Independence Day

by Richard Ford

  Race, of course, was not our official fatal defect. Instead, Clair insisted my helpless age was the issue that kept us from a real future that I from time to time couldn’t keep from wanting in the worst way. We therefore settled ourselves into a little ongoing pocket drama in which I created the role of avuncular but charmingly randy white professor who’d sacrificed a successful but hopelessly stodgy prior life to “work” for his remaining productive years in a (one-student) private college, where Clair was the beautiful, intelligent, voluble, slightly naive but feisty, yet basically kindhearted valedictorian, who realized we two shared lofty but hopeless ideals, and who in the service of simple human charity was willing to woogle around with me in private, hypertensive but futureless (due to our years) lovemaking, and to moon at my aging mug over fish-stick dinners and doughy pancakes in soulless franchise eateries while pretending to everybody she knew that such a thing was absolutely out of the question. (No one was fooled a minute, of course, as Shax Murphy informed me—with a discomforting wink—the day after Clair’s memorial service.)

  Clair’s feeling was ironclad, simple and candidly set out: we were laughably all wrong for each other and wouldn’t last the season; though our wrongness served a good purpose in getting her through a bad patch when her finances were rocky, her emotions in a tangle and she didn’t know anyone in Haddam and was too proud to head back to Alabama. (Dr. Stopler would probably say she wanted to cauterize something in herself and used me as the white-hot tool.) Whereas for me, fantasies of permanence aside as she demanded, Clair made bachelor life interesting, entertaining and enticingly exotic in a hundred thrilling ways, aroused my keen admiration, and kept me in good spirits, while I acclimated myself to the realty business and my kids being gone.

  “Now, when I was back in college, see,” Clair once said to me in her high, sweetly monotonous, lispy voice (we were butt naked, lounging in the evening-lit upstairs front bedroom of my former wife’s former house), “we all used to laaaaugh and laugh about hookin’ up with some rich ole white guy. Like some fat bank president or big politician. That was our cruel joke, you know? Like, ‘Now, when you marry that ole white fool,’ this or that thing was going to happen to you. He was s’posed to try to give you a new car or some trip to Europe, and then you were gonna trick him. You know how girls are.”

  “Sort of,” I said, thinking of course that I had a daughter but didn’t know how girls were, except that mine would probably one day be just like Clair: sweet, certain of everything, basically untrusting for sound reasons. “What was so wrong about us ole white guys?”

  “Oh well, you know,” Clair said, raising onto her sharp little elbow and looking at me as if I’d just shown up on the surface of the earth and needed harsh instruction. “Y’all are all boring. White men are boring. You’re just not as bad as the rest of them. Yet.”

  “You get more interesting the longer you stay alive, is my view,” I said, wanting to put a good word in for my race and age. “Maybe that’s why you’ll learn to like me more, not less, and won’t be able to live without me.”

  “Uh-huh, you got that wrong,” she said, thinking, I’m sure, about her own life, which to date hadn’t been that peachy but, I’d have argued, was looking up. It was true, though, she had very little facility for actually thinking about me and never in the time we knew each other asked me five questions about my children or my life before I met her. (Though I never minded, since I was sure some little personal exegesis would only have proved what she already expected.)

  “If we didn’t get more interesting,” I said, happy to belabor a moot point, “all the other crap we put up with in life might drive us right out of it.”

  “Us Baptists don’t believe that, now,” she said, flinging her arm across my chest and jamming her hard chin into my bare ribs. “What’s his name—Aristotle—Aristotle canceled his class today. He got sick of hearing his own voice and couldn’t make it.”

  “I don’t have anything to teach you,” I said, thrilled as usual.

  “That’s not wrong,” Clair said. “I’m not going to keep you that long anyway. You’ll start to get boring on me, start repeating yourself. I’ll be right out of here.”

  Which was not very different from what happened.

