Richard Ford - The Sportswriter

“I was just wondering how Walter rigged up the switch. He was probably an expert.”

“Do you think you understand all this?”

“I think so.”

“Then tell me, would you?”

“Walter gave himself up to the here and now, but got stranded. Then I think he got excited, and all he knew how to do was sentimentalize his life, which made him regret everything. If he’d made it past today he’d have been fine, I think.” I pick up an Americana matchbook off the kitchen counter, and read the address and phone number to myself. Below it is a copy of Bimini Today with a photograph on the cover of a long silver beach. I put the matchbook down.

“Do you think you were supposed to help him?” X says, still smiling. “He seems so conventional. Just seeing in here.”

“He should’ve helped himself” is my answer, and in fact it is what I believe. “You can’t be too conventional. That’s what’ll save you.” And for a moment a sudden unwanted grief sweeps up in me; a grief, I suppose, for possibilities misconstrued, for consolation not taken (which is what grief is all about). I share, I know, and only for a moment, the grief poor Walter must’ve felt alone here but shouldn’t have. This is not a perfectly good room. There’s little here for small mystery and hope and anticipation to flicker on — yet there’s nothing so corrupting or so lonely here as to be unworkable. I could hang in here until I got myself headed right, though I’d see that I did it in a hurry.

“You look like your best friend died, sweetheart,” X says.

I smile at her and she stands up in the shadowy, death-smelling room, taller than I usually think of her, her shadow rising to the nubbly ceiling.

“Let’s leave,” she says and smiles back in a friendly way.

I think a moment about the drinking glasses Walter probably owned, that I’m sure I was right about them, though I won’t bother looking. “You know,” I say, “I suddenly had this feeling we should make love. Let’s close the door there and get in bed.”

X stares at me in sudden and fierce disbelief. (I can see she is horrified by this idea, and I wish I could take the words back right away, since it was a preposterous thing to say, and I didn’t mean a word of it.) “That’s something we don’t do anymore. Don’t you remember?” X says, bitterly. “That’s what divorce means. You’re really a terrible man.”

“I’m sorry,” I say. Sergeant Benivalle would understand this and have a strategy for getting it straightened out. It has not been the best day of either of our lives, after all.

“I remember why I divorced you now.” X turns away, reaching the door in three unexpectedly long steps, “You’ve really become awful. You weren’t always awful. But now you are. I don’t like you very much at all.”

“I guess I am,” I say and try to smile. “But you don’t have to be afraid.”

“I’m not afraid,” she says, and laughs a hard little laugh, turning through the doorway just as a small man in a white shirt arrives into it. It stops her cold to see him.

The man’s eyes look wide behind thick glasses, and he blocks X’s way without intending to. He leans around her to look at me. “Are you the sister and brother?” he says.

I lean exactly as he does, trying to see him and look pleasant. “No,” I say. “I’m a friend of Walter’s.” This is the only explanation I have, and I can see from his expression that it isn’t enough. He is a youngish Frank Sinatra type with pale, knobby cheeks and curly hair (possibly he’s not as young as he looks, since he has a dry librarian’s air about him). He suspects something’s up, though, and means to get to the bottom of it pronto using this very air. His presence makes me realize how little I have to do with anything here, and that X was right. It’s just lucky we were not getting into bed.

“You don’t belong here,” the young man says. He is for some reason flustered and trying to decide whether to get damn good and mad about everything. Conceivably I could show him Sergeant Benivalle’s card.

“Are you the manager?”

“Yes. What are you stealing? You can’t take anything.”

“We’re not taking anything.”

“Excuse me,” X says, and shoulders past the man into the dark. She has nothing more to say to me. I listen to her footsteps down the sidewalk and feel awful.

The man blinks at me in the living room’s light. “What the hell are you doing here? I’m going to call the police about it. We’ll get—”

“They know about it already,” I say wearily. Here without a doubt is where I should present Sergeant Benivalle’s card, but I do not have the heart.

“What do you want here?” the man says painfully, stranded in the doorway.

“I don’t know. I forgot.”

“Are you some kind of newspaperman?”

“No. I was just Walter’s friend.”

“No one’s allowed in here but the family. So just get out.”

“Are you a friend of Walter’s, too?”

He blinks several times at this particular question. “I was,” the man says. “I certainly was.”

“Then why didn’t you go down and identify him?”

“Just get out,” the man says, and looks dazed.

“Okay.” I start to turn off the light, and remember my book in the dark bedroom. I would like to take it with me to return to the library. “I’m sorry,” I say.

“I’ll turn that off,” the man says abruptly. “You just leave.”

“Thanks.” I walk past the man, brushing his sleeve, then out where the air awaits me, sweet and thick and running full of fears.

X sits in her Citation beneath the streetlight, motor idling, the dashboard lights green in her face. She has waited here for me.

I lean in the passenger window, where the air is warm and smells like X’s perfume. “I don’t see why we had to go in there,” she says stonily.

“I’m sorry about it. It’s my fault. I didn’t mean that in there.”

“You are such a cliché. God.” X shakes her head, though she is still angry.

This is perfectly true, of course. It is also true that I have tried for a kind of sneaky full disclosure, been caught at it, and am about to be left empty-handed.

“I don’t really see why I have to distinguish myself, though I’m a grown man. I don’t have to impress anybody now.”

“You just embarrass me. But that’s right.” She nods, staring unhappily straight into the night. “I was going to ask you to come home with me. Isn’t that funny? I left the kids at the Armentis’.”

“I’d go. That’s a great idea.”

“Well, no.” X reaches round and buckles her seat belt over her wonderfully skirted thighs, sets both hands on the steering wheel. “That little man in there just seemed so strange to me. Was he a friend of your friend’s?”

“I don’t know. He never mentioned him.” She is probably worrying that Walter and I were “romantically linked.”

“Maybe your friend was just meant to kill himself.” She smiles at me with too much irony, too much, anyway, for people who have known each other as long as we have, and slept together, had children, loved each other and been divorced. Irony ought to be outlawed from this kind of situation. It is a pain in the ass and doesn’t help anybody. Hers, regrettably, is a typical mid western response to the complicated human dilemma.

“Wajter didn’t understand his own resources. He didn’t have to do this. It seems to me you could stand to be more adaptable yourself. We could just go home right now. No one’s there.”

“I don’t think so.” She smiles still.

“I still want to,” I say. I grin through the window. I smell the exhaust flooding underneath me, feel the car shuddering behind its safe headlights. The change scoop between the bucket seats, I see, is filled with orange golf tees.