by Richard Ford
Ann presses her back to the closed door, hands behind her. She gives me a purposefully pained and thin smile. I’m irritable. I don’t know why. “Do you real estate people ever really retire?”
“I’m not a ‘real estate people.’ And we do. A lot in the last few years.”
Ann’s wearing a soft, aqua-velour pants-and-top ensemble and a pair of day-glo orange Adidas that have never seen out-of-doors. Both, I assume, have the Feng Shui thumbs-up, as though she was a contemplated piece of furniture in her own living room. She’s also accessorized using a gaudy gold-and-diamond teardrop necklace that husband number two picked up at Harry Winston back in the foggy past, and which she’s brought out to remind me how women were once treated in a civilized world. Her hair, always athletically short, has been even more severely cropped—into a kind of pixie that no longer hides the gray, and which I find unexpectedly appealing. Her whole affect has grown smaller, trimmer, more intense, just, it seems, since I last saw her—sized down near to the dimensions of her girlhood, when I met her in ’69, and we listened to jazz and took the boat to see Miss Liberty and made whirlwind drives to Montauk and didn’t think about jewelry, and had the time of our lives, which just never got better after that. Her skin is shiny though mottled, her facial bones more visible, her glacial blue eyes clear and strangely bright, and her once-soft nose gone beaky and sharpened, as if in concentration. Her breasts seem smaller. She’s, in fact, prettier than I remember her, as if having a progressive, fatal disease agrees with her. Though there is the circular tremor ghosting her chin, the source of her concentration. It may be more pronounced than in November. She is brave to have me here, since I record the progress of her ailment like one of the sensors charting her decline from the prime that seemed always to be hers. Indeed, the whole Feng Shui deal, the velour, the Adidas, the bamboo, the floral prints, the necklace—they all speak of illness, the way an old-fashioned drawing room with damask draperies, shaded lamps, full bookshelves, and a fireplace speak to me of our first precious son being dead in the funeral parlor. The world gets smaller and more focused the longer we stay on it.
I’m still gazing round the over-cogitated room, wishing something would take place: a smoke alarm going off. The phone to ring. The figure of a Yeti striding through the snowy frame of the picture window, pausing to acknowledge us bestilled within, shaking his woolly head in wonder, then continuing into the forest where he’s happiest. There’s not even a Christmas tree here, nor a mirror. Rules restrict such things. Vanities.
Moments of bestillment are not unusual for Ann or me. What can I get from her, after all? What can she get from me? A pillow. (She could’ve easily purchased it online.) All we share is the click of reflex, a hammer falling on an empty chamber, like a desperado whose luck’s run out.
“Has Clarissa told you about . . .” Ann begins to say.
But I’m struck by three things at once, none of which I’ve noticed before. There’s not one photo anywhere—not the children, not Teddy, not her garrulous dad or sorrowing mom. Not me, natch. My face is recorded only in the grainy capture of some camera in the ceiling. The bedroom might have pictures. Or the bathroom. Speaking of which I could stand a leak, but won’t be asking. Old Buck’s Percheron comes uncomfortably to mind.
The second presence (the photos’ absence is a presence) is the clutter of Christmas cards on the teak coffee table—also an issue of the Carnage Clarion, a copy of USA Today, and underneath all, snugged out of disapproving Feng Shui sight, the silver shaft of a putter! Ann still engages in the Republican national pastime, tremor and all, with the bamboo carpet as her “green.” I wonder if she has the pop-up cup that ejects her ball each time she drains one. She used to.
The Clarion headline reads “Life in the Post-Antibiotic Era”—something we all need to be interested in. I wish I could see who’s sending Christmas cards. Undoubtedly the inmates draw lots for who to befriend. Plus Haddam merchants tapping into the money trove a place like this betokens. I see a card with our son Paul Bascombe’s return address in KC. 919 Dunmore—a name he loves. He “builds” his own cards with skills honed as an apprentice joke-meister at Hallmark. Mine this year bore a plain front, inside which was printed “An invisible man marries an invisible woman. Their kids are nothing to look at. Merry Xmas. Preston D. Service.” Ann’s, I’m sure, is something different.
