by Richard Ford
“What’s going on?” I say, more anxious than I care to sound.
“I’m sorry,” she says in an unsorry-sounding voice. “It’s gotten a little out of hand here today. Paul flipped out, and I thought maybe you could get up here early and take him off, but it’s okay now. Where are you?”
“At the Vince Lombardi.”
“The fence what?”
“It’s on the turnpike.” She has in fact used the facilities here. Years ago, of course. “I can make it in two hours,” I say. “What happened?”
“Oh. He and Charley got into a fracas in the boathouse, about the right way and the wrong way to varnish Charley’s dinghy. He hit Charley in the jaw with an oarlock. I think maybe he didn’t mean to, but it knocked him down. Almost knocked him out.”
“Is he all right?”
“He’s all right. No bones broken.”
“I mean is Paul all right?”
A pause for adjustment. “Yes,” she says. “He is. He disappeared for a while, but he came home about nine—which breaks his court curfew. Has he called you?”
“He left me a message.” No need for details: barking, hysterical laughter. (To be great is to be misunderstood.)
“Was he crazy?”
“He just seemed excited. I guessed he was with Stephanie.” Ann and I are of one mind about Stephanie, which is that their chemistry is wrong. In our view, for Stephanie’s parents to send her to a military school for girls—possibly in Tennessee—would be good.
“He’s very upset. I don’t really know why.” Ann takes a sip of something that has ice cubes in it. She has changed her drinking habits since moving to Connecticut, from bourbon (when she was married to me) to vodka gimlets, over whose proper preparation Charley O’Dell apparently exercises total mastery. Ann in general is much harder to read these days, which I assume is the point of divorce. Though on the subject of why now for Paul, my belief is that on any given day there’re truckloads of good excuses for “flipping out.” Paul, in particular, could find plenty. It’s surprising we all don’t do it more.
“How’s Clary?”
“Okay. They’ve gone to sleep in his room now. She says she wants to look out for him.”
“Girls mature faster than boys, I guess. How’s Charley? Did he get his dinghy waxed right?”
“He has a big lump. Look, I’m sorry. It’s all right now. Where is it you’re taking him again?”
“To the basketball and baseball halls of fame.” This suddenly sounds overpoweringly stupid. “Do you want me to call him?” My son with his own line, a proper Connecticut teen.
“Just come get him like you planned.” She’s ill at ease now, itchy to get off.
“How are you?” Comes to my mind that I haven’t seen her in weeks. Not so long, but long. Though for some reason it makes me mad.
“All right. Fine,” she says wearily, avoiding the personal pronoun.
“Are you spending enough time in skiffs? Getting to see the morning mist?”
“What’re you indicating with that tone?”
“I don’t know.” I actually don’t know. “It just makes me feel better.”
Phone silence descends. Video arcade and Roy Rogers clatter rises and encapsulates me. Another plaid-shirted, blue-jeaned wavy-haired, big-wallet trucker is now waiting midway of the lobby, glomming a sheaf of businessy-looking papers, staring hatchets at me as if I were on his private line.
“Tell me something that’s the truth,” I say to Ann. I have no idea why, but my voice to me sounds intimate and means to ask intimacy in return.
I, however, know the look on Ann’s face now. She has closed her eyes, then opened them so as to be looking in an entirely different direction. She has elevated her chin to stare next at the lacquered ceiling of whatever exquisite, architecturally sui generis room she’s occupying. Her lips are pursed in an unyielding little line. I’m actually happy not to see this, since it would shut me up like a truant. “I don’t really care what you mean by that,” she says in an icy voice. “This isn’t a friendly conversation. It’s just necessary.”
“I just wished you had something important to tell me, or something interesting or wholehearted. That’s all. Nothing personal.” I’m fishing for a sign of the argument, the one Paul said she’d had with Charley. Nothing more innocent.
Ann says nothing. So I say meagerly, “I’ll tell you something interesting.”
“Not wholehearted?” she says crossly.
“Well …” I, of course, have opened my mouth without knowing what words to bring forth, what beliefs to proclaim or validate, what human condition to hold under my tiny microscope. It’s frightening. And yet it’s what everybody does—learning how you stand by hearing yourself talk. (Locution, locution, locution.)
