The fam and I were out at a park my wife likes for the pokemon action and my kids like for the playground. We park near this park (hee hee) near (hee hee) the public library and low and behold (why is it low and not high and behold?) they are having a street sale.
I came away with Toni Morrison's Beloved and Great Esquire Fiction: The Finest Stories from the First Fifty Years.
I read The 80 Yard Run by Irwin Shaw last night and it was fantastic. But like many stories that hold up a mirror - was sad. The story is essentially about a man who hits his personal peak on an 80 yard run for his college football team...during practice.
Instead of laying out the rest I will just urge you to read it. Read it. (Shhh, it's below)
Now of course it got me to thinking about my peak and spoiler alert - depressing. I am chuckling to myself but I think (near my, ahem, age) it is reasonable to think about the ole peak and whether or not the ole peak has come and gone or is still out there...waiting for me, like people at the luggage return at the airport.
I get the sense your peak doesn't wait for you; that you go out and get it and strangle it, throttle it, pin it to submission and then make it hit itself and you say "why are you hitting yourself? Why are you hitting yourself?"
Perhaps Positive Psychology (anyone else have to urinate?) will tell you that your attitude toward your actual or perceived peak, be it personal or athletic or musical or what have you...matters.
Split the difference: I'll have hope that I have some peak to hit but realistically I know it isn't going to be athletic or musical.
I wrote about the peak of beauty here.
My hope is that my peak will be creative. Some original work that I create and per the rules: this creation cannot be any of my children and their proxy exploits/achievements. I believe the word is 'vicariously'.
And of course the oomph of Shaw's story is that, gulp, your peak has passed. Scary to look in that mirror...isn't it?
***
IRWIN SHAW
The Eighty-Yard Run
The pass
was high and wide and he jumped for it, feeling it slap flatly against his
hands, as he shook his hips to throw off the halfback who was diving at him.
The center floated by, his hands desperately brushing Darling's knee as Darling
picked his feet up high and delicately ran over a blocker and an opposing
linesman in a jumble on the ground near the scrimmage line. He had ten yards in
the clear and picked up speed, breathing easily, feeling his thigh pads rising
and falling against his legs, listening to the sound of cleats behind him,
pulling away from them, watching the other backs heading him off toward the
sideline, the whole picture, the men closing in on him, the blockers fighting
for position, the ground he had to cross, all suddenly clear in his head, for
the first time in his life not a meaningless confusion of men, sounds, speed.
He smiled a little to himself as he ran, holding the ball lightly in front of
him with his two hands, his knees pumping high, his hips twisting in the almost
girlish run of a back in a broken field. The first halfback came at him and he
fed him his leg, then swung at the last moment, took the shock of the man's
shoulders without breaking stride, ran right through him, his cleats biting
securely into the turf. There was only the safety man now, coming warily at
him, his arms crooked, hands spread. Darling tucked the ball in, spurted at
him, driving hard, hurling himself along, all two hundred pounds bunched into
controlled attack. He was sure he was going to get past the safety man. Without
thought, his arms and legs working beautifully together, he headed right for
the safety man, stiff-armed him, feeling blood spurt instantaneously from the
man's nose onto his hand, seeing his face go awry, head turned, mouth pulled to
one side. He pivoted away, keeping the arm locked, dropping the safety man as
he ran easily toward the goal line, with the drumming of cleats diminishing
behind him.
How long ago? It was
autumn then, and the ground was getting hard because the nights were cold and
leaves from the maples around the stadium blew across the practice fields in
gusts of wind, and the girls were beginning to put polo coats over their
sweaters when they came to watch practice in the afternoon. . . .
Fifteen years.
Darling walked slowly
over the same ground in the spring twilight, in his neat shoes, a man
of thirty-five dressed
in a doublebreasted suit, ten pounds heavier
in the fifteen years, but not fat, with the years between 1925
and 1940
showing in his face.
The
coach was smiling quietly to himself and the assistant coaches were looking at
each other with pleasure the way they always did when one of the second
stringers suddenly did something fine, bringing credit to them, making their $2,ooo a year a tiny bit more secure.
