by Richard Ford
The windows of his office showed the storm moving in across the lake. In front of the building, the sky was still blue. On Kendall’s desk sat “The Pocket Democracy,” just back from the (real) printer. It was as small and sleek as an iPod, easily slipped into a pocket: a concealed weapon of a book. Kendall was staring at it for the hundredth time, with disquiet, when the telephone rang.
“How’s the weather up there?” It was Jimmy.
“Tolstoyan,” Kendall said. “Snowstorm coming in.”
“You like that sort of thing, right? Invigorating.”
Soon Jimmy got around to business. “The ‘Pocket Democracy,’” Jimmy said. “Just got it. I love it. Nice job.”
“Thank you,” Kendall said.
“What do the orders look like?”
“Good, actually.”
“I think it’s priced right. What about getting some reviews?”
“It’s difficult getting reviews for a two-hundred-year-old book.”
“Well, we should do some advertising then,” Jimmy said. “Send me a list of places you think would be best. Not the fucking New York Review of Books. That’s preaching to the converted. I want this book to get out there.”
“Let me think a little,” Kendall said.
“What else was there? Oh yeah! The bookmark! That’s a great idea. Let’s print bookmarks with the Great Experiment quote on them. Put one in every book. Maybe we can do posters, too. We might sell some books for once.”
“That’s the idea,” Kendall said.
“If this book does as well as I hope it will, I tell you what,” Jimmy said. “I’ll give you health insurance.”
Kendall hesitated only an instant. “That would be great.”
“I don’t want to lose you, kiddo. Plus, I’ll be honest. It’s a headache finding someone else.”
The light in the room changed, dimmed. Kendall turned to see the wall of cloud approaching the shoreline. Snow flurries swirled against the windows.
This late generosity wasn’t grounds for reappraisal and regret. Jimmy had taken his sweet time, hadn’t he? And the promise was phrased in the conditional. No, let’s wait and see how things turn out. If Kendall got insurance and a nice raise, then maybe he’d think about shutting Midwestern Storage down.
“Oh,” Jimmy said. “One more thing.”
Kendall waited, looking at the snow. It was like being in a submarine passing through a school of fish.
“Piasecki sent me the accounts. The numbers look funny.”
“What do you mean?”
“What are we doing printing thirty thousand copies of Thomas Paine?” Jimmy said. “And why are we using two printers?”
At congressional hearings, in courtrooms, the accused C.E.O.s and C.F.O.s followed one of two strategies: either they said they didn’t know, or they said they didn’t remember.
“I don’t remember why we printed thirty thousand,” Kendall said. “I’ll have to check the orders. I don’t know anything about the printers. Piasecki handles that. Maybe someone offered us a better deal.”
“The new printer is charging us a higher rate.”
Piasecki hadn’t told Kendall that. Piasecki had become greedy and kept it to himself.
“Listen,” Jimmy said, “send me the contact info for the new printer. And for that storage place. I’m going to have my guy out here look into this.”
The smart thing was to act nonchalant. But Kendall said, “What guy?”
“My accountant. You think I’d let Piasecki operate without oversight? No way! Everything he does gets double-checked out here. If he’s pulling anything, we’ll find out. And then Mr. Piasecki’s up shit’s creek.”
Kendall sat up straighter in his desk chair, making the springs cry out.
“Listen, kiddo, I’m going to London next week,” Jimmy said. “The house’ll be empty. Why don’t you bring your family out here for a long weekend? Get out of that cold weather.”
When Kendall didn’t reply, Jimmy said, “Don’t worry. It’s a nice house. I’ll hide the porn.”
Kendall’s laugh sounded false to him. He wondered if it sounded false to Jimmy. Far below, in the storm’s wash cycle, a faint glimmer revealed rush-hour headlights along the Drive.
“Anyway, you did good, kiddo. You boiled Tocqueville down to his essence. I remember when I first read this book. Blew me away.”
