I didn’t need to answer that right now, that’s all. It’s one of my failings. I always answer questions I don’t need to. I’d do better just going along.”

“It’s me that shouldn’t ask it. But you’re going to let me make you happy, aren’t you?” I smile hopefully at her. What business do I have wanting to know any of this? I’m my own worst enemy.

“I’m happy. God, I’m real happy.” And she throws her arms around me and cries a tiny tear on my cheek (a tear, I want to believe, of happiness) just as the driver cranes his neck in and waves us out. “I’d marry you,” she whispers. “I didn’t mean to make fun of you asking me. I’ll marry you any time.”

“We’ll try to fit it into our agenda, then,” I say and touch her moist soft cheek as she smiles through another fugitive tear.

And then we are up and out and down and into the dashing wet wind of Detroit, and the squabbly street where our suitcases sit in a sop of old melted snow like cast-off smudges. A lone policeman stands watching, ready to chart their destination from this moment on. Vicki squeezes my arm, her cheek on my shoulder, as I heft the two cases. Her plaid canvas is airy; mine, full of sportswriter paraphernalia, is a brick.

And I feel exactly what at this debarking moment?

At least a hundred things at once, all competing to take the moment and make it their own, reduce undramatic life to a gritty, knowable kernel.

This, of course, is a minor but pernicious lie of literature, that at times like these, after significant or disappointing divulgences, at arrivals or departures of obvious importance, when touchdowns are scored, knock-outs recorded, loved ones buried, orgasms notched, that at such times we are any of us altogether in an emotion, that we are within ourselves and not able to detect other emotions we might also be feeling, or be about to feel, or prefer to feel. If it’s literature’s job to tell the truth about these moments, it usually fails, in my opinion, and it’s the writer’s fault for falling into such conventions. (I tried to explain all of this to my students at Berkshire College, using Joyce’s epiphanies as a good example of falsehood. But none of them understood the first thing I was talking about, and I began to feel that if they didn’t already know most of what I wanted to tell them, they were doomed anyway—a pretty good reason to get out of the teaching business.)

What I feel, in truth, as I swing these two suitcases off the wet concrete and our blue bus sighs and rumbles from the curbside toward its other routed hotels, and bellboys lurk behind thick glass intent on selling us assistance, is, in a word: a disturbance. As though I were relinquishing something venerable but in need of relinquishing. I feel a quickening in my pulse. I feel a strong sense of lurking evil (the modern experience of pleasure coupled with the certainty that it will end). I feel a conviction that I have no ethics at all and little consistency. I sense the possibility of terrible regret in the brash air. I feel the need suddenly to confide (though not in Vicki or anyone else I know). I feel as literal as I’ve ever felt—stranded, uncomplicated as an immigrant. All these I feel at once. And I feel the urge—which I suppress—to cry, the way a man would, for these same reasons, and more.

That is the truth of what I feel and think. To expect anything less or different is idiotic. Bad sportswriters are always wanting to know such things, though they never want to know the truth, never have a place for that in their stories. Athletes probably think and feel the fewest things of anyone at important times—their training sees to that—though even they can be counted on to have more than one thing in their mind at a time.

“I’ll carry my own bag,” Vicki says, pressed against me like my shadow, sniffing away a final tear of arrival happiness.