He moved his head closer, and as I rubbed my knuckles on his chin and listened to that terrific, sandpapery sound, he began speaking French again—intense, urgent, soulful French. The whole world feels bettaire.
I began to shift and writhe and feel so good.
He began unbuttoning my blouse, talking softly all the while, softly but urgently, his cigarette hanging from a corner of his mouth. Soon I was more or less naked in the chair, quietly writhing, feeling liquidy from the sound of his voice, my eyes closed as I listened, listened—his life, his whole being, floating out in French.
I rubbed my knuckles on his beard. I couldn’t get enough of that sound.
It was pretty nippy in the room, and he undressed quickly and got into bed and waited for me, showing a hairy chest—tight, dark, curly hair. I took a last sip from my cognac. I was feeling practically drugged from all that French. It was a languorous feeling, not at all a cold weather kind of thing, but I guess all that talking of his had done it. I wanted to stretch and curl up and then stretch again.
It took me about five minutes to get out of the chair and rise to my full height. The cold didn’t bother me. I looked at Jeep, barely able to see him in the smoke-filled room. That added to my languor. The hanging smoke.
I was pretty sure I wanted him. I went over there and got under the covers and curled up against his body. He was tender, and spoke French into my ear, and blew into his own cupped hands to warm them before he touched my body, and his voice became part of the stringy music, a single, soft, unhurrying sound, and I closed my eyes and listened, feeling sleepy and dazed by smoke, moaning oh, oh, content to let him part my legs, to caress my breasts with his strong, warm, professional hands, and then I stretched my limbs, oh, feeling all liquidy, opening my body to him, and he calmly, neatly, firmly entered, speaking French all through it, as I rubbed my knuckles on his gritty chin.
The whole world feels bettaire.
9
I’ve never outgrown the thrill of getting a window seat. This applies even on airplanes, despite the fact that you get to see little or nothing for most of the flight. Regardless of means of transport, I am always disappointed when someone beats me to the window seat. I always feel the window seat is mine. I deserve the window seat. What good is a seat if you can’t see anything from it?
Window seats may be the only way that remains for adults to stay in direct touch with their own childhoods.
We still want that seat. At least I do. There is still a whole world that beckons to us, that is worth seeing. It is one of the unresearched pleasures of our time, looking out the window of a moving vehicle. When I don’t get a window seat, I feel a tiny, crushing sensation deep inside. It would not be overdramatizing the matter to say it is a spiritual loss. The world we see from a moving vehicle was made for children, and being deprived of that streaming view of color and light brings back my childish hurt.
I had a window seat on the 707 that was heading for Chicago as a tremendous storm came barreling down off the Great Lakes and just about sent our sleek aircraft into metallurgical convulsions. It was about two in the morning—I’d been scanning for meteors—and we’d come dragging aboard after a dull, losing effort against the Sabres, which came at the tail end of a quiet, reflective, snowbound, stir-crazy day.
Anyway, the overhead compartments came banging open, and dozens of blankets, coats, and jackets flew down amongst us. Next to me, Lars Larssen twisted in his seat and asked the stewardess if she thought we’d have to divert to another city.
“Please extinguish your smoking materials,” she told him.
It was a quick, hard-hitting, high-volume blizzard. Fortunately we were close enough to O’Hare to make it in before they shut down. But because of previous storms as well as this one, what we found was a paralyzed city. An immobilized transportation system. A silent, ghostly, subfreezing metropolis. In the middle of the night.
Naturally there was chaos at the airport. People running around trying to get some kind of transportation out of there. People sleeping in chairs. Babies crying. Dogs barking in crates. Fistfights by the telephones.
My teammates and I sat around waiting until arrangements were made, and eventually I found myself getting into the back seat of a taxi with Murray Jay Siskind and sportscaster-on-the-mend Merle Halverson. The driver was a black fellow wearing combat fatigues.
We went skidding off into the night, a sad caravan of Rangers, media and hangers-on—about seven cabs, three limousines, a pickup truck, and an ordinary four-passenger sedan with six feet of drifting snow on the roof.
3:05 a.m.
We head toward town. Snow everywhere. Whole houses buried.
Our windshield wipers rapidly freezing up.
The cab leaks cold. Murray, on my left, says, “Don’t you love it?” Merle, on my right, says, “I got out of a hospital bed for this?”
Between them, I am silently resentful. They have the window seats.
“Why did you come back so soon?” Murray says.
“Toby’s after my job. He doesn’t want to do color anymore.”
“I thought Toby was your friend,” Murray says.
“A man with a swimming-pool-shaped kidney has no friends.”
3:18 a.m.
The cab in front of us goes skidding into a nine-foot drift. Our driver sticks his head out the window and shouts obscenities at their driver.
3:25 a.m.
I ask Murray to ask our driver to shut the window. Murray says, “Tell Merle to ask. He’s the voice of the Rangers.” I tell Merle. He looks tired and sad. His long, sagging, jowly face half disappears inside the collar of his coat. It is as though I have asked him to put on hip boots and bring me back a fistful of piranha.
I ask the driver to shut the window.
