by Richard Ford
It hadn’t been so difficult, once her mind was put to it and she could let go of how such things can make you feel. It’d been quite simple.
THE FREE DAY HAD NOT TURNED OUT SO WELL. IT WAS CHILLY. SHE had gotten cold. On the uneven pavement on Nassau Street, she’d turned an ankle in front of Eason’s. Then it had snowed, just a little, but her old boots got damp and her feet felt numb. The little estate shop was shuttered and padlocked for Saturday. The latté she had in Powerscourt arrived weak, though the carvery at O’Neill’s was entirely acceptable. She’d sat at the snug window and watched it snow ’til it quit. She found a scarf for James in Brown Thomas; two shirts and a bird book for the boys (no games); a sheer silk blouse for herself—which James would like. She thought of buying something for Tom—something nautical and funny. But where would he wear it?
A further stroll through the Green in the damp and cold began to feel excessive with her achy ankle, though she made it to the top of Grafton Street and around down into Dawson Street past the smart men’s shops and the fancy restaurants. The tram works were still up. Luas. Lewis. Someday you’d ride to Phoenix Park, but not—it seemed—to the airport.
Ultimately, she walked, ankle and all, across O’Connell Bridge and onto an earlier bus—a direct one, lucky enough. It had all commenced with a startle at eight, and not got better. The next time she’d factor it in, be more prudent.
In her seat, by herself, she thought a thousand things, letting the day climb up and off. When Tom was later driving back by himself, she would be home in bed. They never spoke on the day of. What was to say? I miss you? So, so funny, though, for her heart to go racketing just because she’d got locked out. As if the whole spindly edifice could go up in flames. The grisly details. Some feral creature staring back at her as from a dark cave, eyes burning. What was the shite poem? “. . . What the hand, dare seize the fire?” And yet, how nice the bearded, turban bloke had been. He’d had it all figured. Came with the yob. Such improvisations made it all interesting. Still, he could’ve been pissy.
But now. What was supposed to happen as consequence of just such an indelicate moment as had passed? Some new and sudden and fiercely clear understanding of one’s self? A stern new caution—like a new key? What was the French word? An aperçu? That wasn’t right. But it was all rubbish. Everyone was an adult—excepting of course the boys. If one was expected to learn something, there was nothing. Nothing at the moment, at least.
She was exhausted, as the fall and rise of winter landscape—Dundalk, now—wore past. Almost the sea view from the right side, snow commencing again but gradually changing to rain. There was so much time to be alive; then you weren’t anymore. It was little enough to ask. The ankle throbbed on a bit, ’til she let her eyes give way, allowed the bus—its steady rumble—to soothe her out, so that in a while she fell asleep.
Second Language
Jonathan and Charlotte were divorced but had stayed friends. Charlotte Porter believed that if you married a second time, you had the right only to expect “pieces” of what the first marriage had contained, though you had to be certain the pieces you got were the good ones. Charlotte had had a long marriage—to Francis Dolan, the architect—tall, craggy, handsome, black-haired, dark-eyed Irishman she’d met at NYU, and who’d made his career designing steel and glass corporate cubicles of the kind you passed on the interstate near where they’d lived and raised their children in Goldens Bridge, north of the city. At age forty-five, Francis Dolan had announced he’d like to give northern Maine a try; learn about wooden boats, restore one, sail it to Ireland, later possibly sail around the world. Would Charlotte care to come along?
Charlotte had given this some thought, since she knew sudden, spectacular deviations from the marital norm could be perilous. Francis had always been an agreeable but affectless husband—typical Kerry-man, he believed. He didn’t mix cheerfully with people, including other architects. He treated his and Charlotte’s two children with affectionate but distant regard, yet loved Charlotte—as she loved him. (Though he often acted toward her as if he was slightly surprised he knew her.) The year was 1998—the year of Monica Lewinsky. Charlotte had three years before achieved a broker’s license and done well (instantly) in residentials. Unemployment was down. Housing was brimming. There was no war. Money was to be had. She was forty-four, a tall, easily smiling, lanky, intelligent beauty with a sharp sense of humor and a degree in finance, who felt confident about most everything she did. In her middle twenties she’d been a second-tier runway model at Eileen Ford while working on Wall Street. House hunters often did double takes when she hauled “those legs” out of the car to present a property.
