by Richard Ford
“I’ve got them simmering.” (I hope.)
“You’re very skillful at your profession, aren’t you? You sell houses when no one else sells them.” She rocks forward then back, using just her shoulders, the big rocker grinding the porch boards.
“It’s not a very hard job. It’s just driving around in the car with strangers, then later talking to them on the phone.”
“That’s what my job’s like,” Sally says happily, still rocking. Sally’s job is more admirable but fuller of sorrows. I wouldn’t get within a hundred miles of it. Though suddenly and badly now I want to kiss her, touch her shoulder or her waist or somewhere, have a good whiff of her sweet, oiled skin on this warm evening. I therefore make my way clump-a-clump across the noisy boards, lean awkwardly down like an oversize doctor seeking a heartbeat with his naked ear, and give her cheek and also her neck a smooch I’d be happy to have lead to almost anything.
“Hey, hey, stop that,” she says only half-jokingly, as I breathe in the exotics of her neck, feel the dampness of her scapula. Along her cheek just below her ear is the faintest skim of blond down, a delicate, perhaps sensitive feature I’ve always found inflaming but have never been sure how I should attend to. My smooch, though, gives rise to little more than one well-meant, not overly tight wrist squeeze and a willing tilt of head in my general direction, following which I stand up with my empty glass, peer across the beach at nothing, then clump back to take my listening post holding up the doorframe, half aware of some infraction but uncertain what it is. Possibly even more restrictions are in effect.
What I’d like is not to make rigorous, manly, night-ending love now or in two minutes, but to have already done so; to have it on my record as a deed performed and well, and to have a lank, friendly, guard-down love’s afterease be ours; me to be the goodly swain who somehow rescues an evening from the shallows of nullity—what I suffered before my nap and which it’s been my magician’s trick to save us from over these months, by arriving always brimming with good ideas (much as I try to do with Paul or anybody), setting in motion day trips to the Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum, a canoe ride on the Batsto, a weekend junket to the Gettysburg battlefield, capped off by a balloon trip Sally was game for but not me. Not to mention a three-day Vermont color tour last fall that didn’t work out, since we spent most of two days stuck in a cavalcade of slow-moving leaf-peepers in tour buses and Winnebagos, plus the prices were jacked up, the beds too small and the food terrible. (We ended up driving back one night early, feeling old and tired—Sally slept most of the way—and in no mood even to suffer a drink together when I let her off at the foot of Asbury Street.)
“I made bow ties,” Sally says very assuredly, after the long silence occasioned by my unwanted kiss, during which we both realized we are not about to head upstairs for any fun. “That’s your favorite, correct? Farfalline”
“It’s sure the food I most like to see” I say.
She smiles around again, stretches her long legs out until her ankles make smart little pops. “I’m coming apart at my seams, so it seems,” she says. In fact, she’s an aggressive tennis player who hates to lose and, in spite of her one leg being docked, can scissor the daylights out of a grown man.
“Are you over there thinking about Wally?” I say, for no good reason except I thought it.
“Wally Caldwell?” She says this as if the name were new to her.
“It was just something I thought. From my distance here.”
“The name alone survives,” she says. “Too long ago.” I don’t believe her, but it doesn’t matter. “I had to give up on that name. He left me, and his children. So.” She shakes her thick blond hair as if the specter of Weasel Wally were right out in the dark, seeking admission to our conversation, and she’d rejected him. “What I was thinking about—because when I drove all the way to New York today to pick up some tickets, I was also thinking it then—was you, and about you being here when I came home, and what we’d do, and just what a sweet man you always are.”
This is not a good harbinger, mark my words.
“I want to be a sweet man,” I say, hoping this will have the effect of stopping whatever she is about to say next. Only in rock-solid marriages can you hope to hear that you’re a sweet man without a “but” following along afterward like a displeasing goat. In many ways a rock-solid marriage has a lot to say for itself. “But what?”
“But nothing. That’s all.” Sally hugs her knees, her long bare feet side by side on the front edge of her rocker seat, her long body swaying forward and back. “Does there have to be a ‘but’?”
“Maybe that’s what I am.” I should make a goat noise.
“A butt? Well. I was just driving along thinking I liked you. That’s all. I can try to be harder to get along with.”
