The Sportswriter

by Richard Ford

  Down the railing from me, staring as I was into the sequined gloom, was Walter Luckett, pensive as a judge and quite possibly cold in the spring night, from the way he was hunched over his elbows.

  Walter is the newest member of the Divorced Men. He took Rocko Ferguson’s place when Rocko got remarried and moved down to Philadelphia, and came in as an old acquaintance of Carter Knott’s from Harvard Business School. Walter is from Coshocton, Ohio, attended Grinnell, and pronounces Ohio as if it both begins and ends in a U. He is a special-industries analyst for Dexter & War-burton in New York and looks like it, with tortoise-shell glasses and short, slicked hair. Occasionally I spy him on the train platform going to work, but we rarely speak. In fact I know almost nothing else about him. Carter Knott told me Walter’s wife, Yolanda, left him and ran off to Bimini with a water ski instructor; that it’d been a big shock, but he seemed to be “handling things better now.” That could happen to any of us, of course, and the Divorced Men seemed like just the thing for him.

  Occasionally, I’ve slipped out to the Weirkeeper’s Tavern after eleven—I do this sometimes to see the sports final on the big screen—and there was Walter, a little drunk and talkative. Once he yelled out, “Hey Frank! Where’re all the women?” after which I couldn’t wait to get out.

  Another time I was in The Coffee Spot at dinnertime when Walter came in. He sat down in the booth across from me, and we talked about the Jaycees and what a bunch of phonies he thought they all were, and about the quality of silk underwear you can get out of most catalogs. Some, he said, were made in Korea, but the best ones came right from China; it was one of his industries. And then we just sat for a long time—a hundred years, it felt like—while our eyes tried to find a place to rest, until they finally settled on each other. And then we sat and stared at each other for four, maybe five horrible, horrible minutes, then Walter just got up and walked out without ordering anything or saying another word. Since then he has never mentioned that terrible moment, and I have frankly tried to duck him and on two occasions know that he walked in the door at the August, saw me and walked out again—something I respect him for. All together, I think I like Walter Luckett. He does not really belong in a divorced men’s club any more than I do, but he is willing to try it on for size, not because he thinks he’ll eventually like it, or that this is the thing he’s always missed, but because it’s in some ways the last thing in the world he can imagine doing, and probably feels he should do it for that reason alone. We should all know what’s at the end of our ropes and how it feels to be there.

  “Do you happen to know what I like about standing here at the rail and looking out at the coast, Frank?” Walter said softly, after I had declined to speak a word.

  “What’s that, Walter?” I was surprised he had even noticed me. Walter had caught one weakfish all afternoon, the biggest one caught, and after that he had quit fishing and curled up with a book on one of the bench seats.

  “I like seeing things from an angle you don’t live them. You know what I mean?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “I’m out there embedded in life every day. Then I come just a mile off shore, and it’s dark, and suddenly it’s all different. Better. Right?” Walter looks around at me. He is not a large man, and tonight he is wearing white walking shorts, a baggy blue tennis shirt and deck shoes, which makes him seem even smaller.

  “It seems better. Probably that’s why we come out here.”

  “Right,” Walter said, and stared for a time out at the darkly dazzling coast, the sound of water slapping the side of the boat. Far up I could see the glow of the Asbury Park ferris wheel, and due north the ice-box glow of Gotham. It was consoling to see those lights and know that lives were there, and mine was here. And for the moment I was glad to have come along, and considered the Divorced Men all pretty darn solid fellows. Most of them, in fact, were inside the main cabin yakking with the Spanelises, having the time of their lives. “It’s not the way I always see it though, Frank,” Walter said soberly, clasping his hands over the rail and leaning on his forearms.

  “How do you usually see it, Walter?”

  “Okay. It’s funny. When I was a kid in eastern Ohio, our whole family used to take these long trips. Fairly long, anyway. From Coshocton, in the east part of the state, all the way to Timewell, Illinois, which is in the west part of that state. All of it just flatland, you know. One county same with another one. And I used to ride in the car while my sister played hubcaps or lucky-lives-license or whatever, concentrating on remembering certain things—a house or maybe a silo or a swell of land, or just a bunch of pigs, something I’d be able to remember on the way back. So it would be the same to me, all part of the same experience, I guess. Probably everybody does that. I still do. Don’t you do it?” As Walter looked at me again, his glasses caught a glint of shore light and twinkled at me.

