by Richard Ford
“Well,” I say, aware I could blow the whole deal with an inept turn of phrase, “younger women always want everything to be a success and have love depend on it. But some things can’t be a success and you love somebody anyway.”
Silence again intervenes. Again I think I hear surf languidly sudsing against the sandy shingle.
Sally says, “I don’t think that’s exactly what you said last fall.”
“But it’s pretty close,” I say, “and it’s what I meant and what I mean now. And what do you care? You’re my age, or almost. And I don’t love anybody else.” (Except my ex-wife, which is a non-issue.)
“I guess I’m concerned that you’re making me up different from how I am. Maybe you think there’s only one person in the world for anybody, and so you keep making her up. Not that I mind being improved on, but you have to stick to my particular facts.”
“I have to forget about making people up,” I say guiltily, sorry I ever gave utterance to the idea. “And I don’t think there’s just one person for anybody. At least I hope to hell not, since I haven’t done so well yet.”
“We have some more fireworks out on the water here,” Sally says dreamily. “That’s very nice. Maybe I’m just feeling susceptible tonight. I felt good when you called.”
“I still feel good,” I say, and suddenly the bony, horseface woman who’s been banging the piano to death strides out into the foyer and looks down the hall straight at me, where I’m leaning on the wall above the phone table. She’s in step with the plump woman in the neck brace, whom she’s no doubt been making sing “Balls-de-reee, balls-de-rah.” She issues me another savage-eyebrowed look, as if I was where she knew I’d be and up to my pants pockets in the deceit of some angelic and unsuspecting wifey. “Look. I’m in a public phone here. But I feel a lot better. I just want to see you tomorrow if I can’t see you in ten minutes.”
“Where?” Sally says smally, still susceptible.
“Anywhere. Name it. I’ll come down there in a Cessna.” The two women stay standing in the lighted foyer, unabashedly ogling me and listening in.
“Are you still taking Paul to the train in New York?”
“By six o’clock,” I say, wondering where Paul could be at this minute.
“Well, I could take a train up there and meet you. I’d like that. I’d like to spend the Fourth of July with you.”
“You know, it’s my favorite holiday of a non-religious nature.” I am enthused to hear her even warily agreeable, though she can seem more agreeable than she is. (I have to tabulate all the declarations and forswearings I’ve committed to in the last ten minutes.) “You didn’t answer my question, though.”
“Oh.” She sniffs once. “You’re not really very easy to fix on. And I don’t think I’d be a good long-term lover or a wife for somebody like that. I had a husband who was hard to fix on.”
“That’s all right,” I say. Though surely I’m not as elusive as Wally! The Wally who’s been gone for damn near twenty years!
“Is that all right? For me to be a not very good lover or wife?” She pauses to think about this novel idea. “Don’t you care, or are you just not putting any pressure on me to do anything?”
“I care,” I say. “But I’d actually just be happy to hear any good words.”
“Everything isn’t just about how you say it,” Sally says, very formally. “And I wouldn’t know what to say anyway. I don’t think we mean the same things when we say the same things.” (As predicted.)
“That’s fine too. As long as you’re not sure you don’t love me. I read a poem someplace that said perfect love was not knowing you weren’t in love. Maybe that’s what this is.”
“Oh my,” she says, and sounds sorrowful. “That’s too complicated, Frank, and it’s not very different from how it was last night. It’s not very encouraging to me.”
“It’s different because I get to see you tomorrow. Meet me at seven at Rocky and Carlo’s on Thirty-third and Seventh. We’ll start new from there.”
“Well,” she says. “Are we making a business deal to be in love? Is that what’s happening?”
“No, it’s not. But it’s a good deal, though. Everything’s up front for a change.” She laughs. And then I try to laugh but can’t and have to fake laughing.
