Let Me Be Frank With You

by Richard Ford

  “She likes to help people,” I say. “Always has.” Don’t presume the past. Be nice.

  “Second marriages don’t get all embroiled with the difficult first principle questions, do they?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I’ve had two. Two second marriages. Both better than when I married you.”

  Whip-crack-POW! I didn’t see that welling up. Though I should’ve. Remember Binkler.

  “I see,” I say. “That’s good then, Ann.” Her name is bitter in my mouth. For years, I couldn’t speak it, avoided all opportunities when it came up—in particular when I spoke to her. Now, though, I can use it, as I have no reason to except as my instrument. A weapon. “You’re lucky if you’re happy once,” I say. Not a lie. My eyes fall sadly to the pillow I’ve dutifully brought. I wish I could just go to sleep on it.

  “Are you happy?” Ann says, chin mercilessly on the move. She shakes her head as if to make it stop. I wish I could help her.

  “Yes,” I say. I am the Yeti in the forest. A brute.

  “Marriage is just one story that pretends to be the only story, isn’t it, sweetheart.” Her old pet name. Her pale eyes stare at me as if she’s lost the thread.

  “I suppose.”

  She stands unexpectedly, her bearing erect, hands clasped in front, eyes blinking. I think she’s clenching her molars the way I sometimes do. These visits are worse for her than me. I have Sally’s birthday to look forward to.

  “Well. Thank you for bringing me my pillow,” she says, her voice rising, affecting a smile. She turns her head to animate her face like a glamor girl. The pillow is where I left it.

  “I was glad to,” I say, saving a lie for the end.

  “Tell Sally how proud I am of her.”

  “I will,” I say and smile. “She’ll be flattered. I’ll tell her.”

  “It’s time for you to go, I believe.” Ann opens her eyes widely, but doesn’t move her feet.

  “I know,” I say.

  There is no urge to touch, to kiss, to embrace. But I do it just the same. It is our last charm. Love isn’t a thing, after all, but an endless series of single acts.

  Deaths of Others

  YESTERDAY, TWO DAYS BEFORE CHRISTMAS, as I was eating breakfast on the sunporch, a strange thing happened, which was also a coincidence. I regularly tune in to WHAD-FM while I’m eating my All-Bran. The Yeah? What’s It To You? community squawk box comes on between eight and nine, and I enjoy listening to the views and personal life evaluations of my anonymous fellow citizens—as nutty as they sometimes are. For a man in retirement, these brief immersions offer a fairly satisfying substitute to what was once plausible, fully lived life.

  Since October it’s been pretty much non-stop hurricane yak, in particular focusing on the less-acknowledged consequences of the killer storm—revelations that don’t make it to CBS but still need airing in order that an innocent public can be fully protected and informed. Much of the content, of course, turns out to be highly speculative. President Obama comes in for a fair amount of clobber. A surprisingly large segment of our Haddam population (traditionally Republican; recently asininely Tea Party) believes the President either personally caused Hurricane Sandy, or at the very least piloted it from his underground “boogy bunker” on Oahu, to target the Jersey Shore, where there are a lot of right-wing Italian Americans (there actually aren’t) who were all primed to vote for Romney, only their houses got blown away and they could no longer prove residency. The Boro of Haddam, it should be said, barely sustained a scratch in the storm, though that doesn’t stop people from voicing strong opinions.

  Other callers have pointed out a “strange ether” the storm is suspected of having unearthed from the sea’s fundament, and that’s now become a permanent part of our New Jersey atmosphere, causing an assortment of “effects” we’ll all only know about many years from now, but that won’t be good.

  Many, of course, express concerns that are fairly enough related to the storm’s aftermath, but that seem portentous as life signage. The sudden anxiety-producing appearance of the Speckled Siberian Warbler never before seen in these parts (what’s happening?). An old girlfriend phoning, after years of estrangement in now-demolished Ortley Beach, hoping to reconnect with “Dwayne,” who might be listening and harboring feelings of longing about how love broke down back in ’99. One woman with a subcontinental accent calls often and simply reads a different, slightly ominous Tagore poem about the weather.

