by Richard Ford
“I’ll tell you what let’s do,” Vicki says suddenly. She is seated at the vanity twisting in some Navajo earrings she has bought with her money at the gift shop. They are tiny as pin-heads, lovely and blue as hyacinths.
“You just name it,” I say, looking up from the Out on the Town, which I’ve read cover to cover without finding one local attraction I have the heart for—including Paul Anka, who’s already left town. Even a cab ride to Tiger Stadium and a Mexican dinner seem somehow second rate.
“Let’s go on out to the airport and stand-by for a flight. Nobody goes any place on Saturday. I remember from when I used to watch planes for fun, they used to let people on with tickets for other days. They’re good about that.”
“I thought we’d make a festive night of it,” I say half-heartedly. “I was planning on Greek Town. There’s still plenty to do here.”
“Sometimes, you know, you just get the bug to sleep in your own bed, don’t you think that’s so? We’re s’posed to be at Daddy’s tomorrow before noon anyway. This’ll make it easier.”
“Aren’t you going to be disappointed to miss souvlaki and bak-lava?”
“I don’t even know where they’re located so how could I miss ’em? I bet you have to drive through some snow to get there though.”
“I haven’t been much of a high-flier this trip. I don’t really know what happened.”
“Nothing did.” Looking in the mirror, Vicki pulls back her dark curls to model the Navajos, pinched in behind her plump cheeks. She turns to the side to see and gives me a reassuring smile via the mirror. “I don’t have to ride the merry-go-round to have fun. I take mine from who I’m with, not what I do. I’ve had the best time I could, just being with you, and you’re a clubfoot not to know it.”
“What if the airport’s closed?”
“Then I’ll sit and read stories to you out of movie magazines. There’s worse things than spending the night in the airport. Sometimes I’d rather be there than lots of places.”
“It wouldn’t be that bad, would it?”
“No sir. Put yourself in one of those little TV chairs, eat dinner in a good restaurant. Get your shoes shined. It’d take you all night to hit the high spots,”
“I’ll call us a bellman,” I say, and stand up.
“I don’t know why we waited this long.” She smiles at me.
“I guess I was waiting for something exciting and unusual to happen. I always hope for that. It’s my weakness.”
“You have to know, though, when what you’re waiting for says, ‘Smile, you’re on candid camera.’ Then you got to be ready to smile.”
And I do smile, at her, as I reach for the phone to ring the bell captain. A small future brightens, and not a bad one, but an ordinary good one. And, as I dial, I feel the sky of this long day lighten about me now for the first time, and the clouds begin at last to ascend.
By ten we are in New Jersey as if by miracle of time travel, returned from the flat midwest to the diverse seaboard. Vicki has slept across Lake Erie once again after reading to me several excerpts from Daytime Confidential, all of which made me laugh, but which she took more seriously and seemed to want to mull over, I read a good deal of Love’s Last Journey and found it not bad at all. There was no long flashback prologue to get past, and the writer proved pretty skillful at getting the ball rolling by page two. I woke her only when the pilot banked over what I estimated to be Red Bank, with bright Gotham (the Statue of Liberty tiny but distinct, like a Japanese doll of herself) and all of New Jersey spread out like a glittering diamond apron, the Atlantic and Pennsylvania looming dark as the Arctic.
“What’s that thing,” Vicki asked, staring and pointing below us into the distant carnival of civilized lights.
“That’s the Turnpike. You can see where it meets the Garden State at Woodbridge and heads to New York.”
“Hey-o,” she said.
“I think it’s beautiful from up here.”
“You prob’ly do,” she said. “No telling what you’ll think’s beautiful next. A junk yard I guess.”
“I think you’re beautiful.”
“More than a junk yard. A junk yard in New Jersey?”
“Almost.” I squeezed her strong little arm and held it to me.
“You said the wrong thing now.” Her eyes narrowed in mock pique. “I liked you to this point. But I don’t see how this can go on.”
“You’ll break my heart.”
