The Lay of the Land

by Richard Ford

  “I don’t think that’s the job for the daughter,” I said. I’d already decided to do whatever she said. Talking to your father about his dysfunctions and impairments wasn’t a job for the daughter, either. But there we were. Who else would I want to help me? And who would?

  “Okay,” Clarissa said amiably. “I don’t mind, though. I don’t know what the daughter’s job really is.” She chewed her eggplant while staring at me, leaning on her knobby elbows. She looked like a teen eating a limp French fry. She quietly burped and looked surprised. “It’d be nice if the wife was around. That’s a different screenplay, I guess. Marriage is a strange way to express love, isn’t it? Maybe I won’t try it.”

  I, at that instant, thought of “the wife,” just like people do in movies but almost never in actual life. We usually think about absolutely nothing in these becalmed moments, or else about having our tires rotated or buying a new roll of stamps. Writers, though, like to juice these moments to get at you while you’re vulnerable. What I actually did think of, however, was Sally—sitting down to this very glass-topped breakfast table last June, with the hot sun on the water and bathers standing in the surf, contemplating immersion. A tiny biplane had buzzed down the beachfront, pulling a fluttering sign that said NUDE REVIEW—NJ 35 METEDECONK. I had the New York Times flattened out to the sports page and was skimming a story about a Lakers win, before heading to the obits. It was the morning Sally told me she was leaving for Scotland with her long-presumed-dead former husband, Wally, who’d strangely visited us the week before. She loved me, she said, always would, but it seemed to her “important” (there are so many of these slippery words now) to finish “a thing” she’d started—her ossified marriage, which I’d thought was kaflooey. It seemed, she said, that I didn’t “all that much need” her, and that “under the circumstances” (always treacherous) it was worse to be with someone who didn’t need you than to let someone who maybe did be alone—i.e., Wally, a boy I’d actually gone to military school with but never knew before he showed up in my house. In other words (I supplied this part), she loved Wally more than me.

  I sat there while Sally said some other things, wondering how in hell she could conclude I didn’t need her, and what in hell “need” meant when another person’s “need” was in question.

  Then I cried. But she left anyway.

  And that was that—right at the table where Clarissa said she’d go to Mayo with me to have my prostate radiated and (as the world says) “hopefully” my life saved.

  “I understand the drive south of Red Wing along the Mississippi is gorgeous in the summer.” Clarissa was standing, stacking my lunch plate onto hers.

  “What’s that?” My interior head, for many plausible reasons, felt restless—my grip on the moment, her offer, Sally’s departure, the setting overlooking the Sea-Clift beach, the idea of Red Wing, my newly defined physical condition and survival possibilities all scrabbling for attention.

  “I was thinking about what I could do while you were in the hospital. I looked Minnesota up on the Web.” She smiled the beautiful smile I knew would sink a thousand ships, but was now saving mine. “Minnesota’s okay. In the summer anyway.”

  “I’m sorry, sweetheart. I wasn’t paying attention.” I smiled up at her.

  “I don’t blame you,” Clarissa said, moving her long bones and having a stretch in the sunlight that fell in on us out of the August sky. Oddly enough, and for an instant, I felt glad about everything. “If I’d heard what you heard,” she said, “I wouldn’t pay much attention, either.” And that was finally the way the whole matter was decided.

  5

  The drive out to De Tocqueville minds the woodsy curves of King George Road away from Haddam centre ville, along the walled grounds of the Fresh Light Seminary, now (in the view of local alarmists) under the control of South Korean army factions. The tall, gaunt, flat-roofed old buildings the Presbyterians built loom beyond the darkening, oak-clustered Great Lawn like a New England insane asylum, though within, all souls are saved instead of lost. Single yellowed windows glow high up the building fronts. Fall classes are ended. Foreign students far from Singapore and Gabon, with no chance of travel home, are locked in their dorm rooms front-loading Scripture into their teeming brains, fine-tuning their homiletic techniques in front of the closet mirror, experiencing, no doubt, the first intimation that most believers aren’t real believers and don’t care what you say if you just take their minds off their woes. Some motivated seminarians, I see, have stretched a brash white-red-and-blue banner between two sentinel oaks, proclaiming BUSH IS GOD’S PRESIDENT AND CHARLTON HESTON IS MY HERO.

