Independence Day

by Richard Ford

  “Well,” Char says, suddenly motivated by something—an idea, a memory, a determination not to bellyache to a stranger. “I guess I just need to find a rich husband.” She raps both sets of knuckles hard on the tabletop, grasps her pack of smokes and stands up (she is not very tall). “Let me get out of my Pillsbury doughgirl outfit.” She’s walking slowly away toward a little door off the kitchen, which when she opens it and snaps on the light within reveals a tiny, fluorescentlit bathroom. “I’ll meet you out on the piazza later,” she says.

  “I’ll be there,” I say at the door as it closes and goes locked.

  I wander back out into the foyer to wait in the cool breeze through the screen. The old bucket-eared Swede is now hunched over the tiny phone where I’d been, his big, rough finger jammed in his other cavernous ear for better hearing. “Well, what makes you a saint, ya satchel-ass sonofabitch?” I hear him say. “For starters, tell me that. I’d like to get that straight tonight.”

  I look out through the screen, where all the chairs are now empty—everyone safe in bed, plans in motion for an all-out Sunday morning assault on the Hall of Fame.

  From the darkness of new-mown grass I hear the distant yet close harmonies of a barbershop quartet, singing what sounds very much like “Michelle, ma belle, sont des mots qui vont très bien ensemble, très bien ensemble.” And back among the spruces and elm trunks I see a couple materializing in light-colored summery clothes, arms around, walking in step, returning (I’m certain) from a wonderful five-course dinner in some oak-paneled lakeside auberge now closed and locked up tight as Dick’s hatband. They’re laughing, which makes me realize that it is a good time of night to feel good, to be where you’ve been headed all day, blissful hours with a significant other still in front of you, half surprised that the day’s gone this well, inasmuch as the 4th is the summer’s pivotal day, when thoughts turn easily to fall and rapid change and shorter days and feelings of impendment that won’t give way till spring. These two are ahead of the game.

  They come into view now, in the inn’s reflected window glow: he wearing white bucks, seersucker pants, a yellow jacket slung over his shoulder foreign-correspondent style; she in a flimsy pastel-green skirt and a pink Peter Pan blouse. By their flat Ohio vowels I recognize them as the couple from the parking lot back when I lay dozing and their interests lay in property values. Now they have other interests to pursue above floors.

  “I ate way too much,” he says. “I shouldn’t have ordered that Cajun linguine. I’ll never get to sleep.”

  “That’s no excuse,” she says. “You can sleep when you get home. I’ve got plans for you.”

  “You’re the expert,” he says, not at all eager enough by my standards.

  “You’re damn right I am,” she says, then laughs. “Hah.”

  I want to be well out of their way when they come through—the lacquer of sex being suddenly too thick around me in the night air—want not to be standing behind the screen with a knowing, Now-you-two-have-a-real-good-sleep smirk on my mug. So, as their shoes hit the steps, I slip back into the living room to wait for my “date.”

  Two red-shaded lamps have been left on in the long, warm, overfurnished, cinnamon-scented parlor. The Ohioans troop by without seeing me, their voices falling, becoming more intimate as they reach the first landing and then the hallway above. They are full silent as their key enters the lock.

  I cruise around the old wainscoted parlor lined with oak bookshelves, a full complement of cast-off butler and drumhead tables, slipcovered couches, wobbly hassocks, nautical-looking brass lamps—all scavenged at antique fairs and roadside flea markets in the Cortland-Binghamton-Oneonta triangle. The scented candle has been extinguished, and bulky shadows encompass the wall art, which includes, in addition to Natty Bumppo himself, a framed, yellowed topo from the Twenties, showing “Lake Otsego and Environs,” several portraits of bewhiskered “founders”—doubtless all shopkeepers dressed up to look like presidential candidates—and a sampler hung over the main door, with good advice for the spiritual wanderer: “Confidences are easy to give, but hard to get back.”

