by Richard Ford
Why do I have the feeling she and Lynette have struck some sympathetic pact while I was on the phone? An understanding that puts a ceiling and a floor to old grievances and excludes me—the family closing ranks suddenly and officially, leaving me in the cold. This is the grim side of the non-nuclear family—its capacity to pile disaster on disaster. (Son of a bitch!) After I leave they’ll stoke the fire, haul out the sheet music and sing favorite oldies—together alone. I am called away at the very worst time, before they realize how much they all really like me and want someone just like me around forever. Preemptive, ill-meant death has intruded. Its gluey odors are spread over me. I can smell them myself.
“No,” I say. “There wouldn’t be anything for you to do anyway. You go on and stay here.”
“Well it’s the God’s truth, idn’t it?” Vicki gets up and comes to stand beside me in the dining room archway, looping her arm encouragingly through mine. “I’ll walk with you out, though.”
“Lynette….” I start to say, but Lynette is already waving a spoon at me from the end of the table.
“Now don’t say a word, Franky Bascombe. Just go see ’bout your friend who needs you.”
“Tell Wade and Cade I’m sorry.” I want more than anything not to leave, to be around another hour to sing “Edelweiss” and doze off in my chair while Vicki files her nails and daydreams.
“About what? What is it’s going on?” Wade has heard commotion and come right down to see what all the trouble is about. He’s at the top of the stairs, half a level above us, leaning over as if he were about to fly.
“Let me explain it all to you later, Dad,” Lynette says, and raises her fingers to her lips.
“You two haven’t had a fuss, have you?” Wade’s look is pure bafflement. “I hope nobody’s mad. Why are you leaving, Frank?”
“His best friend’s dead, that’s all,” Vicki says. “That’s what the phone call was about.” It’s clear she wants me out of here and in a hurry, and intends to be on the phone to the dagger-head in Texas before my key is in the ignition.
Though what have I done that’s so wrong? Can a longed-for life sink below the waves because a tone in my voice wasn’t exactly appreciated? Can affections be frail as that? Mine are heartier.
“Wade, I’m just as sorry as hell about this.” I reach up the short carpeted stairway to shake his hard hand. Bafflement has not altogether left him nor me.
“Me too, son. I hope you’ll come on back here. We’re not going anyplace.”
“He’ll come back,” Lynette chirps. “Vicki’ll see to that.” (Vicki is silent on this subject.)
“Tell Cade goodbye,” I say.
“Will do.” Wade comes down and squares me up with a small earnest hand on my shoulder—half a manly hug. “Come back and we’ll go out fishing.” Wade makes a squeaky, embarrassed laugh, and in fact looks slightly dizzy.
“I’ll do it, Wade.” And God knows I would. Though that will never happen in a hundred moons, and I will never see his face again outside a toll plaza. We will never stalk, hungry as bears, into a Red Lobster, never be friends in the ways I had hoped—ways to last a lifetime.
I wave them all goodbye.
On the front lawn everything including our empty croquet wickets is lost and gray and gone straight to hell. I stand in the fluttering wind and sight down the unpeopled curve of Arctic Spruce to the point where it sweeps from sight, all its plantings fresh and immature, its houses split-level and perfectly isosceles. Wade Arcenault is a lucky man to live here, and I am, at heart, cast down to loss in its presence.
Vicki knows I’m stalling and tampers with the door latch of my Malibu until, as if by magic, it swings open.
She is bemused, in no mind for words. I, of course, would talk till midnight if I thought it could improve my chances.
“Why don’t we just go get a motel room right now?” I paint a grin on my face. “You haven’t been to Cape May. We could have a big time.”
“What about your ole dead guy? Herb?” Vicki sets her chin up haughtily. “What about him?”
“Walter.” She’s made me feel slightly embarrassed. “He’s not going anywhere. But I’m still alive. Frank’s still among the living.”
“I’d be ashamed,” Vicki says, shoving the door wide open between us. The wind now has a wintry grit in it. The front has passed quickly and left us in a gray spring chill. In half a minute, she is going. This is the last chance to love her.