The last room-addition of note are three new oil paintings—of fruit—framed and hung on the green wall (for optimism), above the big cherrywood cabinet inside which probably lurks a big LG for when the Masters gets going in April. One by one the paintings portray: a sliced red apple, a sliced-open honeydew, a sliced green kiwi—all with backgrounds of rustic wood table tops, rough-hewn chairs, crisp white napkins, spilled wheat grains and tempting nuts of varying brown, yellow and purple hues. All could fit perfectly in a suburban ophthalmologist’s office—non-confronting, non-anxiety-producing, toothsome, and straight out of the Feng Shui central office in Youngstown . . . if all three sliced fruits didn’t look like glistening, delving vaginas, cracked open and ready for business. At first glance you could believe they’re not what I say. But not twice. I’m unable to take my eyes off them. They’re far from anybody’s version of “suggestive” (I’m thinking of Buck again and his stiffy). They’re, in fact, an in-your-face, front-and-center manifesto requiring those who enter here to be on speaking terms with what the pictures depict, since the person living here damn sure is, and life’s too short to beat around the shrubbery.
Ann’s just said something about our daughter. But I’m unable to say anything. The least wrong remark would be met with a steely gaze, as though I held certain “views” about how things should be art-wise. I don’t have views how things should be art-wise. Mature women, I know, can get pretty hardware-store candid about sex. (Sally’s an exception.) Years of sexual oppression at the rough hands of men, men and more men finally get brought to an end by our untimely deaths; only by then there’s not much time left to do much more than talk in mixed company about gynecological issues, and hang paintings of glistening pussies on the wall in the old folks’ home. Possibly that’s why many become lesbians late in life. Who blames them?
Though Ann’s new wall art produces an instantaneous non-verbal response. Faint stirrings below-decks; shiftings in the apparatus, brought on not only by the fruit painting over the TV cabinet, but by their frankness as expressions of Ann’s new bedrock reality and straight-on determination to let life—hers, Buck’s, everybody’s, mine—be what the hell it’s going to be. Put color pictures of genitalia on the wall and see what happens to your social life. It may all be a drug reaction, of course, and not destined to last.
“Did she?” Ann’s looking at me displeased, her chin destabilized, her mouth drawn into a tight line of effort.
“Hm?”
I’m concentrating hard on my Default Self. Streamline my utterances. Nothing from the past. Optimistic high road. The future’s a blank. Be nice. I’m not worried about my own rudimentary stiffy. They’re not as prompt as they once were—though never unwelcome. But I’m suddenly burning up in my heavy coat, as if somebody’d turned on the steam. It may be more pelvic pain beginning.
“I asked you if Clarissa’d spoken to you about Paul’s ‘great new idea.’” Paul—he of the mercurial Christmas cards and suburban garden-supply (A Growing Concern is his company’s name)—has decided he needs to “grow” his business into the vacant building next door (a former Saturn dealership) and to open a rent-to-own operation, dispensing common household goods to deserving young people just starting out and who don’t want to go into killer debt for a dinette set, cheap oriental carpets, a veneer bedroom suite, and fake hunting prints for the walls. Rent-to-own, Paul believes, is genius. His sister and I, however, are his silent partners and money bags. And I have done my homework on this. He has no idea of the initial outlay, about how stingy are the profit margins, and how much time he’d spend hiring and supervising repo gorillas to shadow his custome
rs’ houses and trailers to get his shit back when they stop paying—which they always do. I don’t intend throwing away a penny at his nut-brain scheme, since I’m reasonably sure his “need” has only to do with the phrase “rent-to-own,” which he thinks is side-splitting—like A Growing Concern. Paul, in my view, is best off wrestling sacks of sphagnum moss and toting flats of nasturtiums and bleeding hearts to the backs of Volvos, then standing by cracking wise with his female customers. I sometimes think of my son as being disabled, though he’s not. He, in fact, pays his bills and taxes, votes Democratic, owns a car and drives it, is sadly divorced, reads books, attends Chiefs’ and Royals’ games, and manages to arrive to work each day in complex, rising spirits. He merely possesses what’s been described (clinically) as an “unusual executive function.” Thus, like most parents of adult children, I’m often wrong about him. From outer space, his life’s as normal as mine, and it is enough that we love each other. Though if I don’t hurry up and die, I fear he’ll end up sleeping in my living room.
