The Lay of the Land

by Richard Ford

  I looked at my sweet daughter, into her fatigue-lined, handsome face, at her thick honeyed hair, strong jaw, her mouth turned down at the corners when her smile was gone. I could see then, and for the first time, what she would look like when she was much older—the opposite of what a father usually sees. Fathers usually think they see the child in the adult’s face. But Clarissa would look, I thought, just like her mother. Not like me, which was acceptable along with the rest. I thought as I lay there, how few jokes we’d shared and how rarely I had seen her laugh since she’d become a grown-up. And while you could say the fault for that belonged to her mother and me, that fault in truth was mostly mine.

  I said something then, in my daze. I believe I said, “I should’ve spent more time with you when you were young.”

  She said, “That’s not true, Frank. I didn’t want to spend more time with you then. Now’s better.” That’s all I remember from those early hours in the hospital and from my daughter, who’s now back “camping out” with Cookie in Gotham, which pleases me, since she may have decided that “the big swim,” the “out in the all of it” were just mirages to keep her from accepting who she is, and that the smooth, gliding life of linked boxes may not be the avoidance of pain but just a way of accepting what you can’t really change. It’s possible she’s come to feel fortunate.

  The passengers across the aisle from Sally have turned out to be Kansas Citians, a jolly, rotund couple named the Palfreymans. Burt Palfreyman is hairless as a cue ball, from chemo, and as blind as Milton from retinal cancer, but full of vim and vigor about a whole new round at “the clinic.” He’s had many others and tells Sally his hair’s getting tired of growing in and has just decided to stay gone. They don’t say what’s ailing Burt this time, though Natalie mentions something about “the whole lymph system,” which can’t be good. Sally remarks that my son lives in Kansas City, too, and works for Hallmark, news that turns them reverent, provoking approving nods, though Burt’s nod is more toward the seat-back in front of him. “First-class outfit,” Burt says soberly, and Natalie, who’s pleasingly rounded, with frizzed salmon-colored hair and puffy cheeks gone venous with worry and long life, stares over at me, around Sally, as if I might not know what a first-class outfit Hallmark really is and that that’s a serious lapse of info, needing correction. I smile back as if I cannot speak but can nod. “It’s all family-owned,” she says. “And they do absolutely everything for Kanzcity.” Burt grins at nothing. He’s wearing a blue velour lounging outfit with purple piping down the legs and looks as comfortable as a blind man can look in an airplane. “They’re right up there with UPS,” Burt says (which he calls “ups”), “or any of those big outfits when it comes to employee benefits, compassionate leave, that kind of thing. Oh yeah. You bet.” He might’ve worked for them in the Braille card department.

  Sally touches my left hand as if to say, Don’t let these nice souls give you the blues. We’ll be landing soon.

  Natalie goes on to say that Burt has just retired after thirty-five years working for a company that makes laundry starch—another solid family-owned outfit in K.C.—which made a place for him in the accounting department once his eyes got to be a problem. They have kids “out west,” which Sally admits she does, too, allowing Natalie to know we’re second-timers. Natalie says the two of them are thinking of going ahead and moving up to Rochester after selling their family home in Olathe. “At least get a condo,” she says, since they’re up and back so much now. They like Burt’s cancer doctor, who’s had them to dinner once, and feel they could fit well into the Rochester community, which is not so different from K.C. “A good deal less crime.” They’ll just need to get used to the winter, which seems a fun idea to her. They’ve made some “relator” appointments to see some places in between Burt’s tests. “Health’s the last frontier, isn’t it?” Natalie hoods her eyes and looks straight to me, as if this is a fact men need to be aware of. I smile back a smile of false approval, though my mind runs to the idea of a barium enema self-administered on a cold bathroom floor, which is what I always think of when I envision my “health”—either something not good or else something that was good but will soon be no more. A permanent past tense. A lost frontier, not just the last one. Health’s a word I never use.

  Getting on to the end, then.