  One March morning I showed up at the office early (my usual) to type an offer sheet for a presentation later that day. Clair had nearly finished her classes to get her realtor’s certification and was at her desk, studying. She was never at ease addressing private-life matters in the office setting, yet as soon as I sat down she got up, wearing a little peach-colored skirt-and-sweater combo and red high heels, came right over to my desk by the front window, took a seat and said very matter-of-factly that she had met a man that week, bond lawyer McSweeny, whom she’d decided to start “dating,” and therefore had decided to stop “dating” me.

  I remember being perfectly dazed: first, by her altogether firing-squad certainty; and then by how damned unhappy the whole prospect made me. I smiled, though, and nodded as if I’d been thinking along those lines myself (I definitely hadn’t) and told her that in my view she was probably doing the right thing, then went on smiling more disingenuously, until my cheeks ached.

  She said she’d finally talked to her mother about me, and her mother had immediately told her, in what Clair said were actually “crude” terms, to get as far away from me as possible (I’m sure it wasn’t my age), even if it meant spending her nights home alone or moving away from Haddam or finding another job in another city—which I said was too strong a medicine. I would just obligingly step aside, hope she was happy and feel lucky to have had the time with her I’d had, though I told her I didn’t think we’d done anything but what men and women had done to and for each other through the ages. My saying this clearly made her aggravated. (She was not well practiced at being argued with, either.) So that I just finally shut up about it and grinned at her again like a half-wit, as a way of saying (I guessed) good-bye.

  Why I didn’t protest, I’m not exactly sure, since I was stung, and surprisingly near to the heart, and spent days afterward tinkering with convoluted futuristic scenarios in which life would’ve been goddamned tough but that sheer off-the-map novelty and unlikelihood might’ve proved the final missing ingredients to true and abiding love—in which case she’d sacrificed to convention a type of mountaintop victory reserved for only the brave and enlightened few. It’s, however, undoubtedly true that my idyll with permanence was entirely founded on Clair’s being a total impossibility, which means she was finally never more than a featured player in some Existence Period melodrama of my own devising (nothing to be proud of, but not radically different from my cameo in her short life).

  After our abrupt sayonara she returned to her desk, resumed studying her realty books—and with this new state of affairs in effect, we stayed on at our desks for another whole hour and a half, doing work! Our colleagues arrived and departed. We both entered into amused, even jocular, conversations with several different individuals. I once asked her about the disposition of a bank foreclosure, and she answered me as equably and cheerfully as you would expect in any well-run office bent on profit. Neither one of us said anything else of moment, and I eventually finished my offer sheet, made a couple of cold client calls, did part of a crossword, wrote a letter, put on my coat and wandered around in it for a few minutes, wisecracking with Shax Murphy, and finally just wandered out and down to the Coffee Spot, after which I did not come back—all the while (I suppose) Clair stayed at her desk, concentrating like a cleric. And basically that was that.

  In short order she and lawyer McSweeny became a nice, viable, single-race item in town. (Though she began treating me, in my view, with unneeded correctness in the office, which became, of course, the only place I ever saw her.) Everybody agreed the two of them were lucky to find each other when attractive members of their race were scarce as diamonds. Predictable difficulties came up to prevent their speedy marriage: Ed’s grasping
grown kids caused a ruckus about Clair’s age and financial situation (Ed, naturally, is my age, and loaded). Clair’s ex-husband, Vernell, declared Chapter 11 in Canoga Park and tried to reopen their divorce decree. Clair’s grandmother died in Mobile, her mother broke her hip, her younger brother got put in jail—the usual wearisome inventory of life’s encroachments. In the long run it all would’ve worked out, with Clair and Ed married to the tune of a clearly worded prenuptial agreement. Clair would’ve moved into Ed’s big late Victorian out on Cromwell Lane, would’ve had a flower garden and a nicer car than a Honda Civic. Her two kids would’ve grown to like going to school with white children and in time forgotten there was a difference. She would’ve gone on selling condos and gotten better at it. Ed’s grown children would’ve finally accepted her for the true-hearted, straight-talking, slightly overcertain girl she was, and not as just some hick gold-panner they needed to sic their own lawyers on. She and Ed, in time, would have enjoyed a somewhat isolated suburban existence, with a few but not many people regularly over for dinner, and even fewer close friends—a life spent with each other in a way most people would pay money to know how to pull off but can’t because their days are too full of rich opportunity they just can’t say no to.

