The Sportswriter (10 page)

For the last year I was married to X, I was always able to “see around the sides” of whatever I was feeling. If I was mad or ecstatic, I always realized I could just as easily feel or act another way if I wanted to—somber or resentful, ironic or generous—even though I might’ve been convinced that the way I was acting probably represented the way I
really
felt even if I hadn’t seen the other ways open. This can be an appealing way to live your life, since you can convince yourself you’re really just a tolerant generalist and kind toward other views.

I even had, in fact, a number of different voices, a voice that wanted to be persuasive, to promote good effects, to express love and be sincere, and make other people happy—even if what I was saying was a total lie and as distant from the truth as Athens is from Nome. It was a voice that totally lacked commitment, though it may well be this is as close as you can ever come to yourself, your own voice, especially with someone you love: mutual agreement with no significant irony.

This is what people mean when they say that so-and-so is “distanced from his feelings.” Only it’s my belief that when you reach adulthood that distance has to close until you no longer see those choices, but simply do what you do and feel what you feel—marriage you may have to relinquish, of course. “Seeing around” is exactly what I did in my stories (though I didn’t know it), and in the novel I abandoned, and one reason why I had to quit. I could always think of other ways I might be feeling about what I was writing, or other voices I might be speaking in. In fact, I could usually think of quite a number of things I might be doing at any moment! And what real writing requires, of course, is that you merge into the
oneness of the writer’s vision
—something I could never quite get the hang of, though I tried like hell and eventually sunk myself. X was always clear as spring water about how she felt and why she did everything. She was completely reliable and resistant to nuance and doubt, which made her a wonderful person for a fellow like me to be married to, though I’m not certain she’s so sure about things now.

Though about athletes, I want to say just one more thing: you can learn too much about them, even learn to dislike them, just as you can with anybody. When you look very closely, the more everybody seems just alike—unsurprising and factual. And for that reason I sometimes tell less than I know, and for my money the boys in my racket make a mistake with in-depth interviews.

I’d just as soon pull a good heartstring. Write about the skinny Negro kid from Bradenton, Florida, who can’t read, suffered rickets and had scrapes with the law, yet who later accepts a basketball scholarship to a major mid western university, becomes a star, learns to read and eventually majors in psychology, marries a white girl and later starts a consulting firm in Akron. That is a good story. Maybe the white girl would be of eastern European extraction. Her parents would oppose, but get won over.

If all this makes it seem that being a sportswriter is at best a superficial business, that’s because it is. And it is not for that reason a bad profession at all. Nor am I, I will admit, altogether imperfectly suited for it.

A
t Terminal A we become two veteran travelers. I stand in line at United while Vicki goes to powder her nose and buy flight insurance. As it turns out, she is as much a denizen of airports as I am. When everything turned bad with old dagger-head Everett, she informed me on the escalator, she used to drive out to the new airport in Dallas, watch planes leave, and pretend she was on all of them. “If you stayed in that airport for one year,” she said, beaming like a carhop as we headed up the glittering ticket concourse full of passengers and loved ones looking for partners, “you’d see everybody in the world. And you’d sure see Charley Pride a hundred times at least.”

Vicki also believes flight insurance to be the world’s best bargain, and who am I to say no, though I advise her not to make me her beneficiary.

“Well, I guess
not”
she says, with a vaguely disgusted look. “I always make the R.C. Church my heir in everything.”

“That’s fine then,” I say, though she and I have never discussed religion.

“I just went to Catholics when I married Everett, in case you’re wondering,” she says, and looks at me oddly. “They do a lot for the hospitals. And the Pope’s a good old guy I think. I wadn’t but a dirty Methodist before, like everybody else in Texas except the Baptists.”

“That’s great,” I say and give her arm a squeeze.

“Freedom to choose,” she says, then skitters away toward the insurance machines.

