by Ben Greenman
“Last night,” said Adam Sandler, “you were about to tell me a story.”
“Yes; I meant to tell you about my friend Jim.”
Jack Nicholson heaved a deep sigh and lit a cigarette to begin to tell his story, but just at that moment the rain began. And five minutes later heavy rain came down, covering the sky, and it was hard to tell when it would be over. Jack Nicholson and Adam Sandler pulled their jackets over their heads.
“Let’s get inside somewhere,” said Adam Sandler. “Let us go to the Foxx Inn; it’s close by.”
“Okay.”
They turned aside and walked through mown fields, sometimes going straight forward, sometimes turning to the right, till they came out on the road. Soon they saw the red roofs of barns; there was a gleam of pond, and the view opened onto a large white building with a miniature golf course in front and a giant oval-shaped pool behind. This was the Foxx Inn.
The miniature golf course had a windmill on the final hole, and it was spinning in the rain. The inn was under construction, and mostly empty, though now and then a man or woman would dart across the lawn or run from the miniature golf clubhouse. It was damp, muddy, and desolate; the water looked cold and malignant. Jack Nicholson and Adam Sandler were already conscious of a feeling of wetness, messiness, and discomfort all over; their feet were heavy with mud, and when crossing the street to get to the Foxx Inn, they were silent, as though they were angry with one another.
In the main building there was a radio playing soul music. The door was open and in the doorway was standing Jamie Foxx himself, a man of forty, tall and handsome, with short hair. He had on a white shirt that badly needed washing, a weathered leather belt, and jeans and boots caked with mud. He recognized Jack Nicholson and Adam Sandler, and was delighted to see them.
“Go into the restaurant, gentlemen,” he said, smiling. “I’ll be there in a minute.”
It was a big two-story structure. Jamie Foxx lived in a corner room, with arched ceilings and little windows. It was beautiful but plain, and there was in the whole place the smell of warm bread and cold beer. Jack Nicholson and Adam Sandler were met just outside the restaurant by a young woman so beautiful that they both stood still and looked at one another.
“You can’t imagine how delighted I am to see you, my friends,” said Jamie Foxx, going into the hall with them. “It is a surprise! This is Zoe Saldana,” he said, indicating the woman. “Will you give our visitors something to change into? I will change too. Only I must first go and wash, for I feel like I’ve been filthy for months. Or else we could just go in the pool.”
“Isn’t it cold?”
“It’s heated! You’ll love it. Or else there’s a row of outside showers. Whatever you want. We have almost no guests, so you’ll have your privacy.”
Beautiful Zoe Saldana, looking so refined and soft, brought them towels and soap, and Jamie Foxx went to out to the showers and the pool with his guests.
“It’s a long time since I had a wash,” he said, undressing. “I love the row of showers and the pool, but somehow I’m always working and never have time to use it.”
He turned on one of the showers and stepped under the water. He soaped his hair and his neck; the water that collected at his feet was brown.
“I’m going to swim,” said Jack Nicholson meaningfully. He undressed as well.
“It’s a long time since I washed,” said Jamie Foxx with embarrassment, giving himself a second soaping, and the water at his feet turned dark blue, like ink.
Jack Nicholson turned and jumped into the water with a loud splash, and swam in the rain, flinging his arms out wide. He stirred the water into waves; he swam to the very middle of the pool and dove to the bottom, surfacing in another place; he went from end to end without coming up for air.
“Oh, my goodness!” he said. He was enjoying himself thoroughly. “Oh, my goodness!” He swam ten lengths and then lay on his back in the middle of the pool, turning his face to the rain. Adam Sandler and Jamie Foxx were ready to go back inside—Adam Sandler had just toweled off, and Jamie Foxx was done with his shower—but still Jack Nicholson went on swimming and diving. “Oh, my goodness!” he said. “Oh, Lord, have mercy on me!”
“That’s enough!” Adam Sandler shouted to him.
