by Richard Ford
“Fifty-five.”
“That ain’t so old.” His breath is thin smoke. His vinyl coat affords little warmth. “My dad’s, like, fifty-six. He does these tough-guy competitions for his age group, up at the convention hall in Asbury. He’s on his fourth wife. Nobody fucks with him.”
“I bet not.”
“Bet they don’t fuck with you,” Chris says to be generous.
“Not anymore they don’t.”
“There you go.” He breathes down into his lapel again. “That’s all you gotta worry about.”
“Happy Thanksgiving,” I say. “Early.” We are beating on, Chris and me, against the current.
“Oh yeah.” He looks embarrassed. “Happy Thanksgiving to you, too.”
Conceivably it’s two. I’ve avoided clocks on my drive home, likewise during the passage through my empty house. Knowledge of the hour, especially if it’s later than I think, will guarantee me no sleep, promising that tomorrow’s celebration of munificence and bounty will degrade into demoralized fatigue before the food arrives.
Clarissa’s bedroom window’s been left open, and I crank it closed, intentionally noticing nothing. I listen to none of my day’s messages. I’ve shown one house to one serious client on the day before Thanksgiving, a day when most toilers in my business are headed off to convivial tables elsewhere. For that reason I’m ahead of the game—which is generally my tack: With few obligations, turn freedom into enterprise. Thoreau said a writer was a man with nothing to do who finds something to do. He would’ve made the realty Platinum Circle. His heirs would own Maine.
But passing by my darkened home office a second time, I’m unable to resist my messages. After all, Clarissa herself might’ve called with a plea that I shoot down and collect her at the elephant gate at the Taj Mahal. In my unwieldy state of acceptance, I concede that something once unpromising could show improvement.
Clare Suddruth has, not surprisingly, called at six—a crucial interval, and at the vulnerable cocktail hour. He says he definitely wants to “re-view” the Doolittle house on Friday, if possible. “At least let’s get through the damn front door this time.” He’s bringing “the boss.” “At my age, Frank, there’s no use worrying about the long run in anything.” He says this as if I hadn’t spoon-fed him those very words. Estelle, the MS survivor, has been counseling with Clare about matters eschatological. I’m just relieved not to have to call the Drs. Doolittle with unhappy news that would cost me the listing. Though Clare’s the type to come in with a low-ball offer, consume weeks with back-and-forth and then get pissed off and walk away. My best strategy is to say I’m tied up until next week (when I’ll be at Mayo) and hope he gets desperate.
Call #2 is from Ann Dykstra, more cut-and-dried-businessy than last night’s sauvignon blanc ramble about what a good man I am, what a long transit life is, me snagging the Hawk’s liner at the Vet in ’87. “Frank, I think we need to talk about tomorrow. I’m thinking maybe I shouldn’t come. Paul and Jill just left, which was very strange. Did you know she only has one hand? Some awful accident. Maybe I’m just saving myself.” What’s wrong with that? “Anyway, maybe I’m getting ahead of myself on several fronts. I sort of sense you may feel the same. Call me before you go to bed. I’ll be up.”
Too late.
Call #3 listens to my Realty-Wise recording, waits, breathes, then says “Shit” in a man’s voice I don’t recognize and hangs up. This is normal.
Call #4 is from the Haddam Boro Police—putting me on the alert. A Detective Marinara. The room where he’s speaking is crowded with voices and phones ringing and paper rattling. “Mr. Bascombe, I wonder if I could talk to you. We’re investigating an incident at Haddam Doctors on eleven twenty-one. Your name came up in a couple of different contexts.” A tired sigh. “Nothing to be alarmed about, Mr. Bascombe. We’re just establishing some investigative parameters here. My number’s (908) 555-1352. That’s Detective Mar-i-nar-a, like the sauce. I’ll be working late. Thanks for your help.” Click.
What investigatory parameters? Though I know. The boys at Boro Hall are hard at it, connecting dots, leveling the playing field. My license number was mentally logged by Officer Bohmer. Dot one. My years-old connection with the grievously unlucky Natherial (who couldn’t have been the target) has been cross-referenced from his list of life acquaintances. Dot two. Possibly my passing association with Tommy Benivalle (who’s conceivably under indictment somewhere) has hit pay dirt via the FBI computer. Dot three. My fistfight with Bob Butts at the August has disclosed an unstable, potentially dangerous personality. Dot four. Who of us could stand inspection and not come out looking like we did it—or at least feeling that way? I am again a person of interest and my best bet is to call and admit everything.
