by Richard Ford
Jonathan Bell was looking at her when she brought her sparkling eyes to him. He had small brown eyes and seemed puzzled, even concerned, as if he’d been speaking then realized she wasn’t listening. He feared something unpleasant had happened. The normal fear, Charlotte supposed, of a man whose wife had put her head on her hands and never looked at him again. He was a challenge. But she might possibly be up to it.
She instinctively smiled. Jonathan had taken off his Columbia cap and was holding it at his side like a schoolboy who’s been ordered to do that. He had a large square head and thick woolly hair which (to Charlotte) denoted Middle West. “I’m sorry,” Charlotte said. “For a moment my mind just fled from real estate.” In his eyes now, she thought, she looked like a pretty young girl.
“It’s fine,” Jonathan said and smiled back with relief. “I was just wondering. If I buy this apartment, will you have dinner with me tonight?” At that very moment, a small hawk—or a falcon or a kestrel, some raptor in any case—soared out into view in the rising air above them, staring down as it did into the peopled vastness. Jonathan had heard of such creatures living in the city. It had a wildness still.
“I would,” Charlotte said. “Even if you don’t buy the apartment. I was going to ask you if you hadn’t asked me.” In only three months they were married.
IN THE RELATIVELY BRIEF TIME THEY TURNED OUT TO ACTUALLY BE married (two years, give or take), Jonathan felt he and Charlotte Porter were extremely happy. To him, the best part was that he could never have imagined getting to marry anyone like Charlotte—so pretty and spirited and unpredictable and clever and independent in ways Mary Linn wasn’t (not that that mattered at all); ways that always made him feel glad and eager to be around her. Charlotte was much more glamorous than Mary Linn, who was more a handsome 1950s-style wife and mother he had profoundly loved and inexpressibly still missed. Charlotte seemed contemporary, fast-paced, glittery and unpredictable about all the things Mary Linn had taken seriously, worked patiently in behalf of, puzzled over, returned to, and always, always finished. And yet because he was, remarkably, married to Charlotte Porter, it seemed all sorts of new things, ideas, involvements, passions, unthought-of outcomes to the mere fact of being himself were now possible—though insisting on knowing what these things precisely were seemed unnecessary. It was an article of faith that they existed and would continue—even if Jonathan felt he would likely never alter his clear view of himself. He was down-to-earth, not so sophisticated at day’s end, a big, nice guy from Chicago with some brains, who’d made it in the oil patch. Being the lucky man who’d made Charlotte Porter fall hopelessly in love with him would never change any part of that.
Charlotte, it turned out, liked “doing things.” So they did things. Many. They went to St. Petersburg. To Bhutan. And to Morocco. All in one year. They went to San Francisco and New Orleans. They went to Idaho to visit Jonathan’s memory-encrusted, former dream house—owned now by a movie agent. (Charlotte didn’t particularly like it but praised it.) Charlotte, it seemed, had few close friends—who all, however, adored her and were thrilled to see her walk through any door and gained joy just from being around her. There were two gay decorators in Westport—Byron and Tweedy, who they drove to see and spent a wonderful night with. Charlotte had worked with them in the early realty days. There was an aged post-expressionist painter and his aged wife—Jess and Bella—who they visited in Bucks County. Byron and Tweedy had their summer place in Tenants Harbor, where Jonathan and Charlotte also visited—not far from where Fran Dolan had restored his boat and sailed it out of sight forever. Jonathan found a rental near there the first summer, and they’d gone kayaking and hiking and eaten lobsters off the boat and drunk martinis with “the twins” until the sun sank below the forest’s perimeter and the islands, and it grew cold and they had to put on sweaters.
