The Sportswriter

by Richard Ford

  “No.”

  “Well, let’s go duck hunting, then. I’ve got all kinds of guns. I was just looking at them yesterday, cleaning them up. You can have one. I’d like you to come back to Coshocton with me, meet my family. Maybe next fall. That Ohio River country is really something. I used to go every single day of the season when I was a kid. You know, as far as Ohio seems, it’s not really that far. Just down the Penn Turnpike. I haven’t been going back lately, but I’m ready to start. My folks are getting old. What about your folks, Frank, where are they now?”

  “They’re dead, Walter.”

  “Ah well, sure. We lose ’em, Frank. What plans have you got?”

  “When?”

  “This summer, say.” Walter is veritably beaming. I wish he would go home.

  “I’m going to take my kids up around Lake Erie.” What business is it of his what plans I have? Everything, to him, is pertinent now.

  “Real good idea.”

  “I’ve just about had it, Walter. It’s been a long day.”

  “I was in despair when I came here, Frank. A lot of life seemed behind me. And now it doesn’t. What can I do? Do you want to go out and have some eggs? There’s a good place on Route 1. What d’ya say to a breakfast?” Walter is on his feet, hands in his pockets, rocking back on his heels.

  “I think I’ll just hit the hay, Walter. The couch is your kingdom.”

  Walter reaches down, picks up his Colts glass, admires it, then hands it over to me. “I think I’ll get in my car and drive around. That’ll settle me down.”

  “I’ll leave the door unlocked.”

  “Okay,” Walter says with a brash laugh. “Frank, let me give you an extra key to my place. You can’t tell when you’re going to want to disappear for a while. My place is yours.”

  “Aren’t you going to be in it, Walter?”

  “Sure, but it can’t hurt. Just so you’ll know you can always drop out of sight when you want to.” Walter hands me the key. I have no idea why Walter would think I’d ever need to drop out of sight.

  “That’s nice of you,” I put the key in my pocket and give Walter a good-natured smile meant to make him leave.

  “Frank,” Walter says. Then without my expecting it or being able to duck or run, Walter grabs my cheek and kisses me! And I am struck dumb. Though not for long. I shove him backwards and in one spasm of wretchedness shout, “Quit it, Walter, I don’t want to be kissed!”

  Walter blushes red as Christmas and looks dazed. “Sure, sure,” he says. I know I have missed Walter’s point here, but I have not missed my own point, not on your life. I would kiss a camel rather than have Walter kiss me on the cheek again. He does not get to first base with me, no matter how much he feels at home.

  Walter stands blinking behind his tortoise-shells. “We lose control by degrees, don’t we, Frank?”

  “Go home, Walter.” I’m peevish now.

  “Maybe I can, Frank. Thanks to you.” Walter smiles his somber war-vet’s smile and walks out the door.

  In a moment I hear his car start. From the window I see the headlights on the street and the car—it is an MG—buzz sadly away. Walter gives me two quick honks and disappears around the curve. I am sure he will call when he gets home; he is that kind of High school Harry. And as 1 settle onto the couch as I used to in the old days when X was gone, fully clothed, a Gokey catalog for reading, I unplug my phone—a small, silent concession to the way lived life works. Don’t call, my silent message says, I’ll be sleeping. Dreaming sweet dreams. Don’t call. Friendship is a lie of life. Don’t call.

  In the first six months after Ralph died, while I was in the deepest depths of my worst dreaminess, I began to order as many catalogs into the house as I could. At least forty, I’m sure, came every three months. I would, finally, have to throw a box away to let the others in. X didn’t seem to mind and, in fact, eventually became as interested as I was, so that quite a few of the catalogs came targeted for her. During that time—it was summer—we spent at least one evening a week couched in the sun room or sitting in the breakfast nook leafing through the colorful pages, making Magic Marker checks for the things we wanted, dogearing pages, filling out order blanks with our Bankcard numbers (most of which we never mailed) and jotting down important toll-free numbers for when we might want to call.