Charlotte, therefore (she felt, entirely in character), decided no. She would stay on in Goldens Bridge for the period Francis was away at sea. She’d look after the children—eight and nine—and pine for him like a seafarer’s wife, sew quilts, make bees’ wax, keep a diary, stand on a widow’s walk, etc. until their life resumed. She knew when Francis came back, he would likely be changed. But she would be also. The children would be. These changes would entail challenges to each other that would require adjustments, new decisions, and lead them (and the children) in new directions together, which everybody understood marriages needed but sometimes could not achieve any other way. She had lived by herself only a little since college, but looked forward to it now. Francis Dolan’s ensign would rise again from the horizon. Then they would see. Nothing seemed to her irregular.
JONATHAN BELL HAD MET AND MARRIED CHARLOTTE PORTER ALL IN the space of three months in 2002, during which time Jonathan bought an expensive loft on Watts Street for which Charlotte was his broker. (She’d reclaimed “Porter” after she and Francis were divorced, when Francis didn’t sail home.) Jonathan had fallen gaspingly in love with Charlotte, showered her with museums and concerts and dinners in the then top-drawer places. He took her to the Columbia–Yale game (he’d played for the Lions in ’71), bought her diamond earrings at Harry Winston, drove her up for the autumn color tour to the Green Mountains, where he slept with her for the first time in the Woodstock Inn and proposed to her at breakfast—to which she surprisingly accepted. They were married at Christmas, three months before hostilities commenced in Iraq and just as the housing market started (though no one realized) to go south.
Johnny Bell was from Chicago. He’d come out of college in the early ’70s with a degree in petroleum engineering, burning to get into the oil business. At the Latin School he’d been the unusual boy—big, unwieldy, soft-muscled but an intense athlete, who performed enviably as a stoutish soccer goalie, but also read history and the Romantics, wrote an excellent paper on Charles Beard and the dispute over economic origins of the Revolution—which won a prize—and also played the French horn. He loved reading. But the idea of world oil exploration, he realized, was his great and guiding passion. He believed if he got rich fast—and he would—he could read all the books he wanted, go back and get a Ph.D. in something, and end up teaching big, cumbersome, innocent-but-smart kids like himself in some good New England prep school, where teaching counted and people came out well-rounded—the way he was. He had no doubt about this.
He’d married a girl from his North Shore neighborhood. Mary Linn (Hewlett), who’d gone to college at Champaign-Urbana and trained to be a grade-school teacher, was a year older and waited to marry big Johnny Bell the moment he graduated. Johnny’d gone to work for an obscure wildcatter company in east Texas—on the lease end (which was his plan). In five years he learned enough about seismology and mineral rights and leveraging, about how to talk to people, not down to them, and (importantly) when to step up with the money. By 1980, he felt he was experienced and savvy enough to go out on his own and had commenced roaming about Texas buying up small leases the bigger companies would later decide they needed but that he (inexplicably, so it seemed) now owned.
It turned out to be a good idea. He and Mary Linn had spent a year in Houston, established a nice life with one daughter
. Johnny kept a small office in Manhattan and worked to keep his operation manageable when everything in the oil patch was going crazy. In 1998, at about the time Francis Dolan was sailing away to Dingle in his restored Nordic Folkboat, Johnny and Mary Linn retired early to the dream home they’d bought the land for and built in Idaho—where Mary Linn believed she might teach school (possibly on a reservation), and which Johnny (who was only forty-six and worth a shitload) felt he could use as a staging ground for a next phase of life, which still theoretically included a Ph.D. in a more useful science that would secure a better world for everybody. He and Mary Linn were Democrats.
All of which would very likely have taken place if one spring morning at breakfast, with impeccable mountain light streaming in over the meadow, and snow still on the peaks, Mary Linn hadn’t sat down with a cup of tea, looked across the table at Johnny, smiled curiously and remarked that she’d probably feel better if she would just lay her head on her folded hands a moment, which she did. And died before Johnny could reach to touch her. She had cancer—the Idaho doctor said—something deep, deep within her limbic lobe. Dying was likely the only real symptom she’d experienced.
