The Sportswriter

by Richard Ford

  “Paddy O’Furniture.” Paul could not hold back his laughter a second and neither could I. We both held our sides—he in the street, I in my car. We laughed like monkeys loud and long until tears rose in his eyes and mine, and I knew if we did not rein ourselves in, his mother would be out wondering (silently) about my “judgment.” Ethnics, though, are among our favorite joke topics.

  “That’s a prize-winner,” I said, wiping a tear from my eye.

  “I have another one, too. A better one,” he said, grinning and trying not to grin at the same time.

  “I have to drive home now, sonny,” I said. “You’ll have to remember it for me.”

  “Aren’t you coming inside?” Paul’s little eyes met mine. “You can sleep on the couch.”

  “Not tonight,” I said, joy bounding in my heart for this sweet Uncle Milty. I would’ve accepted his invitation if I could, taken him up and tickled his ribs and put him in his bed. “Rain Czech.” (One of our oldest standbys.)

  “Can I tell Mom?” He had sprung past the strange confusion of my not coming inside, and on to the next most important issue: disclosure, the reporting of what had happened. In this he is not at all like his father, but he may come to it in time.

  “Say I was driving by, and saw you and we stopped and had a conversation like old-timers.”

  “Even though it isn’t true?”

  “Even though it isn’t true.”

  Paul looked at me curiously. It was not the lie I had instructed him to tell—which he might or might not tell, depending on his own ethical considerations—but something else that had occurred to him.

  “How long do you think it’ll take Ole Vassar to find Ralph?” he said very seriously.

  “He’s probably almost there now.”

  Paul’s face went somber as a churchman’s. “I wouldn’t like it to take forever,” he said. “That’d be too long.”

  “Goodnight, son,” I said, suddenly full of anticipation of quite another kind. I started my motor.

  “Goodnight, Dad.” He broke a smile for me. “Happy dreams.”

  “You have happy dreams your own self.”

  He walked back across Cleveland Street to his mother’s house, while I eased away into darkness toward home.

  5

  The air in Detroit Metro is bright crackling factory air. New cars revolve glitteringly down every concourse. Paul Anka sings tonight at Cobo Hall, a flashing billboard tells us. All the hotels are palaces, all the residents our best friends. Even Negroes look different here—healthy, smiling, prosperous, expensive-suited, going places with briefcases.

  Our fellow passengers are all meeting people, it turns out, and are not resident Michiganders at all, though they all have come from here originally, and their relatives are their mirror-image: the women ash-blond, hippy, smiling; the men blow-dried and silent-mouthed, secretive, wearing modern versions of old-time car coats and Tyroleans, earnest beefsteak handshakes extended. This is a car coat place, a place of wintry snuggle-up, a place I’m glad to have landed. If you seek a beautiful peninsula, look around you.

  Barb and Sue walk us down the concourse. They have bags-on-wheels, snazzy red blazers and shoulder purses, and they are both in jolly moods. They are looking forward to “fun weekends,” they say, and Sue gives Vicki a big lascivious wink. Barb says that Sue is married to a “major hunk” from Lake Orion who owns a bump shop, and that she may quit flying soon to get the oven warmed up. She and Ron, her own husband, she says, “are still ‘dining out.’”

  “Don’t let this old gal fool ya,” Sue sings out with a big grin. “She’s a party doll. The things I could tell you would fill a book. Some of the trips we go on. Whoa.” Sue rolls her eyes and snaps her blond head famously.

  “Just don’t pay any attention to all that,” Barb says. “Just enjoy yourselves, you two, and hev a seef trip home.”

  “We surely will,” Vicki boasts, smiling her newcomer’s smile. “And you have a nice night, too, okay?”

  “No stopping us,” Sue calls back, and off the two go toward the crew check-in, gabbing like college girls with the handsomest boys on campus waiting at the curb in big convertibles and the housemother already hoodwinked.

  “Weren’t they just nice?” Vicki says, looking sentimentally detached in the midst of the mile-long Detroit bustle. She has grown momentarily pensive, though I suspect this is also from too much anticipation, and she will be herself in a jiffy. She is a great anticipator, as much as I am and maybe more. “I didn’t realize those gals were that nice and all.”

