Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER ONE
My name is Frank Bascombe. I am a sportswriter.
For the past fourteen years I have lived here at 19 Hoving Road,
Haddam, New Jersey, in a large Tudor house bought when a book of
short stories I wrote sold to a movie producer for a lot of money, and
seemed to set my wife and me and our three children--two of whom
were not even born yet--up for a good life.
Just exactly what that good life was--the one I expected--I cannot
tell you now exactly, though I wouldn't say it has not come to pass, only
that much has come in between. I am no longer married to X, for
instance. The child we had when everything was starting has died, though
there are two others, as I mentioned, who are alive and wonderful
children.
I wrote half of a short novel soon after we moved here from New
York and then put it in the drawer, where it has been ever since, and
from which I don't expect to retrieve it unless something I cannot now
imagine happens.
Twelve years ago, when I was twenty-six, and in the blind way of
things then, I was offered a job as a sportswriter by the editor of a glossy
New York sports magazine you have all heard of, because of a free-lance
assignment I had written in a particular way he liked. And to my surprise
and everyone else's I quit writing my novel and accepted.
And since then I have worked at nothing but that job, with the
exception of vacations, and one three-month period after my son died
when I considered a new life and took a job as an instructor in a small
private school in western Massachusetts where I ended up not liking
things, and couldn't wait to leave and get back here to New Jersey and
writing sports.
My life over these twelve years has not been and isn't now a bad
one at all. In most ways it's been great. And although the older I get the
more things scare me, and the more apparent it is to me that bad things
can and do happen to you, very little really worries me or keeps me up at
night. I still believe in the possibilities of passion and romance. And I
would not change much, if anything at all. I might not choose to get
divorced. And my son, Ralph Bascombe, would not die. But that's about
it for these matters.
Why, you might ask, would a man give up a promising literary
career--there were some good notices--to become a sportswriter?
It's a good question. For now let me say only this: if sportswriting
teaches you anything, and there is much truth to it as well as plenty of
lies, it is that for your life to be worth anything you must sooner or later
face the possibility of terrible, searing regret. Though you must also
manage to avoid it or your life will be ruined.
I believe I have done these two things. Faced down regret. Avoided
ruin. And I am still here to tell about it.
I have climbed over the metal fence to the cemetery directly behind my
house. It is five o'clock on Good Friday morning, April 20. All other
houses in the neighborhood are shadowed, and I am waiting for my
ex-wife. Today is my son Ralph's birthday. He would be thirteen and
starting manhood. We have met here these last two years, early, before
the day is started, to pay our respects to him. Before that we would
simply come over together as man and wife.
A spectral fog is lifting off the cemetery grass, and high up in the low
atmosphere I hear the wings of geese pinging. A police car has
murmured in through the gate, stopped, cut its lights and placed me under
surveillance. I saw a match flare briefly inside the car, saw the
policeman's face looking at a clipboard.
At the far end of the "new part" a small deer gazes at me where I
wait. Now and then its yellow tapetums blink out of the dark toward
the old part, where the trees are larger, and where three signers of the
Declaration of Independence are buried in sight of my son's grave.
My next-door neighbors, the Deffeyes, are playing tennis, calling their
scores in hushed-polite early-morning voices. "Sorry." "Thanks."
"Forty-love." Pock. Pock. Pock. "Ad to you, dear." "Yes, thank you."
"Yours." Pock, pock. I hear their harsh, thrashing nose breaths, their feet
scraping. They are into their eighties and no longer need sleep, and so are
up at all hours. They have installed glowless barium-sulphur lights that
don't shine in my yard and keep me awake. And we have staved good
neighbors if not close friends. I have nothing much in common with them
now, and am invited to few of their or anyone else's cocktail parties.
People in town are still friendly in a distant way, and I consider them fine
people, conservative, decent.
It is not, I have come to understand, easy to have a divorced man as
your neighbor. Chaos lurks in him--the viable social contract called into
question by the smoky aspect of sex. Most people feel they have to make
a choice and it is always easier to choose the wife, which is what my
neighbors and friends have mostly done. And though we chitter-chatter
across the driveways and hedges and over the tops of each other's cars
in the parking lots of grocery stores, remarking on the condition of each
other's soffits and down-drains and the likelihood of early winter,
sometimes make tentative plans to get together, I hardly ever see them,
and I take it in my stride.
