Let Me Be Frank With You

by Richard Ford

  Friendship, in fact, has always seemed over-rated. Back in my military-school yearbook, if some poor cadet was ever shackled with the phrase “A stalwart friend,” it always meant he was a pariah whom nothing else could be said or done for. Ditto college. Supposedly—this was also in the Coolidge Institute study—emotional closeness has declined 15 percent per year in the last decade, due to social and economic mobility eroding “genuine connectedness”—which we probably didn’t need anyway. Many things, in truth, that pass through my life and mind and which I might be inclined to “share” with a friend, I have nothing to say about. All the information we’re constantly collecting and storing up in our brains and that we trust we’ll later have a use for . . . what am I or any of us supposed to do with all of it? Especially at age sixty-eight? What am I supposed to do, for instance, with the fact that armadillos cause leprosy? Or that dog bites are on the uptick? Or that there’s a rise in the religiously unaffiliated and a trend toward less community involvement? Or that tsetse flies nurse their young, just like Panda bears? It beats me. I could put it on Facebook or Twitter. But, as Eddie Medley says, everybody knows everything, and already doesn’t know what to do with it. I’m not on Facebook, of course. Though both my wives are.

  Is this “economizing on others” nothing but a blunt, shoring-up defense against death’s processional onset (as half the jury might argue)? Or, as the other half would agree, is it a blunt, shoring-up acceptance of the very same thing? I’d say neither. I’d say it’s a simple, goodwilled, fair-minded streamlining of life in anticipation of the final, thrilling dips of the roller coaster. During which ride I don’t want to be any more distracted than I already am.

  In any case, most of my friends are already dead or, like Eddie, soon will be. Every week, my reading in The Packet involves—first thing—a visit to the Corrections box on page two, for concise, reliable attendance on setting the record straight, once and for all. It’s satisfying to have something be correct—no matter what the subject is—even on the second try. After that, once I see if there’s anyone I know who’s croaked, I read at least one non-celebrity obituary—what in newpapers of yore used to be called the “Deaths of Others” page (no four-star generals or nonagenarian actresses or Negro League standouts). I do this, of course, to honor the deceased, but also quietly to take cognizance of how much any life can actually contain (a lot!), while acknowledging that for any of us a point comes when most of life’s been lived and there’s much less of it than there used to be, and yet what’s there is not to be missed or pissed away in a blur. It’s a true corrective to our woolly, reflexive shiverings about “the end.” Jettisoning friends (I could provide a list, but why bother, there weren’t many) . . . jettisoning friends, along with these small, private acts of corrective thinking, has altogether made death mean a great deal less to me than it used to; but better yet, has made life mean a great deal more.

  So far I haven’t spoken about any of this to Sally, although I mean to. She would only tell me—since she now sees the world through a prism of grief—that I started feeling this way because of the hurricane and the terrible, anonymous death it exacted; and that my actions (jettisoning friends, etc.) are a version of deep grief, which she could counsel me about if I’d let her. Since October she’s been dedicating herself, over on The Shore, to elderly Jersey-ites who’ve lost everything, trying to give them something to look forward to at average age ninety-one. (What could that be?) Though lately I’ve noticed her more and more staring at me, as she did when I was combing my hair in the bathroom, and she was questioning me about Eddie. By staring, it’s almost as if she wants to ask me, “Where did you come from?” Or more to the point, “Where did I come from? And why, by the way, am I here now?” I take this to be some unknown-by-me-yet-well-documented syndrome of grief counseling, and itself another consequence of the hurricane, like the callers on WHAD are always going on about. Sally’s at present studying for her state grief-counseling “certification” and is only an “adult trainee”—though she’s proved herself skillful and is much in demand at the disaster sites. But if you’re a grief counselor and hard at the hard business of counseling the truly grieved—whereas I’m only here on the sidelines and not, in my opinion, suffering any evident grief—then the natural inclination would be to suspect that I’m either irrelevant, or that I’m suffering an even worse grief than anyone knows. Or third, that I’m a malcontent who has too much time on his hands and needs to find better ways to be useful. Determining which of those is true isn’t so easy in any life.

  On another occasion, when I noticed Sally staring at me in the undisguisedly estimating way she’s lately adopted, she said—wrinkling her nose as if she smelled something bad—“Sweetheart, have you ever thought of writing a memoir? Your life’s had a pretty interesting trajectory, if you ask me.”