Darling
trotted back, smiling, breathing deeply but easily, feeling wonderful, not
tired, though this was the tail end of practice and he'd run eighty yards. The
sweat poured off his face and soaked his jersey and he liked the feeling, the
warm moistness lubricating his skin like oil. Off in a comer of the field some
players were punting and the smack of leather against the ball came pleasantly
through the afternoon air. The freshmen were running signals on the next field
and the quarterback's sharp voice, the pound of the eleven pairs of cleats, the
"Dig, now dig!" of the coaches, the laughter of the players all
somehow made him feel happy as he trotted back to midfield, listening to the
applause and shouts of the students along the sidelines, knowing that after that run the coach would have to start
him Saturday against
Illinois.
Fifteen
years, Darling thought, remembering the shower after the workout, the hot water
steaming off his skin and the deep soapsuds and all the young voices singing with
the water streaming down and towels going and managers running in and out and
the sharp sweet smell of oil of wintergreen and everybody clapping him on the
back as he dressed and Packard, the captain, who took being captain very
seriously, coming over to him and shaking his hand and saying, "Darling,
you're going to go places in the next two years."
The
assistant manager fussed over him, wiping a cut on his leg with alcohol and
iodine, the little sting making him realize suddenly how fresh and whole and
solid his body felt. The manager slapped a piece of adhesive tape over the cut,
and Darling noticed the sharp clean white of the tape against the ruddiness
of the skin, fresh from the shower.
He
dressed slowly, the softness of his shirt and the soft warmth of his wool socks
and his flannel trousers a reward against his skin after the harsh pressure of
the shoulder harness and thigh and hip pads. He drank three glasses of cold
water, the liquid reaching down coldly inside of him, soothing the harsh dry places
in his throat and belly left by the sweat and running and shouting of practice.
Fifteen years.
The sun
had gone down and the sky was green behind the stadium and he laughed quietly
to himself as he looked at the stadium, rearing above the trees, and knew that
on Saturday when the 70,
000 voices roared as the
team came running out onto the field, part of that enormous salute would be for
him. He walked slowly, listening to the gravel crunch satisfactorily under his
shoes in the still twilight, feeling his clothes swing lightly against his
skin, breathing the thin evening air, feeling the wind move softly in his damp
hair, wonderfully cool behind his ears and at the nape of his,neck.
Louise
was waiting for him at the road, in her car. The top was down and he noticed
all over again, as he always did when he saw her, how pretty she was, the rough
blonde hair and the large, inquiring eyes and the bright mouth, smiling now.
She threw the door open. "Were
you good today?" she asked.
"Pretty good," he said. He
climbed in, sank luxuriously into the soft leather, stretched his legs far out.
He smiled, thinking of the eighty yards. "Pretty damn
good."
She
looked at him seriously for a moment, then scrambled around, like a little
girl, kneeling on the seat next to him, grabbed him, her hands along his ears,
and kissed him as he sprawled, head back, on the seat cushion. She let go of
him, but kept her head close to his, over his. Darling reached up slowly and
rubbed the back of his hand against her cheek, lit softly by a street lamp a
hundred feet away. They looked at each other, smiling.
Louise
drove down to the lake and they sat there silently, watching the moon rise
behind the hills on the other side. Finally he reached over, pulled her gently
to him, kissed her. Her lips grew soft, her body sank into his, tears formed
slowly in her eyes. He knew, for the first time, that he could do whatever he
wanted with her.
"Tonight," he
said. "I'll call for you at seven-thirty. Can you get out?" She
looked at him. She was smiling, but the tears were still full in her eyes.
"All right," she said. "I'll get out. How about you? Won't the
coach raise hell?"
Darling grinned. "I got the
coach in the palm of my hand," he said. "Can you wait till
seven-thirty?" She grinned back at him. "No," she said.
They kissed and she started the car
and they went back to town for dinner. He sang on the way home.