  Traffic out King George has slackened to a trickle, as though a get-out-of-town-now whistle had sounded, whereas normally it’s bumper-to-bumper down to Trenton, three to seven. But the nearing holiday and worsening weather have returned Haddam to its later-after-hours, nothing-happening somnolence, which all would love to legislate, with day workers, secretaries and substitute teachers broomed out back to their studio apartments and double-wides in Ewingville and Wilburtha.

  Possibly it’s a side effect of the Millennium (which doesn’t seem to have other effects), or else it’s my recent indisposed passage in life, but often these days I’m thunderstruck by the simplest, most commonplace events—or nonevents—as if the regular known world had suddenly illuminated itself with a likable freshness, rendering me pleased. Geniuses must experience this every day, with great inventions and discoveries the happy results. (“Isn’t it neat how birds fly. Too bad we can’t….” “If you just rounded off the sides of this granite block, you could maybe move it a mite easier….” etc., etc.) My recent fresh realizations were on the order of being amazed that someone thought to put a yellow light in between the green and the red ones, or that everybody takes the road from Haddam to Trenton for granted but nobody thinks what a stroke of brilliance it was to build the first road. None of these has made me feel I could invent anything myself, and I don’t share my perceptions with others, for fear of arousing suspicions that I’ve gone crazy due to my treatment. And of course I don’t have anybody to share perceptions with anyway. (Clarissa would be bored to concrete.) And to be truthful, my feeling of low-wattage wonder is usually tinged with willowy sadness, since these alertings and sudden re-recognitions carry with them the sensation of seeing all things for the final time—which of course could be true, though I hope not.

  Not long ago, I was in my Realty-Wise office, at my desk with my sock feet up, reading the National Realty Roundtable Agents’ Bulletin—a tedious article from their research department about locked, float-down mortgage rates being the wave of the future—when my eye slipped down to a squib at the end that said, “When asked what practical value there is in knowing if neutrinos possess mass, Dr. Dieter von Reichstag of the Mains Institute, Heidelberg, admitted he didn’t have the foggiest idea, but what really amazed him was that on a minor planet that circles an average-size star (earth), a species has developed that can even ask that question.”

  I’m sure this had some interesting connections to locked, float-downs and to what amazing product enhancements they are in the residential mortgage market (I didn’t read to the end). But the amazement Dr. von Reichstag admitted to is more or less what I feel with frequency these days, albeit about less weighty matters. Dr. von Reichstag may also feel the same sensation of last-go-round somberness that I feel, since all new sensations carry in their DNA intimations of their ending. Viewing the new in this way almost certainly relates to having cancer, and with being an older fast-fading star myself.

  But driving out King George, on the road to meet my ex-wife—a meeting I have trepidations about—I experience in this late-day gloom another of my illuminations, one that interests me, even though it strikes me as tiresome. Simply stated: What an odd thing it is to have an ex-wife you have to have a meeting with! Millions, needless to say, do it day in and day out for legions of good reasons. Chinamen do it. Swahilis do it. Inuits do it. Anytime you see
a man and woman sitting having coffee in a food court at the mall, or having a drink together in the Johnny Appleseed Bar, or walking side-by-side out of the Foremost Farms into a glaring summer sun holding Slurpees, and you instinctively force onto them your own understanding of what they could be up to (adulterers, lawyer-client, old high school chums), it’s much more likely you’re seeing an ex-wife and ex-husband engaged in contact that all the acrimony in the world, all the hostility, all the late payments, the betrayals, the loneliness and sleepless nights spent concocting cruel and crueler punishments still can’t prevent or not make inevitable.

  What is it about marriage that it won’t just end? I’ve now had two go on the fritz, and I still don’t get it. Sally Caldwell may be asking this question wherever she is with the shape-shifting Wally. I hope it’s true.