What I almost say is: “I’m getting married.” Though I somehow stop myself after “I’m,” which sounds enough like “Um.” Except it is what I want to say, since it announces something important to do, and the only reason I don’t say it (other than that it’s not true) is that I’d end up responsible for the story and later have to invent a series of fictitious “subsequent” events and shocking turns of fate to get me off the hook. Plus I’d risk being found out and looking pathetic to my children, who already have reservations about me.
The hillbilly trucker is still glaring at me. He is a tall, hip-sprung guy with depressed cheekbones and beady sunken eyes. Probably he is another lime-cologne devotee. His watchband, I notice, is formed by linked, gold-plated pull-tabs, and he in fact points to the watch face and mouths the words I’m late. I, though, simply mouth some nonsense words back, then turn into the stale little semi-cubicle separating me from the other humans.
“Are you still there?” Ann says irritably.
“Umm. Yeah,” my heart whomping once, unexpectedly. I am staring at my undrunk coffee. “I was thinking,” I say, still slightly confused (perhaps I’m still buzzed), “that when you get divorced you think everything changes and you shed a lot of stuff. But I don’t think you shed a goddamn thing; you just take more on, like cargo. That’s how you find out the limits of your character and the difference between can’t and won V. You might find out you’re a little cynical too.”
“I have to tell you I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about. Are you drunk?”
“I might be. But what I said is still true.” My right eye flutters, along with my heartbeat going bim-bam. I have scared myself.
“Well, who knows,” she says.
“Do you feel like a person who was ever married before?” I wedge my shoulder farther up into my little metal phone coffin for whatever quiet there is.
“I don’t feel like I was married,” Ann says, even more irritable. “I was. A long time ago. To you.”
“Seven years ago on the eighteenth,” I say, though all at once there’s the ice-water-down-the-back recognition that I am actually talking to Ann. Right now. Rather than doing what I do most all the time— not talking to her, or hearing recorded messages of her voice, yet having her on my mind. I’m tempted to tell her how peculiar this feels, as a way of trying to woo her back to me. Though after that, what? Then, loud enough to make me jump out of my shoes, Boom-boom-boom-ding-ding-ding! Crrraaaaaash! Somebody in the hellhole video chamber across the concourse has hit some kind of lurid jackpot. Other players—spectral, drugged-looking teens—drift nearer for a gander. “I’m beginning not to feel like I used to feel.” I say this under the noise.
“And how is that?” Ann says. “You mean you can’t feel what it’s like to feel married?”
“Right. Something like that.”
“It’s because you’re not married. You should get married. We’d all feel better.”
“It’s pretty nice being married to ole Charley, is it?” I’m glad I didn’t blub out I was getting married. I’d have missed this.
“Yes, it is. And he’s not old. And it’s not any of your business. So don’t ask me about i
t, and please don’t think because I won’t answer you that that means anything.” Silence again. I hear her glass tinkle and get set firmly down on some solid surface. “My life’s private,” she says after swallowing, “and it’s not that I can’t discuss it; I won’t discuss it. There’s no subject to discuss. It’s just words. You may be the most cynical man in the world.”
“I hope I’m not,” I say, with what feels like an idiotic smile emerging unbidden onto my features.
“You should go back to writing stories, Frank. You quit too soon.” I hear a drawer open and close wherever she is, my mind ablaze with possibility. “You could have everybody saying what you wanted them to, then, and everything would work out perfectly—for you anyway. Except it wouldn’t really be happening, which you also like.”
“Do you think that’s what I want?” Something like this very thought, of course, is what put me to sleep at Sally’s today.
“You just want everything to seem perfect and everybody to seem pleased. And you’re willing to let seem equal be. It makes pleasing anybody be an act of cowardice. None of this is new news. I don’t know why I’m bothering.”
“I asked you to.” This is a sneak frontal assault on the Existence Period.
“You said to tell you something that was the truth. This is simply obvious.”
“Or reliable. I’d settle for that too.”