  This is not true at all. My life’s fine, in most ways, but doesn’t have a “trajectory.” It’s only the budding mental-health professional in Sally to want to compliment and encourage me—a form of freelance counseling. Though less likably, saying this gives the spurious concept of a “trajectory” a pointless life of its own. In other words, it gives me something different to deal with instead of what I am dealing with—which, happily enough, is not that much.

  “Not really,” I said in reply to the memoir-trajectory suggestion. I was at that moment on my knees, tightening a threaded drain-collar under the kitchen sink, where the coupling had leaked and rotted the floorboards. I wasn’t being completely truthful. Years ago, when my career as a novelist went south, and before I signed on to be a sportswriter in New York, I’d thought (for about twenty minutes) of writing “something memoiristic” about the death of my young son Ralph Bascombe. At that time, all I could come up with was a title, “In the Hands of a Lesser Writer” (which seemed merely accurate), and a good first line, “I’ve always suffered fools well, which is why I sleep so soundly at night.” I had no idea what that meant, but after writing it, I had nothing else to say. Most memoirists don’t have much to say, though they work hard trying to turn that fact into a vocation. “Truth is,” I said to Sally from up under the sink, “I’ve been decommissioning polluted words out of my vocabulary lately. You may not have noticed. I’m keeping an inventory.” I cocked my head around and smiled up at her from the kitchen floor like a happy plumber. I didn’t want to dismiss her suggestion out of hand, though neither did I want to give it serious thought. I knew that my decommissioning words could very easily make her think I was unhinged. She already believes that because I had a happy childhood, I’ve probably suppressed a host of bad things (which I hope is true). Any thought of saying I was also now jettisoning friends would’ve made an even more airtight argument for my holding on to a “secret grief”—something I have no evidence of and don’t believe.

  She gave me another one of the “looks”—hip thrown, mouth mumped, brows worried, arms crossed, right foot wagging on its heel, the way you might stand in line at Rite Aid when things were taking too long.

  “Will you tell me something?” Her thumbs began touching the tips of her fingers on both hands—doing it, then doing it again, like a compulsive.

  “I’ll try,” I said, back tightening the threaded collar on the sink drain with a pipe wrench four times bigger than I needed but that once belonged to my father and thus was sacred.

  “What do you think of me?”

  Cooped up under the fetid sink—plastic cleanser bottles, astringents, nasty sponges, Brillo pads, colorful scrubbers, a couple of grimy mousetraps, and the sweet-smelling yellow-plastic garbage pail unhealthily near my face—I managed to say, “Why do you want to know that?”

  “Things can change,” she said. “I know that.”

  “Not everything,” I said. “That’s why most memoirs aren’t any good. It takes genius to make that fact interesting.”

  “Oh,” Sally said.

  What I thought she really meant by asking such a question for no good reason was: “What d
o I think of you?” It’s not an unusual question. Married people ask it night and day whether they know it or not, especially second-tour veterans like us. They just rarely say it—like Sally didn’t. I was being routinely evaluated. It happens. But I still didn’t want to write a memoir. Reading for the blind and welcoming home heroic soldiers at the airport is plenty enough for me as “my contribution”—and therapy.

  “I love you,” I said, as the collar snugged satisfyingly against the pipe and bit into the white silicone I’d applied.

  “Do you really think you do?” Her pretty head and face and mouth and eyes were above me. Possibly she was looking out the kitchen window at our snowy back yard. Our lawyer neighbors had swagged tiny white Christmas lights all through the leafless oak boughs. Their back yard glittered and shone. They are party givers.

  “I think it and live it,” I said, fingering the pipe and the emulsion for a guilty hint of moisture, and finding none. I began backing out with my huge wrench.

  “I love you. I . . .” Sally started to say something more, then paused and stepped aside so I could climb up, holding the lip of the sink. “I guess I’m under a strain with my clients. I feel a little incognito.” She took a sip from a glass of Sancerre she’d poured without my knowing it. Tiny tree lights outside were twinkling in the afternoon gloom of mid-December. “You’re not grieving at all, are you?” A tear in her left eye but not her right. Her wonderful asymmetry. One of her legs is also slightly shorter than its mate—and yet perfect.