Christian Darling,
thirty-five years old, sat on the frail spring grass, greener now than it ever
would be again on the practice field, looked thoughtfully up at the stadium, a
deserted ruin in the twilight. He had started on the first team that Saturday and
every Saturday after that for the next two years, but it had never been as
satisfactory as it should have been. He never had broken away, the longest run
he'd ever made was thirty-five yards, and that in a game that was already won,
and then that kid had come up from the third team, Diederich, a blank-faced
German kid from Wisconsin, who ran like a bull, ripping lines to pieces
Saturday after Saturday, plowing through, never getting hurt, never changing
his expression, scoring more points, gaining more ground than all the rest of
the team put together, making everybody's AllAmerican, carrying the ball three
times out of four, keeping everybody else out of the headlines. Darling was a
good blocker and he spent his Saturday afternoons working on the big Swedes and
Polacks who played tackle and end for Michigan, Illinois, Purdue, hurling into
huge pile-ups, bobbing his head wildly to elude the great raw hands swinging
like meat-cleavers at him as he went charging in to open up holes for Diederich
coming through like a locomotive behind him. Still, it wasn't so bad. Everybody
liked him and he did his job and he was pointed out on the campus and boys
always felt important when they introduced their girls to him at their proms,
and Louise loved him and watched him faithfully in the games, even in the mud,
when your own mother wouldn't know you, and drove him around in her car keeping
the top down because she was proud of him and wanted to show everybody that she
was Christian Darling's girl. She bought him crazy presents because her father
was rich, watches, pipes, humidors, an icebox for beer for his room, curtains,
wallets, a fifty-dollar dictionary.
"You'll spend every cent your
old man owns," Darling protested once when she showed up at his rooms with
seven different packages in her arms and tossed them onto the couch.
"Kiss me," Louise said,
"and shut up."
"Do you want to break your poor
old man?" "I don't mind. I want to buy you presents."
"Why.?"
"It makes me feel
good. Kiss me. I don't know why. Did you know that you're an important
figure?" "Yes," Darling said gravely.
"When I was waiting for you at
the library yesterday two girls saw you coming and one of them said to the
other, `That's Christian Darling. He's an important figure."'
"You're a liar."
"I'm in love with an important
figure."
"Still, why the hell did you
have to give me a forty-pound dictionary?"
"I wanted to make sure," Louise said, that you had a token of my esteem. I wanted to smother you in
tokens of my esteem."
Fifteen years ago.
They'd married when they got out of
college. There'd been other women for him, but all casual and secret, more for curiosity's sake, and vanity,
women who'd thrown themselves at him and flattered him, a
pretty mother at a summer
camp for boys, an old girl from his home town who'd suddenly blossomed into a coquette, a friend of
Louise's who had dogged him grimly
for six months and had taken advantage of the two weeks that Louise went home
when her mother died. Perhaps Louise had known, but she'd kept quiet, loving
him completely, filling his rooms with presents, religiously watching him battling
with the big Swedes and Polacks on the line of scrimmage on Saturday
afternoons, making plans for marrying him and living with him in New York and
going with him there to the night clubs, the
theaters, the good restaurants, being proud of him in advance, tall,
white-teethed, smiling, large,
yet moving lightly, with an athlete's grace, dressed in evening clothes,
approvingly eyed by magnificently dressed and famous women in theater lobbies,
with Louise adoringly at his side.
Her
father, who manufactured inks, set up a New York office for Darling to manage
and presented him with three hundred accounts, and they lived on Beekman Place
with a view of the river with fifteen thousand dollars a year between them,
because everybody was buying everything in those days, including ink. They saw
all the shows and went to all the speakeasies and spent their fifteen thousand
dollars a year and in the afternoons Louise went to the art galleries and the
matinees of the more serious plays that Darling didn't like to sit through and
Darling slept with a girl who danced
in the chorus of Rosalie and with the wife of a man who
owned three copper mines. Darling played squash three times a week and remained
as solid as a stone barn and Louise never took her eyes off him when they were
in the same room together, watching him with a secret, miser's smile, with a
trick of coming over to him in the middle of a crowded room and saying gravely,
in a low voice, "You're the handsomest man I've ever seen in my whole
life. Want a drink?"
