Independence Day

by Richard Ford

  And I simply didn’t know what in the hell to say or think, much less feel, and for several seconds I just stood holding the receiver to my ear as if the line had gone dead, or as if some lethal current had connected through my ear to my brain and struck me cold as a haddock.

  Anybody, of course, could’ve seen it coming. I’d met Charley O’Dell, age fifty-seven (tall, prematurely white-haired, rich, big-boned, big-schnozzed, big-jawed, literal-as-a-dictionary architect), on various occasions having to do with the delivery and pickup of my children, and had at that time officially declared him a “no-threat.” O’Dell is commandant of his own pretentious one-man design firm, housed in a converted seamen’s chapel built on stilts (!) at the marsh edge in Deep River, and of course pilots his own 25-foot Alerion, built with his own callused hands and fitted with sails sewn at night while listening to Vivaldi, yakkedy, yakkedy, yak. We once stood one spring night, on the little front stoop of Ann’s house—now mine—and yammered for thirty minutes with not one grain of sincerity or goodwill about diplomatic strategies for corraling the Scandinavians into the EEC, something I knew not a fig about and cared less. “Now if you ask me, Frank, the Danes are the key to the whole square-headed pack out there”—one tanned, naked knobby knee hiked up on Ann’s stoop railing, one bespoke deck shoe dangling half off his long big toe, chin balanced pseudo-judiciously on big fist. Charley’s usual attire when he isn’t wearing a bow tie and a blazer is a big white tee-shirt and khaki canvas walking shorts, something they must hand out at graduation at Yale. I, that night, stared him straight in the eyes as if I were paying rapt attention, though in fact I was sucking one of my molars where I’d discovered a randy taste in an area I couldn’t floss, and was also thinking that if I could hypnotize him and will him into disappearing I could have some time alone with my ex-wife.

  Ann, however (suspiciously), wouldn’t give in on the several evenings she and I paused together by my car in the silent dark of divorced former mates who still love each other, wouldn’t crack smirky jokes at Charley’s expense, the way she always had about all her other suitors—jokes about their taste in suits or their dreary jobs, their breath, the reported savage personalities of their ex-wives. Mum was always the word where Charley was concerned. (I guessed wrongly it was respect for his age.) But I should’ve paid closer attention and torpedoed him the way any man would who’s in charge of his senses.

  As a result, though, when Ann gave me the bad news on the phone that June evening just at cocktail hour—the sun having cleared the yardarm in butler’s pantries all over Haddam, and trays of ice were being cracked into crystal buckets, leaded tumblers and slender Swedish pitchers, the vermouth hauled out wryly, the smell of juniper flaring the nostrils of many a bushed but deserving ex-hubby—I was kicked square in the head.

  And my first on-record thought was of course that I had been bitterly, scaldingly betrayed just at a critical point—the point at which I’d gotten things almost “turned around” for the long canter back to the barn—the commencing point of life’s gentle amelioration, all sins forgiven, all lesions healed.

  “Married?” I, in essence, shouted, my heart making one palpable, possibly audible clunk at the bottom of its cavity. “Married to who?”

  “To Charley O’Dell,” Ann said, unduly calm in the face of calamitous news.

  “You’re marrying the bricklayer!” I said. “Why?”

  “I guess because I want somebody to make love to me more than three times after which I never see them again.” She said this calmly too. “You just go to France and I don’t hear from you for months”—which wasn’t true—“I actually think the children need a better life than that. And also because I don’t want to die in Haddam, and because I’d like to see the Connecticut in the morning mist and go sailing in a skiff. I guess, in more traditional terms, I’m in love with him. What’d you think?”

  “Those seem like good reasons,” I said, light-headed.

  “I’m happy you approve.”

  “I don’t approve,” I said, breathless, as if I’d come straight inside from a long run. “You’re moving the kids away too?”

  “It’s not in our decree that I can’t,” she said.

