by Richard Ford
For a while, a year and a half before, I had been involved with Mack Bolger’s wife, Beth Bolger. Oddly enough—only because all events that occur outside New York seem odd and fancifully unreal to New Yorkers—our affair had taken place in the city of St. Louis, that largely overlookable red-brick abstraction that is neither West nor Middlewest, neither South nor North; the city lost in the middle, as I think of it. I’ve always found it interesting that it was both the boyhood home of T. S. Eliot, and only eighty-five years before that, the starting point of westward expansion. It’s a place, I suppose, the world can’t get away from fast enough.
What went on between Beth Bolger and me is hardly worth the words that would be required to explain it away. At any distance but the close range I saw it from, it was an ordinary adultery—spirited, thrilling and then, after a brief while, when we had crossed the continent several times and caused as many people as possible unhappiness, embarrassment and heartache, it became disappointing and ignoble and finally almost disastrous to those same people. Because it is the truth and serves to complicate Mack Bolger’s unlikeable dilemma and to cast him in a more sympathetic light, I will say that at some point he was forced to confront me (and Beth as well) in a hotel room in St. Louis—a nice, graceful old barn called the Mayfair—with the result that I got banged around in a minor way and sent off into the empty downtown streets on a warm, humid autumn Sunday afternoon, without the slightest idea of what to do, ending up waiting for hours at the St. Louis airport for a midnight flight back to New York. Apart from my dignity, I left behind and never saw again a brown silk Hermès scarf with tassels that my mother had given me for Christmas in 1971, a gift she felt was the nicest thing she’d ever seen and perfect for a man just commencing life as a book editor. I’m glad she didn’t have to know about my losing it, and how it happened.
I also did not see Beth Bolger again, except for one sorrowful and bitter drink we had together in the theater district last spring, a nervous, uncomfortable meeting we somehow felt obligated to have, and following which I walked away down Forty-seventh Street, feeling that all of life was a sorry mess, while Beth went along to see The Iceman Cometh, which was playing then. We have not seen each other since that leave-taking, and, as I said, to tell more would not be quite worth the words.
But when I saw Mack Bolger standing in the crowded, festive holiday-bedecked concourse of Grand Central, looking rather vacant-headed but clearly himself, so far from the middle of the country, I was taken by a sudden and strange impulse—which was to walk straight across through the eddying sea of travelers and speak to him, just as one might speak to anyone you casually knew and had unexpectedly yet not unhappily encountered. And not to impart anything, or set in motion any particular action (to clarify history, for instance, or make amends), but simply to create an event where before there was none. And not an unpleasant event, or a provocative one. Just a dimensionless, unreverberant moment, a contact, unimportant in every other respect. Life has few enough of these moments—the rest of it being so consumed by the predictable and the obligated.
I knew a few things about Mack Bolger, about his life since we’d last confronted each other semi-violently in the Mayfair. Beth had been happy to tell me during our woeful drink at the Espalier Bar in April. Our—Beth’s and my—love affair was, of course, only one feature in the long devaluation and decline in her and Mack’s marriage. This I’d always understood. There were two children, and Mack had been frantic to hold matters together for their sakes and futures; Beth was a portrait photographer who worked at home, but craved engagement with the wide world outside of University City—craved it in the worst way, and was therefore basically unsatisfied with everything in her life. After my sudden departure, she moved out of their house, rented an apartment near the Gateway Arch and, for a time, took a much younger lover. Mack, for his part in their upheaval, eventually quit his job as an executive for a large agri-biz company, considered studying for the ministry, considered going on a missionary journey to Senegal or French Guiana, briefly took a young lover himself. One child had been arrested for shoplifting; the other had gotten admitted to Brown. There were months of all-night confrontations, some combative, some loving and revelatory, some derisive from both sides. Until everything that could be said or expressed or threatened was said, expressed and threatened, after which a standstill was achieved whereby they both stayed in their suburban house, kept separate schedules, saw new and different friends, had occasional dinners together, went to the opera, occasionally even slept together, but saw little hope (in Beth’s case, certainly) of things turning out better than they were at the time of our joyless drink and the O’Neill play. I’d assumed at that time that Beth was meeting someone else that evening, had someone in New York she was interested in, and I felt completely fine about it.