“I’m pretty happy with you,” I say. An odd little smirky smile etches along my silly mouth and hardens back up into my cheeks without my willing it.
Sally turns all the way sideways and peers up at me in the gloom of the porch. A straight address. “Well, good.”
I say nothing, just smirk.
“Why are you smiling like that?” she says. “You look strange.”
“I don’t really know,” I say, and poke my finger in my cheek and push, which makes the sturdy little smile retreat back into my regular citizen’s mien.
Sally squints at me as if she’s able to visualize something hidden in my face, something she’s never seen but wants to verify because she always suspected it was there.
“I always think about the Fourth of July as if I needed to have something accomplished by now, or decided,” she says. “Maybe that was one of my problems last night. It’s from going to school in the summers for so long. The fall just seems too late. I don’t even know late for what.”
I, though, am thinking about a more successful color tour. Michigan: Petoskey, Harbor Springs, Charlevoix. A weekend on Mackinaw Island, riding a tandem. (All things, of course, I did with Ann. Nothing’s new.)
Sally raises both her arms above her head, joins hands and does a slinky yoga stretch, getting the kinks out of everything and causing her bracelets to slide up her arm in a jangly little cascade. This pace of things, this occasional lapse into silence, this unurgency or ruminance, is near the heart of some matter with us now. I wish it would vamoose. “I’m boring you,” she says, arms aloft, luminous. She’s nobody’s pushover and a wonderful sight to see. A smart man should find a way to love her.
“You’re not boring me,” I say, feeling for some reason elated. (Possibly the leading edge of a cool front has passed, and everybody on the seaboard just felt better all at once.) “I don’t mind it that you like me. I think it’s great.” Possibly I should kiss her again. A real one.
“You see other women, don’t you?” she says, and begins to shuffle her feet into a pair of flat gold sandals.
“Not really.”
“What’s ‘not really’?” She picks her wine glass up off the floor. A mosquito is buzzing my ear. I’m more than ready to head inside and forget this topic.
“I don’t. That’s all. I guess if somebody came along who I wanted to see”—“see”: a word I hate; I’m happier with “boff” or “boink,” “roger” or “diddle”—“then I feel like that’d be okay. With me, I mean.”
“Right,” Sally says curtly.
Whatever spirit has moved her to put her sandals on has passed now. I hear her take a deep breath, wait, then let it slowly out. She is holding her glass by its smooth round base.
“I think you see other men,” I say hopefully. Cuff links come to mind.
“Of course.” She nods, staring over the porch banister toward small yellow dots embedded in darkness at an incomprehensible distance. I think again of us Divorced Men, huddled for safety’s sake on our bestilled vessel, staring longingly at the mysterious land (possibly at this very house), imagining lives, parties, cool restaurants, late-night carryings-on we ached to be in
on. Any one of us would’ve swum ashore against the flood to do what I’m doing. “I have this odd feeling about seeing other men,” Sally says meticulously. “That I do it but I’m not planning anything.” To my huge surprise, though I’m not certain, I think she scoops a tear from the corner of her eye and massages it dry between her fingers. This is why we are staying on the porch. I of course didn’t know she was actually “seeing” other men.
“What would you like to be waiting on?” I say, too earnestly.
“Oh, I don’t know.” She sniffs to signify I needn’t worry about further tears. “Waiting’s just a bad habit. I’ve done it before. Nothing, I guess.” She runs her fingers back through her thick hair, gives her head a tiny clearing shake. I’d like to ask about the anchor, ball and chain, but this is not the moment, since all I’d do is find out. “Do you think you’re waiting for something to happen?” She looks up at me again, skeptically. Whatever my answer, she’s expecting it to be annoying or deceitful or possibly stupid.
“No,” I say, an attempt at frankness—something I probably can’t bring off right now. “I don’t know what it’d be for either.”
“So,” Sally says. “Where’s the good part in anything if you don’t think something good’s coming, or you’re going to get a prize at the end? What’s the good mystery?”
“The good mystery’s how long anything can go on the way it is. That’s enough for me.” The Existence Period par excellence. Sally and Ann are united in their distaste for this view.
“My oh my oh my!” She leans her head back and stares up at the starless ceiling and laughs an odd high-pitched girlish ha-ha-ha. “I underestimated you. That’s good. I … never mind. You’re right. You’re completely right.”
