The Lay of the Land

by Richard Ford

  I’m already smiling as I come to the bottom of the stairs, very conscious of my booster-club get-up, though Paul is just exiting the sliding glass door to the beach, toting his time capsule, which is a chrome bomb-shaped cylinder as long as two toasters. A tall young blond woman he’s been talking to is in the middle of the room and she looks at me. She’s beside the defunct old rabbit-eared DuMont that was my mother’s and that I’ve kept as a memento, and she unexpectedly smiles back widely to broadcast her surprise and enthusiasm—for me, for Paul, for the overall good direction things are taking down here. This is Jill, dressed—I don’t know why I’d expect any different—in bright red coveralls with a white long-john shirt underneath and some kind of green wooden clog footwear that makes her look six foot seven, when she may only be six three. Her long yellow hair hangs straight past her shoulders and is parted in the middle Rhine maiden–style, exposing a wide Teutonic forehead. Her generous mouth is unquestionably libidinous, though her sparkling dark eyes are welcoming—to me, in my own basement. A great relief. And as advertised, at the bottom of her left sleeve is the alarming hand absence, though there’s good evidence of a wrist. Here, I realize, is the girl who may become mother of my grandchildren, mourner when my obsequies are read out, will tell vivid rambling tales of my exploits once I’m gone. It’d be good to get off on the right foot with her. Though in a day’s time, I’ve met two of my children’s chosen ones. What’s gone wrong?

  “Hi, I’m Frank,” I say. “You must be Jill.”

  “Listen, Frank,” Paul’s saying, just leaving through the door. “You wanna come out and attend the trial internment?” He may mean interment, but possibly not—though he’s talking too loudly for indoors. He pauses, grinning from behind his smudged specs (we’re all grinning down here), his capsule clasped to his wet tee-shirt, which bears an Indian-warrior profile in full eagle-feather war bonnet—the Kansas City Chief. Paul’s still barefoot, still has his gold stud in his left ear. He looks like the guy who delivers the Asbury Press before dawn out of his backseat-less ’71 Cutlass and, I suspect, lives in his car.

  “You bet I want to.” I make a step forward. “Let’s do it.” But he’s already out the sliding door, heading toward his site. My positive response hasn’t registered. I look to Jill and shake my head. “We don’t communicate perfectly all the time.”

  “He’d really like you to approve of him,” Jill says in a slightly nasal midwestern voice. Though startlingly and with an even bigger, eager-er smile, she strides across the linoleum and with her right hand extended gives mine a painful squeeze, the kind lady shot-putters give each other outside the ring. Her smile makes me look straight at her nose, which is noble and makes her wide eyes want to draw in, in concentration, toward the middle. One central incisor has shouldered a half-millimeter over onto its partner, but not to a bad effect. In someone less imposing, this could be a signal to exercise caution (turbulent brooding over life’s helpless imperfections, etc.), but in Junoesque Jill, it is clearly trifling, possibly a giggle, in contrast to her injury and to how monstrously beautiful she otherwise is. I like her completely and wish I wasn’t wearing this preposterous get-up. She looks admiringly out the glass door at Paul, who’s already down inside his hole, bent over, apparently testing the dimensions of things. “He’s really a big fan of yours,” she says.

  “I’m a big fan of his,” I say. Jill exudes a faint lilac sweetness, though the air’s gone musty as a ship’s hold down here. Jill lets her friendly dark eyes roam all around the low-ceilinged basement and sniffs. She smells it, too. I amiably swallow my last bit of bacon—left in plain sight (by who?) on a paper towel in the kitchen. I want to say something forward-thinking about my son, but being up close to his sweet-smelling, pulchritudinous squeeze is far from what I thought would be happening, and I’m not exactly sure what’s appropriate to say. Physical closeness to an abject (and smaller) stranger, however, doesn’t seem to faze her one bit. Clarissa’s the same—relaxed, defensible boundaries—something my age group didn’t understand. I could ask Jill how she likes New Jersey so far or how everything went with Ann last night (though I don’t want to mention Ann’s name), or what’s a bounteous beauty like her doing with an oddment like my son. But what I do say, for some reason, is, “What happened to your hand?”

