The Sportswriter

by Richard Ford

  I swivel around, and framed there in the aluminum rectangle is a face to save a drowning man. A big self-assured smile. A swag of honey hair with two plaited strips pulled back on each side in a complex private-school style. Skin the clarity of a tulip. Long fingers. Pale blond skim of hair on her arm, which at the moment she is rubbing lightly with her palm. Khaki culottes. A white cotton blouse concealing a pair of considerable grapefruits.

  “Hi.” I smile back.

  She rests a hip against the door frame. Below the culottes’ hems her legs are taut and shiny as a cavalry saddle. I don’t exactly know where to look, though the big smile says: Look square at what you like, Jack. That’s what God made it for. “You’re Frank Bascombe, aren’t you?” She’s still smiling as if she knows something, A secret.

  “Yes. I am.” My face grows pleasantly warm.

  Eyes twinkle and brows arch. A look of admiration with nothing shady necessarily implied—a punctilio taught in the best New England boarding schools and mastered in adulthood—the simple but provoking wish to make oneself completely understood. “I’m sorry to butt in. I’ve just wanted to meet you ever since I’ve been here.”

  “Do you work here,” I ask disingenuously, since I know with absolute certainty that she works here. I saw her down a corridor a month ago—not to mention ten minutes ago at the Pigskin Preview—and have looked up her employment files to see if she had the right background for some research. She is an intern down from Dartmouth, a Melissa or a Kate. Though at the moment I can’t remember, since her kind of beauty is usually zealously overseen by some thick-necked Dartmouth Dan, with whom she is sharing an efficiency on the Upper East Side, taking their “term off” together to decide if a marriage is the wise decision at this point in time. I remember, however, her family is from Milton, Mass., her father a small-scale politician with a name I vaguely recognize as lustrous in Harvard athletics (he is a chum of some higher-up at the magazine). I can even picture him—small, chunky, shoulder-swinging, a scrappy in-fighter who got in Harvard on grades then lettered in two sports though no one in his family had ever made it out of the potato patch. A fellow I would usually like. And here is his sunny-faced daughter down to season her résumé with interesting extras for med school, or for when she enters local politics in Vermont/New Hampshire midway through her divorce from Dartmouth Dan. None of it is a bad idea.

  But the sight of her in my doorway, healthy as a kayaker, Boston brogue, “experienced” already in ways you can only dream about, is a sight for mean eyes. Maybe Dartmouth Dan is off crewing dad’s 12-metre, or still up in Hanover cramming for the business boards. Maybe he doesn’t even find this big suavely beautiful girl “interesting” anymore (a decision he’ll regret), or finds her wrong for his career (which demands someone shorter or a little less bossy), or needing better family ties or French. These mistakes still happen. If they didn’t, how could any of us face a new day?

  “I was just sitting in on the football meeting,” Melissa/Kate says. She leans back to glance down the corridor. Voices trail away toward elevators. Forecasting work is over. Her hair is cut bluntly toward her sweet little helical ears so she can flick it as she just did. “My name’s Catherine Flaherty,” she says. “I’m interning here this spring. From Dartmouth. I don’t want to intrude. You’re probably real busy.” A shy, secretive smile and another hair flick.

  “I wasn’t having much luck staying busy, to tell you the truth.” I push back in my swivel chair and lace my hands behind my skull. “I don’t mind a little company.”

  Another smile, the slightest bit permissive. There’s something kinda neat about you, it says, but don’t get me wrong. I give her my own firm, promise-not-to grin.

  “I really just wanted to tell you I’ve read your stories in the magazine and really admire them a lot.”

  “That’s kind of you, thanks.” I nod as harmless as old Uncle Gus. “I try to take the job here pretty seriously.”

  “I’m not being kind.” Her eyes flash. She is a woman who can be both chatty and challenging. I’m sure she can turn on the irony, too, when the situation asks for it.

  “No. I don’t believe you’d be kind for a minute. It’s just nice of you to say so, even if you’re not being nice.” I rest my jaw, right where Vicki has slugged it, in the soft palm of my hand.

  “Fair ’nuff.” Her smile says I’m a pretty good guy after all. All is computed in smiles.