  Except that one spring afternoon Clair happened out to Pheasant Meadow and in an entirely professional way got trapped in a bad situation and ended up as dead as the Mormon traveler in the body bag down in room 15.

  And as I lie in bed here, still alive myself, the Fedders blowing brisk, chemically cooled breezes across my sheets, I try to find solace against the way this memory and the night’s events make me feel, which is: bracketed, limbo’d, unable to budge, as illustrated amply by Mr. Tanks and me standing side by side in the murderous night, unable to strike a spark, utter a convincingly encouraging word to the other, be of assistance, shout halloo, dip a wing; unable at the sad passage of another human to the barren beyond to share a hope for the future. Whereas, had we but been able, our spirits might’ve lightened.

  Death, veteran of death that I am, seems so near now, so plentiful, so oh-so-drastic and significant, that it scares me witless. Though in a few hours I’ll embark with my son upon the other tack, the hopeful, life-affirming, anti-nullity one, armed only with words and myself to build a case, and nothing half as dramatic and persuasive as a black body bag, or lost memories of lost love.

  Suddenly my heart again goes bangety-bang, bangety-bangety-bang, as if I myself were about to exit life in a hurry. And if I could, I would spring up, switch on the light, dial someone and shout right down into the hard little receiver, “It’s okay. I got away. It was goddamned close, I’ll tell ya. It didn’t get me, though. I smelled its breath, saw its red eyes in the dark, shining. A clammy hand touched mine. But I made it. I survived. Wait for me. Wait for me. Not that much is left to do.” Only there’s no one. No one here or anywhere near to say any of this to. And I’m sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry.

  7

  Eight a.m. Things speed up.

  On my way out of the Sea Breeze I remember to hike across, scale the green side of Mr. Tanks’s Peterbilt and squeeze a business card under his king-size windshield wiper, with a personal note on the back saying: “Mr. T. Good meeting you. Call up any time. FB.” I include my home phone. (The art of the sale first demands imagining the sale.) Strangely enough, when I take a quick curious peek inside the driver’s capsule, on the passenger’s seat I see a clutter of Reader’s Digest condenseds and on top of it an enormous yellow cat wearing a gold collar and staring up at me as if I were an illusion. (Pets are not welcome in the Sea Breeze, and Mr. Tanks is no doubt a consummate player-by-the-rules.) I notice also, as I climb down the cab’s outer shell, and just in front of the door, a name, painted in ornate red script and set in quotes: “Cyril.“ Mr. Tanks is a man deserving of study.

  Back in the lot to leave my key (forgoing my deposit), I see that the Suburban with its Boston Whaler rig is gone now, and yellow “crime scene” tape is stretched across the closed door to #15. And I realize then that I’ve dreamed about it all: of a sealed room, of a car being towed off in the dark by small, muscular, sweaty white men in sleeveless shirts, shouting, “Come on back, come on back,” followed by the sound of scary chains and winches and big motors revving, then someone shouting, “Okay, okay, okay.”

  At 8:45 I stop bleary-eyed for coffee at the Friendly’s in Hawleyville. After consulting my atlas, I decide on the Yankee Expressway to Waterbury and over to Meriden, a jog across and down to Middletown—where adjunct Charley “teaches” Wesleyan coeds to distinguish which column is Ionic and which Doric—then CT 9 straight into Deep River; this instead of drag-assing all the way down to Norwalk and 95 as I meant to do last night, driving east along the Sound with, I’m certain, four trillion other Americans craving a safe and sane holiday, yet doing everything they can to prevent me from having one.

