by Richard Ford
My other duties require the usual phone calls from my desk: first to the magazine, for business with Rhonda Matuzak, my editor, who has dug into the rumors that all is not roses on the Detroit team, which could be a problem. The general feeling at the editors’ meeting is I should do the story and take what I get. Sports thrives on this kind of turmoil and patented misinformation, though I am not much interested in it.
Rhonda is divorced and lives alone with two cats in a large dark-walled, high-ceilinged floor-thru in the West Eighties, and is always trying to get me to meet her at Victor’s for dinner, or to haul off to some evening’s activity after work. Though except for one painful night after my divorce I’ve always managed just to have a drink at Grand Central, put her in a cab, then hurry off to Penn Station and home.
Rhonda is a tall raw-boned, ash-blond girl in her late thirties with an old-fashioned, chorus-line figure, but with a face like a racehorse and a loud voice I don’t like. (Illusion would be well-nigh impossible even with the lights off.) For a time after my divorce everything began to seem profoundly ironic to me. I found myself thinking of other peoples’ worries as sources of amusement and private derision which I thought about at night to make myself feel better. Rhonda helped me out of all that by continuing to invite me to dinner and leaving notes on my desk which said “all loss is relative, Jack,” “nobody ever died of a broken heart,” and “only the young die good.” On the one night I agreed to have dinner with her—at Mallory’s on West 70th Street—we ended up in her apartment sitting in facing Bauhaus chairs, with me unhappily coming down with a case of the dreads so thick they seemed to whistle out the heating ducts and swarm the room like a dark mistral. I needed to take a walk in the street for air, I said, and she was considerate enough to believe I was still having trouble getting adjusted to being single again, and not that I was for some reason scared out of my wits to be alone with her. She walked me downstairs and out into the dark and windy canyons of West End Avenue, where we stood at the curb and talked about her favorite subject, American furniture history, and after a while I thanked her, clambered into a cab like a refugee and beat it down to 33rd Street and my safe train to New Jersey.
What I didn’t tell Rhonda and what is still true, is that I cannot stand being alone in New York after dark. Gotham takes on a flashing nighttime character I just can’t bear. The lights of bars demoralize me, the showy glow of taxi cabs whiz-banging down Fifth Avenue or careening out of the Park Avenue tunnel make me somehow heartsick and turmoiled and endangered. I feel adrift and badly so when the editors and the agents stroll out of their midtown offices in their silly garb, headed for assignations, idiot softball games or cocktails on the cuff. I can’t bear all the complications, and long for something that is façades-only and non-literate—the cozy pseudo-colonial Square here in conventional Haddam; the nicotine clouds of New Jersey as seen from a high office building like mine at dusk; the poignancy of a nighttime train ride back down the long line home. It was bad enough that one night to have Rhonda “walk me” down West End three blocks to a good cross street, but it was worse afterwards to ride in that bouncing, clanging cab clear to the station and then to dart—my feet feeling frozen—in and down the escalator from Seventh before the whole city reached out and clutched me like the pale hand of a dead limo driver.
“Why stay out there like a hermit, Bascombe?” Rhonda is louder than usual on the phone this morning. As an equalizer she refers to men by our last names, as if we were all in the Army. I could never yearn for anyone who called me Bascombe.
“A lot of people are where they belong, Rhonda. I’m one of them.”
“You’re talented, God knows.” She taps something hard near the phone with a pencil eraser. “I’ve read those short stories, you know. They’re very, very good.”
“Thanks for saying so.”
“Did you ever think about writing another book?”
“No.”
“You should. You should move up here. At least stay in sometime. You’d see.”
“What would I see?”
“You’d see it’s not so bad.”
“I’d rather have something wonderful, not just not so bad, Rhonda. I’ve pretty much got it right here.”
“In New Jersey.”
“I like it here.”
“New Jersey’s the back of an old radio, Frank. You should smell the roses.”
“I have roses in my yard. I’ll talk to you when I get back, Rhonda.”