In his vibrant, scratchy voice, Jimmy began to recite a passage of “Democracy in America.” It was the passage they were putting on the bookmarks. Out in Montecito, bald, liver-spotted, in a tank top and shorts probably, the old libertine and libertarian crowed out his favorite lines: “In that land the great experiment of the attempt to construct society upon a new basis was to be made by civilized man,” Jimmy read, “and it was there, for the first time, that theories hitherto unknown, or deemed impracticable, were to exhibit a spectacle for which the world had not been prepared by the history of the past.”
Snow pummelled the glass. The lakefront was obscured, the water too. Kendall was enclosed in a dark space high above a city rising from a coast engulfed in darkness.
“That fucking kills me,” Jimmy said. “Every time.”
Richard Ford
UNDER THE RADAR
On the drive over to the Nicholsons’ for dinner—their first in some time—Marjorie Reeves told her husband, Steven Reeves, that she had had an affair with George Nicholson (their host) a year ago, but that it was all over with now and she hoped he—Steven—would not be mad about it and could go on with life.
At this point they were driving along Quaker Bridge Road where it leaves the Perkins Great Woods Road and begins to border the Shenipsit Reservoir, dark and shadowy and calmly mirrored in the late spring twilight. On the right was dense young timber, beech and alder saplings in pale leaf, the ground damp and cakey. Peepers were calling out from the watery lows. Their turn onto Apple Orchard Lane was still a mile on.
Steven, on hearing this news, began gradually and very carefully to steer their car—a tan Mercedes wagon with hooded yellow headlights—off of Quaker Bridge Road and onto the damp grassy shoulder so he could organize this information properly before going on.
They were extremely young. Steven Reeves was twenty-eight. Marjorie Reeves a year younger. They weren’t rich, but they’d been lucky. Steven’s job at Packard-Wells was to stay on top of a small segment of a larger segment of a rather small prefabrication intersection that serviced the automobile industry, and where any sudden alteration, or even the rumor of an alteration in certain polymer-bonding formulas could tip crucial down-the-line demand patterns, and in that way affect the betting lines and comfort zones of a good many meaningful client positions. His job meant poring over dense and esoteric petrochemical-industry journals, attending technical seminars, flying to vendor conventions, then writing up detailed status reports and all the while keeping an eye on the market for the benefit of his higher-ups. He’d been a scholarship boy at Bates, studied chemistry, was the only son of a hard-put but upright lobstering family in Pemaquid, Maine, and had done well. His bosses at Packard-Wells liked him, saw themselves in him, and also in him saw character qualities they’d never quite owned—blond and slender callowness tending to gullibility, but backed by caution, ingenuity and a thoroughgoing, compact toughness. He was sharp. It was his seventh year with the company—his first job. He and Marjorie had been married two years. They had no children. The car had been his bonus two Christmases ago.
When the station wagon eased to a stop, Steven sat for a minute with the motor running, the salmon-colored dash lights illuminating his face. The radio had been playing softly—the last of the news, then an interlude for French horns. Responding to no particular signal, he pressed off the radio and in the same movement switched off the ignition, which left the headlights shining on the empty, countrified road. The windows were down to attract the fresh spring air, and when the engine noise ceased the evening’s ambient sounds were waiting. The peepers. A sound of thrush win
gs fluttering in the brush only a few yards away. The noise of something falling from a small distance and hitting an invisible water surface. Beyond the stand of saplings was the west, and through the darkened trunks, the sky was still pale yellow with the day’s light, though here on Quaker Bridge Road it was nearly dark.
