by Richard Ford
“What do you really care most about in the world? That’s the question of the hour, I think.”
“You. That’s all.”
X laughs again and opens the door wide. “You’re a sport, all right. You’re the original sport.”
I smile at her in the public darkness. My children pile past me inside. The car door closes. And once again we are off.
Walter’s place at 118 Coolidge is a two-story cinderblock apartment row between two nicer older colonials whose young-couple-owners have sunk reasonable money into them, and are home tonight. I’ve never noticed the place, though there is a streetlight out front and it is only two streets over from X’s house, and a block exactly like hers in every way but for this very building. The windowless front has been decorated with aluminum strips made like Venetian blinds, with “The Catalina” painted in script across it and backed by a wan light. Exterior lights along the side-facing doors burn visibly to the street. It is a place for abject senior seminarians, confirmed bachelors and divorcées—people in transition—and it is not, I think, such a bad place. I wouldn’t have minded it in Ann Arbor in the middle sixties, say, or even today if I was fresh out of law school, trying to get my legs under me before starting life in earnest and annexing a little wife. Though it is not a place I’d be happy to end up, or even pass through as a way-station toward somewhere else in adult life. The Catalina would be too unpromising for those conditions. And it would certainly not be a place I’d choose to die. Seeing it makes me wonder exactly what kind of lovers’ nest Yolanda and Eddie Pitcock share in Bimini. I’m sure it’s nothing like this. I’m sure a blue ocean is nearby, and cooling breezes rattling banana palms, and wind chimes punctuating languorous afternoons. Better on all accounts.
X parks behind Walter’s MG, and we walk up the concrete to the mailboxes where a single buggy globe shines dimly. Walter’s business card has been pruned to fit the space marked 6-D, and we start down the lower row of doors where I hear the mutter of televisions.
“It’s dank here,” X says. “I’ve never been anyplace I could actually say was dank. Have you?”
“Locker rooms,” I say, “in some of the older stadiums.”
“I suppose that shouldn’t surprise me, should it?”
“I doubt if Walter liked it much either.”
“Well, he’s fixed that.”
6-D’s outside light is off, and a bright orange sticker masks the door saying POLICEINVESTIGATION, AUTHORIZEDENTRYONLY. I turn the key and open the door into darkness.
A small green light and the tiny numerals 7:53 shine from the black. I own the very same clock at home.
“This is very, very unpleasant,” X says. “I think this man would hate my coming in here.”
“You can go back,” I say.
A smell is in the room and seems not to belong there, a medical smell from a doctor’s office closed for vacation.
“Can’t we turn on a light?”
Though for a moment I can’t find a wall switch, and when I do it is out of service. “This doesn’t work.”
“Well, for God’s sake find a lamp. I don’t like his clock.”
I bump across the dark floor, the furniture around me thick as elephants. I brush what feels like a leather couch, scrape a leg on an end table, pat across the back of a chair, then somewhere in the middle of the room touch the neck of a hanging lamp and pull the chain.
X appears alone in the doorway, her face fixed in a frown. “Well, for God’s sake,” she says again.
“I just want to see it,” I say, standing in the middle of Walter’s living room, seeing spots.
The hanging lamp casts dishy yellow light everywhere, though it is, in truth, a perfectly nice room. There are varnished paneled walls and a doorway leading to a dark bedroom. A pullman kitchen is behind a counter-thru, everything there put away and straight. There is plenty of big comfortable, new-looking furniture—a red leather couch across from a big RCA 24 with bolt holes on top where Walter has attached his duck gun. A set of barbells leans in a corner, several tables hold lamps with interesting oriental shades. A small mahogany secretary sits against a wall with blank paper and pencils laid out neatly as though Walter had intended to do some serious writing.
On the wall outside the bedroom door is a gallery of framed photographs I am eager to see. Pictured is the ’66 Grinnell wrestling team in black and white with Walter, a rangy 145-er, kneeling in an old wire-window gym, arms folded thick, sober as an Indian. Under that is a pretty blond girl with a slightly heavy upper lip and wide-spaced eyes—no doubt Yolanda—taken in a row boat with the wind blowing. Here is the Delta Chi fraternity on risers; here is a picture of two stern-looking senior citizens, a man in a stiff wool suit, a woman in a flowered dress—Ma and Pa Luckettt in Coshocton, without doubt. Here is Walter in a full-traction leg-cast on a hospital bed beside a pretty nurse, both giving a big thumbs-up; and Walter in a convict’s suit and cap beside Yolanda in a dancehall getup, each sneering. Walter has framed his Harvard Business School acceptance letter, and to the side there is a picture of a younger Walter seated at a desk with a stack of businessy-looking papers, smoking a Meerschaum pipe. At the bottom, and to my surprise, is a photo of the Divorced Men’s Club ganged around our big circular table in the August. It is during one of our Thursday night sessions. I’m holding a huge beer mug and wearing an idiot grin, listening animatedly to something Knot-head Knott is spieling about and am undoubtedly bored blind. Knot-head is holding back a big guffaw, but I have no recollection of what we might’ve been talking about. I do not even remember the time’s happening, and seeing it makes me feel it all must’ve been in Walter’s imagination.