“It’s really odd, isn’t it?” Beth said, stirring her long, almost pure-white finger around the surface of her Kir Royale, staring not at me but at the glass rim where the pink liquid nearly exceeded its vitreous limits. “We were so close for a little while.” Her eyes rose to me, and she smiled almost girlishly. “You and me, I mean. Now, I feel like I’m telling all this to an old friend. Or to my brother.”
Beth is a tall, sallow-faced, big-boned, ash-blond woman who smokes cigarettes and whose hair often hangs down in her eyes like a forties Hollywood glamour girl. This can be attractive, although it often causes her to seem to be spying on her own conversations.
“Well,” I said, “it’s all right to feel that way.” I smiled back across the little round black-topped café table. It was all right. I had gone on. When I looked back on what we’d done, none of it except for what we’d done in bed made me feel good about life, or that the experience had been worth it. But I couldn’t undo it. I don’t believe the past can be repaired, only exceeded. “Sometimes, friendship’s all we’re after in these sorts of things,” I said. Though this, I admit, I did not really believe.
“Mack’s like a dog, you know,” Beth said, flicking her hair away from her eyes. He was on her mind. “I kick him, and he tries to bring me things. It’s pathetic. He’s very interested in Tantric sex now, whatever that is. Do you know what that even is?”
“I really don’t like hearing this,” I said stupidly, though it was true. “It sounds cruel.”
“You’re just afraid I’ll say the same thing about you, Johnny.” She smiled and touched her damp fingertip to her lips, which were wonderful lips.
“Afraid,” I said. “Afraid’s really not the word, is it?”
“Well, then, whatever the word is.” Beth looked quickly away and motioned the waiter for the check. She didn’t know how to be disagreed with. It always frightened her.
But that was all. I’ve already said our meeting wasn’t a satisfying one.
Mack Bolger’s pale gray eyes caught me coming toward him well before I expected them to. We had seen each other only twice. Once at a fancy cocktail party given by an author I’d come to St. Louis to wrest a book away from. It was the time I’d met his wife. And once more, in the Mayfair Hotel, when I’d taken an inept swing at him and he’d slammed me against a wall and hit me in the face with the back of his hand. Perhaps you don’t forget people you knock around. That becomes their place in your life. I, myself, find it hard to recognize people when they’re not where they belong, and Mack Bolger belonged in St. Louis. Of course, he was an exception.
Mack’s gaze fixed on me, then left me, scanned the crowd uncomfortably, then found me again as I approached. His large tanned face took on an expression of stony unsurprise, as if he’d known I was somewhere in the terminal and a form of communication had already begun between us. Though, if anything, really, his face looked resigned—resigned to me, resigned to the situations the world foists onto you unwilling; resigned to himself. Resignation was actually what we had in common, even if neither of us had a language which could express that. So as I came into his presence, what I felt for him, unexpectedly, was sympathy—fo
r having to see me now. And if I could’ve, I would have turned and walked straight away and left him alone. But I didn’t.
“I just saw you,” I said from the crowd, ten feet before I ever expected to speak. My voice isn’t loud, so that the theatrically nasal male voice announcing the arrival from Poughkeepsie on track 34 seemed to have blotted it out.
“Did you have something special in mind to tell me?” Mack Bolger said. His eyes cast out again across the vaulted hall, where Christmas shoppers and overbundled passengers were moving in all directions. It occured to me at that instant—and shockingly— that he was waiting for Beth, and that in a moment’s time I would be standing here facing her and Mack together, almost as we had in St. Louis. My heart struck two abrupt beats deep in my chest, then seemed for a second to stop altogether. “How’s your face?” Mack said with no emotion, still scanning the crowd. “I didn’t hurt you too bad, did I?”
“No,” I said.
“You’ve grown a moustache.” His eyes did not flicker toward me.
“Yes,” I said, though I’d completely forgotten about it, and for some reason felt ashamed, as if it made me look ridiculous.
“Well,” Mack Bolger said. “Good.” His voice was the one you would use to speak to someone in line beside you at the post office, someone you’d never see again. Though there was also, just barely noticeable, a hint of what we used to call juiciness in his speech, some minor, undispersable moisture in his cheek that one heard in his s’s and f’s. It was unfortunate, since it robbed him of a small measure of gravity. I hadn’t noticed it before in the few overheated moments we’d had to exchange words.
