The Lay of the Land

by Richard Ford

  I should say straight out: Never tell anyone you know how she or he feels unless you happen to be, just at that second, stabbing yourself with the very same knife in the very same place in the very same heart she or he is stabbing. Because if you’re not, then you don’t know how anybody feels. I can barely tell you how I felt when Sally said, “Frank, when I got to Lake Forest, Wally was there.” (Use of my name, “Frank,” as always, a harbinger of things unpopular. I should change my name to Al.)

  I know for a fact that I said nothing when I heard these words. I managed to put my Salty Dog down on the glass coffee-table top and lower myself onto the brown suede couch beside her, to put both my hands on top of my knees and gaze out at the darkening Atlantic, where the ghostly figures of the high-booted fishermen faced the surf and, far out to sea, the sky still showed a brilliant reflected sliver of azure. Sally sat as I did and may have felt as I did—surprised.

  Sometimes simple words are the best, and better than violent images of the world cracking open; or about how much everything’s like a sitcom and what a pity William Bendix isn’t still around to play Wally—or me; or better than the ethical-culture response, that catastrophe’s “a good thing for everybody,” since it dramatizes life’s great mystery and reveals how much all is artifice—connected boxes, world-within-worlds—the trap Clarissa’s trying to break free of. How we express our response to things is just made-up stuff anyway—unless we tip over dead—and is meant to make the listener think he’s getting his money’s worth, while feeling relief that none of this shit is happening to him personally. Surprised is good enough. When I heard Wally Caldwell, age fifty-five, missing for thirty years, during which time many things had happened and substantial adjustments were made about the nature of existence on earth—when I heard Wally was alive in Lake Forest and had spent the weekend doing God knows what with my wife, I was surprised.

  Sally knew I might be surprised (and again, I was surprised), and she wanted to make this news not cause the world to crack open, for me to go hysterical, etc. She’d had three days with Wally already. She had gotten over the shock of an older, bearded, avuncular and strange Wally hiding out in his parents’ house like some scary older brother with a terrible wound, whom you only see fleetingly behind shadowy chintz curtains in an upstairs dormer window, but who may be heard at night to moan. Her attitude was—and I liked it, since it was typical of her get-up-and-fix-things attitude—that while, yes, Wally’s reappearance had caused some tricky issues to pop up, needing to be resolved, and that while she understood how “this whole business” maybe put me in an awkward position (vis-à-vis, say, the past, the present and the future), this was still a “human situation,” that no one was a culprit (of course not), no one had bad will (except me) and we would all address this as a threesome, so that as little damage as possible would be done to as few a number of innocent souls and lives (I might’ve known who the left-unprotected innocent soul would turn out to be, but I didn’t).

  Wally’s story, she told me, sitting on the suede couch that faced out to the darkened springtime Atlantic, as our Salty Dogs turned watery and dark descended, was “one of those stories” fashioned by war and trauma, sadness, fear and resentment, and by the chaotic urge to escape all the other causes, aided by (what else?) “some kind of schizoid detachment” that induced amnesia, so that for years Wally wouldn’t remember big portions of his prior life, although certain portions were crystal clear.

  Wally, it seems, couldn’t put everything all together, though he admitted he hadn’t just gone out to pick up the Trib thirty years ago, bumped his head getting into his Beetle and suffered a curtain to close. It had to have been—this, he no doubt admitted on one of their cozy Lake Michigan beach tête-à-têtes—that “something unconscious was working on him,” some failure to face the world he confronted as a Viet vet with a (minor) head wound, and a family, and a future as a horticulturist looming, the whole undifferentiated world just flooding in on him like a dam bursting, with cows and trees and cars and church steeples swirling away in the gully-wash, and him in with it. (There are good strategies for coping with this, of course, but you have to want to.)

  Cutting (blessedly) to the chase, Wally’s trauma, fear, resentment and elective amnesia had carried him as far away from the Chicago suburbs, from wife and two kids, as Glasgow, in Scotland, where for a time he became “caught up” in “the subculture” that lived communally, practiced good feeling for everything, experimented with cannabis and other mind-rousing drugs, fucked like bunny rabbits, made jewelry by hand and sold it on damp streets, practiced subsistence farming techniques, made their own clothes and set their communal sights on spiritual-but-not-mainstream-religious revelation. In other words, the Manson Family, led by Ozzie and Harriet.