They went back to the inn. And only when Adam Sandler and Jack Nicholson, wearing cotton robes and slippers they borrowed from Jamie Foxx, were sitting in armchairs; and Jamie Foxx, washed and combed, in a silk shirt, a leather coat, and new black sneakers, was walking about the lobby, evidently enjoying the feeling of warmth, cleanliness, dry clothes, and light shoes; and when Zoe Saldana, stepping noiselessly and smiling softly, handed out drinks and mussels—only then did Jack Nicholson begin his story, and it seemed as though not only Adam Sandler and Jamie Foxx were listening, but also the men and women in the paintings hanging on every wall.
“I have a story about my friend Dick,” he began. “He was like a brother to me. His name was Dick Miller and I saw him during the summers when my family vacationed in the country. From eight to twelve we were as close as two boys could be. Later, I got him a job in a movie called The Terror, and he did character work in Westerns, blaxploitation, you name it. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s go back to childhood.
“We ran wild in the country. We were like little wolves in the fields and the woods. We scared horses. We stripped the bark off trees. If you’ve ever caught a fish off a dock using bread as bait or looked overhead as birds float by in flocks, you’ll never feel entirely whole in the city again. He went back to New York and I went back to New Jersey, but we both had thoughts of freedom. I liked the city fine, I have to say, but Dick was miserable. As he got older, as he worked as an actor, as he earned a reputation, he went on thinking of one thing and one thing only—how to get back to the country. This yearning by degrees passed into a definite desire, into a dream of buying himself a little farm somewhere on the banks of a river or a lake. He was a gentle, good-natured fellow, and I was fond of him, but I never sympathized with this desire to shut himself up for the rest of his life in a little farm.
“It’s the correct thing to say that a man needs no more than six feet of earth. But six feet is what a corpse needs, not a man. And they say, too, now, that a man of some achievement goes back to the land, that’s a good thing. But even that, it’s just the same as death in life. To retreat from town, from the struggle, from the bustle of life, to retreat and bury oneself in one’s farm—it’s not life, it’s egoism, laziness, it’s monasticism of a sort, but monasticism without good works. A man does not need six feet of earth or a farm, but the whole globe, all nature, where he can have room to display the fullness of his free spirit.
“Anyway, Dick kept dreaming of how he would eat his own vegetables, which would fill the whole yard, take his meals on the green grass, sleep in the sun, sit for whole hours on the seat by the gate gazing at the fields and the forest. Gardening books and agricultural magazines were his favorite. They were like Bibles to him. When he read the newspaper, he only looked at the advertisements that had farmland for sale. And his imagination pictured the garden paths, the flowers and fruits, the trees. That sort of thing, you know. These imaginary pictures changed depending on the ad, but in every one of them he always had to have gooseberries. He was obsessed with them. There was a little patch where we vacationed as kids, and for some reason he fixed on that detail. It was the heart of everything he dreamed of, the core of what he felt.
“ ‘Imagine living in the country,’ he would sometimes say. ‘You sit on the porch and you drink tea, while your ducks swim on the pond, there is a delicious smell everywhere, and . . . and the gooseberries are growing.’
“He used to draw a map of his property, and in every map there were the same things: (a) a house for the family, (b) an area for the animals, (c) a garden for vegetables, (d) gooseberry bushes. Whatever money he got, he shut it tight in his fist. His clothes were beyond description; he looked like a beggar, but kept on s
aving and putting money in the bank. When he got bonuses or Christmas presents, they went into the farm account too. Once a man is absorbed by an idea, there is no doing anything with him.
“Years passed. I kept acting. He slowed down, though he didn’t stop entirely. He invested a bit in a firm that sold restaurant equipment. He was over fifty, and he was still reading the advertisements in the papers and saving up for his farm. Then I heard he was married. Still with the same object of buying a farm and having gooseberries, he married an older widow without a trace of feeling for her, simply because she had money.
