A Disturbance

From The Sportswriter by Richard Ford.

The narrator - a sportswriter, thirty-eight and divorced - has taken Vicki (possibly his new potential girlfriend) to Detroit on a holiday. They have just stepped off the airport shuttle bus and are about to enter into their hotel. The getaway is full of potential and 'fun'.

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 to 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 buries, 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. [...]

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.