The Sportswriter (11 page)

Fincher has suddenly adopted the old dirty-leg innuendo he perfected in the Phi Delt house down at Vanderbilt, and means to reduce me to fun or force a briny confidence. A sinister uneasiness surrounds us both. He is more untrustworthy than I thought, and I am as on my guard as any man who has something worth defending—though wretched ever to have let him hold me in a conversation. Fincher is threatening to pull the plug on all anticipation, and I’ll be damned if I’ll let him do it.

“Why don’t you mind your own business, Fincher,” I say, and look him dead in the eyes. I could punch him in the nose, bloody up his jackass pants, and send him home to Memphis in stitches.

“Now-now-now.” Fincher raises his chin and saunters back a half step onto his heels, glancing up over my shoulder toward Vicki. “We’re white men, here, Frank.”

“I’m not married anymore,” I say fiercely. “Anything I do is all right.”

“Yes indeed.” Fincher flashes his big-tooth smile, but it is for Vicki, not me. I am defeated and cannot help wondering if Fincher hasn’t been on this very track before me.

“Well, look what you see when you aren’t properly armed,” Vicki says, fastening a good grip on my arm, and giving Fincher a nasty little smile to let me know she’s got his number. I love her more than I can say.

Fincher mumbles something like “mighty small world,” but he has become half-hearted at best. “I got the insurance,” Vicki says and flutters the papers up to me, ignoring Fincher completely. “You might see a name you know if you look. I changed religions, too.” Her sweet face is gone plain with seriousness. It is a face I did not even want to see two moments before, but that I welcome now as a friend of my heart. I unfold the thick onionskin sheaf from Mutual of Omaha, and see Vicki’s name here as Victory Wanda Arcenault—and mine partway down as beneficiary. The sum is $150,000.

“What about the Pope?” I say.

“He’s still a good ole bird. But I’ll never
see
him.” She blinks her eyes up at me as if a light had burst into view around my ears. “I’ll
see you
, though.”

I would like to hug her till she squeaked, but not in Fincher’s presence. It would give him something to think about, and I want to give him nothing. At the moment he is standing with his mouth formed into a small, perfect
o
. “Thanks,” I say.

“I liked the idea of you spending all that money and thinking about me. It’d make me happy then wherever I was. You could buy a Corvette—only you’d probably want a Cadillac.”

“I just want you,” I say. “Anyway we’ll be together if it crashes.”

She rolls her eyes up at the high crystal-lighted airport ceiling. “That’s true, isn’t it?” She takes the policy back and kneels down to put it in her Le Sac bag.

“I ’spec I’ll just steal on off,” Fincher says, eyes flashy-darty since something has taken place here outside his ken. He has bent himself slightly at the waist and is on the verge of embarrassment, an emotion he has not felt, in all likelihood, for twenty years.

The concourse has begun welling up around us with people wearing paper tags on their breasts that say “Get-Away.” They appear from nowhere and begin flowing in the direction of gates 36–51. The air suddenly smells sweet and peanutty. A plane has been held up for late-arrivers, and a feeling of relief circles us like a spring breeze.

“It’s good to see you, Fincher,” I say. Fincher, of course, is no more a lecher than the rest of us, and I am relieved to let him and his grave Ichabod’s features slip away.

“Uh-huh, you bet,” Vicki says and glances at Fincher with distaste, a look he seems to accept with gratitude.

“I guess they’re lettin us on a little early.” Fincher flashes a smile.

“You have a good trip,” I say.

“Yep, yep,” Fincher says and hoists his clubs onto his bony shoulder.

“Don’t do it in the lake,” Vicki says. But Fincher is already out of her range, and I watch him pick up his step with the other expectants, in from Buffalo, his clubs hitched high up, happy to be in with a new crowd, ready for some good earnest talk and arm-squeezing on their way south.

“You and Fincher have a falling out?” I say this in a chummy voice.

“I ’magine we did.” Vicki is kneeling, elbow-deep in her weekender bag, digging for something at the bottom. We are next up to have our tickets validated. “He’s some kinda joker. A real sneak-up-behind-you guy if you know what that means. A bad potato. We all watch out for him.”

“Did he sneak up behind you?”

“No sir.” She looks up at me in surpirse. “Nasty mind. I keep an eye on who’s back of me.”

