Independence Day

by Richard Ford

  “Super,” Ted says. “Just super.”

  “Anybody else been through to look?” The crucial question.

  “Oh, a few yesterday. Some people right after your folks.” Followed by not unexpected but still aggravating bad news.

  “Ted, I have to remind you that we’ve got an office exclusive on your house. That’s what the Markhams are acting in reliance of. They’re under the impression they’ve got a little time to think without any outside pressure. We got all that stapled down ahead of time.”

  “Well, I don’t know, Frank,” Ted says dimly. Conceivably, of course, Julie Loukinen has played down the exclusivity clause for fear Ted would balk, and just put it on the sign anyway. It’s also likely Ted’s known far and wide as a perpetual “potential,” and Buy and Large or whoever else is involved is simply horning in on the chance of splitting a commission; this versus our suing the shit out of them and queering the whole deal—a strategy tantamount to walking in the winning run, something you never want to do. A third possibility is that Ted’s as crooked as a corkscrew and wouldn’t tell the truth to God in his heaven. The supposedly bum testicle story could be part of the act. (Nothing should surprise anybody anymore.)

  “Look, Ted,” I say. “Just step out and take a look at that green-and-gray sign and see if it doesn’t say ‘exclusive.’ I’m not going to make a big deal out of it right now, because I’m up in Connecticut. But I’m going to get it straight on Tuesday.”

  “How is it up there?” Ted says, daffy as a duck.

  “It’s hot.”

  “Are you up at Mount Tom?”

  “No. I’m in Hawleyville. But if you’d just be considerate enough, Ted, not to show the house to anyone else, maybe we can avoid a big lawsuit. My clients deserve a chance to make an offer.” Not that they haven’t had ample chance, or that they aren’t right now cruising the deserted, lusterless streets of East Brunswick, hoping to find something much better.

  “I wouldn’t mind that,” Ted says, energetic now.

  “Great, then,” I say. “I’ll get back to you in a hurry.”

  “The people after you yesterday said they’d be coming in with an offer this morning.”

  “If they do, Ted,” and I say this threateningly, “remember my clients have first refusal. It’s in writing.” Or it should be. Of course this is standard realty baloney, routinely purveyed by both sides: the “bright ‘n’ early in the morning” offer. In general, people (buyers, usually) who trot out this “promise” are either making themselves feel substantial and will have forgotten it entirely by five o’clock, or else they’re deluding themselves by supposing the mere prospect of a fat offer makes everybody feel better. Naturally, only generous offers you can pinch between your thumb and index, finger make everybody actually feel better. And until one of those comes into view, there’s nothing to get excited about (though a rising tide of seller’s angst never hurt anybody).

  “Frank, do you know what’s a very strange thing I’ve learned,” Ted says in a seeming state of goofy wonderment.

  “What’s that?” Through the window I’m watching a van full of retarded kids off-load in the Friendly’s lot—teenage tongue-thrusters, frail cross-eyed girls, chubby Down’s survivors of unspecified gender—eight or so, bumbling out onto the hot tarmac in elastic-band shorts of various hues, sneakers and dark blue tee-shirts that have YALE printed on the front. Their counselors, two strapping college girls in matching brown shorts and white pullovers, who look like they go to Oberlin and play water polo, get the van locked up while the kids stand staring in all different directions.

  “I’ve learned that I really enjoy showing people my house,” Ted rambles on. “Everyone who’s seen it seemed to like it a lot and they all think Susan and I did all right here. That’s a good feeling to have. I expected to hate it and feel a lot of grief at having my life invaded. You know what I mean?”

  “Yeah,” I say. My interest in Ted is dwindling fast since I realize there’s a decent chance he’s a real estate scammer. “It just means you’re ready to move on, Ted. You’re ready for Albuquerque and all that sunshine.” (And to have your nuts preserved in amber.)

  “My son’s a surgeon in Tucson, Frank. I’m going out for surgery in September.”

  “I remember.” (I got the city wrong.) The gaggle of afflicted teens and their two big, tan-legged, water-polo-type minders are making for the door now, some of the kids in full charge, and all but a couple wearing plastic crash helmets strapped under their chins like linebackers. “Ted, I just wanted to touch base here, see how your day went yesterday. And I needed to remind you about the ‘exclusive.’ That’s a serious agreement, Ted.”

