The Lay of the Land

by Richard Ford

  “Good talking to ya,” he says. His taller, more threatening friend looks straight at me as he steps past, but then seems embarrassed and diverts his eyes.

  “Remember what we talked about,” Lester shouts as they head toward the stairs.

  “You’re already on the list,” the bald guy’s stairwell voice says as the metal door clanks open and their footfalls and muttering voices grow soft, leaving me alone with Lester.

  Mike hasn’t arrived. I stare at Lester’s satchel-ass behind the bar as if it foretold a mystery. He glances around at me (I’m still queasy after my Bob Butts set-to). He has put on tortoiseshell-framed glasses and his practically chinless face is hostile, as if he’s just before invoking his right to refuse to serve anyone. I could use the pisser. Once it was by the exit, but the old smoothed brass MEN plaque is gone and the wall’s been bricked up. The gents must be upstairs in the inn.

  “Who’dju waste your vote on?” Lester says. I transfer my stare from trousers seat to the plastic Christmas tree on the backbar. I’m unwilling to leave till Mike gets here.

  “I voted for Gore.” The sound of these four words makes me almost want to burst out laughing. Except I feel so shitty.

  Lester bellies up to the bar in front of me. His frayed gray-white shirt bears tiny dark specks of tomato juice on its front. His black bartender trousers could use fumigating. He lays his big left hand, the one with the Haddam HS ring on it, palm-down on the eurathaned compass of the bar. The ring’s H crest is bracketed by two tiny rearing stallions on either side, with the numeral 19 below one stallion, and 48 the other. I peer at Lester’s fingers, which promise prophesy. He uses his other index finger to point toward his long left thumb. “Let me show you something,” he says, sinister, matter-of-fact, staring down at his own fingers. “This is your Russian. This next one’s your spic. This one’s your African. This last one’s your Arab or your sand nigger—whichever. You got your choice.” Lester raises his eyes to me coldly, smiling as if he was passing a terrible sentence.

  “My choice for what?”

  “For what language you want to learn when you vote for fuckin’ Gore. He’s givin’ the country away, like the other guy, except his dick got in his zipper.” Lester, as he did earlier, nibbles his lip—but as though he might punch me. “You probably respect my opinion, don’t you? That’s what you guys do. You respect everybody’s fuckin’ opinion. Except you can’t respect everybody’s opinion.” Lester has made a brawler’s fist out of his prophetic hand and leans on it to draw closer to me over the bar. Vile, minty fixative smell—something he’s been told to use when he meets the public—has been adulterated by an acrid steam of hate. It would make me nauseated if I didn’t think Lester was about to assault me.

  “No,” I say. “I don’t respect your opinion.” My voice, even to me, lacks determination. I stand back a step. “I don’t respect your opinion at all.”

  “Oh. Okay.” Lester smiles more broadly but keeps on staring hate at me. “I thought you thought everybody was just like everybody else, everybody equal. All of us peas in a fuckin’ pod.”

  It is what I think, but I won’t be able to explain that now. Precisely at this flash point—and surprisingly—Mike walks out of the stairwell and through the door of the Johnny Appleseed, looking like a happy little middle-manager, in his mustard blazer and Italian tassel-loafers, though he has the spontaneous good sense to halt under the red EXIT as if something was about to combust. It may.

  “It is what I think,” I say, and feel stupid. Lester’s eye shifts contemptuously to Mike, who looks disheartened but is, of course, smiling. “And I think you’re full of shit!” I say this too harshly and somehow begin to lose my balance on the tumbled-over bar stool I haven’t had a chance to put back upright. I am falling yet again.

  “Is the midget a friend of yours now?” Lester sneers, but his eyes stay nastily on Mike, object of all he holds loathsome, treacherous and wrong. The element. The thing to be extirpated.

  I feel hands on my shoulder and lumbar region. I am now not falling (thank God). Mike has moved quickly forward and kept me mostly upright. “He is my friend,” I say, and accidentally kick the bar stool against the brass foot rail with a loud clanging.

  Lester just grimly watches the two of us teetering around the floor like marionettes. “Get out,” he snarls, “and take your coolie with you.” Lester is an old man, possibly seventy. But meanness and bile have made him feel good, able to take an honest pleasure in the world. Old Huxley was right: stranger than we can know.