I poke my head back into the bedroom and snap on the ceiling light. Here it is sparer than out front, but still satisfactory in its own way. An aquarium sits on the dresser, its lurid light exposing floating, tiny black mollies. Walter’s bed has a geometric-design cover with three oversized pillows, and on the night table there is a copy of my book, Blue Autumn, with my author’s picture face-up, and myself looking remarkably lean and ironic. I am drinking a beer, elbowed-in to an open air bar in San Miguel Tehuantepec. I have a crewcut and am smoking a cigarette, and couldn’t look more ridiculous. “Mr. Bascombe,” my biography says, “is a young American living in Mexico. He was born at the end of World War II, served in the Marines, and has attended the University of Michigan.” I pick it up and see it is the Haddam Public Library copy, with the plastic cover taken off. (Walter has boosted it! He told me in the Manasquan that he had a library copy, but I didn’t believe him.) He has jotted small plusses and zeros by certain titles on the contents page. I’d like to see more about that, possibly take the book with me, though I know there’s an inventory inside Sergeant Benivalle’s folder. I set the book back, take a quick look around—shoes, shoetrees, a skinny closet of suits and shirts, a silent butler, a computer terminal on the floor in the corner, an air-conditioner built through from the outside, a Grinnell pennant—the unextraordinary remains of a life at loose ends.
X is seated on the edge of the leather couch, her wrists on her knees, looking at a red ceramic lobster peeking out over the rim of a large green “dip bowl” on the coffee table. “You know?” She stares closely at the lobster’s eyes. Her voice makes a hollow, echoey sound.
“What?”
“It reminds me of a frat house in here, a Phi Delt’s room I used to go into. Ron something. Ron Kirk. It was fixed up exactly this way, like a dentist’s office somebody’d lived in. Just horrible boy’s stuff. I bet there’s a set of Playboys in here somewhere. I looked around for it a little.” She shakes her head in wonder. On the floor in front of the coffee table is more orange tape the police have laid around the chair Walter was sitting in, a chair that is missing. Two large dark brown stains have dried on one of the hooked rugs, and these have been covered with clear plastic, then taped. An area on the wall has also been covered and sealed. X has made no reference to either of them.
“You’re just so strange, Frank, my God. I don’t see how any of you get along alone.” She blinks up at me, smiling, curious at who would kill himself, wishing for a common-sensical explanation for such a strange event. “You know?”
“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.
“You’re not a real bad man. I’m sorry. I don’t think divorce has worked wonders for you.” She puts the car into gear so that it lurches, yet doesn’t quite leave. “It was just a bad idea I had.”
“Your loved ones are the ones you’re supposed to trust,” I say. “Who’s after that?”
She smiles at me a sad, lonely smile out of the instrument panel twilight. “I don’t know.” I can see her eyes dancing in tears.
“I don’t know either. It’s getting to be a problem.”
X lets off on her brake and I step back in the grass. Her Citation hesitates, then hisses off from me up Coolidge and into the night. And I am left alone in the cool silence of dead Walter’s yard and MG, an unknown apartment house behind me, a neighborhood where I am not known, a man with no place to go in particular—out, for the moment, of any good ideas, at the sad end of a sad day that in a better world would never have occurred at all.
Where, in fact, do you go if you’re me?
Where do sportswriters go when the day is, in every way, done, and the possibilities so limited that neither good nor bad seems a threat? (I’d be happy to go to sleep, but that doesn’t seem available.)
It is not, though, a genuine empty moment, and as such, war needn’t be waged against it. It need not even be avoided or faced up to with particular daring. It is not the prologue to terrible regret. An empty moment requires both real expectation and its eventual defeat by the forces of fate. And I have no such hopes to dash. For the moment, I’m beyond all hopes, much as I was on the night X burned her hope chest while I watched the stars.
Walter would say that I have become neither the seer nor the thing seen—as invisible as Claude Rains in the movie, though I have no enemies to get back at, no debts to pay off. Invisibility, in truth, is not so bad. We should all try to know it better, use it to our advantage the way Claude Rains didn’t, since at one time or other—like it or not—we all become invisible, loosed from body and duty, left to drift on the night breeze, to do as we will, to cast about for what we would like to be when we next occur. That, let me promise you, is not an empty moment. And further yet from real regret. (Maybe Walter was interested in me, but who knows? Or cares?) Just to slide away like a whisper down the wind is no small freedom, and if we’re lucky enough to win such a setting-free, even if it’s bad events that cause it, we should use it, for it is the only naturally occurring consolation that comes to us, sole and sovereign, without props or the forbearance of others—among whom I mean to include God himself, who does not let us stay invisible long, since that is a state he reserves for himself.