Good Friday today is a special day for me, apart from the other
specialness. When I woke in the dark this morning, my heart pounding
like a tom-tom, it seemed to me as though a change were on its way, as
if this dreaminess tinged with expectation, which I have felt for some
time now, were lifting off of me into the cool tenebrous dawn.
Today I'm leaving town for Detroit to begin a profile of a famous
ax-football player who lives in the city of Walled Lake, Michigan, and is
confined to a wheelchair since a waterskiing accident, but who has
become an inspiration to his former teammates by demonstrating courage
and determination, going back to college; finishing his degree in
communications arts, marrying his black physiotherapist and finally
becoming honorary chaplain for his old team. "Make a contribution" will
be my angle. It is the kind of story I enjoy and find easy to write.
Anticipation rises higher, however, because I'm taking my new
girlfriend Vicki Arcenault with me. She has recently moved up to New
Jersey from Dallas, but I am already pretty certain I'm in love with her (I
haven't mentioned anything about it for fear of making her wary). Two
months ago, when I sliced up my thumb sharpening a lawnmower blade in
my garage, it was Nurse Arcenault who stitched me up in the ER at
Doctors Hospital, and things have gone on from there. She did her training
at Baylor in Waco, and came up here when her marriage gave out. Her
family, in fact, lives down in Barnegat Pines, not far away, in a subdivision
close to the ocean, and I am scheduled to be exhibit A at Easter
dinner--a vouchsafe to them that she has made a successful transition to
the northeast, found a safe and good-hearted man, and left bad times
including her dagger-head husband Everett far behind. Her father, Wade,
is a toll-taker at Exit 9 on the Turnpike, and I cannot expect he will like
the difference in our ages. Vicki is thirty. I am thirty-eight. He himself is
only in his fifties. But I am in hopes of winning him over and eager as can
be under the circumstances. Vicki is a sweet, saucy little black-hair with a
delicate width of cheekbone, a broad Texas accent and a
matter-of-factness with her raptures that can make a man like me cry out
in the night for longing.
You should never think that leaving a marriage sets you loose for
cheery womanizing and some exotic life you'd never quite grasped
before. Far from true. No one can do that for long. The Divorced Men's
Club I belong to here in town has proven that to me if nothing else--we
don't talk much about women when we are together and feel relieved just
to be men alone. What leaving a marriage released me--and most of
us--to, was celibacy and more fidelity than I had ever endured before,
though with no one convenient to be faithful to or celibate for. Just a long
empty moment. Though everyone should live alone at some time in a
life. Not like when you're a kid, summers, or in a single dorm room in
some crappy school. But when you're grown up. Then be alone. It can
be all right. You can end up more within yourself, as the best
athletes are, which is worth it. (A basketball player who goes for his
patented outside jumper becomes
nothing more than the simple wish personified that the ball go in the hole.)
In any case, doing the brave thing isn't easy and isn't supposed to be. I do
my work and do it well and remain expectant of the best without knowing
in the least what it will be. And the bonus is that a little bundle like Nurse
Arcenault seems sent straight from heaven.
For several months now I have not taken a trip, and the magazine has
found plenty for me to do in New York. It was stated in court by X's
sleaze-ball lawyer, Alan, that my travel was the cause of our trouble,
especially after Ralph died. And though that isn't technically true--it
was a legal reason X and I invented together--it is true that I have
always loved the travel that accompanies my job. Vicki has only seen
two landscapes in her entire life: the flat, featureless gloom-prairies
around Dallas, and New Jersey--a strange unworldliness these days.
But I will soon show her the midwest, where old normalcy floats heavy
on the humid air, and where I happen to have gone to college.
