The Lay of the Land

by Richard Ford

  “What is it that shocks you, Clare? You know everything there is to be afraid of. You seem way ahead of the game to me.”

  Clare shakes his head in self-wonder. “I’m sitting up in bed, Frank—honest to God—up in Parsippany. Estelle’s asleep beside me. And what I go cold thinking about is: If something happens—you know, a bomb—can I ever sell my fucking house? And if I buy a new one, then what? Will property values even mean anything anymore? Where the hell are we then? Are we supposed to escape to some other place? Death’s a snap compared to that.”

  “I never thought about that, Clare.” As a philosophical question, of course, it’s a lot like “Why the solar system?” And it’s just about as practical-minded. You couldn’t put a contingency clause in a buy-sell agreement that says “Sale contingent on there being no disaster rendering all real estate worthless as tits on a rain barrel.”

  “I guess you wouldn’t think about it. Why would you?” Clare says.

  “You said it was pretty philosophical.”

  “I know perfectly well it all has to do with ’Stelle being sick and my other relationship ending. Plus my age. I’m just afraid of the circumstances of life going to hell. Boom-boom-boom.” Clare’s staring out to sea, above the heads of the lithe, untroubled young volley-ballers—a grizzled old Magellan who doesn’t like what he’s discovered. Boom-boom-boom.

  Clare’s problem isn’t really a philosophical problem. It just makes him feel better to think so. His problem with circumstances is itself circumstantial. He’s suffered normal human setbacks, committed perfidies, taken some shots. He just doesn’t want to fuck up in those ways again and is afraid he can’t recognize them when they’re staring him in the face. It’s standard—a form of buyer’s remorse experienced prior to the sale. If Clare would just take the plunge (always the realtor’s warmest wish for mankind), banish fear, think that instead of having suffered error and loss, he’s survived them (but won’t survive them indefinitely), that today could be the first day of his new life, then he’d be fine. In other words, accept the Permanent Period as your personal savior and act not as though you’re going to die tomorrow but—much scarier—as though you might live.

  How, though, to explain this without arousing suspicion that I’m just a smarmy, eel-slippery, promise-’em-anything sharpster, hyperventilating to unload a dump that’s already crumbling from the ground upward?

  You can’t. I can’t. As muddled as I feel out here, I know the Doolittles’ house has serious probs, may be heading toward tear-down in a year or two, and I would never sell this house to Clare and will, in fact, now have to be the bearer of somber financial news to the Doolittles in Boca. All’s I can do is just show Clare more houses, till he either buys one or wanders off into the landscape. (I wonder if Clare’s a blue state or a red state. Just as in Sponsoring, politics is a threshold you don’t cross in my business, though most people who look at beach houses seem to be Republicans.)

  Somewhere, out of the spheres, I hear what sounds like the Marine Corps Hymn played on a xylophone. Dum-dee-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dee-dum, dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum. It’s surprisingly loud, even on the dune top in the breeze. The volleyball kids stop rotating, their heads turn toward us as if they’ve registered something weird, something from home or further back in the racial fog.

  Clare goes fumbling under his jacket for a little black hand-tooled holster looped to his belt like a snub-nose. It’s his cell phone, raising a sudden call to arms and valor—unmistakable as his ring and only his, in any airport, supermarket deli section or DMV line.

  “Sud-druth.” Clare speaks in an unexpected command voice—urgent message from the higher-ups to the troops in the thick of it down here. His snapped answer is aimed into an impossibly tiny (and idiotic) red Nokia exactly like every one of the prep school girls has in her Hilfiger beach bag. “Right,” Clare snaps, jabbing a thumb in his other ear like a thirties crooner and lowering his chin in strict, regimental attention. He steps away a few yards along the dune, where we are trespassers. Every single particle of his bearing announces: All right. This is important. “Yep, yep, yep,” he says.

  For me, though, it’s a welcome, freeing moment, unlike most cell-phone interruptions, when the bystander feels like a condemned man, trussed and harnessed, eyes clenched, waiting for the trap to drop. The worst thing about others blabbing on their cell phones—and the chief reason I don’t own one—is the despairing recognition that everybody’s doing, thinking, saying pretty much the same things you are, and none of it’s too interesting.