  “What do they think?” I felt my heart thunk-a-thunk again at the thought of the children. This, of course, was a serious issue, and one that becomes urgent decades beyond divorce itself: the issue of what the children think of their father if their mother remarries. (He almost never fares well. There are books about this, and they aren’t funny: the father is seen either as a stooge wearing goat horns or a brute betrayer who forced Mom into marrying a hairy outsider who invariably treats the kids with irony, ill-disguised contempt and annoyance. Either way, insult is glommed onto injury.)

  “They think it’s wonderful,” Ann said. “Or they should. I think they expect me to be happy.”

  “Sure, why not?” I said numbly.

  “Right. Why not.”

  And then there was a long, cold silence, which we both knew to be the silence of the millennium, the silence of divorce, of being fatigued by love parceled out and withheld in the unfair ways it had been, by love lost when something should’ve made it not be lost but didn’t, the silence of death—long before death might even be winked at.

  “That’s all I really have to say now,” she said. A heavy curtain had parted briefly, then closed again.

  I was in fact standing in the butler’s pantry at 19 Hoving Road, staring out the little round nautically paned fo’c’sle window into my side yard, where the big copper beech cast ominous puddles of purple, pre-dark shadow over the green grasses and shrubs of late-spring evening.

  “When’s all this happening?” I said almost apologetically. I put my hand to my cheek, and my cheek was cold.

  “In two months.”

  “What about the club?” Ann had stayed on as a part-time teaching pro at Cranbury Hills and had once briefly been an aspirant to the state ladies’ pro-am. She’d actually met Charley there, on the cadge with his reciprocating membership from the Old Lyme Country Club. She had told me (I thought) all about him: a sort of nice older man she felt comfortable with.

  “I’ve taught enough women to play golf now,” she said briskly, then paused. “I put my house on the market this morning with Lauren-Schwindell.”

  “Maybe I’ll buy it,” I said rashly.

  “That’d certainly be novel.”

  I had no idea why I’d say anything so preposterous, except to have something bold to say instead of breaking into hysterical laughter or howls of grief. But then I said, “Maybe I’ll sell this place and move into your house.”

  And as quick as the words left my mouth I had the dead-eyed conviction that I was going to do exactly that, and in a hurry—perhaps so she could never get rid of me. (That may be what marriage means in laymen’s terms: a relation you have with the one person in the world you can’t get rid of except by dying.)

  “I think I’ll leave the real estate ventures to you,” Ann said, ready to get off the phone.

  “Is Charley there?” It seemed conceivable I might just storm over right then and bust him up, bloody his tee-shirt, put some extra years on him.

  “No, he’s not, and don’t come over here, please. I’m crying now, and you don’t get to see that.” I hadn’t heard her crying and concluded she was lying to make me feel like a louse, which was how I felt even though I hadn’t done anything lousy. She was getting married. I was the one getting left behind like a cripple.

  “Don’t worry,” I said, “I don’t want to spoil any of the fun.”

  And then suddenly, the receiver pressed to my ear, another even more inert silence filled the optic lines connecting us. And I had the sharpest pain that Ann was going to die, not in Haddam and not immediately, not even soon, but not so long from then either—at the end of a period of time that, because she was abandoning me for the arms of another, would pass almost imperceptibly, her life’s extinguishment paying out
beyond my knowing via a series of small, exquisite doctors’ appointments, anxieties, dismays, unhappy lab reports, gloomy X rays, tiny struggles, tiny victories, reprieves, then failures (life’s inventory of morose happenstance), at the sudden, misty conclusion of which a call would come or a voice mail or a fax or a mailgram, saying: “Ann Dykstra died Tuesday morning. Services yesterday. Thought you’d want to know. Condolences. C. O’Dell.” After which my own life would be ruined and over with, big time! (It’s a matter of my age that all new events threaten to ruin my precious remaining years. Nothing like this feeling happens when you’re thirty-two.)

  And of course it was just cheap sentimentalism—the kind the gods frown down on from Olympus and send avengers to punish the small-time con men of emotion for practicing. Only sometimes you can’t feel anything about a subject without hypothesizing its extinction. And that is how I felt: full of sadness that Ann was going away to start the part of her life that would end in her death; at which time I’d be elsewhere, piddling around at nothing very important, the way I had since coming back from Europe or—depending on your point of view—the way I had for twenty years. I’d be unthought of or worse, thought of only as “a man Ann was once married to…. I’m not sure where he is now. He was strange.”

