The time since last April has gone by fast, in an almost technicolor-telescopic way — much faster than I’m used to having it go — which may be Florida’s great virtue, instead of the warm weather: time goes by fast in a perfectly timeless way. Not a bit like Gotham, where you seem to feel every second you are alive, but somehow miss everything else.
With my bank savings, I have leased a sporty, sea-green Datsun on a closed-end basis and left my car and my house in Bosobolo’s care. This has allowed him — as he explained in a letter — to bring his wife over from Gabon and to live a real married life in America. I don’t know the fate of the dumpy white girl. Possibly he has put her aside, though possibly not. And neither do I know what my neighbors think of this new arrangement — seeing Bosobolo out in the yard, surveying the spirea and the hemlocks, stretching his long arms and yawning like a lord.
I have a furnished adults-only condo out on a pleasant enough beachy place called Longboat Key, and have taken a leave of indefinite absence from the magazine. And for these few months I’ve lived a life of agreeable miscellany. At night someone will often put on some Big Band or reggae records, and men and women will gather around the pool and mix up some drinks and dance and chitter-chat. There are, naturally, plenty of girls in bathing suits and sundresses, and once in a while one of them consents to spend a night with me, then drifts away the next day back to whatever interested her before: a job, another man, travel. A few agreeable homosexuals live here, as well as an abundance of retired Navy men — midwestern guys in most cases, some of them my age — with a lot of time and energy on their hands and not enough to do. The Navy men have stories about Vietnam and Korea that all together would make a good book. And one or two have asked me about writing their life stories once they learned I write for a living. Though when all that begins to bore me, or when I don’t feel up to it, I take a walk out to the water which is just beyond the retaining wall and hike a while in the late daylight, when the sky is truly high and white, and watch the horizon go dark toward Cuba, and the last tourist plane of the day angle up toward who knows where. I like the flat plexus of the Gulf, and the sensation that there is a vast, troubling landscape underwater all lost, with only the definite land remaining, a sad and flat and melancholy prairie that can be lonely but in an appealing way, I’ve even driven up to the Sunshine Skyway, where I have thought of Ida Simms, and of the night Walter and I talked about her and of how much she meant to him. I have wondered if she ever woke up there or in the Seychelles or some such place and went home to her family. Probably not.
I realize I have told all this because unbeknownst to me, on that Thursday those months ago, I awoke with a feeling, a stirring, that any number of things were going to change and be settled and come to an end soon, and I might have something to tell that would be important and even interesting. And now I am at the point of not knowing the outcome of things once again, a frame of mind that pleases me. I sense that I have faced up to a great empty moment in life but without suffering the usual terrible regret — which is, after all, the way I began to describe this.
Some days I drive over in my Datsun and roam around the Grapefruit League parks, where not a lot is going on now. The Tigers have clinched at least a magic number, and seem to me unstoppable. Around the player complex there is a strange, anxious merriment. A few prospects are beginning in the fall instructional leagues, Latin boys plus a few older players on their way down the ladder, some of whom I even know from years ago. Hanging around on their own, they’re hoping to motivate some kid to hit or shake a bad attitude and to impress someone as being a good coach or a scout, maybe with a farm club out in Iowa, and in that way live a life of their choosing. It is a poignant life here, and play is haphazard at best, listless in its pleasures, and everyone waits for victory. A good human-interest article could be worked up from this small world. An old catcher actually came up to me and confessed he had diabetes and was going blind, and thought it might make a good story for younger readers. But I’ll never write it, just as I never properly wrote about Herb Wallagher and had to accept defeat there. Some life is only life, and unconjugatable, just as to some questions there are no answers. Just nothing to say. I have passed the catcher’s story and my thoughts on to Catherine Flaherty, in the event her current plans do not work out.
Things occur to me differently now, just as they might to a character at the end of a good short story. I have different words for what I see and anticipate, even different sorts of thoughts and reactions; more mature ones, ones that seem to really count. If I could write a short story, I would. But I don’t believe I could, and do not plan to try, which doesn’t worry me. It seems enough to go out to the park like a good Michigander, get the sun on my face while somewhere nearby I hear the hiss and pop of ball on glove leather. That may be a sport writer’s dreamlife. Sometimes I even feel like the man Wade told me about whose life disappeared in the landslide.
Though it’s not true that my old life has been swept away entirely. Since coming here the surprise is that I have had the chance to touch base with honest-to-goodness relatives, some cousins of my father’s who wrote me in Gotham through Irv Ornstein (my mother’s stepson) to say that a Great-Uncle Eulice had died in California, and that they would like to see me if I was ever in Florida. Of course, I didn’t know them and doubt I had ever heard their names. But I’m glad that I have now, as they are genuine salt of the earth, and I am better that they wrote, and that I have taken the time to get to know them.
Buster Bascombe is a retired railroad brakeman with a serious heart problem that could take him any hour of the day or night. And Empress, his wife, is a pixyish little right-winger who reads books like Masters of Deceit and believes we need to re-establish the gold standard, quit paying our taxes, abandon Yalta and the UN, and who smokes Camels a mile a minute and sells a little real estate on the side (though she is not as bad as those people often seem). Both of them are ex-alcoholics, and still manage to believe in most of the principles I do. Their house is a big yellow stucco bungalow outside Nokomis, on the Tamiami Trail, and I’ve driven down at least four times and had steak dinners with them and their grown children — Eddie, Claire Boothe, and (to my surprise) Ralph.
These Florida Bascombes are, to my mind, a grand family of a modern sort who trust that the world has some important things still in it, and who believe life has given them more than they ever expected or deserved of it, not excepting that young Eddie at the present time is out of work. I’m proud to be the novelty member of their family.
Buster is a big humid-eyed, pale-skinned jolly man who sees a palmist about his heart trouble and enjoys taking strangers like me into his confidence. “Your daddy was a clever man, now don’t you think he wasn’t,” he has told me on his screened back porch after dinner, in the sweet aroma of grapefruit groves and azaleas. I hardly remember my father, and so it is all news to me, news even that anyone knew him. “He had a way of seeing the future like no one else,” Buster says and grins. He’d never met my mother. And my admission that I hardly remember anyone from back then doesn’t faze him. It is merely a regrettable mistake of fate he is willing to try to correct for me, even though I have no interesting confidences to return. And truthfully, when I drive back up Highway 24 just as the light is falling beyond my condo, behind its wide avenue of date palms and lampposts, I am usually (if only momentarily) glad to have a past, even an imputed and remote one. There is something to that. It is not a burden, though I’ve always thought of it as one. I cannot say that we all need a past in full literary fashion, or that one is much useful in the end. But a small one doesn’t hurt, especially if you’re already in a life of your own choosing. “You choose your friends,” Empress said to me when I first arrived, “but where your family is concerned you don’t choose.”