I could never yearn for anyone who called me Bascombe.

“A lot of people are where they belong, Rhonda. I’m one of them.”

“You’re talented, God knows.” She taps something hard near the phone with a pencil eraser. “I’ve read those short stories, you know. They’re very, very good.”

“Thanks for saying so.”

“Did you ever think about writing another book?”

“No.”

“You should. You should move up here. At least stay in sometime. You’d see.”

“What would I see?”

“You’d see it’s not so bad.”

“I’d rather have something wonderful, not just not so bad, Rhonda. I’ve pretty much got it right here.”

“In New Jersey.”

“I like it here.”

“New Jersey’s the back of an old radio, Frank. You should smell the roses.”

“I have roses in my yard. I’ll talk to you when I get back, Rhonda.”

“Great,” Rhonda says loudly and blows smoke into the receiver. “Do you want to make any trades before the deadline?” There is an office baseball league that Rhonda is running and I’m in on it this year. It’s a good way to ride out a season.

“No. I’m sitting pat.”

“All right. Try to get some insider stuff on the NFL draft. Okay? They’re putting together the Pigskin Preview Sunday night. You can call it in.”

“Thanks, Rhonda. I’ll do my best.”

“Frank? What’re you searching for?”

“Nothing,” I say. I hang up before she has a chance to think of something else.

      I make my other calls snappy—one is to an athletic shoe designer in Denver for a “Sports Chek” round-up box I’m pulling together on foot injuries, and which other people in the office have worked on. He tells me there are twenty-six bones in the foot, and only two people in eight will ever know their correct shoe size. Of those two, one will still suffer permanent foot injury before he or she is sixty-two—due to product defect. Women, I learn, are 38 percent more susceptible than men, although men have a higher percentage of painful injuries due to body weight, stress and other athletic-related activities. Men complain less, however, and consequently amount to a hidden statistic.

Another call is to a Carmelite nun in Fayetteville, West Virginia, who is trying to run in the Boston Marathon. Once a polio victim, she is facing an uphill credentials fight in her quest to compete, and I’m glad to put a plug in for her in our “Achievers” column.

I make a follow-up call to the public relations people at the Detroit Football Club to see if they have someone they’d like to speak on behalf of the organization about Herb Wallagher, the ex-lineman, but no one is around.

Finally a call to Herb himself in Walled Lake, to let him know I’m on my way. The research department has already done a workup on Herb, and I have a thick pile of his press clips, photographs, as well as transcribed interviews with his parents in Beaver Falls, his college coach at Allegheny, his surgeon, and the girl who was driving the ski boat when Herb was injured and whose life, I’ve learned, has been changed forever. On the phone Herb is a friendly, ruminative fellow with a Beaver Falls way of swallowing his consonants— wunt for wouldn’t, shunt for shouldn’t. I’ve got before-and-after pictures of him in his playing days and today, and in them he does not look like the same person. Then he looks like a grinning tractor-trailer in a plastic helmet. Now he wears black horn-rims, and having lost weight and hair, looks like an overworked insurance agent. Linemen often tend to be more within themselves than most athletes, particularly once they’ve left the game, and Herb tells me he has decided to go to law school next fall, and that his wife Clarice has signed on for the whole trip. He tells me he doesn’t see why anybody shunt get all the education they can get, and that you’re never too old to learn, and I agree wholeheartedly, though I detect in Herb’s voice a nervy formality I can’t quite make out, as if something was bothering him but he didn’t want to make a fuss about it now.