Though by five we are room-bound here, driven in by unseasonable weather and the forbidding streets of this city. We have tried to make the most of everything that’s come our way: a belly-buster lunch in the Frontenac Grill complete with a bottle of Michigan beaujolais. A long nap in a fresh bed, after which I have stood at the window and watched another ore barge down from Lake Superior ply the snowy river, headed, like the one last night, for Cleveland or Ashtabula. It’s possible I should put in a call to Herb, or even to Clarice, though I don’t know what I’d say and finally lack the courage. I might also call Rhonda Matuzak to report I’ve found out nothing usable for the Pigskin Preview. People are in the office this weekend, though it’s doubtful anyone’s counting on me. Mine, for the moment, is not the best sportswriter’s attitude.
“I’ll tell you what let’s do,” Vicki says suddenly. She is seated at the vanity twisting in some Navajo earrings she has bought with her money at the gift shop. They are tiny as pin-heads, lovely and blue as hyacinths.
“You just name it,” I say, looking up from the Out on the Town, which I’ve read cover to cover without finding one local attraction I have the heart for — including Paul Anka, who’s already left town. Even a cab ride to Tiger Stadium and a Mexican dinner seem somehow second rate.
“Let’s go on out to the airport and stand-by for a flight. Nobody goes any place on Saturday. I remember from when I used to watch planes for fun, they used to let people on with tickets for other days. They’re good about that.”
“I thought we’d make a festive night of it,” I say half-heartedly. “I was planning on Greek Town. There’s still plenty to do here.”
“Sometimes, you know, you just get the bug to sleep in your own bed, don’t you think that’s so? We’re s’posed to be at Daddy’s tomorrow before noon anyway. This’ll make it easier.”
“Aren’t you going to be disappointed to miss souvlaki and bak-lava?”
“I don’t even know where they’re located so how could I miss ’em? I bet you have to drive through some snow to get there though.”
“I haven’t been much of a high-flier this trip. I don’t really know what happened.”
“Nothing did.” Looking in the mirror, Vicki pulls back her dark curls to model the Navajos, pinched in behind her plump cheeks. She turns to the side to see and gives me a reassuring smile via the mirror. “I don’t have to ride the merry-go-round to have fun. I take mine from who I’m with, not what I do. I’ve had the best time I could, just being with you, and you’re a clubfoot not to know it.”
“What if the airport’s closed?”
“Then I’ll sit and read stories to you out of movie magazines. There’s worse things than spending the night in the airport. Sometimes I’d rather be there than lots of places.”
“It wouldn’t be that bad, would it?”
“No sir. Put yourself in one of those little TV chairs, eat dinner in a good restaurant. Get your shoes shined. It’d take you all night to hit the high spots,”
“I’ll call us a bellman,” I say, and stand up.
“I don’t know why we waited this long.” She smiles at me.
“I guess I was waiting for something exciting and unusual to happen. I always hope for that. It’s my weakness.”
“You have to know, though, when what you’re waiting for says, ‘Smile, you’re on candid camera.’ Then you got to be ready to smile.”
And I do smile, at her, as I reach for the phone to ring the bell captain. A small future brightens, and not a bad one, but an ordinary good one. And, as I dial, I feel the sky of this long day lighten about me now for the first time, and the clouds begin at last to ascend.
By ten we are in New Jersey as if by miracle of time travel, returned from the flat midwest to the diverse seaboard. Vicki has slept across Lake Erie once again after reading to me several excerpts from Daytime Confidential, all of which made me laugh, but which she took more seriously and seemed to want to mull over, I read a good deal of Love’s Last Journey and found it not bad at all. There was no long flashback prologue to get past, and the writer proved pretty skillful at getting the ball rolling by page two. I woke her only when the pilot banked over what I estimated to be Red Bank, with bright Gotham (the Statue of Liberty tiny but distinct, like a Japanese doll of herself) and all of New Jersey spread out like a glittering diamond apron, the Atlantic and Pennsylvania looming dark as the Arctic.
“What’s that thing,” Vicki asked, staring and pointing below us into the distant carnival of civilized lights.
“That’s the Turnpike. You can see where it meets the Garden State at Woodbridge and heads to New York.”
“Hey-o,” she said.
“I think it’s beautiful from up here.”
“You prob’ly do,” she said. “No telling what you’ll think’s beautiful next. A junk yard I guess.”
“I think you’re beautiful.”
“More than a junk yard. A junk yard in New Jersey?”
“Almost.” I squeezed her strong little arm and held it to me.
“You said the wrong thing now.” Her eyes narrowed in mock pique. “I liked you to this point. But I don’t see how this can go on.”
“You’ll break my heart.”
“It won’t be the first one I broke, will it?”
“What if I’m better?”
“’Bout too late,” she said. “You should of considered all that before you were even born.” She shook her head as though she meant every word of it, then settled back and closed her eyes to sleep as our silver ship perfected its descent to earth.
By eleven-fifteen I have delivered us to Pheasant Meadow. It has become a clear and intensely full-featured night, with the moon waning and tomorrow’s weather giving no sign of arriving from Detroit. It’s the very kind of night that used to make me disoriented and dizzy — the sort of night I stood out in the yard in, while X was inside burning her hope chest, and charted Cassiopeia and Gemini in the northern sky and felt vulnerable beside the rhododendrons. Since then, to be truthful, I have never felt all that easy with the clear night sky, as if I was seeing it from the top of a high building and afraid to look down. (I tend to prefer broken cirrus or mackerel clouds to a pure, starry vault.)
“Don’t bother walkin me,” Vicki says, already out the car door and with her head back inside the window. I have stopped behind her Dart. The hard-hat guys from yesterday have finished off a phony mansard across the lot, although none of the finished buildings have roofs like that. Naturally I was hoping for an invitation inside — a nightcap. But I see my hopes on that front are slim. She has become skittish now, as though someone else was waiting upstairs.
“Tomorrow’s the day he rolled back the stone and raised up from the dead,” she says in all seriousness, staring straight at me as if I was expected to recite a psalm. She has her Le Sac weekender looped over her shoulder and her Navajo earrings on. “I might go to early mass, just for keeping us safe, that and the insurance. Or I might go to the drive-in Methodists in Hightstown. One’s official as the other. I’m thinking twice about lapsin. I’d ask you to come, but I know you wouldn’t like it.”
“I’d like the music.”
“Whatever floats your boat, I guess,” she says. We have been together for two days now, shared another geography, slept in one bed, been quiet together and attended each other’s pleasures and courtesy like married folk. Only now the end is in sight, and neither of us can find the handle to a proper parting. Flippancy and a vague churlishness is her protocol. Unwitting politeness is mine. It is not a good mix.
“I’m going to see you tomorrow, aren’t I?” I am cheerful, bending to see her and seeing beyond her the big blue space-age water tank and beyond that the big Easter moon.