by Richard Ford
When I looked up from my paper, though, and out the window—my home office gives onto the front, and down Poincinet Road toward the state park where Route 35 ends and a few old seasonal businesses are in sight (a chowder house, the Sinker Swim Doughnut)—I couldn’t stop remembering something Clarissa was talking about on our after-Halloween beach walk: That she felt strangely insulated from contemporary goings on. Which, as I’ve said before, is also true for me. I watch CNN every night, but never afterward think much about anything I see—even the election, as stupid as it is. I’ve come to loathe most sports, which I used to love—a loss I attribute to having seen the same things over and over again too many times. Only death-row stories and sumo wrestling (narrated in Japanese) can keep me at the TV longer than ten minutes. My bedside table, as I’ve said, has novels and biographies I’ve read thirty pages into but can’t tell you much about. A couple of weeks ago, I decided I’d write a letter to President Clinton—the opposite of Marguerite’s letter—detailing the sorry state of national affairs (much of it his fault), suggesting he’d be wise to nationalize the Guard and protect the future of the Republic with regard to the “rogue state of Florida.” But I didn’t finish it and put it in a drawer, since it seemed to me the work of a crank that would’ve earned me a visit from the FBI.
But what I wondered, at my desk with a copy of the Asbury Press, gazing out my window, was—it was a kind of minor revelation: Am I not just feeling what plenty of other humans feel all the time but don’t pay any attention to? People with no worrisome follow-up tests next Wednesday, civically alert citizens, members of PACs, schmoes who haven’t lost their spouses to a memory of love lost? And if so, do I even have any excuse to feel insulated? At the end of this reverie, I took out my half-written letter to the President and threw it in the trash and promised myself to write a better one, posing more constructive questions I can work on in the meantime—all in an effort to seem less like a nutter and a complainer, and to do whatever the hell we’re all supposed to do to display we’re responsible and doing our best to make life better.
I had several calls waiting before setting off for Surf Road. One from the Eat No Evil people in Mantoloking, wanting to know if gluten-free, no-salt bread in the organic turkey stuffing would be desired, or if the standard organic Saskatchewan spelt was okay. And could they come at 1:45 instead of 2:00? Another was from Wade, a nervous-nelly call to be sure we’re meeting at the Fuddruckers at Exit 102 on the Parkway at 12:30, and to say that he was bringing his own sandwich which he can eat while the Queen Regent comes down (this needed no answer). Another, which I also didn’t answer, was from Mike, apologizing for engaging in the “non-virtuous action of senseless speech” last night—which he certainly did—and accusing himself of covetousness, which I take as a sign that he’s maybe saying no to the Montmorency spaghetti and that I can keep him as a trusted employee and house-selling house-a-fire.
The fourth call, however, was from Ann, and strummed an ominous minor bass chord in my chest as it bespoke fresh assumptions I don’t share but may have seemed to share at the end of a long and wearisome day.
“It’s easier to leave this as a message than to say it to you, Frank.” My name again. Years ago, when we were married, Ann used to call me “Tootsie,” which embarrassed me in front of people, and then for a while she called me “Satch”—for private personal reasons—this being before “shit-heel” finally won the day. “I didn’t really think ahead much about what I said tonight. I just blurted it. But it still seems right to me. You acted completely stunned. I’m sure I scared you, which I’m sorry about. I certainly don’t have to come to Thanksgiving dinner. You were just sweet to ask. You were very good tonight, by the way, the best I can remember you—to me, anyway.” Cancer obviously agrees with me. “Charley knew what a good man you were, and said so, though probably not to you.” Definitely not. “He always thought I’d have been happier married to you than to him. But you can’t recalculate, I guess. We act on so many things we don’t know very much about, don’t you think? It’s no wonder we’re all a little fucked up—as they say in Grosse Pointe. Anyway, the idea of underlying causes to things has started to oppress me. I didn’t tell you, did I, that I considered attending the seminary after Charley died. It was probably why I came back here. Then I decided religion was just about underlying causes, things that are hidden and have to be treated like secrets all the time. And I—” Click. Time was up.