  “I guess I’m your opposite here, Walter,” I said. “The highway never seems the same coming and going to me. I even think about meeting myself in the cars I pass. I actually forget it all pretty much right away, though I tend to forget a lot of things.”

  “That’s a better way to be,” Walter said.

  “To me, it makes the world more interesting.”

  “I guess I’m having to learn that, Frank,” Walter said and shook his head.

  “Is something bothering you, Walter,” I said—and shouldn’t have, since I broke the rules of the Divorced Men’s Club, which is that we’re none of us much interested in that kind of self-expression.

  “No,” Walter said moodily. “Nothing’s bothering me.” And he stood for a while staring out at the jet coast of Jersey—the boxy beach house lights linking us to whatever hopeful life was proceeding there. “Let me just ask you something, Frank,” Walter said.

  “All right.”

  “Who do you have to confide in?” Walter did not look at me when he said this, though I somehow felt his smooth soft face was both sad and hopeful at the same moment.

  “I guess I don’t, to tell the truth,” I said. “I mean I don’t have anyone.”

  “Did you not even confide in your wife?”

  “No,” I said. “We talked about things plenty of times. That’s for sure. Maybe we don’t mean the same thing by confiding. I’m not particularly a private person.”

  “Good. That’s good,” Walter said. I could tell he was puzzled but also satisfied by my answer, and what’s more I had given him the best answer I could. “Frank, I’ll see you later,” Walter said unexpectedly and gave me a pat on the arm, and walked off down the deck into the dark where one of the Spanelis men was still fishing, though it was black on the water and the tart spring air was chilling enough that I went inside and watched a couple of innings of a Yankees game on the boat’s TV.

  Once we got in, though, and all said our goodbyes, and the divorced men had given the few weakfish and fluke they’d caught to the Spanelis kids, I was walking across the gravel lot to my car, ready to head straight for Vicki’s and steal her away to Lambertville, and here was Walter Luckett scuffing his deck shoes alongside my car and looking, in the dark, strangely like a man who wanted to borrow some money.

  “What-say now, Wally,” I said cheerfully, and went about putting the key in the door lock. I had an hour to get there, and I was for getting going. Vicki goes to bed early even when she doesn’t have to work the next day. She is damned serious about her nursing career, and likes being bright and cheerful, since she believes many of her patients have no one who understands their predicament. The result is I don’t drop in after eight, no matter what.

  “This is a helluva life, isn’t it, Frank?” Walter said and leaned against my back fender, arms folded, staring off as if in amusement as the other divorced men and the Spanelises were barging out of the lot up toward Route 35, their lights brightly swaying. They were honking horns and yelling, and the Spanelis kids were squealing.

  “It sure is, Walter.” I opened my door
and stopped to look at him in the dark. He stuffed his hands in his pockets and bunched his shoulders. He had on a pale sweater draped in the old lank, country club style. “I think it’s a pretty good life, though.”

  “You couldn’t really plan it, could you?”

  “You certainly couldn’t.”

  “There’s so much you can’t foresee, yet it’s all laid out and clear.”

  “You look cold, Walter.”

  “Let me buy you a drink, Frank.”

  “Can’t tonight. Got things to do.” I smiled at him conspiratorially.

  “Just a bone warmer. We can sneak right over into the Manasquan.” Across the lot was the Manasquan Bar, a barny old hip-roofed fisherman’s madhouse with a red BAR sign on top. Ben Mouzakis had invested in it with his wife’s brother, Evangelis, as he told me once when we talked about tax shelters up on deck. “What d’ya say?” Walter said and started off. “Let’s drink one, Frank.”

