by Richard Ford
“What’re you thinking about, old Mr. Man?” She has attached her pair of pink earphones around her neck.
“About what a sweet thigh you’ve got and how much I’d like to pull it my way.”
“Well you surely can. Won’t nobody see you but Suzie and little Barbara, and they don’t care long as no clothes come off. That wasn’t what you were thinking anyway. I know about you, old tricky.”
“I was thinking about Candid Camera. The talking mailbox. I think that’s about the funniest thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”
“I like ’em, too. Ole Allen Funk. I thought I saw him one day in the hospital. I’d heard he lived someplace around. But then it wasn’t. A lot of people look alike now, you know it? But that still isn’t it. I’ll just let you run on.”
“You’re a smart girl.”
“I got a good memory, which you need to nurse. But I’m not really smart. I wouldn’t have married Everett if I had been.” She fattens her cheeks and smiles at me. “Are you not gonna tell me what you’re sitting there worrying?” She takes a good two-armed hold on my arm and squeezes it. She is a girl who likes squeezing. “Or am I gon have to squeeze you till you talk.” She is strong, which I think would also be a requirement for a nurse, though I am sure she doesn’t really care what’s on my mind.
In truth, of course, I have nothing to answer. Undoubtedly I was thinking something, but most things I find myself thinking seem to fly right out of my mind and I can’t remember them at all. It is a trait of character which made being a writer hard and often downright tedious. I either had to sit down and write out whatever I happened to be thinking about at any time of the day or night I happened to think it, or else just forget it all, which is what happened at the end of the time I was working on my novel. Finally I became happy to forget everything and let it all lapse. Real writers have to be more attentive, of course, and attentive was what I wasn’t much interested in being.
I do not think, in any event, it’s a good idea to want to know what people are thinking (that would disqualify you as a writer right there, since what else is literature but somebody telling us what somebody else is thinking). For my money there are at least a hundred good reasons not to want to know such things. People never tell the truth anyway. And most people’s minds, like mine, never contain much worth reporting, in which case they just make something up that’s patently ridiculous instead of saying the truth—namely, I was thinking nothing. The other side, of course, is that you will run the risk of being told the very truth of what someone is thinking, which can turn out to be something you don’t want to hear, or that makes you mad, and ought to be kept private anyway. I remember when I was a boy in Mississippi, maybe fifteen years old—just before I left for Lonesome Pines—a friend of mine got killed in a hunting accident. The very night after, Charlieboy Neblett and I (he was one of my few friends in Biloxi) sat out in Charlieboy’s car drinking beer and complaining about our having thought, then forgiving each other for thinking, that we were glad Teddy Twiford got killed. If Teddy’s mother had come by just then and asked us what we were thinking, she would’ve been flabbergasted to find out what lousy friends of Teddy’s we were. Though in fact we weren’t lousy friends at all. Things just come into your mind on their own and aren’t your fault. So I learned this all those years ago—that you don’t need to be held responsible for what you think, and that by and large you don’t have any business knowing what other people think. Full disclosure never does anybody any favors, and in any event there are few enough people in the world who are sufficiently within themselves to make such disclosure pretty unreliable right from the start. All added to the fact that this constitutes intrusion where you least need to be intruded upon, and where telling can actually do harm to everyone involved.
I remember, in fact, the Lebanese woman I knew at Berkshire College saying to me, after I told her how much I loved her: “I’ll always tell you the truth, unless of course I’m lying to you.” Which at first I didn’t think was a very good idea; though stewing over it after a while I realized that it was actually a piece of great luck. I was being promised truth and mystery—not an easy combination. There would be important things I would and wouldn’t know, and I could count on it, could look forward to it, muse on it, worry about it if I was idiot enough, which I wasn’t, and all I had to do was agree, and be forever freed.