  I had animal-call catalogs, which brought a recording of a dying baby rabbit. Dog-collar catalogs. Catalogs for canvas luggage that would stand up to Africa. Catalogs for expeditions to foreign lands with single women. Catalogs for all manner of outerwear for every possible occasion, in every climate. I had rare-book catalogs, record catalogs, exotic hand-tool catalogs, lawn-ornament catalogs from Italy, flower-seed catalogs, gun catalogs, sexual-implement catalogs, catalogs for hammocks, weathervanes, barbecue accessories, exotic animals, spurtles, slug catchers. I had all the catalogs you could have, and if I found out about another one I’d write or call up and ask for it.

  X and I came to believe, for a time, that satisfying all our purchasing needs from catalogs was the very way of life that suited us and our circumstances; that we were the kind of people for whom catalog-buying was better than going out into the world and wasting time in shopping malls, or going to New York, or even going out into the shady business streets of Haddam to find what we needed. A lot of people we ktiew in town did the very same thing and believed that was where the best and most unusual merchandise came from. You can see the UPS truck on our street every day still, leaving off hammocks and smokers and God knows what all—packs of barbecue mitts and pirate chest mailboxes and entire gazebos.

  For me, though, there was something other than the mere ease of purchase in all this, in the hours spent going through pages seeking the most virtuous screwdriver or the beer bottle cap rehabilitator obtainable nowhere else but from a PO box in Nebraska. It was that the life portrayed in these catalogs seemed irresistible. Something about my frame of mind made me love the abundance of the purely ordinary and pseudo-exotic (which always turns out ordinary if you go the distance and place your order). I loved the idea of merchandise, and I loved those ordinary good American faces pictured there, people wearing their asbestos welding aprons, holding their cane fishing rods, checking their generators with their new screwdriver lights, wearing their saddle oxfords, their same wool nighties, month after month, season after season. In me it fostered an odd assurance that some things outside my life were okay still; that the same men and women standing by the familiar brick fireplaces, or by the same comfortable canopy beds, holding these same shotguns or blow poles or boot warmers or boxes of kindling sticks could see a good day before their eyes right into perpetuity. Things were knowable, safe-and-sound. Everybody with exactly what they need or could get. A perfect illustration of how the literal can become the mildly mysterious.

  More than once on a given night when X and I sat with nothing to say to each other (though we weren’t angry or disaffected), it proved just the thing to enter that glimpsed but perfectly commonplace life—where all that mattered was that you had that hounds-tooth sport coat by Halloween or owned the finest doormat money could buy, or that all your friends recognized “Jacques,” your Brittany, from a long distance away at night, and could call him by the name stitched on his collar and save him from the log truck bearing down on him just over the rise.

  We all take our solace where we can. And there seemed like a life—though we couldn’t just send to Vermont or Wisconsin or Seattle for it, but a life just the same—that was better than dreaminess and silence in a big old house where unprovoked death had taken its sad toll.

  All of which passed in time, as I got more interested in women and X did whatever she did to accommodate her loss. Months later, when I had departed home to teach at Berkshire College, I found myself alone one night in the little dance professor’s house the college rented for me at the low end of the campus near the Tuwoosic River, doing what I did in those first couple of weeks to the exclusion of practi
cally everything else—poring over a catalog. (The faculty lounge was full of them, leading me to be sure I was not alone.) In this instance I was going through the supplement of a pricey hunting outfitter based in West Ovid, New Hampshire, at the foot of the White Mountains, barely eighty miles from where I sat at that moment. Up the hillside that night, a group of students was holding a sing-along (I was meant to be in attendance), and a cool, crisp burnt-apple smell swam with the New England air and flooded my open window, making the possibility of going as remote as Neptune. I was deep in size comparisons of Swiss wicker-and-leather picnic baskets, and just flipping back toward clearance items on the black-and-white insert pages, my thoughts on a fumble-free flashlight, ankle warmers for the chilly nights ahead, a predator-pruf feeder, when suddenly what do I see but a familiar set of eyes.

  After how many years? The narrow, half-squinty, mirthful sparkle I had seen a hundred times over—though only the eyes were visible behind a black silk balaclava worn by a woman modeling a pair of silk underwear from Formosa.