“Great,” Rhonda says loudly and blows smoke into the receiver. “Do you want to make any trades before the deadline?” There is an office baseball league that Rhonda is running and I’m in on it this year. It’s a good way to ride out a season.
“No. I’m sitting pat.”
“All right. Try to get some insider stuff on the NFL draft. Okay? They’re putting together the Pigskin Preview Sunday night. You can call it in.”
“Thanks, Rhonda. I’ll do my best.”
“Frank? What’re you searching for?”
“Nothing,” I say. I hang up before she has a chance to think of something else.
I make my other calls snappy—one is to an athletic shoe designer in Denver for a “Sports Chek” round-up box I’m pulling together on foot injuries, and which other people in the office have worked on. He tells me there are twenty-six bones in the foot, and only two people in eight will ever know their correct shoe size. Of those two, one will still suffer permanent foot injury before he or she is sixty-two—due to product defect. Women, I learn, are 38 percent more susceptible than men, although men have a higher percentage of painful injuries due to body weight, stress and other athletic-related activities. Men complain less, however, and consequently amount to a hidden statistic.
Another call is to a Carmelite nun in Fayetteville, West Virginia, who is trying to run in the Boston Marathon. Once a polio victim, she is facing an uphill credentials fight in her quest to compete, and I’m glad to put a plug in for her in our “Achievers” column.
I make a follow-up call to the public relations people at the Detroit Football Club to see if they have someone they’d like to speak on behalf of the organization about Herb Wallagher, the ex-lineman, but no one is around.
Finally a call to Herb himself in Walled Lake, to let him know I’m on my way. The research department has already done a workup on Herb, and I have a thick pile of his press clips, photographs, as well as transcribed interviews with his parents in Beaver Falls, his college coach at Allegheny, his surgeon, and the girl who was driving the ski boat when Herb was injured and whose life, I’ve learned, has been changed forever. On the phone Herb is a friendly, ruminative fellow with a Beaver Falls way of swallowing his consonants— wunt for wouldn’t, shunt for shouldn’t. I’ve got before-and-after pictures of him in his playing days and today, and in them he does not look like the same person. Then he looks like a grinning tractor-trailer in a plastic helmet. Now he wears black horn-rims, and having lost weight and hair, looks like an overworked insurance agent. Linemen often tend to be more within themselves than most athletes, particularly once they’ve left the game, and Herb tells me he has decided to go to law school next fall, and that his wife Clarice has signed on for the whole trip. He tells me he doesn’t see why anybody shunt get all the education they can get, and that you’re never too old to learn, and I agree wholeheartedly, though I detect in Herb’s voice a nervy formality I can’t quite make out, as if something was bothering him but he didn’t want to make a fuss about it now. It could easily be the team troubles I’ve been hearing about. But more than likely this is just the way with all wheelchair victims: after you lift weights, eat a good breakfast, use the toilet, read the paper and bathe, what’s left for the day but news broadcasts, reticence and turning inward? A good sense of decorum can make life bearable when otherwise you might be tempted to blow your brains out.
“Listen, I’ll sure be glad to see you, Frank.” We have never laid eyes on each other and
have talked on the phone only once, but I feel like I know him already.
“It’ll be good to see you, Herb.”
“You miss a lot of things now, you know,” Herb says. “Television’s great. But it’s not enough.”
“We’ll have a good talk, Herb.”
“We’ll have a time, won’t we? I know we will.”
“I’ll say we will. See you tomorrow.”
“You take care, Frank. Safe trip and all that.”
“Thanks, Herb.”
“Think metric, Frank. Hah.” Herb hangs up.
