by Richard Ford
Except that’s not how I fucking well feel about it.
And how I do feel is not good. My Easter-egg-with-the-downsized-family-inside’s been cracked. The usual Permanent Period protocols aren’t restoring order. My brain’s buzzing with unwanted concerns it wasn’t buzzing with an hour ago.
When I first got my bad prostate news in August, and in the hours before Clarissa became my partisan-advocate, I stood out on the deck, stared at the crowded beach and silvered Atlantic and thought how just one day before this day I didn’t know what I then knew. I tried to drift back to the bliss that didn’t know enough to count itself bliss, have a moment of reprieve, stuff the genie back in. Several times I even said out loud to the warm wind and the aroma of sunblock and salt and seaweed, as transistors buzzed the top-40 countdown and no one noticed me watching from above—I’d say, “Well. At least nobody’s told me I have cancer.” But of course before fresh well-being could swell in my chest and return me inside with a precious moment captured, I was reduced to gulping, squeezing, straining tears and feeling worse than if I’d never kidded myself. Don’t try this.
And what’s zooming around my brain now is the certainty that Ann Dykstra knows next to nothing about me anymore—except what the kids tell her privately—nothing about Sally or about the particulars of my condition, and hasn’t bothered to ask. That may be what she meant by “more to talk about,” which puts it mildly. But for starters, I’m married and holding out hope I can stay that way. My medical condition is “subtly nuanced,” though that may not mean much to her, since she buried one husband only two years ago. Women have things wrong with them just like men, and, as far as I can tell, don’t act as bothered by it. Ann probably assumes I’m adrift and ought to be grateful for any life raft heaved my way. I’m not.
Plus, why would she be attracted to me? And now? I must be much paler from my ordeal. I’m definitely thinner. Am I stooped, too? (I said I never look.) Are my cheekbones knobby? My clothes grown roomy? I’m sure this is how old age and bad health dawn on you—gradually and unannounced. Just all at once people are trying to persuade against things you want to do and always have done: Don’t climb that ladder. Don’t drive after dark. Don’t postpone buying that term life. The Permanent Period, again, is set against this type of graduated obsolescence. But its strengths again seem in retreat.
Ann, of course, has also crudely played the “Ralph card” by referring to parents who lost children and the connecting path to early death—which is close to a cheap shot and offers no reason for us to get back together. I mean, if having my son die condemns me to an early exit, can that mean there are interesting new choices open that weren’t before? Becoming a synchronized sky diver? Sailing alone around the world in a handmade boat? Learning Bantu and ministering to lepers? No. It’s information that releases me to do nothing different and, in fact, almost challenges me to do nothing at all. It’s like dull heredity, whereby you learn you have the gene that causes liver cancer, only you’re too old for the transplant. Better not to know.
Though the truest, deep-background reason Ann is courting me (I know her as only an ex-husband can) is for a private whiff of the unknown, to provide the extra beat in her own life by associating it with a greater exigence than the Lady Linksters can offer: me, in other words, my life, my decline, my death and memory. Her daughter’s on a similar search. If you think this kind of mischief is unthinkable, then think again. As I used to preach to my poor lost students at Berkshire College back in ’83, when I wanted them to write something that wasn’t about their roommate’s acne or how it felt to be alone in the dorm after lights were out and the owls were hooting: If you can say it, it can happen.
6
I motor past the brick-and-glass-facaded village hall, lit up inside like a suburban Baptist church. Thick-chested policemen stand inside, talking casually while a poor soul—a thin, shirtless Negro—waits beside them in handcuffs. Does this bear on the Haddam Doctors Hospital “event” today? A known troublemaker, one of the usual suspects in for a round of grilling? Since there are no TV cameras or uplink trucks out front, no flak jackets, no FBI windbreakers, no leg irons, my guess is not. Just someone who’s had too much pre-holiday fun and now must pay the price.
