by Richard Ford
What I, in fact, felt was: on my guard—but safe. The way you’d feel if crime statistics spiked in your neighborhood but you’d just rescued a two-hundred-pound Rottweiler from the shelter, who saw you as his only friend, whereas the wide world was his enemy.
Sally’s and my marriage seemed as contingency-proof as we could construct it, using the human materials we’re all equipped with. The other thing about second marriages—unlike first ones, which require only hot impulse and drag-strip hormones—is that they need good reasons to exist, reasons you’re smart to pore over and get straight well beforehand. Sally and I both conducted independent self-inquiries back when I was still in Haddam, and each made a clear decision that marriage—to each other—promised more than anything else we could think of that would probably make us both happy, and that neither of us harbored a single misgiving that wasn’t appropriate to life anyway (illnesses—we’d share; death—we’d expect; depression—we’d treat), and that any more time spent in deciding was time we could spend having the time of our lives. Which as far as I’m concerned—and in fact I know that Sally felt the same—we did.
Which is to say we practiced the sweet legerdemain of adulthood shared. We formally renounced our unmarried personalities. We generalized the past in behalf of a sleek second-act mentality that stressed the leading edge of life to be all life was. We acknowledged that strong feelings were superior to original happiness, and promised never to ask the other if she or he really, really, really loved him or her, in the faith that affinity was love, and we had affinity. We stressed nuance and advocated that however we seemed was how we were. We declared we were good in bed, and that lack of intimacy was usually self-imposed. We kept our kids at a wary but (at least in my case) positive distance. We de-emphasized becoming in behalf of being. We permanently renounced melancholy and nostalgia. We performed intentionally pointless acts like flying to Moline or Flint and back the same day because we were “archaeologists.” We ate Thanksgiving and Xmas dinners at named rest stops on the Turnpike. We considered buying a pet refuge in Nyack, a B&B in New Hampshire.
In other words, we put in practice what the great novelist said about marriage (though he never quite had the genome for it himself). “If I should ever marry,” he wrote, “I should pretend to think just a little better of life than I do.” In Sally’s case and mine, we thought a lot better of life than we ever imagined we could. In the simplest terms, we really, really loved each other and didn’t do a lot of looking right or left—which, of course, is the first principle of the Permanent Period.
Because today is November 22nd and not last May, and I have cancer and Sally is this morning far away on the Isle of Mull, I am able to telescope events to make our decade-long happy union seem all a matter of clammy reasons and practicalities, as though a life lived with another was just a matter of twin isolation booths in an old fifties quiz show; and also to make everything that happened seem inevitable and to have come about because Sally was unhappy with me and with us. But not one ounce of that would be true, as gloomy as events became, and as given as I am to self-pity and to doubting I was ever more than semi-adequate in bed, and that by selling houses I never lived up to my potential (I might’ve been a lawyer).
No, no, no, no and no again.
We were happy. There was enough complex warp and woof in life to make a sweater as big as the fucking ocean. We lived. Together.
“But she couldn’t have been so happy if she left, could she?” said the little pointy-nose, squirrel-tooth, bubble-coifed grief counselor I sadly visited up in Long Branch just because I happened to drive by and saw her shingle one early June afternoon. She was used to advising the tearful, bewildered, abandoned wives of Fort Dix combat noncoms who’d married Thai bar girls and never come home. She wanted to offer easy solutions that led to feelings of self-affirmation and quick divorces. Sugar. Dr. Sugar. She was divorced herself.
But that’s not true, I told her. People don’t always leave because they’re unhappy, like they do in shitty romance novels written by lonely New England housewives or in supermarket tabloids or on TV. You could say it’s my fatal flaw to believe this, and to believe that Wally’s return to life, and Sally leaving with him, wasn’t the craziest, worst goddamn thing in the fucking world and didn’t spell the end of love forever. Yet that’s what I believed and still do. Sally could decide later that she’d been unhappy. But since she left, the two polite postcards I’ve received have made no mention of divorce or of not loving me, and that’s what I’m choosing to understand.
