The Lay of the Land

by Richard Ford

  Number 24—the great neighbor-houses’ little sister—would be a great buy for a new divorcée with dough, or for a newly-wed lawyer couple or a discreet gay M.D. with a Gotham practice who needs a getaway. If I could’ve sold easy houses like this, instead of overpriced mop closets you couldn’t fart in without the whole block smelling it, I might’ve stayed.

  And like clockwork, as I stride up the flagstones toward the brass-knockered red door—two shiny brass carriage lamps turning on in unison—I experience the anti-Permanent Period williwaws lifting off of me and the exhilaration of whatever’s about to open up here streaming into my limbs and veins like a physic. One could easily wonder, of course, about a Mr. Definitely Wrong being set to spring out from the other side of the heavy door—John Wayne Gacy in clown gear, waiting to eat me with sauerkraut. What would the termite guy or the Culligan Man do, faced as they are with the same imponderables on a daily basis? Just use the old noodle. Stay alert for the obviously weird, attend your senses, drink and eat nothing, identify exits. I’ve, in fact, never really feared anything worse than being bored to bits. Plus, if they’re gonna, they’re gonna—like the little town in Georgia the tornado ripped a hole through when everybody was at church on Sunday, believing such things didn’t happen there.

  Everything happens everywhere. Look at the fucking election.

  Ding-dong. Ding-dong. Ding-dong.

  A melodious belling. I turn and re-survey the cul-de-sac—wet, cold, bestilled, its other ponderous residences all bearing lawn signs: WARNING. THIS HOUSE IS PATROLLED. The big Georgians’ many leaded windows glow through the trees with antique light, as though lit by torches. No humans or animals are in view. A police car or ambulance wee-up, wee-ups in the distance. Cold air hisses with the rain’s departure. A crow calls from a spruce, then a second, but nothing’s in sight.

  Noises become audible within. A female throat is cleared, a chain lock slid down its track. The brass peephole darkens with an interior eye. A dead bolt’s conclusively thrown. I rise a quarter inch onto my toes.

  “Just a moment, pu-lease.” A rilling, pleasant voice in which, do I detect, the undertones of Dixie? I hope not.

  The heavy door opens back. A smiling woman stands in its space. This is the best part of Sponsoring—the relief of finally arriving to someone’s rescue.

  But I sense: Here is not a complete stranger. Though from out on the bristly welcome mat, the back of my head feeling a breeze flood past into the homey-feeling house, I can’t instantly supply coordinates. My brow feels thick. My mouth is half-open, beginning to smile. I peer through the angled door opening at Mrs. Purcell.

  It couldn’t be a worse opening gambit, of course, for a Sponsor to stare simian-like at the Sponsoree, who may already be fearful the visitor will be a snorting crotch-clutcher escapee from a private hospital, who’ll leave her trussed up in the maid’s closet while he makes off with her underthings. The risk for doing Sponsor work in Haddam is always, of course, that I might know my Sponsoree: a face, a history, a colorful story that defeats disinterest and ruins everything. I should’ve been more prudent.

  Except maybe not. Some days, I see whole crowds of people who look exactly like other people I know but who’re, in fact, total strangers. It’s my age and age’s great infirmity: overaccumulation—the same reason I don’t make friends anymore. Sally always said this was a grave sign, that I was spiritually afraid of the unknown—unlike herself, who left me for her dead husband. Though I thought—and still do—that it was actually a positive sign. By thinking I recognized strangers I, in fact, didn’t recognize, I was actually reaching out to the unknown, making the world my familiar. No doubt this is why I’ve sold many, many houses that no one else wanted.

  “Are you Mr. Fruank?” Dixie’s definitely alight in the voice: bright, sweet and rising at the end to make everything a happy question; vowels that make you sound like yew, handle like handull. Central Virginia’s my guess.

  “Hi. Yeah. I’m Frank.” I extend an affirming hand with a friendlier smile. I’m not a leering crotch-clutcher or a dampened-panty faddist. Sponsors omit last names—which is simpler when you leave.