“Okay, okay,” she says, in a not very hopeful voice. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“You better believe it,” I say in a better one. And we hang up. Though the instant she’s off I depress the plunger and shout into the empty line, “And so you’re nothing but a fucking asshole, are you? Well, I’ll have you killed before Labor Day, and that’s God’s promise.” I snap a vicious look around at the two women, framed by the screen door, peering at me. “I’ll see you in hell,” I say into the dead line, and slam the phone down as the women turn and head hastily upstairs to their beds.
I take a quick peek out onto the porch to see if Paul’s there. He’s not—only one of the gin players is left, asleep but managing to rock his rocker anyway. I make an investigative turn through the smelly dining room, where the light’s still on and the big boarding-house lazy Susan table is cleared and shining dully from being wiped with a greasy rag. Through the two-way kitchen door open at the back I see the young woman who was clanging the dinner bell, wearing a chef’s hat and waving when Paul and I arrived. She’s seated at a long metal table in the brackish light, smoking a cigarette and flipping through a magazine, her hand around a can of Genny, her chef’s hat in front of her. Clearly she’s immersed in her own well-earned and private quality time. But nothing would make me happier than a warmed-up plate of dinner spaghetti with a couple of cold-as-they-may-be slabs of garlic bread and maybe a brew of my own. I’d eat right here, standing up, or sneak a plate to my room by the back stairs so no other guests would have to know about it. (“The next thing, everybody’ll want to eat late, and we’ll be serving dinner from now to Christmas. It’s hard to know where to draw the line in these things”—which of course is true.)
“Hi,” I say in through the kitchen door, one room into the next, sounding meeker than I want to sound.
The young woman—who’s still wearing a chef’s boxy-looking white tunic, institutional baggy pants and a red neckerchief—turns and gives me a skeptical, unwelcoming look. A round tin ashtray sits on the table in front of her, beside a package of Winstons. She looks back and flicks her smoke on the ashtray’s rim.
“What can I do you for?” she says without looking up at me. I take a couple of minuscule steps nearer the doorframe. In fact, I hate to be the one asking for special treatment, who wants his dinner late, his laundry returned without his ticket, who can’t find his stub for his prints, has to have his tires rotated this afternoon because he needs to drive to Buffalo in the morning and the left front seems to be wearing a little unevenly. I prefer my regular place in line. Only tonight, after 10 p.m., worn uneven myself from a long, befuddling day with my son, I’m willing to bend the rules like anyone else.
“I thought I might get a good tip on dinner somewhere,” I say, with a you-know-what-I-really-mean look. My tired eyes dart around to what I can see of the kitchen: a giant cold box, a black eight-burner Vulcan, a bulky silver pot-washer, its door open, four big tub-sinks, dry as a desert, all utensils—pots, pans, skillets, whisks, spatulas—dangling like weaponry from a rack on the rear wall. Nowhere do I see a still-warm pot of spaghetti with a metal spoon handle poked up over the top. Nothing’s doing here food-wise.
“I guess the Tunnicliff’s kitchen shuts off at nine.” The lady chef glances at her wristwatch and shakes her head without looking up. “You just missed that by an hour. I’m sorry to break the news.”
She is a harder-boiled piece of business than I guessed. Frizzy blond hair, pallid indoor skin, blotchy where I can’t now see, thick little wrists and neck, and wandering breasts not well captained inside her chef’s getup. She is twenty-nine, no doubt, with a kid at home she’s slow getting back to, and in
all likelihood rides a big Harley to work. (Almost certainly she’s the innkeeper’s squeeze.) Though whatever her arrangements, they haven’t left her easy to win over.
“Got any better ideas?” My stomach produces an audible querking noise as if on cue.
She takes a drag on her Winston and turns her head slightly to the side and blows smoke the other way. I can see the magazine she’s reading is Achieve Super Marital Sex (something you might get mail order). I can also see she’s not wearing a wedding ring, though that’s not my business. “If you want to drive down to Oneonta, there’s a Chinese stays open till midnight. Their egg drop’s almost edible.” She yawns and stifles it halfway.
