by Richard Ford
“Good-ee,” Sam said, who’d never taken to “Happy Kamper,” though he’d made her rich.
“Just—please,” Esther said. “You’ll be dead someday, my darling. And no one will want to see me.”
“I’d want to,” Janice said. “I’d always want to see you.”
Tommy was going to the door, looking back. “I invited her,” he said. “Or I would’ve.”
OUTSIDE, WHERE EVERYONE PARKED ON THE GRASS, HAPPY WAS alighting. She’d set the dogs loose by letting them pile out over her and rushing off. “Sorry,” she said, reaching in to collect her big straw purse. Blue-tinted aviators, new black skinny “mourning” jeans, a white silk cowgirl shirt with silver furnishings. A silver band holding back her black hair. “I couldn’t think of a house gift. You’re currently out of dogs, aren’t you, Tommy? What was that sweet girl collie’s name. She was wonderful.”
“Jasper,” Tommy answered. “He.”
“Didn’t he die?
“Five years ago.” He took her straw purse just to hold.
“Has it been? Since Mick and I were last here?” She gazed up at him and smiled.
“Longer,” Tommy said and stepped up and kissed her cheek. “I’m really sorry.” He spoke not very loud.
“Yep,” Bobbi said, letting him kiss her without moving. “Behold the whatever. Is there a word for what I am, Tommy? Surviving paramour. Ex-significant-something or other.” Her voice was the sovereign voice. Gin was apparent. Probably in the big purse, violating all the laws of Maine. The dogs were barking at something at the beach, where he and Sam had put in the pit. She and Mick had liked driving drunk, had been avid about it, competitive spilling off many roads, into several shallow ponds, but somehow always missing jail and death. Now, though, was the end of summer. Local cops were feasting on out-of-staters, giving no quarter. Happy’s plates said New York. She’d have to stay the night, or they’d be buying her out of jail at 3 A.M., when no one wanted to be doing that.
“We’ll worry about what to call you later,” Tommy said. “What about the dogs?”
“My children of the night,” Bobbi said. “They’ll be good.” She was moving toward the house.
“They won’t run away?”
“I feed them. They’re not stupid,” Bobbi said. “Would you run away from Janice?” She kept going. “Mick’s dead. Did you hear?”
“We all did, sweetheart,” Tommy said. “Sam and Esther are here. We’re all stunned.”
“I see,” she said. “Me, too. I’m in total shock.”
COCKTAILS WENT WONDERFULLY. JANICE MADE A FUSS OVER BOBBI, who seemed happy to be Bobbi, not Happy, as if everything tonight represented a reversion (specifically for her, not anyone else) to some way of being that pre-dated everything life had sadly become. Janice’s goal, without announcing a goal, was to spin an aura in which Bobbi had just dropped by, and no one had really died, and there were lots and lots and lots of subjects to be gone over—after much too long an absence. Certainly Bobbi needed to tell the four of them about her new projects and where she planned to be through the fall and winter (“Taos, obviously”) and about the famous museum in L.A. finally getting off its ass and pulling the trigger on the acquisition they’d been holding off on for six years, and how she’d just been queried about becoming artist-in-residence at some big state college in Alabama that had recently bought their way into being a world-class art department (people stolen from Yale and Santa Cruz). They wanted her—Bobbi—to be their anchor. What a complete and total hoot that would be, Bobbi said, for a little tsatzheleh from Palisade Avenue to live wherever it was. “Do they even have Jews in Alabama?” she asked. She was drinking the gin, had on her blue shades and new gold sandals, had her sovereign voice up and popping.
“They do,” Sam said. “They’ll make you pick cotton on Saturdays.” He’d been in charge of the music and gone for Dave McKenna, “Dancing in the Dark,” a choice Mick would’ve approved.
“Fuck that,” Bobbi said over the music. “Jews don’t pick cotton.”
“Depends,” Sam said, “if the price per pound is up or down.”
There was nothing you seemingly could do. Tommy understood he was getting drunk on an empty stomach. It was light out still. The tide was almost ebb. The evening water shone black and yellow with the remnants of the sun. Occasionally the big dogs could be spied bounding past the windows. Once, one seemed to have something struggling in its jaws.