  Most of these citizen concerns express nothing but the anxious williwaws that snap us all into wakefulness at 3 A.M.—a worry that something’s happening, we don’t know what, but it’s bad; we could do something about it (move to the Dakotas), except we can’t face further upset in our lives. Though we can sound the alarm for others.

  All this diverse palaver is interesting both as a measure of our national mood and humor—neither of which is soaring—and because it makes me realize how remote I am, this far inland, from such worries myself. As I say, nothing bad befell my house when the hurricane wreaked its vengeance. Though I feel that for most people, me included, this seemingly pointless speculation allows us to share a sense of consequence with the real sufferers, feel that something can be “shaken loose” in ourselves that wouldn’t get acknowledged otherwise. At the very least, it’s an interesting “tool kit” in empathy and agency—two things we should all be interested in.

  Yesterday morning, however, as I stood washing my bowl at the sink and hearing the first footfalls of my wife treading to the bathroom upstairs, I heard on the radio what I believed was a voice I knew, and in fact had heard as recently as just days before. This was the coincidence.

  It began, “. . . Yeah. Okay. I’m just, uh, calling to say I’m a dying man here in Haddam. I mean actually dying. And I’ve been listening for weeks to you people complaining and feeling sorry for yourselves about just being alive. I mean I’ve lived with myself a helluva long time now—same shoe size, same ears, same eye color, same nose, same dick dimensions.” (There’s no “delay” on WHAD; we depend on people to self-censor.) “And I’ve been . . .” (a cough) “. . . satisfied with all that. But I’ll tell you. I’m ready to turn the whole goddamn thing in. No rain checks. No do-overs. Since the goddamn Internet got started, nobody knows anything new to say anyway. Last year, I read—or maybe it was the year before—that two point four million people died in the U.S. That’s thirty-six thousand fewer than the year before. You all know this. I understand. I don’t know why I’m telling you. But it’s worrisome. We have to clear our desks and get out of the way.” (cough then a wheeze) “That’s what this goddamn hurricane’s telling us. I’m almost out of the office myself, here. And I’m not a bit sorry. But we have to pay attention! We . . .” Click.

  “O-kay!” the show’s host said, rustling papers close to the microphone. “I guess . . . there are . . . ummm . . . all kinds of ways we can celebrate . . . ummm . . . Christmas together. Let’s get Dire Straits cued up here while I take a little break.”

  I knew the caller’s voice. It was hoarser and thinner—and fragiler—than the Eddie Medley voice I’d known back in the ’70s, when my first wife, Ann, and our son Ralph moved to Haddam from New York so I could pursue a promising career as a novelist—a venture that promptly came unraveled. Eddie at that time had been about the happiest man anybody ever knew. Smart as Einstein (MIT chemical engineer), he’d laughed off an academic career in favor of being one of the Bell Labs wonder boys. His itch, though, was to get out in the world and start inventing stuff and making a shitload of dough. Which he did—a light, high-density polymer bond that kept a computer off-on switch from exploding. Eddie liked money and liked spending it. In fact, he liked to spend it more than he liked inventing things. And once he’d made his bundle, he realized what he really didn’t like was work. He promptly married a tall, buxom Swedish girl—Jalina (a head taller than he was, which Eddie thought was spectacular), and the two of them set off barging around the globe, scattering houses
—in Val d’Isère, Västervick (where Jalina came from), London, and the South Island. He bought sports cars, collected African art and diamond bracelets, had a vast bespoke Savile Row wardrobe. He kept a Tore Holm in Mystic, owned a millionaire’s flat in Greenwich Village (plus his big “first house” in Haddam, on Hoving Road, where I first knew him). A scratch under five eight, jolly as a jester and handsome as Glenn Ford, Eddie reminded me and everybody at that time of an old-fashioned movie director/playboy, in a beret and jodhpurs, talking through a megaphone.