He turns way around in his seat. Way around. He gives me an incredibly long-suffering look. It is a combination of boredom, impatience, superiority, and long, long suffering.
3:31 a.m.
I ask the driver to shut the window.
He says, “We need to defrost. Don’t you understand nothing?”
Murray says to me, “Ask him to put on the defroster. Or tell Merle to ask him. Either way’s okay by me.”
3:55 a.m.
The city looms. Exhilaration!
The driver of the pickup truck tries to pass us. Not smart. Our driver sticks his head out the window and curses freely. He tries to run the pickup off the road. Both vehicles are skidding all over. I realize that Jeep is sitting in the passenger seat of the pickup. His eyes are full of pure fear.
Murray clutches his manuscript.
4:05 a.m.
Snow is blinding. I notice Murray Jay has been sort of nodding for the past ten or fifteen seconds.
I look at him.
“I am permanently available,” he says. “Any time you want to talk. Day or night. I know what your life is like, Cleo. I know it’s not the Saturday Morning Rodeo Parade people make it out to be. Remember what I said in the locker room at the Spectrum.”
“What?”
“I’m not afraid to be tender.”
Nod, nod, nod, nod.
4:11 a.m.
I am still upset over the window seats. I vow to do better, be grab-bier, get there first next time.
4:20 a.m.
Our driver lights up a joint. He sits twisted away from the steering wheel, his body curled in on itself, in order to keep the gale-force winds from obliterating the pretty, pinpoint glow. He is more or less steering with his left elbow. Occasionally his hip.
Murray asks if he can buy some grass. The driver turns way around. He gives Murray a look that is too glassy-eyed to register the contempt, scorn, and suspicion he wants it to have.
Murray doesn’t really want grass. He is trying to promote a spirit of camaraderie. We are making a daring entrance into the city of Chicago in a howling blizzard at four or five in the morning and there is no camaraderie in our vehicle. He
says he bets the other vehicles are full of people drinking, laughing, telling jokes, horsing around, smoking grass. He describes vivid scenes of tremendous, lighthearted rapport. It is like a Dutch painting of rosy-cheeked men in an alehouse.
4:37 a.m.
We go into a spin. Merle is very still. All through the spin, he is motionless. He is actually spinning, of course, but only to the extent that we are all spinning, that the vehicle is spinning, the planet is spinning, the solar system, the galaxy etc. Merle himself is motionless, his head sunk into his coat.
I wonder if he is dead.
4:55 a.m.
Either the caravan is so spread out or the snow is so heavy that it is impossible to see the other vehicles. It is also hard to care about the other vehicles.
Am I becoming insensitive?
5:01 a.m.
A major street. Is it Michigan Avenue? Hard to tell. Everything buried. Abandoned vehicles turned every which way. Whole buildings icing up.
A pack of wild dogs follows us for two blocks, loping alongside the taxi—hungry-looking, silent, a little crazed of eye.
Monster chunks of hard snow fall from tall buildings, landing all around us.
Still no hint of camaraderie.
5:04 a.m.
Somewhere behind us, we hear the dogs barking and growling. Murray thinks they have found a stray human, a straggler. Someone old and slow.
“What a human interest story,” he says. “Eaten by wild dogs in the middle of Chicago.”
This gets to the driver. We see his eyes watching us in the rear-view mirror.
“You think they might be stalking someone?” he says.
“I don’t think dogs stalk,” Murray says. “Dogs hunt in packs. Cats stalk. Semantics aside, I think they’re hungry enough and wild enough to do something pretty antisocial.”
We see the eyes watching us.
The driver slams on the brakes, puts the vehicle into reverse, and goes skidding back toward the sound of the barking dogs. He is going much faster than he’d been going when moving forward.
I wonder if I should tell Murray that Merle might be dead.
5:10 a.m.
We are still looking for the dogs, backward. The chance of seeing this primitive scene played out has sort of galvanized the driver. He is doing tremendous things, automotively. Cornering flawlessly, driving on the sidewalk, coming out of skids with added momentum, flinging the wheel around in great, violent arcs as if it is a ship’s wheel and he is maneuvering through a minefield—all this in reverse.
Is that a lake out there? Or is that a park?
“In tomorrow’s papers,” Murray tells me, “they will say the city was hushed. The city is not hushed. There are wild, baying dogs. There are tons of snow falling off buildings. There is a careening taxi with three hysterical passengers.”
His manuscript is nestled in his crotch, as much as you can nestle eight hundred pages in that kind of space.
5:14 a.m.
The driver can’t find the dogs and gives up the chase, cursing quietly. He takes it out of reverse.
We breathe more easily.
Icy puddles have formed under our feet and we have to ride with our legs raised slightly. I imagine we look foolish sitting this way, but there is not much chance a passing news photographer will capture it on film. I tell Murray his foolishness is safe with me.
Tremendous icy blasts come sweeping off the lake. The driver, with his window still open, has moved to the passenger seat to avoid the full force of these new winds. He is huddled against the door, his left arm extended toward the wheel. He is driving with the fingertips of his left hand and the heel of his left foot.
Murray says, “Tell him a little fogging of the windows is acceptable.”
5:25 a.m.
Our hotel is in sight. Exhilaration!