  I mouse over the various tabletops, fingering the reading matter—stacks of old MLS booklets for guests whose vacation idea is to consider putting down roots in an alien locale (the Ohioans, for example). The price of the fancy Federalist pile Paul and I passed this afternoon is eye-poppingly low by Haddam standards at 530K (something has to be wrong with it). Plenty of old Peoples and American Heritages and National Geographics are stacked up on the long library table by the back window. I browse down the shelf containing stiff bound editions of New York History, the Otsego Times, The Encyclopedia of Collectibles, American Cage Bird magazine, Mechanix Illustrated, Hersey’s Hiroshima in three different editions, two whole yards of matched Fenimore Coopers, a Golden Treasure of Quotable Poetry, two volumes of Rails of the World, surprisingly enough another Classic Holes of Golf, a stack of recent Hartford Courants—as if somebody had moved here from Hartford and wanted to stay in touch. And to my wonderment and out of all account, among the loose and uncategorized books, here is a single copy of my own now-old book of short stories, Blue Autumn, in its original dust jacket, on the front of which is a faded artist’s depiction of a 1968-version sensitive-young-man, with a brush cut, an open-collared white shirt, jeans, and an uncertain half smile, standing emblematically alone in the dirt parking lot of a country gas station with an anonymous green pickup (possibly his) visible over his shoulder. Much is implied.

  I flinch as always when I see it, since in a panicky time-crunch the artist elected to paint my face from my author’s photo right onto the cover of my book, so that I see my young self now, made to look perplexed, forever staring out alone from the front of my very first (and only) literary effort.

  And yet I cart the book over to one of the red-shaded lamps, full of unexpected thrill. The boxful that I own, shipped to Haddam when the book was remaindered, was left in the attic on Hoving Road, untouched since its arrival and of no more interest to me than a box of clothes that no longer fit.

  But this book, this specimen, sparks interest—since it is after all still “out there,” in circulation, still official if somewhat compromised, still striving to the purposes I meant it to: staging raids on the inarticulate, being an ax for the frozen sea within us, providing the satisfactions of belief in the general mess of imprecision. (Nothing’s wrong with high-flown purposes, then or now.)

  A cake of fine house dust covers the top, so it’s clear none of tonight’s Clue players has had it down for pre-bedtime sampling. The old binding makes a dry-leaves crackle as I open it back. Pages at the front, I see, are yellow and water-stained, whereas those in the middle are milky, smooth and untouched. I take a look at the aforementioned author photo, a black-and-white taken by my then-girlfriend, Dale McIver: again a young man, though this time with a completely unwarranted confidence etched in his skinny mouth, ludicrously holding a beer and smoking a cigarette (!), an empty sun-lit (possibly Mexican) barroom and tables behind, staring fixedly at the camera as though he meant to say: “Yep, you just about have to live out here on the wild margins to get this puppy done the way God intended. And you probably couldn’t hack it, if you want to know the gospel.” And I, of course, couldn’t hack it; chose, in fact, a much easier puppy on a much less wild margin.

  Though I’m not displeased to view myself thus—fore and aft, as it were, on my own book, two sides of the issue; not queasy in the hollow of my empty stomach where most of life-that-might’ve-been finally comes to rest. I carried that sandpaper regret around in me for a time back in 1970, then simply omitted it the way I’d have Paul omit the nightmares and dreads of his child’s life stolen away by bad luck and unconscionable adults. Forget, forget, forget.

  Nor is this the first time I’ve happened onto my book blind:church book sales, sidewalk tables in Gotham, yard sales in unlikely midwestern cities, one rain-soaked night on top of a trash can behind the Haddam Public Li
brary, where I was groping around in the dark to find the after-hours drop-off. And once, to my dismay, in a friend’s house shortly after he’d blown his brains out, though I never thought my book played a part. Once published, a book never strays so far from its author.

  But without thinking a thought about its absolute worth, I intend to put my book in Char’s hands the moment she arrives and to speak the words I can’t now wait to speak: “Who do you think wrote this, that I found right here on the shelf below Natty Bumppo’s portrait and hard by the J. F. Coopers?” (My two likenesses will be my proof.) And not that it’ll have any important favorable effect on her. But for me, finding it still in “use” is high on the manifest of writerly thrills longed for—along with seeing someone you don’t know hungrily reading your book on an overland bus in Turkey; or noticing your book on the shelf behind the moderator on Meet the Press next to The Wealth of Nations and Giants in the Earth; or seeing your book on a list of overlooked American masterpieces compiled by former insiders in the Kennedy administration. (None of these has been my good luck yet.)