She was a literary deconstructionist and had a mind trained for that kind of distinction. And she managed to make a policy out of a fact of life: how much of someone you can actually get to know about. Very little. Though I don’t think in the three vertiginous months we spent together she ever lied to me. There was never a reason to! I saw to that by never asking a question whose answer wasn’t already obvious. X and I might in fact have made a better go of it if she could’ve tried that strategy out on me by not asking me to explain anything that night I stood out in the rhododendrons marveling at Gemini and Cassiopeia, while her hope chest was fast going up the chimney. She might Ve understood my predicament for what it was—an expression of love and inevitability, instead of just love’s failure. Though I will not complain about it. She is fine now, I think, in most ways. And if she is not as certain about things as she once was, that is not a tragedy, and I think she will be better as time goes on.
By the time the copilot pokes his head through the tourist class curtain and gives us all the high sign, Vicki has drifted off to sleep, her head on a tiny pillow, her mouth slightly ajar. I intended to show her Lake Erie, which we’re now passing high above, green and shimmering, with gray Ontario out ahead. She is tired from too much anticipation, and I want her full of energy for our whirlwind trip. She can see the lake on the flight home, and be a slug-a-bed on Sunday night when we return from her parents.
An odd thing happened to me last night, and I would like to say something about it because it touches on the whole business of full disclosure, and because it has stayed on my mind ever since. It is, of course, what I wasn’t prepared to tell Vicki.
For the past two years I have been a member of a small group in town which we got together and called—with admirable literalness—the Divorced Men’s Club. There are five of us in all, though the constituency has changed once or twice, since one fellow got married again and moved away from Haddam to Philadelphia, and another died of cancer. In both instances someone has come along at just the right time to fill in the space, and we have all been happy to have five since that number seems to strike a balance. There have been several times when I have nearly quit the club, if you can call it a club, since I don’t think of myself as a classic joiner and don’t feel, at least anymore, that I need the club’s support. In fact, almost all of it bores the crap out of me, and ever since I began to concentrate on becoming more within myself I’ve felt like I was over the shoals and headed back to the mainstream of my own lived life. But there have been good reasons to stay. I did not want to be the first to leave as a matter of choice. That seemed niggardly to me—gloating that I had “come through,” whereas maybe the others hadn’t, even though no one has ever admitted that we do anything to support one another. To start with, none of us is that kind of confessional, soulful type. We are all educated. One fellow is a banker. One works in a local think tank. One is a seminarian, and the last guy is a stocks analyst. Ours is much more a jocular towel-popping raffish-rogueishness than anything too serious. What we mostly do is head down to the August, puff cigars, talk in booming businessmen’s voices and yuk it up once a month. Or else we pile into Carter Knott’s old van and head down to a ball game in Philadelphia or go fishing over at the shore, where we get a special party deal at Ben Mouzakis’ Paramount Show Boat Dock.
Though there’s another reason I don’t leave the club. And that is that none of the five of us is the type to be in a club for divorced men—none of us in fact even seems to belong in a place like Haddam—given our particular circumstances. And yet we are there each time, as full of dread and timidness as consc
ripts to a firing squad, doing what we can to be as chatty and polite as Rotarians—ending nights, wherever we are, talking about life and sports and business, hunched over our solemn knees, some holding red-ended cigarettes as the boat heads into the lighted dock, or before last call at the Press Box Bar on Walnut Street, all doing our best for each other and for non-confessional personal expression. Actually we hardly know each other and sometimes can barely keep the ball moving before a drink arrives. Likewise there have been times when I couldn’t wait to get away and promised myself never to come back. But given our characters, I believe this is the most in friendship any of us can hope for. (X is dead right about me in this regard.) In any case the suburbs are not a place where friendships flourish. And even though I cannot say we like each other, I definitely can say that we don’t dislike each other, which may be exactly the quiddity of all friendships that have not begun with fellows you knew before your own life became known to you—which is the case with me, and, I suppose, for the others, though I truly don’t know them well enough to say.