Jonathan himself had only a few friends in the city. (Just the odd sectorings and re-sectorings of life.) There were people at the school he’d assumed an interest in. Plus, a few classmates he kept contact with. Acquaintances and neighbors from Texas and Idaho sometimes visited New York, but he didn’t always see them. And Bailes, the Columbia hedge-fund guy, who’d been his and Charlotte’s witness at City Hall, and with whom they’d gone out for dim sum to celebrate. (Jonathan’s fortune, that night, said, “Today you are the luckiest surgeon in America.” Charlotte’s had hilariously said, “Curb your lust for revenge.”) Jonathan had also kept in touch with one of his old history professors, and he and Charlotte had traveled up to 120th and Riverside one evening and engaged in a long-winded dinner with Sol Hertzl and his young Swedish wife, during which they talked about the new war and what could be done to stop it before the world was consumed. They were all of one mind, although Jonathan did not feel, given his experience, that oil was really at the heart of all that went on in the Middle East. It was much more complicated. The history needed to be consulted—the Ottomans, etc. It went on very much like that.
Charlotte seemed to like everything he liked and everything they did. Marriage seemed like the same good idea to both of them. Every place he took Charlotte and every place she took him they were both enthusiastic about and Charlotte was charming and vibrant and pretty and kind and generous—though sometimes she had a tart tongue when she’d had one too many gin and tonics, and also sometimes a sexy sense of humor when she was among people she knew—men, especially. All of which Jonathan felt was precisely what he’d have wanted, and a thousand times better than he’d ever have bargained for when he’d come to New York mired in grief with his dreams in ruins.
Not that everything was perfect—a fact that gave life measure and a testing ballast. Jonathan’s school in the Bronx suffered a weekend fire that nearly destroyed the building, badly injured a janitor, and was unquestionably set by a former student—a fact that caused dismay among the board regarding the wisdom of rebuilding on-site rather than someplace safer. Everything was finally restored, but the school had had to close for a time. The real estate market, meanwhile, began to show signs that the downturn was at hand—though mainly in the out-suburbs, not in the city where Charlotte still worked and was unfazed, feeling she was likely even to do better.
After a year of being married, Jonathan had begun to realize that as happy as he was, and as happy as Charlotte seemed, he had not quite developed what he would call a category or idea or a system that being married to Charlotte seemed to operate under and fulfill. They went everyplace together. Being around her made him blissful. There was nothing about her person he didn’t like. She was reliable, neat, very passionate, respectful, observant, fastidious, not dependent, and seemed not to lie about anything or have much of a temper. But there was a sense he detected—which hadn’t been true there on the roof garden when they’d first met—that some part of Charlotte was not easily reachable. Not that this shouldn’t be true. They were both adults with dense lives behind them. It simply was true—which had not seemed the case with Mary Linn. Though he conceded possibly he was wrong about that. One day, not long after their first anniversary, he was sitting in the spacious, sun-shot Watts Street loft, reading A Portrait of a Lady—a chapter near the end that begins, “It was not with surprise, it was with a feeling of which in other circumstances would have had much of the effect of joy, that as Isabel descended from the Paris Mail at Charing Cross she stepped into the arms, as it were—or any rate into the hands—of Henrietta Stackpole . . .” It was just at that moment—unexpectedly—that Jonathan found himself thinking the words, “I’m not feeling very married for a married man.”
Immediately he thought again, as he often did, how his life had been with Mary Linn; that it had all along been Mary Linn who’d invented the workable, reliable mind-set for their (his) whole life—even though they pretended as if they’d both fashioned it. This was a truth about himself he did not admire. In fact he felt disappointed about himself.
And he might well, Jonathan believed, be doing the same thing again—expecting Charlotte to cr
eate a sense of what being married meant, what it felt like, what its essence should be. Possibly he lacked a talent for this, or else was lazy and self-preoccupied and possibly even too old.
Charlotte certainly gave no sign of wanting or being remotely able to furnish the categoricals of (their) marriage—which seemed to Jonathan at least provisionally understandable. She’d given no apparent thought to changing her name to Charlotte Bell. She’d said Jonathan could move into the Goldens Bridge house if he pleased, though she meant to keep it. He might not, she realized, wish to do that, might choose to stay in his all-but-new loft. They could therefore keep two houses—one in “the country,” she said brightly (though it was hardly the country), and one a stylish town residence for when that was convenient. She had a freer sense about being married than the conventional.