Nineteen
twenty-nine came to Darling and to his wife and father-in-law, the maker of
inks, just as it came to everyone else. The father-in-law waited until 1933 and then blew his brains out and when Darling went to
Chicago to see what the books of the firm looked like he found out all that was
left were debts and three or four gallons of unbought ink.
"Please,
Christian," Louise said, sitting in their neat Beekman Place apartment,
with a view of the river and prints of paintings by Dufy and Braque and Picasso
on the wall, "please, why do you want to start drinking at two o'clock in
the afternoon?"
"I have nothing else
to do," Darling said, putting down his glass, emptied of its fourth drink.
"Please pass the whisky."
Louise filled his glass. "Come
take a walk with me," she said. "We'll walk along the river."
"I don't want to walk along the
river," Darling said, squinting intensely at the prints of paintings by
Dufy, Braque and Picasso.
"We'll walk along Fifth
Avenue."
"I don't want to walk along
Fifth Avenue."
"Maybe," Louise said
gently, "you'd like to come with me to some art galleries. There's an
exhibition by a man named Klee......
"I don't want to go to any art
galleries. I want to sit here and drink Scotch whisky," Darling said.
"Who the hell hung these goddam pictures up on the wall?"
"I did," Louise said.
"I hate them." "I'll take them down," Louise said.
"Leave them there. It gives me
something to do in the afternoon. I can hate them." Darling took a long
swallow. "Is that the way people paint these days?"
"Yes, Christian. Please don't
drink any more." "Do you like painting like that?"
"Yes, dear." "Really?"
"Really."
Darling looked carefully
at the prints once more. "Little Louise Tucker. The middle-western beauty.
I like pictures with horses in them. Why should you like pictures like
that?"
"I just happen to have gone to a
lot of galleries in the last few years "
"Is that what you do in the
afternoon?"
"That's what I do in the
afternoon," Louise said. "I drink in the afternoon."
Louise
kissed him lightly on the top of his head as he sat there squinting at the
pictures on the wall, the glass of
whisky held firmly in his hand. She put on her coat and went out without saying
another word. When she came back in the early evening, she had a job on a
woman's fashion magazine.
They
moved downtown and Louise went out to work every morning and Darling sat home
and drank and Louise paid the bills as they came up. She made believe she was
going to quit work as soon as Darling found a job, even though she was taking
over more responsibility day by day at the magazine, interviewing authors,
picking painters for the illustrations and covers, getting actresses to pose
for pictures, going out for drinks with the right people, making a thousand new
friends whom she loyally introduced to Darling.
"I don't like your
hat," Darling said, once, when she came in in the evening and kissed him,
her breath rich with Martinis.
"What's the matter
with my hat, Baby?" she asked, running her fingers through his hair.
"Everybody says it's very smart."
"It's too damned smart," he
said. "It's not for you. It's for a rich, sophisticated woman of
thirty-five with admirers."
Louise
laughed. "I'm practicing to be a rich, sophisticated woman of thirtyfive
with admirers," she said. He stared soberly at her. "Now, don't look
so grim, Baby. It's still the same simple little wife under the hat." She
took the hat off, threw it into a comer, sat on his lap. "See? Homebody
Number One."
"Your
breath could run a train," Darling said, not wanting to be mean, but
talking out of boredom, and sudden shock at seeing his wife curiously a
stranger in a new hat, with a new expression in her eyes under the little brim,
secret, confident, knowing.
Louise
tucked her head under his chin so he couldn't smell her breath. "I had to
take an author out for cocktails," she said. "He's a boy from the
Ozark Mountains and he drinks like a fish. He's a Communist."
"What the hell is a Communist
from the Ozarks doing writing for a woman's fashion magazine?"
Louise
chuckled. "The magazine business is getting all mixed up these days. The
publishers want to have a foot in every camp. And anyway, you can't find an
author under seventy these days who isn't a Communist."