  “They sure were,” I say, thinking of all the cheerleaders Sue and Barb are the spitting image of. Put a bulky letter-sweater on either of them, a flippy pleated skirt and bobby sox, and my heart would swell for them. “They were wonderful.”

  “How wonderful?” Vicki says, giving me a suspicious frown.

  “About one half as wonderful as you.” I grab her close to me high up under her tender arm. We are awash in shuffling Detroiters, a rock in a stream.

  “Lilacs are pretty, too, but they make an ugly bush,” Vicki says, her eyes knowledgeable and small. “You’ve got the wander-eye, mister. No wonder your wife signed them papers on you.”

  “That’s in the past, though,” I say. “I’m all yours, if you want me. We could get married right now.”

  “I had one forever already that didn’t last,” Vicki says, meanly. “You’re talking like a nut now. I just came here to see the sights, so let’s go see ’em.” She beetles her brows as if something had briefly confused her, then the shiny smile breaks through once again and she reclaims the moment. I am, of course, talking like a nut, though I’d marry her in a flash, in the airport nondenominational chaplain’s office, with a United skycap as my best man, Barb and Sue as cosmetologically perfect bridesmaids. “Let’s get the bags, what d’ya say, boy?” she says, perky now, and on the move. “I want to get a look at that big tire ’fore they tear the sucker down.” She arches her brows at me and there’s a secret fragrant promise embedded, a sex code known only to nurses. How can I say no? “You sure have got a case of the dismal stares, all of a suddenly,” she says, ten yards away now. “Let’s get going.”

  Anything can happen in another city. I had forgotten that, though it takes a real country girl to bring it home. Then I’m away, catching up, smiling, trundling on eager feet toward the baggage carrousels.

  Detroit, city of lost industrial dreams, floats out around us like a mirage of some sane and glaciated life. Skies are gray as a tarn, the winds up and gusting. Flying papers and cellophane skirmish over the Ford Expressway and whap the sides of our suburban Flxible like flak as we lug our way toward Center City. Flat, dormered houses and new, brick-mansard condos run side by side in the complicated urban-industrial mix. And, as always, there is the expectation of new “weather” around the corner. Batten down the hatches. A useful pessimism abounds here and awaits.

  I have read that with enough time American civilization will make the midwest of any place, New York included. And from here that seems not at all bad. Here is a great place to be in love; to get a land-grant education; to own a mortgage; to see a game under the lights as the old dusky daylight falls to blue-black, a backdrop of stars and stony buildings, while friendly Negroes and Polacks roll their pants legs up, sit side by side, feeling the cool Canadian breeze off the lake. So much that is explicable in American life is made in Detroit.

  And I could be a perfect native if I wasn’t settled in New Jersey. I could move here, join the Michigan alums and buy a new car every year right at the factory door. Nothing would suit me better in middle life than to set up in a little cedar-shake builder’s-design in Royal Oak or Dearborn and have a try at another Michigan girl (or possibly even the same one, since we would have all that ready-made to build on). My magazine could install me as the midwest office. It might even spark me to try my hand at something more adventurous—a guiding service to the northern lakes, for example. A chan
ge to pleasant surroundings is always a tonic for creativity.

  · · ·

  “It’s just like it’s still winter here.” Vicki’s nose is to the bus’s tinted window. We have passed the big tire miles back. She peered at it silently as we drifted by, a tourist seeing a lesser pyramid. “Well,” she said as a big fenced-in Ford plant, flat and wide as Nebraska, hauled next into view, “I got that all behind me.”

  “If you don’t like the weather, wait ten minutes. That’s an expression we used to say in college.”

  She fattens her cheeks as Walter Reuther Boulevard flashes by, then the Fisher Building and the lumpish Olympia rises in the furred, gray distance. “They say that in Texas all the time. They prob’ly say it everywhere.” She looks back at the cityscape. “You know what my daddy says about Detroit?”

  “He must not’ve liked it very much.”

  “When I told him I was coming out today with you, he just said, ‘If Detroit was ever a state, it’d be New Jersey.’” She smiles at me cunningly.

  “Detroit doesn’t have the diversity, though I really like both places.”

