by Richard Ford
“You might be wrong. I could still make the line-up.”
She looks at me distrustfully. “Eyes are important to me, okay? They’re windows to your soul. And your eyes … I used to think I could see your soul back in there. But now….” She shakes her head in doubt.
“What do you see?” I don’t want to hear the answer. It is a question I would never even ask Mrs. Miller, and one she’d never take it upon herself to speculate about. We do not, after all, deal in truths, only potentialities. Too much truth can be worse than death, and last longer.
“I don’t know,” Vicki says, in a thin wispy way, which means I had better not pursue it or she’ll decide. “What’re you so interested in my stepbrother for?” She looks at me oddly.
“I don’t know your stepbrother,” I say.
She picks up the wallet and holds the snapshot up so I am looking directly into the swarthy smart-aleck’s face. “Him,” she says. “This poor old thing, here.”
So much of life can’t be foreseen. A hundred private explanations and exculpations come rushing up into my throat, and I have to swallow hard to hold them back. Though, of course, there is nothing to say. Like all needless excuses, the unraveling is not worth the time. However, I feel a swirling dreaminess, an old familiar bemusement, suddenly rise into my appreciation of everything around me. Irony is returned. I have a feeling that if I tried to speak now, my mouth would move, but no sound would occur. And it would scare us both to death. Why, in God’s name, isn’t it possible to let ignorance stay ignorance?
“That poor boy’s already dead and gone to heaven,” Vicki says. She turns the picture toward her and looks at it appraisingly. “He got killed at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. A Army truck hit him. He’s my Daddy’s wife’s son. Was. Bernard Twill. Beany Twill.” She pops the wallet closed and puts it on the table. “I didn’t even really know him. Lynette just gave me his picture for my wallet when he died. I don’t know how come I kept it.” She looks at me in a sweet way. “I’m not stayin mad. It’s just an old purse with nothin in it. Women’re strange on their purses.”
“I’m going to get back in bed,” I say in a voice that is hardly a whisper.
“Long as you’re happy, to hell with the rest. That’s a good motto, isn’t it?”
“Sure. It’s great,” I say, crawling into the big cold bed. “I’m sorry about all this.”
She smiles and sits looking at me as I pull the sheet up around my chin and begin to think that it is not a hard life to imagine, not at all, mine and Vicki Arcenault’s. In fact, I would like it as well as it’s possible to like any life: a life of small flourishes and clean napkins. A life where sex plays an ever-important nightly role—better than with any of the eighteen or so women I knew before and “loved.” A life appreciative of history and its generations. A life of possible fidelity, of going fishing with some best friend, of having a little Sheila or a little Matthew of our own, of buying a fifth-wheel travel trailer—a cruising brute—and from its tiny portholes seeing the country. Paul and Clarissa could come along and join our gang. I could sell my house and move not to Pheasant Run but to an old Quakerstone in Bucks County. Possibly when our work is done, a tour in the Peace Corps or Vista—of “doing something with our lives.” I wouldn’t need to sleep in my clothes or wake up on the floor. I could forget about being in my emotions and not be bothered by such things.
In short, a natural extension of almost all my current attitudes taken out beyond what I now know.
And what’s wrong with that? Isn’t it what we all want? To look out toward the horizon and see a bright, softened future awaiting us? An attractive retirement?
Vicki turns on the television and takes up a rapt stare at its flicking luminance. It’s ice skating at 2 A.M. (basketball’s a memory). Austria, by the looks of it. Cinzano and Rolex decorate the boards. Tai and Randy are skating under steely control. He is Mr. Elegance—flying camels, double Salchows, perfect splits and lofts. She is all in the world a man could want, vulnerable yet fiery, lithe as a swan, in this their once-in-a-lifetime, every thing-right for a flawless 10. Together they perform a perfect double axel, two soaring triple toe loops, a spinning Lutz jump, then come to rest with Tai in a death spiral on the white ice, Randy her goodly knight. And the Austrians cannot control it one more second. These two are as good as the Protopopovs, and they’re Americans. Who cares if they missed the Olympics? Who cares if rumors are true that they despise each other? Who cares if Tai is not so beautiful up close (who is, ever)? She is still exotic as a Berber with regal thighs and thunderous breasts. And what’s important is they have given it their everything, as they always do, and every Austrian wishes he could be an American for just one minute and can’t resist feeling right with the world.