  But is this how life is supposed to be—loving someone, but knowing with certainty you’ll never, never, never (because neither of you remotely wants it) have that person except in this sorry ersatz way that requires a “meeting” to discuss who the hell knows what? Clarissa doesn’t agree and believes all things can be adjusted and made better, and that Ann and I can finally blubbety, blub, blub. But we can’t. And, in fact, if we could, doing so would represent the very linked boxes Clarissa herself claims to hate. Only they’d be mine and Ann’s boxes. A lot of life is just plain wrong. And the older I get, the more clearly and often wrong it seems. And all you can do about it—which is what Clarissa is trying to pre-vision—is just start getting used to it, start selecting amazement over bewilderment. This whole subject, you might say, is just another version of fear of dying. But my bet is 80 percent of divorced people feel this way—bewildered yet possibly also amazed by life—and go on feeling it until the heavy draperies close. The Permanent Period is, of course, the antidote.

  The turn-off to De Tocqueville Academy is like the entrance to a storied baronial game preserve—a lichenous, arched stone gate carved with standing stags holding plaques with Latin mottoes on them. The gate alone would cause any parent driving little Seth or little Sabrina, in the backseat of the Lexus reading Li Po and Sartre three levels above their age group, to feel justly served and satisfied by life. “Seth’s at De Tocqueville. It’s rilly competitive, but worth every sou. His fifth-grade teacher’s got a Ph.D. in philosophy from Uppsala and did his post-doc at the Sorbonne—”

  Inside the gate, the road, murky in early-dark and drizzle, narrows and passes into first-growth hardwood, dense and primordial. Yellow speed moguls proliferate. Roadside signs let the uninitiated know what sort of place he or she’s entering: We’re Liberal! GORE FOR PRESIDENT placards just like out on Route 206 clutter the grassy verge as my headlights pass, while others demand that someone GET US OUT!, that PEACE IS WORTH VIOLENCE, that we all should STOP THE CARNAGE! I’m not sure which carnage they have in mind. There’s one lonely Bush sign, which I’m sure has been put up to preserve the endowment, since no one here would vote for Bush any more than they’d vote for a chimp.

  A pair of whitetails suddenly appears in my headlights, and I have to idle up close and beep-beep before they snort, flag their tails and saunter onto the road edge and begin nibbling grass, unfazed. De Tocqueville, back in the twenties, was in fact a vaunted hunting woods for rich Gotham investment bigwigs (part of the carnage) and was then called Muirgris, which is embossed on the gate in Latin. Packard-loads of happy fat men in tweeds rumbled down on weekends, disported like pashas, drank like Frenchmen, consorted with ladies imported from Philly and occasionally stepped outside to blow the local fauna to smithereens, before packing up on Sundays and happily motoring home.

  Muirgris is now De Tocqueville—and a bane of the old roisterers—a “sanctuary” overrun with deer, turkeys, skunks, possum, squirrels, raccoons, porcupines, some say a catamount and a bear or two, all of which enjoy refuge. Disgruntled Haddam home owners living outside the Muirgris boundaries have voiced complaints about predation issues (deer and bunnies eating their winged euonymus) and made dark threats about hiring professional hunter-trappers to “thin the herd” using controversial net-and-bolt devices, all of which has the gentle De Tocqueville staffers up in arms. There have been property-line confrontations, township-council shouting scenes, police called at late hours. Lawsuits have been filed as the animals have crowded inside, seeking protection, and new worries about Lyme disease, bird flu and rabies are now rumored. A relative of one of the original old sports, an interior design consultant from Gotham, gave a speech at commencement, saying his forebear would want Muirgris to stay up with the new century’s values and be as “green” today as he was “bloody-minded” in his own time. So far, the issue is far from decided.

  I wind a cautious way down to campus—speed bump to speed bump. The school’s buildings are all sited around the old rogues’ hunting lodge, a regal log and sandstone Adirondack-style dacha now converted into an “Admin Mansion,” with earth-friendly faculty and classroom modules built down into the woods, as if prep school was a dreamy summer camp on Lake Memphremagog, instead of a hot petri dish where the future of the fortunate gets on track, while the less lucky schlump off to Colgate and Minnesota-Duluth. My son Paul didn’t rate a sniff here ten years ago.

