by Richard Ford
This, of course, was the world’s worst, most craven cynicism. Not the invigorating little roll in the hay part, which shouldn’t bother anyone, but the demand for full-disclosure when I had nothing to disclose in return and could take no responsible interest in anything except the hope (laughable) that we could “stay friends,” and how early I could slip out the next morning and be about my business or head for home. It was also the worst kind of sentimentalizing—feeling sorry for someone in her lonely life (which is what I almost always felt, though I wouldn’t have admitted it), turning that into pathos, pathos into interest, and finally turning that into sex. It’s exactly what the worst sportswriters do when they push their noses into the face of someone who has just had his head beaten in and ask, “What were you thinking of, Mario, between the time your head began to look like a savage tomato and the moment they counted you out?”
What I was doing, though I didn’t figure it out until long after I’d spent three months at Berkshire College—living with Selma Jassim, who wasn’t interested in disclosure—was trying to be within myself by being as nearly as possible within somebody else. It is not a new approach to romance. And it doesn’t work. In fact, it leads to a terrible dreaminess and the worst kind of abstraction and un-reachableness.
How I expected to be within some little Elaine, Barb, Sue or Sharon I barely knew when I wasn’t even doing it with X in my own life is a good question. Though the answer is clear. I couldn’t.
Bert Brisker would probably say about me, that at that time I wasn’t “intellectually pliant” enough, since what I was after was illusion complete and on a short-term, closed-end basis. And what I should’ve been happy with was the plain, elementary rapture a woman—any woman I happened to like—could confer, no questions asked, after which I could’ve gone home and let life please me in the ways I’d always let it. Though it’s a rare man who can find real wonder in the familiar, once luck’s running against him—which it was.
By the time I came back from teaching three months, which was near the end of this two years, I’d actually quit the whole business with women. But X had been home with Paul and Clary, and had not been communicating, and had begun reading The New Republic, The National Review and China Today, something she’d never done before, and seemed remote. I fell immediately into a kind of dreamy monogamy that did nothing but make X feel like a fool—she said so eventually—for putting up with me until her own uncertainty got aroused. I was around the house every day, but not around to do any good for anybody, just reading catalogs, lying charitably to avoid full disclosure, smiling at my children, feeling odd, visiting Mrs. Miller weekly, musing ironically about the number of different answers I could give to almost any question I was asked, watching sports and Johnny on television, wearing putter pants and plaid shirts I’d bought from L.L. Bean, going up to New York once a week and being a moderately good but committed sportswriter—all the while X’s face became indistinct, and my voice grew softer and softer until it was barely audible, even to me. Her belief—at least her way of putting things since then—was that I’d grown “untrustworthy,” which is not surprising, since I probably was, if what she wanted was to be made happy by my making life as certain as could be, which I could’ve sooner flown than do then. And when I couldn’t do that, she just began to suspect the worst about everything, for which I don’t blame her either, though I could tell that wasn’t a good idea. I contend that I felt pretty trustworthy then, in spite of everything—if she could’ve simply trusted just that I loved her, which I did. (Married life requires shared mystery even when all the facts are known.) I’d have come around before too long, I’m sure of that, and I’d have certainly been happy to have things stay the way they were while hoping for improvements. If you lose all hope, you can always find it again.
Only our house got broken into, hateful Polaroids scattered around, the letters from the woman in Kansas found, and X seemed suddenly to think we were too far gone, farther gone than we knew, and life just seemed unascendant and to break between us, not savagely or even tragically, just ineluctably, as the real writers say.
A lot happens to you in your life and comes to bear midway: your parents can die (mine, though, died years before), your marriage can change and even depart, a child can succumb, your profession can start to seem hollow. You can lose all hope. Any one thing would be enough to send you into a spin. And correspondingly it is hard to say what causes what, since in one important sense everything causes everything else.
So with all this true, how can I say I “love” Vicki Arcenault? How can I trust my instincts all over again?
A good question, but one I haven’t avoided asking myself, for fear of causing more chaos in everybody’s life.