Whatever’s left to tell of my past can be dispensed with in a New York minute. At Michigan I studied the liberal arts in the College of Literature, Science and the Arts (along with ROTC). I took all the courses I was supposed to, including Latin, spent some time at the Daily writing florid little oversensitive movie reviews, and the rest with my feet up in the Sigma Chi house, where one crisp autumn day in 1965, I met X, who was the term party date of a brother of mine named Laddy Nozar, from Benton Harbor, and who—X—impressed me as ungainly and too earnest and not a girl I would ever care to go out with. She was very athletic-looking, with what seemed like too large breasts, and had a way of standing with her arms crossed and one leg in front of the other and slightly turned out that let you know she was probably sizing you up for fun. She seemed like a rich girl, and I didn’t like rich Michigan girls, I didn’t think. Consequently I never saw her again until that dismal book signing in New York in 1969, not long before I married her.
Shortly after our first meeting—but not because of it—I quit school and joined the Marines. This was in the middle stages of the war, and it seemed the right thing to do—with my military bearing—and the NROTC didn’t mind. In fact, I joined with Laddy Nozar and two other boys, at the old post office on Main Street in Ann Arbor and had to cross an embarrassing protest line to do it. Laddy Nozar went to Vietnam and got killed at Con Thien with the Third Marines. The two others finished their tours and now run an ad agency in Aurora, Illinois. As it happened, I contracted a pancreatic syndrome which the doctors thought was Hodgkin’s disease but which turned out to be benign, and after two months in Camp Lejeune I was discharged without killing anyone or being killed, but designated a veteran anyway and given benefits.
This event happened when I was twenty-one years old, and I report it only because it was the first time I remember feeling dreamy in my life, though then what I felt was not so pleasant and I think I would’ve said I felt sullen more than anything. I used to lie in bed in the Navy hospital in South Carolina and think about nothing but dying, which for a while I felt interested in. I’d think about it the way you’d think of a strategy in a ball game, deciding one way then deciding another, seeing myself dead then alive then dead again, as if considerations and options were involved. Then I’d realize I didn’t have any choices and that it wasn’t going to be that way, and I felt nostalgic for a while, but then got sullen as hell so that the doctors ended up giving me antidepressants to stop my thinking about it altogether, which I did. (This happens to a lot of people who get sick at a young age, and, in fact, can ruin your life.)
What it did for me, though, was let me go back to college, since I had only missed a semester, and, by 1967, entertain the idea I’d been entertaining since reading the seafaring diaries of Joshua Slocum at Lonesome Pines—to write a novel. Mine was to be about a bemused young southerner who joins the Navy but gets discharged with a mysterious disease, goes to New Orleans and loses himself into a hazy world of sex and drugs and rumored gun-running and a futile attempt to reconcile a vertiginous present with the guilty memories of not dying alongside his Navy comrades, all of which is climaxed in a violent tryst with a Methodist minister’s wife who seduces him in an abandoned slave-quarters, though other times too, after which his life is shattered and he disappears permanently into the Texas oil fields. It was all told in a series of flashbacks.
This novel was called Night Wing, the title of a sentimental nautical painting that hung above the sweetheart couch in the Sigma Chi chapter room (I used a quotation from Marvell up front). In the middle of my senior year I wrapped it up and sent it off to a publisher in New York who wrote back in six months to say it “showed promise,” and could he see “other things.” The manuscript got lost in the mail back and I never saw it again, and naturally I hadn’t kept a copy. Though I can remember the opening lines as clearly as if I had written them this morning. They described the night the narrator of the story was conceived. “It was 1944, and it was April. Dogwoods bloomed in Memphis. The Japanese had not given in and the war plowed on. His father came home from work tired and had a drink, not thinking of the white-coated men with code names, imagining at that moment an atomic bomb….”
After graduation I bought a car and drove straight out to Manhattan Beach, California, where I rented a room and for four weeks walked in the sand, stared at the women and the oil derricks, but could not see much there that was worth writing about—which I’d decided was what I was going to do. I was getting disability money from the Navy by then, which was supposedly going to pay a tuition, and I managed to have the checks cashed by a woman I met who worked in the bursar’s office of Los Angeles City College, and who sent them to me where I went, to the village of San Miguel Tehuantepec in Mexico, to write stories like a real writer.