It is true that much of my sportswriter's work is exactly what you
would think: flying in airplanes, arriving and departing airports, checking
into and out of downtown hotels, waiting hours in corridors and locker
rooms, renting cars, confronting unfriendly bellmen. Late night drinks in
unfamiliar bars, up always before dawn, as I am this morning, trying to
get a perspective on things. But there is also an assurance to it that I
don't suppose I could live happily without. Very early you come to the
realization that nothing will ever take you away from yourself. But in
these literal and anonymous cities of the nation, your Milwaukees, your
St. Louises, your Seattles, your Detroits, even your New Jerseys,
something hopeful and unexpected can take place. A woman I met at the
college where I briefly taught, once told me I had too many choices, that I
was not driven enough by dire necessity. But that is just an illusion and
her mistake. Choices are what we all need. And when I walk out into the
bricky warp of these American cities, that is exactly what I feel. Choices
aplenty. Things I don't know anything about but might like are here,
possibly waiting for me. Even if they aren't. The exhilaration
of a new arrival. Good light in a restaurant that especially pleases
you. A cab driver with an interesting life history to tell. The casual, lilting
voice of a woman you don't know, but that you are allowed to listen to in
a bar you've never been in, at a time when you would otherwise have
been alone. These things are waiting for you. And what could be better?
More mysterious? More worth anticipating? Nothing. Not a thing.
The barium-sulphur lights die out over the Deffeyes' tennis court.
Delia Deffeyes' patient and troubleless voice, still hushed, begins
assuring her husband Caspar that he played well, while they walk toward
their dark house in their pressed whites.
The sky has become a milky eve and though it is spring and nearly
Easter, the morning has a strangely winter cast to it, as though a high fog
is blotting its morning stars. There is no moon at all.
The policeman has finally seen enough and idles out the cemetery gate
onto the silent streets. I hear a paper slap on a sidewalk. Far off, I hear
the commuter train up to New York making its belling stop at our
station--always a consoling sound.
X's brown Citation stops at the blinking red light at Constitution Street,
across from the new library, then inches along the cemetery fence on
Plum Road, her lights on high beam. The deer has vanished I walk over
to meet her.
X is an old-fashioned, solidly Michigan girl from Birmingham, whom I
met in Ann Arbor. Her father, Henry, was a Soapy Williams
best-of-his-generation liberal who still owns a plant that stamps out
rubber gaskets for a giant machine that stamps out car fenders, though
he is now a Republican and rich as a Pharaoh. Her mother, Irma, lives in
Mission Viejo, and the two of them are divorced, though her mother still
writes me regularly and believes X and I will eventually reconcile, which
seems as possible as anything else.
X could choose to move back to Michigan if she wanted to, buy a
condominium or a ranch-style home or move out onto the estate her
father owns. We discussed it at the divorce, and I did not object. But
she has too much pride and independence to move home now.
In addition, she is firmly behind the idea of family and wants Paul and
Clarissa to be near me, and I'm happy to think she has made a successful
adjustment of her new life. Sometimes we do not really become adults
until we suffer a good whacking loss, and our lives in a sense catch up
with us and wash over us like a wave and everything goes.
Since our divorce she has bought a house in a less expensive but
improving section of Haddam called The Presidents by the locals, and
has taken a job as teaching pro at Cranbury Hills C.C. She co-captained
the Lady Wolverines in college and has lately begun entering some of the
local pro-ams, now that her short game has sharpened up, and even
placed high in a couple last summer. I believe all her life she has had a
yen to try something like this, and being divorced has given her the
chance.
What was our life like? I almost don't remember now. Though I
remember it, the space of time it occupied. And I remember it fondly.
I suppose our life was the generic one, as the poet said. X was a
housewife and had babies, read books, played golf and had friends, while
I wrote about sports and went here and there collecting my stories,
coming home to write them up, mooning around the house for days in old
clothes, taking the train to New York and back now and then. X seemed
to take the best possible attitude to my being a sportswriter. She thought it
was fine, or at least she said she did and seemed happy. She thought she
had married a young Sherwood Anderson with movie possibilities, but it
didn't bother her that it didn't turn out that way, and certainly never
bothered me. I was happy as a swallow. We went on vacations with our
three children. To Cape Cod (which Ralph called Cape God), to
Searsport, Maine, to Yellowstone, to the Civil War battlefields at
Antietam and Bull Run. We paid bills, shopped, went to movies, bought
cars and cameras and insurance, cooked out, went to cocktail parties,
visited schools, and romanced each other in the sweet, cagey way of
adults. I looked out my window, stood in my yard sunsets with a sense of
solace and achievement, cleaned my rain gutters, eyed my shingles,
put up storms, fertilized regularly, computed my equity, spoke to my
neighbors in an interested voice--the normal applauseless life of us all.