“Oh, don’t you just love them two?” Vicki says, sitting cross-legged on her chair, smoking a cigarette and peering into the brightly lit screen as though staring into a colorful dream-life.
“It’s pretty wonderful,” I say.
“Sometimes I want to be her so much,” she says, blowing smoke out the corner of her mouth. “Really. Ole Randy….”
I turn and close my eyes and try to sleep as the applause goes on, and outside in the cold Detroit streets more sirens follow the first one into the night. And for a moment I find it is really quite easy and agreeable not to know what’s next, as if the sirens were going out into this night for no one but me.
6
Snow. By the time I leave my bed, a blanket of the gently falling white stuff has covered the concrete river banks from Cobo to the Ren-Cen, the river sliding by brackish and coffee-colored under a quilted Michigan sky. So much for a game under the lights. Spring has suddenly disappeared and winter stepped in. I am certain by tomorrow the same weather will have reached New Jersey (we are a day behind the midwest in weather matters), though by then, here will have thawed and grown mild again. If you don’t like the weather, wait ten minutes.
Vicki is still deep asleep in her black crepe de Chine, and though I would like to wake her and have a good heart-to-heart, last night feels otherwordly, and optimism about “us two” is what’s in need of emphasizing. A talk can always wait till later.
I shower and dress in a hurry, pockets loaded with note pads and a small recorder, and head off to breakfast and my trip to Walled Lake. I leave a note on the bed table saying I’ll be back by noon, and she should watch a movie on HBO and have a big breakfast sent up.
The Pontchartrain lobby has a nice languorous-sensuous Saturday feel despite the new snow, which the bellhops all agree is “freakish” and can’t last past noon, though a number of guests are lining up to check out for the airport. The black newsstand girl sells me a Free Press with a big smile and a yawn. “I’m bout shoulda stayed in bed,” she laughs in a put-on accent. On the rack there is an issue of my magazine with a story I wrote about the surge in synchronized swimming in Mexico—all the digging work was done by staff. I’m tempted to make some mention of it just in passing, but I wander off to breakfast instead.
In the La Mediterranée Room I order two poached, dry toast and juice, and ask the waiter to hurry, while I check on the early leaders in the AL East—who’s been sent down, who’s up for a cup of coffee. The Free Press sports section has always been my favorite. Photographs galore. A crisp wide-eyed layout with big, readable coldtype print and a hometown writing style anyone could feel at home with. There is a place for literature, but a bigger one for sentences that are meant to be read, not mused over: “Former Brother Rice standout, Phil Staransky, who picked up a couple timely hits in Wednesday’s twi-nighter, on the way to going three-for-four, already has plenty of experts around Michigan and Trumbull betting he’ll see more time at third before the club starts its first swing west. Pitching Coach Eddie Gonzalez says there’s no doubt the Hamtramck native ‘figures in the big club’s plans, especially,’ Gonzalez notes, ‘since the young man left off trying to pull everything and began swinging with his head.’” When I was
in college I had a pledge bring it right to my bed every morning, and was even a mail subscriber when we first moved to Haddam. From time to time I think of quitting the magazine and coming back out to do a column. Though I’m sure it’s too late for that now. (The local sports boys never take kindly to the national magazine writers because we make more money. And in fact, I’ve been given haywire information from a few old beat writers, which, if I’d used it, would’ve made me look stupid in print.)