“It won’t be the first one I broke, will it?”
“What if I’m better?”
“’Bout too late,” she said. “You should of considered all that before you were even born.” She shook her head as though she meant every word of it, then settled back and closed her eyes to sleep as our silver ship perfected its descent to earth.
By eleven-fifteen I have delivered us to Pheasant Meadow. It has become a clear and intensely full-featured night, with the moon waning and tomorrow’s weather giving no sign of arriving from Detroit. It’s the very kind of night that used to make me disoriented and dizzy—the sort of night I stood out in the yard in, while X was inside burning her hope chest, and charted Cassiopeia and Gemini in the northern sky and felt vulnerable beside the rhododendrons. Since then, to be truthful, I have never felt all that easy with the clear night sky, as if I was seeing it from the top of a high building and afraid to look down. (I tend to prefer broken cirrus or mackerel clouds to a pure, starry vault.)
“Don’t bother walkin me,” Vicki says, already out the car door and with her head back inside the window. I have stopped behind her Dart. The hard-hat guys from yesterday have finished off a phony mansard across the lot, although none of the finished buildings have roofs like that. Naturally I was hoping for an invitation inside—a nightcap. But I see my hopes on that front are slim. She has become skittish now, as though someone else was waiting upstairs.
“Tomorrow’s the day he rolled back the stone and raised up from the dead,” she says in all seriousness, staring straight at me as if I was expected to recite a psalm. She has her Le Sac weekender looped over her shoulder and her Navajo earrings on. “I might go to early mass, just for keeping us safe, that and the insurance. Or I might go to the drive-in Methodists in Hightstown. One’s official as the other. I’m thinking twice about lapsin. I’d ask you to come, but I know you wouldn’t like it.”
“I’d like the music.”
“Whatever floats your boat, I guess,” she says. We have been together for two days now, shared another geography, slept in one bed, been quiet together and attended each other’s pleasures and courtesy like married folk. Only now the end is in sight, and neither of us can find the handle to a proper parting. Flippancy and a vague churlishness is her protocol. Unwitting politeness is mine. It is not a good mix.
“I’m going to see you tomorrow, aren’t I?” I am cheerful, bending to see her and seeing beyond her the big blue space-age water tank and beyond that the big Easter moon.
“You better be on time. Daddy’s picky ’bout when he eats. And it takes a whole hour to get there.”
“I’m looking forward to it a lot.” This is not entirely true, but it is my official attitude. This part of tomorrow is actually alive with fearsome ambiguity.
“You hadn’t even met him yet. Wait’ll you meet my stepmother. She’s a breed apart. If you like her you’ll like broccoli. But Daddy’s somethin. You better like him, only he probably won’t like you. Or least that’s how he’ll act. His true thoughts will come to light later. Not that it matters.”
“You love me, don’t you?” When I lean up to be kissed, she gazes down on me with a pert, appraising face. I cannot help wondering if she’s not considering Everett right now and an Alaskan adventure.
“Maybe. What if I do?”
“Then you’ll give me a kiss and ask me to spend the night.”
“No way on that,” she says, and gives her hand a big Dinah Shore kiss and smacks me hard across the che
ek with it. “That’s what you got comin. Signed, sealed and delivered, ole Mister Smart.” And then she is off, skittering toward the darkened apartments, across the skimpy lawn and in the lighted outside door and out of sight. And I am left alone in my Malibu, staring at the glossy moon as if it were all of mystery and anticipation, all the things we are happy to leave and happier yet to see come toward us new again.
8
A suspicious light shines in my living room. A strange car sits at the curb. On the third floor Bosobolo’s desk lamp is lit, though it is after midnight. Easter undoubtedly means special preparations for him, possibly a sermon at one of the Institute’s satellite churches which he services now and then to fine-tune his evangelizing techniques. He has put up a wreath on the front door, a decision we have discussed earlier that won my approval. All the houses on Hoving Road are silent and dark, odd for a Saturday night, when there is usually entertaining going on and windows brightened. In the clear sky above the button woods and tulip trees, I can see only the lemony glitter of Gotham lighting the heavens fifty miles away, as though a great event was going on there—a state fair, say, or a firestorm. And I am happy to see it, happy to be this far from the action, on the leeward side of what the wider world deems important.