  “Well, Ah’m Marguerite Purcell, Mr. Fruank. Why don’t you come in out of this b-r-r-r we’re havin’.” Marguerite Purcell, who’s dressed in a two-piece suit that must be raw silk of the rarest French-rose hue, with matching Gucci flats, steps back in welcome—the most cordial-confident of graceful hostesses, clearly accustomed to all kinds, high to low, entering her private home on every imaginable occasion. Haddam has always absorbed a small population of dispirited, old-monied southerners who can’t stand the South yet can only bear the company of one another in deracinated enclaves like Haddam, Newport and Northeast Harbor. You catch glimpses of their murmuring Town Cars swaying processionally out gated driveways, headed to the Homestead for golf-and-bridge weekends with other white-shoed W&L grads, or turning north to Naskeag to spend August with Grandma Ni-Ni on Eggemoggin Reach—all of them iron-kneed Republicans who want us out of the UN, nigras off the curbs and back in the fields, the Suez mined, and who think the country missed its chance by not choosing ole Strom back in ’48. Hostesses like Marguerite Purcell never have problems money can’t solve. So what am I doing here?

  “Ahm just astonissshed by this weathuh.” Marguerite’s leading me through the parquet foyer into a living room “done” like no living room I’ve seen (and I’ve seen a few) and that the staid Quaker exterior gives no hint of. The two big front windows have been sheathed with shiny white lacquered paneling. The walls are also lacquered white. The green-vaulted ceiling firmament has tiny recessed pin lights shining every which way, making the room bright as an operating theater. The floors are bare wood and waxed to a fierce sheen. There are no plants. The only furnishings are two immense, hard-as-granite rectilinear love seats, covered in some sort of dyed-red animal skin, situated on a square of blue carpet, facing each other across a thick slab-of-glass coffee table that actually has fish swimming inside it (a dozen lurid, fat, motionless white goldfish), the whole objet supported by an enormous hunk of curved, polished chrome, which I recognize as the bumper off a ’54 Buick. The air is odorless, as if the room had been chemically scrubbed to leave no evidence of prior human habitation. Nothing recalls a day when regular people sat in regular chairs and watched TV, read books, got into arguments or made love on an old braided rug while logs burned cheerily in a fireplace. The only animate sign is a white CO2 detector mid-ceiling with its tiny blinking red beacon. Though on the wall above where a fireplace ought to be, there’s a gilt-framed, essentially life-size oil portrait of an elderly, handsome, mustachioed, silver-haired, capitalist-looking gentleman in safari attire, a floppy white-hunter fedora and holding a Mannlicher .50 in front of a stuffed rhino head (the very skin used to make the couch). This fellow stares from the wall with piercing, dark robber-baron eyes, a cruel sensuous mouth, uplifted nose and bruising brow, but with a mysterious, corners-up smirk on his lips, as if once a great, diminishing joke has been told and he was the first one to get it.

  “This wuss my husbund’s favorite room,” Marguerite says dreamily, still primly smiling. She establishes herself on the front edge of one of the red love seats, facing me across the aquarium table, squeezing together, then shifting to the side her shiny stockinged knees. She possesses thin, delicately veined ankles, one of which wears a nearly invisible gold chain flattened beneath the nylon. She is all Old Dominion comeliness, the last breathing female you’d think could stomach a room as weird as this. Obviously, she married it, but now that the Mister’s retreated to his place on the wall, she doesn’t know what in the fuck to do with it. This may be what she wants me to tell her. Anyone—but me—couldn’t resist asking her a hundred juicy, prying, none-of-your-business questions. But, as with all Sponsor visits, I heed the presence of an invisible privacy screen between Sponsoree and self. That works out best for everybody.

  From where I sit, Marguerite seems to have the lens softened all around
her—a trick of the pin lights in the celestial green ceiling. She’s maybe mid-fifties but has a plush, young-appearing face she’s applied a faint rouging to, a worry-free forehead, welcoming blue eyes, with an obviously sizable bustage under her rose suit jacket, and an amorous full-lipped mouth, through which her voice makes a soft whistling sound (“ssurely,” “hussbund’s”), as if her teeth were in the way. My guess is she’s the hoped-for result of a high-end makeover—a length somebody might gladly go to for the chance of an enduring (and rich) second marriage. Her hair, however, is the standard bottle-brown southern do with a wide, pale, scalp-revealing middle part going halfway back, with the rest cemented into a flip that only elderly hairdressers in Richmond know how to properly mold. Southern socialites—my schoolmates’ mothers at Gulf Pines Academy, who’d drive down from Montgomery and Lookout to speak briefly to their villainous sons through lowered windows of their Olds Ninety Eights—wore exactly this hair construction back in 1959. I actually find it sexy as hell, since it reminds me of my young and (I felt) clearly lust-driven fourth-grade teacher, Miss Hapthorn, back in Biloxi.

