by Richard Ford
Time was when a moment like this one—stretched out in a cool, inviting house not my own, drifting toward a nap, but also thrillingly awaiting the arrival of a sweet, wonderful and sympathetic visitor, eager to provide what I need because she needs it too—time was when this state was the best damned feeling on God’s earth, in fact was the very feeling the word “life” was coined for, plus all the more intoxicating and delectable because I recognized it even as it was happening, and knew with certainty no one else did or could, so that I could have it all, all, all to myself, the way I had nothing else.
Here, now, all the props are in place, light and windage set; Sally is doubtless on her way at this instant, eager (or at least willing) to run up, jump in bed, find once more the key to my heart and give it a good cranking-up turn, thereby routing last night’s entire squadron of worries.
Only the old giddyup (mine) is vanished, and I’m not lying here a-buzz and a-thrill but listening haphazard to voices on the beach—the way I used to feel, would like to feel, gone. Left is only some ether of its presence and a hungrified wonder about where it might be and will it ever come back. Nullity, in other words. Who the hell wouldn’t wince?
Possibly this is one more version of “disappearing into your life,” the way career telephone company bigwigs, overdutiful parents and owners of wholesale lumber companies are said to do and never know it. You simply reach a point at which everything looks the same but nothing matters much. There’s no evidence you’re dead, but you act that way.
But to dispel this wan, cavern-of-winds feeling, I try fervently now to picture the first girl I ever “went” with, willing like a high-schooler to project lurid mind-pictures and arouse myself into taking matters in hand, after which sleep’s a cinch. Except my film’s a blank; I can’t seem to remember my first sexual conduction, though experts swear it’s the one act you never forget, long after you’ve forgotten how to ride a bicycle. It’s there on your mind when you’re parked on a porch in your diaper at the old folks home, lost in a row of other dozing seniors, hoping to get a little color in your cheeks before lunch is served.
My hunch, though, is that it was a little pasty brunette named Brenda Patterson, whom a military-school classmate and I convinced to go “golfing” with us on the hot Bermuda-grass links at Keesler AFB, in Mississippi, then half-pleaded, half-teased and almost certainly browbeat into taking her pants down in a stinking little plywood men’s room beside the 9th green, this in exchange for our—me and my pal “Angle” Carlisle—grim-facedly returning the favor (we were fourteen; the rest is hazy).
Otherwise it was years later in Ann Arbor, when, nuzzling under some cedar shrubs in the Arboretum, below the New York Central trestle, I made an effort in full watery daylight to convince a girl named Mindy Levinson to let me do it just with our pants half down, our young tender flesh all over stickers and twigs. I remember she said yes, though, as uninspired as it now seems, I’m not even certain if I went through with it.
Abruptly now my mind goes electric with sentences, words, strings of unrelateds running on in semi-syntactical disarray. I sometimes can go to sleep this way, in a swoony process of returning sense to nonsense (the pressure to make sense is for me always an onerous, sometimes sleepless one). In my brain I hear: Try burning life’s congested Buckeye State biker … There is a natural order of things in the cocktail dress … I’m fluent in the hysterectomy warhead (don’t I?) … Give them the Locution, come awn back, nah, come awn, the long term’s less good for you … The devil’s in the details, or is it God …
Not this time, apparently. (What kinship these bits enjoy is a brainteaser for Dr. Stopler, not me.)
Sometimes, though not that often, I wish I were still a writer, since so much goes through anybody’s mind and right out the window, whereas, for a writer—even a shitty writer—so much less is lost. If you get divorced from your wife, for instance, and later think back to a time, say, twelve years before, when you almost broke up the first time but didn’t because you decided you loved each other too much or were too smart, or because you both had gumption and a shred of good character, then later after everything was finished, you decided you actually should’ve gotten divorced long before because you think now you missed something wonderful and irreplaceable and as a result are filled with whistling longing you can’t seem to shake— if you were a writer, even a half-baked short-story writer, you’d have someplace to put that fact buildup so you wouldn’t have to think about it all the time. You’d just write it all down, put quotes around the most gruesome and rueful lines, stick them in somebody’s mouth who doesn’t exist (or better, a thinly disguised enemy of yours), turn it into pathos and get it all off your ledger for the enjoyment of others.