  “Okay then,” Ted says buoyantly. “Thanks for telling me.” I imagine him, white-haired, soft hands, diminutively handsome in his dimpled Fred Waring way, framed in his back window, marveling out at the bamboo wall that has long shielded him from his peaceable prison. It leaves me with a dull feeling that I’ve gone about this wrong. I should’ve stayed close to the Markhams, but my instincts said otherwise. “Frank, I’m thinking that if I get this cancer thing behind me I might just give realty a try. I think I might have a gift for it. What do you think?”

  “Sure. But it doesn’t take a gift, Ted. It’s like being a writer. A man with nothing to do finds something to do. I’ve got to hit the road now. I’ve got to pick up my son.”

  “Good for you,” Ted says. “Go right on. We’ll talk another time.”

  “You bet,” I say darkly, and then that’s over.

  The kids are clustered at the glass doors now, their counselors wading through them, laughing. One Down’s boy is giving the door handle a vicious jerking and making a fierce face at the pane, in which he can no doubt see his reflection. The rest of them are still looking around and up and down and back.

  When the first counselor drags the door open with the Down’s kid still attached to it, he glares at her and makes a loud, fully uninhibited roar as the door lets hot air right into my face. Then the whole bunch comes scuttling in and past, heading for the second door.

  “Oops,” the first tall girl says to me with a wondrously bountiful grin. “We’re sorry, we’re a little clumsy.” She moves on by in the current of little feebs in their Eli shirts. Her own shirt has a bright-red shield on its breast that says Challenges, Inc. and below that, Wendy. I give her a smile of encouragement as she gets shoved past.

  Suddenly the little Down’s kid whirls left, still attached to the door, and roars again, conceivably at me, his dark teeth clenched and worn to nubs, one little doughboy arm raised, fist balled. I am poised by the phone, smiling down at him, my hopes for the day attempting to scale the ladder of possibility.

  “That means he likes you,” says the second counselor—Megan—inching past at the back of the pack. She’s putting me on, of course. What the roar means is: “Stay away from these two honeys or I’ll eat your face.” (People in many ways are the same.)

  “He seems to know me,” I say to golden-armed Megan.

  “Oh, he knows you.” Her face is freckled with sunshine, her eyes as plain brown as Cathy Flaherty’s were dazzling. “They look alike to us, but they can pick you and me out a mile away. They have a sixth sense.” She smiles without a whit of self-consciousness, a smile to inspire minutes but possibly not hours of longing. The inner door to Friendly’s hisses open, then slowly shuts behind her. I head at that moment out into the sunny morning to begin my last leg to Deep River.

  By 9:50, feeling late, late, late, I’m larruping down-hill-and-up toward Middletown, Waterbury and Meriden, being already lost in the morning’s silvery haze. CT 147 is as verdant, curvy and pleasant as a hedgerow lane in Ireland minus the hedgerows. Tiny pocket reservoirs, cozy roadside state parks, pint-size ski “mountains” perfect for high-school teams, and sturdy frame homes edging the road with satellite dishes out back, show up around every curve. Many houses, I notice, are for sale, and quite a few display yellow plast
ic ribbons on their tree trunks. I can’t now remember what Americans are being held prisoner or where and by whom, though it’s easy to conceive somewhere, somebody must be. Otherwise the ribbons are wishful thinking, a yearning for another Grenada-type tidy-little-war which worked out so happily for all concerned. Patriotic feelings are much more warming when focused on something finite, and there’s nothing like focusing on kicking somebody’s ass or depriving them of their freedom to make you feel free as a bird yourself.

  My thoughts, though, unwillingly run again to the pathetic Markhams, no doubt at this very minute touring some grisly cul-de-sac, accompanied by a nasal-voiced, thick-thighed residential specialist demoralizing the shit out of them with chatter. An indecent, unprofessional part of me hopes that by day’s end, faced with calling me and crawling back to 212 Charity with a full-price offer, they jump for the last house of the day, some standing-empty, dormered Cape whose prior owners gave it to the bank when they transferred-out to Moose Jaw back in ’84, some dire shell on a slab, with negative R factors, potential for radon, a seeping septic, in need of emergency gutter work before the leaves fly.