“It’s a non-starter,” I say relative to Paul’s plan—my utterances kept to a minimum. My boner’s stalled out already—disappointing, but a relief. My jacket had it camouflaged.
But I’m sweating inside my shirt. It’s a hundred degrees in this apartment. My heart does one of those juddering things that aren’t A-fib but scare the shit out of you by reminding you they could be—and will be if you live long enough. Possibly it’s not pelvic pain.
“Are you all right?” Ann’s keeping her distance at the door I’ve entered through. She’s giving me a pseudo-concerned stare, which probably means she wants me to leave. Paul’s business plans are come and gone.
“I am. Yeah.”
“You look a little tissue-y. Do you want me to call someone? We have doctors here.”
“It’s hot as a fucking kiln in here,” I say. “Why do you keep it that way?”
“No, it’s not.” “Tissue-y” is one of her mother’s dagger words used to keep Ann’s libidinous father off his game. Unsuccessfully. It’s the same with me. Sometimes she says I look “fragile.” Sometimes it’s a crack about my “destination memory,” and how retirement lowers the IQ, or how having had cancer kills synapses like a roach motel. Sometimes she tells me I look like my own mother—whom she didn’t know. Sometimes it’s that I “lack discipline” (about everything), and that I should take a “genetics” test to see what fatal diseases lie ahead. I have to be on my guard. And am.
“Does Fang Schway prescribe the temperature?” I massacre the pronunciation to annoy her.
“No,” Ann says and smiles distastefully. “You should sit down. Take off that awful coat. Are your feet wet?”
“They’re fine. I’m fine. How are you?” The Default Self allows questions, but only ones for which you want an answer—the opposite of lawyers.
“I’m sorry?” Ann doesn’t hear as well as once she did. The Default Self also requires that I speak softly. Though sometimes I believe I’m thinking when actually I’m talking. Sally has pointed this out. I may actually have said that about lawyers and not just thought it. Ann, of course, knows nothing about the Default Self and would think it was stupid. Which it’s not.
“How are you!” I say, aiming for the optimistic high road. I’m still on my feet, hot as a poker, my heart racing. I’m not taking off my coat. I’m not here for that long, even though there’s no set time for me to stay. I just don’t want to stand here half-eyeing ripe vaginas. Whatever their mission, it’s accomplished.
“I’m just fine. Thank you.” Ann’s chin has become minorly stabilized. “Do you see what I bought?” She takes an appraising, curatorial step away from the door in the direction of the vaginal portraiture, regarding them as if she now saw something new she liked.
“What’d you buy those for?” I say. “They look like pussies.” Lying is forbidden.
“Oh.” Ann gives them a stagy moué then raises her chin in mock re-assessment. “Do you think so? I think they just look like fruit. I suppose I can see what you might mean. Do they make you uncomfortable?”
“They started to give me a boner. But it changed its mind.”
“I see,” Ann says and pretends to fan herself. She and I never experienced boner problems back when. “We should change the subject then.”
“Fine.” I glance out the picture window, thinking of the Yeti, plodding his or her slow way through the dark woods toward Skillman. Snow is sifting through the exterior light cone that brightens the duck pond. No ducks are there.
Ann sits on the front edge of one of the flower-print chairs, arranges her hands on her velour knee like a demure elderly lady—which she is. Boner and pussy talk are over. Her hands aren’t trembling. I feel like a man who’s just committed a violent act in his sleep and snapped awake. Though all I’ve done is drive out here in shit weather, deliver a pillow, and get unexpectedly hot and gamy feeling.
“I’ve been taking a class here called Deaths of Others,” Ann says.
“That’s interesting,” I say insincerely.
“It is,” she says. “Our topic has been whether suicide is a religious issue or a medical one. People talk about that all the time here.” She smiles at me savagely.
“I think it’s all a matter of space,” I say, looking around to find something—not her, not the venereal art, not the picture window with the lighted pond—to fasten onto. There’s really not much here, which is the Feng Shui way. “At some point you just need to leave the theater so the next crowd can see the movie.”
