Coming into the End Zone Read Free Page A

has paid fifty thousand dollars for five chapters and a synopsis of his new novel, and two, married to each other but calling individually, each no longer able to stand the ego of the other. They are separating.
    Until I was in my fifties I knew only one writer, a fellow journalist named William Kennedy who thought, like me, that someday he would be writing novels. No others. Now the only people I know seem to be writers. I argue about this with myself, wondering if it is not a bad, narcissistic state of affairs. Writing may be a vice peculiar to the outcasts of society, and writers a class of eccentric persons who cling together for support against the outside, ‘normal’ world.
    I wish Mr. Brown, the refrigerator man, would call to say he will install the thermostat. There are puddles of excess water on the floor, and a low, throbbing sound that issues from it. I hear very little else in the house, but I can hear the old machine’s dying gasps and watery gurgles.
    Late this afternoon I call Richard Lucas, who is not a writer, but an old friend, a successful sales manager for a publisher of scholarly books in California. Last year he went on a glorious trip to China for his company. He loved the country and the people but returned with some sort of Oriental bug, he said, that he could not shake. Two months later, the strange virus was still in possession of him because his immune system had gone awry, and he knew, he told me, why he was still so sick. No one else knew. I was not to say.
    This spring I saw him at a university press meeting in Cambridge, and his handsome face and body were changed into an old man’s visage and frame. He was unstable on his feet, he suffered from a variety of what he called, with a smile, ‘opportunistic’ afflictions. He was cheerful, and hopeful, and very clearly sick.
    Now, on the telephone, he tells me he spends his spare time listening to all of the Ring des Nibelungen on CDs. He wonders if it is time for him to stop work. Is there a chance I might come to the West Coast for a visit? I say I will try, having no great hopes but eager to see him again, as well as other young friends who have settled in San Francisco. All of them have an apostolic approach to that beautiful place. Everyone, they think, should come out and live there, and look out at the Bay from the hills and wander Golden Gate Park and eat every kind of foreign food in the Castro section.
    It is too late, I believe, for me to live in a new place, although it is not entirely new to me. Once, during the war years, I lived there, on Van Ness Avenue as I recall, and later across the Bay in Oakland when you could still take a cool, foggy ferryboat ride to that city-suburb.… I tell Richard to come here to Washington when he is in the East (his company has an office in New York City, like most publishers who went west), but it is a foolish thing to say, to make him believe he will be able to visit me. He says he will try.
    After he hangs up, I realize I say this more and more. Not ‘I will see you there’ but ‘Come here to see me.’ Age. Loss of the enjoyment of leaving home. I should add that to my list of dislikes I made the other day:
    â€¢ Travel.
    A legal-minded adviser on the radio tells a questioner: ‘Get it in writing.’ Meaning, I suppose, don’t trust the oral agreement or the hearty handshake. Get it in writing. I recognize it is the unspoken command that hovers over the head of every writer every morning, every hour of every day. Stop talking about it, planning to do it, considering the alternatives. Get it in writing.
    Growing old means abandoning the established rituals of one’s life, not hardening into them as some people think. There are the occasional reunions with people from the past, ‘old’ friends. Leftovers from places where one once lived, neighbors, office mates from the places one worked or taught. Christmas cards are ritual cords