  “He likes New Jersey, but he didn’t like this place.” We swerve into the long concrete trench of the Lodge freeway, headed to midtown. “He hasn’t ever liked a place much, which I always thought was kind of a shame. This place doesn’t look so bad, though. Lots of colored, but that’s all right with me. They gotta live, too.” She nods seriously to herself, then takes my hand and squeezes it as we enter a vapor-lit freeway tunnel which takes us to the riverfront and the Pontchartrain.

  “This was the first city I ever knew. We used to come into town when I was in college and go to burlesque shows and smoke cigars. It seemed like the first American city to me.”

  “That’s the way Dallas is to me. I’m not upset to be gone from it, though. Not a little teensy.” She purses her lips hard and turns loose of my hand. “My life’s lots better now, I’ll tell you that.”

  “Where would you rather be?” I ask as the milky light of Jefferson Avenue dawns into our dark bus and passengers begin to murmur and clutch belongings up and down the aisle. Someone asks the driver about another stop farther along the hotel loop. We are all of us itchy to be there.

  Vicki looks at me solemnly, as if the gravity of this city had entered her, making all lightheartedness seem sham. She is a girl who knows how to be serious. I had hoped, of course, she’d say there’s no place she’d rather than with m-e me. But I cannot mold all her wishes to my model for them, fulfill her every dream as I do my own. Yet she is as unguarded to this Detroit chill as I am, and secretly it makes me proud of her.

  “Didn’t you say you went to college around here somewhere?” She’s thinking of something hard for her to come to, a glimmering of a thought.

  “About forty miles away.”

  “Well, what was that like?”

  “It was a nice town with trees all around. A nice park for spring afternoons, decent profs.”

  “Do you miss it? I bet you do. I bet it was the best time in your life and you wish you had it back. Tell the truth.”

  “No ma’am,” I say. And it’s true. “I wouldn’t change from right this moment.”

  “Ahhh,” Vicki says skeptically, then turns toward me in her seat, suddenly intense. “Do you swear to it?”

  “I swear to it.”

  She fastens her lips together again and smacks them, her eyes cast to the side for thinking power. “Well, it idn’t true with me. This is to answer where would I rather be.”

  “Oh.”

  Our Flxible comes hiss to a lumbering stop in front of our hotel. Doors up front fold open. Passengers move into the aisle. Behind Vicki out the tinted glass I see Jefferson Avenue, gray cars moiling by and beyond it Cobo, where Paul Anka is singing tonight. And far away across the river, the skyline of Windsor—glum, low, retrograde, benumbed reflection of the U.S. (The very first thing I did after Ralph was buried was buy a Harley-Davidson motorcycle and take off driving west. I got as far as Buffalo, halfway across the Peace Bridge, then lost my heart and turned back. Something in Canada had taken the breath of spirit out of me, and I promised never to go back, though of course I have.)

  “When I think about where would I rather be,” Vicki says dreamily, “what I think about is my first day of nursing school out in Waco. All of us were lined up in the girls’ dorm lobby, clear from the reception desk out to the Coke machine between the double doors. Fifty girls. And across from where I was standing was this bulletin board behind a little glass window. And I could see myself in it. And written on that bulletin board in white letters on black was ‘We’re glad you’re here’ with an exclamation. And I remember thinking to myself, ‘You’re here to help people and you’re the prettiest one, and you’re going to have a wonderful life.’ I remember that so clearly, you know? A very wonderful life.” She shakes her head. “I always think of that.” We are last to leave the bus now, and other passengers are ready to depart. The driver is folding closed the baggage doors, our two sit on the damp and crowded sidewalk. “I don’t mean to be ole gloomy-doomy.”

  “You’re not a bit of gloomy-doomy,” I say. “I don’t think that for a minute.”

  “And I don’t want you to think I’m not glad to be here with you, because I am. It’s the happiest day of my life in a long time, ’cause I just love all of this so much. This big ole town. I just love it so much. I didn’t need to answer that right now, that’s all. It’s one of my failings. I always answer questions I don’t need to. I’d do better just going along.”

  “It’s me that shouldn’t ask it. But you’re going to let me make you happy, aren’t you?” I smile hopefully at her. What business do I have wanting to know any of this? I’m my own worst enemy.

