by Richard Ford
She of course called Dr. Stopler, who calmly informed her that medical science knew mighty damn little about how the old mind works in relation to the old brain—whether they’re one and the same pancake, two parts of one pancake, or just altogether different pancakes that somehow work in unison (like an automobile clutch). However, distressed family relations were pretty clear bugaboo factors leading to childhood mental illness, and from what he already knew, Paul did have some qualifying preconditions: dead brother, divorced parents, absent father, two major household moves before puberty (plus Charley O’Dell for a stepdad).
He did allow, though, that when he’d conducted his evaluative “chat” with Paul back in May, prior to his Camp Wanapi visit, Paul had failed entirely to exhibit low self-esteem, suicide ideation, neurological dysfunction; he was not particularly “oppositional” (then), hadn’t suffered an IQ nosedive and didn’t display any conduct disorders—which meant he didn’t set a fire or murder any birds. In fact, the doctor said, he’d demonstrated a “real capacity for compassion and a canny ability to put himself in another’s shoes.” Though circumstances could always change overnight; and Paul could easily be suffering any and every one of the aforementioned maladies at this very minute, and might’ve abandoned all compassion.
“I’m really just pissed off at him now,” Ann says. She is standing, looking out over the porch rail where I first saw her today, staring across the apron of shining river toward the few small white house façades catching the sun from deep in the encroachment of solid greens. Once again I steal an approving look at her new substantial-without-sacrificing-sexual-specificity womanliness. Her lips, I notice, seem fuller now, as if she might’ve had them “enhanced.” (Such surgeries can sweep through the more well-to-do communities like new kitchen appliances.) She rubs the back of one muscular calf with the top of her other shoe and sighs. “You may not know how exactly lucky you’ve had it,” she says, after a period of silent staring.
I mean to say nothing. A careful review of how lucky I am could too easily involve more airing of my “be/seem” misdeeds and tie into the possibility that I’m a coward or a liar or worse. I scratch my nose and can still smell grackle on my fingers.
She looks around at where I sit still not very comfortably silent on my lily pad.
“Would you agree to seeing Dr. Stopler?”
“As a patient?” I blink.
“As a co-parent,” she says. “And as a patient.”
“I’m really not based in New Haven,” I say. “And I never much liked shrinks. They just try to make you act like everybody else.”
“You don’t have that to worry about.” She regards me in an impatient older-sister way. “I just thought if you and I, or maybe you and I and Paul, went down, we might iron some things out. That’s all.”
“We can invite Charley, if you want to. He’s probably got some ironing out that needs doing. He’s a co-parent too, right?”
“He’ll go. If I ask him.”
I look around at the mirror window behind which sits the spectral white piano and a lot of ultra-modern, rectilinear blond-wood furniture arranged meticulously between long, sherbet-colored walls so as to maximize the experience of an interesting inner space while remaining unimaginably comfy. Reflected, I see the azure sky, part of the lawn, an inch of the boathouse roof and a line of far treetops. It is a vacant vista, the acme of opulent American dreariness Ann has for some reason married into. I feel like getting up and walking out onto the lawn—waiting for my son in the grass. I don’t care to see Dr. Stopler and have my weaknesses vetted. My weaknesses, after all, have taken me this far.
Behind the glass, though, and unexpectedly, the insubstantial figure of my daughter becomes visible crossing left to right, intending where, I don’t know. As she passes she gazes out at us—her parents, bickering—and, blithely assuming I can’t see her, flips one or both of us the bird in a spiraling, heightening, conjuring motion like an ornate salaam, then disappears through a door to another segment of the house.
“I’ll think about Dr. Stopler,” I say. “I’m still not sure what a milieu therapist is, though.”
The corners of Ann’s mouth thicken with disapproval—of me. “Maybe you could think of your children as a form of self-discovery. Maybe you’d see your interest in it then and do something a little more wholeheartedly yourself.” Ann’s view is that I’m a half-hearted parent; my view is that I do the best I know how.