  Why, in an otherwise pleasant and profitable summer season, the Markhams would so shadow my mind isn’t clear, unless it’s that after much finagling, obstruction and idiot discouragement at every level, I have now fashioned the Easter egg, filled it with the right sweet stuff, made the hole and put their eye right to it; and yet I’m afraid they’ll never see inside, after which their lives will be worse—my belief being that once you’re offered something good, you ought to be smart enough to take it.

  Years back, I remember, in the month before Ann and I moved to Haddam, new, happy suburban ethers full in our noses, we got it in mind to buy a practical-sturdy Volvo. We drove out in my mother’s old Chrysler Newport to the dealership in Hastings-on-Hudson, kibitzed around the showroom for a hour and a half—chin-rubbing, ear-scratching potential young buyers—fingering the mirror surfaces of some olive-drab five-door job, slipping into and out of its sensible seats, sniffing its chilly perfume, checking out the glove box capacity, the unusual spare tire mounts and jack assembly, finally pretending even to drive it—Ann side by side with me in the driver’s seat, both of us staring ahead through the dealership window at a make-believe road to the future as new Volvo owners.

  Until, at the end, we simply decided we wouldn’t. Who knows why? We were young, spiritedly inventing life by the minute, rejecting this, saying yea to that, completely by whim. And a Volvo, a machine I might even still own and use to transport potting soil or groceries or firewood or keep as a fish car to haul myself to the Red Man Club—a Volvo just didn’t suit us. Afterward we drove back into the city toward whatever did suit us, our real future: marriage, parenthood, sportswriting, golf, glee, gloom, death, gyrating unhappiness unable to find a center point, and later, divorce, separation and the long middle passage to now.

  Though when I’m in just the right deprived-feeling, past-entangled mood and happen to see one, some brawny-sleek, murmuring black or silver up-to-date-version Volvo, with its enviable safety record, its engine primed to drop out on impact, its boastable storage spaces and one-piece construction, I’m often struck with a heart’s pang of What if? What if our life had gone in that direction … some direction a car could’ve led us and now be emblem for? Different house, different town, different sum total of kids, on and on. Would it all be better? Such things happen, and for as little cause. And it can be paralyzing to think an insignificant decision, a switch thrown this way, not that, could make many things turn out better, even be saved. (My greatest human flaw and strength, not surprisingly, is that I can always imagine anything—a marriage, a conversation, a government—as being different from how it is, a trait that might make one a top-notch trial lawyer or novelist or realtor, but that also seems to produce a somewhat less than reliable and morally feasible human being.)

  It’s best at this moment not to think much along these lines. Though this I’m sure is another reason why the Markhams come to mind on a weekend when my own life seems at a turning or at least a curving point. Likely as not, Joe and Phyllis know how these things work as well as I do and are scared shitless. Yet, while it’s bad to make a wrong move, as maybe I did with the Volvo, it’s worse to regret in advance and call it prudence, which I sense is what they’re doing roving around East Brunswick. Disaster is no less likely. Better—much, much better—to follow ole Davy Crockett’s motto, amended for use by adults: Be sure you’re not completely wrong, then go ahead.

  By ten-thirty I’m past bland, collegiate Middletown and up onto Route 9, taking in the semi-panoramic view of the Connecticut (vacationers assiduously canoeing, jet skiing, windsurfing, sailing, paraskiing or skydiving right into the drink), and then straight downstream the short distance to Deep River.

  My chief hope of a secondary nature here is not to lay eyes on Charley, for reasons I perhaps have brought to light already. With luck he’ll be nursing his lumpy jaw out of sight, or else waxing his dinghy or sighting a plumb line or doodling in his sketchbook—whatever rich dilettante architects do when they’re not competing in marathon gin rummy matches or tying their bow ties blindfolded.