Seminary Street, when I cruise in just past six, appears reduced to its village self. The streets crews have strung up red and green twinkly Christmas lights and plastic pine-needle bunting over the three intersections. (The “no neon” ordinance is a good thing.) A modest team of rain-geared believers is setting up a lighted crèche on the lawn at the First Prez, where in days gone by I occasionally snuck in for a restorative, chest-swelling sing. Two women and two men are kneeling in the wet grass, training and retraining misty floods and revolving colored lights into the manger’s little interior, while others cart in ceramic wise men and ceramic animals and real hay bales to set the scene. All is to be up and going for the first holiday returnees.
Across the street—below the United Jersey Bank sign, its bleary news crawl streaming out-of-town events—a gaggle of local kids, all boys, stands slouched in the pissy weather, wearing baggy jeans cut off at the calves, long white athletic jerseys and combat boots. This is the Haddam gang element, children of single moms back-in-the-dating-scene, and dads working late, who arrive home too tired to wonder where young Thad or Chad or Eli might be, and head straight for the blue Sapphire in the freezer. These kids merely long for attention, possibly even a little tough-love discipline, and so are willing to provide it for each other, their mode of communication being bad posture, bad complexion, piercings, self-mortifications, smirky graffiti from Sartre, Kierkegaard and martyred Russian poets. In his day, Paul Bascombe was one of them. He once spray-painted “Next time you can’t pretend there’ll be anything else” on the wall of the high school gym, for which he was suspended, though he said he didn’t know what it meant.
These idle kids—six of them, under the bright galloping news banner—are taunting the Presbyterian crèche assemblers, who occasionally look across Seminary and shake their heads sadly. Gamely, one ball-capped man comes out to the curb, where I stop at the light, and shouts something about lending a hand. The kids all smile. One shouts back, “Eat me,” and the man—probably he’s the preacher—fakes a laugh and goes back.
And yet, as it always could, the town works its meliorating blessing on me and my mood. There’s nothing like a night-time suburban town at holiday season to anesthetize woe out of the feelable existence. I cruise down past the Square, where the Pilgrim Village Interpretive Center is now closed and padlocked against pranksters, the Pilgrims all hied off to their motel rooms, period animals stabled and safe in host back yards, the re-enactors disappeared into their Winnebagos, their uniforms drying, tomorrow’s skirmishes vivid in their minds. At the I Scream Ice Cream, customers are crowded in under the lights, while others wait outside against the damp building, having a smoke. A thin queue has formed at the shadowy Garden Theater—a Lina Wertmüller offering I saw a hundred years ago, reprised for the holiday, the ship’s-prow marquee proclaiming Love and Anarchy. It’s the holiday. Not much is shaking.
My rendevous with Mike at the August is not until 6:45. I have time to slide by my dentist’s, on the chance he’ll be in late doing a pre-holiday bridge repair and can make a quick adjustment to my night guard before I head out to Mayo next Tuesday. I turn around in the Lauren-Schwindell lot—my old realty firm. All’s dark within, Real-Trons sleeping, desks clean, alarms armed, not open until Tuesday no matter who wants what. A big cheery orange banner in the window proclaims GOBBLE, GOBBLE, GOBBLE, which I understand means “Thanks.”
I drive back up to Witherspoon, which goes direct to 206 and Calderon’s office. The gang-posse hangs out under the bank sign, eyeing me pseudo-menacingly, though this time my notice is captured by the crawl, a miniature, bulb-lit Times Square above them, to which they’re oblivious. Quarterlysdown29.3…ATTdown62%…Dowclose10.462…HappyThanksgiving2000…LLBeanChinamadeslippersrecalledduetodra
wstringdefectabletochoketoddlerusers…PierreSalingertestifiesreLockerbiecrashsez“Iknowwhodidit”…Airlineblanketsandheadrestssaidnotsanitized…Buffalostymiedunder15"lakeeffectsnow…HorrorstorieswithFlaballots:“WhatinthenameofGodisgoingonhere?”workersez…NJenclavesuffersmysteriousbombdetonlinktoelectionsuspec’d…TropicaldepresWaynenotlikelytomakeland…BigpileupontheGardenState…HappyThanksgiving…
These things are never easy to read.
