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.
At 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.