  Yet I felt, if I was to have a part, any part in it at all, it would have to be spoken right then—on the phone, streets away but different neighborhoods (the geography of divorce), me alone in my house, feeling, as recently as ten minutes prior, hopeful about my unruined prospects but suddenly feeling as divorced as a man can be.

  “Don’t marry him, sweetheart! Marry me! Again! Let’s sell both our shitty houses and move to Quoddy Head, where I’ll buy a small newspaper from the proceeds. You can learn to sail your skiff off Grand Manan, and the kids can learn to set type by hand, be wary little seafarers, grow adept with lobster pots, trade in their Jersey accents, go to Bowdoin and Bates.” These are words I didn’t say into the dense millennial silence available to me. They would’ve been laughed at, since I’d had years to say them before then and hadn’t—which Dr. Stopler of New Haven will tell you means I didn’t really want to.

  “I think I understand all this,” I said instead, in a convinced voice, as I poured myself a convincing amount of gin, bypassing the vermouth. “And I love you, by the way.”

  “Please,” Ann said. “Just please. You love me? What difference does that make? I’m finished with what I had to tell you, anyway.” She was and is the kind of bedrock literalist who takes no interest in the far-fetched (the things I sometimes feel I’m only interested in), which is I’m sure why she married Charley.

  “To say that some important truths are founded on flimsy evidence really isn’t saying much.” I voiced this view meekly.

  “That’s your philosophy, Frank, not mine. I’ve heard it for years. It only matters to you how long some improbable thing holds up, right?”

  I took my first sip of just-cold-enough gin. I could feel the slow exhilaration of a long, honing talk coming. There aren’t very many better feelings. “For some people the improbable can last long enough to become true,” I said.

  “And for other people it can’t. And if you were about to ask me to marry you instead of Charley, don’t. I won’t. I don’t want to.”

  “I was just trying to speak to an ephemeral truth at a moment of transition and trudge on beyond it.”

  “Trudge on, then,” Ann said. “I’ve got to cook dinner for the children. I do want to admit this, though: I thought that it’d be you who’d get married again after we got divorced. To some bimbo. I admit I was wrong.”

  “Maybe you don’t know me very well.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Thanks for calling me,” I said. “Congratulations.”

  “Sure. It was nothing.” Then she said good-bye and hung up.

  But … nothing? It was nothing?

  It was something!

  I bolted my gin in one shuddering, breathless gulp, to wash down frothing bitterness. Nothing? It was epochal. And I didn’t care if it was blue-blood Charley from Deep River, pencil-neck, breastpocket-penholder Waldo from Bell Labs or tattooed Lonnie down at the car wash: I’d have felt the same. Like shit!

  Up to that moment, Ann and I had had a nice, cozy-efficient system worked out, one by which we lived separate lives in separate houses in one small, tidy, peril-free town. We had flings, woes, despairs, joys, a whole gearbox full of life’s meshings and unmeshings, on and on, but fundamentally we were the same two people who’d gotten married and divorced, only set in different equipoise: same planets, different orbits, same solar system. But in a pinch, a real pinch, say a head-on car crash requiring extended life support or a prolonged bout of chemo, no one but the other would’ve been in attendance, buttonholing the doctors, chatting up the nurses, judiciously closing and opening heavy curtains, monitoring the game shows through the long, silent afternoons, shooing away prying neighbors and long-ignored relatives, former boyfriends, girlfriends, old nemeses come to make up—shepherding them all back down the long hallways, speaking in confidential whispers, saying “She had a good night,” or “He’s resting now.” All this while the patient dozed, and the necessary machines clicked and whirred and sighed. And all just so we could be alone. Which is to say we had standing in the other’s dire moments, even if not in the happy ones.

