Independence Day

by Richard Ford

  Ann is nodding as if she’s trying to get my view straight in her head. “I divorced you,” she says slowly and meticulously, “because I didn’t like you. And I didn’t like you because I didn’t trust you. Do you think you ever told me the truth once, the whole truth?” She taps her fingers on her bare thigh, not looking my way. (This is the perpetual theme of her life: the search for truth, and truth’s defeat by the forces of contingency, most frequently represented by yours truly.)

  “Tell the truth about what?” I say.

  “Anything,” she says, gone rigid.

  “I told you I loved you. That was true. I told you I didn’t want to get divorced. That was true too. What else was there?”

  “There were important things that weren’t being admitted by you. There’s no use going into it now.” She nods some more as if to ratify this. Though there is in her voice unexpected sadness and even a tremor of remorse, which makes my heart swell and my air passage stiffen, so that for one long festering moment I’m unable to speak. (I’ve been badly slipped up on here: she is distraught and dejected, and I cannot answer.)

  “For a time,” she continues, very, very softly and carefully, having slightly recovered herself, “for a long time, really, I knew we weren’t all the way to the truth with each other. But that was okay, because we were trying to get there together. But suddenly I just felt hopeless, and I saw that truth didn’t really exist to you. Though you got it from me the whole time.”

  Ann was forever suspecting other people were happier than she was, that other husbands loved their wives more, achieved greater intimacy, on and on. It is probably not unusual in modern life, though untrue of ours. But this is the final, belated, judgment on our ancient history: why love failed, why life broke into this many pieces and made this pattern, who at long last is to blame. Me. (Why now, I don’t know. I still, in fact, don’t know with any clarity what she’s talking about.) And yet I so suddenly want to put my hand on her knee in hopes of consoling her that I do—I put my hand on her knee in hopes of consoling her. God knows how I can.

  “Can’t you tell me something specific?” I say gently. “Women? Or something I thought? Or something you thought I thought? Just some way you felt about me?”

  “It wasn’t something specific,” she says painstakingly. Then stops. “Let’s just talk about buying and selling houses now. Okay? You’re very good at that.” She turns an unpleasant and estimating eye on me. She doesn’t bother to remove my warm and clammy hand from her smooth knee. “I wanted somebody with a true heart, that’s all. That wasn’t you.”

  “Goddamn it, I have a true heart,” I say. Shocked. “And I am better. You can get better. You wouldn’t know anyway.”

  “I came to realize,” she says, uninterested in me, “that you were never entirely there. And this was long before Ralph died, but also after.”

  “But I loved you,” I say, suddenly just angry as hell. “I wanted to go on being your husband. What else from the land of truth did you want? I didn’t have anything else to tell you. That was the truth. There’s plenty about anybody you can’t know and are better off not to, for Christ sake. Not that I even know what they are. There’s plenty about you, stuff that doesn’t even matter. Plus, where the hell was I if I wasn’t there?”

  “I don’t know. Where you still are. Down in Haddam. I just wanted things to be clear and certain.”

  “I do have a true heart,” I shout, and I’m tempted again to give her a whack, though only on the knee. “You’re one of those people who think God’s only in the details, but then if they aren’t the precise right details, life’s all fucked up. You invent things that don’t exist, then you worry about being denied whatever they are. And then you miss the things that do exist. Maybe it’s you, you know? Maybe some truths don’t even have words, or maybe the truth was what you wanted least, or maybe you’re a woman of damn little faith. Or low self-esteem, or something.”

  I take my hand off her knee, unwilling now to be her consoler.

  “We don’t really need to go into this.”

  “You started it! You started it last night, about being and seeming, as if you were the world’s expert on being. You just wanted something else, that’s all. Something beyond what there is.” She’s right, of course, that we shouldn’t go on with this, since this is an argument any two humans can have, could have, have had, no doubt are having at this moment all over the country to properly inaugurate the holiday. It really has nothing to do with the two of us. In a sense, we don’t even exist, taken together.