  Eventually, Wally said, the “petrol” had run out of the communal subculture, and with a satellite woman—a professor of English, naturally—he had migrated up to the wilds of Scotland, first to the Isle of Skye, then to Harris, then to Muck, and finally to Mull, where he found employment in the Scottish Blackface industry (sheep) and finally—more to his talents and likings—as a gardener on the laird’s estate and, as time went on, as head gardener and arborist (the laird was wild for planting spruce trees), and eventually as the estate manager for the entire shitaree. A complete existence was there, Wally said, a long way from Lake Forest “and that whole life” (again meaning wife and kids), from the Cubs, the Wrigley Building, the Sears Tower, the river dyed green—again, the whole deluging, undifferentiated crash-in of modern existence American-style, whose sudsy, brown tree-trunk-littered surface most of us somehow manage to keep our heads above so we can see our duty and do it. I’m not impartial in these matters. Why should I be?

  In due time, the lady friend—“a completely good and decent woman”—got tired of life on Mull as a crofter’s companion and returned to her job and husband—likewise a professor, in Ohio. A couple of local lassies moved in and, in time, out again. Wally got used to living semi-officially in the manager’s stone cottage, scrubbing the loo, restocking the fridge with haggis, smoking fish, burning peat, reading The Herald, listening to Radio 4, snapping on the telly, sipping his cuppa, keeping his Wellies dry and his Barbour waxed during the long Mull winters. This was the wee life, the one he was suited for and entitled to and where he expected his days to end amongst the cold stones and rills and crags and moors and cairns and gorse and windblown cedars of his own dull nature—here in his half-chosen, half-fated, half-fucked-up-and-escaped-to destination resort from life gone kaflooey.

  Enter then the Internet—in the form of the old laird’s young son, Morgil, who’d taken the reins of the property (having been to college at Florida State) and who’d begun to suspect that this lumpy American in the manager’s accommodation was probably other than he’d declared himself, was possibly an old draft dodger or a fugitive from some abysmal crime in his own country, from which he’d exiled himself, some guy who dressed up in clown suits and ate little boys for lunch. The standard idea of America, viewed from abroad.

  What young Morgil found when he checked—and who’d be shocked?—was a “Wally Caldwell” Web site the old Lake Forest parents had erected as a long last hope, or whatever inspires Web sites (I don’t maintain one at Realty-Wise, though Mike does, www.RealtyTibet.com, which is how Tommy Benivalle found him). No outstanding warrants, Interpol alerts or Scotland Yard red flags were attached to the site, only several sequentially aged photos of Wally (one actually in a Barbour) that looked exactly like the Wally out planting spruce sprigs and pruning other ones like a character out of D. H. Lawrence. “Please contact the Caldwell Family if you know this man, or see him, or hear of him. Amnesia may be involved. He’s not dangerous. His family misses him greatly and we are now in our eighties. Not much time is left.”

  Young Morgil didn’t feel it would be right to send a blind message out of the blue—that a cove of Wally Caldwell’s general description was working right on old Cullonden, on the Isle o
f Mull, under the name of Wally Caldwell. It’d be better, he gauged, to tell Wally, even at the risk of its being sensitive news that might wake him up from a long dream of life and dash him into a world he had no tolerance for, send him screaming and gibbering off onto the heath, his frail vessel cracked, so that all his ancient parents would have to show for their Web site was a pale, broken, silent man in green pajamas, who seemed sometimes to smile and recognize you but mostly just sat and stared at Lake Michigan.

  Morgil tacked a note to Wally’s door the next morning—a color printout of the Caldwell home page—the computerized middle-aged face side-by-side with a yearbook photo from Illinois State (“Call me Mr. Wall”). No mention was made of Sally, Shelby and Chloë, or that he’d been declared expired. The only words it contained were his parents’ tender entreaties: “Come home, Wally, wherever you are, if you are. We’re not mad at you. We’re still here in Lake Forest, Mom and Dad. We can’t last forever.”