In my house stands Walter Luckett.
More accurately, waiting in the room I now use as a cozy study, an old side porch with French doors, overstuffed summerish furniture, brass lamps with maps for shades (bought from a catalog), bookshelves to the ceiling and a purplish Persian rug that came with the house. It is the room I normally consider mine, though I am not hard-nosed about it. But even Bosobolo, who has the run of everything, stays clear without having to be asked. It is the room where I finally gave up work on Tangier, where I do most of my sportswriting, where my typewriter sits on my desk. And when X left me, it was in this room that I slept every night until I could face going back upstairs. Most people have such comfortable, significant places if they own a home, and Walter Luckett is standing in the middle of mine with a wry self-derisive smirk that probably caused a certain kind of brainy, pock-marked girl back in Coshocton to think, “Well, now. Here’s something new to the planet…. More’s here than meets the eye,” and later to put up with hell and foolishness to be his date.
Though I can’t say it makes me glad to see him, since I’m tired, and as recently as twelve hours ago was in faraway Walled Lake, having a conversation with a crazy man out of which I won’t get a story to write. What I want to do is put that behind me and hit the hay. Tomorrow like all tomorrows could still be a banner day.
Walter is holding a copy of a canvas luggage catalog, and, upon seeing me, has rolled it into a tight little megaphone. “Frank. Your butler let me in, or I wouldn’t be here at this hour. You have my word on that.”
“It’s okay, Walter. He’s not my butler, though, he’s my roomer. What’s up?”
I set down my one-suiter bought from the very catalog he is now spindling. I like this room very much, its brassy, honeyed glow, paint peeling insignificantly off its moldings, the couches and leather chairs and hatchcover table all arranged in a careless, unpretentious way that is immensely inviting. I would like nothing more than to curl up anywhere here and doze off for seven or eight unmolested hours.
Walter is wearing the same blue tennis shirt and walking shorts he wore in the Manasquan two nights ago, a pair of sockless loafers and a Barracuda jacket with a plaid lining (referred to as a jerk’s suit in my fraternity). In all likelihood it is the same suit-of-casual-clothes Walter has worn since Grinnell days. Only behind his tortoise-shells, his eyes look vanquished, and his slick bond-salesman’s hair could stand a washing. Walter looks, in other words, like private death, though I have a feeling he is here to share some of it with me.
“Frank, I haven’t slept for three days,” Walter blurts and takes two tentative steps forward. “Not since I talked to you over at the shore.” He squeezes the Gokey catalog into the tightest tube possible.
“Let’s make you a drink, Walter,” I say. “And let me have that catalog before you tear it apart.”
“No thanks, Frank. I’m not staying.”
“How about a beer?”
“No beer.” Walter sits down in a big armchair across from my chair, and leans up, forearms to knees: the posture of the confessional, something we Presbyterians know little about.
Walter is sitting under a framed map of Block Island, where X and I once sailed. I gave the map to her as a birthday present, but laid claim to it in the divorce. X complained until I said the map meant something to me, which caused her to relent instantly—and it does. It is a link to palmier times when life was simple and un-grieved. It is a museum piece of a kind, and I’m sorry to see Walter Luckett’s beleaguered visage beneath it now.
“Frank, this is a helluva house. I mean, when I thought you had a colored butler with a British accent, it didn’t surprise me at all.” Walter looks around wide-eyed and approving. “Say about how long you’ve owned it.” Walter smiles a big first-bike kid’s grin.
“Fourteen years, Walter.” I pour myself a good level of warm gin from a bottle I keep behind the children’s World Books and drink it down with a gulp.
