The Sportswriter Read Free Page B

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