  This freed moment, however, strands me out of context and releases me to the good sensations we all wish were awaiting us “behind” every moment: That—despite my moment of syncope, my failed house-showing, my crumbling Thanksgiving plans, my condition, my underlying condition, my overarching condition—there is still a broad fertile plain where we can see across to a white farmhouse with willows and a pond the sky traffics over, where the sun is in its soft morning quadrant and there is peace upon the land. I suddenly can feel this. Even the prep school kids seem excellent, promising, doing what they should. I wish Clare could feel it. Since with just a glimpse—permitted by a kindly, impersonal life force—many things sit right down into their proper, proportionate places. “It’s enough,” I hear myself breathing to myself. “It’s really enough.”

  “Yep, yep, yep.” Clare’s internalizing whatever’s to be internalized. Get those fresh troopers up where they can see the back side of that hill and start raining hellfire down on the sorry bastards. And don’t be back to me till that whole area’s secured and you can give me a full report, complete with casualties. Theirs and ours. Got that? Yep, yep. “I’ll get home around one, sweetheart. We’ll have some lunch.” It is a homelier communiqué than imagined.

  Clare punches off his Nokia and returns it to its holster without turning around. He’s facing north, up the shore toward Asbury Park, miles off, and where I’ll soon be going. His posture of standing away gives him the aura of a man composing himself.

  “Everything copacetic?” I smile, in case he should turn around and unexpectedly face me. A friendly visage is always welcome.

  “Yes, sure.” Clare does turn, does see my welcoming mug—a mug that says, We aren’t looking at a house anymore; we’re just men out here together, taking the air. The volleyballers have formed a caucus beside their net and are laughing. I hear one of their cell phones ringing—a gleeful little rilling that exults, Yes, yes, yes! “My wife, Estelle—well, you know her name.” Clare glances toward the calm sea and its white filigree of sudsy surf, over which gulls are skimming for tiny fleeing mackerel. “When I’m gone for very long, it’s like she thinks I’m not coming back.” He dusts his big hands, cleaning off some residue of his call. “Of course, I did go away and didn’t come back. You can’t blame her.”

  “Sounds like it’s all different now.”

  “Oh yeah.” Clare runs his two clean hands back through his salt ’n pepper hair. He is a handsome man—even if part doozie, part fearful shrinker from the world’s woe and clatter. We have things in common, though I’m not as handsome. “What were we gassing about?” His call has erased all. A positive sign. “I was bending your ear about some goddamn thing.” He smiles, abashed but happy not to remember. A glimpse of my wide plain with the house, sun, pond and willows may, in fact, have been briefly his.

  “We were talking about foundations, Clare.”

  “I thought we were talking about fears and commitments.” He casts a wistful eye back at #61’s troubled exterior—its weathered soffits, its gutter straps (defects I hadn’t noticed). I say nothing. “Well,” Clare says, “same difference.”

  “Okay.”

  “Somebody else’ll want this place.” He offers a relieved grin. Another bullet dodged.

  “Somebody definitely will,” I say. “You can bet on it. Not many things you can bet on, but on that, you can.”

  “Good deal,” Clare says.

  We find other things
to talk about—he is a Giants fan, has season tickets—as I walk him back down and out to his Only Connect truck. He’s happy to be heading home empty-handed, happy to be going where someone loves him and not where somebody’s studying archaeology. I’m satisfied with him and with my part in it all. He is a good man. The Doolittles, I’m sure, after a day of raging, then brooding, then grudging resolution, could easily decide to come down on their asking. Houses like theirs change hands every four to six years and are built for turnover. Not many people feel they were born to live in a house forever. I’ll sell it by Christmas, or Mike will. Possibly to Clare. They truly aren’t making any more of it here at the beach. And in fact, if the Republicans steal the show, they’ll soon be trucking it away.

  On my way back out Cormorant Court, Clare blinks his lights, and I pull over in front of a chalet where my red-and-white REALTY-WISE sign stands out front. The Hondurans lounge on the little front steps, eating their lunches brought from home.