When Sally came down later that night and found me asleep on the couch beside the can of Planters with the TV playing The Third Man (the scene where Joseph Cotten gets bitten by the parrot), she wasn’t unhappy with me—though she certainly wasn’t happy. I understood she’d just come unexpectedly face-to-face with big contingency—the thing we’d schemed against and almost beaten, and probably the only contingency that could’ve risen to eye level and stared us down: the re-enlivening of Wally. And she didn’t know what to do about it—though I did.
All marriages—all everythings—tote around contingencies whether we acknowledge them or don’t. In all things good and giddy, there’s always one measly eventuality no one’s thought about, or hasn’t thought about in so long it almost doesn’t exist. Only it does. Which is the one potentially fatal chink in the body armor of intimacy, to the unconditional this ’n that, to the sacred vows, the pledging of troths, to the forever anythings. And that is: There’s a back door somewhere to every deal, and there a draft can enter. All promises to be in love and “true to you forever” are premised on the iron contingency (unlikely or otherwise) that says, Unless, of course, I fall in love “forever” with someone else. This is true even if we don’t like it, which means it isn’t cynical to think, but also means that someone else—someone we love and who we’d rather have not know it—is as likely to know it as we are. Which acknowledgment may finally be as close to absolute intimacy as any of us can stand. Anything closer to the absolute than this is either death or as good as death. And death’s where I draw the line. Realtors, of course, know all this better than anyone, since there’s a silent Wally Caldwell in every deal, right down to the act of sale (which is like death) and sometimes even beyond it. In every agreement to buy or sell, there’s also the proviso, acknowledged or not, that says “unless, of course, I don’t want to anymore,” or “that is, unless I change my mind,” or “assuming my yoga instructor doesn’t advise against it.” Again, the hallowed concept of character was invented to seal off these contingencies. But in this wan Millennial election year, are we really going to say that this concept is worth a nickel or a nacho? Or, for that matter, ever was?
Sally stood at the darkened thermal glass window that gave upon the lightless Atlantic. She’d slept in her clothes, too, and was barefoot and had a green L.L. Bean blanket around her shoulders in addition to the French sweater. I’d opened the door to the deck, and inside was fifty degrees. She’d turned off The Third Man. I came awake studying her inky back without realizing it was her inky back, or that it was even her—wondering if I was hallucinating or was it an optical trick of waking in darkness, or had a stranger or a ghost (I actually thought of my son Ralph) entered my house for shelter and hadn’t noticed me snoozing. I realized it was Sally only when I thought of Wally and of the despondency his renewed life might promise me.
“Do you feel a little better?” I wanted to let her know I was here still among the living and we’d been having a conversation earlier that I considered to be still going on.
“No.” Hers was a mournful, husky, elderly-seeming voice. She pinched her Bean’s blanket around her shoulders and coughed. “I feel terrible. But I feel exhilarated, too. My stomach’s got butterflies and knots at the same time. Isn’t that peculiar?”
“No, I wouldn’t say that was necessarily so peculiar.” I was trying my white investigator’s labcoat on for size.
“A part of me wants to feel like my life�
��s a total ruin and a fuck-up, that there’s a right way to do things and I’ve made a disaster out of it. That’s how it feels.” She wasn’t facing me. I didn’t really feel like I was talking to her. But if not to her, then to who?
“That’s not true,” I said. I could understand, of course, why she might feel that way. “You didn’t do anything wrong. You just flew to Chicago.”
“There’s no sense to spool everything back to sources, but I might’ve been a better wife to Wally.”
“You’re a good wife. You’re a good wife to me.” And then I didn’t say this, but thought it: And fuck Wally. He’s an asshole. I’ll gladly have him big-K killed and his body Hoffa’d out for birdseed. “What do you feel exhilarated about?” I said instead. Mr. Empathy.
“I’m not sure.” She flashed a look around, her blond hair catching light from somewhere, her face appearing tired and marked with shadowy lines from too-sound sleep and the fatigue of travel.
“Well,” I said, “exhilaration doesn’t hurt anything. Maybe you were glad to see him. You always wondered where he went.” I put a single cocktail peanut into my dry mouth and crunched it down. She turned back to the cold window, which was probably making her cold. “What’s he going to do now,” I said, “have himself re-incarnated, or whatever you do?”
“It’s pretty simple.”
“I’ll keep that in mind. What about the being-married-to-you part? Does he get to do that again? Or do I get you as salvage?”