  Ann understands I don’t precisely loathe Charley, only that I believe that whenever she tells him she loves him there’s an asterisk after “love” (like Roger Maris’s home run title), referencing prior, superior attainment in that area, as though I’m certain she’ll one day pitch it all and begin life’s last long pavane with me and me alone (though neither of us seems to want that).

  In nearly all my preceding visits, I’ve ended up feeling I’d snuck onto the property by way of a scaled fence and left (for wherever I’m taking my children—the mollusk exhibit at Woods Hole, a Mets game, a blustery ferry ride to Block Island for a little stolen quality time) as though I was one step ahead of the law. Ann says I fabricate these feelings. But so what? I still have them.

  Charley, unlike me, who thinks everything’s mutable, is the sort of man who puts his trust in “character,” who muses when alone about “standards” and bona fides, “parsing” and “winnowing out men from boys,” but who (it’s my private bet) stands at the foggy mirror in the locker room at the Old Lyme CC thinking about his dick, wishing he had a bigger one, considering if a rectangular glass doesn’t distort proportions, deciding eventually that everybody’s looks smaller when viewed by its hypercritical owner and that, in absolute terms, his is bigger than it looks because he’s tall. Which he is.

  One evening, standing together out below the knoll where his house sits, our shoes nuzzling the pea-gravel path that leads down to his boathouse, beyond which is a dense, pinkly-rose-infested estuarial pond protected from the Connecticut by a boundary of tupelo gums, Charley said to me, “Now, you know, Frank, Shakespeare must’ve been a pretty damn smart cookie.” In his big bony hand he was cradling one of his drop-dead vodka gimlets in a thick, hand-blown Mexican tumbler. (He hadn’t offered me one, since I wasn’t staying.) “I took a look at everything he wrote this year, okay? And I think history’s writers just haven’t moved the bar up much since six-teen-whatever. He saw human weakness better than anybody ever did, and sympathetically at that.” He blinked at me and rolled his tongue around behind his lips. “Isn’t that what makes a writer great? Sympathy for human weakness?”

  “I don’t know. I never thought a thing about it,” I said bleakly but churlishly. I already knew Charley thought it was “odd” that a man who once wrote respectable short stories would “end up” selling real estate. He also had views about my living in Ann’s old house, though I never asked what they were (I’m sure they’re prejudicial).

  “All right, but how do you see it?” Charley sniffed through his big Episcopalian nose, furrowing his silver eyebrows as if he were smelling a complex bouquet in the evening’s mist that was available only to him (and possibly his friends). He was clad in his usual sockless deck shoes, khaki shorts and a tee-shirt, but with a thick blue zi
ppered sweater I’d seen thirty years ago in a J. Press catalogue and wondered who in the hell would buy. He is of course as fit as a greyhound and maintains some past master’s squash ranking for oldsters.

  “I don’t really think literature has anything to do with moving the bar up,” I said distastefully (I was right). “It has to do with being good in an absolute sense, not better.” I now wish I could’ve punctuated this with a shout of hysterical laughter.

  “Okay. That’s hopeful.” Charley pulled on his long earlobe and looked down, nodding as though he were visualizing the words I’d said. His thick white hair glowed with whatever light was left in the twilight. “That’s really a pretty hopeful view,” he said solemnly.

  “I’m a hopeful man,” I said, and promptly felt as hopeless as an exile.

  “Fair enough then,” he said. “Do you suppose in a hopeful way you and I are ever going to be friends?” He half raised his head and looked at me through his metal-rim glasses. “Friend” I knew to be, in Charley’s view, the loftiest of lofty human conditions men of character could aspire to, like Nirvana for Hindus. I never wanted to have friends less in my life.

  “No,” I said bluntly.

  “Why’s that, do you think?”

  “Because all we have in common is my ex-wife. And eventually you’ll feel it’s okay to discuss her with me, and that would piss me off.”

  Charley held onto his earlobe, his gimlet in his other hand. “Might be.” He nodded speculatively. “You’re always coming across something in someone you love that you can’t fathom, aren’t you? So then you have to ask somebody. I guess you’d be an obvious choice. Ann’s not that simple, as I’m sure you know.”

  He was doing it already. “I don’t know,” I said. “No.”