  “How’s the old Pigskin going?” I say, with forced jauntiness.

  “Well, it’s pretty exciting, I guess,” she says. “They finally just throw out their graphs and ratings and play their hunches. Then the yelling really starts. I liked it.”

  “Well, we do try to factor in all the intangibles,” I say. “When I started here, I had a heck of a time figuring out why anybody was right, ever, or even how they knew anything.” I nod, pleased at what is, of course, a major truth of a lived life, though there’s no reason to think that this Catherine Flaherty hasn’t known it longer than I have. She is all of twenty, but has the sharp-eyed look of knowing more than I do about the very things I care most about—which is the fruit of a privileged life. “You thinking of taking a crack at this when school’s over?” I say, hoping to hear Yep, you bet I am. But she looks instantly pensive, as though she doesn’t want to disappoint me.

  “Well, I took the Med-Cats already, and I spent all this time applying. I oughta hear any day now. But I wanted to try this, too. I always thought it’d be neat.” She starts another wide smile, but her eyes suddenly go serious as if I might take offense at the least glimmer of what’s fun. What she really wants is a piece of good strong advice, a vote in one direction or the other. “My brother played hockey at Bowdoin,” she says for no reason I can think of.

  “Well,” I say happily and without one grain of sincerity, “you can’t go wrong with the medical profession.” I swivel back in mock spiritedness and tap my fingertips on the armrest. “Medicine’s a pretty damn good choice. You participate in people’s lives in a pretty useful way, which is important to me. Though my belief is you can do that as a sportswriter—pretty well, in fact.” My hurt knee gives off a bony throb, a throb almost surely engineered by my heart.

  “What made you want to be a sportswriter?” Catherine Flaherty says. She’s not a girl to fritter. Her father has taught her a thing or two.

  “Well. Somebody asked me at a time when I really didn’t have a single better idea, to tell you the truth. I’d just run out of goals. I was trying to write a novel at the time, and that wasn’t going like I wanted it to. I was happy to drop that and come on board. And I haven’t regretted it a minute.”

  “Did you ever finish your novel?”

  “Nope. I guess I could if I wanted to. The trouble seemed to me that unless I was Cheever or O’Hara, nobody was going to read what I wrote, even if I finished it, which I couldn’t guarantee. This way, though, I have a lot of readers and can still turn my attention to things that matter to me. This is, after I’d earned some respect.”

  “Well, everything you write seems to have a purpose to show something important. I’m not sure I could do that. I may be too cynical,” Catherine says.

  “If you’re worried about it, you probably aren’t. That’s what I’ve found. I worry about it all the time myself. A lot of guys in this business never think about it. And some of those are the mathematical guys. But my thinking is, you can learn how not to be cynical—if you’re interested enough. Somebody could teach you what the warning signs are. I could probably teach you myself in no time.” Knee throbbing, heart a-pounding: Let me be your teacher.

  “What’s a typical warning sign?” She grins and flicks her honey hair in a this-oughta-be-good way.

  “Well, not worrying about it is one. And you already do that. Another is catching yourself feeling sorry for somebody you’re writing about, since the next person you’re liable to feel sorry for is you, and then you’re in real trouble. If I ever find myself feelin
g like somebody’s life’s a tragedy, I’m pretty sure I’m making a big mistake, and I start over right away. And I don’t really think I’ve ever felt stumped or alienated doing things that way. Real writers feel alienated all the time. I’ve read where they’ve admitted it.”

  “Do you think doctors feel alienated?” Catherine looks worried (as well she might). I can’t help thinking about Fincher and the dismal, jackass life he must lead. Though it could be worse.

  “I don’t see how they can avoid some of it, really” is my answer. “They see an awful lot of misery and meanness. You could give medical school an honest try, and then if that doesn’t work out you can be pretty sure of a job writing sports. You could probably come right back here, in fact.”