“He went on living frugally after marrying this widow. Her first husband had been a wealthy doctor, and with him she was accustomed to wine and vacations and little tokens of his affection; with Dick she got nearly nothing. She began to pine away in her life, took ill, and died. I don’t think that Dick thought for one second that he was responsible for her death. Money, like drink, separates a man from reality. When I was growing up, there was a rich man in town who, before he died, bought honey, spread it over some cash, and ate it, so that no one else could have it. And once when I was on a movie set a stuntman fell under a train car and had his leg cut off. We rushed him to the hospital, the blood was flowing, and he kept asking them to look for his leg. It turned out there was five hundred dollars in the boot, and he was afraid it would be lost.”
“That sounds like a whole separate story,” said Adam Sandler.
Jack Nicholson stared into middle distance for a minute. “You shouldn’t interrupt,” he said. Then he went on. “Anyway, after his wife died, Dick started looking for a property for himself. With the amount of money he had accumulated—his, his wife’s, the doctor’s—Dick bought a property of two hundred acres in Ohio, with a main house, an area for animals, a park that could be converted to a garden, but with no orchard, no gooseberry bushes, and no duck pond; there was a river, but the water in it was the color of coffee, because it was downstream from a rubber plant. But Dick didn’t worry; he ordered twenty gooseberry bushes, planted them, and began living as in the country.
“Last summer I went to pay him a visit. I thought I would go and see what it was like. In his letters to me Dick called his estate ‘Miller Farms’ or, in a nod to the Westerns, ‘the Circle M Ranch.’ I got to the place in the afternoon. It was hot. Everywhere there were ditches, fences, hedges, trees planted in rows, and there was no knowing how to get to the main yard, or where to park my car. I went up to the house, and was met by a fat red dog that looked like a pig. It wanted to bark but it was too lazy. The cook, a fat, barefooted woman, came out of the kitchen, and she, too, looked like a pig, and said that Dick was resting after dinner. I went in to see him. He was sitting up in bed with a quilt over his legs. He had grown older, fatter, wrinkled. His cheeks, his nose, and his mouth all stuck out. He looked as though he might begin grunting into the quilt at any moment.
“I shook his hand, and we laughed and cried a little at the thought that we had once been young and now were both gray-headed and near the grave. He dressed and led me out to show me the place.
“ ‘How are you getting along here?’ I asked.
“ ‘Oh, all right. Great.’
“He was not a bit player any longer, but a real landowner, a gentleman farmer. He had already grown used to it and liked it. He ate a great deal, drove around in an expensive pickup truck, was suing the rubber factory, and felt important when he went into town. And he concerned himself with the salvation of his soul in a substantial, gentlemanly manner, and performed deeds of charity—not simply, but with an air of consequence. And what deeds of charity! He donated money to the local hospital, and when the local laborers did work for him, he paid them not only in money but also in whiskey—he thought that was the thing to do. Oh, that horrible whiskey! One day he might call the sheriff to roust a local man for trespassing, and the next month, if the man hauled wood for him or nailed a shingle to his bar, he’d buy him whiskey.
“Dick’s life had changed for the better, and that inspired in him the most insolent self-conceit. At one time, Dick had been afraid to have any views of his own, but now could say nothing that was not gospel truth, and he made pronouncements like he was a senator. ‘Education is essential, but not every man has the mind for it,’ he’d say, or ‘Corporal punishment is harmful as a rule, but in some cases it is necessary and there is nothing to take its place.’
“ ‘When a man works for me,’ he would say, ‘he comes away treated better than before. That is what it is to manage land.’
“All this, observe, was uttered with a wise, benevolent smile. He repeated twenty times over: land, land, land. Obviously, he did not remember the apartment in Chicago where he had been born and grown up. There was a small town named Miller just east of Cincinnati, and he was happy to let others believe that it was named for his family.
“But he’s not really the point of this story. I am. I want to tell you about the change that took place in me during the few hours I spent at Miller Farms. In the evening, when we were drinking tea, the cook put on the table a plateful of gooseberries. They were not bought, but his own gooseberries, gathered for the first time since the bushes were planted. Dick laughed and looked for a minute in silence at the gooseberries, with tears in his eyes; he could not speak for excitement. Then he put one gooseberry in his mouth, looked at me with the triumph of a child who has at last received his favorite toy, and said:
“ ‘Delicious!’