Dinner was served at precisely a quarter to ten. Everything perfect. The lamb roasted to pink, with the tangy ginger marinade Janice had found in the Times. Esther had made a vinegar and mustard dressing for the tomatoes and had shaved the corn. Plus, “Bobbi’s Brussel sprouts,” which she’d been assigned to dice but gotten tired of and handed off to Tommy. Some current of tension had at first circulated brightly, then subsided with the food and everyone eating. Sam had later put on lively Brazilian music, and everyone had “come down” from something without realizing they’d been wound up. Wound up about Mick dying. Wound up about something among the four of them—reluctance—that had changed when Bobbi arrived. Wound up about Bobbi deciding to avail herself of sympathy no one had quite known they possessed and could offer, but in fact had realized they could. And would. It was very good, Tommy thought. To think that at their age they had reserves they would draw on and allocate. He hadn’t been certain of that.
But he wanted them to go down to the beach very soon. There, would be a thin stratum of last low-horizon light. Blue and orange fading to greenish dark, conferring a sense of peace and complicity. He and Janice too often neglected it. He would bring down some Cristal and all drink a toast to Mick Riordan, then head off to bed.
Quietly, patiently over an after-dinner Jameson, Bobbi told them of Mick’s last moments in the kitchen of the cottage at Watch Hill, while she prepared dinner and he sat at the table, beginning to discuss a plan he was hatching; she couldn’t remember if he’d said what it was, possibly something he would write—she couldn’t be sure. His speech, she now said, might’ve been a little wiggly from one of his strokes. She believed Mick never for a minute intended to go up to Providence the next day and had elected (if that was the word) to die precisely as he did, seated at the dinner table with most of a martini in front of him, as if that was the most logical “next step” in what he might’ve calculated his life to be. He just was waiting, she felt, until she—Bobbi—could get there and everything fall into place. “It wasn’t really sad,” she said, still wearing her blue glasses, seated at the after-the-meal table with Sam and Esther, up from Cape Neddick. “Isn’t that strange?” Bobbi said, peering at her whiskey as if she were talking to it or about it. “The whole four days after, when I was just there, communicating with his silly daughters, and seeing about the cremation, and finding someone to stay in the house, calling Donleavy in New York, and the lawyers. It was as if Mick was there, and we were doing these things together.” Bobbi nodded at her estimation of what it had all been like, and also of the weight of death versus life. All four of them agreed, though in different terms, that it was probably good. Not good that Mick had died. Certainly not. But good that Bobbi felt okay about it happening the way it did. Relieved (if that was the word, which it probably was).
Esther Parr started to speak on the subject of having been in the room in Brooklyn Heights when her grandmother—another Esther—had died, and the sensation she’d experienced of something, some weight, being lifted, and of she and her mother and her sister Rachel looking at each other and almost laughing. She decided, however, she would not go into that.
“Let’s visit the beach,” Tommy said (he felt) valiantly, but also reverently (why, he wasn’t sure).
“I’m dead. I’m totally dead,” Bobbi said in declining. “I have to feed the creatures.” Her dogs, whom she’d paid no attention to in the last two hours. Occasionally one of them had pawed the door and barked or whimpered, but Bobbi had passed them off. “‘We’re fine,’ they say. They amuse themselves. They’
re never bored. They were bred to hunt lions, so everything seems fun to them.”
“The tide’s in too far now,” Sam said. Janice began picking up plates and silverware. Rustling about. Esther rose to help.
“Where do I sleep?” Bobbi said. She took her glasses off, still seated, wiping her eyes not of a tear but of the dross of fatigue. Her face was naked and frail, her eyes deep in their sockets. She didn’t look the way you expected her face behind the glasses to look. Tommy knew how old she was. Sixty, almost. What was it she was experiencing? Possibly there wasn’t a good word. You wouldn’t devalue it, but not quite grief. Less.
“In the cottage,” Tommy said. “The little room’s all made up.” She’d slept there once—when Mick had been drunk and awful and couldn’t be put up with in the big bedroom, so she’d moved. It was years ago. Other dogs ago, who’d left fleas and broken a screen and chewed through things. Nothing that couldn’t be fixed—though Mick and Bobbi hadn’t bothered. It had been how they did many things. Not looking back so much.