  I blow the dust off and run my finger over the page ends to uncover the original red stain, then flip to the front and survey the contents page, twelve little titles, each as serious as a eulogy: “Words to Die By,” “The Camel’s Nose,” “Epitaph,” “Night Wing,” “Waiting Offshore,” all the way down to the title story—considered my “chance” at something to expand into a novel and thereby break me into the big time.

  The book doesn’t in fact seem ever to have been opened (only rained on). I turn past the dedication—“To My Parents” (who else?)—back to the title page, ready to greet crisp “Frank Bascombe,” “Blue Autumn” and “1969,” set out in sturdy, easy-on-the-eyeball Ehrhardt, and to feel the old synchronicity extend to me in the here and now. Except what my eye finds, scrawled over the title page in blue, and in a hand I don’t know, is: “For Esther, remembering that really bleu autumn with you. Love ya, Dwayne. Spring, 1970,” every bit of which has been x-ed through with a smeary lipstick and below it written: “Dwayne. Rhymes with pain. Rhymes with fuck. Rhymes with the biggest mistake of my life. With contempt for you and your cheap tricks. Esther. Winter, 1972.” A big red smooch has been plastered on the page below Esther’s signature, and this connected by an arrow to the words “My Ass,” also in lipstick. This is a good deal different—by virtue of being a great deal less—than what I’d expected.

  But what I feel, dizzily, is not wry, bittersweet, ain’t-life-strange amusement at poor Dwayne and Esther’s hot flame gone smoking under the waves, but a totally unexpected, sickening void opening right in my stomach—right where I said it wouldn’t two minutes ago.

  Ann, and the end of Ann and me and everything associated with us, comes fuming up in my nostrils suddenly like a thick poison and in a way it never has even in my darkest seven-year despairings, or in the grim aftermath of my periodic revivals of hope. And instead of bellowing like a gored Cyclops, what I instinctively do is whap my book shut and sling it side-arm whirligig across the room, where it smacks the brown wall, knocks loose a crust of Florida-shaped plaster and hits the floor in the crumbles and dust. (Many fates befall books other than being read and treasured.)

  The chasm (and what else is it?) between our long-ago time and this very moment suddenly makes yawningly clear that all is now done and done for; as though she was never that she, me never that me, as though the two of us had never embarked on a life that would lead to this queer librarial moment (though we did). And rather than being against all odds, it’s in precise accordance with the odds: that life would lead to here or someplace just as lonely and spiritless, no less likely than for Dwayne and fiery, heartbroke Esther, our doubles in love. Gone in a hiss and fizzle. (Though if it weren’t that tears had just sprung stinging to my eyes, I’d accept my loss with dignity. Since after all I’m the man who counsels abandonment of those precious things you remember but can no longer make hopeful use of.)

  I drag my wrist across my cheeks and dab my eyes with my shirtfront. Someone, I sense, is coming from somewhere in the house, and I hustle over, snake up my book, refit its cover, flatten the pages I’ve busted and carry it back to its coffin slot, where it can sleep for twenty more years—this just as Char appears at the front door, looks out, then sees me standing here like a teary immigrant and saunters in smelling of cigarettes and appley sweetness applied just on the off chance I might be the guy to buy her that condo.

  And Char is not the Char of ten minutes ago. She’s dressed now in some shrunk-tight jeans with red cowboy boots, a concha belt, a sleeveless black tank top that reveals strong, round, bare athletic shoulders and the breasts I’ve already envisioned (now in much plainer view). She has done “something” to her eyes, and also to her hair, which has made it frizzier. There’s rose color in her cheeks, and what seems like glistening lubricant on her lips, so that she’s recognizable from when she was a chef, but only just. Though to me she’s not nearly as comely as in her boxy whites, when less of her was in view.

  But neither am I in the same “place” emotion-wise as ten minutes ago, nor am I exactly used to women with their tits on such nautical display. And I’m now no longer looking forward to being hauled through the door of the Tunnicliff—a place I can all too perfectly picture—and filling the slot as one of “Char’s guys from the inn” while the locals grab off their nightly geeze at those hogans, while writing me off as the doofus I am.