“And he ate them greedily, continually repeating, ‘Delicious! Taste them!’
“They were sour and unripe, but you know what they say: ‘A man profits more from a lie that elevates him than a truth that may bring him down to earth.’ In Dick, I saw a happy man who had fulfilled his cherished dream, who had attained his object in life, who was satisfied with his fate and himself. There is always, for some reason, an element of sadness mingled with my thoughts of human happiness, and, on this occasion, at the sight of a happy man, I was overcome by an oppressive feeling that was close upon despair.
“It was particularly oppressive at night. A bed was made up for me in the room next to Dick’s bedroom, and I could hear that he was awake, and that he kept getting up and going to the plate of gooseberries and taking one. I reflected how many satisfied, happy people there really are! What a suffocating force that is. You look at life: the insolence and idleness of the strong, the ignorance and brutishness of the weak, incredible suffering all about us, overcrowding, violence, hypocrisy, lying, disconnection, unfelt debauchery. Yet drive through any town and look in the windows. They are calm and still. People go to the supermarket smiling, for the most part. They leave their children at school or attend our movies content to be bothered only by the trivial problems in their day, and never by the larger problems that encircle that and every other day. We get married, we grow old, we escort the dead to the cemetery; but we do not see and hear this suffering. What is terrible in life, which is as central to it as anything else, goes on somewhere behind the scenes, or in statistics: war dead, children in poverty. This order of things is evidently necessary; evidently the happy man only feels at ease because the unhappy bear their burdens in silence, and without that silence happiness would be impossible. It’s a case of general hypnotism. There ought to be behind the door of every happy, contented man someone standing with a hammer, continually reminding him with a tap that there are unhappy people; that however happy he may be, life will show him the shadow of that happiness sooner or later. When trouble comes for him in the form of disease, debt, or madness, no one will see or hear, just as now he neither sees nor hears others. But there is no man with a hammer; the happy man lives at his ease, and trivial daily cares faintly agitate him like the wind in the aspen tree—and all goes well.
“That night I realized that I, too, was happy,” Jack Nicholson went on, getting up. “Just like Dick, I liked to hold forth on life and art and religion. I, like Dick, used to read articles on science and play jazz records. Freedom is a bl
essing, I used to say; we can no more do without it than without air, but there is work to be done, and there will be time later for freedom. I used to talk like that, and now I ask, ‘Why should we wait until later?’ ”
Jack Nicholson looked angrily at Jamie Foxx and Adam Sandler. “I know what you’ll say, that work precedes freedom, that man must earn, that a productive life is important. But who is it says that? Where is the proof that it’s right? You say that’s how things are, but is that really the case, that I need to stand at the edge of a chasm and wait helplessly for it to widen before I ever have the chance to build a bridge across it? And again, wait for the sake of what? Wait till there’s no strength to live?
“I went away from my friend’s house early in the morning, and ever since then it has been unbearable for me to be at home in the city, or even to drive through a small town. I am oppressed by that peace and quiet; I am afraid to look at the windows, for there is no spectacle more painful to me now than the sight of a happy family sitting round the table. I am old and am not fit for the struggle; I am not even capable of hatred; I can only grieve inwardly, feel irritated and vexed; but at night my head is hot from the rush of ideas, and I cannot sleep. I wish I was young!”
Jack Nicholson walked backward and forward in excitement, and repeated: “I wish I was young! I wish I was young!”
He suddenly went up to Jamie Foxx and began pressing first one of his hands and then the other.
“Man,” he said in an imploring voice, “don’t be calm and contented, don’t let yourself be put to sleep! While you are young, strong, confident, don’t let yourself forget to do good, and to think about doing good, and to think about how much of life does us no good. There is no happiness, and there ought not to be; but if there is a meaning and an object in life, that meaning and object is not our happiness, but something greater and more rational. Do good!”