And the answer like most other reliable answers is in parts.
I have relinquished a great deal. I’ve stopped worrying about being completely within someone else since you can’t be anyway—a pleasant unquestioning mystery has been the result. I’ve also become less sober-sided and “writerly serious,” and worry less about the complexities of things, looking at life in more simple and literal ways. I have also stopped looking around what I feel to something else I might be feeling. With all those eighteen women, I was so bound up creating and resolving a complicated illusion of life that I lost track of what I was up to—that I ought to be having a whale of a good time and forget about everything else.
When you are fully in your emotions, when they are simple and appealing enough to be in, and the distance is closed between what you feel and what you might also feel, then your instincts can be trusted. It is the difference between a man who quits his job to become a fishing guide on Lake Big Trout, and who one day as he is paddling his canoe into the dock at dusk, stops paddling to admire the sunset and realizes how much he wants to be a fishing guide on Lake Big Trout; and another man who has made the same decision, stopped paddling at the same time, felt how glad he was, but also thought he could probably be a guide on Windigo Lake if he decided to, and might also get a better deal on canoes.
Another way of describing this is that it’s the difference between being a literalist and a factualist. A literalist is a man who will enjoy an afternoon watching people while stranded in an airport in Chicago, while a factualist can’t stop wondering why his plane was late out of Salt Lake, and gauging whether they’ll still serve dinner or just a snack.
And finally, when I say to Vicki Arcenault, “I love you,” I’m not saying anything but the obvious. Who cares if I don’t love her forever? Or she me? Nothing persists. I love her now, and I’m not deluding myself or her. What else does truth have to hold?
At twelve-forty-five I am awake. Vicki sleeps beside me, breathing lightly with a soft clicking in her throat. In the room there is the dense dimensionless feeling of going to sleep in the dark though waking up still in the dark and wondering about the hours till dawn: how many will there be still? Will I suffer some unexpected despair? How am I likely to pass the time? I am usually—as I’ve said—such a first-rate sleeper that I’m not bothered by these questions. Though I’m certain part of my trouble is the ordinary thrill of being here, with this woman, free to do anything I please—that familiar old school’s out we all look and hope for. Tonight would be a good time to take a solo walk in the dark city streets, turn my collar up, get some things thought out. But I have nothing to think out.
I turn on the television with the sound off, something I often do when I’m on the road alone, while I browse a player roster or sharpen up some notes. I love the television in other cities, the assurance of looking up from my chair in some strange room to see a familiar newscaster talking in his familiar Nebraska accents, clad in a familiarly unappealing suit before a featureless civic backdrop (I can never remember the actual news); or to see an anonymous but completely engrossing athletic event acted out in a characterless domed arena, under the same lemony light, to the tune of the same faint zizzing, many miles from anywhere my face would be known.
These comprise a comfort I would not like to do without.
On television the station reruns a pro basketball game I am only too happy to watch. Detroit plays Seattle. (Reruns, inciden tally, are where you learn a game inside and out. They’re far superior to the actual game in the actual place it’s played, where things are usually pretty boring and you often forget altogether about what you’re there for and find yourself getting interested in other things.)
I go get Vicki’s Le Sac bag, open it up and take out one of her Merits, and light it. I have not smoked a cigarette in at least twenty years. Not since I was a freshman in college and attended a fraternity smoker where older boys gave me Chesterfields and I stood against a wall, hands in pockets, and tried to look like the boy everyone would want to ask to join: the silent, slender southern boy with eyes older than his years, something already jaded and over-experienced about him. Just the one we need.
While I’m at it, I push down through the bag. Here is a rosary (predictable). The United inflight magazine (swiped). A card of extra pearlescent buttons (useful). Car keys to the Dart on a big brass ring with a V insignia. An open tube of Velamints. Two movie ticket stubs from a theater where Vicki and I saw part of an old Charlton Heston movie (until I fell asleep). The flight-insurance policy. A paperback copy of a novel, Love’s Last Journey, by someone named Simone La Noire. And a fat, brown leather wallet with a tooled western-motif of a big horse head on shiny grain.