I turn and pass down Witherspoon, the old part of Haddam, from when it was a real town—the old hardware, the old stale-but-good Greek place, the pole-less barbershop, the old Manusco photography gallery where everyone got his and her graduation portraits done until Manusco went to prison for lewdness. A new realtor’s moved in here—Gold Standard Homes—beside the Banzai Sushi Den, where few customers are visible through the window. The tanning salon’s in full swing for those heading to the islands. Bombdeton…linktoelectionsuspec’d—I “speak” these quasi-words in a mental voice that sounds portentous, though I don’t think it could be true. Such a thought doesn’t want to stay in mind and drifts away on the rainy evening’s odd movie-street limbo, overtaken quickly by a thought that I can get my night guard fixed before heading home. I wonder, driving again along untrafficked Pleasant Valley Road past the cemetery fence, if I mentioned to Ann about the bomb, or if I told Marguerite during my Sponsor visit, or did she mention it to me, and did I go past Haddam Doctors before or after my funeral home stop? I can spend hours of a perfectly sleepable night wondering if I’ve kept such things straight, getting it all settled, then starting the process over, then wondering if I’ve contracted chemically induced Alzheimer’s and pretty soon won’t know much of anything.
Here again is the hospital, its upper storeys lit up like a Radisson, its middle ones blacked out, its broken ground floor exterior turned incandescent by spotlights on metal scaffolds, shining alarmingly onto the distressed earth, turning the air pale metallic through the rain and dark. Humans—I see the FBI and ATF in blue rain jackets and white hard hats, and plenty of yellow-coated HPD—are in motion around the scene, so many hours after, their movement stylized and ominous. Yellow police tape cordons most of the grounds, and plenty of official vehicles, including an ambulance, a fire truck, more cruisers and two black panel trucks are parked helter-skelter inside the perimeter, as if something else is anticipated. No faces appear at the high hospital windows. The upper floors, the burn unit, the oncology ward, the ICU and maternity wings—the alpha and omega services—are in full swing, nobody with time for a crime scene outside. Officers, the same as earlier, their blue-flashing police cars parked up on the curb, wave me and the few other drivers on through. Red fusees sputter on the pavement.
Naturally, I’d love to shake loose some info, a name, a theory, a motive, a clue, but no one would spill any beans. “You’ll know as soon as we know.” “Everybody’s doing their best out here.” I stare up at the babyish rain-slick face of the young traffic cop, cold under his cop hat. He’s rosy-cheeked, accustomed to smiling, but for the moment is as stern as a prosecutor. He peers inside my car with another practiced gaze. Anything suspicious here? Any tingle that says, “Maybe?” Any sign this could be Mr. Nutcase? A BUSH? WHY? sticker. A REALTOR sticker. Faded red Suburban with an Ocean County transfer station windshield sticker. Haven’t I seen you pass by here already today? Maybe you’d better pull over…. I glide through, glancing in the rearview. He watches me as the red of my taillights fades into the dark, reads my license numbers, registers nothing, turns to the next car.
I turn onto Laurel Road, and immediately ahead is Calderon’s office, on the back side of an older blond-brick sixties dental plaza that fronts on 206 and where I’ve always used this rear entrance. As I cruise up Laurel, toward the little three-storey cube down a flight of steps below a grassy embankment, I see two sets of lights are, in fact, glowing within. One suite, I know, is the endo guy, finishing off an after-hours root canal on some friend’s impecunious sister. Another is the dental psychologist who works, evenings-only, on secretaries and dress-shop clerks who don’t have the moolah for implants but still want to feel better about their smiles.