  “I will.” I’m pushing against Mike with my left arm, urging him toward the exit. He has yet to make a noise. What a surprise all this must be. “And I’ll never come in this shithole again,” I say. “I used to like this place. You’d have been a lot better off if you’d sold your mother’s house and moved to Arizona.” Why I say these things—other than that they’re true—I can’t tell you. You rarely get the exit line you deserve.

  “Blow it out your ass, you fag,” Lester says. “I hope you get AIDS.” He scowls, as if these weren’t exactly the words he wanted to say, either. Though he’s said them now and ruined his good mood. He turns sideways and looks back up at the TV as we meet the cold air awaiting us in the stairwell. A hockey game is on again, men skating in circles on white ice. The sound comes on, an organ playing a lively carnival air. Lester glances our way to make sure we’re beating it, then turns the volume up louder for a little peace.

  Up on the damp sidewalk bordering the Square, white HPD sawhorses have been established along the Pilgrim Interpretive Center’s wattle fence so that during Pilgrim business hours pedestrians can stand and observe what Pilgrim life was once all about and hear Pilgrims deliver soliloquies. A youngish boy-girl couple in identical clear plastic jackets and rain pants stands peering over into the impoundment, shining a jumbo flashlight across the ghostly farm yard. The young husband’s pointing things out to the young wife in a plummy English voice that knows everything about everything. They’ve let their white Shihtzu, in its little red sweater, go spiriting around inside the mucked-up yard, rooting the ground and pissing on things. “Ser-gei?” the husband says, using his most obliging voice. “Look at him, darling, he thinks this is all brilliant.” “Isn’t he funny? He’s so funny,” his young wife says. “Those hungry buggers would probably eat him,” the young man observes. “Probab-lee,” the wife says. “Come along, Ser-gei, it’s 2000, old man, time to go home, time to go home.”

  Mike and I cross the shadowed Square to my car, parked in front of Rizutto’s. Mike still has said nothing, acknowledging that I don’t want to talk either. A Buddhist can nose out disharmony like a beagle scenting a bunny. I assume he’s micromanaging his private force fields, better to interface with mine on the ride home.

  All the Square’s pricey shops are closed at seven o’clock except for the liquor store, where a welcoming yellow warmth shines out, and the Hindu proprietor, Mr. Adile, stands at his white-mullioned front window, hands to the glass, staring across at the August, where few guest rooms are lit. In steel indifference to the holiday retail frenzy elsewhere, nothing stays open late in Haddam except the liquor store. “Let ’em go to the mall if they need hemorrhoidal cream so bad.” Shopkeepers trundle home to cocktails and shepherd’s pie once the sun goes past the tree line (4:15 since October), leaving the streets with a bad-for-business five o’clock shadow.

  Up on Seminary, where I cruised barely an hour ago, the news crawl at United Jersey flows crisply along. The stoplight has switched to blinking yellow. The Haddam gang element has skittered home to their science projects and math homework, greasing the ways for Dartmouth and Penn. The crèche is up and operating on the First Prez lawn—rotating three-color lights, red to green to yellow, brightening the ceramic wise men, who, I see, are dressed as up-to-date white men, wearing casual clothes you’d wear to the library, and not as Arabs in burnooses and beards. Work, I suspect, continues apace at the hospital—where someone got blottoed today. Ann Dykstr
a’s home, musing on things. Marguerite’s feeling better about what’s not worth confessing. And Ernie McAuliffe’s in the ground. Altogether, it’s been an eventful though not fulfilling day to kick off a hopeful season. The Permanent Period needs to resurge, take charge, put today behind me, where it belongs.

  In a moment that alarms me, I realize I haven’t pissed and that I have to—so bad, my eyes water and my front teeth hurt. I should’ve gone upstairs in the Appleseed, though it would’ve meant beseeching Lester and letting him savor the spectacle of human suffering. “Hold it!” I say. Mike halts and looks startled, his little monk’s face absorbing the streetlamp light. Good news? Bad news? More unvirtuous thoughts.

  My car would make for good cover and has many times since the summer—on dark side streets and alleys, in garbage-y roadside turn-outs, behind 7-Elevens, Wawas, Food Giants and Holiday Inn, Jrs. But the Square’s too exposed, and I have to step hurriedly into the darkened Colonial entryway of the Antiquarian Book Nook—ghostly shelving within, out-of-print, never-read Daphne du Mauriers and John O’Haras in vellum. Here I press in close to the molded white door flutings, unzip and unfurl, casting a pained look back up the side street toward the Pilgrim farm, hoping no one will notice. Mike is plainly shocked, and has turned away, pretending to scrutinize books in the Book Nook window. He knows I do this but has never witnessed it.