When Marjorie said what she had just said, she’d been looking straight ahead to where the headlights made a bright path in the dark. Perhaps she’d looked at Steven once, but having said what she’d said, she kept her hands in her lap and continued looking ahead. She was a pretty, blond, convictionless girl with small demure features—small nose, small ears, small chin, though with a surprisingly full-lipped smile which she practiced on everyone. She was fond of getting a little tipsy at parties and lowering her voice and sitting on a flowered ottoman or a burl table top with a glass of something and showing too much of her legs or inappropriate amounts of her small breasts. She had grown up in Indiana, studied art at Purdue. Steven had met her in New York at a party while she was working for a firm that did child-focused advertising for a large toymaker. He’d liked her bobbed hair, her fragile, wispy features, translucent skin and the slightly husky voice that made her seem more sophisticated than she was, but somehow convinced her she was, too. In their community, east of Hartford, the women who knew Marjorie Reeves thought of her as a bimbo who would not stay married to sweet Steven Reeves for very long. His second wife would be the right wife for him. Marjorie was just a starter.
Marjorie, however, did not think of herself that way, only that she liked men and felt happy and confident around them and assumed Steven thought this was fine and that in the long run it would help his career to have a pretty, spirited wife no one could pigeonhole. To set herself apart and to take an interest in the community she’d gone to work as a volunteer at a grieving-children’s center in Hartford, which meant all black. And it was in Hartford that she’d had the chance to encounter George Nicholson and fuck him at a Red Roof Inn until they’d both gotten tired of it. It would never happen again, was her view, since in a year it hadn’t happened again.
For the two or possibly five minutes now that they had sat on the side of Quaker Bridge Road in the still airish evening, with the noises of spring floating in and out of the open window, Marjorie had said nothing and Steven had also said nothing, though he realized that he was saying nothing because he was at a loss for words. A loss for words, he realized, meant that nothing that comes to mind seems very interesting to say as a next thing to what has just been said. He knew he was a callow man—a boy in some ways, still—but he was not stupid. At Bates, he had taken Dr. Sudofsky’s class on Ulysses, and come away with a sense of irony and humor and the assurance that true knowledge was a spiritual process, a quest, not a storage of dry facts—a thing like freedom, which you only fully experienced in practice. He’d also played hockey, and knew that knowledge and aggressiveness were a subtle and surprising and uncommon combination. He had sought to practice both at Packard-Wells.
But for a brief and terrifying instant in the cool padded semi-darkness, just when he began experiencing his loss for words, he entered or at least nearly slipped into a softened fuguelike state in which he began to fear that he perhaps could not say another word; that something (work fatigue, shock, disappointment over what Marjorie had admitted) was at that moment causing him to detach from reality and to slide away from the present, and in fact to begin to lose his mind and go crazy to the extent that he was in jeopardy of beginning to gibber like a chimp, or just to slowly slump sideways against the upholstered door and not speak for a long, long time—months—and then only with the aid of drugs be able merely to speak in simple utterances that would seem cryptic, so that eventually he would have to be looked after by his mother’s family in Damariscotta. A terrible thought.
And so to avoid that—to save his life and sanity—he abruptly just said a word, any word that he could say into the perfumed twilight inhabiting the car, where his wife was obviously anticipating his reply to her unhappy confession.
And for some reason the word—phrase, really—that he uttered was “ground clutter.” Something he’d heard on the TV weather report as they were dressing for dinner.
“Hm?” Marjorie said. “What was it?” She turned her pretty, small-featured face toward him so that her pearl earrings caught light from some unknown source. She was wearing a tiny green cocktail dress and green satin shoes that showed off her incredibly thin ankles and slender, bare brown calves. She had two tiny matching green bows in her hair. She smelled sweet. “I know this wasn’t what you wanted to hear, Steven,” she said, “but I felt I should tell you before we got to George’s. The Nicholsons’, I mean. It’s all over. It’ll never happen again. I promise you. No one will ever mention it. I just lost my bearings last year with the move. I’m sorry.” She had made a little steeple of her fingertips, as if she’d been concentrating very hard as she spoke these words. But now she put her hands again calmly in her minty green lap. She had bought her dress especially for this night at the Nicholsons’. She’d thought George would like it and Steven, too. She turned her face away and exhaled a small but detectable sigh in the car. It was then that the headlights went off automatically.
