a bottle of Michigan beaujolais. A long nap in a fresh bed, after which I have stood at the window and watched another ore barge down from Lake Superior ply the snowy river, headed, like the one last night, for Cleveland or Ashtabula. It’s possible I should put in a call to Herb, or even to Clarice, though I don’t know what I’d say and finally lack the courage. I might also call Rhonda Matuzak to report I’ve found out nothing usable for the Pigskin Preview. People are in the office this weekend, though it’s doubtful anyone’s counting on me. Mine, for the moment, is not the best sportswriter’s attitude.

“I’ll tell you what let’s do,” Vicki says suddenly. She is seated at the vanity twisting in some Navajo earrings she has bought with her money at the gift shop. They are tiny as pin-heads, lovely and blue as hyacinths.

“You just name it,” I say, looking up from the Out on the Town , which I’ve read cover to cover without finding one local attraction I have the heart for — including Paul Anka, who’s already left town. Even a cab ride to Tiger Stadium and a Mexican dinner seem somehow second rate.

“Let’s go on out to the airport and stand-by for a flight. Nobody goes any place on Saturday. I remember from when I used to watch planes for fun, they used to let people on with tickets for other days. They’re good about that.”

“I thought we’d make a festive night of it,” I say half-heartedly. “I was planning on Greek Town. There’s still plenty to do here.”

“Sometimes, you know, you just get the bug to sleep in your own bed, don’t you think that’s so? We’re s’posed to be at Daddy’s tomorrow before noon anyway. This’ll make it easier.”

“Aren’t you going to be disappointed to miss souvlaki and bak-lava?”

“I don’t even know where they’re located so how could I miss ’em? I bet you have to drive through some snow to get there though.”

“I haven’t been much of a high-flier this trip. I don’t really know what happened.”

“Nothing did.” Looking in the mirror, Vicki pulls back her dark curls to model the Navajos, pinched in behind her plump cheeks. She turns to the side to see and gives me a reassuring smile via the mirror. “I don’t have to ride the merry-go-round to have fun. I take mine from who I’m with, not what I do. I’ve had the best time I could, just being with you, and you’re a clubfoot not to know it.”

“What if the airport’s closed?”

“Then I’ll sit and read stories to you out of movie magazines. There’s worse things than spending the night in the airport. Sometimes I’d rather be there than lots of places.”

“It wouldn’t be that bad, would it?”

“No sir. Put yourself in one of those little TV chairs, eat dinner in a good restaurant. Get your shoes shined. It’d take you all night to hit the high spots,”

“I’ll call us a bellman,” I say, and stand up.

“I don’t know why we waited this long.” She smiles at me.

“I guess I was waiting for something exciting and unusual to happen. I always hope for that. It’s my weakness.”

“You have to know, though, when what you’re waiting for says, ‘Smile, you’re on candid camera.’ Then you got to be ready to smile.”

And I do smile, at her, as I reach for the phone to ring the bell captain. A small future brightens, and not a bad one, but an ordinary good one. And, as I dial, I feel the sky of this long day lighten about me now for the first time, and the clouds begin at last to ascend.

By ten we are in New Jersey as if by miracle of time travel, returned from the flat midwest to the diverse seaboard. Vicki has slept across Lake Erie once again after reading to me several excerpts from Daytime Confidential , all of which made me laugh, but which she took more seriously and seemed to want to mull over, I read a good deal of Love’s Last Journey and found it not bad at all. There was no long flashback prologue to get past, and the writer proved pretty skillful at getting the ball rolling by page two. I woke her only when the pilot banked over what I estimated to be Red Bank, with bright Gotham (the Statue of Liberty tiny but distinct, like a Japanese doll of herself) and all of New Jersey spread out like a glittering diamond apron, the Atlantic and Pennsylvania looming dark as the Arctic.

“What’s that thing,” Vicki asked, staring and pointing below us into the distant carnival of civilized lights.

“That’s the Turnpike. You can see where it meets the Garden State at Woodbridge and heads to New York.”

“Hey-o,” she said.

“I think it’s beautiful from up here.”

“You prob’ly do,” she said. “No telling what you’ll think’s beautiful next. A junk yard I guess.”

“I think you’re beautiful.”

“More than a junk yard. A junk yard in New Jersey?”

“Almost.” I squeezed her strong little arm and held it to me.

“You said the wrong thing now.” Her eyes narrowed in mock pique. “I liked you to this point. But I don’t see how this can go on.”

“You’ll break my heart.”

“It won’t be the first one I broke, will it?”

“What if I’m better?”

“’Bout too late,” she said. “You should of considered all that before you were even born.” She shook her head as though she meant every word of it, then settled back and closed her eyes to sleep as our silver ship perfected its descent to earth.

By eleven-fifteen I have delivered us to Pheasant Meadow. It has become a clear and intensely full-featured night, with the moon waning and tomorrow’s weather giving no sign of arriving from Detroit. It’s the very kind of night that used to make me disoriented and dizzy — the sort of night I stood out in the yard in, while X was inside burning her hope chest, and charted Cassiopeia and Gemini in the northern sky and felt vulnerable beside the rhododendrons. Since then, to be truthful, I have never felt all that easy with the clear night sky, as if I was seeing it from the top of a high building and afraid to look down. (I tend to prefer broken cirrus or mackerel clouds to a pure, starry vault.)