Richard Ford - The Sportswriter

“Maybe so. I wasn’t suggesting you take up fly-tying.”

“Frank, I don’t know what the hell I’ve gotten myself into, and there’s no use acting like I’m smart. I wouldn’t be in this if I was. I just feel on display in this mess, and I’m scared to death.” Walter shakes his head in contrite bafflement. “I’m sorry about all this, Frank. I wanted to keep improving myself, by myself.”

“It’s all right, Walter. I’m not sure, though, if you can improve yourself much. Why don’t I fix us both a drink.” Unexpectedly, though, my heart suddenly goes out to Walter the self-improver, trying to go it alone. Walter is the real New-Ager, and in truth, he and I are not much different. I’ve made discoveries he’ll make when he calms down, though the days when I could stay up all night, riled up about some point d’honneur or a new novel or bracing up a boon pal through some rough seas are long gone. I am too old for all that without even being very old. A next day — any new day — means too much to me. I am too much anticipator, my eye on the future of things. The best I can offer is a nightcap, and a room for the night where Walter can sleep with the light on.

“Frank, I’ll have a drink. That’s white of you. Then I’ll get the hell out of here.”

“Why don’t you just bed down here tonight. You can claim the couch, or there’s an extra bed in the kids’ room. That’d be fine.” I pour us both a glass of gin, and hand one to Walter. I’ve stashed away some roly-poly Baltimore Colts glasses I bought from a Balfour catalog when I was in college, in the days when Unitas and Raymond Berry were the big stars. And now seems to me the perfect time to crack them out. Sports are always a good distraction from life at its dreariest.

“This is nice of you, Franko,” Walter says, looking strangely at the little rearing blue Colt, shiny and decaled into the nubbly glass from years ago. “Great glasses.” He smiles up in wonderment. There is a part of me Walter absolutely cannot fathom, though he doesn’t really want to fathom it. In fact he is not interested in me at all. He might even sense that I am in no way interested in him, that I’m simply performing a Samaritan’s duty I would perform for anyone (preferably a woman) I didn’t think was going to kill me. Still, some basic elements of my character keep breaking into his train of thought. Like my Colts glasses. At his house he has leaded Waterfords, crystals etched with salmon, and sterling goblets — unless, of course, Yolanda got it all, which I doubt since Walter is cagier than that.

“Salud,” Walter says in a craven way.

“Cheers, Walter.”

He puts the glass down immediately and drums his fingers on the chair arm, then stares a hole right into me.

“He’s just a guy, Frank.” Walter sniffs and gives his head a hard shake. “A monies analyst right on the Street with me. Two kids. Wife named Priscilla up in Newfoundland.”

“What the hell are they doing way up there?”

“New Jersey, Frank. Newfoundland, New Jersey. Passaic County.” A place where X and I used to drive on Sundays and eat in a tur key-with-all-the-trimmings restaurant. Perfect little bucolic America set in the New Jersey reservoir district, an hour’s commute from Gotham. “I don’t know what you’d want to say about either of us,” Walter says.

“Nothing might be enough.”

“He’s an okay guy is what I’m saying. Okay?” Walter clasps his hands in his lap and gives me a semi-hurt look. “I went over to his firm to cash some certificates for a customer, and somehow we just started talking. He follows the same no-loads I do. And you know you can just talk. I was late already, and we decided to go down to the Funicular and drink till the traffic cleared. And one conversation just led to another. I mean, we talked about everything from petrochemicals in the liquid container industry to small-college football. He’s a Dickinson grad, it turns out. But the first thing I knew it was nine-thirty and we’d talked for three hours!” Walter rubs his hands over his small handsome face, right up under his glasses and into his eye sockets.

“That doesn’t seem strange, Walter. You could’ve just shaken hands and headed on home. It’s what you and I do. It’s what most people do.” (And ought to do!)

“Frank, I know it.” He resettles his tortoise-shells using both sets of fingers. There’s nothing for me to say. Walter acts like a man in a trance and waking him, I’m afraid, will only confuse things and make them go on forever. With any luck this will all end soon, and I can hop into bed. “Do you want to hear it, Frank?”

“I don’t want to hear anything that’ll embarrass me, Walter. Not in any way. I don’t know you well enough.”

“This isn’t embarrassing. Not a bit.” Walter swivels to the side and reaches for his glass, looking at me hopefully.

“It’s right there.” I point to the gin.

Walter goes and pours himself a drink, then slumps back in his easy chair and drinks it down. Bolting, we used to call it at Michigan. Walter just bolted his drink. It occurs to me, in fact, that I could be in Michigan at this very moment, that Vicki and I might’ve driven out to Ann Arbor and be eating a late supper at the Pretzel Bell. Flank steak and hot mustard with a side of red cabbage. I have made an error in my critical choices. “Do you know who Ida Simms is, Frank?” Walter looks at me judiciously, his lower lip pressed tightly above his upper. He means to imply an icy logic’s being applied — the rest from here on out will deal only in the bedrock and provable facts. No gushy sentiment for this boy.

“It sounds familiar, Walter. But I don’t know why.”

“Her picture was in all the papers last year, Frank. An older lady with a Nineteen-forties hairdo. It looked like some kind of advertisement, which in a way it was. The woman who just disappeared? Got out of a cab at Penn Station, with two little poodles on a leash, and nobody’s seen her since? The family ran the ads with her picture, asking for calls if anybody knew anything. Somebody dear to them who walked right out of the world. Boom.” Walter shakes his head, both comforted and astonished by what a strange world it is. “She’d had mental problems, Frank, been in hospitals. All that came out. You’d have to figure the signs weren’t too good for her if you were the family. The impulse to do away with yourself must get pretty strong in those circumstances.

Walter looks at me with his blue eyes shining significantly, and I’m forced to look up squarely at Block Island again. “You never can tell, Walter. People are gone ten years, then one day they wake up in St. Petersburg on the Sunshine Skyway, and everything’s fine.”

“I know it. That’s true.” Walter stares down at his loafers. “We talked about the whole business, Frank. Yolanda and I. She thought the picture was some kind of a fake, a massage parlor or something phony. But I couldn’t. I didn’t know anymore than she did. Except here was a picture of this woman, Frank, looking like somebody’s mother somewhere, yours or mine, her hair all done up like the Forties, and a scared smile on her face like she knew she was in trouble, and I just was not ready to think fake. I told Yolanda she ought to believe it wasn’t a fake just because it might not be. You know what I mean?”

“I guess.” I saw the picture, in fact, twenty times at least. Whoever was running it had had the bright idea of putting it on the sports page of the Times , which I read just before the obits. I’d wondered myself if Ida Simms wasn’t a unisex barber shop or an erotic catering service, and sombody’d just thought of using a picture of his mother as an ad. I finally forgot about it and got interested in the spring trades.