Richard Ford - The Sportswriter

Winds buffet me on my way home and impede my progress. It has, in fact, been a terrible weekend weatherwise, though who could’ve predicted it on Friday morning at my son’s grave.

My choice of routes home is not a wise one — the Parkway — where there is no consoling landscape, only pines and sad sedgy hummocks and distant power right-of-ways trailing skyward toward Lakehurst and soulful Fort Dix. An occasional Pontiac dealer’s sign or a tennis bubble peeps above the conifers, but these are far too meager and abstracted. I’m on the old knife-edge of dread, without constructive distance from what’s to come, and I see only the long, empty horizon that X told me about but that I was too idiotic to fear.

All the traffic is coming up from Atlantic City and the beaches in a hurry, and at Route 98 I consult the map and turn out hoping to square off to Route 9 and then, by driving the farmy section lines toward Freehold, get home. The foul weather has moved on past, and on the radio unexpected stations turn up with unexpected news — what’s for lunch tomorrow at the Senior Citizens’ Center in South Amboy (city chicken and Texas Toast); the weather in Kalispell and Coeur d’Alene (much summerier than here). On the feminist station from New Brunswick, a woman with a sexy voice reads dirty passages from Tropic of Cancer —Van Norden’s soliloquy on love, where he compares orgasm to holy communion, then prays for a woman who’s better than he is. “Find me a cunt like that, will you?” Van Norden pleads. “If you could do that I’d give you my job.” Afterwards the female DJ gives poor Miller a good whipping for his attitudes, followed immediately by a “get acquainted” offer for a sex club not far from my office. I stay tuned until winds carry the words away and I’m left with the pleasant if brief idea of a hundred dollar whore waiting for me somewhere if I only had the gumption to find her and didn’t have other duties. Unhappy ones. The worst kind.

Suddenly, in two dreadful minutes, I make an inventory of everything that could possibly turn out better in the next twenty-four to thirty-six hours, and come up with nothing except a wavering mirage memory of Selma Jassim from years ago and our late-night hours, half-asleep and half-drunk and in a high state of excitement, with her moaning in unintelligible Arabic and me in animal anticipation (all this when I should’ve been reading student essays). Of course I can’t remember one thing we could’ve said, or how we kept each other interested very long with the little we had to offer from the fringes of our upturned lives, Though anything is possible, any amount of rapturous transport, when you’re lonely enough and at the nubbins end of your rope. Mutinous freedom awaits there for those who can bear it.

What I actually remember are long sinuous sighs in the night and the intermittent tinkle of ice cubes from glasses, her cigarette smoke in the dark of the dance-lady’s house and the still October air turned electric with longing. And then, the next day, the long fog of having been up and awake all night, and a sense of accomplishment for having gotten through the night at all.

I don’t regret a moment of it, the way you wouldn’t regret wolfing down the last crumbly morsel of, say, the blackberry cobbler you had when you were snowbound in December on a rural highway in Wyoming and no one knew you were there, and the sun setting on you for the last time. Regret is not part of that, I’ll tell you (even though knowing her absolutely lengthened the distance between X and me at the time, and made me dreamy and untalkative at the wrong crucial moment).

But I am no martyr to a past. And halfway through the town of Adelphia, New Jersey, on Business 524, I pull into an empty Acme lot and put in a call to Providence, where I think she might be. A voice could help. Better than four hundred-dollar prostitutes and a free trip to Coeur d’Alene.

In the phone booth I lean heavily on the cool plexiglass, staring at a wire shopping cart stranded in the empty parking lot, while the operator in faraway 401 runs through her listings. At a distance across the blacktop, a burger joint is open on Easter. Ground Zero Burg — a relic of the old low-slung Forties places with sliding screens, windows all around and striped awnings. A lone black car sits nosed under the awning, a carhop leaned in talking to the driver. The sky is white and skating toward the ocean at top speed. Things can happen to you. I know that. Evil lurks most everywhere, and death is too severe for most ordinary remedies. I have dealt with them before.

A ring and then an answer straightaway.

“Halloo.”

“Selma?” An inexplicable name, I know, but it’s pronounced differently in Arabic.

“Yes?”

“Hi Selma, it’s Frank. Frank Bascombe.”

Silence. Puzzlement. “Oh. Yes. Of course. And how are you?” Cigarette smoke in the receiver. Nothing surprising here.

“Fine. I’m fine.” I couldn’t be worse, though I won’t admit it. And what next? I have nothing else to say. What do we expect other people can do for us? One of my problems is that I am not a problem-solver. I rely on others, even though I like to think I don’t.

“So. How long has it been?” It’s damn good of her to try and make conversation with me, since I seem incapable of it.

“Three years, Selma. Seems like a long time.”

“Ah, yes. And you still write … what was it you wrote that I thought so amusing?”

“Sports.”

“Sports. Yes indeed. I remember now.” She laughs. “Not novels.”

“No.”

“Good. It made you so happy.”

I watch the stoplight on Route 524 as it changes from yellow to red, and try to picture the room where she is sitting. A Queen Anne-style house, white or blue, on College Hill. Angeli Street or Brown Street. The view from the window: a nice prospect of elms and streets running down to the old factory piles with the big bay far in the hazy afterground. If only I could be there instead of a parking lot in Adelphia. I would be miles happier. New prospects. Real possibilities rising like new mountains. I could be convinced in no time flat that things weren’t so bad. “Frank?” Selma says into the musing silence at my end. I am putting a sail in on the bay, calculating winds and seas. Populating a different world.

“What.”

“Are you sure you’re feeling well? You sound quite strange. I’m always very happy to hear from you. But you don’t sound particularly as if you’re all right. Exactly where are you now?”

“In New Jersey. In a phone booth in a town called Adelphia. I’m not as good as I could be. But that’s all right. I just wanted to hear your voice and think about you.”

“Well, that’s very nice. Why don’t you tell me what’s wrong.” The familiar tinkle of a single ice cube (some things remain the same). I wonder if she is wearing her Al Fatah burnoose right now, which drove our Jewish colleagues crazy. (In private, of course, they loved it.)

“What are you doing right now,” I say, staring across the Acme lot. The name “Shelby” has been scratched on the glass in front of my eyes. A cool urine scent hangs around me. At Ground Zero Burg the carhop suddenly stands back from the lone car, hands on her hips in what looks like disgust. Trouble may be brewing there. They don’t know how good they have it.

“Oh. Well. I’m reading today,” Selma says and sighs. “What else do I do?”

“Tell me what. I haven’t read a book in I don’t know when. I wish I had. The last one I read wasn’t very good.”

“Robert Frost. I’m meant to teach him in a week’s time.”

“That sounds great. I like Frost.”

“Great? I don’t know about that.” Tinkle, tinkle.