THE NEXT YEAR. THE NEXT YEAR BECAME, OF COURSE, THE YEAR OF deep, furious, and murky shadows, of wandering, of unbridled confusions, of panics of such helplessness that Jonathan thought he could not survive. He no longer believed he had any right to have his own plans—Mary Linn’s unfinished, preposterously unfulfilled life and dreams (teaching Indians) represented such a greater, un-solaceable loss than his life could ever rise to—though he still had years and years. For all his oddness and schoolboy calculations that had worked the way he’d mapped out while still a large, studious, self-consciously-driven kid at the Latin School, it had always been Mary Linn who imagined and oversaw their life’s rationales, and who seemed more completely to experience it. Their love. Their intimacy. Their confused fears. Their shared intelligence about most everything. All he’d done was move comfortably into her kind and beneficent world—even taking credit for much of it, since Mary Linn didn’t mind, even liked it that he would. All he’d really done was make money and pay for things. Now that that infallible, magical, irreplaceable world was gone (like a star plucked from the firmament, causing the sky to go black), he had no idea how to manufacture anything resembling a life.
When he met and in short order courted, flattered, wooed, romanced, and impulsively married the glamorous, spirited Charlotte Porter, Johnny Bell had been in town not quite a year. He’d sold his Idaho house—furniture and all—and folded his assets, in excess of twenty-five million, with a Columbia friend who promised to keep him rich and getting richer, in exchange for the use of his money for a fund the friend had cobbled up. Jonathan was in New York only because he had his small office there and, once he’d sold the Meadow House, couldn’t think of anywhere else to be. He hated California, where his daughter was. Texas was not a place he could go anymore. Chicago was over with the deaths of his parents. He considered graduate studies, but found he wasn’t interested in anything and wouldn’t qualify except as an oddity. New York made sense in the way it did to many people—because (but only because) no other place else made any sense at all. Elimination. His understanding of history—Charles Beard—told him this was the course many things followed.
In the city he took a sublet in the East Thirties and put out feelers for someplace permanent. He got interested—which was how he heard about Charlotte—in a school in the Bronx where adult Spanish-speaking immigrants were being taught to speak English and to have a new chance at life. He and Mary Linn had served on boards for similar projects in Houston. Mary Linn had taught in one. This seemed like a fitting tribute. As it happened, the Bronx school was seeking a new board president with business savvy, who could step in if need be with executive skills and run things. Teaching in a private school, which is what Celia, his daughter, was doing in California, was forgotten.
When Charlotte Porter came to pick Jonathan up in his Murray Hill apartment in September 2002, she’d been in the city for two years—serving clients who’d found themselves empty nesters and wanting to leave Brewster, Katonah, and Lake Mohawk for a Gotham victory lap before packing off to Jupiter and Hobe Sound. Charlotte had not considered getting married again, and many times had wondered whether, if she hadn’t met the charmingly remote and handsome Fran Dolan at a NYU student function and hadn’t smoked a powerful joint, she would ever have married anyone. She liked men, had had two relationships since her divorce. One with an intense but too-diminutive brain surgeon, and one with a burly cop who’d wanted her to relocate to Staten Island. Charlotte also felt she liked women as well as men. She’d never slept with a woman and didn’t see any reason she would. But she imagined a time when she and some likable, open-minded female might decide to go in, share expenses, move to Rhode Island, buy a shingled house by the ocean, and start a business selling lampshades. Nothing seemed out of the question. Having her two now-teenage children, Cormac and Sinead, still at home was cumbersome but could be worked with. Though then surprisingly they’d asked to move to Dingle to be with their dad, and had become less conscientious about calling. Which she understood. She had been that way, too. Life changed. They would come back to college. Or possibly not.