  But in six years of no work, Eddie ran right through all his insulator money, lost everything but his Haddam house, and had to sell his patent to the Japanese. Jalina stuck around to be sure the last dollar was gone, then departed back to the cold countries (she didn’t ask for alimony. She’d spent it all). Eddie came back to his house, down the street from me. He had fresh offers to pitch in at Bell as a senior something-or-other, or in one of the think tanks sprouting up then in what had been farmers’ fields. But he still lacked a taste for work. He’d managed to squirrel away some offshore money the IRS (and Jalina) didn’t know about. He had no dependents. He concluded his acuity about women was probably suspect and that a life without that hair shirt was worth trying on. He took a job for a while as the science librarian at the Haddam Public. And when that became unbearable, he hung out an unusual shingle as the “Prince of Electronic Repair” and made house calls to fix people’s hi-fis or re-boot their alarm systems or program their remotes. When even that began to seem too much like work, he decided what thousands of Americans decide—people who have halfway winning personalities, no burning need for money, no aptitude for work or boredom, yet who have a willingness to think that driving around looking at other people’s houses is a reasonable way to pass a life when you can’t think of anything else. In other words, he became a realtor—at Recknun and Recknun, one of my competitors at the Lauren-Schwindell firm, where I worked until I married Sally and moved to The Shore in nineteen ninety-something. It’s not an unusual American story. Just as there’s no right way to plan a life and no right way to live one—only plenty of wrong ways.

  For a time, when Eddie was back to Haddam in the mid-’80s after Jalina had left, he became an energetic member of the Divorced Men’s group, which a few of us sad sacks started out of a lack of imagination plus spiritlessness. Eddie was keen for us all to do things together—climb Mount Katahdin, take a cycling trip around Cape Breton, canoe the Boundary Waters, attend the French Open (Eddie was inept but fanatical). We Divorced Men, however, had zero interest in any of these activities and preferred just meeting in shadowy bars in Lambertville or at The Shore, getting quietly schnockered on vodka gimlets, nattering inconsequentially about sports, then eventually feeling shitty about life and critical of each other, and heading on home.

  Eddie, though, didn’t own a suffering bone. He clattered on enthusiastically about his departed wife, waxed nostalgic about his growing-up life in the Mohawk Valley, the glory days in Cambridge where he was smarter than anybody and helped the other engineers with their matrix-vector multiplications; then about the flash years when nothing was too good or too much or too expensive, and how rewarded he felt to have had the patience to discover the one and only thing that would make Jalina (briefly) happy—wondrous excess. It was Eddie who gave us all nicknames, whether we liked them or not. “Ole Knot-head” for Carter Knott; “Ole Tomato” for Jim Warburton; “Ole Basset Hound” for me. Even one for himself, “Ole Olive”—after an appetizer-menu item he thought was hilarious in a dockside eatery where we’d fetched up one night in Spring Lake, after a desultory deep-sea fishing exploit where most of us got seasick. “Olive Medley.” As in, “I’ll have the olive medley and a scotch.” Eddie always made me like him by being the irrepressible tryer, something I then liked to think I’d been in my life but was almost certainly wrong about.

  At a certain point, though, I just stopped seeing Eddie. He wandered away from the Divorced Men. He and I didn’t sell the same caliber of homes and were never in jousting contest. He was never all that keen about real estate to begin with. He had enough money. I heard he started a divinity degree at the Seminary, then quit. I heard later he’d gone abroad with the Friends Service and contracted dengue, causing his twin sister to move down from Herkimer and nurse him back to health. Once or twice I saw him riding an old Schwinn Roadmaster down Seminary Street. Then somebody said—Carter Knott—that Eddie was writing a novel (the last outpost for a certain species of doomed optimist). Eventually I met Sally, and we moved away to Sea-Clift, after which I never thought another thought about Olive Medley—so much was I both in and of my life by then, and in no mood to keep current with a blear past of divorce, distant children, death, and my own personal fidget-’n’-drift along life’s margins.

  Until a phone call last week or possibly ten days ago; then a phone message that Sally heard but I didn’t—although I didn’t intend to do anything about either of them. Eventually she said, “. . . I think it’s someone who knows you. He doesn’t sound all that well . . .”

  Later in the day I listened.