“Well, I’m not,” I say loudly into the wind. “I didn’t kill my self. I want you to go off and let me love you. And tomorrow we’ll get married.”
“Not hardly.” She looks glumly at the dry black weather stripping on my poor car’s poor window frame. She picks off a piece with a crimson fingernail.
“Why not?” I say. “I want to. This time yesterday we were in bed like newly weds. I was one of the only six people in the world then. What the hell happened? Did you just go crazy? Twenty minutes ago you were happy as a monkey.”
“No way I went crazy, José,” she says coarsely.
“My name’s not José, goddamn it.” I cast a wintry eye at Lynette’s spurious beigey Jesus nailed to the siding. He makes life a perfect misery for as many as he can, then never takes the heat. He should try resurrection in today’s complex world. He’d fall right off His cross on His ass. He couldn’t sell newspapers.
“We don’t have none of the same interests, doesn’t look like,” Vicki says nearly inaudibly, fumbling a finger at her blue Navajo earring. “I just figured that out sitting at the table.”
“But I’m interested in you!” I shout. “Isn’t that enough?” The wind is kicking up. From around the house Wade’s Boston Whaler blunks against the dock. My own words are broken and carried off like chaff.
“Not to be married, it isn’t,” she says, her jaw set in certainty. “Just foolin like what we been doin is one thing. But that won’t get you all the way to death.”
“What will? Just tell me and I’ll do it. I want to go all the way to death with you.” Words, my best refuge and oldest allies, are suddenly acting to no avail, and I am helpless. In the wind, in fact, words hardly seem to clear my mouth. It is like a dream in which my friends turn against me and then disappear—a poor man’s Caesar dream, a nightmare in itself. “Look here. I’ll get interested in nursing. I’ll read some books and we can talk about nursing all the goddamn time.”
Vicki tries to smile but looks dumbfounded. “I don’t know what to say, really.”
“Say yes! Or at least something intelligent. I might just kidnap you.”
“Right you won’t.” She curls her lip and narrows her eyes, a look I’ve never seen and that scares me. She is without fear if fearlessness is what’s asked for. But just so long as she is fearlessly mine.
“I’m not going to be fooled with,” I say, and move toward her.
“I just don’t love you enough to marry you,” She throws down her hands in exasperation. “I don’t love you in the right way. So just go on. You’re liable to say anything, and I don’t like that.” Her hair has become whipped and tangled.
“There isn’t any right way,” I say. “There’s just love and not love. You’re crazy.”
“You’ll see,” she says.
“Get in this car.” I pull back the door. (She has decided not to love me because I might change her, but she couldn’t be more wrong. It is I who’ll happily bend.) “You just think you want some little life like Lynette’s to complain about, but I’m going to give you the best of all worlds. You don’t know how happy you’re going to be.” I give her a big signpost grin and step forward to put my arms around her, but she busts me full in the mouth with a mean little itchy fist that catches me midstride and sends me to the turf. I manage to grab onto the car door to ease my fall, but the punch is a looping girl’s left hook straight from the shoulder, and I actually walked directly into it, eyes wide open.
“I’ll ’bout knock you sill
y,” she says furiously, both fists balled like little grapeshoots, thumbs inward. “Last guy took holt of me went to eye surgery.”
And I can’t help smiling. It is the end to all things, of course. But a proper end. I taste thick, squeamish blood in my mouth. (My hope is that no one inside has seen this and feels the need to help me.) When I look up, she has backed off a half step, and to the right of dolorous Jesus I see Cade’s big head peering down at me, impassive as Buddha. Though in all ways Cade does not matter in this, and I don’t mind his seeing me in defeat. It is an experience he already knows, and would sympathize with if he could.
“Get on up and go see your dead guy,” Vicki says in a quavery, cautionary voice.
“Okay.” I’m still smiling my dopey Joe Palooka smile. Possibly there are even stars and whirligigs shooting above my head. I might not be in complete control, but I’m certain I can drive.
