Richard Ford - The Sportswriter

I believe now she told me a lie about Fincher Barksdale and my former wife, though it was finally not a hurtful lie. Maybe she’s embarrassed about it all. But she had purposes of her own to serve, and if I was not going to confide in her (and I wasn’t) there was no reason for her to confide in me. I wasn’t harmed more than a sore jaw can harm you, and I hold no bad feelings. Sailor-Vee, as she herself often said.

I have finally resigned from the Divorced Men’s Club. Though after Walter’s death it really seemed to me there was not much enthusiasm left. It did not seem to serve its purpose very well, and the other men, I think, will eventually just go back to being friends in the old-fashioned ways.

Regarding my children, they are planning a visit, though they have planned to come all summer long, and it could be their mother suspects I’m leading an unsavory bachelor’s life here and will not send them. Somehow something always seems to come up. They were disappointed not to take our trip around Lake Erie, but there will be other times while they are still young.

X’s mother, Irma, has moved back to Michigan with Henry. Together again after twenty years. They are afraid, I’m sure, of dying alone. Unlike me, they can feel time flying. In her last letter Irma said, “I read in the Free Press , Franky, many prominent people — except for one woman broadcaster — read the sports sometime early each day. I think that’s encouraging. Don’t you?” (I do.) “I think you should pay closer attention.”

Regarding X herself, I can only say, who knows? She does not think I’m a terrible man, which is more than most marriages have to go on into the future. She has lately begun competing on the mideast club pro tour, challenging other groups of women in Pennsylvania and Delaware. She told me on the phone that lately she’s played the best golf of her life, putts with supreme confidence, and has a deft command over her long irons — skills she isn’t even sure she would have if she’d played competitively all these years. She also said there are parts of her life she would take back, though she wasn’t specific about which ones. I am afraid she has become more introspective now, which is not always a hopeful sign. She talked about moving, but did not say where. She said she would not get married. She said she might take flying lessons. Nothing would surprise me. Just before she hung up the last time she asked me why I hadn’t consoled her on the night our house was broken into, those years ago, and I told her that it all seemed at once so idiotic and yet so inexplicable that I simply had not known what I could say, but that I was sorry, and that it was a failure on my part. (I didn’t have a heart to say I’d spoken, but she hadn’t heard me.)

As I’ve said, life has only one certain closure. It is possible to love someone, and no one else, and still not live with that one person or even see her. Anything or anyone who says different is a liar or a sentimentalist or worse. It is possible to be married, to divorce, then to come back together with a whole new set of understandings that you’d never have liked or even understood before in your earlier life, but that to your surprise now seems absolutely perfect. The only truth that can never be a lie, let me tell you, is life itself — the thing that happens.

Will I ever live in Haddam, New Jersey, again? I haven’t the slightest idea.

Will I be a sportswriter again and do those things I did and loved doing when I did them? Ditto.

I read in the St. Petersburg Times a week ago that a boy had died in De Tocqueville Academy, the son of a famous astronaut, which is why it made the news, though he died quietly. Of course it made me think of Ralph, my son, who did not die quietly at all, but howling mad, with a voice all his own, full of crazy curses and outrage and even jokes. And I realized that my own mourning for him is finally over — even as the astronaut’s is just beginning. Grief, real grief, is relatively short, though mourning can be long.

I walked out of the condos onto the flat lithesome beach this morning, and took a walk in my swimming trunks and no shirt on. And I thought that one natural effect of life is to cover you in a thin layer of … what? A film? A residue or skin of all the things you’ve done and been and said and erred at? I’m not sure. But you are under it, and for a long time, and only rarely do you know it, except that for some unexpected reason or opportunity you come out — for an hour or even for a moment — and you suddenly feel pretty good. And in that magical instant you realize how long it’s been since you felt just that way. Have you been ill, you ask. Is life itself an illness or a syndrome? Who knows? We’ve all felt that way, I’m confident, since there’s no way that I could feel what hundreds of millions of other citizens haven’t.

Only suddenly, then, you are out of it — that film, that skin of life — as when you were a kid. And you think: this must’ve been the way it was once in my life , though you didn’t know it then, and don’t really even remember it — a feeling of wind on your cheeks and your arms, of being released, let loose, of being the light-floater. And since that is not how it has been for a long time, you want, this time, to make it last, this glistening one moment, this cool air, this new living, so that you can preserve a feeling of it, inasmuch as when it comes again it may just be too late. You may just be too old. And in truth, of course, this may be the last time that you will ever feel this way again.

The author of six novels and two collections of stories, Richard Ford has received the Pulitzer Prize, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the PEN/Malamud Award for short fiction. His work has been translated into sixteen languages. He lives in Maine and New Orleans.