  And so he did. Wally crossed the sea to home and the welcome arms of his mom and dad. A changed bloke, but nonetheless their moody, slow-thinking son, all things suddenly glittering and promise-laden, whereas before all had been a closed door, a blank wall, an empty night where no one calls your name. I know plenty about this.

  Which was the strange tableau my unsuspecting wife walked in upon, carrying her suitcase and lost memories, expecting only a “drinks evening” with the in-laws, followed by some whitefish au gratin, then early to bed between cold, stiff sheets and the next day making nice with elderly strangers at the Wik-O-Mek, trying patiently, pleasantly to re-explain to them exactly who she was (a former daughter-in-law?). But instead, she found Wally, bearded, older, fattish, balded, gray-toothed, though still innocent and vague the way she’d once liked, only dressed like a Scottish gamekeeper with an idiotic accent.

  She was surprised. We were both surprised.

  When she’d told me this whole preposterous story, it’d long gone dark in the house. Chill had filtered indoors off the surface of the moonlit sea. She sat perfectly still, peering out at the high tide, the fishermen vanished to home, a red phosphorescence seeding the water’s swell. I left and came back with a sweater I’d bought years before in France, when I’d been in love in a haywire way (my then-beloved is now a thoracic surgeon at Brigham and Women’s), though my love story, then, had an all-round satisfactory end that left life open for new investigations and not obstructed by problematical, profoundly worrisome insolubles.

  Sally put on the sweater Catherine Flaherty had settled into on cold French spring nights facing the Channel. She hugged her arms the way Catherine had, burying her cold chin into the crusted, musty-smelling nap, giving herself time to think a clear thought, since Wally was in Lake Forest and I was here. All the safety netting of our little life was still up to catch her, and she could—as it seemed to me she should—just forget the whole commotion, writing it all off as a dream that would go away if you let it. My heart went out to her, I’ll admit. But I also understood there could be no tweezing and tracing of slender filaments back through the knot to make loose ends become continuous and smooth. They weren’t loose ends. These were what I called my life. And even though they were short, blunt and more frayed than what I’d rather, they were still what I had. If I’d known what awaited me, I might’ve phoned up some boys in Bergen County who owed me a favor and had ’em fly out and perform a penitential errand on Wally’s noggin.

  There are many different kinds of people on the planet—people who never let you forget a mistake, people who’re happy to. People who almost drown as children and never swim again, and people who jump right back in and paddle off like ducks. There are people who marry the same woman over and over, while others have no scheme in their amours (I’m this man. It’s not so bad). And there are definitely people who, when faced with misfeasance of a large and historical nature, even one that needn’t cloud the present and forbid the future, just can’t rest until the misfeasance is put right, redressed, battered to dust with study and attention so they can feel just fine about things and go forward with a clear heart—whatever that might be. (The opposite of this is what the Permanent Period teaches us: If you can’t truly forget something, you can at least ignore it and try to make your dinner plans on time.)

  In Sally’s behalf, she was dazed. She’d gone to Illinois and seen a ghost. Everything in life suddenly felt like a cold higgle-piggle. It’s the kind of shock that makes you realize that life only happens to you and to you alone, and that any concept of togetherness, intimacy, union, abiding this and abiding that is a hoot and a holler into darkness. My idea, of course, would’ve been to wait a week or two, go about my business selling houses, book a Carnival Cruise vacation to St. Kitts, then in a while nose back in to see how the land lay and the citizenry had re-deployed. My guess was that with time to reflect, Wally would’ve disappeared quietly back to Mull, to his spruce and cairns and anonymity. We could exchange Christmas cards and get on with life to its foreshortened ending. After all, how likely are any of us ever to change—given that we’re all in control of most things?

  Again, of course, I was wrong. Wrong, wrongety, wrong, wrong, wrong.