  Off in the darkening surround, the sounds of “Scarborough Fair” drifted into the purple hills, and the smell of elm and apple wood floated lushly through my open window, but I couldn’t care less.

  I flipped forward and back. And suddenly here was Mindy Levinson on almost every page: with long brown hair and a tentative smile, a Swedish Angora jacket over her shoulder (not looking the least bit Jewish); farther back, standing by a red Vermont barn, wearing a Harris Tweed casual jacket and appearing proud and arrogant; just inside the cover in an Austrian hat, but seeming repentant of some untold misdeed; elsewhere toward the back, ensconced in a comfy New Hampshire kitchen, starting a fire with a brass spark-igniter made in the shape of a duck’s head. And later still, coralling a bunch of munchkin kids all wearing rabbit’s fur puppet hats.

  When she was my first college love interest, Mindy and I used to slip off campus, into her parents’ Royal Oak home and boink the daylights out of each other for days on end. It was Mindy who had traveled with me on a tour of Hemingway Country and stayed out on a beach at Walloon Lake while fireflies twinkled. She was the first girl I ever lied to a room clerk because of. Later, of course, she married a slimy land developer named Spencer Karp and settled down in the Detroit suburb of Hazel Park near her parents and had kids before I was even through with school.

  But I could not have been more stupefied. Out of a disorderly and not especially welcome present came a friendly, charitable face from the past (not an experience I have that often). Here was Mindy Levinson smiling at me twenty times out of a shiny life I might’ve had if I’d just gone to law school, gotten bored with corporate practice, dropped it all, moved up to New Hampshire, hung out my shingle, and set up my wife in a town-and-country dress shop all her own—a pretty life, prizable and beckoning, apparently without a crumb of alienation or desperate midnight heart’s pounding. A fairy-tale life for real adults.

  Where, I wondered, was Mindy? Where was Spencer Karp? Why did she not look Jewish now? What about Detroit?

  What I did was immediately pick up the phone, dial the twenty-four-hour toll-free number and talk to a sleepy-sounding older woman whom I directed to the catalog page with the kids in the puppet hats and ordered three. As I was reading off my credit card number, I happened to say that the woman in that picture looked strangely familiar, like my sister from whom I was separated by the adoption agency. Did the company use local women for their models? I asked. “Yes,” came the stoical reply. Did she know who this particular woman might be? There was then a pause. “I don’t know nothin about that kind of thing,” the woman said suspiciously. “Is this all you want to buy?” She sighed with exasperation and lack of sleep. I admitted it was but that I had decided not to buy the puppet hats after all, after which the woman cut me off.

  I sat for a while and gazed out my screenless window into the yellow-lit dale of Berkshire College, where the maples and oaks were still in summer leaf, listening to “Scarborough Fair” change to “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore,” and then to “Try to Remember,” trying indeed to remember as much as I could about Mindy and those long-ago days in Ann Arbor, sensing both mystery and coincidence, and considering the small stirring caused by the two brown eyes behind the black balaclava, and the non-Jewish smile in a popcorn sweater.

  A certain kind of mystery requires investigation so that a better, more complicated mystery can open up like an exotic flower. Many mysteries are not that easy to wreck and will stand some basic inquiry.

  Mine entailed getting up at the crack of dawn the next day and driving the eighty miles over to West Ovid, strolling into the store whose catalog I brought with me, and asking the clerk straight out who this woman in the moleskin ratcatchers was, since she looked like a woman I had gone to college with, and who had married my best friend in the service from whom I’d been separated in a Vietnamese POW camp and did not know the fate of to this very moment.

  The cash register woman—a dwarfish, ruby-faced little Hampshirewoman—was only too happy to tell me that the woman in question was Mrs. Mindy Strayhorn, wife of Dr. Pete Strayhorn, whose dental office was down in the middle of town, and that all I had to do was go down there, walk in the office and see if he was my long-lost friend. I was not the first person, she said, to recognize old friends in the catalog, but that most people, when they inquired, turned out to be mistaken.