But no lights issue from Suite 308—Calderon’s office. All’s dark and buttoned up. Although up ahead, out at the curb as if awaiting a bus, is someone who actually looks like Calderon—topcoat, beret, a big-featured face distinguishable by black horn-rims and a black mustache I’m used to seeing sprouted behind his dental mask while he scrutinizes my bicuspids through a plastic AIDS shield. Here is my dentist—an odd vision to encounter after dark. Calderon’s probably my age, the doted-on only son of Argentine renaissance scholar-diplomats who couldn’t go home. He attended Dartmouth in the sixties and settled in New Jersey after dental school. He’s a tall, handsome, wry-mouthed, dyed-hair pussy hound, married to the fourth Mrs. Calderon, a young, tragically widowed, crimson-haired Haddam tax lawyer who makes poor Calderon dye his mustache, too, and work out like a decathalete at Abs-R-Us Spa in Kendall Park to keep him looking younger than she is. In his dental practice, Calderon affects bright tangerine clinical smocks, shows Gilbert Roland oldies on the patients’ TV instead of tapes about what’s wrong with your teeth and only hires blond knockout assistants who make the trip over worthwhile. He was briefly a member of our Divorced Men’s Club in the eighties and still is known to specialize in married female patients who require their cavities be filled at home. I’m always cheered up by my visits, since not only do I leave with shiny teeth, soft tissue checked, fillings tucked in tight and a feeling of well-being, but I’m also happy to pass an hour with another consenting adult who understands the lure of the Permanent Period but who hasn’t had to dream it up the way I did. I, in fact, sometimes go right to sleep in the chair, with my mouth propped open and the drill whirring.
It makes me feel good now just to see Calderon waiting for who-knows-what out on the curb, though it’s a long shot he’ll take me back inside and knock off an adjustment.
I shoot down my driver’s side window and angle over, satisfied if we only share a word. Calderon immediately smiles conspiratorially—with no idea who I am. Rain drizzle whooshes past on 206, thirty yards away.
“Hola, Erno. ¿Dónde está el baño?” I say this out my window—our usual palaver.
“El Cid es famoso, ¿verdad?” Ernesto beams a big scoundrel’s smile, still not recognizing me, but putting his big veneers on display. His are white as pearls and made for him by a dental colleague at his wife’s insistence. In his beret, he looks more like an old-timey film star than a philandering gum plumber. “Monet didn’t have a dentist, I guess.” This bears upon some lusty joke he told me the last time and has treated all his patients to for months. I don’t remember it exactly, since I haven’t been in since April. He doesn’t know I’ve had/have cancer—which is a relief, since it makes me forget it. “What’re you do-ing out here, a-mi-go, looking for houses to sell?”
Ernesto pretends to be more Latin than he is after thirty years. I’ve heard him on the phone with his denture lab in Bayonne. He could be from Bayonne. He does know who I am, though. Another small benison.
“I was hoping for a little after-hours dental attention.” He’ll think I’m kidding, but I’m not. Though having a night guard in my pocket feels ridiculous.
“No! Hombre! Don’t tell me. Look at myself.” He gaps back his topcoat to display a tuxedo with flaming red piping. His shoes are the shiny patent-leather species, and he’s wearing a red bow tie and a red-and-green-striped cummerbund that does everything but blink and play music. Calderon’s headed somewhere fancy, while I’m adrift on the back streets with a sore mandible. Who could expect a dentist to be late for a dinner party just because a patient’s in need?
“So where’s your big shindig?” I’m happy to get into the party spirit if I can’t get my night guard fixed.
“Bet-sy went to see her old daddy in Chevy Chase. So…I am left alone once again con my thoughts. ¿Entiendes? I’m going to New Jork to my club.” Ernest
o’s donkey eyes brim with the promise of extramarital holiday high jinks. He’s regaled me in the dentist’s chair with winking accounts of his upper-Seventies “gentleman’s club,” where it’s understood he’d be happy to take me and where I’d have the time of my life. Everything top-drawer. The best clientele—former Mets players, local news anchors, younger-set mafiosi. Black tie required, high-quality champagne on ice, the “ladies,” naturally, all Barnard students with great personalities, making money for med-school tuition. I’ve pictured the “gentlemen” rumpus-ing round the plush-carpeted, damask-wallpapered rooms with their tuxedo pants off, in just their patent-leather pumps, dark socks and dinner jackets, comparing each other’s equipment, of which it’s my guess Ernesto probably has a prize specimen.