“It has its plusses, Delia. I’ve adjusted pretty well now.”
“How long has it been since you read The Sun Also Rises, Frank?”
“It’s probably been a while now.”
“You should reread it,” Delia says. “There’re important lessons there. That man knew something. Caspar met him in Paris once.”
“He was always one of my favorites.” Not true, though a lie’s what’s asked for. It’s not surprising that Delia’s view of the complex world dates from about 1925. In fact it might have been a better time back then.
“Caspar and I were married in our sixties, you know.”
“I didn’t realize that.”
“Oh, yes. Caspar had a nice fat wife who died. I even met her once. Of course, my own poor husband died years before. Caspar and I went out of wedlock in Fez, in 1942, and kept aware of each other’s whereabouts afterwards. When I heard Alma, his fat wife, had died, I called him up. I was with a niece in Maine by then, and in two months Caspar and I were married and living just below Mount Reconnaissance in Guam, which was his last posting. I certainly didn’t expect what I got from life, Frank. But I didn’t waste time either.” She smiles fiercely, as if she can see my future and the certainty that it will not be quite as wonderful.
“It’s a beautiful day, isn’t it, Dee?”
“It is, yes. It’s quite lovely. I believe it’s Easter.”
“I can’t remember a prettier one.”
“I can’t either, Frank. Why don’t you come over this week and have a scotch with Caspar. He’d love for you to come talk men’s talk. I think he’s pretty upset by all this mining.” In the fourteen years I’ve lived here, I have been in the Deffeyes’ house only two times (both times to fix something), and Delia means no harm by one more insincere invitation. We have reached the natural end of our neighborliness, though she’s too polite to admit the inevitability of it, a quality I like in her. I gaze up from the yard into the still blue Easter morning and, to my surprise, see a balloon, large upon the currents of a gleaming atmosphere, its mooring lines adangle, a big red moon with a smiling face on its bloated bag. Two tiny stick-figure heads peer down from the basket, point arms at us, pull a chain which produces a far-off gasping.
Where did they leave earth, I wonder? The grounds of a nearby world headquarters? A rich man’s mansion on the Delaware? How far can they see on a clear day? Are they safe? Do they feel safe?
Delia does not seem to notice, and awaits my answer to her invitation.
“I’ll do that, Dee.” I smile. “Tell Cap I’ll stop by this week. I’ve got a joke to tell him.”
“Any day but Tuesday.” She smiles a prissy smile. This is the usual complication. “He misses men, I’m afraid.”
Delia strays away now with her paper to her sunny lawn and tennis court, me to my barbecue pit and roses and day, upward-tending in most all ways, one I’ll be happy to put into the file of Easters spent richly and forgotten.
Gong, go the bells in town. Gong, gong, gong, gong, gong.
Just before ten I put in a call to X, to wish the children happy Easter. It is now a holiday we “trade,” and this the first one when I haven’t been around. Though no one’s home on Cleveland Street. X’s answer message says that if I’m interested in golf lessons I should leave my name and number. In the background I hear Clary say “Later, bird brain,” and break up laughing. There is an edge in X’s voice now, something strange to me, an all-business, money-in-the-bank brassiness that reminds me of her father. It makes me wonder if my family is off smorging in Bucks County with one of X’s software or realtor friends, some big hairy-armed guy in a green sports jacket, with everything on the company cuff.
I decide not to leave a message (though I’d like to).
For some reason I call Walter Luckett’s number and let the phone ring a long time without an answer while I stare out on the paisley Easter street. Where would I be if I were Walter? In some bully bar in the West Village? Cruising the elmy streets of insular Newfoundland in a devil’s own fury? Hitting some backboard balls at the high school before taking in The Robe at Lost Bridge Mall? I’m not even certain I care to know. Some people were not made to have best friends, and I might be one. Walter might be another, though for different reasons. Acquaintanceship usually suffices for me, which was more or less the one important lesson learned from my Lebanese girfriend, Selma Jassim, at Berkshire College, since if anything, she believed mutual confidences of almost any kind were just a lot of baloney.
I decided to go teach at Berkshire College — I know now — to deflect the pain of terrible regret — the same reason I quit writing my novel, years ago, and began to write sports; the same reason most of us make our dramatic turns to the right and left about midway, and the same reason some people drive right off the course and into the ditch.
One afternoon a year after Ralph died, I was at home on one of the week-long breaks that occur at the magazine between large assignments, and when we are supposed to rest up and re-establish a semblance of regular life. I was sitting in the breakfast nook — it was in May — reading some piled-up copies of Life when the phone rang. The man calling said his name was Arthur Winston and he was married to Beth Winston, who was the sister of my former literary agent, Sid Fleisher, whom I had not heard from since he had written us a condolence card. Arthur Winston said he was the chairman of the English Department at Berkshire College in Massachusetts, and he had been talking to Sid in Sid’s house in Katonah, and Sid had mentioned a writer he had once represented who had written one good book of short stories, but then quit writing entirely. One thing led to another, Arthur said, and he had ended up with the book, which he claimed to have read and admired. He asked if I had been writing any other short stories since then, and for some reason I gave him an evasive answer which could’ve made him think I had, and that with a little coaxing I could actually be induced to write plenty more (though none of this was true). He said to me then that he was over a pretty big barrel. The usual writer at Berkshire, an older man whose name I didn’t know, had suddenly gone berserk at the end of the spring semester and started vicious fist fights with several people — one of them a woman — and had begun carrying a gun under his coat, so that he had been institutionalized and would not be back in the fall. Arthur Winston said he knew it was a long shot, but that Sid Fleisher had said I was a “pretty interesting” fellow who’d lived a “pretty unusual” life since quitting writing, and he — Arthur — thought maybe a semester of teaching would be just the thing to get my work fired up again, and if I wanted to do it he would consider it a personal favor to him and would see to it I taught anything I pleased. And I simply said “Yes, that’s fine,” and that I would be there in the fall.
I do not exactly know what got into my thinking. I had never thought about such a thing in my life, and in one way it couldn’t have been crazier. The magazine, of course, is always happy to extend leaves for what it considers widening experiences. But when I told X she just stood there in the kitchen and stared out the window at the Deffeyes’ tennis court where Paul and Clary were watching Caspar play with one of his octogenarian friends — each old man wearing a crisp white sweater and hitting bright orange balls in high looping volleys — and said “What about us? We can’t move to Massachusetts. I don’t want to go there.”
“That’s fine,” I said, actually for a moment seeing myself leading a graduation day exercise at some tiny Gothic-looking campus, wearing a floppy cap and crimson gown, carrying a scepter, and being the soul of everyone’s admiration. “I’ll commute,” I said. “The three of you can come up odd weekends. We’ll go stay in country inns with cider mills. We’ll have a wonderful time. It’ll be easy.” I was suddenly eager to get up there.