  Ann’s styleless brown Honda Accord sits alone in the shadowy, sodium-lit faculty lot, the rest of the De Tocqueville staff long gone for Turkey Day festivities. It’s possible Ann wants to discuss the children today: Clarissa’s revised gender agenda and lack of life direction; Paul’s arrival tomorrow with a companion; how to apportion visiting hours, etc. She may, in fact, be afraid of Paul, as I slightly am, though he claims she’s his “favorite parent.” Having children can sometimes feel like a long, not very intense depression, since after a while neither party has much left to give the other (except love, which isn’t always simple). You’re each, after all, taken up with your own business—staying alive, in my case. And for reasons they have no control over, the children are always aware they’re waiting for you to croak. Paul has expressed this very view as a “generic fact” of parent-child relations, point-blank to his mother, which is probably why she fears him. Clarissa’s current gift-of-life to me is the rarest exception, though one partly entered on by her—and why not—because it allows her to think of herself as equally rare and exceptional.

  In any case, conversations with one’s ex-wife always exist in a breed-unto-themselves/zero-gravity atmosphere that’s attractive for its old familiarities, but finally less interesting than communication with an alien. Whenever I’m around Ann, no matter how civil or chatty or congenial we manage it, no matter what the advertised subject matter (it was worse when the kids were younger), her silent thoughts always turn to the old go-nowhere ifs and what-ifs, all the ways “certain people” (who else?) should be, but mysteriously are not. Try, try, try to be better. Award good-citizenship medals, wait patiently at bedsides, shell out my last dime for kids’ therapy—still Ann can’t ignore the one fatally blown circuit from long ago, the one that doused the lights and put karmic unity forever out of reach. The Permanent Period again stands me in good stead here by allowing me to take for granted exactly who I am—good, or awful—not who I should be, and along the way blurs the past to haze. But Ann is finally a life-long essentialist and thinks there’s a way all things should be, no matter how the land lies around her feet. Whereas I am a lifelong practitioner of choices and always see things as possibly different from how they look.

  But even with these asymmetries being in continuous effect, I constantly carry around a sometimes heart-wrenching, hand-sweating fear that Ann will manage to die before I do (the odds there have clearly shifted to my favor). Each time I’m about to see her—the few times since she moved back to Haddam last year—I’ve sunk myself into a deep fret that she’s about to release a truckload of bad news. A mysterious lesion, a “shadow,” a changed mole, blood where you don’t want blood, all requiring ominous tests, the clock ticking—all things I know about now. Following which, I won’t know what the hel
l to do! If loving somebody you’ll never really know again and only rarely see can be difficult—though I don’t really mind it—think about having to grieve for that person long after any shared life is over, life that could’ve made grieving worthwhile. You think grief like that, grief once removed, can’t be experienced? It can kill you dead as a mackerel. I, in fact, wouldn’t last a minute and would head straight to the Raritan bridge at Perth Amboy and leave my car a derelict on the Parkway. Think about that the next time you see such a vehicle and wonder where the driver went.

  De Tocqueville Academy is a day school only. Even the Arab and Sri Lankan kids have well-heeled host families and good places to go—the Vineyard, the Eastern Shore—for holidays. A couple of dim fluorescent lights are left burning in the Admin Mansion, just like at the seminary, and down toward the classroom modules, past the postmodern ecumenical chapel, toward the glass-exterior athletic installation, a scattering of yellow lights prickles through the oaks and copper beeches as the day is ending. I’m confident I’m being observed on a bank of TV screens from some warm security bunker close by, the watchful crew standing around with coffee mugs, studying me, a “person of interest, doing what, we don’t know,” my name already jittering through the FBI computer at Quantico. Am I wanted? Was I wanted? Should I be? I’m surprised Ann can stand it here, that the practical-bone, non-joiner Michigan girl in her can put up with all this supervised, pseudo-communal, faux-humanistic, all-pull-together atmosphere that infests these private school faculties like mustard gas—everyone burnishing his eccentricities smooth so as to offend no one, yet remaining coiled like rattlers, ready to “become difficult” and “have problems” with colleagues whose eccentricities aren’t burnished the same way. You think it’s the psychotic parents and the hostile, under-medicated kids who drive you crazy. But no. It’s always your colleagues—I know this from a year’s teaching at a small New England college back in the day. It’s the Marcis and the Jasons, the exotic Ber-nards and the brawny Ludmillas, over for the Fulbright year from Latvia, who send you screaming off into the trees to join the endangered species hiding there. In-depth communication with smaller and smaller like-minded groups is the disease of the suburbs. And De Tocqueville’s where it thrives.