  I let go (at the last survivable moment) with as much containment as I can manage, straight onto the bookshop door and down to its corners onto the pavement—vast, warm tidal relief engulfing me, all fear I might drain into my pants exchanged in an instant for full, florid confidence that all problems can really be addressed and solved, tomorrow’s another day, I’m alive and vibrant, it’s clear sailing from here on out. All purchased at the small cost of peeing in a doorway like a bum, in the town I used to call home and with the cringing knowledge that I could get arrested for doing it.

  Mike coughs a loud stage cough, clears his throat in a way he never does. “Car coming, car coming,” he says, soft-but-agitated. I hear girdering tires, a throaty V-8 murmur, the two-way crackle in the night, the familiar female voice directing, “Twenty-six. See the man at 248 Monroe. Possible 103-19. Two adults.”

  “Coming,” Mike says in a stifled voice.

  There’s never very much and I’ve almost done it, though my unit’s out and not easily crammed back in tight quarters. I crouch, knees-in to the door frame, piss circling my shoes. I cup my two hands, nose to the door glass the way Mr. Adile peered out from the liquor store window, and stare fiercely in with all my might—dick out, unattended and drafty. I’m hoping my posture and the unlikelihood that I’m actually doing what I’m doing will suppress all prowl-car attention, and that I won’t be forced by someone shining a hot seal beam to turn around full-flag and set in motion all I’d set in motion, which would be more than I could put up with. Warm urine aroma wafts upward. My poor flesh has recoiled, my heart slowed by the cold pane against my forehead and hands. The Book Nook interior is silent, dark. My breathing shallows. I wait. Count seconds…5, 8, 11, 13, 16, 20. I hear, but don’t see, the cruiser surge and speed up, feel the motor-thrill and the radio-crackle pulse into my hams. And then it’s past. Mike, my Tibetan lookout, says, “They’re gone. Okay. No worries.” I tuck away, zip up quick, take a step back, feel cold on my sweated, battered neck, cheek and ears. I might be okay now. Might be okay. No worries. Clear sailing. All set.

  Mike sits in motionless, ecclesiastical silence while I drive us home—Route 1 to 295 to NJ 33, skirt the Trenton mall tie-ups, then around to bee-line 195, to the Garden State toward Toms River. Cold rain has started again, then stopped, then started. The temperature’s at 31, the road surface possibly coated with invisible ice. My suede shoes, I regret, smell hotly of urine.

  Mike would’ve understood little of events at the Appleseed, only the last part, which seemed (mysteriously) concerned with him. And like any good Buddhist, he’s decided the less made of negativity, the better. For all I know, he could be meditating. Anger is just attachment to the cycle of birth and death, while we live in thick darkness that teaches that all phenomena (such as myself) have inherent existence, and we must therefore distinguish between a rope and a snake or else be a dirty vase turned upside down and unable to gain knowledge. This was all in the book Mike left on my desk after my Mayo procedure. The Road to the Open Heart. Giving it to me represents his belief that I basically appreciate such malarkey, and that one of the reasons we get along so well and that he’s become a fireball real estate agent is, again, that—due to my being “pretty spiritual” in a secular, pedestrian, all-American sort of way—we see many things the same. Namely, that few outcomes are completely satisfactory, it’s better to make people happy—even if you have to lie—rather than to harm them and make them sad, and we should all be trying to make a contribution.