By wide degrees now I am better. Public places always work this curative on me, and if anything I suffer the opposite of agoraphobia. I enjoy the freely shared air of the public. It is, in a way, my element. Even the yellow-aired Greyhound terminals and murky subway stations make me feel a well-being, that a place has been provided for me and my fellow man together. When I was married to X, I hated the grinding summer weeks we’d spend first at the Huron Mountain Club, and, later, at Sumac Hills down in Birmingham, where her father was a founding member. I hated that still air of privilege and the hushed, nervous noises of mid western exclusivity. I thought it was bad for the children and kept stealing off with Ralph to the Detroit Zoo and the Belle Isle Botanical Garden, and once all the way out to the Arboretum in Ann Arbor. X’s had been an entire life of privilege—clubs and reserved tables and private boxes at the ball game—though I think all that means nothing if you have a sound enough character to weather it, which she has.

Across from me studying the departures board I spy a face I recognize but hope to get away without acknowledging. It is the long face of Fincher Barksdale. Fincher is holding his white United ticket folder and has a big TWA golf bag over his shoulder. Fincher is my internist, and I have visited him, as I said, to inquire about my pounding heart, and have heard from him that it is likely a matter of my age, and that many men approaching forty suffer from symptoms inexplicable to medical science, and that in a while they just go away by themselves.

Fincher is one of those lanky, hairy-handed, hip-thrown, vaguely womanish southerners who usually become bored lawyers or doctors, and whom I don’t like, though X and I were friendly with him and his wife, Dusty, when we first came to Haddam and I had a small celebrity with my picture in
Newsweek
. He is a Vanderbilt grad, and older than I am by at least three years though he looks younger. He took his medicine and a solid internist’s residency at Hopkins, and though I do not like him one bit, I am happy to have him be my doctor. I try to look away in a hurry, out the big window toward the spiritless skyline of Newark, but I’m sure Fincher has already seen me and is waiting to be sure I’ve seen him and absolutely don’t want to talk to him before he pipes up.

“Now look out here. Where’re we slippin off to, brother Frank.” It is Fincher’s booming southern baritone, and without even looking I know he is stifling a white, toothy smile, tongue deep in his cheek, and having a wide look around to see who else might be listening in. He extends me his soft hand without actually noticing me. We are not old fraternity brothers. He was a Phi Delt, though he once suggested we might have a distant aunt in common, some Bascombe connection of his from Memphis. But I squelched it.

“Business, Fincher,” I say nonchalantly, shaking his long, bony hand, hoping Vicki doesn’t come back anytime soon. Fincher is a veteran lecher and would take pleasure in making me squirm on account of my traveling companion. One of the bad things about public places is that you sometimes see people you would pay money not to see.

Fincher is wearing green jackass pants with little crossed ensigns in red, a blue Augusta National pullover and black-tasseled spectator shoes. He looks like a fool, and is undoubtedly flying off on a golfing package somewhere—Kiawah Island, where he shares a condo, or San Diego, where he goes for doctors’ conventions six or eight times a year.

“What about you, Fincher?” I say, without the slightest interest.

“Just a hop down to Memphis, Frank, down to Memphis for the holiday.” Fincher rocks back on his heels and jingles change in his pockets. He makes no mention of his wife. “Since we lost Daddy, Frank, I go down more, of course. Mother’s doing real fine, I’m happy to say. Her friends have closed ranks around her.” Fincher is the kind of southerner who will only address you through a web of deep and antic southernness, and who assumes everybody in earshot knows all about his parents and history and wants to hear an update on them at every opportunity. He looks young, but still manages to act sixty-five.

“Glad to hear it, Fincher.” I take a peek down past Delta and Allegheny to see if Vicki’s coming this way. If Fincher and the two of us are flying the same flight, I’ll change airlines.

“Frank, I’ve got a little business venture I want to tell you about. I started to get into it in the office the other day, but things went right on and got ahead of me. It’s something you absolutely ought to consider. We’re past the venture capital stages, but you can still get in on the second floor.”

“We’re due out of here in a minute, Fincher. Maybe next week.”