  At the conclusion of Sally’s long recitation of the lost-Wally saga, a chronicle I wasn’t that riveted by, since I didn’t think it could foretell any good for me (I was right), she announced she needed to take a nap. Events had pretty well wrung her out. She knew I was not exactly a grinning cheerleader to these matters, that I was possibly as “mixedup” as she was (not true), and she needed just to lie in the dark alone for a while and let things—her word—“settle.” She smiled at me, went around the room turning on lamps, suffusing the dark space she was then abandoning me to with a bronze funeral-parlor light. She came around to me where I’d stood up in front of the couch, and kissed me on my cheek (oh Lord) in a pall-bearerish, buck-up-bud sort of way, then ceremoniously mounted the stairs, not to our room, not to the marriage bower, the conjugal refuge of sweet intimacies and blissful nod, but to the guest room!—where my daughter now sleeps and also “sleeps” with new Mr. Right Who Drives A Fucking Healey.

  I might’ve gone crazy right then. I should’ve let her mount the stairs (I heard the guest room floorboards squeezing), waited for her to get her shoes shucked and herself plopped wearily onto the cold counterpane, then roared upstairs, proclaiming and defaming, vilifying and contumelating, snatching knobs off doors, kicking table legs to splinters, cracking mirrors with my voice—laying down the law as I saw it and as it should be and as it served and protected. Let everybody on Poincinet Road and up the seaboard and all the ships at sea know that I’d sniffed out what was being served and wasn’t having it and neither was anybody else inside my walls. One party left alone to his heartless devices, in his own heartless living room, while another heartless party skulks away to dreamland to revise fate and providence, ought to produce some ornate effects. No fucking way, José. This shit doesn’t wash. My way or the highway. Irish (or Scots) need not apply. Members only. Don’t even think of parking here.

  But I didn’t. And why I didn’t was: I felt secure. Even though I could feel something approaching, like those elephants who feel the stealthy footfalls of those Pygmy spear toters far across savannas and flooded rivers. I felt at liberty to take an interest, to put on the white labcoat of objective investigator, be Sally’s partner with a magnifying glass, curious to find out what these old bones, relics and potsherds of lost love had to tell. These are the very moments, of course, when large decisions get decided. Great literature routinely skips them in favor of seismic shifts, hysterical laughter and worlds cracking open, and in that way does us all a grave disservice.

  What I did while Sally slept in the guest room was make myself a fresh Salty Dog, open a can of cocktail peanuts and eat half of them, since bluefish at Neptune’s Daily Catch had become a dead letter. I switched off the lights, sat a while in the leather director’s chair, hunkered forward over my knees in the chilly living room and watc
hed phosphorescent water lap the moonlit alabaster beach till way past high tide. Then I went upstairs to my home office and read the Asbury Press—stories about Elián González being pre-enrolled at Yale, a plan to make postmodern sculpture out of Y2K preventative gear and place it on the statehouse lawn in Trenton, a CIA warning about a planned attack on our shores by Iran, and a lawsuit over a Circuit City in Bradley Beach being turned down by the local planning board—with the headline reading HOW’S THE DOWNTICK AFFECTING HOLIDAY SHOPPING?

  I rechecked my rental inventory (Memorial Day was three weeks away). I took note that the NJ Real Estate Cold Call reported four million of our citizens were working, while only 4.1 percent of our population was not—the longest economic boom in our history (now giving hissing sounds around the edges). Finally, I went back down, turned on the TV, watched the Nets lose to the Pistons and went to sleep on the couch in my clothes.

  This isn’t to suggest that Wally’s re-emergence hadn’t caught my notice and didn’t burn my ass and cause me to think that discomforting, messy, troublesome readjustments wouldn’t need to take place, and soon. Readjustments requiring Wally being declared un-dead, requiring divorcing, estate re-planning and updated survivorship provisos, all while recriminations cut the air like steak knives, and all lasting a long time and raking everybody’s patience, politeness and complex sense of themselves over the hot coals like spare ribs. That was going to happen. I may also have felt vulnerable to the accusation of marital johnny-come-lately-ism. Though I’d have never met Sally Caldwell, never married her (I might still have romanced her), had it not been that Wally was gone—we all thought—for good.