The Lay of the Land

by Richard Ford

  Sally has admitted—seated at the same glass-topped breakfast table overlooking the ocean where she’d told me she was leaving and gave me her wedding ring only a short, eventful six months ago—that she simply never made Wally happy enough, though she loved him, and it was too bad they couldn’t have gotten a divorce like Ann and I did and freed each other from the past. In time, I will find words to explain to her that none of this is as simple as she thinks, and in doing so possibly help explain herself to herself, and let her and Wally off some hooks—one of which is grief—hooks they couldn’t get off on their own. It’s my solemn second-husbandly duty to do such things. In these small ways, there’s been appreciable progress made in life in just the twelve days since I got out of Ocean County. We both feel time is precious, for obvious reasons, and don’t want to waste any of it with too much brow beetling.

  In any case, I rescheduled my Mayo post-procedure checkup, which will be tomorrow at nine with blunt-fingered Dr. Psimos. And since Chicago was, in a sense, on the way, Sally asked me to go with her to Lake Forest to present a solid-front fait accompli when she delivered Wally’s ashes to the aged parents. It is an unimpartably bad experience to have your son die once in a lifetime, as my son Ralph did. And even though I have officially accepted it, I will never truly get over it if I live to be a hundred—which I won’t. But it is unimpartably worse and in no small measure strange to have your son die twice. And even though I knew nothing to say to his parents and didn’t really want to go, I felt that to meet someone who knew Wally as an adult, as I did in a way, and who knew his odd circumstances and could vouch for them, and who was at the same time a total stranger they’d never see again, might prove consoling. Not so different from a Sponsor visit, when you settle it all out.

  The elderly Caldwells were rosy-cheeked, white-haired, small and trim Americans, who welcomed Sally and me into their great fieldstone manse that backs up on the lake and is probably worth eight million and will one day be turned into a research institute run by Northwestern to study (and interpret) whatever syndrome Wally suffered from that made everybody’s life a monkey house. I couldn’t help thinking it could also be turned into four luxury condos, since it had superb grounds, mature plantings and drop-dead views all the way to Saugatuck. A big conical blue spruce was already up and elaborately lighted in the long drawing room with the stone fireplace, where Sally (I guessed) first re-encountered Wally last May. The Caldwells were soon to be off to a do at the Wik-O-Mek that evening and wanted us to come along and stay over, since there would be dancing. I’d have died before doing anything like that and, in fact, managed to work into the conversation that unfortunately I’d recently been shot in the chest (which seemed not to surprise them all that much) and had trouble sleeping, which isn’t true, and Sally said we were really just stopping by on our way up to Mayo for my checkup and needed to get going—as if we were driving all the way. They both acted cheerful as could be, fixed us each an old-fashioned, talked dishearteningly about the election (Warner described all their neighbors as decent Chuck Percy Republicans) and how they felt the economy was headed for recession, witness the tech sector and capital-spending cuts. Constance took grateful but unceremonious possession of Wally’s ashes—a small box upholstered in black velvet. They both guardedly mentioned Sally’s two children in a way that made me sure they sent them regular whopper checks. Then they talked about what an exotic life Wally had chosen to live—“Strange and in some ways exciting,” Constance said. We all sat around the huge but cozy spruce-and-apple-wood-scented room and drank our cocktails and thought about Wally as if he was both with us and as if he had never lived, but definitely not as though he’d sharked my wife away from me—even if unwillingly. At some point all four of us started to get not-surprisingly antsy and probably fearful of our words beginning to take on meanings we might regret. Sally and Constance excused themselves, in a southern way, to go upstairs together with the cremains box. Warner took me out the French doors to the low-walled patio, which was snowy and already iced in. He wanted me to see the lake, frozen and blue, and also where he’d put up his fancy covered and heated one-man practice tee he could use all winter. He wondered if I played golf—as though he was sizing me up as a son-in-law. I said no, but that my former wife was a golf coach and played for the Lady Wolverines in the sixties. With a pixyish grin—he looked nothing like Wally, which leads to speculation—he said he’d played for the purple and white when he came back from the Marianas. We had nothing else to say after that, and he walked me around the outside of the big rambling house through the gleaming crust of snow to where the ladies were just then exiting the front door (it was their standard way to hustle you out). And in no more than three minutes, after we’d all uncomfortably hugged one another and said we’d definitely visit somewhere, someday on the planet, Sally and I headed out the drive, out of Lake Forest, back toward the Edens and toward O’Hare.