Something stirs inside Merle’s coat. It is Merle. He says, “Where are we?”
Great sheets of ice and snow come crashing down from the tops of buildings.
Murray and I look at each other, trying to come up with a fitting answer to Merle’s question in light of the avalanches all around us.
The driver says, “Warm Springs, Georgia, fuck-head.”
Murray and I stop trying.
5:32 a.m.
We go into a spin and crash into the canopy supports in front of our hotel. No one comes out to complain. We pile out of the cab on the street side, since the canopy has collapsed, and after getting our luggage out of the trunk and paying the driver, we walk on top of the canopy into the hotel lobby.
A short, pipe-smoking man stands behind the desk, watching us trudge crookedly with our suitcases across the lobby. He knocks tobacco out of his pipe as we register.
“You the hockey people?”
“That’s right,” Murray says.
“You people are strewn all over the county. You know that? I’ve been getting calls for two hours. No traction. Or lost in drifts. Or can’t get off the expressway. What do they expect me to do? You’re the only ones who made it in.”
“Can we have our room keys?” Murray says.
“You play hockey with that little beard?”
“It comes off. My whole mouth and jaw come off for the games. I wear a hinged, steel support. It’s like a jock for the lower face.”
“Funny fella.”
“Can we have some keys?”
“Enjoy it while you can is what I tell you people. We get all the major sports staying here. Before you know it, you’ll be out there in the real world.”
He points his pipe stem at us.
“It comes at you from all sides out there. Either way you turn, you get stiffed. Believe me, what you got to look forward to, I wouldn’t envy a dog.”
5:40 a.m.
We get our keys and trudge into the elevator.
“That’s a funny little twisted sort of face that man has,” Merle says.
“Knotty pine,” Murray says.
My floor.
“We call it gnarled,” I tell them.
I woke up at 8:30 with a staticky stomach. Simple, outright hunger. I tried to go back to sleep, but it was no go. I got dressed and went down to the hotel coffee shop and had breakfast. Then I stood around the lobby and watched them coming in.
They were still coming in, the weary, the bent, the shaken, the defeated.
J. P. Larousse, Toby Scott, Gordon Eraser, Brian Eraser, Nils Nilsson, Lars Larssen, one reporter, two reporters, three front office functionaries, Bruce McLeod’s mother, on and on, the stricken, the cramped, the drawn, the sleepless, the hollow.
I went to my room. I realized I hadn’t yet checked the weather. I parted the curtains. Snow flurries. A more or less hushed city.
I called Shaver and told him about the ride in. We had a nice talk. That made me feel better.
I sat around a while, half envying those people who are always running around saying, “I have to get organized, I can’t seem to get organized, there’s so much to do.” People who run around waving lists. People who set personal deadlines.
I had nothing to organize. Nothing to list. Nothing to set a deadline for.
Which world is the real world?
I think people make lists because they like crossing the items out as they’re taken care of. This is one of those pleasures like sitting in window seats. No one talks about it or makes studies of it, but it is a giant pleasure for a lot of people. Crossing things off lists.
I missed Shaver. I missed Floss. I missed my mommy and daddy.
I won’t go into detail about the rest of the day. It was similar to the previous day in Buffalo—quiet, dull, stir-crazy. There are times when so little happens it is actually fatiguing.
The game was on. Very little snow fell during the day and the team bus got us to the arena with only a couple of detours around unplowed streets. Some of us dozed off on the bus, others in the dressing room, others on the bench during the game.
Near the end of the game, little Dougie White got in a scrap with one of the littler Black Hawks and they went up and down the ice pummeling and clutching for about four and a half minutes. I was on the bench at the time and had that schizy feeling you get when you know someone is watching you. I turned around. It was Jeep—Jean-Paul—looking at me with a fair amount of tremendous intensity.
I smiled briefly, reflectively, and turned back to the ice, where the two fighters still feebly mauled, sliding together into one of the nets.
In the dressing room, there was another fight, this one between teammates. Big, sleepy, blondish Wayne Lassiter taking on stocky Jack Ferguson. It was a terrible brawl, and because they weren’t on skates they were able to get a lot more leverage and force into their punches. Teammates broke it up three times, and each time Jack and Wayne started hammering again. I watched a little awestruck. These guys wanted to kill each other, and when two big men go at it bareknuckled with all they have in a relatively small amount of space, it practically changes the molecules in the air. Everything jumps to a higher level. Things seem more real, more true. The remains of Ferguson’s uniform were mostly ripped off him and he stood there throwing punches with his slangy parts hanging out. About four guys formed a flying wedge and tried to get between them, and I felt a pair of eyes across the room riveted on me, and I looked over there through the mass of half-naked, tangled, sweaty, grappling bodies.
Jean-Paul, Jean-Paul.
We got back to the hotel. As I dragged my tired body across the lobby, the short, gnarled man at the front desk rang his little bell at me.
Messages galore.
A phone call from Archie Brewster. No word, no number. Thanks, Arch.
A phone call from Glenway Packer, l.a. confirmed. My first big-name-brand commercial.
Amazons: An Intimate Memoir by the First Woman Ever to Play in the National Hockey League Page 20