“Maybe,” I say, though the thought of dread-filled weekly drives to dread-filled New Haven for expensive fifty-five dread-filled minutes of mea culpa! mea culpa! gushered into the weary, dread-resistant map of some Austrian headshrinker is enough to set anybody’s escape mechanisms working overtime.
The fact is, of course, Ann maintains a very unclear picture of me and my current life’s outlines. She has never appreciated the realty business or why I enjoy it—doesn’t think it actually involves doing anything. She knows nothing of my private life beyond what the kids snitch about in offhand ways, doesn’t know what trips I take, what books I read. I’ve over time become fuzzier and fuzzier, which given her old Michigan factualism makes her inclined to disapprove of almost anything I might do except possibly joining the Red Cross and dedicating my life to feeding starving people on faraway shores (not a bad second choice, but even that might not save me from pathos). In all important ways I’m no better in her mind than I was when our divorce was made final—whereas, of course, she has made great strides.
Only I don’t actually mind it, since not having a clear picture makes her long for one and in so doing indirectly long for me (or that’s my position). Absence, in this scheme, both creates and fills a much-needed void.
But it’s not all positive: when you’re divorced you’re always wondering (I am anyway, sometimes to the point of granite preoccupation) what your ex-spouse is thinking about you, how she’s viewing your decisions (assuming she thinks you make any), whether she’s envious or approving or condescending or sneeringly reproachful, or just indifferent. Your life, because of this, can become goddamned awful and decline into being a “function” of your view of her view—like watching the salesman in the clothing store mirror to see if he’s admiring you in the loud plaid suit you haven’t quite decided to buy, but will if he seems to approve. Therefore, what I’d prefer Ann’s view to be is: of a man who’s made a spirited recovery from a lost and unhappy union, and gone on to discover wholesome choices and pretty solutions to life’s thorny dilemmas. Failing that, I’d be happy to keep her in the dark.
Though in the end the real trick to divorce remains, given this refractory increase in perspectives, not viewing yourself ironically and losing heart. You have, on the one hand, such an obsessively detailed and minute view of yourself from your prior existence, and on the other hand, an equally specific view of yourself later on, that it becomes almost impossible not to see yourself as a puny human oxymoron, and damn near impossible sometimes to recognize who your self is at all. Only you must. Writers in fact survive this condition better than almost anyone, since they understand that almost everything—e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g—is not really made up of “views” but words, which, should you not like them, you can change. (This actually isn’t very different from what Ann told me last night on the phone in the Vince Lombardi.)
Ann has assumed a seat on the porch railing, one strong, winsome brown knee up, the other swinging. She is half facing me and half observing the red-sailed regatta, most of whose hulls have moved behind the treeline. “I’m sorry,” she says moodily. “Tell me where you two’re going, again? You told me last night. I forgot.”
“We’re heading up to Springfield this morning.” I say this cheerfully, happy to change the subject away from me. “We’re having a ‘sports lunch’ at the Basketball Hall of Fame. Then we’re driving over to Cooperstown by tonight.” No use mentioning a possible late crew addition of Sally Caldwell. “We’re touring the Baseball Hall of Fame tomorrow morning, and I�
��ll have him in the city at the stroke of six.” I smile a reliable, You’re in good hands with Allstate smile.
“He’s not really a big baseball fan, is he?” She says this almost plaintively.
“He knows more than you think he knows. Plus, going’s the ur-father-son experience.” I erase my smile to let her know I’m only half bluffing.
“So have you thought up some important fatherly things to say to solve his problems?” She squints at me and tugs at her earlobe exactly the way Charley does.
I, however, intend not to give away what I’ll say to Paul on our trip, since it’s too easy to break one’s fragile skein of worthwhile purpose by jousting with casual third-party skepticism. Ann is not in a good frame of mind to validate fragile worthwhile purposes, especially mine.