“What do you think I think?”

“It’s on your face like eggs.”

“I’m just jealous,” I say. “Can’t you tell?”

“I wouldn’t know.” She finds a tiny perfume phial from her bag, uncaps it and takes it to her neck and arms while she kneels on the airport floor. She smiles up at me in a spicy way I know she knows I like. “You ain’t got nothin to worry about, lemme tell you, Mister. You’re numero uno and there’s no number two.”

“Tell me about Fincher, then.”

“One-a-these days. You won’t be surprised, though, I’ll tell you that.”

“You’d be surprised what surprises me.”

“And what
don’t
surprise me. Ever.” She stands to take my hand in the ticket line. Her hand’s moist, and the air smells of Chanel No. 5.

“You win.”

“Right. I’m a winner all the way,” she says airily. And if I could make the moment last—lost in the anticipation of a safe trip, a fatal crash, a howling success, a grinding bitter failure—I would, and never leave this airport, never gain on or rejoin myself, and never know what’s to come, the way you always have to know, though it’s only the same, the same you waiting.

4

On the plane we are in the midwest from the first moment we take our seats. The entire tourist cabin of our 727 virtually vibrates with its grave ying-yangy appeal. Hefty stewardesses with smiles that say “Hey, I could love you once we’re down and safe” stow away our carry-ons. Vicki folds her weekender strap inside and hands it up. “Gaish, now is that ever neat,” says a big blond one named Sue and puts her hands on her hips in horsey admiration. “I wanta show Barb that. We’ve got the pits with our luggage. Where’re you guys headed?” Sue’s smile shows a big canine that is vaguely tan-colored, but she is full of welcome and good spirits. Her father was in the Air Force and she has a lot of athletic younger brothers, I would stake my life on it. She’s seen plenty.

“Detroit,” Vicki announces proudly, taking a secret peek at me.

Sue cocks her blond head to the side with pride. “You gyz’ll love Detroit.”

“Well, I’m really lookin forward to it,” Vicki says with a grin.

“Greet, reelly greet,” Sue says and sways off to start the coffee around. All about me, almost immediately, people begin to converse in the soft nasalish voices and mildish sentiments familiar from my college days. Everyone seems to be a native Detroiter heading home for the holidays, and no one coming west just to visit but us. Someone nearby claims to have stayed up and watched an entire telethon and missed two days of work. Someone else headed up to “the thumb” on a fishing trip but had motor trouble and ended up marooned in Bad Axe for a weekend. Someone had started Wayne State and pledged Sigma Nu but by last Christmas was back to work at his dad’s sheet metal business. It might be said, of course, that the interiors of all up-to-date conveyances of travel put one in mind of the midwest. The snug-fitted overhead bins, the comfy pastel recliners, disappearing tray-tables and smorgasbord air of anything-you-want-within-sensible-limits. All products of mid western ingenuity, as surely as a waltz is Viennese.

In a little while Barb and Sue circulate back and conduct a serious Q&A with Vicki about her weekender bag, which neither of them has seen the exact likes of, they say, and Vicki is only too happy to discuss. Barb is a squat little strawberry blondie with too much powder makeup and slightly heavy hands. She is interested in something called “price points” and “mean value mark-up,” and whether or not an identical bag couldn’t be bought at Hudson’s boutique in a mall near her own condo in Royal Oak; it turns out she studied retailing in college. Vicki says hers came from Joske’s, but that’s all she knows, and the girls talk about Dallas for a while (Barb and Sue have both been based there at different times) and Vicki says she likes a store called Spivey’s and a rib place in Cockrell Hill called Atomic Ribs. They all three like each other a lot. Then all at once we’re in the air rising out over the cloud-shaded Watchungs and a bright blue-green industrial river, toward Pennsylvania, making for Lake Erie, and the girls slide off to other duties. Vicki picks up the arm rest and shoves close to me on our three-across seats, her shiny, encased thigh as hard as a saucepan, her breath drowsy with excitement. We are well above the morning’s storminess now.

“What’re you thinking about, old Mr. Man?” She has attached her pair of pink earphones around her neck.

“About what a sweet thigh you’ve got and how much I’d like to pull it my way.”