“I’d be happy to be wrong,” I say, and look, I’m sure, goofy.
“Fine,” Sally says, looking at me as if I were the rarest of rare species. “Waiting to be proved wrong, though—that’s not exactly taking the bull by the horns, is it, Franky?”
“I never really understood why anybody’d take a bull by its horns in the first place,” I say. “That’s the dangerous end.” I don’t much like being called “Franky,” as though I were six and of indeterminate gender.
“Well, look.” She is now sarcastic. “This is just an experiment. It’s not personal.” Her eyes flash, even in the dark, catching light from somewhere, maybe the house next door, where lamps have been switched on, making it look cozy and inviting indoors. I wouldn’t mind being over there. “What does it mean to you to tell somebody you love them? Or her?”
“I don’t really have anybody to say that to.” This is not a comforting question.
“But if you did? Someday you might.” This inquiry suggests I have become an engaging but totally out-of-the-question visitor from another ethical system.
“I’d be careful about it.”
“You’re always careful.” Sally knows plenty about my life—that I am sometimes finicky but in fact often not careful. More of irony.
“I’d be more careful,” I say.
“What would you mean if you said it, though?” She may in fact believe my answer will someday mean something important to her, explain why certain paths were taken, others abandoned: “It was a time in my life I was lucky enough to survive;” or “This’ll explain why I got out of New Jersey and went to work with the natives in Pago Pago.”
“Well,” I say, since she deserves an honest answer, “it’s provisional. I guess I’d mean I see enough in someone I liked that I’d want to make up a whole person out of that part, and want to keep that person around.”
“What does that have to do with being in love?” She is intent, almost prayerful, staring at me in what I believe may be a hopeful manner.
“Well, we’d have to agree that that was what love was, or is. Maybe that’s too severe.” (Though I don’t really think so.)
“It is severe,” she says. A fishing boat sounds a horn out in the ocean dark.
“I didn’t want to exaggerate,” I say. “When I got divorced I promised I’d never complain about how things turned out. And not exaggerating is a way of making sure I don’t have anything to complain about.” This is what I tried explaining to smushed-dick Joe this morning. With no success. (Though what can it mean for one’s desideratum to come up twice in one day?)
“You can probably be talked out of your severe view of love, though, can’t you? Maybe that’s what you meant by being happy to be wrong.” Sally stands as she says this, once again raises her arms, wine glass in hand, and twists herself side to side. The fact that one leg is shorter than the other is not apparent. She is five feet ten. Almost my height.
“I haven’t thought so.”
“It really wouldn’t be easy, I guess, would it? It’d take something unusual.” She is watching the beach where someone has just started an illegal campfire, which makes the night for this moment seem sweet and cheerful. But from sudden, sheer discomfort, and also affection and admiration for her scrupulousness, I’m compelled to grab my arms around her from behind and give her a hug and a smoochy schnuzzle that works out better than the last one. She is no longer humid underneath her caftan, where she seems to my notice to be wearing no clothes, and is sweeter than sweet. Though her arms stay limp at her side. No reciprocation. “At least you don’t need to worry how to trust all over again. All that awful shit, the stuff my dying people never talk about. They don’t have time.”
“Trust’s for the birds,” I say, my arms still around her. I live for just these moments, the froth of a moment’s pseudo-intimacy and pleasure just when you don’t expect it. It is wonderful. Though I don’t believe we have accomplished much, and I’m sorry.
“Well,” Sally says, regaining her footing and pushing my cloying arms off in a testy way without turning around, making for the door, her limp now detectable. “Trust’s for the birds. Isn’t it just. That’s the way it has to be, though.”
“I’m pretty hungry,” I say.
She walks off the porch, lets the screen slap shut. “Come in then and eat your bow ties. You have miles to go before you sleep.”
Though as the sound of her bare feet recedes down the hall, I am alone in the warm sea smells mixed with the driftwood smoke, a barbecue smell that’s perfect for the holiday. Someone next door turns on a radio, loud at first, then softer. E-Z Listn’n from New Brunswick. Liza is singing, and I myself drift like smoke for a minute in the music: “Isn’t it romantic? Music in the night … Moving shadows write the oldest magic … I hear the breezes playing … You were meant for love … Isn’t it romantic?”