“My view is sort of a facilitator’s view,” I say, hopefully. “I just think he’s got some problems figuring out a good conception of himself”—to put it mildly—“and I want to offer a better one so he doesn’t get too attached to the one he’s hanging onto now, which doesn’t seem too successful. A defective attitude can get to be your friend if you don’t look out. It’s sort of a problem in risk management. He has to risk trying to improve by giving up what’s maybe comfortable but not working. It’s not easy.” I would smile again, but my mouth has gone dry as cardboard saying this much and trying to seem what I am—sincere. I drink down a gulp of ice tea, which is sweet the way a child would like it and has lemon and mint and cinnamon and God knows what else in it, and tastes terrible. Clarissa’s finger-drawn happy face has droozled down and become a scowling jack-o’-lantern in the heat.
“Do you think you’re a good person to instruct him about risk management?” Ann suddenly looks toward the river as if she’d heard an unfamiliar sound out in the summer atmosphere. A fishy breeze has in fact risen offshore and moved upriver, carrying all manner of sounds and smells she might not expect.
“I’m not that bad at it,” I say.
“No.” She is still looking off. “Not at risk management. I guess not.”
I hear a noise myself, unfamiliar and nearby, and stand up to the porch rail and peer over the lawn, hoping I’ll see Paul coming up the hill. But to the left, at the edge of the hardwoods, I can see, instead, all of Charley’s studio. As advertised, it is a proper old New England seaman’s chapel raised ten cockamamie feet above the pond surface on cypress pilings and connected to land by a catwalk. The church paint has been blasted off, leaving the lapped boards exposed. Windows are big, tall, clear lancets. The tin roof simmers in the sun of nearly noon.
And then Charley himself makes an appearance on the little back deck (happily in miniature), fresh from this morning’s sore-jawed brainstorms, cooking up super plans for some rich neurosurgeon’s ski palace in Big Sky, or a snorkeling hideaway in Cabo Cartouche—Berlioz still booming in his oversized ears. Bare-chested, tanned and silver-topped, in his usual khaki shorts, he is transporting from inside what looks like a plate of something, which he places on a low table beside a single wooden chair. I wish I could crank his big telescope down and survey the oarlock damage. That would interest me. (It’s never easy to see why your ex-wife marries the man she marries if it isn’t you again.)
I would like, however, to talk about Paul now: about the possibility of his coming down to Haddam to live, so as to stop limiting my fathering to weekends and holidays. I haven’t entirely thought through all the changes to my own private dockets that his arrival will necessitate, the new noises and new smells in my air, new concerns for time, privacy, modesty; possibly a new appreciation for my own moment and freedoms; my role: a man retuned to the traditional, riding herd on a son full time, duties dads are made for and that I have missed but crave. (I could also bear to hear about the howlers Ann and Charley have been conducting, though that isn’t my business and could easily turn out to be nothing: mischief Clarissa and Paul dreamed up to confuse everyone’s agenda.)
But I’m thwarted by what to say, and frankly inhibited by Ann. (Perhaps this is another goal of divorce—to reinstitute the inhibitions you dispensed with when things were peachy.) It’s tempting just to push off toward less controversial topics, like I did last night: my headaches with the Markhams and McLeods, rising interest rates, the election, Mr. Tanks—my most unforgettable character—with his truck, his gold-collared kitty and his Reader’s Digest condenseds, a personal docket that makes my own Existence Period look like ten years of sunshine.
But Ann suddenly says, apropos of nothing but also, of course, of everything, “It’s not really easy being an ex-spouse, is it? There isn’t much use for us in the grand plan. We don’t help anything go forward. We just float around unattached, even if we’re not unattached.” She rubs her nose with the back of her hand and snuffs. It’s as if she’s seen us outside our real bodies, like ghosts above the river, and is wishing we’d go away.
“There’s always one thing we can do.” She makes a point of rarely using my name unless she’s angry, so that most of the time I just seem to overhear her and offer a surprise reply.