George Nicholson was a big squash-playing, thick-chested, hairy-armed Yale lawyer who sailed his own Hinckley 61 out of Essex and had started backing off from his high-priced Hartford plaintiffs’ practice at fifty to devote more time to competitive racket sports and senior skiing. George was a college roommate of one of Steven’s firm’s senior partners and had “adopted” the Reeveses when they moved into the community following their wedding. Marjorie had volunteered Saturdays with George’s wife, Patsy, at the Episcopal Thrift Shop during their first six months in Connecticut. To Steven, George Nicholson had recounted a memorable, seasoning summer spent hauling deep-water lobster traps with some tough old sea dogs out of Matinicus, Maine. Later, he’d been a Marine, and sported a faded anchor, ball and chain tattooed on his forearm. Later yet he’d fucked Steven’s wife.
Having said something, even something that made no sense, Steven felt a sense of glum and deflated relief as he sat in the silent car beside Marjorie, who was still facing forward. Two thoughts had begun to compete in his reviving awareness. One was clearly occasioned by his conception of George Nicholson. He thought of George Nicholson as a gasbag, but also a forceful man who’d made his pile by letting very little stand in his way. When he thought about George he always remembered the story about Matinicus, which then put into his mind a mental picture of his own father and himself hauling traps somewhere out toward Monhegan. The reek of the bait, the toss of the ocean in late spring, the consoling monotony of the solid, tree-lined shore barely visible through the mists. Thinking through that circuitry always made him vaguely admire George Nicholson and, oddly, made him think he liked George even now, in spite of everything.
The other compering thought was that part of Marjorie’s character had always been to confess upsetting things that turned out, he believed, not to be true: being a hooker for a summer up in Saugatuck; topless dancing while she was an undergraduate; heroin experimentation; taking part in armed robberies with her high-school boyfriend in Goshen, Indiana, where she was from. When she told these far-fetched stories she would grow distracted and shake her head, as though they were true. And now, while he didn’t particularly think any of these stories was a bit truer, he did realize that he didn’t really know his wife at all; and that in fact the entire conception of knowing another person—of trust, of closeness, of marriage itself—while not exactly a lie since it existed someplace if only as an idea (in his parents’ life, at least marginally) was still completely out-of-date, defunct, was something typifying another era, now unfortunately gone. Meeting a girl, falling in love, marrying her, moving to Connecticut, buying a fucking house, starting a life with her and thinking you really knew anything about her—the last part was a complete fiction, which made all the rest a joke. Marjorie might as well
have been a hooker or held up 7-Elevens and shot people, for all he really knew about her. And what was more, if he’d said any of this to her, sitting next to him thinking he would never know what, she either would not have understood a word of it or simply would’ve said, “Well, okay, that’s fine.” When people talked about the bottom line, Steven Reeves thought, they weren’t talking about money, they were talking about what this meant, this kind of fatal ignorance. Money—losing it, gaining it, spending it, hoarding it—all that was only an emblem, though a good one, of what was happening here right now.
At this moment a pair of car lights rounded a curve somewhere out ahead of where the two of them sat in their station wagon. The lights found both their white faces staring forward in silence. The lights also found a raccoon just crossing the road from the reservoir shore, headed for the woods that were beside them. The car was going faster than might’ve been evident. The raccoon paused to peer up into the approaching beams, then continued on into the safe, opposite lane. But only then did it look up and notice Steven and Marjorie’s car stopped on the verge of the road, silent in the murky evening. And because of that notice it must’ve decided that where it had been was much better than where it was going, and so turned to scamper back across Quaker Bridge Road toward the cool waters of the reservoir, which was what caused the car—actually it was a beat-up Ford pickup—to rumble over it, pitching and spinning it off to the side and then motionlessness near the opposite shoulder. “Yaaaa-haaaa-yipeeee!” a man’s shrill voice shouted from inside the dark cab of the pickup, followed by another man’s laughter.