"I don't think I
like you to associate with all those people, Louise," Darling said.
"Drinking with them." "He's a very nice, gentle boy,"
Louise said. "He reads Emest Dowson." "Who's Emest Dowson?"
Louise patted his arm, stood up,
fixed her hair. "He's an English poet." Darling felt that somehow he
had disappointed her. "Am I supposed to know who Emest Dowson is?"
"No, dear. I'd better go in and
take a bath."
After
she had gone, Darling went over to the comer where the hat was lying and picked
it up. It was nothing, a scrap of straw, a red flower, a veil, meaningless on
his big hand, but on
his wife's head a signal
of something . . . big city, smart and knowing women drinking and dining with
men other than their husbands, conversation about things a normal man wouldn't
know much about, Frenchmen who painted as though they used their elbows instead
of brushes, composers who wrote whole symphonies without a single
melody in them, writers
who knew all about politics and women who knew all about writers, the movement
of the proletariat, Marx, somehow mixed up with five-dollar dinners and the
best looking women in America and fairies
who made them laugh and
half-sentences immediately understood and secretly hilarious and wives who
called their husbands "Baby." He put the hat down, a scrap of straw
and a red flower, and a little veil. He drank some whisky straight and went
into the bathroom where his wife was lying deep in her bath, singing to herself
and smiling from time to time like a little girl, paddling the water gently
with her hands, sending up a slight spicy fragrance from the bath salts she
used.
He stood
over her, looking down at her. She smiled up at him, her eyes half closed, her
body pink and shimmering in the warm, scented water. All over again, with all
the old suddenness, he was hit deep inside him with the knowledge of how
beautiful she was, how much he needed her.
"I came in
here," he said, "to tell you I wish you wouldn't call me'Baby."'
She looked up at him from the bath, her eyes quickly full of sorrow,
halfunderstanding what he meant. He knelt and put his arms around her, his
sleeves plunged heedlessly in the water, his shirt and jacket soaking wet as he
clutched her wordlessly, holding her crazily tight, crushing her breath from
her, kissing her desperately, searchingly, regretfully.
He got
jobs after that, selling real estate and automobiles, but somehow, although he
had a desk with his name on a wooden wedge on it, and he went to the office
religiously at nine each morning, he never managed to sell anything and he
never made any money.
Louise
was made assistant editor, and the house was always full of strange men and
women who talked fast and got angry on abstract subjects like mural painting,
novelists, labor unions. Negro short-story writers drank Louise's liquor, and a
lot of Jews, and big solemn men with scarred faces and knotted hands who talked
slowly but clearly about picket lines and battles with guns and leadpipe at
mine-shaft-heads and in front of factory gates. And Louise moved among them
all, confidently, knowing what they were talking about, with opinions that they
listened to and argued about just as though she were a man. She knew everybody,
condescended to no one, devoured books that Darling had never heard of, walked
along the streets of the city, excited, at home, soaking in all the million
tides of New York without fear, with constant wonder.
Her
friends liked Darling and sometimes he found a man who wanted to get off in the
comer and talk about the new boy who played fullback for Princeton, and the
decline of the double wing-back, or even the state of the stock market, but for
the most part he sat on the edge of things, solid and quiet in the high storm
of words. "The dialectics of the situation . . . The theater has been
given over to expert jugglers ... Picasso? What man has a right to paint old
bones and collect ten thousand dollars for them? ... I stand firmly behind
Trotsky ... Poe was the last American critic. When he died they put lilies on
the grave of American criticism. I don't say this because they panned my last
book, but . . ."
Once in
a while he caught Louise looking soberly and consideringly at him through the
cigarette smoke and the noise and he avoided her eyes and found an excuse to
get up and go into the kitchen for more ice or to open another bottle.
"Come
on," Cathal Flaherty was saying, standing at the door with a girl,
"you've got to come down and see this. It's down on Fourteenth Street, in
the old Civic Repertory, and you can only see it on Sunday nights and I
guarantee you'll come out of the theater singing." Flaherty was a big
young Irishman with a broken nose who was the lawyer for a longshoreman's
union, and he had been hanging around the house for six months on and off,
roaring and shutting everybody else up when he got in an argument. "It's a
new play, Waiting
for Lefty; it's about taxi-drivers."