  I look around at the long porch, the great blue house on its big lawn, the shimmering windows behind which my two children are imprisoned, possibly lost to me. Charley has not come out onto his little porch again. What I’d thought he was doing—eating his ethical lunch in the ethical sunshine while we two battered at each other far above and out of earshot—is probably all wrong. I know nothing about him and should be kinder.

  Ann just shakes her head again, without words accompanying. She eases herself down off the porch rail, lifts her chin, runs one finger from her temple back through her hair, and takes a quick look at the mirror window as if she saw someone coming—which she does: our son, Paul. Finally.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m sorry I drove you crazy when we were married. If I’d known I was going to, I wouldn’t ever have married you. You’re probably right, I rely on how I make things seem. It’s my problem.”

  “I thought you thought how I thought,” she says softly. “Maybe that’s mine.”

  “I tried. I should’ve. I loved you very much all the time.”

  “Some things just can’t be fixed later, can they?” she says.

  “No, not later,” I say. “Not later they can’t.”

  And that is essentially and finally that.

  Why the long face?” Paul says to his mother and also to me. He has arrived, smirking, onto the porch looking far too much like the murder boy from Ridgefield last midnight, as committed to bad luck as a death row convict. And to my surprise he’s even pudgier and somehow taller, with thick, adult eyebrows even more like his mom’s, but with a bad, pasty complexion—nothing like he looked as recently as a month ago, and not enough anymore (or ever) like the small, gullible boy who kept pigeons at his home in Haddam. (How do these things change so fast?) His hair has been cut in some new, dopey, skint-sided, buzzed-up way, so that his busted ear is evident in its bloody little bandage. Plus, his gait is a new big-shoe, pigeon-toed, heel-scrape, shoulder-slump sidle by which he seems to give human shape to the abstract concept of condescending disapproval for everything in sight (the effects of stress, no doubt). He simply stands before us now—his parents—doing nothing. “I thought of a good homonym while I was getting dressed,” he says slyly to either or both of us. “‘Meatier’ and ‘meteor.’ Only they mean the same thing.” He smirks, wishing to do nothing out here more than present himself in a way we won’t like, someone who’s lost IQ points or might be considering it.

  “We were just discussing you,” I say. I’d meant to mention something about Dr. Rection, to speak to him via private code, but I don’t. I am in fact sorry to see him.

  His mother, however, steps right up to him—essentially ignoring him and me—grips his chin with her strong golfer’s thumb and index finger, and turns his head to examine his split ear. (He is nearly her height.) Paul is carrying a black gym bag with Paramount Pictures—Reach Your Peak stenciled on its side in white (Stephanie’s stepfather is a studio exec, so I’m told) and is wearing big black-and-red clunker Reeboks with silver lightning bolts on the sides, long and baggy black shorts, and a long midnight-blue tee-shirt that has Happiness Is Being Single printed on the front below a painting of a bright-red Corvette. He is a boy you can read, though he also is someone you’d be sorry to encounter on a city street. Or in your home.

  Ann asks him in a private voice if he has what he needs (he has), if he has money (he does), if he knows where to me
et in Penn Station (yes), if he feels all right (no answer). He cuts his knifey eyes at me and screws up one side of his mouth as if we’re somehow in league against her. (We aren’t.)

  Then Ann abruptly says, “So okay, you don’t look great, but go wait in the car, please. I want to have a word with your father.”

  Paul wrinkles his mouth into a mirthless little all-knowing look of scorn having to do with the very notion of his mother talking to his father. He has become a smirker by nature. But how? When?

  “What happened to your ear, by the way?” I say, knowing what happened.

  “I punished it,” he says. “It heard a bunch of things I didn’t like.” He says this in a mechanistic monotone. I give him a little push in the direction he’s come from, back through the house and out toward the car. And so he goes.

  I’d appreciate it if you’d try to be careful with him,” Ann says. “I want him back in good shape for his court appearance Tuesday.” She has sought to lead me the way Paul has gone, “back through,” but I’m having no part of her sinister house beautiful, with its poisonous élan, spiffy lines and bloodless color scheme. I lead us (I’m still inexplicably limping) down the steps to the lawn and around via the safer grass and through the shrubberies to the pea-gravel driveway, just the way a yardman would. “I think he’s injury prone,” she says quietly, following me. “I had a dream about him having an accident.”

