Though there’s another reason I don’t leave the club. And that is that none of the five of us is the type to be in a club for divorced men — none of us in fact even seems to belong in a place like Haddam — given our particular circumstances. And yet we are there each time, as full of dread and timidness as conscripts to a firing squad, doing what we can to be as chatty and polite as Rotarians — ending nights, wherever we are, talking about life and sports and business, hunched over our solemn knees, some holding red-ended cigarettes as the boat heads into the lighted dock, or before last call at the Press Box Bar on Walnut Street, all doing our best for each other and for non-confessional personal expression. Actually we hardly know each other and sometimes can barely keep the ball moving before a drink arrives. Likewise there have been times when I couldn’t wait to get away and promised myself never to come back. But given our characters, I believe this is the most in friendship any of us can hope for. (X is dead right about me in this regard.) In any case the suburbs are not a place where friendships flourish. And even though I cannot say we like each other, I definitely can say that we don’t dislike each other, which may be exactly the quiddity of all friendships that have not begun with fellows you knew before your own life became known to you — which is the case with me, and, I suppose, for the others, though I truly don’t know them well enough to say.
We met — the original five — because we’d all signed up for the “Back in Action” courses at Haddam High School, courses designed expressly for people like us, who didn’t feel comfortable in service clubs. I was enrolled in “Twentieth-Century American Presidents and Their Foreign Policies.” A couple of the other fellows were in “Water-Color Foundations” or “Straight-Talking” and we used to stand round the coffee urn on our breaks keeping our eyes diverted from the poor, sad, skinny divorced women who wanted to go home with us and start crying at 4 A.M. One thing led to another, and by the time our courses were half over we’d started going over to the August, jawing about fishing trips to Alaska and baseball trades, singling out one another’s idiosyncracies, and assigning funny names for each other like “ole Knot-head” for Carter Knott, the banker; “ole Basset Hound” for Frank Bascombe; “ole Jay-Jay” for Jay Pilcher — who, inside of a year, died alone in his house with a brain tumor he never even knew about. Perfect Babbitts, really, all of us, even though to some extent we understood that.
In a way, I suppose you could say all of us were and are lost, and know it, and we simply try to settle into our lost-ness as comfortably and with as much good manners and little curiosity as we can. And perhaps the only reason we have not quit is that we can’t think of a compelling reason to. When we do think of a good reason we’ll all no doubt quit in an instant. And I may be getting close.
But that is not so much the point as a way of getting around to it.
Yesterday was the day of our spring fishing excursion for flukes and weakfish, out of Brielle. Knot-head Knott made all the arrangements, and while Ben Mouzakis does not give us one of his boats all to ourselves for the money we pay, he usually just books one other party of congenial fellows for the afternoon and takes us out at cost since he knows we’ll talk it up in Haddam and come back ourselves next year, and because I honestly think he enjoys our company. We are all good fellows for an afternoon.
I had left Haddam in the glum spirits I’ve fallen into each year on the day before Ralph’s birthday. It had rained early just the way it did today, but by the time I had come round the traffic rotary in Neptune and turned toward the south Shore Points, the rain had swept up into the Amboys leaving me drenched in the supra-real seashore sunshine and traffic hum of Shark River, as indistinguishable from my fellow Jerseyites as a druggist from Sea Girt.
It is of course an anonymity I desire. And New Jersey has plenty to spare. A passing glance down off the bridge-lock at Avon and along the day-trip docks where the plastic pennants flutter and shore breezes dance always assures me that any one of these burly Bermuda-shorts fellows waiting impatiently with their burly wives for the Sea Fox to weigh its anchor or the Jersey Lady to cast off, could just as well be me, heading out after monkfish off Mantoloking or Deauville. Such random identifications always strike me as good practice. Better to think that you’re like your fellow man than to think — like some professors I knew at Berkshire College — that no man could be you or take your place, which is crazy and leads straight to melancholy for a life that never existed, and to ridicule.
Anyone could be anyone else in most ways. Face the facts.
Though possibly because of my skittishness, yesterday the Bermuda-shorts guys on the docks didn’t seem altogether hopeful from my distance. They seemed to be wandering off bandy-legged from their spouses down the dock planks, arms folded, faces querulous in the mealy sunshine, their natural Jersey pessimism working up a fear that the day might go wrong — in fact couldn’t go right. Someone would charge them too much for an unwanted and insignificant service; the wife would get seasick and force the boat in early; there’d be no fish and the day would end with a sad chowder at a rueful chowder house a stone’s throw from home. In other words, all’s ahead to be regretted; better to start now. I could’ve yelled right out to them: Cheer up! Chances are better than you think Things could pan out. You could have a whale of a time, so climb aboard. Though I didn’t have quite the spirits for it.
But as it happened, I would not have been more right. Ben Mouzakis had chartered half the boat to a family of Greeks — the Spanelises — from his own home village near Parga on the Ionian, and the divorced men were all on best behavior, acting like good-will ambassadors on a fortunate posting, assisting the women with their stubby rods, baiting hooks with brown chub and untangling back-lashed reels. The Greek men had their own way of fixing on bait so that it was harder to pick clean, and a good deal of time was spent learning this procedure. Ben Mouzakis eventually broke out some retsina, and by six o’clock fishing was over, the few fluke caught off the “secret reef” were packed in ice, the radio was beamed into a Greek station in New Brunswick, and everyone — the divorced men and the Spanelises, two men, three pretty women and two children — were sitting inside the long gallery cabin, elbows on knees, nodding and cupping glasses of wine and talking solemnly with the best good-neighborly tolerance about the value of the drachma, Melina Mercouri and the trip to Yosemite the Spanelises were planning for June if their money held out.
I was contented with the way the day had turned out. Sometimes an awful sense of loss comes over me when I am with these men, as profound as a tropical low. Though it has been worse in the past than yesterday. Something about them — earnest, all good-hearted fellows — seems as dreamy to me as it’s possible to be, dreamier than I am by far. And dreamy people often do not mix well, no matter what you might believe. Dreamy people actually have little to offer one another, tend in fact to neutralize each other’s dreaminess into bleary nugatude. Misery does not want company — happiness does. Which is why I have learned to stay clear of other sportswriters when I’m not working — avoid them like piranhas — since sportswriters are often the dreamiest people of all. It is another reason I will not stay in Gotham after dark. More than one drink with the boys from the office at Wally’s, a popular Third Avenue watering hole, and the dreads come right down out of the fake tin ceiling and the Tiffany hanging lamps like cyanide. My knee starts to hop under the table, and in three minutes I’m emptied of all conviction and struck dumb as a shoe and want nothing but to sit and stare away at the pictures on the wall, or at how the moldings fit the ceiling or how the mirrors in the back bar reflect a different room from the one I’m in, and fantasize about how much I’m going to enjoy my trip home. A group of sportswriters together can narrow your view far beyond pessimism, since the worst of them tend to be cynics looking only for false drama in the germs of human defeat.