“You awright, aren’t you?” She will not come a step closer, but squints an assessing eye at me long-distance. I’m sure I am pale as potatoes, though I’m not ashamed to be decked by a strong girl who can turn grown men over in their beds and get them in and out of distant bathrooms single-handed. In fact, it confirms everything I have always believed of her. There may be hope yet for us. This may be the very love she’s been seeking but hasn’t trusted, and needed only to whop me good to make us both realize it.
“Why don’t you call me tomorrow?” I say, sprawled on my elbows, my head starting to ache, though I’m still smiling a good loser’s smile.
“I doubt that.” She crosses her arms like Maggie in the funnies. Who is a better Jiggs than I am? Who is worse at learning from his experience?
“You better go inside,” I say. “It’s an indignity for you to see me get on my feet.”
“I didn’t mean to hit you,” she says in a bossy way.
“Like hell. You’d’ve knocked me out if you knew how to make a fist. You make a girl’s fist.
“I don’t hit too many.”
“Go on,” I say.
“You sure you’re awright?”
“Would you call me tomorrow?”
“Maybe, maybe not.” I can actually hear her stockings scrape as she turns and starts back across the lawn in the wind, her arms swinging, each foot planted toe-down to keep from sinking in the sod. She does not look back—as she shouldn’t—and quickly dis appears into the house. Cade has likewise left the window. And for a time then I sit where I’ve fallen beside my car and stare up at the rending clouds, trying to make the world around me stop its terrifying spin. Everything has seemed beckoning and ahead, though I am unsure now if life has not suddenly passed me like a big rumbling semi and left me flattened here by the road.
11
Winds buffet me on my way home and impede my progress. It has, in fact, been a terrible weekend weatherwise, though who could’ve predicted it on Friday morning at my son’s grave.
My choice of routes home is not a wise one—the Parkway—where there is no consoling landscape, only pines and sad sedgy hummocks and distant power right-of-ways trailing skyward toward Lakehurst and soulful Fort Dix. An occasional Pontiac dealer’s sign or a tennis bubble peeps above the conifers, but these are far too meager and abstracted. I’m on the old knife-edge of dread, without constructive distance from what’s to come, and I see only the long, empty horizon that X told me about but that I was too idiotic to fear.
All the traffic is coming up from Atlantic City and the beaches in a hurry, and at Route 98 I consult the map and turn out hoping to square off to Route 9 and then, by driving the farmy section lines toward Freehold, get home. The foul weather has moved on past, and on the radio unexpected stations turn up with unexpected news—what’s for lunch tomorrow at the Senior Citizens’ Center in South Amboy (city chicken and Texas Toast); the weather in Kalispell and Coeur d’Alene (much summerier than here). On the feminist station from New Brunswick, a woman with a sexy voice reads dirty passages from Tropic of Cancer—Van Norden’s soliloquy on love, where he compares orgasm to holy communion, then prays for a woman who’s better than he is. “Find me a cunt like that, will you?” Van Norden pleads. “If you could do that I’d give you my job.” Afterwards the female DJ gives poor Miller a good whipping for his attitudes, followed immediately by a “get acquainted” offer for a sex club not far from my office. I stay tuned until winds carry the words away and I’m left with the pleasant if brief idea of a hundred dollar whore waiting for me somewhere if I only had the gumption to find her and didn’t have other duties. Unhappy ones. The worst kind.
Suddenly, in two dreadful minutes, I make an inventory of everything that could possibly turn out better in the next twenty-four to thirty-six hours, and come up with nothing except a wavering mirage memory of Selma Jassim from years ago and our late-night hours, half-asleep and half-drunk and in a high state of excitement, with her moaning in unintelligible Arabic and me in animal anticipation (all this when I should’ve been reading student essays). Of course I can’t remember one thing we could’ve said, or how we kept each other interested very long with the little we had to offer from the fringes of our upturned lives, Though anything is possible, any amount of rapturous transport, when you’re lonely enough and at the nubbins end of your rope. Mutinous freedom awaits there for those who can bear it.