  I could not get out the door fast enough. And not to Doc Stray-horn’s, needless to say. But to the phone booth in front of the Jeep dealership across the road, where I looked up Stray horn on Raffles Road and dialed Mindy without catching a breath or blinking an eye.

  “Frank Bascombe?” she said, and I would’ve known her playful voice in a crowded subway car. “My goodness. How in the world did you ever find us here?”

  “You’re in the catalog,” I said.

  “Oh, well sure.” She laughed in an embarrassed way. “Isn’t that funny. I do it for the clothes discount, but Pete thinks it isn’t quite nice.”

  “You really look great.”

  “Do I?”

  “Darn right. You’re prettier than ever. A whole lot prettier.”

  “Well, I had my nose fixed after I married Spencer. He hated my old one. I’m glad you like it.”

  “Where is Spencer?”

  “Oh, Spencer. I divorced him. He was a crumb, you know.” (I did know.) “I’ve lived here ten years now, Frank. I’m married to a nice man who’s a dentist. We have children with perfect teeth.”

  “Great. It sounds like a great life. Plus you do the modeling.”

  “Isn’t that a riot? How are you? What’s happened to you in seventeen years? A lot, I’ll bet.”

  “Quite a bit,” I said. “I don’t want to talk about that, though.”

  “Okay.”

  Red and silver streamers were spinning outside down the front of the Jeep dealership’s lot. Two long lines of Cherokees and Apaches sat in the brisk New England sunlight. It soon would be winter, and the mountains at this latitude were already red and yellow higher up. In a day I would have to begin teaching students I already knew I wasn’t going to like, and everything seemed to be starting on a new and perilous course. I knew, though, I wanted to see Mindy Levinson Karp Strayhorn one last time. Many, many things would’ve changed, but if she was who she was, I would still be me.

  “Mindy?”

  “What?”

  “I’d sure like to see you.” I felt myself grinning persuasively at the phone.

  “When did you have in mind, Frank?”

  “In ten minutes? I’m down the street right now. I was just passing through town.”

  “Ten minutes. That’ll be great. It’s pretty easy to find our house. Let me give you directions.”

  The rest of it was short but all I’d hoped for (though possibly not what you would think). I drove to her house, a rambling remodeled Moravian farmhouse with a barn, plenty of out-buildings and a pleasant pond that reflected the sk
y and the geese that swam on it. There was a golden dog and a housekeeper who looked at me suspiciously. Two children who might’ve been ten and eight, and a taller girl who might’ve been seventeen stood at the back end of the hall and smiled at me when their mother and I left. Mindy and I took a drive in my car with the top down toward Sunapee Lake and caught up on things. I told her about X and Ralph and my other children and my writing career and sportswriting and my plans to try teaching for a short while, all of which seemed not to interest her much, but in a pleasant way (I didn’t expect anything different). She told me about Spencer Karp and about her husband and her children and how much she appreciated “just the general mental attitude” of the people up here in the “north country,” and how in her mind the whole nation was changing not so much for the better as for the worse, and nobody could make her go back to Detroit now. At first she was guarded and skittish and talked like a travel agent as we skimmed along the highway, sitting over by the door as if she wasn’t sure I wasn’t some dark destroyer come to wreck her existence with out-of-date memories. After a while, though, when she saw how tame I really was, how enthusiastic, how all I wanted was to be near her life for a couple of hours, unquestioning and intending only to admire all from a distance and not to try and “go in” or to get her in the sack in some shabby motel on the way to Concord (exactly like I used to), then she liked me all over again and laughed and was happy the rest of the time. In fact, she eventually couldn’t help giving me a kiss and a hug every little while, and putting her head on my shoulder once we were far enough from West Ovid that no one she knew would see her. She even told me she didn’t intend to tell Pete about my visit, because that would make it all “the more delicious,” which made me kiss her again and embarrass her.

  And then I simply drove her home. She was wearing a mint-colored cotton dirndl right out of the catalog and which she raised above her excellent knees when she was sitting in the car. And she looked as pretty as her picture, which is how I remember her, and how I think of her each time I see her, season onto season, wearing one set of bright traditional clothes after another, on and on into a perfect future.