“Would you just give me a big hug,” I say. “You’re a wonderful girl.”

And instantly she throws an armlock around me with a neck-crunching ferocity. “Oh, oh, oh,” she sighs into my ear, and as easy as that (I was not wrong) rapture rises in me. “Does it make you happy to have me here?” She is patting my cheek softly and staring straight at it.

“We’re going to have us some fun, you better believe what I say.”

“Oh, boy blue,” she murmurs, “boy, boy blue.” She kisses my ear until my legs tingle, and I want to squeeze my eyes shut and give up control. This is enough to bring us back up to ground level, and send us to the airport with all my old hopes ascendant.

I am easily rescued, it’s true.

At this moment it may be of interest to say a word about athletes, whom I have always admired without feeling the need to be one or to take them at all seriously, and yet who seem to me as literal and within themselves as the ancient Greeks (though with their enterprises always hopeful).

Athletes, by and large, are people who are happy to let their actions speak for them, happy to be what they do. As a result, when you talk to an athlete, as I do all the time in locker rooms, in hotel coffee shops and hallways, standing beside expensive automobiles—even if he’s paying no attention to you at all, which is very often the case—he’s never likely to feel the least bit divided, or alienated, or one ounce of existential dread. He may be thinking about a case of beer, or a barbecue, or some man-made lake in Oklahoma he wishes he was waterskiing on, or some girl or a new Chevy shortbed, or a discothèque he owns as a tax shelter, or just simply himself. But you can bet he isn’t worried one bit about you and what you’re thinking. His is a rare selfishness that means he isn’t looking around the sides of his emotions to wonder about alternatives for what he’s saying or thinking about. In fact, athletes at the height of their powers make literalness into a mystery all its own simply by becoming absorbed in what they’re doing.

Years of athletic training teach this; the necessity of relinquishing doubt and ambiguity and self-inquiry in favor of a pleasant, self-championing one-dimensionality which has instant rewards in sports. You can even ruin everything with athletes simply by speaking to them in your own everyday voice, a voice possibly full of contingency and speculation. It will scare them to death by demonstrating that the world—where they often don’t do too well and sometimes fall into depressions and financial imbroglios and worse once their careers are over—is complexer than what their training has prepared them for. As a result, they much prefer their own voices and questions or the jabber of their teammates (even if it’s in Spanish), And if you are a sportswriter you have to tailor yourself to their voices and answers: “How are you going to beat this team, Stu?” Truth, of course, can still be the result—“We’re just going out and play our kind of game, Frank, since that’s what’s got us this far”—but it will be their simpler truth, not your complex one—unless, of course, you agree with them, which I often do. (Athletes, of course, are not always the dummies they’re sometimes portrayed as being, and will often talk intelligently about whatever interests them until your ears turn to cement.)

An athlete, for example, would never let a story like the one Vicki just told me get to him, even though the same feelings might strike him in the heart. He is trained not to let it bother him too much or, if it bothers him more than he can stand, to go outside and hit five hundred balls off the practice tee or run till he drops, or bash himself head-on into a piece of complicated machinery. I admire that quality more than almost any other I can think of. He knows what makes him happy, what makes him mad, and what to do about each. In this way he is a true adult. (Though for that, it’s all but impossible for him to be your friend.)

For the last year I was married to X, I was always able to “see around the sides” of whatever I was feeling. If I was mad or ecstatic, I always realized I could just as easily feel or act another way if I wanted to—somber or resentful, ironic or generous—even though I might’ve been convinced that the way I was acting probably represented the way I really felt even if I hadn’t seen the other ways open. This can be an appealing way to live your life, since you can convince yourself you’re really just a tolerant generalist and kind toward other views.

I even had, in fact, a number of different voices, a voice that wanted to be persuasive, to promote good effects, to express love and be sincere, and make other people happy—even if what I was saying was a total lie and as distant from the truth as Athens is from Nome. It was a voice that totally lacked commitment, though it may well be this is as close as you can ever come to yourself, your own voice, especially with someone you love: mutual agreement with no significant irony.

This is what people mean when they say that so-and-so is “distanced from his feelings.” Only it’s my belief that when you reach adulthood that distance has to close until you no longer see those choices, but simply do what you do and feel what you feel—marriage you may have to relinquish, of course. “Seeing around” is exactly what I did in my stories (though I didn’t know it), and in the novel I abandoned, and one reason why I had to quit. I could always think of other ways I might be feeling about what I was writing, or other voices I might be speaking in. In fact, I could usually think of quite a number of things I might be doing at any moment! And what real writing requires, of course, is that you merge into the oneness of the writer’s vision—something I could never quite get the hang of, though I tried like hell and eventually sunk myself. X was always clear as spring water about how she felt and why she did everything. She was completely reliable and resistant to nuance and doubt, which made her a wonderful person for a fellow like me to be married to, though I’m not certain she’s so sure about things now.