  But since there was still plenty of light left and I had my old orienteering feel for streets and cardinal points—realtors all think we have this, but can be calamitously wrong—I said I wanted to drive past my mother’s last address in Skokie, where she’d lived while I was in college, with Jake Ornstein, her good husband, and where she’d died in 1965. We got off at Dempster Avenue and drove east to where I thought it would intersect, via a tricky set of small-street maneuverings, with Skokie Boulevard. Everything felt familiar to me, equipped as I was with the sense of near-belonging I’d had from thirty-five years ago, when I used to ride over from Ann Arbor on the old New York Central and be picked up at the LaSalle Street Station by my mother. But when I got to where I thought Skokie Boulevard should’ve been (possibly my old-fashioned was working on me), there was a big but past-its-prime shopping mall, with an Office Depot and a poorly patronized Sears as its anchors and a lot of vacant store spaces in between. I realized then that somewhere toward the back of the employee-parking section of the Sears was where my mother and Jake’s house had been—a blue-roofed, single-dormer, center-stoop, quasi-Colonial Cape where my mother had lived out her last days, and where I’d gone to see her before being officially rendered an orphan at age nineteen.

  “Do you know where your mom’s buried?” Sally was driving our renter Impala and wasn’t in a hurry, since her duties toward Wally and herself were now forever discharged. She’d happily have driven around all day.

  I said, “It’s one of those places where you just see miles of granite headstones and freeways go by on three sides. I could probably find it from the air. She’s buried beside Jake.”

  “We can look for it,” she said, widening her eyes like a challenge. “I think it’d be nice if you went there once before you died. Not that you’re in jeopardy of dying. At least you better not be. I have plans for you.” That was our sexual code in prior days. “I’ve got plans for you, buster.” An eyebrow cocked. I’d certainly like those plans to see good results again soon.

  “I hope you do,” I said. We were again headed back toward the Edens and the route to the airport. “It’s enough that I tried to find it. She’d think that was good. It’s one of the ways life’s like horseshoes.”

  “There’re more than you know, you know.” She smiled broadly at me, her eyes shiny in a way I hadn’t seen them shine in a while. This also clearly meant something amorous and made me happy, though also apprehensive that something close to amorous was all I was expected to manage. We got to the airport with two hours to spare.

  I will say that in the days since Sally’s return, some of which time I was in the hospital in Toms River, before I walked out as a convalescing man, holey-chested as a minor-league saint, she has treated me—as I feared she might—with kid gloves, almost as if in some karmic way she believes she caused what happened to me. I probably have not objected enough, though Mike Mahoney says karma doesn’t work like that. Still, Sally often seems to be “attending” to me, and sometimes addresses me in an over-animated third-person manner—spirited attendant to fractious attendee: �
�So what does Frank have on his mind today?” “So is Frank going to clamber out of bed today?” I’ve heard this is what people do in therapy sessions when straight talk hits the wall. “Frank believes, or at least is willing to speculate, that Sally is overcompensating for prior behavior that requires no compensation, and Frank is wishing it would stop.” I actually said this to her. And for a day she turned silent and evasive, even a little testy. But by the second day, she was cheerful again, though still more solicitous than makes me happy.

  I’m actually ready to believe that what any marriage might need is a good whacking abandonment or betrayal to test its tensile strength (most of them survive that and worse). In any case, I’m pretty well over being angry and feel an exhilarated sense of necessity just to be alive still and have her back. Marriage, in fact, does not even feel much like marriage anymore, even though Sally has asked for her wedding ring back (but has yet to put it on). Possibly it never really felt like marriage, and that in spite of two efforts I don’t know what marriage is. Maybe it’s not our natural human state, which is why Paul only smiled when I asked him about it.

  But in these days since being shot in the chest, as this Millennial plague year ends and the confounding election’s finally resigned to, what I’ve begun to feel is a growing sense of enlightenment, even though I have plenty of pain from my bullet holes. Enlightenment often gets lost in intimate life with another person: the positive conviction, for instance, that the person you are now would make precisely the same choices you’re living with and that your life is actually the way you want it. That enlightened understanding can get lost. Life with Sally returned to Sea-Clift feels, in fact, less like a choice I made long ago, and more like the feeling of meeting someone you instantaneously like while on a walking trip along the Great Wall, and who seems sort of familiar and who by the end of the day you decide to share your pup tent with.