  “Not this pig,” I said. My old Michigan joke. “I’m the happiest man in the world. Don’t I oink it?”

  “You do. You oink it,” she said. “Just checking. Sorry.” And that seemed to do the trick.

  WHEN I WOKE UP THIS MORNING, CHRISTMAS EVE day, I found myself thinking of Eddie Medley. Something in his voice—the phone message and on the radio—hoarse, frail, but revealing of an inward-tending-ness that spoke of pathos and solitude, irreverence and unexpected wonder. More the tryer than I’d first thought, but caked over by illness and time. Even in a depleted state, he seemed to radiate what most modern friendships never do, in spite of all the time we waste on them: the chance that something interesting could be imparted, before-the-curtain-sways-shut-and-all-becomes-darkness. Something about living with just your same ole self all these years, and how enough was really enough. I didn’t know anyone else who thought that. Only me. And what’s more interesting in the world than being agreed with?

  But still. Nobody wants to see a dying man—not even his mother. Had I thought one thought about Eddie prior to now, he’d have been on the list for jettisoning. But since I no longer have to do anything I don’t want to do, feeling an active, persistent sensation of reluctance can become a powerful source of interest all its own, after which doing the supposedly unwanted thing can become irresistible. As old Trollope said, “Nothing surely is as potent as a law that may not be disobeyed.” I could at least call Eddie on the telephone.

  I therefore hunted up the Haddam “purple pages.” An Edward Medley still resided at #28 Hoving Road, four down and across from my old Tudor family home—long since bulldozed for a rich man’s showplace—then rife on the Haddam townscape, but less so now with realty cratered and Bush’s recession that Obama took the heat for.

  Standing in the kitchen, I called Eddie’s number—because I could. A watery-warm, half-sunny springlike morning had turned the tree trunks damp and black and punky. The ground was sogged, almost snowless, and puddled—the grass showing-through still green, the rhododendrons unfurled as if it was March. Three nights before, when I drove to visit my former wife, Ann, in her fancy facility where she has Parkinson’s, winter’s icy curtain had already descended—rain, sleet, snow, and cold fused together. Today, all was forgiven.

  “Mr. Medley’s house,” a softly resonant, funereal voice said. A man’s. Not Eddie’s.

  “Hi,” I said. “It’s Frank Bascombe calling. I’m trying to reach Eddie. He left me a couple of messages. I’m just calling back.” My heart started whomping—boompety, boomp, boomp, boompety. I knew already. A miscalculation. Potentially a bad one—the sweetening weather possibly was the resolve weakener, along with having too much time on my hands. As I’ve been told. I began handing the receiver to its wall cradle, as if I’d just seen a burglar’s head pass my window and needed to find a place to hide, my heart boompeting . . .

  “Is it ole Basset?” A drastic voice buzzed through the extended earpiece, trapping me with my name. Basset Hound. Why are we such fuck-ups? Why couldn’t the wrong thing just declare itself without my having to dip a fucking toe in? Errors are errors long before we commit them. “Frank?” Eddie—hoarse, failing, spectral voice and all—had me pinioned via his speaker phone, through which he sounded even more back-from-the-dead than before. And nobody I wanted to talk to. A big, eruptive tussis boiled up through the line. I should’ve clicked off, “lost” the connection and beat it out the front door. Most people are happy with someone having tried. “Are you there, Basset?” Eddie was shouting. The dense webbing in his lungs made a worrisome, organic groaning noise. “Oh, shit,” he said. “I lost the fucker.”

  “I’m here,” I said tentatively.

  “He’s on! I got him. Okay!” Whoever owned the funereal voice—a male nurse, a hospice worker, a “companion”—also said “Okay,” from the background.

  “When’re you coming over here?” Eddie shouted. “You better hurry up. I’m hearing bells.”

  Not that far away on Hoving Road, Eddie was hearing the same bells I was hearing in my kitchen—the carillon at St. Leo the Great RC, gonging out Angels we have heard on-high, sweetly singing o’er the plain . . .

  “Well . . . Look. Eddie . . .” I tried to say.

  “Why didn’t you call me back, you jackass?” Cough. Groan. Organ deep “Uuuhooo wow. Jesus.”

  “I am calling back,” I said, irritably. “This is calling back. I’m doing it. I was busy.” Boomp-boomp-boomp.