I sat at my desk, deciding if I wanted to hear the rest, which waited in message five. Humans generally get out the gist of what they need to say right at the beginning, then spend forever qualifying, contradicting, burnishing or taking important things back. You rarely miss anything by cutting most people off after two sentences. Ann’s spiel about how much we all don’t know about everything we do is linked thematically to Mike Mahoney’s fourth-grade perception on the Barnegat bridge last night that we all live in houses we didn’t choose and that choose us because they were built to somebody else’s specifications, which we’re happy to adopt, and that that says something about the price of baloney. Each has the specific gravity of a rice-paper airplane tossed from the top of the Empire State Building that soars prettily before it’s lost to oblivion. Another example of non-virtuous speech. Maybe Ann’s now dabbling in Eastern religions, since her old-line Reform Lutheranism stopped packing a wallop.
Except. Our ex-wives always harbor secrets about us that make them irresistible. Until, of course, we remember who we are and what we did and why we’re not married anymore.
Message five. “Okay, sweetie, I’ll get this over with. Sorry for the long message. I’ve had a glass of New Zealand sauvignon blanc.” Long messages ask for but don’t allow answers, which is why they’re inexcusable. “I just want to say that I can’t get over the long transit we all make in our lives. The strangest thing we’ll ever know is just life itself, isn’t it?” No. “Not science or technology or mysticism or religion. I’m not looking for underlying causes anymore. I want things to be evident now. When I saw you tonight, at first it was like being in a jet airplane and looking out the window and seeing another jet airplane. You see it, but you really can’t appreciate the distance it is from you, except it’s really far. But by the end, you’d gotten much closer. For the first time in a very long time you were good, like I said in my last message, or maybe I said it at school. Any-hoo, I just thought of one last thing, then I’m going to bed. Do you remember once when you took the little kids to see a baseball game? In Philadelphia, I guess. Charley and I were somewhere on his boat, and you had them down there. And some player, I guess, hit a ball that came right at you. Of course you remember all this, sweetheart. And Paul said you just reached up with one hand and caught it. He said everybody around you stood up and applauded you, and your hand swelled up huge. But he said you were so happy. You smiled and smiled, he said. And I thought when he told me: That’s the man I thought I married. Not because you could catch an old ball, but because that’s all I thought it took to make you happy. I realized that when I married you I thought I could make you happy just like that. I really did think that. Things made you happy then. I think you gave that ball to Paul. I have it somewhere. So okay. Life’s an odd transit. I already said that. It’ll be nice to see Paul tomorrow—at least I hope it will. Good night.” Click.
“It’s also true…” I said these words right into the receiver, with no one on the other end, my fingers touching my Realtor of the Year crystal paperweight from my early selling days in Haddam. It was holding down some unopened mail beside the phone. “…It’s also true”—and here I quit speaking to no one—“that we conjure up underlying causes and effects based on what we want the underlying causes to be. And that’s how we get things all fucked up.” But in any case, Ann would’ve done better marrying me precisely because I could catch a line drive with my bare hand, and then letting that handsome, manly, uncomplicated facility be the theme of life—one I might’ve lived up to—rather than thinking she cou
ld ever make me happy! The kind of happy I was that day at the Vet when “Hawk” Dawson actually doffed his red “C” cap to me, and everyone cheered and I practically convulsed into tears—you can’t patent that. It was one shining moment of glory that was instantly gone. Whereas life, real life, is different and can’t even be appraised as simply “happy,” but only in terms of “Yes, I’ll take it all, thanks,” or “No, I believe I won’t.” Happy, as my poor father used to say, is a lot of hooey. Happy is a circus clown, a sitcom, a greeting card. Life, though, life’s about something sterner. But also something better. A lot better. Believe me.
There was a sixth call. From my son Paul Bascombe, on the road, telling me he and “Jill” wouldn’t make it in tonight—last night, now—due to “hitting the edge of some lake-effect snow” that “has Buffalo paralyzed clear down into western PA.” They were “hoping to push on past Valley Forge.” Weighty pauses were left between phrases—“has Buffalo paralyzed,” “lake-effect snow,” “western PA”—to denote how hysterical these all are, requiring extra time for savoring. The two of them, he said, “almost picked up a flop in Hershey.” I’ve invited them to stay here, but Paul doesn’t like my house and I’m happy for them not to. I have a sense, of course, that Paul has surprises for us. Something’s in his flat, no-affect, Kanzcity-middlewestern, put-on phone voice that I don’t like, since he seems to strive too hard to become that strange overconfident, businessy mainstreamer with a mainstreamer’s sealed-off certainty riven right into the lingo. I haven’t given up on the notion of things generally “working out,” or with either of my children “fitting in,” but I’d also be pleased if they both thought these things had happened. I halfway expected Paul to say he’d “rest in the City of Brotherly Love,” but he couldn’t have suppressed a shout of hilarity, which would’ve ruined it.