Lately—it was around the time she met Johnny Bell and showed him a loft and in three months married him—lately, she’d seen the movie When Harry Met Sally on TV. The whole long thing everybody howled about—the fake orgasm and how cute Meg Ryan was. Walking through her house, the one she’d shared with Francis Dolan and the children, holding now a glass of pinot, turning off lights, closing the house for the night—she’d thought, “That was 1983 (the year they’d married). I remember that very well. Life had its proper ground then. You knew more or less where you were and what, and what you would be later. But now. What word,” she thought, “would you use to say what life was even like now—much less later?” It was an interesting question. Life now seemed to be composed of some strange, insubstantial paper she couldn’t quite keep hold of. Standing at the back screen, peering into the dark yard beyond which were woods where feral animals still roamed, the word “surface” was all but written against the night. Life was that and only that. A surface. That was what you could rely on it to be. Which was all right, since she’d never really thought of it as being very different, even though she’d tried to apply other words. “Proper ground,” for instance. And not that this fact was perilous or depressing or even anything you’d need to change. It was just not the way she’d tried to think when she was married—that life is a surface. Now, though, it seemed very, very true. She was rather sorry she didn’t have Francis here to talk about these things with.
AT THE SPLENDID WATTS STREET LOFT, WHICH SHE WOULD SOON sell to Jonathan Bell, the two of them stood side by side on the landscaped roof deck, facing the direction once dominated by the Twin Towers—now a sunny vacancy. Charlotte assumed the client knew what he wasn’t looking at and saw no reason to be more specific about the place, although in other showings of the flat, listed at four-two, clients had wanted to talk all about the day; where they’d been, who they’d known who died, how you could’ve lived elsewhere in the city and never known anything was happening. They all said that. That terrible morning, Charlotte had been on the phone with her mother in Alpine, in New Jersey. Her mother had seen the first plane pass over and mentioned it as strange, then gone on about something relating to Charlotte’s younger sister Nika, who was a movie producer and considering getting her head shaved. Charlotte had been at home.
Jonathan Bell didn’t mention the disaster. Instead he stared straight off into the newly emptied air as if being here on this warm, breezy rooftop above the busy city made him happy in a way he hadn’t expected, and wasn’t sure what to say or do about it. He’d talked to Charlotte—as they walked through the vacant, sunny rooms—with affection, but in no particular detail, about his dead wife. He mentioned his former dream house in Idaho—and that he�
�d thought he’d miss it but did not. Strange. And how not missing it made him feel both guilty but also unexpectedly free. He mentioned his daughter, teaching in California, and about the school he was involved with and hoped would provide new and decent lives for people who had no reason to expect a new life. He quoted the poet Blake on the subject that fools should persist in their folly to become wise, which was what he’d done to be successful in the business he’d not long ago given up. He asked Charlotte how long she’d done real estate, and where she was from—Alpine—and what her husband did. These were the things people talked about. Men always asked you about your husband as a way of finding out if possibly they could sleep with you at some hazy time in the future—a time that would never come. Though it was Charlotte’s habit to answer all questions with candor, and to permit the client to believe she might also envision a day, a moment in a taxi or an elevator, when an unplanned touch or unexpectedly intimate look might indeed change folly into some form of knowing. The goal was to draw the client nearer to you and make the sale. Male clients understood this and didn’t mind if nothing happened later. It was probably a relief to them if nothing happened. Which with Charlotte Porter nothing ever did.
Jonathan Bell, however, seemed somehow not to be your everyday rich oil gazillionaire. A large, apparently ruminant man in khakis and deckers, a blowsy green polo and faded blue “C” cap from college. He was substantial and attractively needy, and certain about himself. Talkative. He definitely wasn’t handsome in the way she’d always wanted men to be—was too bulky and an audible breather. And though she knew that the Blake quotation was his way of impressing her and of determining if she could be impressed, she didn’t mind; thought it was nice. Better than the way most things happened. She even liked the measured, throaty, chin-down way Jonathan Bell talked, which—Charlotte guessed—must’ve been the Chicago way. It had character and was new to her. So that just in one moment, out on the terrace in the sun and warming breeze where she’d been many times with different sorts of rich clients, she felt unexpectedly good—just being around this man (and understood why his wife had loved him so). Something had happened when she wasn’t noticing. What was it? Perhaps only she was aware of it—since Jonathan Bell in all likelihood wouldn’t be. To her complete surprise she was thinking: “Could I ever imagine myself in the arms of this big, sweet, preoccupied, grieving and probably, finally distant and frustrating man?” To which the answer seemed, oddly, “Yes. Without a doubt or a second thought. Why didn’t I know it when I first saw him?”