“You get me as salvage.” She turned and walked slowly toward me where I sat staring up at her, slightly dazzled, as if she was the ghost I’d mistook her for. Her little limp was pronounced because she was beat. She sat on the couch and leaned into me so I could smell the sweated, unwashed dankness of her hair. She put her hand limply on my knee and sighed as if she’d been holding her breath and didn’t realize it till now. Her coarse blanket prickled through my shirt. “He’d like to meet you,” she said. “Or maybe I want him to meet you.”
“Absolutely,” I said, and could identify a privileged sarcasm. “We’ll invite some people over. Maybe I’ll interest him in a summer rental.”
“That’s not really necessary, is it?”
“Yes. I’m in command of my necessaries. You be in command of yours.”
“Don’t be bad to me about this. It flabbergasts me as much as it does you.”
“That isn’t true. I’m not exhilarated. Why are you exhilarated? I answered that for you, but I don’t like my answer.”
“Mmmmmm. I think it’s just so strange, and so familiar. I’m not mad at him anymore. I was for years. I was when I first saw him. It was like meeting the President or some famous person. I know him so well and then there he is and of course I don’t know him. There was something exciting about that.” She looked at me, put her hands atop each other on my cold knee and smiled a sweet, tired, imploring, mercy-hoping smile. It would’ve been wonderful if we hadn’t been talking about her ex-dead husband and the disaster he was casting our way, but instead about how good something was, how welcome, how much we missed something we both loved and now here it was.
“I don’t feel that way,” I said. I was on solid ground not feeling what she felt. It occurred to me that how she felt toward Wally was a version of being married to him, which was a version of the truth I mentioned before and couldn’t argue with. But I didn’t have to like it.
“You’re right,” she said patiently.
And then we didn’t speak for a little while, just sat breathing in the cold air, each of us fancifully, forcefully seeking a context into which our separate views—of Wally, and disaster—could join forces and fashion an acceptable and unified response. I was further from the middle of events and had some perspective, so that the heavier burden fell on me. I’d already started suiting up in the raiments of patient understander. Oh woe. Oh why?
“Something has to happen,” Sally said with unwanted certainty. “Something had to happen when Wally left. Something has to happen now that he’s back. Nothing can’t happen. That’s my feeling.”
“Who says?”
“Me,” she said sadly. “I do.”
“What has to happen?”
“I have to spend some time with him.” Sally spoke reluctantly. “You’d want to do the same thing, Frank.” She wrinkled her chin and slightly puffed her compressed lips. She often took on this look when she was sitting at her desk composing a letter.
“No, I wouldn’t. I’d buy him a first-class ticket to anyplace he wanted to go in Micronesia and never think about him again. Where’re you planning to spend time with him? The Catskills? The Lower Atlas? Am I supposed to be there, too, so I can get closer to my needs? I’m close enough to them now. I’m sitting beside you. I’m married to you.”
“You are married to me.” She actually gasped then and sobbed, then gasped again and squeezed my hand harder than anybody’d ever squeezed it, and shook her head from side to side, so tears dashed onto my cheek. It was as if we were both crying. Though why I would’ve been crying, I don’t know, since I should’ve been howling again, shouting, waving my bloody fists in the air as the earth split open. Inasmuch as, with her certainty dawning like a new alien sun, split it did, where it stays split to this day.
I’ll make the rest short, though it’s not sweet.
I buttoned the buttons on my moral investigator’s labcoat and got busy with the program. Sally said she’d be willing to invite Wally down to Sea-Clift—either to a rental she would arrange for him (using who as agent?), or to our house, where he could put up in one of the two guest rooms for the short time he’d be here. The oddest things can be made to seem plausible by insisting they are. Remember Huxley on Einstein. Remember the Trojan Horse. Or else, Sally said, she and he could “go away somewhere” (the Rif, the Pampas, the Silk Road to Cathay). They wouldn’t be “together,” of course, more like brother and sister having a wander, during which crucial period they’d perform what few in their situation (how many are in that situation?) could hope to perform: a putting to rest, an airing, a re-examination of old love allowed to wither and die, saying the unsayable, feeling the unpermitted, reconciling paths not taken and those taken. Cleanse and heal, come back stronger. Come back to me. Yes, there might be some crying, some shouting, some laughter, some hugging, some crisp slappings across the face. But it would be “within a context,” and in “real time,” or some such nonsense, and all those decades would be drained of their sour water, rolled up and put away like a late-autumn garden hose, never to leave the garage again. In other words, it was a “good thing” (if not for everybody)—life’s mystery dramatized, all is artifice, connected boxes, etc., etc., etc.