“I want to go to sleep. Please? Okay? I’ve had a trying day. I don’t want to argue with you.”
“We’re not arguing.” I hear the drawer open and close again. Back in the gift-shop complex, a man shouts, “I brake for beer,” and laughs like hell.
“Everything’s in quotes with you, Frank. Nothing’s really solid. Every time I talk to you I feel like everything’s being written by you. Even my lines. That’s awful. Isn’t it? Or sad?”
“Not if you liked them.”
“Oh, well …,” Ann says, as if a bright light had flashed somewhere outside a window in an otherwise limitless dark, and she had been moved by its extraordinary brilliance and for a moment become transported. “I guess so,” she says, seemingly amazed. “I’ve just gotten very sleepy. I have to go. You wore me out.” These are the most intimate words she’s addressed to me in years! (I have no idea what might’ve inspired them.) Though sadder than what she thinks is sad is the fact that hearing them leaves me nothing to say, no lines I even can write for her. Moving closer, even slightly, even for a heartbeat, is just another form of storytelling.
“I’ll be there in the morning,” I say brightly.
“Fine, fine,” Ann says. “That’ll be fine, sweetheart.” (A slip of the tongue.) “Paul’ll be glad to see you.” She hangs up before I can even say good-bye.
A number of travelers have now cycled out of the Vince heading back to the night, awake enough for another hour of driving before sleep or the police catch up. The trucker who’s been fish-eyeing me is now talking to another of his ilk, also wearing a plaid shirt (in green; shirts only available in truck stops). The second guy is gigantic with a huge Milwaukee goiter, red suspenders, a piggy crew cut and an oversize silver-and-gold rodeo-champeen belt buckle to keep his jeans cinched up over his, I’m sure, minuscule private parts. They’re both shaking their heads disgustedly at me. Clearly their business is more important than mine—a 900 number for finding out which of their favorite hookers are working the BP lot on Route 17 north of Suffern. I’m sure they’re Republicans; I probably seem like the most obvious caller to intimidate.
I decide, though, in a moment of discomposure over Ann, to call the Markhams, since my bet is Joe’s all talk about clearing out, and he and Phyllis are right now sitting up stolidly watching HBO, the very thing they lack but yearn for in Island Pond.
The switchboard rings for a long time before it’s answered by a woman who was asleep one moment before and who says Sleepy Hollow so it sounds like “slippery olive.”
“Those left, I think,” she says in an achy, light-in-your-eyes voice. “I saw ‘em packin’ their vehicle around nine, I guess. But lemme ring it.”
And in an instant, Joe is on the line.
“Hi, Joe, it’s Frank Bascombe,” I say, arch-cheerful. “Sorry to fall out of touch. I’ve had some family problems I couldn’t get out of.” (My son poleaxed his mother’s hubby with an oarlock, then started barking like a Pomeranian, which has caused us all to drop back a couple of squares.)
“Who do you think this is?” Joe says, obviously gloating to Phyllis, who’s no doubt parked beside him in a swampy TV glow, bingeing on Pringles. I hear a bell ding on Joe’s end and someone jabbering in Spanish. They’re apparently watching boxing from Mexico, which has probably put Joe in a fighting mood. “I thought I told you we were gettin’ out of here.”
“I hoped I’d catch you before you got away, just see if there’re any questions. Maybe you’d made a decision. I’ll call back in the morning if that’s better.” I ignore the fact that Joe has called me an asshole and a prick on my machine.
“We already got another realtor,” Joe says contemptuously.
“Well, I’ve shown you what there is out there that I know about. But the Houlihan house is worth a serious thought. We’ll see some movement there pretty quick if the other agencies are on the case. It may be a good time to make an offer if you thought you wanted to.”
“You’re talking to yourself,” Joe sneers. I hear a bottle clink the rim of a glass, then another glass. “Go, go, go,” I hear him say in a brash voice—obviously to Phyllis.
“Let me talk to him,” she says.
“You’re not going to talk to him. What else do you want to tell me?” Joe says, so I can hear the receiver scrape his dopey goatee. “We’re watching the fights. It’s the last round. Then we’re leaving.” Joe’s forgotten already about the supposed other realtor.