  Which doesn’t faze her one bit more. She looks down at the vacant sleeve end, then raises it to eye level. She is still very close to me. A pink stump becomes visible, starting (or ending) where her carpal bone would be, the flesh finely stitched to make a smooth flap. Jill’s happy demeanor seems undiminished by a hand being conspicuously not there. “If everybody would just ask like that,” she says happily, “my life’d be easier.” We both look straight at the stump like surgeons. “I was in the Army, in Texas,” she says, “training for land mine work. And I guess I got the worst-possible grade. I shouldn’t have been doing it, as big as I am. It’s better if you’re small.” She moves the appendage around in a tight little orbit to exhibit its general worthiness and I suppose to permit me to touch it, which I don’t think I’ll do. I’ve never knowingly been this close to or conversant with an amputee. Doctors get used to these things. But no one much gets anything cut off in normal real estate goings-on. Without meaning to, I inch back and give her what I hope is an affirming nod. “So when I got to Hallmark,” she goes on chattily, “they thought, Well, here’s a natural for the sympathy-card department.” I knew it. “Which I was, but not because of my hand, but because I’m really sympathetic.” She rolls her eyes and shakes her head as though getting rid of that ole hand was the best-possible luck.

  “So, is that where you two met, then?” I say. Out the corner of my eye, I uncomfortably spy Paul crawling back out of his hole, dusting off his knees, looking as if he’d just invented fluid mechanics. His silver capsule lies in the beach grass. He begins speaking toward the hole as if someone, a member of his crew, was still down there doing last-minute deepening and manicuring.

  “We really met on the Internet,” Jill says, “though I’d already seen him at a film series and knew he’d be interesting. Which he is.” She stows her stump in her red coveralls pocket and warmly regards my son, who’s still outside talking away. I should go out there. Though my instinct is to stay where I am and chat up the big blondie, even if the big blondie belongs to my son and only has one hand. “We were really shocked when we finally met face-to-face at a bookstore”—conceivably the place where I got into hot water last spring—“and realized we were both writers at Hallmark.” In a bikini, Jill probably looks like young Anita Ekberg (minus a hand). It’s difficult to envision Paul, who’s a lumpy five ten, raree-ing around with her in his little Charlotte Street billet. Though no doubt he does. “Odd couple’s redundant is what we think,” Jill says. I’ve begun to think about what Paul, in his rage last spring, told me about his job—that it was the same as what Dostoyevsky or Hemingway or Proust or Edna St. Vincent Millay did: supplied useful words to ordinary people who don’t have enough of them. I, of course, thought he was nuts.

  But suddenly, here is something crucial. I could spend the next six weeks locked in a room with these two, learn how Jill felt about boot camp, learn the mascot’s name of her girls’ basketball team, where she was the center, learn how she found her star-crossed way to K.C., how she came to write Ross Perot’s name in on her presidential ballot; and possibly at the same time get to know Paul’s closely guarded ideas about matrimony (coming as he does from a broken home), get his overview about parity in the NFL, hear his long-term thoughts for leaving Hallmark and joining Realty-Wise—things most fathers hear. But I still wouldn’t know much more that’s important about them as a couple than I do after these five perfectly good minutes. It’s electrifying to think Jill’s a lusty young Anita Ekberg, and interesting to know that Paul is interesting. But they are what they seem—which is enough to be. I don’t want to change them. I’m willing and ready to jump right to the climax, confer fatherly blessings on their union (if that
’s what this is) before Paul makes it back inside. If they make each other happy for two seconds, then they can probably last decades—longer than I’ve lasted. I bless you—I say these words silently in anticipation of leaving. I bless you. I bless you. Sum quod eris, fui quod sis.

  “Did you really go to Michigan?” Jill steps back and takes a look at my block-M, a studious cleft formed between her dark eyebrows. She leans forward and gives me the sensation of being loomed over. Obviously, she doesn’t see my outfit as comical.

  “Did I what?”

  “My dad went to U of M,” she says.

  “Did he? Great.”