  “I’m happy. God, I’m real happy.” And she throws her arms around me and cries a tiny tear on my cheek (a tear, I want to believe, of happiness) just as the driver cranes his neck in and waves us out. “I’d marry you,” she whispers. “I didn’t mean to make fun of you asking me. I’ll marry you any time.”

  “We’ll try to fit it into our agenda, then,” I say and touch her moist soft cheek as she smiles through another fugitive tear.

  And then we are up and out and down and into the dashing wet wind of Detroit, and the squabbly street where our suitcases sit in a sop of old melted snow like cast-off smudges. A lone policeman stands watching, ready to chart their destination from this moment on. Vicki squeezes my arm, her cheek on my shoulder, as I heft the two cases. Her plaid canvas is airy; mine, full of sportswriter paraphernalia, is a brick.

  And I feel exactly what at this debarking moment?

  At least a hundred things at once, all competing to take the moment and make it their own, reduce undramatic life to a gritty, knowable kernel.

  This, of course, is a minor but pernicious lie of literature, that at times like these, after significant or disappointing divulgences, at arrivals or departures of obvious importance, when touchdowns are scored, knock-outs recorded, loved ones buried, orgasms notched, that at such times we are any of us altogether in an emotion, that we are within ourselves and not able to detect other emotions we might also be feeling, or be about to feel, or prefer to feel. If it’s literature’s job to tell the truth about these moments, it usually fails, in my opinion, and it’s the writer’s fault for falling into such conventions. (I tried to explain all of this to my students at Berkshire College, using Joyce’s epiphanies as a good example of falsehood. But none of them understood the first thing I was talking about, and I began to feel that if they didn’t already know most of what I wanted to tell them, they were doomed anyway—a pretty good reason to get out of the teaching business.)

  What I feel, in truth, as I swing these two suitcases off the wet concrete and our blue bus sighs and rumbles from the curbside toward its other routed hotels, and bellboys lurk behind thick glass intent on selling us assistance, is, in a word: a disturbance. As though I were relinquishing
something venerable but in need of relinquishing. I feel a quickening in my pulse. I feel a strong sense of lurking evil (the modern experience of pleasure coupled with the certainty that it will end). I feel a conviction that I have no ethics at all and little consistency. I sense the possibility of terrible regret in the brash air. I feel the need suddenly to confide (though not in Vicki or anyone else I know). I feel as literal as I’ve ever felt—stranded, uncomplicated as an immigrant. All these I feel at once. And I feel the urge—which I suppress—to cry, the way a man would, for these same reasons, and more.

  That is the truth of what I feel and think. To expect anything less or different is idiotic. Bad sportswriters are always wanting to know such things, though they never want to know the truth, never have a place for that in their stories. Athletes probably think and feel the fewest things of anyone at important times—their training sees to that—though even they can be counted on to have more than one thing in their mind at a time.

  “I’ll carry my own bag,” Vicki says, pressed against me like my shadow, sniffing away a final tear of arrival happiness. “It’s light as a feather duster.”

  “You’re not going to do anything from now on out but have fun,” I say, both bags up and moving. “You just let me see a smile.”

  And she smiles a smile as big as Texas. “Look, I ain’t p.g., you know,” she says as the pneumatic hotel doors glide away. “I always carry what’s mine.”

  It is four-thirty by the time we get to our room, a tidy rectangle of pretentious midwestern pseudo-luxury—a prearranged fruit basket, a bottle of domestic champagne, blue bachelor buttons in a Chinese vase, red-flocked whorehouse wall décor and a big bed. There is an eleventh-story fisheye view upriver toward the gaunt Ren-Cen and gray pseudopodial Belle Isle in the middle distance—the shimmer-lights of suburbs reaching north and west out of sight.

  Vicki takes a supervisory look in all spaces—closets, shower, bureau drawers—makes ooo’s and oh’s over what’s here free of charge by way of toiletries and toweling, then establishes herself in an armchair at the window, pops the champagne and begins to take everything in. It is exactly as I’d hoped: pleased to respectful silence by the splendor of things—a vote that I have done things the way they were meant to be.