"Odets," the girl with
Flaherty said. "It's by a guy named Odets." "I never heard of
him," Darling said.
"He's a new one," the girl
said.
"It's like watching
a bombardment," Flaherty said. "I saw it last Sunday night. You've
got to see it." "Come on, Baby," Louise said to Darling,
excitement in her eyes already. "We've been sitting in the
Sunday Times all day, this'll be a great change."
"I see enough taxi-drivers every day," Darling said, not because he
meant that, but because he didn't like to be around Flaherty, who said things
that made Louise laugh a lot and whose judgment she accepted on almost every
subject. "Let's go to the movies."
"You've never seen anything like
this before," Flaherty said. "He wrote this play with a baseball
bat." "Come on," Louise coaxed, "I bet it's
wonderful."
"He has long hair," the
girl with Flaherty said. "Odets. I met him at a party. He's an actor. He
didn't say a goddam thing all night."
"I don't
feel like going down to Fourteenth Street," Darling said, wishing
Flaherty and his girl would get
out. "It's gloomy."
"Oh,
hell!" Louise said loudly. She looked coolly at Darling, as though she'd
just been introduced to him and was making up her mind about him, and not very
favorably. He saw her looking at him, knowing there was something new and
dangerous in her face and he wanted to say something, but Flaherty was there
and his damned girl, and anyway, he
didn't know what to say.
"I'm going," Louise said,
getting her coat. "I don't think Fourteenth Street is gloomy."
"I'm telling
you," Flaherty was saying, helping her on with her coat, "it's the
Battle of Gettysburg, in Brooklynese."
"Nobody could get a
word out of him," Flaherty's girl was saying as they went through the
door. "He just sat there all night."
The door
closed. Louise hadn't said good night to him. Darling walked around the room
four times, then sprawled out on the sofa, on top of the Sunday Times. He lay
there for five minutes looking at the ceiling, thinking of Flaherty walking
down the street talking in that booming voice, between the girls, holding their
arms.
Louise
had looked wonderful. She'd washed her hair in the afternoon and it had been
very soft and light and clung close to her head as she stood there angrily
putting her coat on. Louise was getting prettier every year, partly because she
knew by now how pretty she was, and made the most of it.
"Nuts," Darling said,
standing up. "Oh, nuts."
He put on his coat and went down to
the nearest bar and had five drinks off by himself in a comer before his money
ran out.
The
years since then had been foggy and downhill. Louise had been nice to him, and
in a way, loving and kind, and they'd fought only once, when he said he was
going to vote for Landon. ("Oh, Christ," she'd said, "doesn't
anything happen inside your head? Don't you read the papers? The penniless
Republican!") She'd been sorry later and apologized for hurting him, but
apologized as she might to a child. He'd tried hard, had gone grimly to the art
galleries, the concert halls, the bookshops, trying to gain on the trail of his
wife, but it was no use. He was bored, and none of what he saw or heard or
dutifully read made much sense to him and finally he gave it up. He had
thought, many nights as he ate dinner alone, knowing that Louise would come
home late and drop silently into bed without explanation, of getting a divorce,
but he knew the loneliness, the hopelessness, of not seeing her again would be
too much to take. So he was good, completely devoted, ready at all times to go
any place with her, do anything she wanted. He even got a small job, in a
broker's office and paid his own way, bought
his own liquor.
Then
he'd been offered a job of going from college to college as a tailor's
representative. "We want a man," Mr. Rosenberg had said, "who as
soon as you look at him, you say, 'There's a university man."' Rosenberg
had looked approvingly at Darling's broad shoulders and well-kept waist, at his
carefully brushed hair and his honest, wrinkleless face. "Frankly, Mr.
Darling, I am willing to make you a proposition. I have inquired about you, you
are favorably known on your old campus. I understand you were in the backfield
with Alfred Diederich."