Though toward the end of our marriage I became lost in some
dreaminess. Sometimes I would wake up in the morning and open my
eyes to X lying beside me breathing, and not recognize her! Not even
know what town I was in, or how old I was, or what life it was, so dense
was I in my particular dreaminess. I would lie there and try as best I
could to extend not knowing, feel that pleasant
soaring-out-of-azimuth-and-attitude sensation I grew to like as long as it
would last, while twenty possibilities for who, where, what went by. Until
suddenly I would get it right and feel a sense of--what? Loss, I think you
would say, though loss of what I don't know. My son had died, but I'm
unwilling to say that was the cause, or that anything is ever the sole cause
of anything else. I know that you can dream your way through an
otherwise fine life, and never wake up, which is what I almost did. I
believe I have survived that now and nearly put dreaminess behind me,
though there is a resolute sadness between X and me that our marriage is
over, a sadness that does not feel sad. It is the way you feel at a high
school reunion when you hear an old song you used to like played late at
night, only you are all alone.
X appears out of the agate cemetery light, loose-gaited and sleepy,
wearing deck shoes, baggy corduroys and an old London Fog I gave her
years ago. Her hair has been cut short in a new-style way I like. She is a
tall girl, big and brown-haired and pretty, who looks younger than she is,
which is only thirty-seven. When we met fifteen years ago in New York,
at a dreary book signing, she was modeling at a Fifth Avenue clothing
store, and sometimes even now she has a tendency to slouch and walk
about long-strided in a loose-limbed, toes-out way, though when she takes
a square stance up over a golf ball, she can smack it a mile. In some
ways she has become as much of a genuine athlete as anyone I know.
Needless to say, I have the greatest admiration for her, and love her
in every way but the strictest one. Sometimes I see her on the street
in town or in her car without expecting to and without her knowing it,
and I am struck by wonder: what can she want from life now? How could
I have ever loved her and let her go.
"It's chilly, still," she says, in a small, firm voice when she is close
enough to be heard, her hands stuffed down deep inside her raincoat.
It is a voice I love. In many ways it was her voice I loved first, the
sharpened midwestern vowels, the succinct glaciated syntax: Binton
Herbor, himburg, Gren Repids. It is a voice that knows the minimum
of what will suffice, and banks on it. In general I have always
liked hearing women talk more than men.
I wonder, in fact, what my own voice will sound like. Will it be a
convincing, truth-telling voice? Or a pseudo-sincere, phony, ex-husband
one that will stir up trouble? I have a voice that is really mine, a frank,
vaguely rural voice more or less like a used car salesman: a no-frills
voice that hopes to uncover simple truth by a straight-on application of
the facts. I used to practice it when I was in college. "Well, okay, look at
it this way," I'd say right out loud. "All right, all right." "Yeah, but look
here." As much as any, this constitutes my sportswriter voice, though I
have stopped practicing by now.
X leans herself against the curved marble monument of a man named
Craig--at a safe distance from me--and presses her lips inward. Up
to this moment I have not noticed the cold. But now that she said it, I
feel it in my bones and wish I'd worn a sweater.
These pre-dawn meetings were my idea, and in the abstract they
seem like a good way for two people like us to share a remaining
intimacy. In practice they are as uncomfortable as a hanging, and it's
conceivable we will just forgo it next year, though we felt the same way
last year. It is simply that I don't know how to mourn and neither does X.
Neither of us has the vocabulary or temperament for it, and so we are
more prone to pass the time chatting, which isn't always wise.
"Did Paul mention our rendezvous last night?" I say. Paul, my son, is
ten. Last night I had an unexpected meeting with him standing in the
dark street in front of his house, when his mother was inside
and knew nothing of it, and I was lurking about outside. We had a talk
about Ralph, and where he was and about how it might be possible to
reach him--all of which caused me to go away feeling better. X and I
agree in principle that I shouldn't sneak my visits, but this was not that
way.
"He told me Daddy was sitting in the car in the dark watching the
house like the police." She stares at me curiously.
"It was just an odd day. It ended up fine, though." It was in fact
much more than an odd day.
"You could've come in. You're always welcome."
I smile a winning smile at her. "Another time I will." (Sometimes we
do strange things and say they're accidents and coincidences, though I
want her to believe it was a coincidence.)
"I just wondered if something was wrong," X says.
"No. I love him very much."