Jonathan, for his part, had not liked the Goldens Bridge house at all—a flat-roofed, glass and board ’n’ batten deck house perched on a woody, ledged overlook in sight of a polluted stream where nothing lived. The house had tiny rooms, high crank-out windows, low, dim ceilings. It was a cave. It reminded him of cheap, remote Houston suburbs where people drove for hours to get to work and never saw their families. What kind of architect had Charlotte’s first husband been that such a wreck had seemed acceptable? Irish, he supposed. Jonathan preferred the idea of selling both properties—hers and his—buying a mansion overlooking the Hudson in Riverdale, and having that be where they lived.
Charlotte had happily said no thank you. She liked the deck house. She’d lived in it thirty years. She understood precisely why Jonathan might not like it. But she intended to live in it because even though she’d raised two children there and been married to another man she no longer loved within its inadequate rooms—it was paid for, was hers, she felt protected there. It was the perfect size for one. Plus, she liked working from home.
None of which did Charlotte explain to Jonathan with any tone of inflexibility or ultimatum, but in fact with the same smiling, sparkling-eyed, teasing spirit she’d discovered as her way of making Jonathan happy, and that had so far proved successful in all her other exchanges with him. These conversations also included her insistence about going on working (because she gained validation from selling things); the possibility that they might not see each other every single night; and also her conception that their new marriage would be a “do things together” union, which was when Charlotte revealed her view about second marriage and the need to get the best parts of the first long one, while missing the bad and boring parts that drove people crazy—even if, she granted, Jonathan’s first marriage to Mary Linn had never driven him crazy and could have lasted on forever but for her untimely death.
It was this (Charlotte’s) array of attitudes and fervent, positivist beliefs that made Jonathan—alone in his many-windowed apartment, reading Portrait of a Lady—believe that Charlotte was not going to invent a more close-fitting conception of marriage than she already had with the do-things-together and spend-odd-nights-apart scheme. In all likelihood, if there was ever to be a better-functioning, full-enfolding conception of marriage between him and Charlotte—not at all like the one Mary Linn had valiantly, successfully applied herself to for decades, but different—then he, Jonathan, was going to have to supply one for them or (basically) live without. Which seemed something he could possibly even do—since living with (or mostly with) Charlotte Porter was the best life story he could imagine for this stage of life.
In May, when Jonathan and Charlotte had been married a year and almost a half and were going many places but living not really together but only partly, Jonathan began to take note of the fact that he had put on weight and was up to two forty-five, but hadn’t particularly worried about it or felt different in any way. His weight had always drifted—two twenty-five to two forty. His blood pressure was completely reliable. He explained this bump by the fact that he was less active, went to the gym less, read more—precisely the way he wanted to—and to the fact that he was now so happy with his life that he’d begun saying yes to everything. Charlotte didn’t seem to mind or notice. He was a big man. She liked that and told him so on their initial trip to the Woodstock Inn. “You’re a big old boy, aren’t you, Jonathan?” she’d said their first night together. The subject never really came up afterward, although the word “big” was often in her depictions of him. “You’re a big reader.” “You’re a big sauvignon blanc enthusiast.” “You had a big life before I knew you.” Charlotte, of course, stayed sleek and slender and fabulous. There was just more of him to love, Jonathan thought.
But on his yearly visit to Doctor Kramer, there was a callback saying there were troubling signs in Jonathan’s blood work, indicating there was possibly disease in his thyroid, plus also a marker for high triglycerides, both of which would account for his weight gain but also to more ominous portents. They should look further—more thorough diabetes tests. There could be cautionary surgery down the line, ahead of more serious episode eventualities. Cancer didn’t seem in the cards.
The whole flurry of events happened at once. His tests came back uneasily inconclusive. Jonathan went to Albert Einstein the next Thursday. His thyroid was removed with some minor surgical complications owing to his weight and (now) blood pressure. The histology was done and proved to be negative (though a big cyst was found). Jonathan came back home—or “home” to Charlotte’s deck house in Goldens Bridge—on Saturday afternoon, determined to rest up a couple of days or three, after which they were flying up to Owls Head in Byron’s plane for the holiday weekend. It would be Memorial Day.