  When she led me into the lifeless and over-heated living room, I noticed Marguerite stealing two spying looks my way as if I, too, might’ve reminded her of somebody and wasn’t the only one searching time’s vault.

  And she’s now examining me again. And not like the beguiling Virginia hostess who sparkles at the guest, hoping to find something she can adore so she can decide to change her mind about it later, but with the same submerged acknowledging I detected before. These magnolia blossoms, of course, can be scrotum-cracking, trust-fund bullies who secretly smoke Luckies, drink gin by the gallon, screw the golf pro and don’t give an inch once money’s on the table. Only they never act that way when you first make their acquaintance. I’m wondering if I sold her a house back in the mists.

  Though all at once my heart, out ahead of my brain, exerts a boul-derish, possibly audible whump-whoomp-de-whomp. I know Marguerite Purcell. Or I did.

  The knees. The good ankles. The ghosty anklet. The bustage. The plump lips. The way the peepers fasten on me, slowly close, then stay closed too long, revealing an underlying authority making decisions for the composed face. (The lisp is new.) She may remember me, too. Except if I admit it, Sponsorship loses all purchase and I’ll have to beat it, just when I got here.

  Marguerite reopens her small pale blue eyes, looks self-consciously down, arranges her pretty hands on her rose skirt hem, flattens the fabric across her knee-tops, smiles again and recrosses her ankles. No one’s spoken since we sat down. Maybe she’s also having a day when everybody looks like somebody else and thinks nothing of this moment of faulty recognition. And maybe she’s not the woman I “slept” with how many years back (sleep did eventually come), when her name was Betty Barksdale—“Dusty” to her friends—then the beleaguered, abandoned wife of Fincher Barksdale, change-jingling local M.D. and turd. He left her to join some foreign-doctors outfit in deepest Africa, where he reportedly went native, learned the local patois, took a fat African bride with tribal scarrings, began doctoring to the insurgents (the wrong insurgents) and ended up in a fetid, lightless, tin-sided back-country prison from which he eventually found his way to a public square in a regional market town, where he was roped to a metal no-parking post and hacked at for a while by boy soldiers hepped up on the amphetamines he’d been feeding them.

  But even if Marguerite is the metamorphosed Dusty from ’88, I may not be that easy to recollect. Most high jinks aren’t worth remembering anyway. Behind her warm, self-conscious smile, she might be silently saying, What is it now? This guy? Frank…um…something? Something about when my first husband, something, I guess, didn’t come back or some goddamn thing. Who cares?

  I’d lobby for that. We don’t have to revisit a tepid boinking we boozily committed upstairs in her green-shingled Victorian on Westerly Road that Fincher stuck her with. Though if it is her, I’d like (silently) to compliment the impressive metamorphosis to magnolia blossom, since the Dusty I knew was a smirky, blond, slightly hard-edged, cigarette-smoking former Goucher girl who made fun of her husband’s blabbermouth east Memphis relatives and about what he’d think if he ever knew she was rogering the realtor. He never got to think anything.

  Though the wellspring of transformation is almost always money. It works miracles. First Fincher’s big life-insurance policies, then the lavishments of old Clyde Beatty Purcell all worked their changes. Ex-friends who knew her as sorrowing, needful Dusty could all go fuck themselves. (I’d like to know if I look as old as she does. Possibly yes. I’ve had cancer, I’m internally radiated, in recovery. It happens.)

  Marguerite’s warm society smile has faded to a querulous pert, designating confusion. I’ve become quiet and may have alarmed her. Her eyes elevate above my head to gaze toward the blocked-off front windows, as if she could see through them to the dying day. She wags her soft chin slowly, as though confirming something. “I don’t want to talk about our politics, Mr. Frank, it’s too depresssin’.” Politics is strictly verboten in Sponsoring anyway. Hard to think we could be on the same side. “In the New Yawk Times today, Mr. Bush said if Florida goes to the Dem-uh-crats, it could be ahrmed insurrection. Or worse. That rascal Clinton. It’ss shocking.” She frowns with disdain, then she sniffs, her nose darting upward as if she’d just sniffed the whole disreputable business out of the air forever.