  Clare idles alongside, his window already down so we can confer vehicle-to-vehicle in the cold air. Possibly he wants to set matters straight about my BUSH? WHY? bumper sticker, which I’m sure he doesn’t approve of. I should probably peel it off now.

  “What’s the story with these?” he half shouts through his window (his passenger seat’s been removed for insurance reasons). He’s now wearing a pair of Foster Grants that make him look more like General MacArthur. He’s talking about the chalet being spiffed up.

  “Same old,” I say. “I sell. You buy.”

  Clare’s tough Marine Corps mouth, used to doing the talking, all the ordering, assumes a wrinkled, compromised expression of deliberate tolerance. He knows the opportunity to be taken seriously even by me is almost over. He gets most things—it’s one of his virtues. But I’m as happy to sell him one of these as I am the Doolittles’. I’ve shown many a client a house they didn’t want, then sold them a chalet as a consolation prize. Although blending business (potential rental income) with sentimental impulses (buying a house for the dying wife) can be troublesome for buyers. Internal messages can become seriously mixed, and bad results in the form of lost revenues ensue.

  “What’s the damage?” Clare says from the financial safety of his work truck.

  “A buck seventy-five.” Add twenty-five for wasting my time this morning, and since he’s obviously got the scratch. “Walking distance to the beach.”

  “Rent ’em year-round?” Clare’s smiling. He knows what a schmendrick he is.

  “Make your nut in the summer. Seven-fifty a week last year. I take fifteen percent, get my crew in for upkeep. Capital improvement’s yours. You probably clear seven per summer, before taxes and insurance. You really need to own three or four to make it happy.” And you have to keep your heart out of your pocketbook. And this last summer wasn’t that great. And Estelle won’t like it. Clare’s probably not ready for all this.

  “That’s assuming some miserable asshole doesn’t sue you,” he says out of the echo chamber of his truck. He may have heard me say something I didn’t say. But he’s refound his authority and begun frowning not at me but out his windshield toward NJ 35 at the end of Cormorant Court.

  “There’s always that.” I smile a zany smile of who cares.

  “Fuckin’ ambulance chasers.” Clare’s two divorces could conceivably have left a bad taste in his mouth for the legal profession. He shakes his head at some unavenged bad memory. We’ve all been there. It’s nothing to share the day before Thanksgiving. I try to think of a good lawyer joke, but there aren’t any. “I see you voted for Gore. The patsy.” He’s acknowledging my BUSH? WHY? sticker.

  “I did.”

  He stares stonily ahead at nothing. “I couldn’t vote for Bush. I voted for his old man. Now we’re in the soup. Wouldn’t you say?”

  “I think we are.”

  “God help us,” Clare says, and looks puzzled for the first time.

  “I doubt if he will, Clare,” I say. “Are you staging a big Thanksgiving?” I’m ready to part company. But I want to celebrate Clare-the-redeemed-Republican with a warm holiday wish.

  “Yeah. Kids. Estelle’s sister. My mom. The clan.”

  It’s nice to know Clare has a mom who comes for holidays. “That’s great.”

  “You?” Clare shifts into gear, his truck bumping forward.

  “Yep. The whole clan. We try to connect.” I smile.

  “Okay.” Clare nods. He hasn’t heard me right. He idles away up toward 35 and the long road back to Parsippany.

  10

  Since there’s no direct-est route to Parkway Exit 102N, where Wade’s already fuming at Fuddruckers, I take the scenic drive up 35, across the Metedeconk and the Manasquan to Point Pleasant, switch to NJ 34 through more interlocking towns, townships, townlettes—one rich, one not, one getting there, one hardly making its millage. I love this post-showing interlude in the car, especially after my syncope on the dune. It’s the moment d’or which the Shore facilitates perfectly, offering exposure to the commercial-ethnic-residential zeitgeist of a complex republic, yet shelter from most of the ways the republic gives me the willies. “Culture comfort,” I call this brand of specialized well-being. And along with its sister solace, “cultural literacy”—knowing by inner gyroscope where the next McDonald’s or Borders, or the next old-fashioned Italian shoe repair or tuxedo rental or lobster dock is going to show up on the horizon—these together I consider a cornerstone of the small life lived acceptably. I count it a good day when I can keep all things that give me the willies out of my thinking, and in their places substitute vistas I can appreciate, even unwittingly. Which is why I take the scenic route now, and why when I get restless I fly out to Moline or Flint or Fort Wayne for just a few hours’ visit—since there I can experience the new and the complex, coupled with the entirely benign and knowable.