  “I’m from Cheboygan.” She holds up her right hand to exhibit how much the state of Michigan—lower peninsula only—resembles a hand. With her stunted left arm, she taps the hand at about where the town of Cheboygan lies, near the top. “Right there on Lake Huron,” she says, making Huron sound like Hyurn. I knew a boy from Cheboygan back in the icy mists. Harold “Doodlebug” Bermeister, defenseman on our pledge hockey team, who longed to return to Cheboygan with his B.S. and buy a Chevy franchise. Doodlebug got blown to cinders in Vietnam the year he graduated and never saw Cheboygan again. No way this Jill is Doodlebug’s daughter. She’s twice as tall as he was. But if she is a wandering Bermeister and life’s a long journey leading to my son, it doesn’t need any explaining. I accept. Though you could work up a good greeting card out of the whole improbability, something on the order of “Happy Birthday, son of my third marriage to my foster sister of Native American descent.”

  “I never really got up there,” I say in re Cheboygan.

  “It’s where they have the snowmobile hall of fame,” she says earnestly.

  Paul’s letting himself back in through the sliding glass door, his capsule wedged under his arm pigskin-style, wiping his bare feet on the rug and still talking away as if we’d all been outside doing things together. With his smudged glasses, mullet, his beard-stache and general unkempt belly-swell under his Chiefs shirt, Paul looks oddly elderly and therefore ageless—less like the Asbury Press guy and more like one of the beach loonies who occasionally walk into your house, sit down at your dinner table and start babbling about Jesus running for president, so you have to call the police to come haul them away. These people never harm anything, but it’s hard to see them (or Paul) as mainstream.

  “So. You got it all set?” I say and give him one of our sly-shrewd chivvying looks, meant to draw attention to my Bay City orthodontist outfit. Such greeting is our oldest workable code: common phrasings invested with secret double, sometimes quadruple “meanings” that are by definition hilarious—but only to us. As a troubled boy of tender years, Paul was forever anticipating, keeping steps ahead, as if the left-behind brother of a dead boy had to be two boys, doubly, even triply aware of everything, could not just be a single yearning heart. Other priorities tended to get overlooked, and our code became our only way to converse, to keep love fitfully in sight and the world beneath us. In adulthood, of course, this fades, leaving just a vapor of lost never would-bes.

  “Sherwood B. Nice,” Paul says—not really an answer—though he elevates his chin in a victorious way, possibly having to do with Jill. In the corner of his right eye, a small dent retains an apple redness from the terrible beaning at age fifteen, which he claims not to remember. I’ve never been sure how well he sees, though the doctors back then said he’d have vitreous swimmers, shortened depth perception, and in later life could face problems. Elevating his chin to see out the bottom of his eyes is compensatory. None of this, naturally, is ever discussed. “So. Aaaallll at once,” Paul immediately starts in, bringing his time capsule over to the hatch-cover table. It is his patented Tricky Dick voice. “Just out of nowhere, out of the clear blue.” He hoods his eyes and extends his schnoz like Nixon. “I realized. That what I really needed to do, you understand, was to help others. It was just that simple.” He gives his jowly face a solemn pseudo-Nixon head shake. “I hope you all can understand what I’m getting at here.” This may be his reaction to my get-up. I’m satisfied, though as always to me he is a borderless uncertainty. I don’t even feel like his father—more like his uncle or his former parole officer. It’s good if Jill, queen of Cheboygan, can try to admire, understand and please him, and he her. I bless you. I don’t know what we’re supposed to do now. “How’s your mom?”

  “She’s not coming over today,” Paul says. He’s monkeying with his time capsule while I’m standing here. It has a little silver side door that slides open to permit installation of sacred artifacts. Where do you get one of these things? Is there a Web site? Why are we even down here where I never come? “She said you had cancer. How’s that going?” He frowns at me, then down again, as though this was another encoded joke of ours.

  “Oh, it’s great,” I say. “I have a prostate full of radioactive BBs I didn’t have when I saw you last.”

  “Cooo-ul. Do they hurt?”

  “It—”

  “My stepfather had that,” Jill says, the cleft reappearing between her wide-set eyes. A show of sympathy.

  “How’d he do?”

  “He died. But not from that.”