  I step through the green-leafed, thick-smelling hydrangeas, blooming a vivid purple. “My dreams are always like the six o’clock news,” I say. “Everything happening to other people.” The sexual whir I experienced on seeing Ann is now long gone.

  “That’s fine about your dreams,” she says, hands in pockets. “This one happened to be mine.”

  I don’t wish to think about terrible injury. “He’s gotten fat,” I say. “Is he on mood stabilizers or neuroblockers or something?”

  Paul and Clarissa are already conferring by my car. She is smaller and holding his left wrist in both her hands and trying to raise it to the top of her head in some kind of sisterly trick he’s not cooperating with. “Come on!” I hear her say. “You putz.”

  Ann says, “He’s not on anything. He’s just growing up.” Across the gravel lot is a robust five-bay garage that matches the house in every loving detail, including the miniature copper weather vane milled into the shape of a squash racket. Two bay doors are open, and two Mercedeses with Constitution State plates are nosed into the shadows. I wonder where Paul’s station wagon is. “Dr. Stopler said he displays qualities of an only child, which is too bad in a way.”

  “I was an only child. I liked it.”

  “He’s just not one. Dr. Stopler also said”—she’s ignoring me, and why shouldn’t she?—“not to talk to him too much about current events. They cause anxiety.”

  “I guess they do,” I say. I am ready to say something caustic about childhood to seal my proprietorship of this day—revive Wittgenstein about living in the present meaning to live forever, blah, blah, blah. But I simply call a halt. No good’s to come. All boats fall on a bitter tide—children know it better than anyone. “Do you think you know what’s making him worse, just all of a sudden?”

  She shakes her head, grips her right wrist with her left hand, and twists the two together, then gives me a small bleak smile. “You and me, I guess. What else?”

  “I guess I was wanting a more complicated answer.”

  “Well, good for you.” She rubs her other wrist the same way. “I’m sure you’ll think of one.”

  “Maybe I’ll have put on my tombstone ‘He expected a more complicated answer.’”

  “Let’s quit talking about this, okay? We’ll be at the Yale Club just for tonight if you need to call.” She looks at me in a nose-wrinkled way and slouches a shoulder. She has not meant to be so harsh.

  Ann, in amongst the hydrangeas, and for the first time today looks purely beautiful—pretty enough for me to exhale, my mind to open outward, and for me to gaze at her in a way I once gazed at her all the time, every single day of our old life together in Haddam. Now would be the perfect moment for a future-refashioning kiss, or for her to tell me she’s dying of leukemia, or me to tell her I am. But that doesn’t happen. She is smiling her stalwart’s smile now, one that’s long since disappointed and can face most anything if need be—lies, lies and more lies.

  “You two have a good time,” she says. “And please be careful with him.”

  “He’s my son,” I say idiotically.

  “Oh, I know that. He’s just like you.” And then she turns and walks back toward the yard, continuing on, I suspect, out of sight and down to the water to have her lunch with her husband.

  8

  Clarissa Bascombe has snugged something tiny and secret into Paul’s hand as we were leaving. And on our way up to Hartford, on our way up to Springfield, on our way to the Basketball Hall of Fame, he has held it without acknowledgment while I’ve yodeled away spiritedly about what I’ve thought will break our ice, get our ball rolling, fan our coals—start, via the right foot, what now feels like our last and most important journey together as father and son (though it probably isn’t).