Interesting. I thought it was all pretty interesting. A true experiment in knowing another person—me knowing her, not her knowing Wally, who I didn’t give a shit about. A revealing frame to put on Sally’s life and into which I could see, since this was between Sally and me—which I still think is true. Can you always tell a snake from a garden hose?
The Silk Road strategy didn’t appeal to me, for obvious reasons. I suggested (these things do happen) that we invite The Wall down for a week (or less). He could bivouac upstairs, set out all his toilet articles in the guest’s bath. We could meet the way I used to meet Ann’s previous, now dead, architect husband, Charley O’Dell—with stiffened civility, frozen-smile, hands-in-pockets mildness that only now and then sprang into psychotic dislike, with biting words that wounded and the threat of physical violence.
I could do better. I had nothing to fear from an ex-dead man. I’d tin his ears about the real estate business, let him experience Mike Mahoney, talk over the election, the Cubs, the polar ice cap, the Middle East. Though mostly I’d just stay the hell away from him, fish the Hendrickson hatch at the Red Man Club, spend a day with Clarissa and Cookie in Gotham, test-drive new Lexuses, sell a house or two—whatever it took, while the two of them did what they needed to do to get that moldy old hose put away on the garage nail of the past
tense.
On the twenty-ninth of May, Wally “the Weasel,” as he was known in military school, my wife’s quasi-husband, father of her two maniac children, Viet vet, combat casualty, free-lance amnesiac, cut-and-run artist par excellence, heir to a sizable North Shore fortune, meek arborist, unmourned former dead man and big-time agent of misrule—my enemy—this Wally Caldwell entered my peaceful house on the Jersey Shore to work his particular dark magic on us all.
Clarissa and Cookie came down for the arrival to give moral support. Clarissa, who was still wearing a tiny diamond nostril stud (since jettisoned), felt it was an “interesting” experiment in the extended-family concept, but basically nonsensical, that something was “wrong” with Sally and that I needed to keep my “boundaries” clear and that they (being Harvard lesbians) knew all about boundaries—or something to that effect.
Sally became convulsively nervous, oversensitive and irritable as the hour of Wally’s arrival neared (I affected calm to show I didn’t care). She snapped at Clarissa, snapped at me, had to be talked to by Cookie. She smoked several cigarettes (the first time in twenty years), drank a double martini at ten o’clock in the morning, changed her clothes three times, then stood out on the deck, sporting stiff white sailcloth trousers, new French espadrilles, a blue-and-white middy blouse and extremely dark sunglasses. All was a calculated livery betokening casual, welcoming resolution and sunny invulnerability, depicting a life so happy, invested, entitled, entrenched, comprehended, spiritual and history-laden that Wally would take a quick peek at the whole polished array—house, beach, lesbian kids, damnable husband, unreachable lemony ex-wife, then hop back in his cab and start the long journey back to Mull.
I will concede that the real Wally, the portly, thin-lipped, timidly smiling, gray-toothed, small-eyed, suitcase-carrying, thick-fingered bullock who struggled out of the Newark Yellow Cab, didn’t seem a vast challenge to my or anyone’s sense of permanence. I had perfect no-recollection of him from forty years ago and felt strangely, warmly (wrongly) welcoming toward him, the way you’d feel about a big, softhearted PFC in a fifties war movie, who you know is going to be picked off by a Kraut sniper in the first thirty minutes. Wally had on his green worn-smooth corduroys—though it was already summery and he was sweltering—a faded, earthy-smelling purple cardy over a green-and-ginger rugger shirt, under which his hod-carrier belly tussled for freedom. He wore heavy gray woolen socks, no hat and the previously mentioned smelly but not mud-spackled Barbour from his days nerdling about the gorse and rank topsoil of his adopted island paradise.
