Richard Ford - The Sportswriter

Lynette is smiling at me now. My answer, whatever it was, has been enough for her, and she just wants to take this chance to look me over.

“Well, Lynette, why don’t you stare at Frank an hour or two,” Vicki nearly shouts and crosses her arms angrily.

“I just want to see him, hon. I like to have one time to see a whole person clearly. Then I know them. It doesn’t hurt a thing. Frank can tell I mean only good, can’t you, Frank?”

“Absolutely.” I smile.

“I’m glad I ain’t livin here,” Vicki snaps.

“That’s why you have a nice place all your own,” Lynette says amiably. “Of course, I’ve never been invited there.” She ambles into the steamy, meaty kitchen, leaving the two of us on the couch alone with the cliff-divers.

“You and me ought to have a talk,” Vicki says sternly, her eyes suddenly red and full of tears. The forced air comes on again and drums us both with a cool mechanical influx. Elvis Presley trots to the door and looks at us. “Get outa here, Elvis Presley,” Vicki says. Elvis Presley turns around and trots into the dining room.

“What about?” I smile hopefully.

“Just a bunch of things.” She wipes her eyes with her fingertips, which requires her to duck her head.

“About you and me?”

“Yes.” She makes her pouty lips go sour. And once again my poor heart drums fast. Who knows why? To save me? I don’t have a liar’s clue to what needs to be said between us, but her mood is a mood with unhappy finality in it.

Why, though, can’t everything — just for today — wait? Wait a beat as the actor says. Just go on without change a bit longer? Why can’t every sweet untranscendent thing we know or think we know go on along a little longer without closure having to rear its practical head? Walter Luckless Luckett could not have been more right about me. I don’t like to think of this or that thing ending, or even changing. Death, the old streamliner, is not my friend, nor will he ever be.

Though I can’t put off whatever this is, and maybe I don’t even want to. She is a demon after changes today, her whole person exuding transition. Only there’s no real need for it, is there? (Thunk-a, thunk-a thunk , my heart’s pumping.) We haven’t even had dinner yet, not tasted the lamb cooked hard as a coaster. I have yet to meet her father and her brother. I had sheltered hope that her dad and I could become bosom buddies even if Vicki and I didn’t work things out. He and I could still be friends. If his tire went flat some rainy night in Haddam or Hightstown or anyplace within my area code, he could call me up, I’d drive out to get him, we’d have a drink while the tire was being fixed at Frenchy’s and he would go off into the Jersey darkness certain he had a friend worthy of his trust and who looked down life’s corridor more or less the way he did. Maybe we could take the brother fishing at Manasquan (no need to bring the women in on it). Vicki could be married to Sweet Lou Calcagno’s stepson over in Bamber, have a wonderful life as a beer distributor’s wife with all the hullygully of kids. And I could be the trusted family friend with a heart of gold. I’d renounce my failed suitor’s glower for the demeanor of a wise old uncle. That would be enough for me, just the natural playing out of the pleasing present.

Vicki stares out the window at the houses along Arctic Spruce, her arm on the couch back. Sometimes it is possible to see in her face the lineaments of the older woman she will be, when her features will take on dimension, weight around the chin, a character more serious than now. She will undoubtedly be stout in later life, which is not always a hopeful sign.

Amber light has turned the lawns as green as England. In driveways all up the curving curbless street sit bright new cars — Chryslers, Olds, Buicks — each one with a hefty, moneyed look. In the middle distance a great white RV sits in a side yard. Smoke curls from almost every white brick chimney, though it is not cold enough by a long shot. Some doors have wreaths up since Christmas. My trailing wind has arrived.

Someone, I see, has set white croquet wickets around the Arcenaults’ front lawn. Two striped stakes face each other at less than regulation distance. Games have been planned for the day, and here is how I will paint my trapdoor to escape the incoming empty moment I feel.

“Let’s play,” I say, giving Vicki’s arm an uncle’s squeeze. This is not a ruse I’m up to, only a break in the broody unfinished silence we’ve fallen victims to.

She looks amazed, though she isn’t. Her eyes round out like dimes. “In all this wind and the rain comin?”

“It isn’t raining yet.”

“Man-o-man-o-man,” Vicki says, and snaps her fingers in hot succession. “It’s your funeral.” But she is off the couch quick, and headed for some upstairs storage room for mallets.

On television, CBS is trying to get us settled back into basketball, now that things are under control again. However, each time they show what’s happening on the court, a short, bulb-nosed, red-faced man wearing a loud, checked sport coat comes into the picture shouting “Aw, fuck you” soundlessly at someone on the New York team, waving a stubby arm in disgust. This checked coat guy is one of my favorites. Mutt Greene, the Clevelands’ G.M. I interviewed him once just after I’d restarted life as a sportswriter. He was a coach in Chicago then, but by his own choice has since moved up to the front office in another city, where I’m sure life seems better. He said to me “People surprise you, Frank, with just how fuckin stupid they are.” He was smoking a big expensive cigar in a cramped coach’s office under the Chicago arena. “I mean, do you actually realize how much adult conversation is spent on this fuckin business? Facts treated like they were opinions just for the simple purpose of talking about it longer? Some people might think that’s interesting, bub, but I’ll tell you. It’s romanticizing a goddamn rock by calling it a mountain range to me. People waste a helluva lot of time they could be putting to useful purposes. This is a game. See it and forget about it.” Afterwards we got involved in a pretty lively conversation about grass seeds and the piss-poor choices you face when your trouble was a high water table and inadequate drainage, which was not my problem, but was the case at his home on Hilton Head.

The interview wasn’t very productive on the subject of “seeing the keys” in classic big-man, small-man match-ups, which is what I was after. But I think of it as informative, though I don’t agree with everything he said. Still, he was happy to sit down with a young sportswriter and teach a lesson in life. “Keep things in perspective and give an honest effort” is what I took back to the Sheraton Commander that night. And when you’ve done with that take an interest in a new grass seed or an old Count Basie record you’ve missed listening to lately, or a catalog or a cocktail waitress, which — the last of these — is precisely what I did and wasn’t sorry about it.

On the court now the players are paying everyone murderous looks and pointing long bony fingers as threats. In particular the black players look fierce, and the white boys, pale and thin-armed, seem to want to be peacemakers, though they are actually just trying to stay out of trouble’s way. The trainer, a squat, worried-looking man in white pants, is trying to pull Mutt Greene down a runway below the stands. But Mutt is fighting mad. To him, real life’s going on here. Nothing’s for show. He has lost all perspective and wants to raise a little hell about the Knicks’ way of playing. He’s come out of the stands to show what he’s worth, and I admire him for it. I’m sure he misses the old life.