“Remember the last time?” Bobbi said and smirked, fitting her aviators back on, masking herself. One of the dogs barked softly outside, and then the other one. Sam had gotten up and stepped out into the yard to smoke and admire the last lighted clouds. Or possibly he’d sensed something. He knew Bobbi from forever; knew what generally followed what in her patterned behavior, how easily she worked round to resentment.
“I remember,” Tommy said.
“We remember,” Janice said from the kitchen where she was rinsing dishes with Esther.
“You two were such complete shits,” Bobbi said, adjusting her glasses behind her ears then giving her head a shake as if she was waking up.
“Were we?” Janice said, invisible but acute. Sam could be heard outside speaking to the dogs. “‘A little neglect breeds mischief,’” he was saying. “‘For want of a horse . . .’” The rest was lost.
“Oh yes, you certainly were,” Bobbi said, still at the table. “You were both perfectly disgusting. Your poor little screen and some cheap Afghan pillow, was it?” Her martini glass, a third full, sat in front of her. She dipped a finger in and licked it.
Nothing of that need be mentioned, Tommy preferred. It had, though, been a kind of turning point. Bobbi had forgotten, or allowed herself not to remember. He was electing to put it behind them because old Mick had died. It hadn’t been a large matter, though they had not come back, it was true.
Janice said nothing more, went on with Esther rinsing and filling the dishwasher.
“Well, Mick said.” Bobbi wouldn’t be stopped now. “And you know Mick. He said when your hosts act like you two acted—like complete shits—in Ireland you crap in the bed and leave it as a message. Ha! At least we didn’t do that. We were too nice. We were good guests.”
“Thanks for that,” Janice said. In the kitchen, she and Esther were being amused and annoyed by Bobbi. Tommy, though, was simply being present, and quiet—in the dining room, where the candles had worked down, and empty glasses were left, but the overheads were up bright, signaling an evening was over. He felt what seemed to be the hollow of obligation. Which would be to what? An obligation (false) to a time that was now gone, of which Bobbi Kamper was the unwished-for vestige? Or better, obligation to a core of—it must be—modesty? Something that may even have been near his insufficiency as a writer and would outlive him. He’d need to ask Janice once again when they were in bed and the lights off.
“Maybe we all should go to bed,” Tommy said, and put a smile on as a corrective—against something going off the rails. No one wanted that.
“I’ll drink to that,” Janice said in the kitchen. “Esther’s asleep on her feet in here, while she’s supposed to be helping me.”
“Ho-hum,” Esther Parr said. She could be heard exiting the back door that opened down the hill through the woods to the guesthouse. Sam was still fiddling with the dogs, having a second smoke. The door to the hall clicked closed—Janice slipping off to bed without good night. She deferred to her own private etiquettes. It was her house. Everything could be gone over after Bobbi was gone.
Tommy heard Sam in the yard, quoting more poetry. “‘A dog starved at his master’s gate predicts the ruin of the state.’ You dogs should memorize more things. You’d be better companions.” Sam had most of Blake by heart. And more.
“You’re such a husband,” Bobbi said meanly. “How d’you do it? I could never learn the trick.” She’d realized Janice had gone. She could say whatever came to her head. It was how she was experiencing loss—as a freeing up, a setting loose from what few likable qualities she possessed. It was not a question he wished to answer. It was not a question. “Do you remember when you tried to fuck me?”
“I really don’t remember that,” Tommy said. “When would that’ve been? I remember most of the women I’ve tried to fuck—especially the ones where I failed.”
“Oh, and you failed,” Bobbi said. “You certainly did. Cravenly. Abjectly. It was at the Dupuis’—those awful people from New Orleans who took the gigantic summer castle in Westport, and we were all there and had to stay the night. Janice was there. You weren’t such a good husband that night. You were extremely drunk. I didn’t make an issue of it. Though I told Mick, later. He thought it was funny. And also pathetic. Though he didn’t much care.”
“Odd the things that slip your mind,” Tommy said. Perhaps she believed it. Mick always said Bobbi drank gin and began inventing—scenarios, lives, affronts, loves, misdeeds—all of which he then had to live with.
