Richard Ford - The Sportswriter

I told her, of course, that I couldn’t just leave. (Though if I had I might still be married, arid I had the feeling she was dead right about my staying; that another failed writer would crawl out of the woodwork and be in my place in less than twenty-four hours, and Arthur Winston would never think of my “interesting” face again.) I felt, however, that something had brought me up there and it may have been ridiculous, but I thought I needed to see what it was — which is what I told X. Plus, I’d given my word. I told her, lamely, that I wanted her to come up every weekend, and she could even take Paul out of school and move all three of them in with me (which was, needless to say, even more ridiculous).

When I said all this, X sat in the car staring out at the waiting bus, then sighed and said sadly “I’m not coming back up here anymore at all, Frank. Something’s in the air up here that makes me feel old and completely silly. So you’ll just have to go it alone.”

And with that she got out with Paul and Clary, and lugged their big bag onto the bus. When they climbed aboard the children both cried (X didn’t), and they left me standing alone and dazed, waving at them from the Bay State parking lot.

What Selma and I did after that and for the next thirteen weeks before I went back home to New Jersey and divorce, was simply share a fitful existence. She was an acerbic cold-eyed Arab of dusky beauty, who was thirty-six at the time (exactly my age), but seemed older than I was. She had come to Berkshire College that fall from Paris only to obtain a visa (she said), so she could find a rich American “industrialist,” marry him, then settle down in a rich suburb for a happy life. (She knew a pleasant, easy existence staunched almost any kind of unhappiness.)

I never visited home again until the semester was over, and X never wrote me or even called. And what Selma and I did to amuse ourselves was stay inside my little faculty cottage lolling in bed, or else drive in my Malibu wherever we could go in the time we had away from campus, talking for hours about whatever interested us — conversations I actually remember as the most engrossing of my entire life — primarily, of course, because they were stolen. We drove to Boston, up to Maine, down into Westchester, far up into Vermont, and as far west as Binghamton. We stayed in small motels, ate in roadhouses, stopped for drinks in bars with names like The Mohawk, The Eagle and The Adams — dark, remote, millstone places where the outside world rarely entered, and where we knew no one and were cause for no notice: a tall, long-necked Arab woman in sleek black silks, smoking French cigarettes, and an ordinary-looking Joe in a crew-neck sweater, chinos and a John Deere Tractor cap I’d affected when I got to Berkshire. We were tourists headed to and from nowhere.

We hardly ever talked about literary subjects. She was a critical theorist and as far as I could tell had only the darkest, most ironic contempt for all of literature. (As a joke, she invented a scheme for taking all the “I” pronouns out of one of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novels and gave a seminar on it that all our colleagues said was “ingenious.”) What we talked about instead were small-talk things — why a particularly brilliant hillside of sugar maples changed their color at different schedules and what that might suggest of disease; why American highways ran though the places they did; what it was like to drive in London (where I have never been and she had been a student); her first husband, who was British; my only wife; an acting career she’d abandoned; how I felt about compulsory military service at various crucial stages in my life — nothing of great interest, though anything that came along and that we could chatter about without implying a future (we had no delusions about that). Yet it all served to make one day passable before we had to go back to teach, something I came to loathe. I found out a great deal about her in the course of things, though I never asked any of it, and it was always understood that I really knew nothing. There were other people in her life, I knew that, a good many of them, men and women both, people who lived in foreign countries — some possibly even in prison — others who were estranged for reasons that she simply wouldn’t go into. For a period of one week I felt extremely strongly about her, entertained all kinds of impractical and romantic notions, things I never went into, and then I abandoned them all. I told her I loved her a hundred times, usually in chuckling, dare-devilish ways we both understood was a lot of hooey, since she laughed at the idea of almost any kind of usual affection and claimed love was an emotion she had no interest in finding out about.

She had only one, I thought, strange attachment, which was the subject of altruism and which she lectured me about at length the first morning we woke up together, when she was standing around naked in my sunny little house smoking cigarettes and staring out the window at the Tuwoosic as if it were the Irrawaddy. She said altruism drove Arabs crazy because it was always “phony” (a word she liked). She grew furious when she talked about it, threw her head from side to side and shouted and laughed, while I simply sat in bed and admired her. It was not religion or economics that fueled the flames of world hatreds, she felt; it was altruism. She told me that first morning, with a grave look, that by the time she was eighteen she’d survived two drug addictions, a “profound” involvement with terrorists in which she hinted she’d killed people; been kidnaped, raped, imprisoned, had flirtations with a number of dark isms , all of which had galvanized her intellect and forged unassuage-ably her belief that she knew why people did things — to suit themselves and no other reason — which was why she preferred to stay as remote as possible. She said she disliked the Christian members of the faculty (not the Jews), and not because of the self-satisfied squalor of their collegiate lives which she made laughing, sneering reference to (though only because they weren’t rich), but because the Christians thought they were altruists and pretended to be generous and well-meaning. The only remedy for altruism, she felt, was either to be very poor or enormously rich. And she knew which of those she wanted.

What Selma thought about me I’m not exactly sure. I thought she was simply a knock-out, though I’m not certain she didn’t think of me as pathetic, despite expressing admiration for me of the kind every American would like to inspire when traveling to faraway, more advanced cultures. I would sometimes get into sudden states of agitation during which I would clam up and get somber as a mental patient or else begin directing vicious remarks toward something I knew nothing about — often, near the end of the term, it was some colleague I’d decided had slighted me, but whom I really had nothing against and usually had never even met. Selma would humor me at that point and say she’d never met anyone like me; that I was the savvy, hard-nosed realist she had heard real Americans were (puny academics fell far below), but that I also had a thoughtful, complicatedly whole-hearted and vulnerable side which made the whole mix of my character intellectually exotic and brilliant. She said it had been a positive step to quit real writing and become a sportswriter, which she knew practically nothing about, but saw just as a way of making a living that wasn’t hard. She thought my being at Berkshire College was as ridiculous as X did, and as her own presence there. Though in truth what I really think she thought of me was that we were alike, both of us displaced and distracted out of our brainpans and looking for ways to get along. “You might just as well have been a Muslim,” she said more than once and raised her long sharp nose in a way I knew she meant as estimable. “You should’ve been a sportswriter, too,” I said. (I didn’t know what I meant by that, though we both laughed about it like apes.)