  “I see. Well, this is all pretty new to me.” I say this as if we were talking about changing car-repair affiliations. I smile and look around my shadowy basement. In addition to the Block Island map, there’s a large hanging framed reproduction left by the prior owners, depicting the Lord Barnegat, famed two-masted whaling schooner that plied the ocean right outside in the 1870s and is currently in a museum in Navesink. I should toss out all this shit and turn the space into a screening room for resale to TV people. “I don’t see life as a perfect mold broken,” I say uncomfortably when neither of them says anything more about my having cancer. Possibly Jill and I share this point of view. What else has Ann blabbed to them?

  The cancer topic has struck them both mute, the way it does most people, and I feel suddenly stupid standing here dressed like a nitwit, as if none of us has anything to say to the other on any subject but my “illness.” Aren’t they in the greeting-card business? Though probably we’re all three waiting for one of us to do something unforgivable so we can convulse into a throat-slashing argument and Paul can grab Jill and clear out back to K.C. I think again of him whonking away with this bounteous, one-handed Michigan armful and I admit I’m happy for him.

  “The caterers’ll be here at one-forty-five,” I say to have something to say so I can leave. “Did your sister say when she might be back?”

  Mention of Clarissa instantly inscribes a displeased/pleased smile on Paul’s beard-encircled lips. His sister is, of course, his eternal subject, though she has always treated him like a dangerous mutant, which he relishes. By taking possession of the most-unsettling-life-course trophy, she has further put him off his game. Jill could be his attempt to wrest back the trophy.

  “So did you meet Gandhi’s grandson?” Paul smirks while he goes on fiddling with his time capsule, though he’s nervous, his eyes snapping at Jill, who regards him encouragingly. His mouth breaks into a derisive grin. “He’s into fucking equitation therapy. Whatever that is. He’s probably writing a semi-autobiographical novel, too.” Paul combs one hand back through his mullet and frowns with what I’m supposed to know is dismayed belief. “I like asked him, ‘What’s the most misunderstood airline?’ And he goes, ‘I don’t know. Royal Air Maroc?’ I go, ‘Fucking bullshit. It’s Northwest. It flies to the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul. No contest.’” Paul’s lip curls in its right corner. Something’s setting him off.

  “Maybe he didn’t understand what you were getting at,” I say to be fatherly. “I’m guessing she’s not too serious about him anyway.”

  “Oh, what a giant relief that is.” Paul’s odd round face assumes an expression of profoundest disdain.

  “I thought he seemed pretty interesting,” Jill says—her first semi-familial utterance and the first uncoded words anybody’s spoken since Paul came back inside. Althoug
h, of course, she’s wrong.

  “He’s a butthole. Case closed,” Paul snarls. “‘Are you all right? Are you all right?’ He’s like a fucking nurse. He’s one of those dipshits who’s always asking people if they’re all right. ‘Are you all right? How ’bout you? Are you all right, too? Do you want a fucking foot massage? How ’bout a back rub? Or a blow job? Maybe a high colonic?’” In this frame of mind, as a junior at Haddam High, Paul used to get so angry at his teachers, he’d beat his temples with his palms—the universal SOS for teen troubles ahead. It’s hard to imagine him selling residential real estate.

  “I think you should let this go, okee, honey?” Jill says and smiles at him.

  Paul glowers at Jill, then at me, as if he’s just exited a trance—blinking, then smiling. “Issat it?” he says. “You done? That be all? You want cheese on that?” It’s possible he might bark, which is also something he did as a teen.

  Someplace, from some sound source I can’t locate, as if it came out of the drywall, I hear music. Orchestral. Ravel’s Bolero— the military snares and the twiny oboes, played at high volume. No doubt it’s the Feensters. What more perfect Thanksgiving air? Possibly they’re in the hot tub, staging a musicale for the beach visitors and, of course, to aggravate the shit out of me. At Easter, they played “The March of the Siamese Children” all day long. Last 4th of July, it was “Lisbon Antigua” by Pérez Prado, until the Sea-Clift Police (summoned by me) paid them a courtesy call, which started a row. It’s conceivable that in the cathode-ray tube business, Nick got too close to some bad-actor chemicals that are just now being registered in his behavior. To ask them to turn it down would invite a fistfight, which I don’t feel like. Though I’m happy to call the police again. Then, just as suddenly, Bolero stops and I hear voices raised next door and a door slam.