It has the feeling of an odd morning, despite the friendly anonymity of the hotel. A distinct buzzing has begun in the pit of my stomach, a feeling that is not unpleasant but insistent. Several people I saw in the lobby have reminded me of other people I know, an indicator that something exceptional’s afoot. A man in the checkout line reminded me of—of all people—Walter Luckett. Even the black shop girl put me in mind of Peggy Connover, the woman I used to write in Kansas and whose letters caused X to leave me. Peggy, in fact, was Swedish and would laugh to think she looked a bit Negroid. Like all signs, these can be good or bad, and I choose to infer from them that life, anyone’s life, is not as disconnected and random as it might feel, and that down deep we’re all reaching out for a decent rewarding contact every chance we get.
Last night, after Vicki went to sleep, I experienced the strangest dream, a dream I’ve never had before and one I would rather not have again. I am not much of a dreamer to begin with, and almost never remember them past the moment just before my eyes open. When I do, I can usually ascribe everything to something I’ve eaten in the afternoon, or to a book I’d been reading. And for the most part there’s never much that’s familiar in them anyway.
But in this dream I was confronted by someone I knew—a man—but had forgotten—though not completely, because there were flashes of recollection I couldn’t quite organize into a firm picture-memory. This man mentions to me—so obliquely that now I can’t even remember what he said—something shameful about me, clearly shameful, and it scares me that he might know more and that I’ve forgotten it, but shouldn’t have. The effect of all this was to shock me roundly, though not to wake me up. When I did wake up at eight, I remembered the entire dream clear as a bell, though I could not fill in names or faces or the shame I might’ve incurred.
Besides not being a good collector of my dreams, I am not much a believer in them either or their supposed significance. Everyone I’ve ever talked to about dreams—and Mrs. Miller, I’m happy to say, feels exactly as I do, and will not listen to anyone’s dreams—everyone always interprets their dreams to mean something unpleasant, some lurid intention or ungenerous, guilty desire crammed back into the subconscious cave where its only chance is to cause trouble at a later time.
Whereas what I ama proponent of is forgetting. Forgetting dreams, grievances, old flaws in character—mine and others’. To me there is no hope unless we can forget what’s said and gone before, and forgive it.
Which is exactly why this particular dream is bothersome. It is about forgetting, and yet there seems to be a distinct thread of unforgiving in it, which is the source of the shock I felt even deep in sleep, in an old town where I feel as comfortable as a Cossack in Kiev, and where I want nothing more than that the present be happy and for the future—as it always does—to look after itself. I would prefer to think of all signs as good signs, or else to pay no attention to them at all. There are enough bad signs all around (read the New York Times) not to pick out any particular one for attention. In the case of my dream, I can’t even think of what I ought to be anxious about, since I am eager—even ascendant. And if it is that I’m anxious in the old mossy existential sense, it will have to stay news to me.
It is, of course, an irony of ironies that X should’ve left me because of Peggy Connover’s letters, since Peggy and I had never committed the least indiscretion.
She was a woman I met on a plane from Kansas City to Minneapolis, and whom in the space of an afternoon, a dinner, and an evening, I came to know as much about as you could know in that length of time. She was thirty-two and not at all an appealing woman. She was plump with large, white teeth and a perfectly pie-shaped face. She was leaving her family with four children, back in the town of Blanding, Kansas, where her husband sold insulation, to go live with her sister in northern Minnesota and become a poet. She was a good-natured woman, with a nice dimpled smile, and on the plane she began to tell me about her life—how she had gone to Antioch, studied history, played field hockey, marched in peace marches, written poems. She told me about her parents who were Swedish immigrants—a fact that had always embarrassed her; that she dreamed sometimes of huge trucks going over cliffs and woke up terrified; about writing poems that she showed to her husband, Van, then hearing him laugh at them, though he later told her he was proud of her. She told me she had been a sexpot in college, and had married Van, who was from Miami of Ohio, because she loved him, but that they weren’t on the same level educationally, which hadn’t mattered then, but did now, which was why she felt she was leaving him.
When we got off the plane she asked me, standing in the concourse, where I was staying, and when I told her the Ramada, she said she could just as easily stay there and that maybe we could have dinner together because she liked talking to me. And since I had nothing else to do, I said okay.