"Good," X says and sighs.
I have spoken in a voice that pleases me, a voice that is really mine.
X brings a sandwich bag out of her pocket, removes a hard-boiled
egg and begins to peel it into the bag. We actually have little to say. We
talk on the phone at least twice a week, mostly about the children, who
visit me after school while X is still out on the teaching tee. Occasionally
I bump into her in the grocery line, or take a table next to hers at the
August Inn, and we will have a brief chairback chat. We have tried to
stay a modern, divided family. Our meeting here is only by way of a
memorial for an old life lost.
Still it is a good time to talk. Last year, for instance, X told me that if
she had her life to live over again she would probably wait to get
married and try to make a go of it on the LPGA tour. Her father had
offered to sponsor her, she said, back in 1966--something she had
never told me before. She did not say if she would marry me when the
time came. But she did say she wished I had finished my novel, that it
would have probably made things better, which surprised me. (She
later took that back.) She also told me, without being particularly
critical, that she considered me a loner, which
surprised me too. She said that it was a mistake to have made as few
superficial friends as I have done in my life, and to have concentrated
only on the few things I have concentrated on--her, for one. My
children, for another. Sportswriting and being an ordinary citizen. This did
not leave me well enough armored for the unexpected, was her opinion.
She said this was because I didn't know my parents very well, had gone
to a military school, and grown up in the south, which was full of
betrayers and secret-keepers and untrustworthy people, which I agree is
true, though I never knew any of them. All that originated, she said, with
the outcome of the Civil War. It was much better to have grown up, she
said, as she did, in a place with no apparent character, where there is
nothing ambiguous around to confuse you or complicate things, where the
only thing anybody ever thought seriously about was the weather.
"Do you think you laugh enough these days?" She finishes peeling her
egg and puts the sack down deep in her coat pocket. She knows about
Vicki, and I've had one or two other girlfriends since our divorce that I'm
sure the children have told her about. But I do not think she thinks they
have turned my basic situation around much. And maybe she's right. In
any case I am happy to have this apparently intimate, truth-telling
conversation, something I do not have very often, and that a marriage can
really be good for.
"You bet I do," I say. "I think I'm doing all right, if that's what you
mean."
"I suppose it is," X says, looking at her boiled egg as if it posed a small
but intriguing problem. "I'm not really worried about you." She raises her
eyes at me in an appraising way. It's possible my talk with Paul last night
has made her think I've gone off my bearings or started drinking.
"I watch Johnny. He's good for a laugh," I say. "I think he gets funnier
as I get older. But thanks for asking." All this makes me feel stupid. I
smile at her.
X takes a tiny mouse bite out of her white egg. "I apologize for prying
into your life."
"It's fine."
X breathes out audibly and speaks softly. "I woke up this morning in
the dark, and I suddenly got this idea in my head about Ralph laughing.
It made me cry, in fact. But I thought to myself that you have to strive
to live your life to the ultimate. Ralph lived his whole life in nine years,
and I remember him laughing. I just wanted to be sure you did. You
have a lot longer to live."
"My birthday's in two weeks."
"Do you think you'll get married again?" X says with extreme
formality, looking up at me. And for a moment what I smell in the dense
morning air is a swimming pool! Somewhere nearby. The cool, aqueous
suburban chlorine bouquet that reminds me of the summer coming, and
all the other better summers of memory. It is a token of the suburbs I
love, that from time to time a swimming pool or a barbecue or a leaf fire
you'll never ever see will drift provocatively to your nose.
"I guess I don't know," I say. Though in truth I would love to be able
to say Couldn't happen, not on a bet, not this boy. Except what I do
say is nearer to the truth. And just as quick, the silky-summery smell is
gone, and the smell of dirt and stolid monuments has won back its
proper place. In the quavery gray dawn a window lights up beyond the
fence on the third floor of my house. Bosobolo, my African boarder,
is awake. His day is beginning and I see his dark shape pass the
window. Across the cemetery in the other direction I see yellow lights in
the caretaker's cottage, beside which sits the green John Deere
backhoe used for dredging graves. The bells of St. Leo the Great begin
to chime a Good Friday prayer call. "Christ Died Today, Christ Died
Today" (though I believe it is actually "Stabat Mater Dolorosa").
"I think I'll get married again," X says matter-of-factly. Who to, I
wonder?