  She gives me her best eye-twinkling smile, long Beantown teeth catching the light like opals. We’re all alone here now. Empty cubicles stretch in empty rows all the way to the empty reception arca and the empty elevator banks—a perfect place for love to blossom. We’ve got things in hand and plenty to share—her admiration for me, my advice about her future, my admiration for her, her respect for my opinion (which may rival even her old man). Forget that I’m twice her age, possibly older. Too much gets made of age in this country. Europeans smirk behind our backs, while looking forward to what good might be between now and death. Catherine Flaherty and I are just two people here, with plenty in common, plenty on our minds and a yen for a real give-and-take.

  “You’re really great,” she volunteers. “You’re just a real optimist. Like my father. All my worries just seem like little tiny things that’ll work out.” Her smile says she means every word of it, and I can’t wait to start passing more wisdom her way.

  “I like to think of myself as pretty much a literalist,” I say. “Whatever happens to us is going to be literal when it happens. I just try to arrange things the best way I know how according to my abilities.” I glance around behind at my desk as if I’d just remembered and wanted to refer to something important—a phantom copy of Leaves of Grass or a thumbed-up Ayn Rand hardback. But there’s only my empty yellow legal pad with false starts jotted down like an old grocery list. “Unless you’re a real Calvinist, of course, the possibilities really aren’t limited one bit,” I say, pursing my lips.

  “My family’s Presbyterian,” Catherine Flaherty says, and perfectly mimics my own tight-lipped expression. (I’d have given racetrack odds she was on the Pope’s team.)

  “That’s my bunch, too. But I’ve let my lines go a little slack. I think that’s probably okay, though. My hands are pretty full these days.”

  “I’ve got a lot to learn, too. I guess.”

  And for a long moment sober silence reigns while the lights hum softly above us.

  “What’ve they got you doing around here to soak up experience,” I ask expansively. Whatever idea is dawning on me is still below the horizon, and I don’t intend to seem calculating, which would send her out of here in a hurry. (I realize at this moment how much I would hate to meet her father, though I assume he’s a great guy.)

  “Well, I’ve just done some telephone interviewing, and that’s sort of interesting. The retired crew coach at Princeton was a Russian defector in the fifties and smuggled out information about H-bombs during athletic meets. That was all hushed up, I guess, and the government had his job at Princeton all ready for him.”

  “Sounds good,” I say. And it does. A low-grade intrigue, something to get your teeth in.

  “But I have a hard time asking good questions.” She wrinkles her brow to show genuine concern with her craft. “Mine are too complicated, and no one says much.”

  “That isn’t surprising,” I say. “You just have to keep questions simple and remember to ask the same ones over and over again, sometimes in different words. Most athletes are really dying to tell you the whole truth. You just need to get out of their way. That’s exactly why a lot of sportswriters get cynical as hell. Their role’s a lot smaller than they thought, and that turns them sour. All they’ve done, though, is learn how to be good at their business.”

  Catherine Flaherty leans against the aluminum door jamb, eyes gleaming, mouth uncertain, and says exactly nothing at this important moment, merely nods her pretty head. Yes. Yes.

  It’s all up to me.

  The clear moon on this night has posted a smooth silver hump above my dark horizon, and I have only to stand up, put my hands firmly on my chest like St. Stephen and suggest we stroll out into the cool air of Park Avenue, maybe veer over to Second for a sandwich and a beer at someplace I will have to know about (but don’t yet), then let the dreamy night take care of itself and us from there on. A couple. Regulation city-dwellers, arm-in-arm under that dog moon, familiars strolling the easy streets, old hands at the new business of romance.

  I take a peek at the clock above Eddie Frieder’s cubicle, see through his office window, in fact, and out through the bright night at the building across the street. The windows there are yellow with old-fashioned light. A heavy man in a vest stands looking down toward the avenue. Toward what? What is on his mind, I cannot help wondering. A set of alternatives that don’t appeal to him? A dilemma that could consume his night in calculating? A future blacker than the night itself? Behind him, someone I cannot see speaks to him or calls his name, and he turns away, raises his hands in a gesture of acceptance and steps from view.