In it—right up front—is a picture of a man I’ve never seen before, a swank-looking greaseball character, wearing an open-collared white shirt and a white big-knit shepherd’s roll cardigan. The fellow has thick, black eyebrows, a complicated but strict system of dark hair waves, narrow eyeslits and a knifey smile set in the pouting, mocking angle of swarthy self-congratulation. Around his pencil-neck is a gold cross on a chain. It is Everett.
The carpet king from the other Big D is a leering, hip-sprung lounge lizard in a fourth-rate Vegas motel; the kind of fellow who wears his cigarettes under his shirt sleeve, possesses long, skinny arms and steely fingers, and as a policy drinks huge amounts of cheap beer at all hours of the day and night. I would recognize him anywhere. Lonesome Pines was full of such types, from the best possible homes, and all capable of the sorriest depravities. I couldn’t be more disappointed to find his picture here. Nor more perplexed. It’s possible that he is a superior, good-natured yokel and were we ever to meet (which we won’t), we’d cement a sensible common ground from which to express earnestly our different opinions about the world. (Sports, in fact, is the perfect lingua franca for such crab-wise advances between successive boyfriends and husbands who might otherwise fall into vicious fistfights.)
But in truth I couldn’t give a damn about Everett’s selling points. And I am of a mind to flush his picture down the commode then stand my ground when the first complaint is offered.
I take a deep, annoyed drag on my cigarette and attempt a difficult French Inhale I once saw practiced in college. But the smoke gets started backwards in my throat and not up my nose, and suddenly I’m seized by a terrifying airlessness and have to suppress a horrible gagging. I make a swift stagger into the bathroom and close the door to keep from waking Vicki with a loud grunt-cough that purples my face.
In the bathroom mirror I resemble a wretched sex-offender—cigarette dangling in my fingers, blue-piped pajamas rumpled, my face gaunt from gasping, the stern light pinching my eyes narrow as Everett’s. I am not a pretty sight, and I’m not a bit happy to see myself here. I should have gone out in the streets alone and figured out something to figure out. Certain situations dictate to you how they should be used to advantage. And you should always follow the conventional wisdom in those cases—in fact, in all cases. Always go up on deck to watch the sun come up. Always take a late-night swim after your hosts are in bed. Always take a hike in the woods near your friends’ cabin and try to find a new route to the waterfall or an old barn to explore. If nothing else you save yourself giving in to a more personal curiosity and the trouble that always seems to cause. I have gone poking around after full disclosure before my disavowal of it is barely out of my mouth—a disappointing testimony to self-delusion, even more disappointing than finding dagger-head Everett’s picture in Vicki’s pocketbook where, after all, it had every right to be and I had none.
When I exit the bathroom Vicki is seated at the dressing table, smoking one of her own Merits, elbow on the chair back, the TV off, looking sultry and alien as a dancehall girl. She is wearing a black crepe de Chine “push up” nightgown and matching toeless mules. I don’t like the spiky looks of this (though it’s conceivable I might’ve liked it earlier in the evening) since it looks like something Everett would like, might even have bought himself as a final, fragrant memento. I would not stand for it one minute if I was calling the shots, which I’m not.
“I didn’t mean to wake you up,” I say balefully and slink to the end of the big granddaddy bed, two feet from her sovereign knees, where I take a seat. Evil has begun to lurk the room, ready to grip with its cold literal claws. My heart begins pounding the way it was when I woke up this morning, and I feel as if my voice may become inaudible.
I am caught. Though I would save the moment, save us from anger and regret and even more disclosure, the enemy of intimacy. I wish I could blurt out a new truth; that I suffer from a secret brain tumor and sometimes do inexplicable things I afterwards can’t discuss; or that I’m writing a piece on pro basketball and need to see the end of the Seattle game where Seattle throws up a zone and everything comes down to one shot the way it always does. The saved moment is the true art of love.