  Eventually, after a long recovery during which one or the other would have had to relearn some basic human life functions up to now taken for granted (walking, breathing, pissing), certain key conversations would’ve taken place, certain dour admissions been offered if not already offered in moments of extremis, and important truths reconciled so that a new and (this time) binding union could be forged.

  Or maybe not. Maybe we would simply have parted again, though with new strengths and insights and respects achieved through the fragile life experiences of the other.

  But all of that was gone like a fart in a skillet. And jeez Louise! If I’d thought back in ’81 that Ann would get remarried, I’d have fought it like a Viking instead of giving in to divorce like a queasy, uninspired saint. And I’d have fought it for a damn good reason: because no matter where she held the mortgage papers, she completely supposed my existence. My life was (and to some vague extent still is) played out on a stage in which she’s continually in the audience (whether she’s paying attention or not). All my decent, reasonable, patient, loving components were developed in the experimental theater of our old life together, and I realized that by moving house up to Deep River she was striking most of the components, dismembering the entire illusion, intending to hook up with another, leaving me with only faint, worn-out costumes to play myself with.

  Naturally enough, I fell into a deep, sulfurous, unsynchronous gloom, stayed at home, called no one for days, drank a lot more gin, reconsidered heavy-equipment-operator’s class and becoming an unwieldy embarrassment to people who knew me, and overall felt myself becoming significantly less substantial.

  I spoke once or twice to my children, who seemed to calculate their mother’s marriage to Charley O’Dell with the alacrity with which a small investor notices a gain in a stock he feels certain he’ll eventually lose money on. Though he’d later change his mind, Paul uncomfortably declared Charley to be an “okay” guy and admitted having gone to a Giants game with him in November (something I hadn’t heard about because I was in Florida and contemplating going to France). Clarissa seemed more interested in the wedding itself than in the conception of remarriage, which didn’t seem to worry her much. She was concerned with what she was going to wear, where everyone would stay (the Griswold Inn in Essex) and if I could be invited (“No”), plus whether she could be a bridesmaid if I got married in the future (which she said she hoped I would). All three of us talked about all these matters for a while via extension phones. I tried to calm fears, sweeten prospects and simplify growing confusions about my own and their possible unhappiness, until there was nothing
left to say, after which we parted company, never to speak under those exact circumstances or in those same innocent voices again. Gone. Poof.

  The wedding itself was an intimate though elegant “on the grounds” affair at Charley’s house—“The Knoll” (pretentious hand-hewn post-and-beam Nantucket cottage adaptation: giant windows, wood from Norway and Mongolia, everything built-in flush, rabbeted, solar panels, heated floors, Finnish sauna, on and on and on). Ann’s mother flew in from Mission Viejo, Charley’s aged parents somehow motored down from Blue Hill or Northeast Harbor or some such magnate’s enclave, with the happy couple flying off to the Huron Mountain Club, where Ann’s father had left her his membership.

  But no sooner had Ann solemnized her retreaded vows than I plunged forward with my own plans (founded on my previously explained sense of practicality, since high-spirited synchronicity hadn’t fared well) to purchase her house on Cleveland Street for four ninety-five, and to get rid of my big old soffit-sagging half-timber on Hoving Road, where I’d lived nearly every minute of my life in Haddam and where I mistakenly thought I could live forever, but which now seemed to be one more commitment holding me back. Houses can have this almost authorial power over us, seeming to ruin or make perfect our lives just by persisting in one place longer than we can. (In either case it’s a power worth defeating.)

  Ann’s house was a crisp, well-kept freestanding Greek Revival town house of a style and 1920s vintage typical of the succinct, Nice-but-not-finicky central Jersey architectural temper—a place she’d bought on the cheap (with my help) after our divorce and done some modernizing work on (“opening out” the back, adding skylights and crown moldings, repointing some basement piers, finishing off the third floor to be Paul’s lair, then giving the clapboards a new white paint job and new green shutters).

  In truth, the house was a natural for me, since I’d already spent a three-years collection of sleepless nights there when a child was sick or when, in the early days of our sad divorced limbo, I’d sometimes gotten the jimjams so bad Ann would take pity on me and let me slip in and sleep on the couch.