What I actually remember are long sinuous sighs in the night and the intermittent tinkle of ice cubes from glasses, her cigarette smoke in the dark of the dance-lady’s house and the still October air turned electric with longing. And then, the next day, the long fog of having been up and awake all night, and a sense of accomplishment for having gotten through the night at all.
I don’t regret a moment of it, the way you wouldn’t regret wolfing down the last crumbly morsel of, say, the blackberry cobbler you had when you were snowbound in December on a rural highway in Wyoming and no one knew you were there, and the sun setting on you for the last time. Regret is not part of that, I’ll tell you (even though knowing her absolutely lengthened the distance between X and me at the time, and made me dreamy and untalkative at the wrong crucial moment).
But I am no martyr to a past. And halfway through the town of Adelphia, New Jersey, on Business 524, I pull into an empty Acme lot and put in a call to Providence, where I think she might be. A voice could help. Better than four hundred-dollar prostitutes and a free trip to Coeur d’Alene.
In the phone booth I lean heavily on the cool plexiglass, staring at a wire shopping cart stranded in the empty parking lot, while the operator in faraway 401 runs through her listings. At a distance across the blacktop, a burger joint is open on Easter. Ground Zero Burg—a relic of the old low-slung Forties places with sliding screens, windows all around and striped awnings. A lone black car sits nosed under the awning, a carhop leaned in talking to the driver. The sky is white and skating toward the ocean at top speed. Things can happen to you. I know that. Evil lurks most everywhere, and death is too severe for most ordinary remedies. I have dealt with them before.
A ring and then an answer straightaway.
“Halloo.”
“Selma?” An inexplicable name, I know, but it’s pronounced differently in Arabic.
“Yes?”
“Hi Selma, it’s Frank. Frank Bascombe.”
Silence. Puzzlement. “Oh. Yes. Of course. And how are you?” Cigarette smoke in the receiver. Nothing surprising here.
“Fine. I’m fine.” I couldn’t be worse, though I won’t admit it. And what next? I have nothing else to say. What do we expect other people can do for us? One of my problems is that I am not a problem-solver. I rely on others, even though I like to think I don’t.
“So. How long has it been?” It’s damn good of her to try and make conversation with me, since I seem incapable of it.
“Three years, Selma. Seems like a long time.”
“Ah, yes. And you still write … what was it you wrote that I thought so amusing?”
“Sports.”
/> “Sports. Yes indeed. I remember now.” She laughs. “Not novels.”
“No.”
“Good. It made you so happy.”
I watch the stoplight on Route 524 as it changes from yellow to red, and try to picture the room where she is sitting. A Queen Anne-style house, white or blue, on College Hill. Angeli Street or Brown Street. The view from the window: a nice prospect of elms and streets running down to the old factory piles with the big bay far in the hazy afterground. If only I could be there instead of a parking lot in Adelphia. I would be miles happier. New prospects. Real possibilities rising like new mountains. I could be convinced in no time flat that things weren’t so bad. “Frank?” Selma says into the musing silence at my end. I am putting a sail in on the bay, calculating winds and seas. Populating a different world.
“What.”
“Are you sure you’re feeling well? You sound quite strange. I’m always very happy to hear from you. But you don’t sound particularly as if you’re all right. Exactly where are you now?”
“In New Jersey. In a phone booth in a town called Adelphia. I’m not as good as I could be. But that’s all right. I just wanted to hear your voice and think about you.”
“Well, that’s very nice. Why don’t you tell me what’s wrong.” The familiar tinkle of a single ice cube (some things remain the same). I wonder if she is wearing her Al Fatah burnoose right now, which drove our Jewish colleagues crazy. (In private, of course, they loved it.)
“What are you doing right now,” I say, staring across the Acme lot. The name “Shelby” has been scratched on the glass in front of my eyes. A cool urine scent hangs around me. At Ground Zero Burg the carhop suddenly stands back from the lone car, hands on her hips in what looks like disgust. Trouble may be brewing there. They don’t know how good they have it.
“Oh. Well. I’m reading today,” Selma says and sighs. “What else do I do?”
“Tell me what. I haven’t read a book in I don’t know when. I wish I had. The last one I read wasn’t very good.”