  I did not want to have a nightcap with Walter Luckett. I wanted to go speeding back toward Vicki and drowsy Lambertville while the last flickers of sunlight clung in the western sky. The memory of those awful centuries spent in The Coffee Spot rose up in my thoughts suddenly, and I almost jumped in the car and rammed out of the lot like a desperado. But I didn’t. I stood and looked at Walter, who by now had walked halfway across the empty lot in his walking shorts and sweater, and had turned toward me and assumed a posture I can only describe as heartbreaking. And I could not say no. Walter and I had something in common—something insignificant, but something that his heartbreaking posture made undeniable. Walter and I were both men, Vicki or no Vicki, Lambertville or no Lambertville.

  “Only one,” I said into the parking lot darkness. “I’ve got a date.”

  “You’ll make it,” Walter said, lost now in the bleary seaside lowlights of Brielle. “I’ll see to that myself.”

  In the Manasquan Walter ordered a scotch and I ordered a gin, and for a while we sat in complete uncomfortable silence and stared at the old pictures behind the bar that showed record stripers caught off the dock. I thought I could detect Ben Mouzakis in several—a chesty young roughneck of the Fifties, a big immigrant’s crazy grin, no shirt, muscles bristling, standing beside some other taller men in khakis and two hundred dead fish strung along a rafter board.

  The Manasquan is a dark, pine-board, tar-smelling pile of sticks inside and in truth it is one of my favorite places for small departures. Any other time I wouldn’t have minded being there one bit. It has a long teak bar with a quasi-nautical motif, and no one makes the first attempt to be friendly, though drinks are poured honestly and at a reasonable price for a touristy seaside area. Sometimes, arriving too early for our excursion, I have walked over, taken a seat at the bar and bought a good greasy hamburger and felt right at home reading a newspaper or watching TV alongside the few watchcap fishermen who huddle and mutter at the end of the bar, and the woman or two who float around speaking brashly to strangers. It is a place where you’d be happy to consider yourself a regular, though when all is said and done you have nothing at all in common with anyone there except some speechless tenor of spirit only you know a damn thing about.

  “Frank, were you ever an athlete?” Walter said forthrightly after our long and studious staring.

  “Just an athletic supporter, Walter,” I said and gave him a grin to set him at his ease. He obviously had something on his mind; and the sooner he got it out, the sooner I could be blazing a trail west.

  Walter smiled back at me ironically, gave his nose a disapproving pinch, pushed up at his glasses. Walter, I realized, was actually a handsome man, and it made me like him. It isn’t easy for handsome people to be themselves, or even try to be. And I had a feeling Walter was trying to be himself for the moment, and I liked him for that reason, though I wished he’d get on with it.

  “You were out at Michigan, is that right,” Walter asked.

  “Right.”

  “That’s Ann Arbor, not East Lansing.”

  “Right.”

  “I know that’s different.” Walter nodded thoughtfully and sniffed again. “You couldn’t be an athlete there, I comprehend that. That’s like a factory.”

  “It wasn’t that bad.”

  “I was an athlete out at Grinnell. Anybody could be one. It wasn’t a big thing, although I’m sure it’s gotten bigger now. I never go back anymore.”

  “I don’t go back to Ann Arbor, either. What’d you do?”

  “Wrestled. One forty-five. We wrestled against Carleton and Macalester and those places. I wasn’t very good.”

  “Those are good schools, though.”

  “They are good schools,” Walter said. “Though you don’t hear much about them. I guess everybody wants to talk about sports, right?” Walter looked at me seriously.

  “Sometimes,” I said. “But I don’t mind it. Other people know a lot more about sports than I do, to tell you the truth. It’s a pretty innocent part of people, and talking has the effect of bringing us all together on a good level.” I don’t know why I started talking to Walter in this Grantland Rice after-dinner speech way, except that he seemed to want that and it was truthfully the only thing I could think of. (It’s also true that I believe every word of it, and it’s a lot better than talking about some pretentious book that only one person’s read.)

  Walter moved the ice around in his drink using his finger. “What would you say’s the worst part about your job, Frank? I hate traveling myself, and I have to do it. I bet that’s it, right?”