“Now who’re we here with, Frank?” A definite mistake there. I have set Fincher nosing all around again like a bird dog.

“With a friend, Fincher.”

“I see. Now this is one minute to tell, Frank. Just while we’re standing here. See now, some boys and I are starting up a mink ranch right down in south Memphis, Frank. It’s always been my dream, for some damn reason.” Fincher smiles at me in stupid self-amazement. He is picturing his stupid farm at this moment, I can tell, his tiny lizard’s eyes dull with lusterless blue absorption. They are without question the peepers of a fool.

“It’d get hot for the minks, wouldn’t it?”

“Oh well, you
have
to air-condition, Frank. Definitely. No way around that mountain. The start-up’s sky high, too.” Fincher is nodding like a banker, his blond and grayed head a pleasant puzzle of fresh financial wranglings. He crams both hands in his pockets and gives whatever’s down there another stern jingle. Though just for the moment I am struck by Fincher’s hair, the thinning top of which sinks into view as he glances ritually at his spectators. His hair is barbered into the dopey-blond Tab Hunter brushcut circa 1959, crisp as a saltine and with just a soupçon of odorless colloid to hold it in place. He is the perfect southerner-in-exile, a slew-footed mainstreet change jingler in awful clothes—a breed known only
outside
the south. At Vandy he was the tallish, bookish Memphian meant for a wider world—brushcut, droopy suntans, white bucks, campaign belt and a baggy long-sleeved Oxford shirt, hands stuffed in his pockets, arrogantly bored yet supremely satisfied and accustomed to the view from his eyrie. (Essentially the very way he is now.) At Hopkins he met and married a girl from Goucher who couldn’t stand the South and craved the suburbs as if they were the Athens of Pericles, and Fincher has been free ever since to jingle his change and philander around the links with the other southern renegades of whom, as I’ve said, there is a handsome cadre. When the awful day of reckoning comes to Fincher, I want to be somewhere far away in a boat, I know that.

“Frank,” Fincher says, having gone on talking about mink farms while I rode up over the clouds, “now don’t you think it’d be a high-water mark for the New South? You care about all those things, don’t you?”

“Not much,” I say, and the truth is not at all.

“Well now, Frank, everybody thought old Tom Edison was crazy, didn’t they?” Fincher pulls his ticket folder out of his back pocket and whacks it across his palm and smirks.

“I’m pretty sure everybody thought Edison was smart, Fincher.”

“Okay. You know what I mean, son.”

“It’s forward thinking, Fincher, I’ll give it that much.”

And Fincher suddenly assumes an unexpected dazed look as if that was the signal he has been waiting for. And for a moment we stand in silence among hundreds of milling passengers, just the way we might stand together at the window up in the Petroleum Club in Memphis, brainstorming and conniving over next year’s tail-gate party at the Commodore-Ole Miss game. Somehow or other Fincher has managed to set himself at ease, despite my reservations with his mink farm, and I actually admire him for it.

“You know, Frank. I’ve probably never said this to you.” Fincher nods his head like a sage old trial judge. “But I admire the hell out of what you do and how you lead your life. There’s a lot of us would like to do that, but lack the nerve and the dedication.”

“What I do’s pretty easy, Fincher. You’d probably be as good at it as I am. You ought to give it a try.” I squeeze my toes inside my shoes.

“Now you’d need to tie me up in chains and beat me with a stick to get me to write, Frank. I get the ants nowadays just writing a scrip.” Fincher’s mouth mulls down in a mock-grimace. He secretly knows he could do it as well as I can and most likely better, but feels the need to pay me some kind of unfelt compliment. “There’s a whole lot of us would like to mouse off with a little nurse, too,” Fincher says with a big wink.

I turn and look off down the crowded concourse and see Vicki skittering back with her insurance papers, walking with difficulty on her plastic high heels. She looks like a secretary on an urgent trip to the copy machine, elbows thrown out for balance, her feet seemingly made of wood. Fincher
has
seen her and recognized her from the hospital halls, and I am caught.