  Once we swerve off busy CT 9 onto busier, car-clogged I-91, go past the grimy jai alai palace and a new casino run by Indians, I set off on my first “interesting topic”: just how hard it is right here, ten miles south of Hartford, on July 2, 1988, when everything seems of a piece, to credit that on July 2, 1776, all the colonies on the seaboard distrusted the bejesus out of each other, were acting like separate, fierce warrior nations scared to death of falling property values and what religion their neighbors were practicing (like now), and yet still knew they needed to be happier and safer and went about doing their best to figure out how. (If this seems completely nutty, it’s not, under the syllabus topic of “Reconciling Past and Present: From Fragmentation to Unity and Independence.” It’s totally relevant—in my view—to Paul’s difficulty in integrating his fractured past with his hectic present so that the two connect up in a commonsense way and make him free and independent rather than staying disconnected and distracted and driving him bat-shit crazy. History’s lessons are subtle lessons, inviting us to remember and forget selectively, and therefore are much better than psychiatry’s, where you’re forced to remember everything.)

  “John Adams,” I say, “said getting the colonies all to agree to be independent together was like trying to get thirteen clocks to strike at the same second.”

  “Who’s John Adams?” Paul says, bored—his pale, bare, beginning-to-be-hairy legs crossed in a concertedly unmanly manner, one Reebok with its Day-Glo-yellow lacing hiked up threateningly near the gearshift lever.

  “John Adams was the first Vice President,” I say. “He was the first person to say it was a stupid job. In public, that is. That was in 1797. Did you bring your copy of the Declaration of Independence?”

  “Nuhhhn.” This may mean either.

  He is staring out at the reemerged Connecticut, where a sleek powerboat is pulling a tiny female water-skier, billowing the river’s shiny skin. In a bright-yellow life vest, the girl heels waaaaay back against her towrope, carving a high, translucent spume out of the crusty wake.

  “Why are you driving so effing slow?” he says to be droll. Then, in a mocking old-granny’s voice, “Everybody passes me, but I get there just as fast as the rest of ’em.”

  I, of course, intend to drive as fast as I want and no faster, but take an appraising look at him, my first since we shoved off from Deep River. His ear that wasn’t bammed by the Mercedes’s steering wheel has some gray fuzzy litter in it. Paul also doesn’t much smell good, smells in fact like unbathed, sleep-in-your-clothes mustiness. He also doesn’t seem to have brushed his teeth in a while. Possibly he is reverting to nature. “The original framers, you know,” I say hopefully, but instantly getting the Constitution’s authors muddled up with the signers of the Declaration (my persistent miscue, though Paul woul
d never know), “they wanted to be free to make new mistakes, not just keep making the same old ones over and over as separate colonies and without showing much progress. That’s why they decided to band together and be independent and were willing to sacrifice some controls they’d always had in hopes of getting something better—in their case, better trade with the outside world.”

  Paul looks at me contemptuously, as if I were an old radio tuned to a droning station that’s almost amusing. “Framers? Do you mean farmers?”

  “Some of them were farmers,” I say. There’s no use trying to haul this business back. I’m not facilitating good contact yet. “But people who won’t quit making the same mistakes over and over are what we call conservatives. And the conservatives were all against independence, including Benjamin Franklin’s son, who eventually got deported to Connecticut, just like you.”

  “So are conservatives farmers?” he says, feigning puzzlement but ridiculing me.

  “A lot of them are,” I say, “though they shouldn’t be. What’d your sister give you?” I’m watching his closed left fist. We are quickly coming up into the Hartford traffic bottleneck. Elaborate road construction is on the right, between the interstate and the river—a soaring new off-ramp, a new parallel lane, arrows flashing, yellow behemoths full of Connecticut earth rumbling along beside us, white men in plastic hats and white shirts standing out in the snappy hot breeze, staring at thick scrolls of plans.

  Paul looks at his fist as if he has no idea of what it contains, then slowly opens it, revealing a small yellow bow, the twin of the red one Clarissa gave me. “She gave you one,” he mutters. “A red one. She said you said you wanted to be her bow, but it was spelled another way.” I’m shocked at what a shady, behind-the-scenes conniver my daughter is. Paul holds the two loose ends of his yellow bow and pulls them tight so the two loops daintily involute and make a knot. Then he puts the whole in his mouth and swallows it. “Umm,” he says, and smiles at me evilly. “Good ribbance.” (He’s constructed this event, including the change in his sister’s story, just for a punch line.)