In the next five hours we had a buffet dinner, then after that went down to my room to drink a bottle of German wine she had bought for her sister, and she talked some more, with me just adding a word here and there. She told me about her break with Lutheranism, about her philosophy of child-rearing, about her theories of Abstract Expressionism, the global village, and a Great Books course she’d built up to teach somewhere if the chance ever came along.
At eleven-fifteen, she stopped talking, looked down at her pudgy hands and smiled. “Frank,” she said, “I just want to tell you that I’ve been thinking about sleeping with you this whole time. But I don’t really think I should.” She shook her head. “I know we’re supposed to do what our senses dictate, and I’m very attracted to you, but I just don’t think it would be right, do you?”
Her face looked troubled by this, but when she looked at me a big hopeful smile came on her lips. And what I felt for her then was a great and comprehending nostalgia, because for some reason I thought I knew just exactly how she felt, alone and at the world’s mercy, the same way I’d felt when I’d been in the Marines, suffering from an unknown disease with no one but unfriendly nurses and doctors to check on me, and I had had to think about dying when I didn’t want to. And what it made me feel about Peggy Connover was that I wanted to make love to her—more, in fact, than I’d wanted to do that in a long time. It’s possible, let me tell you, to become suddenly attracted to a woman you don’t really find attractive; a woman you’d never want to take to dinner, or pick up at a cocktail party, or look twice at in an elevator, only just suddenly it happens, which was the case with Peggy.
Though what I said was, “No, Peggy, I don’t think it would be right. I think it’d cause a lot of trouble.” I don’t know why I said this or said it in this way, since it wasn’t what my senses were dictating.
Peggy’s face lit up with pleasure, and also, I think, surprise. (This is always the most vulnerable time in such encounters. At the very moment you absolve yourself of any intention to do wrong, you often roll right into each other’s arms. Though we didn’t.) What happened was that Peggy came over to the bed where I was sitting, sat beside me, took my hand and squeezed it, gave me a big damp kiss on the cheek and sat smiling at me as if I were a man like no other. She told me how lucky she felt to meet me and not some “other type,” since she was vulnerable that night, she said, and probably “fair game.” We talked for a while about how she was probably going to feel in the morning after having drunk all that wine, and that we would probably want a lot of coffee. Then she said that if it was all right she’d like to find something I’d written and read it and write me about it. And I said I’d like that. Then as
if by some secret signal she came around the bed, pulled back the covers, climbed in beside me and went immediately to snoring sleep. I slept beside her the rest of the night fully clothed, on top of the covers, and never touched her once. And in the morning I left before she woke up, to go interview a football coach, and never saw her again.
After about a month, a fat letter—the first of several from Peggy Connover—arrived at the house, full of talk about her kids, humorous remarks about her welfare, her weight, her ailments, about Van, whom she’d decided to go back to live with, what plans she was making for their life; but also about stories of mine she’d read in the magazine and had comments on (she liked some but not every one), all of it in the same chatty voice as when we’d talked, closing each time with “Well, Frank, hope to see you again real soon. Love, Peg.” All of which I was happy to hear about, and even answer a time or two, since it pleased me that, as we had never been more than friends, we could still be, with everything hunky-dory. And it pleased me that somewhere out in the remote world someone was thinking of me for no bad reason at all, and even wishing me well.
These, of course, were the letters X found in the drawer of my desk when she was looking for the sack of silver dollars she feared might’ve been stolen. And it was these letters that in some way made our life seem to break apart for her, and made continuing somehow seem impossible (I found it likewise impossible to explain anything then, since much else was wrong already). X believed, I think, when she read Peggy Connover’s letters, that if these chatty, normal over-the-fence-sounding sentiments were hidden there in my drawer (they weren’t hidden, of course), in all probability more letters full of similar good sense and breezy humor were going out (she was right). And that there was none of that around the house for her. And she began to think, then, that love was simply a transferable commodity for me—which may even be true—and she didn’t like that. And what she suddenly concluded was that she didn’t want to, or have to, be married to someone like me a second longer—which is exactly how it happened.