Not that you ever truly lose anything, of course—as Paul is finding out with pain and difficulty—no matter how careless you are or how skilled at forgetting, or even if you’re a writer as good as Saul Bellow. Though you do have to teach yourself not to cart it all around inside until you rot or explode. (The Existence Period, let me say, is made special for this sort of adjusting.)
For example. I never worry about whether or not my parents felt rewarded because they only had me or if they might’ve wanted another child (a memory-based anxiety that could drive the right person nuts). And it’s simply because I once wrote a story about a small, loving family living on the Mississippi Gulf Coast who have one child but sort of want another one, ya-ta-ya-ta-ya-ta—ending with the mother taking a solitary boat ride on a hot windy day (very much like this one) out to Horn Island, where she walks on the sand barefoot, picks up a few old beer cans and stares back at the mainland until she realizes, due to something being said by a nun to some nearby crippled children, that wishing for things that can’t be is—you guessed it—like being on an island with strangers and picking up old beer cans, when what she needs to do is get back to the boat (which is just whistling) and return to her son and husband, who are that day on a bass-fishing trip but will soon be back, wanting supper, and who that very morning have told her how much they both love her, but which has succeeded only in making her sad and lonely as a hermit and in need of a boat ride….
This story, of course, is in a book of stories I wrote, under the title, “Waiting Offshore.” Though since I stopped writing stories eighteen years ago I’ve had to find other ways to cope with unpleasant and worrisome thoughts. (Ignoring them is one way.)
When Ann and I were first married and living in NYC, in 1969, and I was scribbling away like a demon, hanging around my agent’s office on 35th Street and showing Ann my precious pages every night, she used to stand at the window pouting because she could never find, she felt, much direct evidence of herself in my work—no cameos, no tall, slouchingly athletic golfer types of strong, resolute Dutch extraction, saying calamitously witty or incisive things to take the starch out of lesser women or men, who, naturally, would all be sluts or bores. What I used to tell her was—and God smite me if I’m lying almost twenty years later—that if I could encapsulate her in words, it would mean I’d rendered her less complex than she was and would therefore signify I was already living at a distance from her, which would eventuate in my setting her aside like a memory or a worry (which happened anyway, but not for that reason and not with complete success).
Indeed, I often tried telling her that her contribution was not to be a character but to make my little efforts at creation urgent by being so wonderful that I loved her; stories being after all just words giving varied form to larger, compelling but otherwise speechless mysteries such as love and passion. In that way, I explained, she was my muse; muses being not comely, playful feminine elves who sit on your shoulder suggesting better word choices and tittering when you get one right, but powerful life-and-death forces that threaten to suck you right out the bottom of your boat unless you can heave enough crates and boxes—words, in a writer’s case—into the breach. (I have not found a replacement for this force as yet, which may explain how I’ve bee
n feeling lately and especially here today.)
Ann, of course, in her overly factual, Michigan-Dutch way, didn’t like the part that seemed to be my secret, and always assumed I was simply bullshitting her. If we were to have a heart-to-heart at this very minute, she would finally get around to asking me why I never wrote about her. And my answer would be that it was because I didn’t want to use her up, bind her in words, set her aside, consign her to a “place” where she would be known, but always as less than she was. (She still wouldn’t believe me.)
I try running all this end to end as I watch the ceiling fan baffle light around my room’s shadowy atmosphere: Ann wishes for … Horn Island … God smite my Round Hill elves … try burning this one …
Someplace far, far away I seem to hear footsteps, then the softened sound of a wine cork being squeezed, then popped, a spoon set down gently on a metal stovetop, a hushed radio playing the theme music of the news broadcast I regularly tune to, a phone ringing and being answered in a grateful voice, followed by condoning laughter—a sweet and precious domestic sonority I so rarely feel these days that I would lie here and listen till way past dark if I only, only could.