“Elderly white men are in the suicide demographic,” Ann says, “along with young American Indians, gun owners, residents of the Southwest, and people abused as children.”
“I’m one for five,” I say. “I’m safe.”
“I’d never find the nerve.”
“Most people who try to kill themselves fail, but then they’re pretty happy about it later. Nobody’s first choice is being dead, I guess.” We both read the same magazines, though I don’t see an Economist on the coffee table.
“Are you still donating your mortal remains to medical research?” Ann says, primly.
I know what she’s doing. She’s angling toward telling me she’s bought a cemetery plot in Haddam cemetery—near our son Ralph’s grave—in the “new part,” which is no longer new. She and I used to meet there on his birthday when we first were divorced. We read poems to console each other. Long, long ago. Ralph would be forty-three. I hardly remember him. Though I can hear his voice.
What Ann doesn’t remember, speaking of “destination memory,” is that I know all about her plans and have for months. Clarissa told me when she informed me Ann was moving back to Haddam. Ann herself has told me twice. We’ve talked about it—though only briefly. She talked. I listened. I’ve also twice told her I’ve decided not to leave my “mortal remains” to the Mayo Clinic. As the moment when that might actually happen grew closer, it began giving me the willies. The Mayo people were completely sporting about it. “Two out of six change their minds, anyway,” the woman said, clicking along merrily on her computer, erasing me off the donor list. “We manage fine, though. I don’t blame you. It seems pretty icky to me.”
“No,” I say. “I’m not.” This, pertinent to my mortal remains.
“I’ve decided to be buried near Ralph,” Ann says in a firm voice, hands still on knees, looking very pretty. If we knew what made women attractive all things would be very different.
I notice, though, she’s biting the inside of her cheek—hard enough to tighten the skin in her soft face and possibly quiet a tremor, which doesn’t quite work. The drugs she takes may make her do this. Her face looks suddenly despairing.
“That’s a good idea,” I say.
“Where are your arrangements?” She blinks. What else can I do but stand here?
“Same place,” I say. “Well. Not the precise same. But near enough. You know?”
“Okay,” she says. Ann Dykstra is (or was once) one of those staunch mi
ddlewestern females who, to any serious assertion, spontaneously says “okay.” By which she could mean, “Really?” Or “I’m not so sure I like that.” Or “I agree but not wholeheartedly.” Though also, “Sure. Why not.” Which is what she means now. Sure. Why not.
Only, when she says “okay” I catch, as if in my nostrils, the faint, rich whiff of our old life long ago. A whole world in a moment’s fragrance. It is not unwelcome.
Burial plans have now possibly become the new bedrock issue—not fruit paintings, not hurricanes, not whether I loved her once or didn’t. It’s an improvement.
“Sally’s working very hard over on The Shore, isn’t she?” Ann’s thinking of the hurricane even now, perhaps of the things it caused that no one quite realizes. Sally has told her about her work, including the proper use of the “empathy suit”—useful teaching tool in the grief-assuagement business.
When Ann decided to make the move to here, she spent extravagant time and effort to “surrender” old Mr. Binkler to “a family,” since he wouldn’t be welcome in “the community,” what with allergies and all the doggy business. The only taker was someone in Indiana. Ann insisted on driving to La Porte to interview old B’s prospective new parents. But that wasn’t allowed, the rescue people said. The next thing you knew, she’d want him back. It had happened before, with bad results. The plan fell quickly through, and Binkler was left without a port in his last storm. Ann then decided, after much agonizing and crying, to have poor old B “humanely put down.” Our daughter, of course, went ballistic. But Ann did it, speaking of empathy. This, too, I suppose, can be attributed to the hurricane’s fury.
“She is,” I say, referring to Sally’s efforts in South Mantoloking.
“She’s a great seeker, isn’t she, Frank?” Ann smiles at me warmly, no longer biting her cheek. Her chin is at it again. Though my name on her lips has made her happy. I, for this moment, cannot tolerate looking at her and have to stare around the room. It is only an instant—partly good, partly terrible—and will pass.