  But with this gesture, the Marguerite-Dusty-Betty deal is sealed. In our night of brief abandon, after I’d shown her a gigantic Santa Barbara hacienda on Fackler Road (she wanted to squander all Fincher’s money so he couldn’t come home), we two wound up on bar stools at the Ramada on Route 1, with one thing following fumblingly the next. I had a well-motivated prohibition against casual client boinking, but it got lost in the shuffle.

  As the night spirited on and the Manhattans kept arriving, Dusty, who’d begun referring to herself as “the Dream Weaver,” gradually gave in to a strange schedule of abrupt smirks, fidgets, tics, brow-clenchings, lip-squeezings, cheek-puffings, teeth-barings and fearsome eye-rollings—as if life itself had ignited a swarm of nervous weirdness, attesting to the great strain of it all. It rendered our subsequent lovemaking a challenge and, as I remember it, unsuccessful, except for me, of course. Though the next morning when I was skulking out through the kitchen door (I thought before she could wake up), I encountered Dream Weaver Dusty, already at the sink in a faded red kimono, staring wanly out the window, hair askew and barefoot, but with an unaccountably graceful, empathetic welcome and a weak smile, wondering if I wanted an English muffin or maybe a poached egg before I disappeared. She was hollow-eyed and certainly didn’t want me to stay (I didn’t). But the night’s stress-plus-booze-inspired tangle of tics, warps and winces had also vanished, leaving her exhausted but calm. Vanished, that is, except for one—the one I just saw, the tiny heavenward flickage of nose tip toward ceiling, punctuating a subject needing to be put to rest. Its effect on me now is to inspire not what you’d think, but even franker admiration for her reincarnation and the proficient adaptation to the times. How many of us, faced with a bad part to play, wouldn’t like to slip offstage in act one, then reappear in act three as an entirely different personage? It’s a wonder it doesn’t happen more. My wife, Sally, did the exact opposite when, far along in the play, she went back to being the wife from act one who never got the ovation she deserved.

  I look out the arched doorway to the parquet foyer and to closed doors leading farther into the house. Is anyone else in here with us? A loyal servant, a Cairn terrier, possibly old Purcell himself, hooked to tubes and breathing devices, up the back stairs, watching game shows.

  “I don’t want to talk about politics, either.” I smile back like a kindly old GP with a pretty patient presenting with nonspecific symptoms that don’t really bother her all that much. Possibly there are indistinct rumblings happening inside her brain—an English-muffin moment without a place in time.

  “I have a
strange question to ask you, Frank.” Marguerite’s delicate shoulders go square, her back straightens, fingers unlace and re-lace atop her shiny knees. Perfect posture, as always, ignites the low venereal flicker. You never know about these things.

  “Strange questions are our stock-in-trade,” I offer back genially.

  “I don’t suppose you’re an expert in this.” Eyelids down and holding. I nod, expressing competence. Marguerite has worked a little free of her plantation accent. She’s more downtown Balmur. Her limpid blues rise again and seek the absent window behind me and blink in an inspiration-seeking way. “I have a very strange urge to confess something.” Her eyes stay aloft.

  I am as noncommittal as Dr. Freud. “I see.”

  The room’s glistening white walls, firmamental ceiling and aquarium table holding motionless, creepily mottled goldfish all radiate in silent stillness. I hear a heat source tick-tick-ticking. One of the crows outside issues a softened caw. It’s a Playhouse 90 moment, one interminable soundless shot. How do you get a room to smell this way, I wonder. Why would you want it to?

  Marguerite’s slender left hand, on which there’s a ring supporting an emerald as big as a Cheerios box, wanders to above her left breast, fingertips just touching a pin made of two tiny finely joined golden apples, then returns to her knee. “But I really have nothing to confess. Nothing at all.” Her gaze falls to me plaintively. It is the look of someone who’s spent twenty-five years in customer service at the White Plains Saks, feels okay about it, but now realizes something more challenging might’ve been possible. It’s disheartening to encounter this look in a woman you like. “It’s a little unnerving,” she says softly. “What do you think, Frank?” Her full lips push tantalizingly outward to signify candor.