  Cancer, naturally, exerts extra stresses on life (if you don’t instantly die). We all cringe with cancer scares: the mole that doesn’t look right; the lump below our glutes where we can’t monitor it, the positive chest X ray (why does positive always mean fatal?) resulting in CAT scans, blood profiles, records reviews from twenty years back, all of which scare the shit out of us, make us silent but wretched as we await the results, entertaining thoughts of apricot treatments in Guadalajara and inquiries about euthanasia for nonresidents in Holland (I did all these). And then it’s nothing—a harmless fatty accumulation, a histoplasmosis scar from childhood—innocent abnormalities (there are such things). And you’re off the hook—though you’re not unfazed. You’ve been on a journey and it’s not been a happy one. Even without a genuine humming tumor deep in your prostate, just this much is enough to kill you. The coroner’s certificate could specify for any of us: “Death came to Mr. X or Ms. Y due to acute heebie-jeebies.”

  But then when the sorry news does come, you’re perfectly calm. You’ve used up all your panic back when it didn’t count. So what good is calm? “Well, I’m thinking we’d better do a little biopsy and see what we’re dealing with….” “Well, Mr. Bascombe, have a seat here. I’ve got some things I need to talk to you about….” Be calm now? Calm’s just another face of wretched.

  And then what follows that is the whole dull clouding over of all good feeling, all that normally elevates days, moods, reveries, pretty vistas, all the minor uplifts known to be comforting…. Crash-bang! Meaningless! Not real reality anymore, since something bad had always been there, right? The days before my bad news, when I had cancer but didn’t know I had it and felt pretty damn good—all of those days are not worth sneezing at. Good was a lie, inasmuch as my whole grasp on life required that nothing terrible happen to me, ever—which is nuts. It did.

  So the on-going challenge becomes: How, post-op, to maintain a supportable existence that resembles actual life, instead of walking the windy, trash-strewn streets in a smudged sandwich board that shouts IMPAIRED! FEEL SORRY FOR ME! BUT DON’T BOTHER TAKING ME SERIOUSLY AS A WHOLE PERSON, BECAUSE (UNLIKE YOU) I WON’T BE ARO
UND FOREVER!

  I wish I could tell you I had a formula for changing the character of big into small. Mike has suggested meditation and a trip to Tibet. (It may come to that.) Clarissa’s been a help—though I’m ready for her life to re-commence. Selling houses is clearly useful for making me feel invisible (even better than “connected”). And Sally’s absence has not been a total tragedy, since misery doesn’t really want company, only cessation. Suffice it to say that I mostly do fine. I overlook more than I used to, and many things have just quit bothering me on their own. Which leads me to think that my “state” must not be such a thoroughly bad or altered one.

  And I’ll also admit that in the highly discretionary lives most of us lead, there is sweet satisfaction to this being it, and to not having it be always out there to dread: the whacker coronary; both feet amputated after paraskiing down K2 on your birthday; total macular degeneration, so you need a dog to help you find the can. This longing for satisfaction, I believe, is in the hearts of those strange Korea vets who admit to wartime atrocities they never committed and never would’ve; and may be the same for poor friendless Marguerite, back in Haddam, wondering what she has to confess. There is a desire to face some music, even if it’s a tune played only in your head—a desire for the real, the permanent, for a break in the clouds that tells you, This is how you are and will always be. Great nature has another thing to do to you and me, so take the lively air, the poet said. And I do. I take the lively air whenever I can, as now. Though it’s that other thing great nature promises that I rely on, the thing that quickens the step and the breath and so must not be thought of as the enemy.

  11