Mack looked at me again, hands in his expensive Italian coat pockets, a coat that had heavy, dark, bone buttons and long, wide lapels. Too stylish for him, I thought, for the solid man he was. Mack and I were nearly the same height, but he was in every way larger and seemed to look down to me—something in the way he held his chin up. It was almost the opposite of the way Beth looked at me.
“I live here now,” Mack said, without really addressing me. I noticed he had long, dark almost feminine eyelashes, and small, perfectly shaped ears, which his new haircut put on nice display. He might’ve been forty—younger than I am—and looked more than anything like an army officer. A major. I thought of a letter Beth had shown me, written by Mack to her, containing the phrase, “I want to kiss you all over. Yes I do. Love, Macklin.” Beth had rolled her eyes when she showed it to me. At another time she had talked to Mack on the telephone while we were in bed together naked. On that occasion, too, she’d kept rolling her eyes at whatever he was saying—something, I gathered, about difficulties he was having at work. Once we even engaged in a sexual act while she talked to him. I could hear his tiny, buzzing, fretful-sounding voice inside the receiver. But that was now gone. Everything Beth and I had done was gone. All that remained was this—a series of moments in the great train terminal, moments which, in spite of all, seemed correct, sturdy, almost classical in character, as if this later time was all that really mattered, whereas the previous, briefly passionate, linked but now-distant moments were merely preliminary.
“Did you buy a place?” I said, and all at once felt a widely spreading vacancy open all around inside me. It was such a preposterous thing to say.
Mack’s eyes moved gradually to me, and his impassive expression, which had seemed to signify one thing—resignation—began to signify something different. I knew this because a small cleft appeared in his chin.
“Yes,” he said and let his eyes stay on me.
People were shouldering past us. I could smell some woman’s heavy, warm-feeling perfume around my face. Music commenced in the rotunda, making the moment feel suffocating, clamorous: “We three kings of Orient are, bearing gifts we traverse afar . . .”
“Yes,” Mack Bolger said again, emphatically, spitting the word from between his large straight, white, nearly flawless teeth. He had grown up on a farm in Nebraska, gone to a small college in Minnesota on a football scholarship, then taken an MBA at Wharton, had done well. All that life, all that experience was now being brought into play as self-control, dignity. It was strange that anyone would call him a dog when he wasn’t that at all. He was extremely admirable. “I bought an apartment on the Upper East Side,” he said, and he blinked his eyelashes very rapidly. “I moved out in September. I have a new job. I’m living alone. Beth’s not here. She’s in Paris where she’s miserable—or rather I hope she is. We’re getting divorced. I’m waiting for my daughter to come down from boarding school. Is that all right? Does that seem all right to you? Does it satisfy your curiosity?”
“Yes,” I said. “Of course.” Mack was not angry. He was, instead, a thing that anger had no part in, or at least had long been absent from, something akin to exhaustion, where the words you say are the only true words you can say. Myself, I did not think I’d ever felt that way. Always for me there had been a choice.
“Do you understand me?” Mack Bolger’s thick athlete’s brow furrowed, as if he was studying a creature he didn’t entirely understand, an anomaly of some kind, which perhaps I was.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“Well then,” he said, and seemed embarrassed. He looked away, out over the crowd of moving heads and faces, as if he’d sensed someone coming.
I looked toward where he seemed to be looking. But no one was approaching us. Not Beth, not a daughter. Not anyone. Perhaps, I thought, this was all a lie, or possibly even that I’d, for an instant, lost consciousness, and this was not Mack Bolger at all, and I was dreaming everything.
“Do you think there could be someplace else you could go now?” Mack said. His big, tanned, handsome face looked imploring and exhausted. Once Beth had said Mack and I looked alike. But we didn’t. That had just been her fantasy. Without really looking at me again he said, “I’ll have a hard time introducing you to my daughter. I’m sure you can imagine that.”
“Yes,” I said. I looked around again, and this time I saw a pretty blond girl standing in the crowd, watching us from several steps away. She was holding a red nylon backpack by its straps. Something was causing her to stay away. Possibly her father had signaled her not to come near us. “Of course,” I said. And by speaking I somehow made the girl’s face break into a wide smile, a smile I recognized.