Call #5 is, also predictably, from Mike, at ten, and sounds as if he may have been into the sauce (he’s a Grand Marnier man). Mike hopes that I’ve enjoyed an excellent day with my family around me (I haven’t); he also notes that Buddha permits individuals to make decisions without giving offense because “the nature of existence is permanent, which can include temporarily taking up a quest to free oneself from the cycle of time.” There’s more, but I don’t intend to hear it at what is probably two-something. He’ll be naming streets in Lotus Estates by Monday. His arc is shorter than most.
I’m relieved there’s no call-out-of-the-weirdness from Paul, and half-relieved/half not that there’s nothing from Wade. Nothing’s from Clarissa. And I’ll be honest and admit, in the new spirit of millennial necessity, that not a night begins and ends without a thought that Sally Caldwell might call me. I’ve played such a call through my brain cells a hundred times and taken pleasure in each and every one. I don’t know where she is. Mull or not Mull. She could be in Dar es Salaam, and I’d welcome a call gratefully. A lot of things seem one way but are another. And how a thing seems is often just the game we play to save ourselves from great, panicking pain. The true truth is, I wish Sally would come home to me, that we could be we again, and Wally could wear a tartan, hybridize many trees and be satisfied with his hermit’s lot—which he chose and, for all I know, may long for, given the kind of lumpy-mumpy bloke he was in this house. Possibly I will call her on Thanksgiving, use the emergency-only number. Nothing has qualified as an emergency—but may.
The sea and air outside my window are of a single petroleum density, with no hint of the tide stage. One socketed nautical light drifts southward at an incalculable distance. I’ve always attributed such lights to commercial craft, dragging for flounder, or a captaincy like the Mantoloking Belle, commandeered by divorced men or suicide survivors or blind golfers out on the waves for a respite before resuming brow-furrowing daylight roles. Though I know now, and am struck, that these can be missions of another character—grieving families scattering loved ones’ ashes, tossing wreaths upon the ocean’s mantle, popping a cork in remembrance. Giving rather than taking.
When our sweet young son Ralph breathed his last troubled breath in the now-bomb-shattered Haddam Doctors, in time-dimmed ’81 (Reagan was President, the Dodgers won the Pennant), Ann and I, in one of our last free-wheeling marital strategizings—we were deranged—sought to plot an “adventurous but appropriate” surrender of our witty, excitable, tenderhearted boy to time’s embrace. A journey to Nepal, a visit to the Lake District, a bush-pilot adventure to the Talkeetnas—destinations he’d never seen but would’ve relished (not without irony) as his last residence. But I was squeamish and still am about cremation. Something’s more terrifying than death itself about the awful, greedy flames, the sheer canceling. Whereas death seems a regular thing, a familiar, in no need of fiery dramatizing, orderly to the point of stateliness, just as Mike says. I couldn’t cremate my son! Only to have him come back in powdered form, in a handy box, with a terrifying new name I’d never forget in four hundred years: Cremains! I’ve scattered the ashes of two Red Man Clubmen, and these residues turn out not to be powdered nearly enough, but are ridden through with bits of bone—odorless
gray grit—like the cinders we Sigma Chi pledges used to shovel onto the front walk of the chapter house in Ann Arbor.
Ann felt exactly the same. We had two other children to think about; Paul was seven, Clarissa five. Plus, there was no way to transport a whole embalmed body on an around-the-world victory lap. It would’ve cost a fortune.
For a few brief hours, we actually thought about, and twice talked of donating Ralph’s physical leavings to science, or of possibly going the organ donor route. Though we pretty quickly realized we could never bear the particulars or face the documents or stand to have strangers thank us for our “gift,” and would never forgive ourselves once the deeds were done.
So finally, with Lloyd Mangum’s help, we simply and solemnly buried Ralph in a secular ceremony in the “new part” of the cemetery directly behind our house on Hoving Road, where he rests now near the founder of Tulane University, east of the world’s greatest expert on Dutch elm disease, a stone’s throw away from the inventor of the two-level driving range and, as of yesterday, in sight of Watcha McAuliffe. Interment at sea—a shrouded bundle sluiced off the aft end of a sportfishing craft with a fighting seat and a flying deck, performed under cover of darkness and far enough out so the Coast Guard wouldn’t come snooping—wasn’t an option we knew about. But it’s on my list for when my own time arrives and final thoughts are in the ballpark.