Darling nodded. "Whatever
happened to him?"
"He is walking around
in a cast for seven years now. An iron brace. He played professional football and they
broke his neck for him."
Darling smiled. That, at least, had
turned out well.
"Our suits are an easy product
to sell, Mr. Darling," Rosenberg said. "We have a handsome,
custom-made garment. What has Brooks Brothers got that we haven't got? A name.
No more."
"I can make fifty-sixty dollars
a week," Darling said to Louise that night. "And expenses. I can save
some money and then come back to New York and really get started here."
"Yes, Baby," Louise said.
"As it is," Darling
said carefully, "I
can make it back here once a month, and holidays and the summer. We can see each other often."
"Yes,
Baby." He looked at her face, lovelier now at thirty-five than it had ever
been before, but fogged over now as it had been for five years with a kind of
patient, kindly, remote boredom.
"What
do you say?" he asked. "Should I take it?" Deep within him he
hoped fiercely, longingly, for her to say, "No, Baby, you stay right
here," but she said, as he knew she'd say, "I think you'd better take
it."
He
nodded. He had to get up and stand with his back to her, looking out the
window, because there were things plain on his face that she had never seen in
the fifteen years she'd known him. "Fifty dollars is a lot of money," he said. "I
never thought I'd ever see fifty dollars
again." He laughed. Louise laughed, too.
Christian Darling sat on
the frail green grass of the practice field. The shadow of the stadium had
reached out and covered him. In the distance the lights of the university shone
a little mistily in the light haze of evening. Fifteen years. Flaherty even now
was calling for his wife, buying her a drink, filling whatever bar they were in
with that voice of his and that easy laugh. Darling half-closed his eyes,
almost saw the boy fifteen years ago reach for the pass, slip the halfback, go
skittering lightly down the field, his knees high and fast and graceful,
smiling to himself because he knew he was going to get past the safety man.
That was the high point, Darling thought, fifteen years ago, on an autumn
afternoon, twenty years old and far from death, with the air coming easily into
his lungs, and a deep feeling inside him that he could do anything, knock over
anybody, outrun whatever had to be outrun. And the shower after and the three
glasses of water and the cool night air on his damp head and Louise sitting
hatless in the open car with a smile and the first kiss she ever really meant.
The high point, an eighty-yard run in the practice, and a girl's kiss and
everything after that a decline. Darling laughed. He had practiced the wrong
thing, perhaps. He hadn't practiced for 1929 and New York City and a girl who
would turn into a woman. Somewhere, he thought, there must have been a point
where she moved up to me, was even with me for a moment, when I could have held
her hand, if I'd known, held tight, gone with her. Well, he'd never known. Here
he was on a playing field that was fifteen years away and his wife was in
another city having dinner with another and better man, speaking with him a different, new language, a language nobody
had ever taught him.
Darling
stood up, smiled a little, because if he didn't smile he knew the tears would
come. He looked around him. This was the spot. O'Connor's pass had come sliding
out just to here ... the high point. Darling put up his hands, felt all over
again the flat slap of the ball. He shook his hips to throw off the halfback,
cut back inside the center, picked his knees high as he ran gracefully over two
men jumbled on the ground at the line of scrimmage, ran easily, gaining speed,
for ten yards, holding the ball lightly in his two hands, swung away from the
halfback diving at him, ran, swinging his hips in the almost girlish manner of
a back in a broken field, tore into the safety man, his shoes drumming heavily
on the turf, stiff-armed, elbow locked, pivoted, raced lightly and exultantly
for the goal line.
It was only after he had
sped over the goal line and slowed to a trot that he saw the boy and girl
sitting together on the turf, looking at him wonderingly. He stopped short,
dropping his arms, "I ... " he said, gasping a little, though his
condition was, fine, and the run hadn't winded him. "I-once I played
here."
The boy
and the girl said nothing. Darling laughed embarrassedly, looked hard at them
sitting there, close to each other, shrugged, turned and went toward his hotel,
the sweat breaking out on his face and running down into his collar.