  “Yeah. Okay. It’s Olive, Frank. Are you there? Olive Medley. Eddie. Haven’t seen you in some time. Years ago, I think. You live over on Wilson Lane, right. Number sixty.” I recognized Eddie, but then again I didn’t recognize him. He was the hoarse, rattling voice I later heard on the radio. A reedy emanation of thin-ness and debility wheezing down the fiber-optic highway. Not the tryer I liked once. And not sounds I wanted to hear more of. “Give me a call, Frank. I’m dying.” (Cough!) “Love to have a visit before that happens. It’s Olive.” (Could he have still called himself Olive?) “Call me.”

  I had no intention of calling him. I’m of the view that calling me doesn’t confer an obligation that I have to respond—the opposite model from when I was in the realty business.

  Approximately five days later, however, as Sally was leaving for South Mantoloking to resume her grief-counseling duties—her “giveback” to the hurricane relief (a source of growing wonderment and low-grade anxiety for me)—she stopped and stared at me where I was standing in the bathroom, combing my hair in the mirror after a shower. “Whoever that was who called twice last week called back,” she said. “It sounds important. Is his name Arthur?” Sally often starts conversations with me as if they were continuations of talks we’d been having two minutes ago, only it could be three weeks ago, or could have been only in her mind. She lives in her own head much of the time since the hurricane.

  “Olive,” I said, frowning at a new dark spot on my temple. “Olive Medley.”

  “Is that a name?” She was at the door, watching me.

  “It was a nickname. Years ago.”

  “Women never give each other nicknames,” she said, “except mean ones. I wonder why?” She turned and started down the stairs. I didn’t say I had no intention of calling Eddie back. Sally and I maintain different views of life ongoing, divergences that may not precisely fortify our union as committed second-time spouses, but don’t do harm—which can be the same as good. Sally views life as one thing leading naturally, intriguingly on to another; whereas I look at life in terms of failures survived, leaving the horizon gratifyingly—but briefly—clear of obstructions. To Sally, it would always be good to encounter an old friend. To me, such matters have to be dealt with case by case, with the outcome in doubt to the last.

  Indeed, for months now—and this may seem strange at my late moment of life (sixty-eight)—I’ve been trying to jettison as many friends as I can, and am frankly surprised more people don’t do it as a simple and practical means of achieving well-earned, late-in-the-game clarity. Lived life, especially once you hit adulthood, is always a matter of superfluity leading on to less-ness. Only (in my view) it’s a less-ness that’s as good as anything that happened before—plus it’s a lot easier.

  None of us, as far as I can tell, are really designed to have that many friends. I’ve done reading on this subject, and statistics from th
e Coolidge Institute (unfriendly to begin with) show that we each of us devote a maximum of 40 percent of our limited time to the five most important people we know. Since time invested determines the quality of a friendship, having more than five genuine friends is pretty much impossible. I’ve, for that reason, narrowed my important-time-with-others to time with Sally, to my two children (blessedly in faraway cities), to my former wife, Ann (now in a high-priced “care facility” uncomfortably close by). Which leaves only one important slot open. And that I’ve decided to fill by calling my own number—by making me my last, best friend. The remaining 60 percent I leave available for the unexpected—although I read for the blind on the radio once every week, and each Tuesday I drive to Newark Liberty to welcome home our returning heroes—which turns out to take up a good bit of the extra.

  Like most people, of course, I was never a very good friend in the first place—mostly just an occasionally adequate acquaintance, which was why I liked the Divorced Men’s Club. Selling real estate is also perfect for such people as me, as is sportswriting—two pursuits I proved pretty good at. I am, after all, the only child of older parents who doted on me—the ne plus ultra of American adult familial circumstances. I was, thus, never in possession of that many friends, being always captivated by what the adults were doing. The standard American life-mold, especially in the suburbs, is that we all have a smiling Thorny Thornberry just over our back fence, someone to go to the big game with, or to talk things over late into autumn nights at some roadside bar; a friend who helps you hand-plane the fir boards to the precise right bevel edge for that canoe you hope, next June, to slide together into Lake Naganooki and set out for some walleye fishing. Only, that hasn’t been my fate. Most of my friends over time have been decidedly casual and our contacts ephemeral. And I don’t feel I’ve lost anything because of it. In fact, like many of the things we suddenly stop to notice about ourselves, once we’re fairly far down the line we are how we are because we’ve liked it that way. It’s made us happy.