We met—the original five—because we’d all signed up for the “Back in Action” courses at Haddam High School, courses designed expressly for people like us, who didn’t feel comfortable in service clubs. I was enrolled in “Twentieth-Century American Presidents and Their Foreign Policies.” A couple of the other fellows were in “Water-Color Foundations” or “Straight-Talking” and we used to stand round the coffee urn on our breaks keeping our eyes diverted from the poor, sad, skinny divorced women who wanted to go home with us and start crying at 4 A.M. One thing led to another, and by the time our courses were half over we’d started going over to the August, jawing about fishing trips to Alaska and baseball trades, singling out one another’s idiosyncracies, and assigning funny names for each other like “ole Knot-head” for Carter Knott, the banker; “ole Basset Hound” for Frank Bascombe; “ole Jay-Jay” for Jay Pilcher—who, inside of a year, died alone in his house with a brain tumor he never even knew about. Perfect Babbitts, really, all of us, even though to some extent we understood that.
In a way, I suppose you could say all of us were and are lost, and know it, and we simply try to settle into our lost-ness as comfortably and with as much good manners and little curiosity as we can. And perhaps the only reason we have not quit is that we can’t think of a compelling reason to. When we do think of a good reason we’ll all no doubt quit in an instant. And I may be getting close.
But that is not so much the point as a way of getting around to it.
Yesterday was the day of our spring fishing excursion for flukes and weakfish, out of Brielle. Knot-head Knott made all the arrangements, and while Ben Mouzakis does not give us one of his boats all to ourselves for the money we pay, he usually just books one other party of congenial fellows for the afternoon and takes us out at cost since he knows we’ll talk it up in Haddam and come back ourselves next year, and because I honestly think he enjoys our company. We are all good fellows for an afternoon.
I had left Haddam in the glum spirits I’ve fallen into each year on the day before Ralph’s birthday. It had rained early just the way it did today, but by the time I had come round the traffic rotary in Neptune and turned toward the south Shore Points, the rain had swept up into the Amboys leaving me drenched in the supra-real seashore sunshine and traffic hum of Shark River, as indistinguishable from my fellow Jerseyites as a druggist from Sea Girt.
It is of course an anonymity I desire. And New Jersey has plenty to spare. A passing glance down off the bridge-lock at Avon and along the day-trip docks where the plastic pennants flutter and shore breezes dance always assures me that any one of these burly Bermuda-shorts fellows waiting impatiently with their burly wives for the Sea Fox to weigh its anchor or the Jersey Lady to cast off, could just as well be me, heading out after monkfish off Mantoloking or Deauville. Such random identifications always strike me as good practice. Better to think that you’re like your fellow man than to think—like some professors I knew at Berkshire College—that no man could be you or take your place, which is crazy and leads straight to melancholy for a life that never existed, and to ridicule.
Anyone could be anyone else in most ways. Face the facts.
Though possibly because of my skittishness, yesterday the Bermuda-shorts guys on the docks didn’t seem altogether hopeful from my distance. They seemed to be wandering off bandy-legged from their spouses down the dock planks, arms folded, faces querulous in the mealy sunshine, their natural Jersey pessimism working up a fear that the day might go wrong—in fact couldn’t go right. Someone would charge them too much for an unwanted and insignificant service; the wife would get seasick and force the boat in early; there’d be no fish and the day would end with a sad chowder at a rueful chowder house a stone’s throw from home. In other words, all’s ahead to be regretted; better to start now. I could’ve yelled right out to them: Cheer up! Chances are better than you think Things could pan out. You could have a whale of a time, so climb aboard. Though I didn’t have quite the spirits for it.
