Richard Ford - The Sportswriter

“You. That’s all.”

X laughs again and opens the door wide. “You’re a sport, all right. You’re the original sport.”

I smile at her in the public darkness. My children pile past me inside. The car door closes. And once again we are off.

Walter’s place at 118 Coolidge is a two-story cinderblock apartment row between two nicer older colonials whose young-couple-owners have sunk reasonable money into them, and are home tonight. I’ve never noticed the place, though there is a streetlight out front and it is only two streets over from X’s house, and a block exactly like hers in every way but for this very building. The windowless front has been decorated with aluminum strips made like Venetian blinds, with “The Catalina” painted in script across it and backed by a wan light. Exterior lights along the side-facing doors burn visibly to the street. It is a place for abject senior seminarians, confirmed bachelors and divorcées — people in transition — and it is not, I think, such a bad place. I wouldn’t have minded it in Ann Arbor in the middle sixties, say, or even today if I was fresh out of law school, trying to get my legs under me before starting life in earnest and annexing a little wife. Though it is not a place I’d be happy to end up, or even pass through as a way-station toward somewhere else in adult life. The Catalina would be too unpromising for those conditions. And it would certainly not be a place I’d choose to die. Seeing it makes me wonder exactly what kind of lovers’ nest Yolanda and Eddie Pitcock share in Bimini. I’m sure it’s nothing like this. I’m sure a blue ocean is nearby, and cooling breezes rattling banana palms, and wind chimes punctuating languorous afternoons. Better on all accounts .

X parks behind Walter’s MG, and we walk up the concrete to the mailboxes where a single buggy globe shines dimly. Walter’s business card has been pruned to fit the space marked 6-D, and we start down the lower row of doors where I hear the mutter of televisions.

“It’s dank here,” X says. “I’ve never been anyplace I could actually say was dank. Have you?”

“Locker rooms,” I say, “in some of the older stadiums.”

“I suppose that shouldn’t surprise me, should it?”

“I doubt if Walter liked it much either.”

“Well, he’s fixed that.”

6-D’s outside light is off, and a bright orange sticker masks the door saying POLICEINVESTIGATION, AUTHORIZEDENTRYONLY. I turn the key and open the door into darkness.

A small green light and the tiny numerals 7:53 shine from the black. I own the very same clock at home.

“This is very, very unpleasant,” X says. “I think this man would hate my coming in here.”

“You can go back,” I say.

A smell is in the room and seems not to belong there, a medical smell from a doctor’s office closed for vacation.

“Can’t we turn on a light?”

Though for a moment I can’t find a wall switch, and when I do it is out of service. “This doesn’t work.”

“Well, for God’s sake find a lamp. I don’t like his clock.”

I bump across the dark floor, the furniture around me thick as elephants. I brush what feels like a leather couch, scrape a leg on an end table, pat across the back of a chair, then somewhere in the middle of the room touch the neck of a hanging lamp and pull the chain.

X appears alone in the doorway, her face fixed in a frown. “Well, for God’s sake,” she says again.

“I just want to see it,” I say, standing in the middle of Walter’s living room, seeing spots.

The hanging lamp casts dishy yellow light everywhere, though it is, in truth, a perfectly nice room. There are varnished paneled walls and a doorway leading to a dark bedroom. A pullman kitchen is behind a counter-thru, everything there put away and straight. There is plenty of big comfortable, new-looking furniture — a red leather couch across from a big RCA 24 with bolt holes on top where Walter has attached his duck gun. A set of barbells leans in a corner, several tables hold lamps with interesting oriental shades. A small mahogany secretary sits against a wall with blank paper and pencils laid out neatly as though Walter had intended to do some serious writing.

On the wall outside the bedroom door is a gallery of framed photographs I am eager to see. Pictured is the ’66 Grinnell wrestling team in black and white with Walter, a rangy 145-er, kneeling in an old wire-window gym, arms folded thick, sober as an Indian. Under that is a pretty blond girl with a slightly heavy upper lip and wide-spaced eyes — no doubt Yolanda — taken in a row boat with the wind blowing. Here is the Delta Chi fraternity on risers; here is a picture of two stern-looking senior citizens, a man in a stiff wool suit, a woman in a flowered dress — Ma and Pa Luckettt in Coshocton, without doubt. Here is Walter in a full-traction leg-cast on a hospital bed beside a pretty nurse, both giving a big thumbs-up; and Walter in a convict’s suit and cap beside Yolanda in a dancehall getup, each sneering. Walter has framed his Harvard Business School acceptance letter, and to the side there is a picture of a younger Walter seated at a desk with a stack of businessy-looking papers, smoking a Meerschaum pipe. At the bottom, and to my surprise, is a photo of the Divorced Men’s Club ganged around our big circular table in the August. It is during one of our Thursday night sessions. I’m holding a huge beer mug and wearing an idiot grin, listening animatedly to something Knot-head Knott is spieling about and am undoubtedly bored blind. Knot-head is holding back a big guffaw, but I have no recollection of what we might’ve been talking about. I do not even remember the time’s happening, and seeing it makes me feel it all must’ve been in Walter’s imagination.

I poke my head back into the bedroom and snap on the ceiling light. Here it is sparer than out front, but still satisfactory in its own way. An aquarium sits on the dresser, its lurid light exposing floating, tiny black mollies. Walter’s bed has a geometric-design cover with three oversized pillows, and on the night table there is a copy of my book, Blue Autumn , with my author’s picture face-up, and myself looking remarkably lean and ironic. I am drinking a beer, elbowed-in to an open air bar in San Miguel Tehuantepec. I have a crewcut and am smoking a cigarette, and couldn’t look more ridiculous. “Mr. Bascombe,” my biography says, “is a young American living in Mexico. He was born at the end of World War II, served in the Marines, and has attended the University of Michigan.” I pick it up and see it is the Haddam Public Library copy, with the plastic cover taken off. (Walter has boosted it! He told me in the Manasquan that he had a library copy, but I didn’t believe him.) He has jotted small plusses and zeros by certain titles on the contents page. I’d like to see more about that, possibly take the book with me, though I know there’s an inventory inside Sergeant Benivalle’s folder. I set the book back, take a quick look around — shoes, shoetrees, a skinny closet of suits and shirts, a silent butler, a computer terminal on the floor in the corner, an air-conditioner built through from the outside, a Grinnell pennant — the unextraordinary remains of a life at loose ends.

X is seated on the edge of the leather couch, her wrists on her knees, looking at a red ceramic lobster peeking out over the rim of a large green “dip bowl” on the coffee table. “You know?” She stares closely at the lobster’s eyes. Her voice makes a hollow, echoey sound.

“What?”

“It reminds me of a frat house in here, a Phi Delt’s room I used to go into. Ron something. Ron Kirk. It was fixed up exactly this way, like a dentist’s office somebody’d lived in. Just horrible boy’s stuff. I bet there’s a set of Playboys in here somewhere. I looked around for it a little.” She shakes her head in wonder. On the floor in front of the coffee table is more orange tape the police have laid around the chair Walter was sitting in, a chair that is missing. Two large dark brown stains have dried on one of the hooked rugs, and these have been covered with clear plastic, then taped. An area on the wall has also been covered and sealed. X has made no reference to either of them. “You’re just so strange, Frank, my God. I don’t see how any of you get along alone.” She blinks up at me, smiling, curious at who would kill himself, wishing for a common-sensical explanation for such a strange event. “You know?”