  Paul, as I said, along with Jill, has returned to K.C. and to the sweet feasible life of greeting cards and giving words to feelings others lack their own words for. On the day I left the hospital, we buried Paul’s time capsule behind the house in a quiet ceremony that was very much like burying a dog or a goldfish. Paul put in some of his riotous rejects, Jill put in a lock of her yellow hair for purposes of DNA, later on. Detective Marinara (whose name turns out to be Lou) put in a broken pair of handcuffs Paul had wangled out of him, in addition to his police business card. Sally put in a smooth granite pebble off the beach at Mull and another off our beach in Sea-Clift. Clarissa, with Cookie present, put in the mahogany gearshift knob off Thom’s Healey. Mike put in his signed Gipper photo and a green prayer flag. Ann did not attend, although she was invited and may now have made some positive strides with her daughter. I, as a joke, put in one of the spent titanium BBs (packaged in a plastic baggie), which I apparently “passed” on the operating table in Toms River, no doubt when I woke up in mid-surgery and everyone had a good laugh at my expense. Paul was pleased, made a couple of corny wisecracks about the Millennium, and then we covered the little missile up with sand. (I’m sure in the next big blow it’ll be unearthed and washed away and turn up in Africa or Scotland, which will work out just as well.) For whatever Paul may have said to Ann or Ann to him about wanting to break into the real estate industry, this never came up between us—a relief, since his style of everyday mainstream life would never adapt well to the need to coax and coddle and be confessor, therapist, business adviser and risk assessor to the variety of citizen pilgrims who cross my threshold most days. He would like them, do his level best for them, but ultimately think everything they said was a riot and wouldn’t understand the heart from which their words drew strength—much as he doesn’t understand mine. He is a different kind of good man from most. And though I love him and expect him to live long and thrive, I don’t truly understand him much, cannot do much for him except be happy he’s where he is and with his love, and that he will know increase in his days. Perhaps over time, if I have time, I will even come to know them better than I do.

  As to Mike and the sale of Realty-Wise, I have elected to take a Tibetan partner. In the time that I was laid up, he not only sold the Timbuktu house-on-wheels to a wholly different Indian client—they apparently come in droves when they come—but also sold 61 Shore Road, cracked piers and all, plus four chalets, to Clare Suddruth, who showed up Friday morning after Thanksgiving with Estelle, having called the emergency number when I didn’t answer, and was so eager to get his money out of his pocket and into somebody else’s that Mike feared he might be “losing an inner struggle” (experiencing a psychotic detachment) and possibly wasn’t responsible for his acts. A call to the bank settled that. Mike also turned down a listing on the Feensters’ beach house when he was approached by poor dead Drilla’s sister, and discreetly passed the business along to Sea-Vu Associates. Nick, it turns out, had many more enemies than the two Russian kids, and had not been as fastidious in his personal affairs as would’ve been needed to keep him above ground.

  At first, Mike didn’t see how partnership would suit his ambitions or his arrangements with his Spring Lake dowager. But I convinced him that in the long run, which might not be such a long run, all will be his to buy out. I said I was not ready for éminence grise status or to retire to an island, and that in the coming housing climate with a big shiny bubble around it, he’d be smarter to be half-in instead of all the way, to retain some liquidity, keep a diverse portfolio and his options open for the deal you can’t see coming until it’s suddenly there. He has his children to think about, I reminded him, and a soon-t
o-be former wife he may someday feel differently about. We’re not having a new shingle made or opening a bigger office, though we’ve subscribed to the Michigan State Newsletter and to “Weneedabreak.com.” On his business card it will soon say “Mike Mahoney, Co-Broker,” and he is thinking of enrolling in an executive boot camp in the Poconos, which I approve of. On the scale of human events and on the great ladder that’s ever upward-tending, this has left him satisfied. At least for now.

  Winds buffet us. Our flying culvert makes a sudden shimmying eee-nyaw-eee noise, and a tiny red seat belt emblem illuminates above me. The big brassy stewardess, whose name tag says Birgit, stands up like a friendly stalag matron and begins talking into a telephone receiver turned upside down, working her dark mannish eyebrows at the comedy of knowing none of us can understand anything she says. Though we’re all veterans of this life. We know where we’re descending to. No one’s surprised or applauding. “Here goes nuttin’,” someone says behind me and guffaws. Sally Caldwell, sweet wife of my middle season, squeezes my hand, smiles a falsely gay smile, rolls her eyes dreamily and leans to give me a “be brave” kiss on my oddly cold cheek.

  Below us I see the whited landscape stamped out in squares despite the early snow and failing light. It is nearly four. We pass, lowering, lowering over farms and farmettes and farm-equipment corrals, single stores with gas pumps along the ribbon of Route 14, where Clarissa and I walked and talked and sweated last August. Settlement’s thickening and widening to include vacant baseball diamonds, a Guard armory with starred tanks and trucks out back (in case the fuckers make it this far inland, and they might), the Applebee’s, the red blinking tower of an old AM transmitter morphed now into all new radiography—cell phone, cable, radar, NORAD, government surveillance. I don’t yet see the great Mayo citadel with its own antennas and helipads, ICBM launchers and surface-to-air missiles to shoot down marauding microbes, but it’s there. It’s what we’ve come for. I press my cheek to the cold window, try to see the airport out ahead, establish the world on a more human scale. But I see only another jet, tiny and at an incalculable distance, its own red beacons winking, vectored for some different landing.

  It is, of course, only on the human scale, with the great world laid flat about you, that the Next Level of life offers its rewards and good considerations. And then only if you let it. A working sense of spirituality can certainly help. But a practical acceptance of what’s what, in real time and down-to-earth, is as good as spiritual if you can finagle it. I thought for a time that practical acceptance, the final, certifying “event” and extra beat for me had been my breathless “yes, yes,” to my son Ralph Bascombe’s death, and that I would never again have to wonder if how I feel now would be how I’d feel later on. I felt sure it would be. Here was necessity.