“Mick thought you were only moderately talented,” Bobbi said. “Esther was much more gifted.”
“I always thought that,” Tommy said.
“We know, don’t we?” Bobbi said. “About ourselves.”
“Sometimes we do.” It seemed to appease her for him to share even an unimportant acknowledgment. She may have had few such agreements in these later years.
“What’s the theme of our book, tonight, Tommy?” Bobbi said in the diminishing candlelight, Sam still out delighting the dogs, everyone else in bed.
“Maybe there isn’t one.”
“No?” Bobbi said. “Isn’t that scary? For there not to be a—what? What would you say? A larger consequence to all this?” She leaned back as if to get clear of her own words.
“I wouldn’t say so,” Tommy said.
“I have Mick’s ashes in the car. I’ve no idea what to do with them.”
“You’ll figure it out,” Tommy said.
“Couldn’t I just leave them with you here? I’m not really an ashes kinda girl.”
“No,” Tommy said. “That wouldn’t be good.”
“Ah!” Bobbi said. “So. There is a theme. ‘And in the end the poor grieving girl wasn’t allowed to leave the old man’s ashes because it wasn’t good.’ I give that to you for free, Thomas. You can write it.”
“Time for bed,” Tommy said for what might’ve been the fourth time.
Bobbi Kamper was rising not so steadily. Sam would be asked to accompany her down. “Where will the dogs sleep?”
“In the room with you,” Tommy said.
“Are you not going to commit suicide this time?” She put both her hands on the table for support.
“In memory of Mick,” he said. “It’s my free one.”
“Give us a kiss, ole sweety,” she said. “Make Happy happy.” She took her blue glasses off again. Her face was small and precise, made smaller by time. Not unpretty. He would kiss her. He had always liked kissing her, had over the years kissed her many times. Innocently. Meaninglessly. This would be another such kiss. It would conclude things as well as they could be concluded. He leaned to kiss her.
HE STOOD IN THE YARD WHERE SAM HAD BEEN WITH THE DOGS. DOWN the hill, in the guest cottage, where lights were burning, he heard voices—Sam’s and Bobbi’s—then some laughter. Then Esther. “As if we all didn’t realize . . .” he heard her say. They’d known one another much longer. It was different among the thre
e of them. There seemed to be nothing that connected anything important to anything else here. In the end (which was now) events just stopped. He had a crazy notion—to go to her car, find whatever simple cinerary Old Mick’s ashes were collected in, carry them to the beach and pour them in the pit—if it was still there, where the tide would find them. Return them to the flood, as he did often with cold ashes from the stove in the little fisherman’s shack by the beach where he once wrote books. It would be a better outcome for the old fooler than his mortal remains being left back someplace, overlooked, mistaken for something else, forgotten. Bobbi was not an ashes kind of girl. It was why she’d come. Such an odd thing. And he could always just take them. Only you wouldn’t. His sense of obligation to that core of modesty—its better aspect—forbid that absolutely.
Though he thought, as he stepped inside the house, switching off lights, turning toward bed, that she’d been very wrong—Bobbi—about his and Jan’s incivility when the dogs had wrecked things, and Bobbi and Mick had laughed it off, laughed at them, no doubt. He and Janice had only mentioned what anyone would’ve and had not ever brought it up again. It was a small matter. And hadn’t they tonight admitted Bobbi to their life, afforded her comfort and some small release from her moment of sorrow when she was alone and had only them—not exactly friends, no, but not enemies? Had they not, all of them, done their very best? For Bobbi? And for Mick? For all of them? Which was only, of course, his view, and was possibly self-serving and might just as well be forgotten in light of all—in light of Mick and the moment itself, and in light of how they would all want to conduct themselves tomorrow, when a new day would dawn, and there would be much they would still wish to say.
Displaced
When your father dies and you are only sixteen, many things change. School life changes. You are now the boy whose father is missing. People feel sorry for you, but they also devalue you, even resent you—for what, you’re not sure. The air around you is different. Once, that air contained you fully. But now an opening’s cut, which feels frightening, yet not so frightening.