  Not that I’m totally in the clear. If I intend to be healed and be a full participant more than an attendee, I believe I will have to become more interesting per se. Although being shot with a machine pistol by a fourteen-year-old assassin and living to tell about it gives me a good, unconventional story that most people probably won’t have. I may also need to become more intuitive, which I would’ve said I was anyway, until cancer got in the picture. And possibly I could stand an improved sense of spirituality—which Sally seems to have come home with, and Mike Mahoney sells like popsicles. “Faith is the evidence of things unseen” always seemed a reasonably reliable spiritual credo to have, and evoked me to myself in a secular sense—though you could also say it gave rise to problems. Or: “In an age of disbelief…it is for the poet to supply the satisfactions of belief in his measure and his style”—except of course I am not a poet, though I’ve read plenty of them and find their books easy to finish. But in the most purely personal-spiritual vein—since I took two slugs four inches above my own—the best motivational question in the spirituality catechism, and one seeking an answer worth remembering, may not be “Am I good?” (which is what my rich Sponsorees often want to know and base life on), but “Do I have a heart at all?” Do I see good as even a possibility? The Dalai Lama in The Road to the Open Heart argues I definitely do. And I can say I think I do, too. But anymore—as they say back down in New Jersey—anymore than that is more spiritual than I can get.

  How any of this jibes with acceptance and the Next Level, I’m not sure. Self-improvement as a concept already smacks of the Permanent Period, of life you can live over again, which is a thought I’ve put behind me now but may be harder to outlive than it seems. Truly, at a certain point around the course, can you do much to change your chances? Isn’t it really more a matter of readying? Of life as prelude?

  In a purely itemized way, then, these things are now of record at the end.

  I’ve always liked the joke about the doctor coming into the examining room, holding a clipboard, wearing his stethoscope and mirrored visor, and saying, “I’ve got good news and bad news. The bad news is you have cancer and you’ll be dead in a week. The good news is I fucked my nurse last night.”

  My good news is I have cancer, but I sleep better than ever since being shot and nearly offed. The Ocean County Hospital doctors said this is not unusual. Death can take on a more contextualized importance relative to our nearness to it. And truthfully, I do not fear death even as much as I used to, which wasn’t much, although these things can get hidden. I did not, for example, get on the plane today and feel as I once felt—that I recognized the flight attendant from other flights (they never recognize me) and that therefore my odds of averting disaster were shortened. Neither today did I feel the urge I’ve felt for years—even on my happy, worry-erasing trips to Moline and Flint—to repeat my traveler’s mantra upon taking my seat: “An airplane is forty tons of aluminum culvert, pressure-packed with highly volatile and unstable accelerants, entering a sky chock-full of other similar contraptions, piloted by guys with C averages from Purdue and carrying God only knows what other carnage-producing incendiary materials, so it’s stupid not to think it will seek its rightful home on earth at the first opportunity. Therefore today must be a good day to die.” I used to take strength from those words, spoken silently as I watched my luggage ride the conveyor and the baggage handlers secretly stealing glances up at my face in the window and mouthing words I couldn’t lip-read but that seemed to be directed to me, smirking and laughing while they sent on board whatever fearsome cargo the other people were carrying (these baggage people rarely fly themselves).

  For item number two, my strange syncopes have quit occurring since I was wounded. Why, I can’t say, but it may be that I meditate now without really realizing it.

  On other fronts, the mystery of Natherial Lewis’s death was brought to a sad but sure solution—one that seems unrelated to a hate crime. A simpler matter than guessed was at its heart, as is often true in these cases. A man of the Muslim faith desired to “send a message” to a medical doctor of the same persuasion who, this first man believed, lived too much in the world of infidels and needed reminding. The medical doctor, of course, had already left to spend Thanksgiving in Vieques on the day the reminder was delivered—which must have proved to the bomb maker he was right. Only Natherial was there in the cafeteria, in the early a.m., listening to his transistor radio, looking out the window, watching dawn come up on the hospital grounds, waiting to go home and to bed—which he never did. No one was supposed to be hurt, the guilty man said. It was just a message.