Charlotte turned out to be a wonderfully tireless, skillful, enthusiastic and somewhat severe nurse. She cooked healthy meals for him—savory soup and organic meat loaf that he loved. She helped him change the dressing on his neck, standing beside him, supervising, as he—grumpy, a bit saggy and unshaven—did the re-wrap in the bathroom mirror. She made him a place on her living room couch where he could nap, watch the Cubs, and see out to the newly leafing trees and the dry streambed and the high suburban sky, and where she could sit beside him and do the analysis on her realty comps. She’d brought movies from Blockbuster and driven him down to the city to have his incision inspected and declared to be healing nicely, the sutures dissolving as expected. Charlotte looked after him, Jonathan thought, in a way he could only have dreamed of. It was just for three and a half days, but Charlotte never grew impatient or bored or distracted or dismissive of the fact that because he didn’t have cancer he wasn’t up and around and back to his own place so she could carry on listing and cashing in on high-end co-ops, condos, and town houses. Charlotte walked around the house, dressed, Jonathan thought, like a movie star, her golden hair sleekly back to emphasize her sharp chin, her perfect, cultivated nose, her small ears, her cheekbones that had turned the heads of people at the Ford Agency. She was tall and lithe and long-gaited and, barefoot in pale blue sweats, seemed to roam the house ever in search of more things to do for him that would assure his recovery.
For his part, Jonathan stayed mostly on the couch, wearing his blue-and-white-striped pj’s from Paul Stuart, eating homemade whole-grain bread and olive tapenade (and the meat loaf), staring out at the revetment of oaks and beeches and cedars down to the squalid stream, wondering what actual appeal this place could possibly have for Charlotte and why marriage and the new life with him, in which there were no money worries, wouldn’t make a big new house on the Hudson irresistible. Through the sliding glass, Jonathan could make out where Charlotte’s kids—or someone—had built a large tree house in the arms of a big copper beech. This construction had three levels and steps nailed to the thick trunk bark, with Tarzan ropes hung down for swinging. It, however, had been allowed to deteriorate over years. The children were in their twenties and in Ireland and didn’t come home much. He’d met neither of them. It all seemed odd. The thick ropes were wispy and gray and weather-worn, and some of the steps had fallen off. A few of the tree house timbers were rotted through. It
was a hazard. The whole of the appurtenant grounds had in fact fallen into disrepair—from disuse—the beds and plantings and the retaining wall that separated the yard from the deep gulley and the woods. There were dead branches in all the trees that could fall and do damage. The house itself was showing signs. Gutter straps, he’d noticed, needed tending to. Soffits in need of venting. An old TV antenna should’ve been removed long ago from the chimney. The flat roof almost certainly needed re-sealing with acrylic. In the dining room ceiling corner there was a scabby-looking brown water spot like a cancer, which Charlotte had had patched but didn’t seem to care about. She, after all, looked like a million bucks, could sell sand to Bedouins, and charm the pants off the Pope. She was, though, letting many other things go but didn’t want anything to change—in spite of having invited Jonathan (sort of) into her life and liking how that was turning out. She liked him. Liked who he was, liked the big oversized, middle western metes and bounds of him, which he’d once thought only Mary Linn could truly love. It was incongruous. In her way, Charlotte was too.
They had agreed—the two of them—about Jonathan’s money. His daughter got a fat trust fund that could easily see her through an entire life without working—unless the world turned upside down. Charlotte would receive a cool four mil if and when he died, though she didn’t want it, she said. Jonathan kept five million as walking-around-town money—living expenses, travel, doing things together with Charlotte. The rest he kept in Bailes’ technology fund where it seemed it did nothing but grow, grow, grow. Eventually the lion’s share would transition to charities—including his school, which Jonathan was considering re-building from the ground up out of his own pocket, since the board had turned fractious, with members resigning. He could very easily stand the repairs on Charlotte’s crumbling house—and would, if reluctantly—but that seemed not something she wanted him to do. So, he determined, he would simply forget about all of it and knew that after not even very much time this would not be difficult.