I lumber down the stairs, my teeth brushed, my face washed, though groggy and misaligned in time. My teeth in fact don’t feel they’re in the right occlusion either, as if I’d gnashed them in some dream (no doubt a dismal “night guard” is in my future).
It is twilight. I’ve slept for hours without believing I slept at all, and feel no longer fuguish but exhausted, as though I’d dreamed of running a race, my legs heavy and achy clear up to my groin.
When I come around the newel post I can see, out the open front doorway, a few darkened figures on the beach and, farther out, the lights of a familiar oil platform that can’t be seen in the hazy daytime, its tiny white lights cutting the dark eastern sky like diamonds. I wonder where the freighter is, the one I saw before—no doubt well into harbor.
A lone, dim candle burns in the kitchen, though the little security panel—just as in Ted Houlihan’s house—blinks a green all-clear from down the hall. Sally usually maintains lights-off till there’s none left abroad, then sets scented candles through the house and goes barefoot. It is a habit I’ve almost learned to respect, along with her cagey sidelong looks that let you know she’s got your number.
No one is in the kitchen, where the beige candle flickers on the counter for my sake. A shadowy spray of purple irises and white wisteria have been arranged in a ceramic vase to dress up the table. A green crockery bowl of cooling bow ties sits beside a loaf of French bread, my bottle of Round Hill in its little chilling sleeve. Two forks, two knives, two spoons, two plates, two napkins.
I pour a glass and head for the porch.
“I don’t think I hear you with your bells on,” Sally says, while I’m still trooping down the hall. Outside, to my surprise it is almost full dark, the beach apparently empty, as if the last two minutes had occupied a full hour. “I’m just taking in the glory of the day’s end,” she continues, “though I came up an hour ago and watched you sleep.” She smiles around at me from the porch shadows and extends her hand back, which I touch, though I stay by the door, overtaken for a moment by the waves breaking white-crested out of the night. Part of our “understanding” is not to be falsely effusive, as though unmeant effusiveness was what got our whole generation in trouble somewhere back up the line. I wonder forlornly if she will take up where she left off last night, with me flying across cornfields looking like Christ almighty, and her odd feelings of things being congested—both of which are encrypted complaints about me that I understand but don’t know how to answer. I have yet to speak. “I’m sorry I woke you up last night. I just felt so odd,” she says. She’s seated in a big wood rocker, in a long white caftan slit up both sides to let her hike her long legs and bare feet up. Her yellow hair is pulled back and held with a silver barrette, her skin brown from beach life, her teeth luminous. A damp perfume of sweet bath oil floats away on the porch air.
“I hope I wasn’t snoring,” I say.
“Nope. Nope. You’re a wife’s dream. You never snore. I hope you saw I put de Tocqueville out for you since you’re taking a trip and also reading history in the middle of the night. I always liked him.”
“Me too,” I lie.
She gives me the look then. Her features are narrow, her nose is sharp, her chin angular and freckled—a sleek package. She is wearing thin silver earrings and heavy turquoise bracelets. “You did say something about Ann—speaking of wives, or former wives.” This is the reason for the look, not my lying about de Tocqueville.
“I only remember dreaming about somebody not getting his insurance premiums paid on time, and then about if it was better to be killed or tortured and then killed.”
“I know what I’d choose.” She takes a sip of wine, holding the round glass in both palms and focusing into the dark that has taken over the beach. New York’s damp glow brightens the lusterless sky. Out on the main drag cars are racing; tires squeal, one siren goes woop.
Whenever Sally turns ruminant, I assume she’s brooding over Wally, her long-lost, now roaming the ozone, somewhere amongst these frigid stars, “dead” to the world but (more than likely) not to her. Her situation is much like mine—divorced in a generic sense—with all of divorce’s shaky unfinality, which, when all else fails, your mind chews on like a piece of sour meat you just won’t swallow.