But as it happened, I would not have been more right. Ben Mouzakis had chartered half the boat to a family of Greeks—the Spanelises—from his own home village near Parga on the Ionian, and the divorced men were all on best behavior, acting like good-will ambassadors on a fortunate posting, assisting the women with their stubby rods, baiting hooks with brown chub and untangling back-lashed reels. The Greek men had their own way of fixing on bait so that it was harder to pick clean, and a good deal of time was spent learning this procedure. Ben Mouzakis eventually broke out some retsina, and by six o’clock fishing was over, the few fluke caught off the “secret reef” were packed in ice, the radio was beamed into a Greek station in New Brunswick, and everyone—the divorced men and the Spanelises, two men, three pretty women and two children—were sitting inside the long gallery cabin, elbows on knees, nodding and cupping glasses of wine and talking solemnly with the best good-neighborly tolerance about the value of the drachma, Melina Mercouri and the trip to Yosemite the Spanelises were planning for June if their money held out.
I was contented with the way the day had turned out. Sometimes an awful sense of loss comes over me when I am with these men, as profound as a tropical low. Though it has been worse in the past than yesterday. Something about them—earnest, all good-hearted fellows—seems as dreamy to me as it’s possible to be, dreamier than I am by far. And dreamy people often do not mix well, no matter what you might believe. Dreamy people actually have little to offer one another, tend in fact to neutralize each other’s dreaminess into bleary nugatude. Misery does not want company—happiness does. Which is why I have learned to stay clear of other sportswriters when I’m not working—avoid them like piranhas—since sportswriters are often the dreamiest people of all. It is another reason I will not stay in Gotham after dark. More than one drink with the boys from the office at Wally’s, a popular Third Avenue watering hole, and the dreads come right down out of the fake tin ceiling and the Tiffany hanging lamps like cyanide. My knee starts to hop under the table, and in three minutes I’m emptied of all conviction and struck dumb as a shoe and want nothing but to sit and stare away at the pictures on the wall, or at how the moldings fit the ceiling or how the mirrors in the back bar reflect a different room from the one I’m in, and fantasize about how much I’m going to enjoy my trip home. A group of sportswriters together can narrow your view far beyond pessimism, since the worst of them tend to be cynics looking only for false drama in the germs of human defeat.
Beyond that, what is it that makes me back off from even the best like-minded small talk when there is no chance of the willies nor the least taint of cynicism, and when in principle at least I like the whole idea of comradeship (otherwise why would I go fishing with the Divorced Men)? Simply, that I hate for things to get finally pinned down, for possibilities to be narrowed by the shabby impingement of facts—even the simple fact of comradeship. I am always hoping for a great surprise to open in what has
always been a possible place for it—comradeship among professionals; friendship among peers; passion and romance. Only when the facts are made clear, I can’t bear it, and run away as fast as I can—to Vicki, or to sitting up all night in the breakfast nook gazing at catalogs or to writing a good sports story or to some woman in a far-off city whom I know I’ll never see again. It’s exactly like when you were young and dreaming of your family’s vacation; only when the trip was over, you were left faced with the empty husks of your dreams and the fear that that’s what life will mostly be—the husks of your dreams lying around you. I suppose I will always fear that whatever this is, is it.
Even so, I have been happy enough on the Divorced Men’s fishing trips. My habit is not to rent a rod and reel but to walk around and exchange a wry word with the men who are fishing like demons, go get their beers, sit in the passengers’ cabin and watch television, or go up top and stand beside Ben and watch the sonar on the pilot’s deck, where he finds the fish like clouds of white metal on the dark green baize. Ben never remembers my name, though after a while he recognizes me as someone named John, and we have diverse conversations about the economy or Russian fishing vessels or baseball, which Ben is a fanatic for, and which serves as a good man-to-man connection.
On yesterday’s excursion I finished the day doing what I like best, standing at the iron rail near the bow of the Mantoloking Belle staring off at the jeweled shore lights of New Jersey, brightening as dark fell, and feeling full of wonder and illusion—like a Columbus or a pilgrim seeing the continent of his dreams take shape in the dusk for the first time. My plans for the evening were to be at Vicki’s by eight, to surprise her with an intimate German dinner at Truegel’s Red Palace on the river at Lambertville—celebrating two months of love—then have her home early. Altogether it was not a bad bunch of prospects.