“Now that’s old dollars. Plus location. Plus the interest rates from that era. That adds up. I have clients over here, old man Nat Far-querson for one. I live over in The Presidents now, Coolidge Street. Not a bad part of town, don’t you think?”
“My wife lives on Cleveland. My former wife, I guess I should say.”
“My wife’s in Bimini, of course, with Eddie Pitcock. Of all things.”
“I remember you said.”
Walter’s eyes go slitted, and he frowns up at me as if what I’d just said deserved nothing better than a damn good whipping. A silence envelops the room, and I cannot suppress an impolite yawn.
“Frank, let me get right to this. I’m sorry. Since this Americana business I’ve just been dead in my tracks. My whole life is just agonizing around this one goddamn event. Christ. I’ve done so much worse in my life, Frank. Believe me. I once screwed a thirteen-year-old girl when I was twenty and married, and bragged about it to friends. I slept like a baby. Like a baby! And there’s worse than that, too. But I can’t get this one out of my mind. I’m thirty-six, Frank. And everything seems very bad to me. I’ve quit becoming, is what it feels like. Only I stopped at the wrong time.” A smile of wonder passes over Walter’s dazed face, and he shakes his head. His is the face of a haunted war veteran with wounds. Only to my thinking it’s a private matter, which no one but him should be required to care a wink about. “What’re you thinking right now, Frank,” Walter asks hopefully.
“I wasn’t thinking anything, really.” I give my own head a shake to let Walter know I’m an earnest war veteran myself, though in fact I’m lost in a kind of fog about Vicki. Wondering if she’s expecting me to call and for us to make up, wondering for some reason if I’ll ever see her again.
Walter leans up hard on his knees, looking more grim than earnest. “What did you think when I said what I said two nights ago? When I originally told you? Pretty idiotic, huh?”
“It didn’t seem idiotic, Walter. Things happen. That’s all I thought.”
“I’m not putting babies in freezers, am I, Frank?”
“I didn’t think so.”
Walter’s face sinks solemner still, in the manner of a man considering new frontiers. He would like me to ask him a good telling question, something that will then let him tell me a lot of things I don’t want to know. But if I have agreed to listen, I have also agreed not to ask. This is the only badge of true friendship I’m sure of: not to be curious. Whatever Walter is up to may be as novel as teaching chickens to drive cars, but I don’t want the whole lowdown. It’s too late in the night. I’m ready for bed. And besides, I have no exact experience in these matters. I’m not sure what anyone—including trained experts—ought to say except, “All right now, son, let’s get yo
u on over to the state hospital and let those boys give you a shot of something that’ll bring you back to the right side of things.”
“What do you worry about, Frank, if you don’t mind my asking?” Walter is still ghost-solemn.
“Really not that much, Walter. Sometimes at night my heart pounds. But it goes back to normal when I turn on the light.”
“You’re a man with rules, Frank. You don’t mind, do you, if I say that? You have ethics about a lot of important things.”
“I don’t mind, Walter, but I don’t think I have any ethics at all, really. I just do as little harm as I can. Anything else seems too hard.” I smile at Walter in a bland way.
“Do you think I’ve done harm, Frank? Do you think you’re better than I am?”
“I think it doesn’t matter, Walter, to tell you the truth. We’re all the same.”
“That’s evading me, Frank, because I admire codes, myself. In everything.” Walter sits back, folds his arms, and looks at me appraisingly. It’s possible Walter and I will end up in a fistfight before this is over. Though I would run out the door to avoid it. In fact, I feel a nice snugged wooziness rising in me from the gin. And I would be happy to take this right up to bed.
“Good, Walter.” I stare fervently at Block Island, trying to find X’s and my first landfall from all those years ago. Sandy Point. I scan the bookshelves behind Walter’s head as if I expected to see those very words on a friendly spine.
“But let me ask you, Frank, what do you do when something worries you and you can’t make it stop. You try and try and it won’t.” Walter’s eyes become exhilarated, as if he’d just willed into being something that was furious and snapping and threatening to swirl him away.