I sometimes imagine that one night right at dusk she’ll be here on her porch, wondering away as now, and up’ll stride ole Wal, a big grin on his kisser, more slew-footed than she remembered, softer around center field, wide-eyed and more pudding-faced, but altogether himself, having suddenly, in the midst of a thriving florist’s career in Bellingham or his textile manufacturer’s life in downstate Pekin, just waked up in a movie, say, or on a ferry, or midway of the Sunshine Bridge, and immediately begun the journey back to where he’d veered off on that long-ago morning in Hoffman Estates. (I’d rather not be present for this reunion.) In my story they embrace, cry, eat dinner in the kitchen, drink too much vino, find it easier to talk than either of them would’ve thought, later head back to the porch, sit in the dark, hold hands (optional), start to get cozy, consider a trek up the flight of stairs to the bedroom, where another candle’s lit—thinking as they consider this what a strange but not altogether supportable thrill it would be. Then they just snap out of it, laugh a little, grow embarrassed at the mutually unacknowledged prospect, then grow less chummy, in fact cold and impatient, until it’s clear there’s not enough language to fill the space of years and absence, plus Wally (aka Bert, Ned, whatever) is needed back in Pekin or the Pacific Northwest by his new/old wife and semi-grown kids. So that shortly past midnight off he goes, down the walkway to oblivion with all the other court-appointed but not-quite dead (not that much different from what Sally and I do together, though I always show up again).
Anything more, of course, would be too complex and rueful: the whole bunch of them ending up on TV, dressed in suits, sitting painfully on couches—the kids, the wives, the boyfriend, a family priest, the psychiatrist, all there to explain what they’re feeling to bleachers full of cakey fat women eager to stand up and say they themselves “would prolly have to feel a lot of jealousy, you know?” if they were in either wife’s place, and really “no one could be sure if Wally was telling the truth about where …” True, true, true. And who cares?
Somewhere on the water a boat neither of us can see suddenly becomes a launch pad for a bright, fusey, sparkly projectile that arcs into the inky air and explodes into luminous pink and green effusions that brighten the whole sky like creation’s dawn, then pops and fizzles as other, minor detonations go off, before the whole gizmo weakens and dies out of view like an evanescing spirit of nighttime.
Invisible on the beach, people say Ooooo and Aaahhh in unison and applaud each pop. Their presence is a surprise. We wait for the next boomp, whoosh and burst, but none occ
urs. “Oh,” I hear someone say in a falling voice. “Shit.” “But one was nice,” someone says. “One ain’t enough a-nuthin,” is the answer.
“That was my first official ‘firework’ of the holiday,” Sally says cheerfully. “That’s always very exciting.” Where she’s looking the sky is smoky and bluish against the black. We are, the two of us, suspended here as though waiting on some other ignition.
“My mother used to buy little ones in Mississippi,” I offer, “and let them pop off in her fingers. ‘Teensies,’ she called them.” I’m still leaned amiably on the doorframe, glass dangling in my hand, like a movie star in a celebrity still. Two sips on a mostly empty stomach, and I’m mildly tipsy.
Sally looks at me doubtfully. “Was she very frustrated with life, your Mom?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Well. Somebody might say she was trying to wake herself up.”
“Maybe,” I say, made uncomfortable by thinking of my guileless parents in some revisionist’s way, a way that were I only briefly to pursue it would no doubt explain my whole life to now. Better to write a story about it.
“When I was a little girl in Illinois, my parents always managed to have a big fight on New Year’s Eve,” Sally says. “There’d always be yelling and things being thrown and cars starting late at night. They drank too much, of course. But my sisters and I would get terribly excited because of the fireworks display at Pine Lake. And we’d always want to bundle up and drive out and watch from the car, except the car was always gone, and so we’d have to stand in the front yard in the snow or wind and see whatever we could, which wasn’t much. I’m sure we made up most of what we said we saw. So fireworks always make me feel like a girl, which is probably pretty silly. They should make me feel cheated, but they don’t. Did you sell a house to your Vermont people, by the way?”