  “All right, Mr. Pleasure Unit, you ready to roll? Or are you still reading the instructions?” Char’s new eyelashes bat closed and open, her small hazel eyes roguishly fixing me. “What’s wrong with your eyes? You been in here crying? Is that what I’m getting into?”

  “I looked at a book and got dust in my eyes,” I say ludicrously.

  “I didn’t know anybody ever read those books. I thought they were just to make the room look cozy.” She surveys the shelves, unimpressed. “Jeremy buys ’em by the metric ton from some recycler up in Albany.” She sniffs, detecting some of the cinnamon redolence. “Pew. P-U,” she says. “Smells like an old folks’ home at Christmas in here. I’m in need of a Black Velvet.” She fires me off a challenging smile. A smile with a future.

  “Great!” I say, thinking I’d feel better if I could just take a walk by myself down to the soggy lakeshore and hear the tinkly, liquid sounds of faceless, nameless others enjoying themselves gaily in long, red-walled rooms lit by crystal chandeliers. Not much to ask.

  But I can’t back out on something as unfreighted as a simple walk and a drink, especially since it’s me did the asking. Canceling will make me out to be a weepy, cringing nutcase who can’t go a step without scuttling back three for fear and shame.

  “Maybe I’ll just have to break down and cook you a fried-egg sandwich à la Charlane. Since you’re so starved.” She’s moving toward the front screen, her hard butt encased in denim like a rodeo wrangler’s, her thighs chunky and taut.

  “I should try to find my son eventually, I guess,” I mutter not quite loud enough to be heard, following onto the porch, where little town lights twinkle in through the trees.

  “Say what?” Char gives me a head-cocked look. We’re in the solid porch darkness here now.

  “My son Paul’s here with me,” I say. “We’re going to the Hall of Fame in the morning.”

  “Did you leave Mom at home this time?” She rolls her tongue around inside her cheek again. She has heard a warning signal.

  “In a sense I did. I’m not married to her anymore.”

  “So who are you married to?”

  “Nobody.”

  “And where’s your son gone?” She glances out around at the dark lawn, as if he’s there. She runs a finger under her tank top strap, attempting to seem noncommittal. I sniff apple perfume again. That would have to go.

  “I don’t know where he is,” I say, trying to sound both at ease and concerned. “He sort of took off when we got here. I had a nap.”

&nb
sp; “When was this?”

  “I guess five-thirty or a quarter to six. I’m sure he’ll be coming back pretty soon.” I’ve lost all heart for everything now—a walk, the Tunnicliff, a drink, oeufs à la Charlane. Though my failure is a part of human mystery I understand, even have sympathy for. “I should maybe stick around here. So he can find me.” I smile cravenly at her in the darkness.

  Out on the highway a dark car rumbles past, its windows open or its top down, loud rock music blaring and thumping through the silent trees. I can make out one scalding phrase only: “Get wet, go deep, take it all.” Paul could be there, in the act of disappearing forever, to be seen by me only on milk cartons or grocery store bulletin boards: “Paul Bascombe, 2–8-73, last seen near Baseball Hall of Fame, 7–2-88.” It is not a relaxing thought.

  “Well, whatever stokes your flame the hottest, I guess,” Charlane says, already I hope thinking of something else. “I gotta take off, though.” She’s leaving down the steps right away, concluding I’m more trouble than I’m worth, though also probably embarrassed for me.

  “Do you have any children?” I say just to say something.

  “Oh yeah,” she says, and half turns back.

  “Where’s he right now?” I say. “Or she. Or they?”

  “He’s at wilderness survival.”

  I hear a faint cry then, a woman’s high-pitched voice, brief and ululating, from somewhere above. Char looks up and around, a little smile crossing her lips. “Somebody’s enjoying her fireworks early.”

  “What’s your son learning to survive?” I say, trying not to think about the Ohioans right above us. Char and I are descending back through the stages of familiarity and in a minute will once again be unknown to each other.

  She sighs. “He’s with his dad, who lives out in Montana in a tent or a cave someplace. I don’t know. I guess they’re surviving each other.”