  The Road to the Open Heart is a big, showy coffee-table slab chocked full of idealized, consciousness-expanding color photographs of Tibet and snowy mountains and temples and shiny-headed teenage monks in yellow-and-red outfits, plus plenty of informal snapshots of the Dalai Lama grinning like a happy politician while meeting world leaders and generally having the time of his life. Supposedly, the little man-god wrote the whole book himself, though Mike’s admitted he probably didn’t have time to “write” write it—one of the lies that make you feel better. Though it doesn’t matter since the book is full of his most important teachings boiled down to bite-size paragraphs with easy-to-digest chapter headings even somebody with cancer could memorize, which was what the monks were doing: “The Path to Wisdom.” “The Question We Should All Ask Ourselves.” “The Sweet Taste of Bodhicitta.” “The Middle Way.” Mike left a bookmark at page 157, where the diminutive holiness talks ominously about “death and clear light,” followed by some more upbeat formulations about the “earth constituent, the water constituent, the fire constituent, and the wind constituent,” followed by another photograph of the very view you’ve just been promised—if you’re spiritual enough: an immaculate dawn sky in autumn. At this moment, the book’s in a stack on my bedside table, and on one of these last balmy autumn days I intend to take it down to the ocean and send it off, since in my view the Lama’s teachings all have the ring of the un-new, over-parsed and vaguely corporate about them—which, of course, is thought to be good, and a famous tenet of the Middle Way. What I needed, though, post-Mayo, was the New and Completely Unfamiliar Way. To me, the DL’s wisdom also seemed only truly practicable if your intention was to become a monk and live in Tibet, where these things apparently come easy, whereas I just wanted to go on being a real estate agent on the Jersey Shore and figure out how to get around a case of prostate cancer.

  Mike and I did talk about The Road to the Open Heart in the office one day while combing through some damage-deposit receipt forms to identify skippers—although our talk mainly concerned my son Ralph and was to the point that there are many mysteries and phenomena that can’t be apprehended through sense or reason, and that Ralph might have a current existence as a mystery. It was then that he told me about young people who die young becoming masters who teach us about impermanence—which, as I said, I can buy, the Permanent Period not entirely withstanding.

  Still, you can take the Middle Way only so far. Asserting yourself may indeed lead to angry disappointment—the DL’s view—and anger only harms the angry and karma produces bad vibes in this life and worse ones in the next, where you could end up as a chicken or a professor in a small New England college. But the Middle Way can just as easily be the coward’s way out. And based on what Mike probably heard back in the Johnny Appleseed, I’d feel better about him if he’d get in a lather about being called a coolie, insist we turn around, drive back to Haddam and kick some Lester ass, then head home laughing about it—instead of just sitting there in the reflected green dashboard glow composed as a little monkey under a Bodhi tree. East meets West.

  I’m still feeling a little drunk, in addition
to being roughed up, and may not be driving my best. My hands are cold and achy. My knees stiff. I’m gripping the wheel like a ship’s helm in a gale. Twice I’ve caught myself broxing the be-jesus out of my unprotected molars. And twice when I took my eyes off the red taillight smear and the shoe-polish black highway, I found I was going ninety-five—which explains Mike’s leaden silence. He’s been scared shitless since Imlaystown, and is in a frozen fugue state, from which he’s picturing the radiant black near-attainment as I send us skidding off into a cedar bog. I dial it back to seventy.

  Today has gone not at all how I intended, although I’ve done nothing much more than what I planned—with the obvious exceptions of the hospital being detonated, having Ann ask me to marry her and getting into a moronic fight with Bob Butts. It’s loony, of course, to think that by lowering expectations and keeping ambitions to a minimum we can ever avert the surprising and unwanted. Though the worst part, as I said, is that I’ve cluttered my immediate future with new-blooming dilemmas exactly like young people do when they’re feckless and thirty-three and too inexperienced to know better. I wouldn’t have admitted it, but I may still possess a remnant of the old feeling I had when I was thirty-three: that a tiny director with a megaphone, a beret and jodhpurs is suddenly going to announce “Cut!” and I’ll get to play it all again—from right about where I crossed the bridge at Toms River this morning. This is the most pernicious of anti-Permanent Period denial and life sentimentalizing, which only lead you down the road to more florid self-deceptions, then dump you out harder than ever when the accounts come due, which they always do. It also suggests that I may not be up for controversy the way I used to be, and may have lapsed into personal default mode.

  We’re nearing the 195 junction with the Garden State, where millions (or at least hundreds of thousands) are now streaming south toward Atlantic City—not a bad choice for Turkey Day. It’s the stretch of highway we detoured around this morning due to police activity. I shoot through the interchange as new lighted town signage slips past: Belmar, South Belmar, pie-in-the-sky Spring Lake, all sprawling inland from the ocean into the pine scrub and lowlands west of the Parkway. HUNGRY FOR CAPITAL. REGULAR BAPTIST CHURCH—MEET TRIUMPH AND DISASTER HEAD-ON. HOCKEY ALL NIGHT LONG. NJ IS HOSPITAL COUNTRY. Any right-thinking suburbanite would like to feel confident about these things.