“That’s a pretty fur piece,” I say, grinning witlessly. I sniff a gamy pilot light/old stale food smell reminiscent of Ted Houlihan’s house. I of course hate egg drop soup, know no one who actually likes it, and hold my ground.
“Twenty-five air miles.” She flips the pages of her magazine to one that has pictures I’m not close enough to see.
“Nothing else open in town, then, huh?” I am less convincing, I can tell.
“Bars. This is just a little hick burg. It pretends different. But what else is new.” She flips another page nonchalantly, then leans forward to get a better look at something—possibly a defter “mounting strategy” or some fancy new penetration protocol, a tricky Swedish “apparatus” for manipulating previously undiscovered parts and zones, ingenuity for making life better than ever. (My own parts, I realize dimly, have not been manipulated in a coon’s age, except in the age-old way; I wonder bleakly if Paul might not be somewhere in the menaceless warp of Cooperstown, having his own parts ardently worked over while I’m here begging a little supper.)
“Look,” I say, “you think there’s any chance I could get a little leftover spaghetti? I’m as hungry as a bear, and I’d be glad to eat it cold. Or I’d eat something else that was handy. Maybe some tapioca or a sandwich.” I edge in the door to make my presence more a feature in the room.
She shakes her frizzy head and thumps her Genny, still intent on her sex magazine. “Jeremy hangs a big lock on the fridge so nobody can come down for Dagwoods, which used to happen, especially with the Japanese. They’re apparently always starving. But I’m not trusted with the combination, ’cause I’d just stand back and let you have it all.”
I look to the dimly shining Traulsen cold box, and indeed there’s a hasp and bail soldered right onto it, and a big impregnable-looking lock—something it’d be a lot of trouble to jimmy off.
I’m close enough, though, to see the diagram that’s captured the chef’s special attention: a full page of four-panel drawings showing a man and woman, both naked, and painted using translucent, unprurient pastels, in front of a completely nonsexual pea-green background of hazy bedroom details (all emblematic of marriage). Fido-style is the theme here. In panel #1 they’re both on their knees; in #2 “he’s” standing and “she’s” half draped off a bed, fully “offered;” in #3 they’re both standing, and I can’t see #4, though I’d like to.
“You finding some new recipes in there?” I leer down at her.
Her head twists around and up, and she gives me a brazen, pouty-mouth look that says: Mind your own business or I’ll mind it for you. It makes me immediately like her, even if she won’t unlock the fridge and build me up a Dagwood. This, I think, is the end of dinner, though my bet is she’s got the combination committed to memory.
“I thought you wanted a sandwich,” she says, looking back, amused at the canine escapades of two idealized pastel versions of married people who look like us. “Whatta you think she’s saying?” She points her short finger, which has some flour dried on its fingernail, at #1, in which the female is looking back around at the already hooked-up male, as if she’s just had a good new idea. “‘Knock, knock, Who’s there?’” the chef says. “‘Did you hear the garage door?’ or ‘Do you mind if I balance my checkbook?’” She tours her tongue roguishly around in her cheek and looks mock-disgusted, as if this were all just shameless.
“Maybe they’re talking about a sandwich,” I say, experiencing a gradual resituating of my own little-thought-of below-decks apparatus.
“Maybe they are,” she says, leaning back again while she smokes. “Maybe she’s sayin’, ‘Now, did you remember to buy Bibb lettuce, or did you get that old iceberg again?’”
“What’s your name?” I say. (My talk with Sally has been more serious and relieving than actual fun.)
“C-h-a-r, Char,” she says. She has a pop of her Genny and swallows it down. “Which is short for Charlane, not Charlotte and not Charmayne. My older sisters are blessed with those.”
“Your pop must’ve been named Charles.”
“You know him?” she says. “Great big loud guy with a tiny little brain?”
“I don’t think so.” I’m waiting for her to flip another page, interested to see what else our panelists come up with.
