“I guess I’m your opposite here, Walter,” I said. “The highway never seems the same coming and going to me. I even think about meeting myself in the cars I pass. I actually forget it all pretty much right away, though I tend to forget a lot of things.”
“That’s a better way to be,” Walter said.
“To me, it makes the world more interesting.”
“I guess I’m having to learn that, Frank,” Walter said and shook his head.
“Is something bothering you, Walter,” I said — and shouldn’t have, since I broke the rules of the Divorced Men’s Club, which is that we’re none of us much interested in that kind of self-expression.
“No,” Walter said moodily. “Nothing’s bothering me.” And he stood for a while staring out at the jet coast of Jersey — the boxy beach house lights linking us to whatever hopeful life was proceeding there. “Let me just ask you something, Frank,” Walter said.
“All right.”
“Who do you have to confide in?” Walter did not look at me when he said this, though I somehow felt his smooth soft face was both sad and hopeful at the same moment.
“I guess I don’t, to tell the truth,” I said. “I mean I don’t have anyone.”
“Did you not even confide in your wife?”
“No,” I said. “We talked about things plenty of times. That’s for sure. Maybe we don’t mean the same thing by confiding. I’m not particularly a private person.”
“Good. That’s good,” Walter said. I could tell he was puzzled but also satisfied by my answer, and what’s more I had given him the best answer I could. “Frank, I’ll see you later,” Walter said unexpectedly and gave me a pat on the arm, and walked off down the deck into the dark where one of the Spanelis men was still fishing, though it was black on the water and the tart spring air was chilling enough that I went inside and watched a couple of innings of a Yankees game on the boat’s TV.
Once we got in, though, and all said our goodbyes, and the divorced men had given the few weakfish and fluke they’d caught to the Spanelis kids, I was walking across the gravel lot to my car, ready to head straight for Vicki’s and steal her away to Lambertville, and here was Walter Luckett scuffing his deck shoes alongside my car and looking, in the dark, strangely like a man who wanted to borrow some money.
“What-say now, Wally,” I said cheerfully, and went about putting the key in the door lock. I had an hour to get there, and I was for getting going. Vicki goes to bed early even when she doesn’t have to work the next day. She is damned serious about her nursing career, and likes being bright and cheerful, since she believes many of her patients have no one who understands their predicament. The result is I don’t drop in after eight, no matter what.
“This is a helluva life, isn’t it, Frank?” Walter said and leaned against my back fender, arms folded, staring off as if in amusement as the other divorced men and the Spanelises were barging out of the lot up toward Route 35, their lights brightly swaying. They were honking horns and yelling, and the Spanelis kids were squealing.
“It sure is, Walter.” I opened my door and stopped to look at him in the dark. He stuffed his hands in his pockets and bunched his shoulders. He had on a pale sweater draped in the old lank, country club style. “I think it’s a pretty good life, though.”
“You couldn’t really plan it, could you?”
“You certainly couldn’t.”
“There’s so much you can’t foresee, yet it’s all laid out and clear.”
“You look cold, Walter.”
“Let me buy you a drink, Frank.”
“Can’t tonight. Got things to do.” I smiled at him conspiratorially.
“Just a bone warmer. We can sneak right over into the Manasquan.” Across the lot was the Manasquan Bar, a barny old hip-roofed fisherman’s madhouse with a red BAR sign on top. Ben Mouzakis had invested in it with his wife’s brother, Evangelis, as he told me once when we talked about tax shelters up on deck. “What d’ya say?” Walter said and started off. “Let’s drink one, Frank.”
I did not want to have a nightcap with Walter Luckett. I wanted to go speeding back toward Vicki and drowsy Lambertville while the last flickers of sunlight clung in the western sky. The memory of those awful centuries spent in The Coffee Spot rose up in my thoughts suddenly, and I almost jumped in the car and rammed out of the lot like a desperado. But I didn’t. I stood and looked at Walter, who by now had walked halfway across the empty lot in his walking shorts and sweater, and had turned toward me and assumed a posture I can only describe as heartbreaking. And I could not say no. Walter and I had something in common — something insignificant, but something that his heartbreaking posture made undeniable. Walter and I were both men, Vicki or no Vicki, Lambertville or no Lambertville.
“Only one,” I said into the parking lot darkness. “I’ve got a date.”
“You’ll make it,” Walter said, lost now in the bleary seaside lowlights of Brielle. “I’ll see to that myself.”
In the Manasquan Walter ordered a scotch and I ordered a gin, and for a while we sat in complete uncomfortable silence and stared at the old pictures behind the bar that showed record stripers caught off the dock. I thought I could detect Ben Mouzakis in several — a chesty young roughneck of the Fifties, a big immigrant’s crazy grin, no shirt, muscles bristling, standing beside some other taller men in khakis and two hundred dead fish strung along a rafter board.
The Manasquan is a dark, pine-board, tar-smelling pile of sticks inside and in truth it is one of my favorite places for small departures. Any other time I wouldn’t have minded being there one bit. It has a long teak bar with a quasi-nautical motif, and no one makes the first attempt to be friendly, though drinks are poured honestly and at a reasonable price for a touristy seaside area. Sometimes, arriving too early for our excursion, I have walked over, taken a seat at the bar and bought a good greasy hamburger and felt right at home reading a newspaper or watching TV alongside the few watchcap fishermen who huddle and mutter at the end of the bar, and the woman or two who float around speaking brashly to strangers. It is a place where you’d be happy to consider yourself a regular, though when all is said and done you have nothing at all in common with anyone there except some speechless tenor of spirit only you know a damn thing about.
“Frank, were you ever an athlete?” Walter said forthrightly after our long and studious staring.
“Just an athletic supporter, Walter,” I said and gave him a grin to set him at his ease. He obviously had something on his mind; and the sooner he got it out, the sooner I could be blazing a trail west.
Walter smiled back at me ironically, gave his nose a disapproving pinch, pushed up at his glasses. Walter, I realized, was actually a handsome man, and it made me like him. It isn’t easy for handsome people to be themselves, or even try to be. And I had a feeling Walter was trying to be himself for the moment, and I liked him for that reason, though I wished he’d get on with it.
“You were out at Michigan, is that right,” Walter asked.
“Right.”
“That’s Ann Arbor, not East Lansing.”
“Right.”
“I know that’s different.” Walter nodded thoughtfully and sniffed again. “You couldn’t be an athlete there, I comprehend that. That’s like a factory.”
“It wasn’t that bad.”
“I was an athlete out at Grinnell. Anybody could be one. It wasn’t a big thing, although I’m sure it’s gotten bigger now. I never go back anymore.”