“I’m just checking in. Your message sounded a little agitated.”
“That was three hundred and fifty years ago. We’re seeing a new person tomorrow. We would’ve made an offer six hours ago. Now we won’t.”
“Maybe seeing someone else is a good strategy at this point in time,” I say—I hope—infuriatingly.
“Good. I’m glad you’re glad.”
“If there’s anything I can do for you and Phyllis, you know my number.”
“I know it. Zero. Zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero.”
“In 609. Be sure to tell Phyllis I said good-bye.”
“Bascombe sends you warm greetings, dear,” Joe says snidely.
“Lemme talk,” I hear her say.
“A two letter word ending in 0.” Joe stretches 0 out to a long diphthongal uhhoouu, just the way the bozos do in the Beaver Valley.
“You don’t have to be such a turd,” she says. “He’s doing the best he can.”
“You mean he’s a shithead?” Joe says, partly covering the mouthpiece so I can hear what he’s called me but still pretend not to, and he can say what he pleases but pretend not to have said it. After a certain point, which may be a point I’ve already passed, I don’t give a rusty fuck anymore.
Though their situation is pretty much what I imagined this morning: that they’d enter a terrible trial-by-fire period having to do with their sense of themselves, a period which they’d exit disoriented. Afterward they’d wander in a fog until they reached a point of deciding something, which is when I’d wanted to talk to them. As it is, I’ve called while they’re still disoriented and merely seem decisive. If I’d waited until tomorrow, they’d both be in straitjackets and ready to roll; inasmuch as what’s true for them is true for any of us (and a sign of maturer years): you can rave, break furniture, get drunk, crack up your Nova and beat your knuckles bloody on the glass bricks of the exterior wall of whatever dismal room you’re temporarily housed in, but in the end you won’t have changed the basic situation and you’ll still have to make the decision you didn’t want to make before, and probably you’ll make it in the very way you’d resented and
that brought on all the raving and psychic fireworks.
Choices are limited, in other words. Though the Markhams have spent too long in addlebrained Vermont—picking berries, spying on deer and making homespun clothes using time-honored methods—to know it. In a sense, I provide a service somewhat wider in scope than at first it might seem—a free reality check.
“Frank?” Phyllis is now on the line. Bumping and scraping of motel furniture starts in the background, as if Joe were loading it all in the car.
“Still here,” I say, though I’m thinking I’ll give Sally a call. Conceivably I can fly her up to Bradley in the morning, where Paul and I could nab her on the way to the Basketball Hall of Fame, then proceed to Cooperstown in a new-dimensional family modality: divorced father, plus son living in another state and undergoing mental sturm und drang, plus father’s widowed girlfriend, for whom he feels considerable affection and ambiguity, and whom he may marry or else never see again. Paul would view it as right for our times.
“I guess Joe and I have sort of pulled together on this whole thing now,” Phyllis says. Phyllis sounds to me like she’s having to exert physical force to talk, as if she’s being stuffed in a closet or having to squeeze between big rocks. I imagine her in a pink granny gown, her arms plump above the elbows, possibly wearing socks due to unaccustomed air-conditioning.
“That’s just great.” Bing, bing, bingety-bing. Kids are racking up big numbers on the Samurai Showdown across in the arcade. The Vince operates more like a small-town mall than a part-time sports shrine.
“I’m sorry it’s turned out this way after all the work you put in,” she says, somehow and with effort freeing herself from whatever’s restraining her. Possibly she and Joe are arm-wrestling.
“We’ll fight on another day,” I say cheerfully. I’m sure she means to tell me her and Joe’s complex reasoning for changing boats midstream. Though I’m only willing to hear her spiel it out because telling it will make her feel desperate the instant she’s finished. For donkeyish clients like the Markhams, the worst option is having to act on your own advice; whereas letting a paid professional like me tell you what to do is much easier, safer and more comforting, since the advice will always be to follow convention. “Just so you feel like you’ve made the right decision,” I say. I’m still thinking vividly about Sally flying up to meet me: a clear mental picture of her getting in a small plane, in high spirits, carrying an overnight bag.