At dinner, eaten at the round oak table under bright ceiling light, seated either side of the vase sprouting purple irises and white wisteria and a wicker cornucopia spilling summery legumes, our talk is eclectic, upbeat, a little dizzying. It is, I understand, a prelude to departure, with all memory of languor and serious discussion of love’s particulars off-limits now, vanished like smoke in the sea breeze. (The police have since arrived, and the firemakers hauled off to jail the instant they complained about the beach being owned by God.)
In the candlelight Sally is spirited, her blue eyes moist and shining, her splendid angular face tanned and softened. We fork up bow ties and yak about movies we haven’t seen but would like to (Me—Moonstruck, Wall Street; she— Empire of the Sun, possibly The Dead); we talk about possible panic in the soybean market now that rain has ended the drought in the parched Middle West; we discuss “drouth” and “drought;” I tell her about the Markhams and the McLeods and my problems there, which leads somehow to a discussion of a Negro columnist who shot a trespasser in his yard, which prompts Sally to admit she sometimes carries a handgun in her purse, right in South Mantoloking, though she believes it will probably be the instrument that kills her. For a brief time I talk about Paul, noting that he is not much attracted to fire, doesn’t torture animals, isn’t a bed-wetter that I know of, and that my hopes are he will live with me in the fa
ll.
Then (from some strange compulsion) I charge into realty. I report there were 2,036 shopping centers built in the U.S. two years ago, but now the numbers are “way off,” with many big projects stalled. I affirm that I don’t see the election mattering a hill of beans to the realty market, which provokes Sally to remember what rates were back in the bicentennial year (8.75%), when, I recall to her, I was thirty-one and living on Hoving Road. While she mixes Jersey blueberries in kirsch for spooning over sponge cake, I try to steer us clear of the too-recent past, talk on about Grandfather Bascombe losing the family farm in Iowa over a gambling debt and coming in late at night, eating a bowl of berries of some kind in the kitchen, then stepping out onto the front porch and shooting himself.
I have noticed, however, throughout dinner that Sally and I have continued to make long and often unyielding eye contact. Once, while making coffee using the filter-and-plunger system, she’s stolen a glimpse at me as if to acknowledge we’ve gotten to know each other a lot better now, have ventured closer, but that I’ve been acting strange or crazy and might just leap up and start reciting Shakespeare in pig Latin or whistling “Yankee Doodle” through my butt.
Toward ten, though, we have kicked back in our captain’s chairs, a new candle lit, having finished coffee and gone back to the Round Hill. Sally has bunched her dense hair back, and we are launched into a discussion of our individual self-perceptions (mine basically as a comic character; Sally’s a “facilitator,” though from time to time, she says, “as a dark and pretty ruthless obstructor”—which I’ve never noticed). She sees me, she says, in an odd priestly mode, which is in fact the worst thing I can imagine, since priests are the least self-aware, most unenlightened, irresolute, isolated and frustrated people on the earth (politicians are second). I decide to ignore this, or at least to treat it as disguised goodwill and to mean I, too, am a kind of facilitator, which I would be if I could. I tell her I see her as a great beauty with a sound head on her shoulders, who I find compelling and unsusceptible to being made up in the way I explained earlier, which is true (I’m still shaken by being perceived as a priest). We venture on toward the issue of strong feelings, how they’re maybe more important than love. I explain (why, I’m not sure, when it’s not particularly true) that I’m having a helluva good time these days, refer to the Existence Period, which I have mentioned before, in other contexts. I fully admit that this part of my life may someday be—except for her—hard to remember with precision, and that sometimes I feel beyond affection’s grasp but that’s just being human and no cause for worry. I also tell her I could acceptably end my life as the “dean” of New Jersey realtors, a crusty old bird who’s forgotten more than the younger men could ever know. (Otto Schwindell without the Pall Malls or the hair growing out my ears.) She says quite confidently, all the while smiling at me, that she hopes I can get around to doing something memorable, and for a moment I think again about bringing up the Marine cuff links and their general relation to things memorable, and possibly dropping in Ann’s name—not wanting to seem unable to or as if Ann’s very existence were a reproach to Sally, which it isn’t. I decide not to do either of these.