“Funny,” she says, putting her Winston between her teeth so the smoke makes her squint, and pushing the bulky chef’s sleeves above her fragile elbows. She is more delicate on second notice. Her outfit is what makes her look chunky and tough. The “chef look” is not a good look for her.
“How’d you get to be a chef?” I say, happier, even just for a moment, to be here in the lighted kitchen with a woman rather than scrounging a burger in the dark or struggling to make contact with my son.
“Oh, well, first I attended Harvard and got a Ph.D.—let’s see—in, ah, can opening. Then I did my postdoctoral work in eggs and toast buttering. That must’ve been at MIT.”
“I bet it’s harder than English.”
“You would think so.” She lays the page over to reveal more pastel panels, this time spotlighting fellatio, with some vivid but tasteful close-ups showing everything you’d ever want to know from a picture. The female panelist, I notice, now has her hair tied back in an accommodating ponytail. “My, my,” Char says.
“You a subscriber?” I say archly. My stomach makes another deep, organic-sounding grumble-gurgle.
“I just read what the guests leave after meals. That’s all.” Char pauses longer at the fellatio panels. “This was left under one of the chairs. I’ll be interested by who asks about it tomorrow. My guess I’ll get to keep it.”
I picture ole horseface stealing down after lights-out to give the room a tumble.
“Listen,” I say, with the sudden realization (again) that I can do anything I want (except get a plate of spaghetti). “Would you like to strike out to one of those bars and let me buy you another beer while I have a gin and maybe a sandwich? My name’s Frank Bascombe, by the way.” I give her a smile, wondering if we should shake hands.
“And by the way?” Char says, mocking me. She snaps the magazine shut back-to-front, and on the back is a full-page color ad for a thick, pink, anatomically audacious but rather fuzzily photographed dildo that some comical prior reader has drawn a red Happy Face on the business end of. “Well, hel-lo,” Char says, peering down at the pink appendage grinning back off the tabletop. “Aren’t we happy?” The dildo is referred to in the ad as “Mr. Standard Pleasure Unit,” though I’m dubious about what it has to do with the standard marriage realities. Under standard circumstances, “Mr. Pleasure” would be a hard act to follow. “He” in fact doesn’t have a particularly good effect on my own enthusiasm and leaves me oddly glum.
“Maybe I’ll let you walk me over to the Tunnicliff,” Char says, sliding the magazine out across the slick tabletop, rejecting Mr. Pleasure Unit as pie in the sky. She pushes back in her metal chair and turns her attention finally to me. “That’s halfway home. And we’ll say good night at that point.”
“Great. That’s great,” I say. “That’ll be a good end to the night for me.”
She stays seated, however, squeezes her eyes shut, then pops them open as if she’s just emerged from a trance, then woggles her head around to loosen everything up at the end of
a long day’s hard chefing. “What line of work you in, Frank?” She’s not quite ready to get up, possibly deciding she needs more background on me.
“Residential realty.”
“Where at?” She fingers her Winston hard pack as though she’s thinking about something else.
“Down in Haddam, in New Jersey. About four hours from here.”
“Never hoid of it,” she says.
“It’s a pretty well-kept secret.”
“You in the Millionth Dollar Club? I’d be impressed if you were.” She raises her eyebrows.
“Me too,” I say. (In Haddam, of course, the Millionth Dollar Club had better be joined by Valentine’s Day, or you’re out of business by Easter.)
“I prefer to rent,” Char says, staring inertly at the distant Achieve Super Marital Sex where she’s shoved it away, with Mr. Standard Pleasure Unit’s happy face turned up. “Actually I want to get into a condo, but a car costs what a house used to cost. And I’m still paying off my car.” (Not a Harley.)
“You can rent these days,” I say cheerfully, “for about half the cost of buying and save money to boot.” (There’s in fact no use telling her that at her age—twenty-eight or thirty-three—she’s looking at a life of more of the same unless she robs a bank or marries a banker.)