But. Acceptance, again. What have I now accepted that visits me in my stale bedroom, where I’m warm and dank beneath the covers, my stack of unread books beside me, and at an unknown but indecent hour? What is it that rocked me like an ague, turned me loose like a flimsy ribbon on a zephyr? All these years and modes of accommodation, of coping, of living with, of negotiating the world in order to fit into it—my post-divorce dreaminess, the long period of existence in the early middle passage, the states of acceptable longing, of being a variablist, even the Permanent Period itself—these now seem not to be forms of acceptance the way I thought, but forms of fearful nonacceptance, the laughing/grimacing masks of denial turned to the fact that, like the luckless snowmobiler Chick Frantal, my son, too, would never be again in this life we all come to know too well.
It’s this late-arriving acknowledgment that’s unearthed me like a boulder tumbled down a mountain. That was my lie, my big fear, the great pain I couldn’t fathom even the thought of surviving, and so didn’t fathom it; fathomed instead life as a series of lives, variations on a theme that sheltered me. The lie being: It’s not Ralph’s death that’s woven into everything like a secret key, it’s his not death, the not permanence—the extra beat awaited, the mutability of every fact, the grinning, eyebrows-raised chance that something’s waiting even if it’s not. These were my sly ruses and slick tricks, my surface intrigues and wire-pulls, all played against permanence, not to it.
Hard to think, though, that the Frantals alone could’ve sprung me this far loose with their sad acceptance qua sales pitch. Chances are, with the year I’ve had, I was headed there anyway, preparing to meet my Maker. When I asked what it was I had to do before I was sixty, maybe it’s just to accept my whole life and my whole self in it—to have that chance before it’s too late: to try again to achieve what athletes achieve when their minds are clear, their parts in concert, when they’re “feeling it,” when the ball’s as big as the moon and they hit it a mile because that’s all they can do. When nothing else is left. The Next Level.
A cooling tear exits my eye crease where I’m turned on the pillow to face the inky sea. The single-lighted ship is nearly past the window’s frame. Possibly they do more than one cremains box per night if no mourners are along. This could be what the funeral business means when it says “We’re trustworthy.” No tricks. No shameless practices. No doubling up. No tossing Grandma Beulah in the dumpster behind Eckerd’s. We do what we say we’ll do whether you’re along or not. A rarity.
Somewhere below the ocean’s hiss I hear Bimbo’s doggy voice, musical within the Feensters’ walls, yap-yap-yap, yap-yap-yap. Then a muffled man’s voice—Nick—not decipherable, then silence. I detect the murmur of the Sumitomo banker’s limo as it motors down Poincinet Road past my house for his early morning pickup, hear two car doors close, then the murmured passage back. No Thanksgiving for the Nikkei.
My last tear, after this many, and many more not shed, is a tear of relief. Acceptable life frees you to embrace the next thing. Though who’s to say it all wouldn’t have worked fine anyway—those familiar old rejections and denials performing their venerable tasks. Years ago, I knew that mourning could be long. But this long? Easy to argue some things might be better left alone, since permanence, real permanence, not the soft blandishments of the period I invented, can be scary as shit, since it rids you of your old, safe context. With whom, for instance, am I supposed to “share” that I’ve accepted Ralph’s death? What’s it supposed to mean? How will it register and signify? Will it be hard to survive? Can I still sell a house? Will I want to? And how would it have been different if I’d accepted everything right from the first, like the CEO of GE or General Schwarzkopf would’ve? Would I be living in Tokyo now? Would I have died of acceptance? Or be in Haddam still? God only knows. Maybe all would’ve been about the same; maybe acceptance is over-rated—though the shrinks all tell you different, which just means they don’t know. After all, we each carry around with us plenty of “things” that’re unsatisfactory, “things” we’re wanting to undo or ignore so other “things” can be happier, so the heart can open wider. Ask Marguerite Purcell. As I said, acceptance is goddamned scary. I feel its very fearsomeness here in my bed, in my empty house with the storm past and Thanksgiving waiting with the dawn in the east. Be careful what you accept, is my warning—to me. I will if I can.
Out in the dark, I hear a motorcycle, nazzing, gunning, high-pitched, somewhere out on Ocean Avenue, though it fades. Then I think I hear another car, a smaller foreign one with narrow-gauge tires and a cheap muffler, slowing at my driveway. For a moment, I think it’s Clarissa, home now, with Thom in the Healey, or alone in a rented Daewoo—safe. I’ll hear the front door softly open and softly click closed. But that’s not it. It’s only the Asbury Press. I hear music from the carrier’s AM as his window lowers and the folded paper whaps the gravel. Then the window closes and the song fades—“Gotta take that sentimental journey, sen-ti-men-tal jour-ur-ney home.” I hear it down the street and down into my sleep. And then I hear nothing more.
