In a weird way, Guy’s ideas about sports had been greeted with even more hostility than the SLA’s manifestos. He’d challenged some very entrenched notions about masculinity, about strength, about triumph, and he’d done it precisely at a time when thousands of young men were thinking twice about wearing uniforms and taking orders. From Guy’s suggestion that it was unnecessary to listen to people like Bear Bryant or Bobby Knight, that there was something illegitimate about their absolute authority, it could logically be inferred that it was equally unnecessary to listen to Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. Of course the draft was finished. And the war was over too. But these were moves that had been made under a dread aura of concession, rather than in the spirit of progress.
Guy had no idea of what a lightning rod he’d become. While he could describe with admirable eloquence the sort of wrongdoing that went on every Saturday afternoon in the name of sport, he had been against the war because it was stupid and murderous, not because he had any per se objection to the way in which soldiers were trained. But the paranoid brain sees things in terms of metaphor: Guy thought that athletes were more important than gate receipts and Howard Cosell; ergo he was putting across a clandestine vilification of our South Asia policy. The man was unfixably askew from bedrock American principles. He was an “enemy of sport,” Agnew said. He could just as easily have said “our enemy.”
Ah, who cares about Spiro Agnew? Nobody cares about Spiro Agnew.
The thing is that when Guy had first heard about the Oberlin job, he’d been enchanted, thought of the place in terms of woodwinds, of simply dressed cellists with lank hair and calloused fingers, of listening to music in an amphitheater on a star-stung night. The stridor, the white roar of the arena, was far from his mind. He was tricked. The search committee flew him out. He opened his mouth, and the usual sounds came out. He didn’t try to fool anybody; he told them he would hire women and blacks. He told them that he would attempt to make the ecumenical style of the place fit his principles, not the other way around. In his mind he saw himself sitting under the stars on a soft midwestern evening, listening to music.
Anyway, he was hired. Oberlin had built a nice new sports complex. And he and Randi stayed up late the night before school began, hanging a curtain across the men’s locker room, since the architects had forgotten to put in a separate one for women: oops. He hired Linda Huey to coach women’s track and promised her a budget equal to that of the men’s team (faint stirrings of disquiet among the trustees). He hired Tommie Smith to coach men’s track. He saw a gold medalist who had a sympathetic way with young athletes; they saw the black fist hanging in the Mexico City sky, hanging forever in commemoration of a shame this sort of victory simply couldn’t address, the fist that still sent ripples of unease trembling across the dark fields of the Republic. After the billeting of this seditionist, the hiring of “fellow Negroes” (as one paper put it) Cass Jackson and Patrick Penn went almost unnoticed. Almost.
This is the college that began admitting women and blacks in the 1830s?
But nay, this is sport, in the name of which Stanley Royster is kicked off the Cal track team for becoming involved in black politics on campus. In the name of which Sylvester Hodges is prohibited from competing at the NCAA championship wrestling tournament because of the unpardonable offense of wearing a mustache. Rah.
He should have known better.
They pushed on. There was a peculiar sense not of siege exactly but of hollow impermanence. It colored every decision they made. Neighbors who wouldn’t have voluntarily suffered their presence judged them to be “distant.” They marked their calendars for the days when out-of-town friends passed through, Guy and Randi did, marked those square-inch boxes in the brightest red ink. They bought a Bell & Howell projector at a garage sale and found a mailorder place where they could obtain prints of ancient two-reel comedies, so they could avoid watching “moron TV.”
Also, less cozily, out of sheer boredom, Guy began an affair with a town girl named Erica Dyson. Very uncharacteristic, that whole thing. She seemed to think she was pregnant all the time. Randi found out when Guy began a somewhat recklessly recurrent and increasingly compulsive line of inquiry with her regarding the (a) nature and (b) frequency of ovulation. She asked why one day (she knew she shouldn’t, but), Guy answered her with habitual candor, and she went crazy and smashed all the dishes. Period. This is how American marriages stay together out here where the wind has a different sound and smell depending on which direction it’s coming from and that’s the big news of the day. To be honest, Guy was a little more concerned about Erica Dyson than he was about Randi. He pictured her parking her Duster across the tracks at some rural crossing where a freight train traveling at 80 mph would shower both her and the Plymouth into two adjacent fields, over two county lines, into the bailiwick of public inquiry. And the bundle, the potential heir whose likely imaginary presence her hand nervously traced across her detumescent abdomen: What if?
So Guy went to Allen Memorial Hospital that winter evening to get stitches for the cut above his eye that a jagged piece of Corning Ware had inflicted; and he sat in the waiting room of the new wing while he waited to be fixed up, holding an old copy of the Reader’s Digest and turning its pages, composing the unbelievable lies he would tell successively to the nurse, the intern, the attending physician, and finally, later, Erica Dyson, wondering idly how many solid citizens of Lorain County belted their spouses, or slept around, or cheated on their income taxes, or took two newspapers out of the dispenser on Main Street when they’d paid for only one, and as he did these things, he knew that he was approaching the end of his midwestern sojourn, that the ingredients of his real life were being gathered up and prepared for him somewhere out there in the great meanwhile.
A pale boy, a sheen like dewy spider’s webbing the only suggestion of hair on the sides and back of his skull, sat opposite Guy sandwiched between two morbidly obese women. Guy decided that they were his aunts. The boy was the living embodiment of the sort of characterless object that the popular culture had positioned as the representative face of American Boyhood when Guy had been growing up. The boy cradled his right forearm in his left; could it actually be that he had fallen from a tree? The aunts had looked up from the twin pies they were placing to cool on adjacent windowsills and seen the boy topple from the branches of an apple tree, the very one from which they’d gained the fruit to bake the pies, and rushed out, each drying her damp hands on her apron. The two of them, Guy and the boy, stared in frank and open astonishment at each other. The hair, the mustache, the staring eyes, which under the very best of circumstances made Guy look faintly rabid: Even by 1973 Guy was a curiosity. And the boy’s fish belly looks we’ve already rehearsed. Finally, the boy reached up to tug on the nearest broad sleeve.