  Meanwhile our long drought is officially declared ended in New Jersey on the strength of tropical depression Wayne, which never became a hurricane but brought a change for all. Some people associate the dry season’s ending with the election being settled and a hoped-for upturn in the economy. But these people are Republicans who’ll do fine no matter who’s elected. They are the ones who sell you water in a desert.

  On a less optimistic note, Wade Arsenault has, unhappily, died. Of a stroke. A general system failure. “Eighty-four,” as Paul Harvey would say, on the Sunday after Thanksgiving. No surprise to him and probably not disappointing, either, if he knew anything about it. I did not go to the funeral because I was in the hospital and didn’t hear until later. Though I wouldn’t have gone. Wade and I were not the kind of friends who need to attend each other’s funerals. In any case, his daughter, Ricki, and his thick-necked policeman son, Cade, were there to send him on to glory. Ricki called me in the hospital and sounded much the same as when I last saw her sixteen years ago, her voice a bit deepened and made less confident by time. I pictured her with a mall haircut, an extra thirty pounds strapped to her once-wonderful hips and a look of non-acceptance camouflaged behind a big Texas smile. “Deddy liked you s’much, Frank. Like me, I guess—hint, hint. It made a big difference to him havin’ you be his big buddy. Life’s peculiar, idn’t it?” “It is,” I said, staring apprehensively out my hospital window down onto Hooper Avenue choked with Christmas shoppers and misted with tiny snowflak
es. I hoped she wasn’t calling from downstairs or out in her car, and wasn’t about to come check me out, being a nurse and all. But she didn’t. She was always a smarter cookie than I was a cookie. She told me that she’d discovered the Church of Scientology and was a better person for that, though at her age she doubted anybody would ever love her for what she was—which I said was dead wrong (I couldn’t remember what her exact age was). Our conversation did not range far after that. I think she would’ve liked to see me, and some parts of me would’ve liked to see her. But we were not moved enough to do that, and in a while we said good-bye and she was gone forever.

  On the nearer-to-home front, Clarissa Bascombe’s scrape with local law in Absecon was indeed serious, but ended not nearly as badly as it might’ve. Her mother did bring down a lawyer from Haddam, a big, blond, handsome Nordic-looking palooka with eyes on both sides of his head—who I’d seen a hundred times and never paid any attention to, and who, I believe, is Ann’s new goodly swain—not the patch-pockets history teacher I previously imagined. She told me this lawyer, Otis—I don’t know if that’s his last name or his first—had “good connections,” which meant either the mob or the statehouse, whatever the difference might be. But by six p.m. Thanksgiving Day, this Otis had Clarissa sprung from the Absecon lockup and had made allegations that the police applied reckless and undue force by running her off the road and into the blinking lane-change arrow and on into the NJDOT employee, whose foot was only sprained and may have been sprained a week before. Otis also claimed Clarissa had possibly been the victim of date rape, or at the very least of a pretty scary dating experience that amounted to assault, leaving her traumatized—as good as innocent. She was actually fleeing for her safety, he said, when she made contact with the Absecon police. Thom may pay the freight for this or he may not, since he naturally turns out to have a past no one knew about but, also naturally, has mouthpieces of his own. It’s enough that Clarissa was unharmed and will eventually look less like a fool than she felt at the time. When she arrived at the hospital late on Thanksgiving night, when I’d been in surgery and was just waking up, feeling surprisingly not so bad but out of my head, she stood close by my bed, gave me her serious stare, put her two hands on my wrist below where they had me strung up to fluids and infusions and heartbeat monitors, then smiled gamely and said in what I remember as an extremely softened, chastened, worn-out, had-it-with-life voice, “I guess I’ve become number one in number two.” This was our joke of possibly longest standing and refers to a sign we once saw on a septic-service truck on the back roads of Connecticut, when she was just a girly girl and I was an insufficient father trying to find sufficiency. There were, or seemed to be, others in the room with her—Ann, possibly Paul, possibly Jill, possibly Detective Marinara. I may have dreamed this. Along the top of the green wall, where it corniced with the white ceiling, was a frieze bearing important phrases that the hospital authorities wanted us patients to see as soon as we opened our eyes (if we did). What I read said, “When patients feel better about their comfort level they heal faster and their length of stay is shortened.”