  “I’m busy, too,” Eddie said. “Busy getting dead. If you want to catch me live, you better get over here. Maybe you don’t want to. Maybe you’re that kind of chickenshit. Pancreatic cancer’s gone to my lungs and belly. I’m not catching, though . . .”

  “I’ll . . .”

  “It is goddamn efficient. I’ll say that. They knew how to make cancer when they made this shit. Two months ago I was fine. I haven’t seen you in a long time, Frank. Where the hell have you been?” Cough, wheeze. “Uuuhooo,” again.

  The mellow male voice said, “Just ease back, Eddie.”

  “Okay. Owwww! That goddamn hurts. Owww. OWWW!” Something was crunching against the speaker like Christmas foil. “What’re you trying to do to me . . . Frank? Are you coming?”

  “I’m . . .” Eddie was way too much of a tryer, I saw—the way he always was. I never really liked him, agreement or no agreement.

  “I’m what? I’m an asshole? Grant a dying man his wish, Frank. Is that too much for you? I guess it is. Jesus.”

  “Okay. I’ll come,” I said quickly—trapped, miserable. “Sit tight, Eddie.”

  “Sit tight?” Cough. “Okay. I’ll sit tight. I can do that.”

  The soft voice again, “That’s good, Eddie. Just . . .” Then the line was empty between us. I was alone and breathless—in my kitchen. A pronged filament of golden sunlight passed through the chilled window from the back yard, brightened the dark countertop in front of me. My heart was still rocketing, my hand clutching the receiver out of which someone had just been speaking to me and now was gone. Too fast. Reluctance to acquiescence. I hadn’t meant it to come out this way. Possibly I didn’t have enough to do. I needed to find strategies to avoid such moments as this.

  A WITTERING URGENCY HAS COMMANDEERED MY DAY and self. Plans I might’ve had have gone a-flutter. Packing for my Christmas Day trip to KC is postponed. Practice, which I do for reading-to-the-blind, is now put off ’til later (I’m reading Naipaul—always tricky). I know I’ve claimed to leave 60 perc
ent of available hours for the unexpected—a galvanizing call to beneficent action, in this case. But what I mostly want to do is nothing I don’t want to do.

  Still, in thirty minutes, I’m out the door, to my car and the moist, milky winter-warm morning. A big L-10 is just whistling over—so low I can almost see tiny faces peering down, quizzical, as New Jersey’s middle plain rises to greet them. On our rare ocean-wind days, the Newark approaches shift westward, and the in-bounds from Paris and Djibouti lumber in at tree tops, so that we might as well live in Elizabeth. The current warm snap also denotes new weather moving across from Ohio, readying a jolly white Christmas for wise stay-at-homes, though a nightmare for the imprudent—me—flying on Christmas Day, using miles.

  My Christmas-trip idea, in its first positive iteration, was for a festive family fly-in to ole San Antone (my life-long dream is to visit the Alamo—proud monument to epic defeat and epic resilience), all bankrolled by me, including a stay at the Omni, an early-season Spurs’ game, capped off by a big Christmas almuerzo at the best “real Mexican” joint money could buy—La Fogata, on Vance (I did my research). Others could then wander the River Walk and do as others wanted, while Sally and I took a driving trip up to the Pedernales and the LBJ shrines—locales of dense generational interest and meaning; then backtrack through Austin so I could see the Charles Whitman Tower from sixty-six, then be climbing onto Southwest by the twenty-eighth, headed home to the Garden State.

  None of which worked out. Sally decided the grievers of South Mantoloking needed her “at this critical holiday season” more than I did. Clarissa, in Scottsdale, is currently having “issues” with her brother, who means to expand his garden-supply business to include a rent-to-own outlet in the building next door—which she and I oppose. They’re not talking. In the face of our opposition, Paul has declared the Alamo (the “à la mode” in his parlance) to be an historical bad joke and waste of time and blood, and that no one should ever enter Texas in the first place. Instead, he’s insisted I come to KC, where he can grill me about his rent-to-own theories. Not very appealing, to be honest. Though it’s what I’ve decided, since there are days (which must be true for all fathers) when I badly miss my surviving son—as strange a man as he is and will be. Plus, I don’t want to be home alone on Christmas.