Nine years ago, when he was an unusual and uninspired senior at Haddam HS—it was during the two years when Ann’s husband, Charley, had his first cruel brush with colon cancer and Ann simply couldn’t deal with Paul and Clarissa—Paul lived with me in the very house on Cleveland Street where he’d lived as a little boy, the house I bought from Ann when she moved away from Haddam and married Charley, and of course the very house she lives in this morning. It was the time when Ann—for some good reasons—thought Paul might have Asperger’s and was forcing me, at great expense, to drive him down to Hopkins to be neurologically evaluated. He was evaluated and didn’t have Asperger’s or anything else. The Hopkins doctor said Paul was “unsystematically oppositional” by nature and probably would be all his life, that there was nothing wrong with that, nor anything I could do or should want to, since plenty of interesting, self-directed, even famous people were also that. He named Winston Churchill, Bing Crosby, Gertrude Stein and Thomas Carlyle, which seemed a grouping that didn’t bode well. Though it was amusing to think of all four of them writing greeting cards out in K.C.
The day from that relatively halcyon time which I remember most feelingly was a sunny Saturday morning in spring. Forsythias and azaleas were out in Haddam. I had been outside bundling the wet leaves I’d missed the fall before. Paul had few friends and stayed home on weekends, working on ventriloquism and learning to make his dummy—Otto—talk, roll his bulging eyes, mug, agitate his acrylic eyebrows over something Paul, his straight man, said and needed to be made a fool of for. When I came in the living room from the yard, Paul was seated on the old hard-seated Windsor chair he practiced on. He looked dreadful, as he usually looked—baggy jeans, torn sweatshirt, long ratty hair dyed blue. Otto was perched on his knee, Paul’s left hand buried in his complicated innards. Otto’s unalterably startled, perpetually apple-cheeked oaken face was turned so that he and Paul were staring out the window at my neighbor Skip McPherson’s Dodge Alero, which McPherson was washing in front of his house across the street.
I was always trying to say things to Paul that were friendly and provoking and that made it seem I was an engaged father who knew things about his son that only the two of us could know—which maybe I was. These were sometimes dummy jokes: “Feeling a little wooden today?” “Not as chipper as usual?” “Time to branch out.” It was one reliable strategy I’d found that offered us at least a chance at rudimentary communication. There weren’t many others.
Otto’s idiot head swiveled around to peer at me when I came through the front door, though Paul maintained an intense, focused stare out at Skip McPherson. Otto’s get-up was a blue-and-white-plaid hacking jacket, a yellow foulard, floppy brown trousers, and a frizz of bright yellow “hair,” on top of which teetered a green derby hat. He looked like a drunk bet-placer at a second-rate dog track. Paul had bought him at a going-out-of-business magic shop in Gotham.
“I’ve decided what I want to be,” Paul said, staring away purposefully. Otto regarded Paul, batted his eyebrows up and down, then looked back at me. “The invisible man. You know? He unwinds his bandages and he’s gone. That’d be great.” Paul often said distressing things just to be, in fact, oppositional and usually didn’t really know or care what they meant or portended.
“Sounds pretty permanent.” I sat on the edge of the overstuffed chair I usually read my paper in at night. Otto stared at me, as if listening. “You’re only seventeen. Somebody might say you just got here.” Otto spun his head round full circle and blinked his bright-blue bulbous eyes, as if I’d said something outrageous.
“I can act through Otto,” Paul said. “It’ll be perfect. Ventriloquism makes the best sense if the ventriloquist’s invisible. You know?” He kept his stare fixed out at Skip, who was working over his hubcaps.
“Okay,” I said. Somebody might’ve interpreted this as a silent “cry for help,” an early warning sign of depression, some antisocial eruption in the offing. But I didn’t. Adolescent jabber designed to drive me crazy, is what I thought. Paul has put this instinct to work in the greeting-card industry. “Sounds great,” I said.
“It’s great and it’s also true.” He turned and frowned at me.
“True. Okay. True.”
“Greet ’n true,” Otto said in a scratchy falsetto that sounded like Paul, though I couldn’t see his whispering lips or his suppressed pleasure. “Greet ’n true, greet ’n true, greet ’n true.”