  In Friendly’s I browse through the Norwalk Hour for any mention of last night’s tragedy, although I’m sure it happened too late. I learn here, however, that Axis Sally has died in Ohio, aged eighty-seven and an honors graduate of Ohio Wesleyan; Martina has out-dueled Chris in three sets; hydrologists in Illinois have decided to draw down Lake Michigan to channel water into the more important and drought-starved Mississippi; and Vice President Bush has declared prosperity to be at “a record high” (though as if to call him a liar there are sidebar reports of declines in prices, mutual funds and CDs, declines in factory orders and aircraft demands—all “pocketbook” issues Dullard Dukakis needs to shanghai or lose his ass in a bucket).

  After paying, I make my strategic calls squeezed between the double doors of Friendly’s “lobby”: one to my answering machine, disclosing nothing—a relief; another to Sally, intending to offer a private charter to anyplace I can meet her—no answer, not even a recording, causing my gut to wrench like someone had tightened a rope around it and jerked downward.

  Apprehensively then I call Karl Bemish, first at the root beer palace, where there’s no reason for him to be yet, then at his bachelor digs in Lambertville, where he answers on the second ring.

  “Everything’s jake here, Frank,” he shouts, to my inquiry about the felonious Mexicans. “Aw yeah, I should’ve called you back last night. I called the sheriff instead. I expected some action, really. But. False alarm. They never showed up again, the little fucks.”

  “I don’t want you being in danger down there, Karl.” Customers stream in and out beside me, opening the door, jostling me, letting in hot air.

  “I’ve got my alley sweeper, you know,” Karl says.

  “You’ve got your what? What’s that?”

  “A sawed-off twelve-gauge pump,” Karl says supremely, and grunts an evil laugh. “A serious piece of machinery.”

  This is the first I’ve heard of an alley sweeper, and I don’t like it. In fact, it scares me silly. “I don’t think it’s a good idea to have an alley sweeper at the root beer stand, Karl.” Karl doesn’t like me to call it root beer, or a “stand,” but that’s how I think of it. What else is it? An office?

  “Well, it beats lying facedown behind the birch beer cooler drinking your brains out of your paper hat. Or maybe I’m wrong about that,” Karl says coolly.

  “Jesus Christ, Karl.”

  “Just don’t worry. I don’t even bring it out till after ten.”

  “Do the police know about it?”

  “Hell, they told me where to buy it. Up in Scotch Plains.” Karl shouts this too. “I shouldn’t have blabbed it to you. You’re such a goddamn nervous nelly.”

  “It makes me goddamn nervous,” I say, and it does. “I can’t use you dead. I’d have to serve the root beer myself, plus our insurance won’t pay off if you’re killed with an unlicensed gun in there. I’d probably get sued.”

  “You just go on and have a holiday with your kid. I’ll hold down Fort Apache. I’ve got some other things to do this morning. I’m not alone here.”

  The
re’s no more getting through to Karl now. My window’s just been shut. “Leave me a message if anything’s strange, would you do that?” I say this in an unlikely-to-be-acknowledged voice.

  “I plan to be out of touch all morning,” Karl says, and makes a dumb hardee-har-har laugh, then hangs up.

  I immediately dial Sally again, in case she’s been out picking up croissants and the Daily Argonaut. But nothing.

  My last call is to Ted Houlihan—for an update, but also to grill him on the status of our office “exclusive.” Making client calls is actually one of the most satisfying parts of my work. Roily Mounger was right on the money when he said real estate has almost nothing to do with the state of one’s soul; consequently a necessary business call is tantamount to an enjoyable game of Ping-Pong. “It’s Frank Bascombe, Ted. How’s everything going down there?”

  “Everything’s just fine, Frank.” Ted sounds frailer than yesterday, but as happy as he claims. A slow gas leak may create an unbeatable euphoria.

  “Just wanted to tell you my clients are taking a day to think about it, Ted. They were impressed with the house. But they’ve looked at a lot of houses, and they need to push themselves beyond a threshold now. I do think the last house I showed them, though, is the one they ought to buy, and that was yours.”