Before, when I was in town writing sports, as a married, then latter, divorced man, I’d always fancied myself a spectral presence, like a ship cruising foggy banks, hoping to hang near and in hearing distance of the beach but without ever bashing into it. Now, though, by reason of Haddam’s or any suburb’s capacity to accommodate any but the rankest outsider (a special lenience which can make us miss even the most impersonal housing tract or condo development), I felt towny: a guy who shares a scuzzy joke with the Neapolitan produce man, who knows exactly the haircut he’ll get at Barber’s barbershop but goes there anyway, who’s voted for more than three mayors and can remember how things used to be before something else happened and as a result feels right at home. These feelings of course ride the froth of one’s sense of hope and personal likelihood.
Every age of life has its own little pennant to fly. And mine upon returning to Haddam was decidedly two-sided. On one side was a feeling of bright synchronicity in which everything I thought about — regaining a close touch with my two children after having flown the coop for a while, getting my feet wet in some new life’s enterprise, possibly waging a campaign to reclaim lost ground with Ann — all these hopeful activities seemed to be, as though guided by a lightless beam, what my whole life was all about. I was in a charmed state in which nothing was alien and nothing could resist me if I turned my mind to it. (Psychiatrists like the one my son visits warn us about such feelings, flagging us all away from the poison of euphoria and hauling us back to flat earth, where they want us to be.)
The other feeling, the one that balanced the first, was a sensation that everything I then contemplated was limited or at least underwritten by the “plain fact of my existence”: that I was after all only a human being, as untranscendent as a tree trunk, and that everything I might do had to be calculated against the weight of the practical and according to the standard considerations of: Would it work? and, What good would it do for me or anybody?
I now think of this balancing of urgent forces as having begun the Existence Period, the high-wire act of normalcy, the part that comes after the big struggle which led to the big blow-up, the time in life when whatever was going to affect us “later” actually affects us, a period when we go along more or less self-directed and happy, though we might not choose to mention or even remember it later were we to tell the story of our lives, so steeped is such a time in the small dramas and minor adjustments of spending quality time simply with ourselves.
Certain crucial jettisonings, though, seemed necessary for this passage to be a success — just as Ted Houlihan mentioned to Joe Markham an hour ago but which probably didn’t register. Most people, once they reach a certain age, troop through their days struggling like hell with the concept of completeness, keeping up with all the things that were ever part of them, as a way of maintaining the illusion that they bring themselves fully to life. These things usually amount to being able to remember the birthday of the first person they “surrendered” to, or the first calypso record they ever bought, or the poignant line in Our Town that seemed to sum life up back in 1960.
Most of these you just have to give up on, along with the whole idea of completeness, since after a while you get so fouled up with all you did and surrendered to and failed at and fought and didn’t like, that you can’t make any progress. Another way of saying this is that when you’re young your opponent is the future; but when you’re not young, your opponent’s the past and everything you’ve done in it and the problem of getting away from it. (My son Paul may be an exception.)
My own feelings were that since I’d jettisoned employment, marriage, nostalgia and swampy regret, I was now rightfully a man a-quiver with possibility and purpose — similar to a way you might feel just prior to taking up the sport of, say, glacier skiing; and not for sharpening your acuities or tempting grisly death, but simply to celebrate the hum of the human spirit. (I could not, of course, have told you what my purpose actually was, which probably meant my purpose was just to have a purpose. Though I’m certain I was afraid that if I didn’t use my life, even in a ridiculous way, I’d lose it — what people used to say about your dick when I was a kid.)
My qualifications for a new undertaking were, first, that I was not one bit preoccupied with how things used to be. You’re usually wrong about how things used to be anyway, except that you used to be happier — only you may not have known it at the time, or might’ve been unable to seize it, so stuck were you in life’s gooeyness; or, as is often the case, you might never have been quite as happy as you like to believe you were.
The second of my qualifications was that intimacy had begun to matter less to me. (It had been losing ground since my marriage came to a halt and other attractions failed.) And by intimacy I mean the real kind, the kind you have with only one person (or maybe two or three) in a lifetime; not the kind where you’re willing to talk to someone you’re close to about laxative choices or your dental problems; or, if it’s a woman, about her menstrual cycle, or your aching prostate. These are private, not intimate. But I mean the real stuff— silent intimacies—when spoken words, divulgences, promises, oaths are almost insignificant: the intimacy of the fervently understood and sympathized with, having nothing to do with being a “straight shooter” or a truth teller, or with being able to be “open” with strangers (these don’t mean anything anyway). To none of these, though, was I in debt, and in fact I felt I could head right into my new frame of reference — whatever was beginning — pretty well prepared and buttoned up.
Third, but not last, I wasn’t actually worried that I was a coward. (This seemed important and still does.) Years earlier, in my sportswriting days, Ann and I were once walking out of a Knicks-Bullets night game at the Garden, when some loony up ahead began brandishing a pistol and threatening to open up on everybody all around. Word went back like a windstorm over wheat stalks. “Gun! He’s got a GUN! Watch it!” I quickly pulled Ann inside a men’s room door, hoping to get some concrete between the gun muzzle and us. Though in twenty seconds the gunman was tackled and kicked to sawdust by a squad of New York’s quick-witted finest, and thank God no one was hurt.
But Ann said to me when we were in the car, waiting in a drizzle to enter the bleak tunnel back to New Jersey, “Did you realize you jumped behind me when that guy had his gun?” She smiled at me in a tired but sympathetic way.
“That’s not what I did!” I said. “I jumped in the rest room and pulled you in with me.”
“You did that too. But you also grabbed me by my shoulders and got behind me. Not that I blame you. It happened in a hurry.” She drew a wavy vertical line in the window fog and put a dot at the bottom.
“It did happen in a hurry. But you’re wrong about what happened,” I said, flustered because in fact it had all happened fast, I’d acted solely on instinct and couldn’t remember much.
“Well, if that’s what happened,” she said confidently, “then tell me if the man — if it was a man — was colored or white.” Ann has never gotten over her old man’s Michigan racial epithets.