  But get shot in the heart and live, and you’ll learn some things about necessity—and quick. Lying in my ultramodern hospital bed in Toms River, looped to this machine and that fluid, with winter’s woolen days coming on, I determined to be buried in powdered form somewhere at sea off Point Pleasant (it seemed simplest), and set about the solemn details that only a cold hospital room in New Jersey can make seem congenial: compiled my list of pallbearers, jotted down some basic obituary thoughts, concluded how I wanted my assignables assigned, to whom and with what provisos; who to take the business (Mike. Who else?). Happily, there wasn’t so much. For a day or two afterward, I lay there and it all made me glad, and I thought I’d feel glad that way forever. Only by day three, I’d started to feel differently about everything—saw that what I’d decided was a mistake, probably a vanity—I’m not sure why. But right then and there, in that motorized bed with a hospital priest shanghaied from his everyday death duties and not at all sure if what he was doing was right, I fired all my pallbearers, forgot about a sea-burial, tore my organ-donor card in half and executed a document provided in the “welcome kit” by the hospital ethicist, consigning all my mortal leavings to science—the option I and Ann had failed for lack of courage to choose for our first son years ago. The medical kids, I felt, would treat me with all the dignity and compassion I’m due and no doubt with a measure of irreverence and amusement, which seemed right and a better way to turn a small event—my death and life—into a slightly less small one, while keeping things simple and still making a contribution. Not a contribution you can see from a satellite, like Mount St. Helens or the Great Wall, but one that puts its money where its mouth is.

  On the day I got home from the hospital, the weather turned ice-cream nice, and the low noon sun made the Atlantic purple and flat, then suddenly glow as the tide withdrew. And once again I was lured out, my pants legs rolled and in an old green sweatshirt, barefoot, to where the soaked and glistening sand seized my soft feet bottoms and the frothing water raced to close around my ankles like a grasp. And I thought to myself, standing there: Here is necessity. Here is the extra beat—to live, to live, to live it out.

  We are going down fast now. Sally clutches my fingers hard, smiles an encouragement. The big engines hum. Our craft dips, shudders hard, and I feel myself afloat as the white earth rises to meet us—square buildings, moving cars, bundled figures of the other humans coming into clear focus as we descend. Some are watching, gaping up. Some are waving. Some turn their backs to us. Some do not notice us as we touch the ground. A bump, a roar, a heavy thrust forward into life again, and we resume our human scale upon the land.

  Acknowledgments

  An unusual and embarrassing number of people made significant contributions to the writing of this book, none as illuminating, as consequential and as sweetly given as those made by Kristina Ford. My dear friends Gary Fisketjon, Amanda Urban, Gill Coleridge and Gabrielle Brooks have again given me the benefit of their judgment and encouragement, which have been indispensable. I wish also to thank Liz Van Hoose, Jennifer Smith, Amy Loyd, Field Maloney and Richard Brody for their kindness in extending the range of my notice. I’m grateful to Alexandra Pringle and Nigel Newton, to Olivier Cohen, to Elisabeth Ruge and Arnulf Conradi, to Claus Clausen, Jorge Herralde and to Inge and Carlo Feltrinelli for their trust in me. I’m also indebted to Katherine Hourigan, to Lydia Buechler, Carol Edwards and Margaret Halton for their generosity. I wish to thank Helen Schwartz for her essential writing on New Jersey houses, Deborah Treisman for her editorial counsel, Rachel Bolton for her trust, Tom Campbell for his saving advice and Debra Allen for her friendship for this work and for me. It is also true that I would not have written this book had I not met Mike Featherstone, and would not have felt I could write it had I not met Dennis Iannaccone and Paul Principe, the kings of the New Jersey Shore. Finally, I wish to express my lifetime’s gratitude and affection to Christopher and to Koukla MacLehose, for expanding the horizon I see, and for their enduring friendship. RF

  ALSO BY RICHARD FORD

  A Multitude of Sins

  Women with Men

  Independence Day

  Wildlife

  Rock Springs

  The Sportswriter

  The Ultimate Good Luck

  A Piece of My Heart

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF AND ALFRED A. KNOPF CANADA

  Copyright © 2006 by Richard Ford

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  www.randomhouse.ca

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc. Knopf Canada and colophon are trademarks.

  Portions of this novel previously appeared in slightly different form in The New Yorker.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

  Swallow Press/Ohio University Press: Excerpt from “To What Strangers, What Welcome” by J. V. Cunningham, from The Poems of J. V. Cunningham. Copyright © 1997 by J. V. Cu
nningham. Reprinted by permission of Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio (www.ohioswallow.com).