“Nothing’s happened here,” Mack said unexpectedly to me, though he was staring at his daughter. From the pocket of his overcoat he’d produced a tiny white box wrapped and tied with a red bow.
“I’m sorry?” People were swirling noisily around us. The music seemed louder. I was leaving, but I thought perhaps I’d misunderstood him. “I didn’t hear you,” I said. I smiled in an involuntary way.
“Nothing’s happened today,” Mack Bolger said. “Don’t go away thinking anything happened here. Between you and me, I mean. Nothing happened. I’m sorry I ever met you, that’s all. Sorry I ever had to touch you. You make me feel ashamed.” He still had the unfortunate dampness with his s’s.
“Well,” I said. “All right. I can understand that.”
“Can you?” he said. “Well, that’s very good.” Then Mack simply stepped away from me, and began saying something to the blond girl standing in the crowd smiling. What he said was, “Wow-wee, boy, oh boy, do you look like a million bucks.”
And I walked on toward Billy’s then, toward the new arrangement I’d made that would take me into the evening. I had, of course, been wrong about the linkage of moments, and about what was preliminary and what was primary. It was a mistake, one I would not make again. None of it was a good thing to have done. Though it is such a large city here, so much larger than, say, St. Louis, I knew I would not see him again.
CALLING
A year after my father departed, moved to St. Louis, and left my mother and me behind in New Orleans to look after ourselves in whatever manner we could, he called on the telephone one afternoon and asked to speak to me. This was before Christmas, 1961. I was home from
military school in Florida. My mother had begun her new singing career, which meant taking voice lessons at a local academy, and also letting a tall black man who was her accompanist move into our house and into her bedroom, while passing himself off to the neighborhood as the yard man. William Dubinion was his name, and together he and my mother drank far too much and filled up the ashtrays and played jazz recordings too loud and made unwelcome noise until late, which had not been how things were done when my father was there. However, it was done because he was not there, and because he had gone off to St. Louis with another man, an ophthalmologist named Francis Carter, never to come back. I think it seemed to my mother that in view of these facts it didn’t matter what she did or how she lived, and that doing the worst was finally not much different from doing the best.
They’re all dead now. My father. My mother. Dr. Carter. The black accompanist, Dubinion. Though occasionally I’ll still see a man on St. Charles Avenue, in the business district, a man entering one of the new office buildings they’ve built—a tall, handsome, long-strided, flaxen-haired, youthful, slightly ironic-looking man in a seersucker suit, bow tie and white shoes, who will remind me of my father, or how he looked, at least, when these events occurred. He must’ve looked that way, in fact, all of his years, into his sixties. New Orleans produces men like my father, or once did: clubmen, racquets players, deft, balmy-day sailors, soft-handed Episcopalians with progressive attitudes, good educations, effortless manners, but with secrets. These men, when you meet them on the sidewalk or at some uptown dinner, seem like the very best damn old guys you could ever know. You want to call them up the very next day and set some plans going. It seems you always knew about them, that they were present in the city but you just hadn’t seen a lot of them—a glimpse here and there. They seem exotic, and your heart expands with the thought of a long friendship’s commencement and your mundane life taking a new and better turn. So you do call, and you do see them. You go spec fishing off Pointe a la Hache. You stage a dinner and meet their pretty wives. You take a long lunch together at Antoine’s or Commander’s and decide to do this every week from now on to never. Yet someplace along late in the lunch you hit a flat spot. A silent moment occurs, and your eyes meet in a way that could signal a deep human understanding you’d never ever have to speak about. But what you see is, suddenly—and it is sudden and fleeting—you see this man is far, far away from you, so far in fact as not even to realize it. A smile could be playing on his face. He may just have said something charming or incisive or flatteringly personal to you. But then the far, far away awareness dawns, and you know you’re nothing to him and will probably never even see him again, never take the trouble. Or, if you do chance to see him, you’ll cross streets midblock, cast around for exits in crowded dining rooms, sit longer than you need to in the front seat of your car to let such a man go around a corner or disappear into the very building I mentioned. You avoid him. And it is not that there is anything so wrong with him, nothing unsavory or misaligned. Nothing sexual. You just know he’s not for you. And that is an end to it. It’s simple really. Though of course it’s more complicated when the man in question is your father.