That’s all I remember about this—though I didn’t think about it at the time in 1991. But it’s probably not something a father could forget and might even experience guilt about, which I may have done for a while, but stopped. I also remember because it reminds me of Paul in the most vivid of ways, of what he was like as a boy, and makes me think, as only a parent would, of the progress that lurks unbeknownst in even our apparent failures. By his own controlling hand, Paul may now be said to have gotten what he wanted, willed invisibility, and may already be far down the road to happiness.
Clarissa’s beau, the New Hampshire Healey 1000 guy, I’m grievously forced to meet as I make my hurried trip through the kitchen, wanting to catch a bite and beat it. I intentionally stayed in my office, hoping the lovebirds would get bored waiting for Clarissa’s “Dad” and head out for a beach ramble or a cold Healey ride for a shiatsu massage up in Mantoloking. I could meet him later. But when I head through, my Surf Road listing papers in hand, aiming for a fast cup of coffee and a sinker, I find Clarissa. And Thom. (As in “Hi, Frank, this is my friend Thom”—I’m guessing the spelling—“who I woogled the bee-jesus out of all night long in your guest room, whether you approve or don’t.” This last part she doesn’t say.)
The two of them are arranged languidly, side-by-side, yet somehow theatrically intent at the glass-topped breakfast table, precisely where Sally gave me my bad news last May. Clarissa’s wearing a pair of man’s red-and-green-plaid boxer shorts and a frayed blue Brooks Brothers pajama shirt—mine. Her short hair’s mussed, her cheeks pale, her contacts are out, and she has her long-toed bare feet across the space of chairs in Thom’s lap and is studying an Orvis catalog. (All evidence of a “committed relationship” with another female gone.
Poof. Things happen too fast for me—which, I guess, is a given.)
Thom’s frowning hard over an open copy of what looks like Foreign Affairs (thick, creamy, deckled pages, etc.) and looks up to smile weakly as my fatherly identity is expressed (in my own kitchen). I mean to proffer only the most carefully crafted, disinterested and hermetically banal sentiments and damn few of them, for fear I’ll say extremely wrong things, after which terrible words from my daughter’s razor tongue will lacerate my head and heart.
Only, Thom’s old—at least forty-six! And even bumbling through my kitchen like a renter and barely daring a look or to meet his dark eyes—my listing papers being my something to hold on to—I know this character’s rap sheet. And it has DANGER stamped on it in big red block letters. Clarissa has carefully mentioned nothing about him in the last days, only that he “teaches” equestrian therapy to Down’s syndrome kids at a “pretty famous holistic center” over in Manchester, where she volunteers a day a week when she isn’t working in my office. She’s intended him to attract absolutely no vetting commentary from me. Apparently the “whole thing”—the connected boxes versus the complex, well-differentiated big swim I was unarguably in—was still pretty precarious, and she didn’t need other people’s (mine, her mother’s) views making her difficult life harder to navigate. This is all re-conveyed to me now in my kitchen with one look of post-coital lassitude and menace.
Thom, however—Thom is no mystery. Thom is known to me and to all men—fathers, especially—and loathed.
Tall, rangy, long-muscled, large-eyed, smooth-olive-skinned Amherst or Wesleyan grad—read Sanskrit, history of science and genocide studies, swam or rowed till books got in the way; born “abroad” of mixed parentage (Jewish-Navajo, French, Berber—whatever gives you charcoal gray eyes, silky black hair on the back of your hands and forearms); deep honeyed voice that seems made of expensive felt; intensely “serious” yet surprisingly funny, also touchingly awkward at the most unexpected moments (not during intercourse); plays a medieval stringed instrument, of which there are only ten in existence; has mastered Go, was once married to a Chilean woman and has a teenage child in Montreal he’s deeply committed to but rarely sees. Worked in Ghana for the Friends Service, taught in experimental schools (not Montessori), built his own ketch and sailed it to Brittany, wears one-of-a-kind Persian sandals, a copper anklet, black silk singlets suggesting a full-body tan, sage-colored desert shorts revealing a shark bite on his inner thigh from who-knows-what ocean, and always smells like a fine wood-working shop. He’s only at the Equestrian Center now because of an “awakening” on the Going to the Sun Highway, which indicated he had yet to fully deliver on his “promise.” And since he’d grown up with horses in North Florida or Buenos Aires or Vienna, and since his little sister had Down’s, maybe there was still time to “make good” if he could just find the right place: Manchester, New Jersey.