"Who to?" Not--please--one of the fat-wallet 19th-hole
clubsters, the big hale 'n' hearty, green-sports-coat types who're always
taking her on weekends to the Trapp Family Lodge and getaways to
the Poconos, where they take in new Borscht Belt comedians and
make love on waterbeds. I hope against all hope not. I know all about
those guys. The children tell me. They all drive Oldsmobiles and wear
tasseled shoes. And there is every good reason to go out with them, I
grant you. Let them spend their money and enjoy their discretionary time
They're decent fellows, I'm sure. But they are not to be married.
"Oh, a software salesman, maybe," X says. "A realtor. Somebody I
can beat at golf and bully." She smiles at me a mouth-down smirky smile
of unhappiness, and bunches her shoulders to wag them. But
unexpectedly she starts to cry through her smile, nodding toward me as if
we both knew about it and should've expected this, and that in a way I
am to blame, which in a way I am.
The last time I saw X cry was the night our house was broken into,
when, in the search for what might've been stolen, she found some letters
I'd been getting from a woman in Blanding, Kansas. I don't know why I
kept them. They really didn't mean anything to me. I hadn't seen the
woman in months and then only once. But I was in the thickest depths of
my dreaminess then, and needed--or thought I did--something to
anticipate away from my life, even though I had no plans for ever seeing
her and was in fact intending to throw the letters away. The burglars had
left Polaroid pictures of the inside of our empty house scattered about for
us to find when we got back from seeing The Thirty-Nine Steps at the
Playhouse, plus the words, "We are the stuffed men," spray-painted onto
the dining room wall. Ralph had been dead two years. The children were
with their grandfather at the Huron Mountain Club, and I was just back
from my teaching position at Berkshire College, and was hanging around
the house more or less dumb as a cashew, but otherwise in pretty good
spirits. X found the letters in a drawer of my office desk while looking for
a sock full of silver dollars my mother had left me, and sat on the floor
and read them, then handed them to me when I came in with a list of
missing cameras, radios and fishing equipment. She asked if I had
anything to say, and when I didn't, she went into the bedroom and began
tearing apart her hope chest with a claw hammer and a crowbar. She
tore it to bits, then took it to the fireplace and burned it while I stood
outside in the yard mooning
at Cassiopeia and Gemini and feeling invulnerable because of dreaminess
and an odd amusement I felt almost everything in my life could be subject
to. It might seem that I was "within myself" then. But in fact I was light
years away from everything.
In a little while X came outside, with all the lights in the house
left shining and her hope chest going up the chimney in smoke--it was
June--and sat in a lawn chair in another part of the dark yard from
where I was standing and cried loudly. Lurking behind a large
rhododendron in the dark, I spoke some hopeful and unconsoling words
to her, but I don't think she heard me. My voice had gotten so soft by
then as to be inaudible to anyone but myself. I looked up at the smoke of
what I found out was her hope chest, full of all those precious things:
menus, ticket stubs, photographs, hotel room receipts, place cards, her
wedding veil, and wondered what it was, what in the world it could've
been drifting off into the clear spiritless New Jersey nighttime. It
reminded me of the smoke that announced a new Pope--a new
Pope!--if that is believable now, under those circumstances. And in four
months I was divorced. All this seems odd now, and far away, as if it had
happened to someone else and I had only read about it. But that was my
life then, and it is my life now, and I am in relatively good spirits about it.
If there's another thing that sportswriting teaches you, it is that there are
no transcendent themes in life. In all cases things are here and they're
over, and that has to be enough. The other view is a lie of literature and
the liberal arts, which is why I did not succeed as a teacher, and another
reason I put my novel away in the drawer and have not taken it out.
"Yes, of course," X says and sniffs. She has almost stopped crying,
though I have not tried to comfort her (a privilege I no longer hold). She
raises her eyes up to the milky sky and sniffs again. She is still holding
the nibbled egg. "When I cried in the dark, I thought about what a big
nice boy Ralph Bascombe should be right now, and that I was
thirty-seven no matter what. I wondered about what we should all be
doing." She shakes her head and squeezes her arms tight against her
stomach in a way I have not seen her do in a long time. "It's
not your fault, Frank. I just thought it would be all right if you saw me
cry. That's my idea of grief. Isn't that womanish?"