  By Eddie Frieder’s clock it is the eleventh hour exactly. Easter night. The office is silent and still, but for a faraway computer’s hum and for the clock itself, which snakes to its next minute station. There is a sweet smell on the odorless air—the smell of Catherine Flaherty, a smell of full closets, of secret private-school shenanigans, of dark (but not too dark) rendezvous. And for a moment I am stopped from speech and motion, and imagine precisely how she will take on the duty of loving me. It is, of course, a way I know already, cannot help but know, all things considered (that’s one subject that does not surprise you once you’re an adult). It will be the most semi-serious of ways. Not the way she would love Dartmouth Dan, nor the way she will love the lucky man she is likely to marry—some wide-eyed Columbia grad with a family law practice all in place. But something in the middle of those, a way that means to say: This is pretty serious, though only for experience sake; I’d be the most surprised little girl in Boston if this turns out to be important at all; it’ll be interesting, you bet, and I’ll look back on it someday and feel sure I did the right thing and all, but not be sure exactly why I think so; full steam ahead.

  And what’s my attitude? At some point nothing else really matters but your attitude—your hopes, your risks, your sacrifices, your potential islands of regret and reward—as you enter what is no more than rote experience upon the earth.

  Mine, I’m happy to say, is the best possible.

  “Well, hey,” I say in a stirring voice, hands upon my breast. “What say we get out of here and take a walk? I haven’t eaten since lunch, and I could pretty much eat a lug wrench right now. I’ll buy you a sandwich.”

  Catherine Flaherty bites a piece of her lip as she smiles a smile even bigger than mine and colors flower in her tulip cheeks. This is a pretty good idea, she means to say, full of sentiment. (Though she is already nodding a business woman’s agreement before she speaks.) “Sounds really great.” She flips her hair in a definitive way. “I guess I’m pretty hungry too. Just let me get my coat, and we’ll go for it.”

  “It’s a deal,” I say.

  I hear her feet slip-skip down the carpeted corridor, hear the door to the ladies’ sigh open, sigh back, bump shut (always the practical girl). And there is no nicer time on earth than now—everything in the offing, nothing gone wrong, all potential—the very polar opposite of how I felt driving home the other night, when everything was on the skids and nothing within a thousand kilometers worth anticipating. This is really all life is worth, when you come down to it.

  The light across the street is off now. Though as I stand watching
(my bum knee good as new), waiting for this irresistible, sentimental girl’s return, I can’t be certain that the man I saw there—the heavy man in his vest and tie, surprised by the sudden sound of a voice and his own name, a sound he didn’t expect—I can’t be certain he’s not there still, looking out over the night streets of a friendly town, alone. And I step closer to the glass and try to find him through the dark, stare hard, hoping for even an illusion of a face, of someone there watching me here. Far below I can sense the sound of cars and life in motion. Behind me I hear the door sigh closed again and footsteps coming. And I sense that it’s not possible to see there anymore, though my guess is no one’s watching me. No one’s noticed me standing here at all.

  THE END

  Life will always be without a natural, convincing closure. Except one.

  Walter was buried in Coshocton, Ohio, on the very day I sounded the horns of my thirty-ninth birthday. I didn’t go to his funeral, though I almost did. (Carter Knott went.) In spite of everything, I could not feel that I had a place there. For a day or two he was kept over in Mangum & Gayden’s on Winthrop Street, where Ralph was four years ago, and then was driven back to the midwest by long-haul truck. It turns out it wasn’t his sister I saw on the train platform in Haddam that night, but some other woman. Walter’s sister, Joyce Ellen, is a heavy-set, bespectacled, YWCA-type who has never married and wears mannish suits and ties, is as nice a person as you will ever meet, and has never read Teddy Roosevelt’s Life. She and I had a long, friendly visit at a coffee shop in New York, where we talked about the letter Walter had left and about Walter in general. Joyce said he was a kind of enigma to her and her entire family, and that he hadn’t been in close touch with them for some time. Only in the last week of his life, she said, Walter had called up several times to talk about hunting and the possibility of moving back there and setting up a business and even about me, whom he described as his best friend. Joyce said she thought there was something very strange about her brother, and she wasn’t all that surprised when the call came in. “You can feel these things coming,” she said (though I do not agree). She said she hoped Yolanda wouldn’t come to the funeral, and I have a suspicion she got her wish.