“And what’s that?” She looks at me disapprovingly, her dark brows clouded, her leg twitching in a barely detectable, spasmic way.
“Get married to each other again,” I say, “just to state the obvious.” (Though not necessarily the inevitable.) “Last year I sold houses to three couples”—two, actually—“each of whom was at one time married, and who got divorced and married, then divorced, then married their original true love again. If you can say it you can do it, I guess.”
“We can put that on your tombstone,” Ann says with patent distaste. “It’s the story of your life. You don’t know what you’re going to say next, so you don’t know what’s a good idea. But if it wasn’t a good idea to be married to you seven years ago, why would it be a better idea now? You’re not any better.” (This is unproved.) “It’s conceivable you’re worse.”
“You’re happily married anyway,” I say, pleased with myself, though wondering who the “special someone” will be who’ll make decisions about my tombstone. Best if it could be me.
Ann scrutinizes Charley treading long-strided, barefooted, bare-chested back inside his studio, no doubt to see if his miso is ready and to dig the soy sauce and shallots out of the Swedish mini-fridge. Charley, I notice, walks in a decidedly head-forward, hump-shouldered, craning way that makes him look surprisingly old—he’s only sixty-one—but which makes me experience a sudden, unexpected and absolutely unwanted and impolitic sympathy for him. A good head shot with an oarlock is more telling on a man his age.
“You like thinking I ought to be sorry I married Charley. But I’m not sorry. Not at all,” Ann says, her tan shoe giving another nervous little twitch. “He’s a much better person than you are”—grossly unproved—“not that you have any reason to believe that, since you don’t know him. He even has a good opinion of you. He tries to be a pal to these children. He thinks we’ve done a better than average job with them.” (No mention of his daughter the novelist.) “He’s nice to me. He tells the truth. He’s faithful.” My ass as a bet on that, though I could be wrong. Some men are. Plus, I’d like to hear an example of some sovereign truth Charley professes—no doubt some self-congratulating GOP Euclideanism: A penny saved is a penny earned; buy low, sell high; old Shakespeare sure knew his potatoes. My unmerited sympathy for him goes flapping away.
“I guess I didn’t realize he held me in high esteem,” I say (and I’m sure he doesn’t). “Maybe we should be best friends. He asked me about that once. I was forced to decline.”
Ann just shakes her head, rejecting me the way a great actor rejects a heckler in the audience—utterly and without really noticing.
“Frank, you know when we were all living down in Haddam five years ago, in that sick little arrangement you thrived on, and you were fucking that little Texas bimbo and having the time of your life, I actually put an ad in the Pennysaver, advertising myself as a woman who seeks male companionsh
ip. I actually risked boredom and rape just to keep things the way you liked them.”
This is not the first time I’ve heard about the Pennysaver etc. And Vicki Arcenault was far from a bimbo. “We could’ve gotten remarried again anytime,” I say. “And I wasn’t having the time of my life. You divorced me, if you can remember precisely. We could’ve moved back in together. All kinds of things could’ve happened instead of what did.” Possibly I’m about to hear that the most difficult milieu adjustment of my adult life didn’t really have to be made (if only I’d been clairvoyant). It’s the worst news anyone could hear, and for a nickel I’d pop Ann right in the chops.
“I didn’t want to marry you.” She keeps shaking her head, though less forcefully. “I just should’ve left, that’s all. Do you even think you know why you and I got unmarried?” She takes a brief, angling look at me—uncomfortably like Sally’s look. I’d rather not be delving into the past now, but into the future or at least the present, where I’m most at home. It’s all my fault, though, for rashly bringing up the queasy matter of—or at least the word—marriage.
“I’m on record,” I say, to answer her fair and square, “as believing our son died and you and I tried to cope with it but couldn’t. Then I left home for a time and had some girlfriends, and you filed for divorce because you wanted me gone.” I look at her haltingly, as if in describing that time in our life I’d as much as stated a Goya could’ve easily been painted by a grandmother in Des Moines. “Maybe I’m wrong.”