  “I don’t mind it,” I said. “There’re things about it I’m not sure I could live without anymore. In particular, now that I’m home alone.”

  “Okay, sure.” Walter drank down his scotch in one gulp and signaled for another in one continuous finger-wiggle gesture. “So it’s not the travel. Okay, that’s good.”

  “I think the hardest part about my job, Walter, since you asked, is that people expect me to make things better when I come. If I come to interview them or write about them or just call them up on the phone, they want to be enriched. I’m not talking about money. It’s just part of the natural illusion of my profession. The fact is, we can sometimes not make things worse, or we can make things worse. But we can’t usually make things better for individuals. Sometimes we can for groups. But then not always.”

  “Interesting.” Walter Luckett nodded as though it was anything but interesting. “What do you mean, worse?”

  “I mean sometimes things can seem worse just by not being better. I don’t know if I ever thought about it before,” I said. “But I think it’s right.”

  “People don’t have any right to think you can make life better for them,” Walter said soberly. “But it’s what they want, all right. I agree.”

  “I don’t know about rights,” I said. “It’d be nice if we could. I think I once thought I could.”

  “Not me,” Walter said. “One lousy marriage proved that.”

  “It’s a disappointment. I don’t mean marriage is a disappointment. Just ending it.”

  “I guess.” Walter looked down at the fishermen at the dim-lit end of the bar, where they were huddling over some playing cards with fat Evangelis. One of the men laughed out loud, then another man put the cards in his coat pocket and smirked, and the talk got quiet. I would’ve given anything for a peek at those cards and to have had a good laugh with the fishermen instead of being land-locked with Walter. “Your marriage wasn’t disappointing to you, then?” Walter said in a way I found vaguely insulting. Walter had just the tips of his slender fingers touching the glass of scotch, and then he looked at me accusingly.

  “No. It was really a wonderful marriage. What I remember of it.”

  “My wife’s in Bimini,” Walter said. “My ex-wife, I need to say now. She went down there with a man named Eddie Pitcock, a man I’ve never seen and know nothing about except his name, which I know from a private detective I hired. I could find out a l
ot more. But who cares? Eddie Pitcock’s his name. Isn’t that a name for the guy who runs away with your wife?”

  “It’s just a name, Walter.”

  Walter pinched his nose again and sniffed.

  “Right. You’re right about that. That isn’t what I want to talk about anyway, Frank.”

  “Let talk about sports, then.”

  Walter stared intently at the fish pictures behind the bar and breathed forcefully through his nose. “I feel pretty self-important hauling you over here like this, Frank. I’m sorry. I’m not usually self-important. I don’t want this to be the story of my life.” Walter had completely ignored my offer of a good sports conversation, which seemed to mean something more serious was on the way, something I was going to be sorry about. “It isn’t a very amusing life. I’m sure of that.”

  “I understand,” I said. “Maybe you just wanted to have a drink and sit in a bar with someone you knew but didn’t have to confide in. That makes plenty of sense. I’ve done that.”

  “Frank, I went in a bar in New York two nights ago, and I let a man pick me up. Then I went to a hotel with him—the Americana, as a matter of fact—and slept with him.” Walter stared furiously out into the fishing pictures. He stared so hard that I knew he would like nothing in the world better than to be one of those happy, proud khaki-clad fishermen displaying his fat stripers to the sun on a happy July day, say, in 1956, when we would have been, Walter and me, eleven years old—assuming we are the same age. I would’ve been doubly happy at the moment to be there myself.

  “Is that what you wanted to tell me, Walter?”

  “Yes.” Walter Luckett said this as if stunned, looking deadly serious.

  “Well,” I said. “It doesn’t matter to me.”

  “I know that,” Walter said, his chin vaguely moving up and down in a kind of secret nod to himself. “I knew that ahead of time. Or I thought I did.”

  “Well, that’s fine, then,” I said. “Isn’t it?”

  “I feel pretty bad, Frank,” Walter said. “I don’t feel dirty or ashamed. It’s not a scandal. I probably ought to feel stupid, but I don’t even feel that way. I just feel bad. It’s like it’s loosed a bad feeling in me.”