Inside six months of arriving, all in a rush, I wrote twelve stories—one of which was a reduced form of Night Wing. Without sending one to a magazine, I shipped the whole book to the publisher I’d been in touch with the year before, who wrote back inside of four weeks to say that his company might publish the book with a number of changes I was only too happy to make, and sent back immediately. He encouraged me to keep writing, which 1 did, though without much enthusiasm. I had written all I was going to write, if the truth had been known, and there is nothing wrong with that. If more writers knew that, the world would be saved a lot of bad books, and more people—men and women alike—could go on to happier, more productive lives.
The rest is of even less interest. My book, Blue Autumn, was officially accepted while I was on the road driving up from San Miguel Tehuantepec. (They wired me a check for $700.) I stopped off that evening and took in a Little League game under the lights in the town of Grants, New Mexico, and drank a bottle of Cold Duck sitting alone in the stands to toast myself and my fortunes. Almost the next day a movie producer offered to buy the book for a good price, and by the time I got to New York—which my editor suggested was a good place to live—I was rich, at least for those times. It was 1968.
Right away I rented a railroad apartment on Perry Street in Greenwich Village and tried to set up some kind of writer’s life, a life I actually liked. My book was published in the spring; I gave readings at some small local colleges, interviews on the radio, went out with a lot of girls, acquired a literary agent I still get Christmas cards from. I had my picture in Newsweek, stayed up late almost every night drinking and carousing with the new friends I was making, wrote very little (though I stayed at my desk a lot), met X at the book signing on Spring Street and took an advance from my publisher to write a novel I claimed to have an idea for, but had no interest in at all, nor any idea in the world what I could write about.
In the fall of 1969, X and I began to spend a great deal of time together. I took my first trip to the Huron Mountain Club and to the cushy golf clubs her father had memberships in. I found out she was not ungainly or too earnest at all, but was actually a wonderful, unusual, challenging girl (she was still modeling and making plenty of money). We got married in February of 1970, and I began doing some magazine assignments to deflect the agony of writing my novel, which was entitled Tangier, and took place in Tangier—where I had never been, but assumed was like Mexico. The first line of Tangier was, “Autumn came later that year to the rif of the Low Atlas, and Carson was having an embarrassing time staying publicly sober.” It was about a Marine who had deserted the war and wandered across
the edges of continents in search of his sense of history, and was told in the first person and also mostly in flashbacks. It sits in my drawer in a closet under a lot of old life-insurance forms and catalogs to this very moment.
In the spring, my book was still in some book stores because a New York reviewer had said, “Mr. Bascombe is a writer who could turn out to be interesting.” The movie producer decided he could “see a movie” in my stories, and paid me the rest of the money he owed me (though one was never made). I began churning out more work on Tangier, which everybody including me thought I should write. Ralph began to be on the way. X and I were having a fine time going to ball games at Yankee Stadium, driving to Montauk, taking in movies and plays. And suddenly one morning I woke up, stood at the window from which I could see a slice of the Hudson, and recognized that I had to get out of New York immediately.
When I think about it now, I’m not sure why we didn’t just move into a larger apartment. If you were to ask X she would tell you it wasn’t her idea. Yet something in me just suddenly longed for it. I felt at the time that going into things with a sense of certainty and confidence was everything. And that morning I woke up with the feeling my passport to New York had been invalidated and I had insurmountable wisdom as to the ways of the world; a feeling that we had to get out of town pronto so that my work could flourish in a place where I knew no one and no one knew me and I could perfect my important writer’s anonymity.
Faced with this, X put in a vote for Lime Rock, Connecticut, up the Housatonic, where we had taken drives. But I couldn’t have been more fearful of that indecisive Judas country. Its minor mountains and sad Shetland-sweater, Volvo-wagon enclaves spoke to me only of despair and deceit, sarcasm and overweening informalities—no real place for a real writer; only for second-rate editors and agents of textbook writers, was my judgment.