Part 3
13
Brrrp-brrrrp! Brrrp-brrrrp! Brrrp-brrrrp! Brrrp-brrrrp!
My Swiss telephone, stylish, metal, minuscule (a present from Clarissa on my return to the land of the living), sings its distressing Swiss wake-up song: “Bad news, bad news for you (and it ain’t in Switzerland, either).”
I clutch for the receiver, so flat and sleek I can’t find it. My room’s full of morning light and cottony, humid, warmer air. What hour is it? I knock over my pile of books, detonating a loud and heavy clatter.
“Bascombe,” I say, breathless, into the tiny voice slit. This is never how I answer the phone. But my heart’s pounding with expectancy and a hint of dread. It’s Thanksgiving morning. Do I know where my daughter is?
“Okay, it’s Mike.” This is not how he talks, either. My answer-voice has startled him. He says nothing, as if someone’s holding a loaded gun on him.
“What time is it?” I say. I’m confused from too deep sleep, where I believe I was having a pleasant dream about eating.
“Eight forty-five. Did you hear my message last night?”
“No.” Half true. I didn’t listen past the Buddhist flounces and flourishes.
“Okay—” He’s about to tell me it’s been one heckuva hard decision, but the world’s a changing place and, even for Buddhists, is entirely created by our aspirations and actions, and suffering doesn’t happen without a cause and effort is the precondition of positive actions—the very reason I didn’t listen last night. I’m in bed, fully clothed, with my shoes still on, the cou
nterpane wrapped around me like a tortilla. “Could you drive over to 118 Timbuktu at eleven and meet me?”
“What the hell for?”
“I sold it.” Mike’s accentless voice is fruity with exuberance. “Cash deal.”
“One eighteen Timbuktu’s already sold.” I’m about to be aggravated. Acceptance is right away posing a challenge. I’m relieved, of course, it’s not Clarissa telling me she and lizard Thom are married, that I somehow missed all the big clues yesterday. “It’s up on trucks,” I say. “I’m moving it over to 629 Whitman.” Our Little Manila section, which has begun gentrifying at an encouraging rate. He knows all this.
“My people want the house right now, as is.” It’s as though the whole idea tickles him silly and has elevated his voice half an octave. “They want to take over the moving and put it on a lot on Terpsichore that I’m ready to sell them.”
“Why can’t this wait till Monday?” I’m about to doze off, though I have to piss (the third time since 2 a.m.). Outside my open window, up in the scrubbed azure firmament, white terns tilt and noiselessly wheel. The air around my covers feels soft and cushiony-springlike, though it’s late November. Laughter filters up from the beach—laughter that’s familiar.
“You hold the deed on that, Frank.” Mike uses my name only at moments of all else failing. Usually, he calls me nothing at all, as if my name was an impersonal pronoun. “They have to buy it direct from you. And they’re ready right now. I thought you might just drive over.”
He, of course, is right. I sold 118 Timbuktu in September to a couple from Lebanon (Morris County), the Stevicks, who planned to demolish it first thing next spring and bring in a new manufactured dwelling from Indiana that had a lifetime guarantee and all the best built-ins. I stepped back in and offered to take the house in lieu of commission, since it’s a perfectly good building. They agreed and I’ve been arranging to move it to a lot I own on Whitman, where it’ll fit in and bring a good price because the inventory’s low over there. At 1,300 sq. ft., it’ll be bigger than most of its Whitman Street neighbors and be exactly the kind of small American ranch any Filipino who used to be a judge in Luzon, but who over here finds himself running a lawn-care business, would see as a dream come true. Arriba House Recyclers (Bolivians) from Keansburg have been doing the work on a time-permits basis, and throwing me a break. I’m looking at a good profit slice by the time the whole deal’s over. Except, if I sell it off the truck like a consignment of hot Sonys, get a good price (less Mike’s 2 percent), dispense with the rigamarole of moving a house up Route 35, getting a foundation dug and poured and utilities run, paying for all the permits and line-clearance fees, I’d need to have my head examined not to do Mike’s deal on the spot. It’s true that as deeded owner, only I can convey it if we’re conveying this morning. (We call deals like this WACs, for “write a check.”) Only I’m not certain I have the heart for real estate on Thanksgiving morning, even if all I have to do is say yes, sign a bill of sale and shake a stranger’s hand. The Next Level and universal acceptance may be closing the shutters on the realtor in me.