“Well you surely can. Won’t nobody see you but Suzie and little Barbara, and they don’t care long as no clothes come off. That wasn’t what you were thinking anyway. I know about you, old tricky.”

“I was thinking about Candid Camera. The talking mailbox. I think that’s about the funniest thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”

“I like ’em, too. Ole Allen Funk. I thought I saw him one day in the hospital. I’d heard he lived someplace around. But then it wasn’t. A lot of people look alike now, you know it? But that still isn’t it. I’ll just let you run on.”

“You’re a smart girl.”

“I got a good memory, which you need to nurse. But I’m not really smart. I wouldn’t have married Everett if I had been.” She fattens her cheeks and smiles at me. “Are you not gonna tell me what you’re sitting there worrying?” She takes a good two-armed hold on my arm and squeezes it. She is a girl who likes squeezing. “Or am I gon have to squeeze you till you talk.” She is strong, which I think would also be a requirement for a nurse, though I am sure she doesn’t really care what’s on my mind.

In truth, of course, I have nothing to answer. Undoubtedly I was thinking something, but most things I find myself thinking seem to fly right out of my mind and I can’t remember them at all. It is a trait of character which made being a writer hard and often downright tedious. I either had to sit down and write out whatever I happened to be thinking about at any time of the day or night I happened to think it, or else just forget it all, which is what happened at the end of the time I was working on my novel. Finally I became happy to forget everything and let it all lapse. Real writers have to be more attentive, of course, and attentive was what I wasn’t much interested in being.

I do not think, in any event, it’s a good idea to want to know what people are thinking (that would disqualify you as a writer right there, since what else is literature but somebody telling us what somebody else is thinking). For my money there are at least a hundred good reasons not to want to know such things. People never tell the truth anyway. And most people’s minds, like mine, never contain much worth reporting, in which case they just make something up that’s patently ridiculous instead of saying the truth—namely, I was thinking nothing. The other side, of course, is that you will run the risk of being told the
very
truth of what someone is thinking, which can turn out to be something you don’t want to hear, or that makes you mad, and ought to be kept private anyway. I remember when I was a boy in Mississippi, maybe fifteen years old—just before I left for Lonesome Pines—a friend of mine got killed in a hunting accident. The very night after, Charlieboy Neblett and I (he was one of my few friends in Biloxi) sat out in Charlieboy’s car drinking beer and complaining about our having thought, then forgiving each other for thinking, that we were glad Teddy Twiford got killed. If Teddy’s mother had come by just then and asked us what we were thinking, she would’ve been flabbergasted to find out what lousy friends of Teddy’s we were. Though in fact we weren’t lousy friends at all. Things just come into your mind on their own and aren’t your fault. So I learned this all those years ago—that you don’t need to be held responsible for what you think, and that by and large you don’t have any business knowing what other people think. Full disclosure never does anybody any favors, and in any event there are few enough people in the world who are sufficiently within themselves to make such disclosure pretty unreliable right from the start. All added to the fact that this constitutes intrusion where you least need to be intruded upon, and where telling can actually do harm to everyone involved.

I remember, in fact, the Lebanese woman I knew at Berkshire College saying to me, after I told her how much I loved her: “I’ll always tell you the truth, unless of course I’m lying to you.” Which at first I didn’t think was a very good idea; though stewing over it after a while I realized that it was actually a piece of great luck. I was being promised truth
and
mystery—not an easy combination. There would be important things I would and wouldn’t know, and I could count on it, could look forward to it, muse on it, worry about it if I was idiot enough, which I wasn’t, and all I had to do was agree, and be forever freed.

She was a literary deconstructionist and had a mind trained for that kind of distinction. And she managed to make a policy out of a fact of life: how much of someone you can actually get to know about. Very little. Though I don’t think in the three vertiginous months we spent together she ever lied to me. There was never a reason to! I saw to that by never asking a question whose answer wasn’t already obvious. X and I might in fact have made a better go of it if she could’ve tried that strategy out on me by not asking me to explain anything that night I stood out in the rhododendrons marveling at Gemini and Cassiopeia, while her hope chest was fast going up the chimney. She might Ve understood my predicament for what it was—an expression of love and inevitability, instead of just love’s failure. Though I will not complain about it. She is fine now, I think, in most ways. And if she is not as certain about things as she once was, that is not a tragedy, and I think she will be better as time goes on.