Staring, though, at Vicki’s sculptured, vaguely padded knees, I now am clearly lost and feel the ultimate slipping away again, bereavement threatening like thunder to roll in and take its place.
“So what is it you were lookin for in my bag?” she says. Hers is a frown of focused disdain. I am the least favorite student caught looking for the gradebook in the teacher’s desk. She is the friendly substitute there for one day only (though we all wish she were the regular one) but who knows a sneak when she sees him.
“I wasn’t looking for anything, really. I wasn’t looking.” I was looking, of course. And this is the wrong lie, though a lie is absolutely what’s needed. My first tiny skirmish with the facts goes into the debit column. My voice falls ten full decibels. This has happened before.
“I don’t keep secrets,” she says now in a flat voice. “I suppose you do though.”
“Sometimes I do.” I lose nothing admitting that.
“And you lie about things, too.”
“Only if it’s completely necessary. Otherwise never.” (It is better than confiding.)
“And like lovin me, too, I guess?”
A sweet girl’s heart only speaks truths. Evil suddenly takes an unexpected rebuke. “You’re wrong there,” I say, and nothing could be truer.
“Humph,” she says. Her brow gathers over small prosecutorial eyes. “And I’m s’pose to believe that now, right? With you ram-maging around my things and smokin cigarettes and me dreaming away?”
“You don’t have to believe it for it to be true.” I put my elbows on my knees, honest-injun style.
“I hate a snake,” she says, looking coldly around at the ashtray beside her as if a dead snake were coiled right there. “I just swear I do. I stay way clear of ’em. Cause I seen plenty. Right? They’re not hard to recognize, either.” She cuts her eyes away at the door to the hall and sniffs a little mirthless laugh. “That was just a lie on me, wadn’t it?”
“The only way you’ll find that out, I guess, is just to stay put.” Out in the chilly streets I hear a police siren wail down the wide, dark avenue and drawl off into the traffic. Some poor soul is having it worse than I am.
“So what about getting married?” she says archly.
“That, too.”
She smirks her mouth into a look of disillusionment and shakes her head. S
he stubs out her cigarette carefully in the ashtray. She has seen this all before. Motel rooms. Two A.M. Strange sights. The sounds of strange cities and sirens. Lying boys out for the fun and a short trip home. Empty moments. The least of us has seen a hundred. It is no wonder mystery and its frail muted beauties have such a son-of-a-bitching hard time of it. They’re way outnumbered and ill-equipped in the best of times.
“Well-o-well,” she says and shrugs, hands down between her knees in a fated way.
But still, something has been won back, some aspirant tragedy averted. I am not even sure what it is, since evil still floods the room up to the cornices. The Lebanese woman I knew at Berkshire College would never have let this happen, no matter what I had done to provoke it, since she was steeled for such things by a life of Muslim disinterest. X wouldn’t either, though for other, even better reasons (she expected more). Vicki is hopeful, but not of much, and so is never far from disappointment.
Still, the worst reconciliation with a woman is better than the best one you work out with yourself.
“There’s nothing in this bag worth stealin, or even finding out about,” Vicki says wearily, everting her lips at her weekender as if it were a wreckage that has washed ashore after years of not being missed. “Money,” she says languidly, “I keep hid in a special place. That’s one secret I keep. You won’t get that.”
I want to hug her knees, though this is clearly hands-to-yourself time. The slightest wrong move will see me on the phone locating another room on another floor, possibly in the Sheraton, four cold and lonely blocks away, and no coat to keep out the slick Canadian damp.
Vicki peers over at the glass desktop, at her wallet open alongside her cigarettes. The snapshot of brain-dead Everett leers upwards (it may in fact be hard to tell my somber, earnest face from his).
“I really believe there’s only six people in the world,” she says in a softened voice, staring down at Everett’s mug. “I’d been thinking you might be one. An important one. But I think you had too many girlfriends already. Maybe you’re somebody else’s one.”
