The Lay of the Land

by Richard Ford

  “My sister lives up in Barnegat Acres,” he says. “It’s on the bay.”

  “A stone’s throw. It’s nice over there.” Though it isn’t so nice. The water has a sulfurous bite and a cheesy smell. Quirky bay breezes hold acrid fog too close to shore. And it’s not far from the shut-down nuke facility in Silverton, which depresses house sales to flat-line.

  “So.” More typing, a squeak of Detective M’s metal chair, then an amiable sniff of the constabulary nose. “Would you be willing, Mr. Bascombe, to drive over tomorrow and take part in an identification protocol?”

  “What’s that? Mine or somebody else’s?”

  “Just a lineup, Mr. Bascombe. It’s not very likely we’ll even do it. But we’re trying to enlist some community cooperation here, do some eliminating. We’ve got witnesses we need to double-check. It’d be a help to us if you’d agree. Mr. Lewis has a son in the department here.” (A cousin to young Lawrence, the hearse driver.)

  “Okay. You bet.” If I don’t agree, my name goes into another pile, and the next person I’m interviewed by won’t be yakking about his sister Babs in Barnegat Acres but will be one of the neatnik, black-belt karate guys with Arctic blue eyes in an FBI windbreaker. It lances into my brain that I haven’t called Clare Suddruth back yet but am supposed to show him 61 Surf Road tomorrow. Then I remember I intend not to be available.

  “Okay, then, that’s all set,” Detective Marinara says, more clicking. “Will. Participate. In. IDP. And…that’s great.”

  “I’m happy to. Well. I’m—”

  “Yep,” Marinara says. “Ya still in the realty business over there?”

  “Sure am. Realty-Wise. You want to buy a house on the ocean? I’ll sell you one.”

  “Oh yeah, I just gotta get these citizens over here to quit killing each other, then I’ll be over with you.”

  “That’s a tall order but a noble quest, Detective.”

  “It’s changed, Mr. Bascombe. It’s a big difference than when you lived over here.”

  Just as I thought! He knows all about me. My life’s displayed on his green screen. My mother’s maiden name, my freshman GPA, my blood pressure, my tire pressure, my Visa balance and sexual preference. Probably he can see when I’m scheduled to die.

  “People get rich, they get upset a lot easier. They keep me hoppin’, I’ll tell you that. Homicide rate’s inchin’ up in Delaware County. You don’t hear about it. But I hear about it.”

  “Is your family together for Thanksgiving?”

  “Oh, well. I’m workin’, ain’t I? Let’s don’t go down that road. You just have a good one.”

  “It’s always complex.”

  “Whew. You got that right. Thanks for your cooperation, Mr. Bascombe. We’ll be contacting you about tomorrow.” And click, Marinara’s gone, sucked into a computer dot just as I hear my son outside shout out, “He who smelt it, dealt it. That’s all I know.” It’s hard to know what he’s talking about, but my guess is the election.

  I called last night,” Ann Dykstra-Bascombe-Dykstra-O’Dell-Dykstra says before I can say it’s me. I’ve called her cell. Where is she? In an underwear boutique at the Quaker Bridge Mall? On the 18th at HCC? In the can? You have no control over where your personal private voice is being heard, what audience it’s being piped into, who’s lying about who’s where. It’s an intrusion but isn’t quite. I was ordering two cubic yards of pea gravel at the Garden Emporium in Toms River last week, and the customer beside me at the register was blabbing away, “Listen, sweetheart, I’ve never been so in love with anybody in my whole fucking life. So just say yes, okay? Tell that imbecile to go fuck himself. We can be on Air Mexico to Puerto Vallarta at ten o’clock tonight—”

  “We need to talk about some things, Frank,” Ann says in a disciplined voice. “Did you just elect to not call me last night?”

  “This is calling you. I wasn’t home last night. I was busy.” Sleeping in my car. I’ve now showered and shaved and positioned myself, in my plaid terry-cloth robe and fleece mukluks, in as steadfast a sitting position as possible at my desk, coccyx flush to the chair back, feet flat to the floor, knees apart but nervous, breath regulated. It is the posture for hearing disappointing biopsy reports, offer turn-downs and “Someone’s been badly injured” calls. It’s also the posture for delivering bad news.

  Yet I’m already on the defensive. My toes curl in my mukluks; my sphincter reefs in. And I’m the delivering party: Don’t come here today. Or ever. My heart thumps as if I’d sprinted up a fire escape to get here. Ann has perfected the skill of making me feel this way. It’s her golfer’s inner meritoriousness. I’m forever the hunch-shouldered, grinning census taker at the door; she, the one living the genuine life. I have my questionnaire and my stubby pencil but will never know what reality—the one behind her, within the complex rooms—is all about. Hers is the voice of reasoned experience, sturdy values, good instincts and correct outlook (no matter how conventional); I am outside the threshold, the regretted one in need of sobering lessons. It’s why she could turn away from me seventeen years ago and never (until now) look back. Because she was right, right, right. It’s amazing I don’t hate her guts.

  “I think Gore should concede, don’t you?”

  “No.”

  “Well. He should. He’s a sap. The market’ll go crazy if he wins.” Sap. The all-around Michigan term of disparagement. Her father characterized me as a sap when Ann and I were dating. “Where’d you find that sap?” Its sound twists a tighter knot in my gut. No one ever gets called a sap without feeling he probably is one.

  “He may be a sap, but the other guy’s unmentionably stupid.” I can’t actually mention the other guy’s name.

  “What did John Stuart Mill say?”

  “I don’t know. He didn’t say it was better to have a stupid President.”

  “Better to have a happy, unmentionable pig than a something, something something.”

  “That’s not what he said.” And it’s not what I want to talk about. Mill would’ve supported Gore and the whole ticket and feel betrayed just like I do.

  “Have you talked to Paul?” She is progressing down a checklist.

  “No. He’s out on the beach right now, digging a grave for his time capsule. I haven’t talked to Jill, either.”

  “Well, she’s interesting. She’s different.” I hear Paul laugh again, then shout, “G’day, mate.” Possibly Mr. Oshi has freed himself.

  “Listen,” I say. “About today. I mean this afternoon.”

  Dense silence. Different from the galactic dead space Detective Marinara receded into. This silence of Ann’s is the silence known only to divorced people—the silence of making familiar but unwelcome adjustments to evidence of continued bad character, of second-tier betrayals, unreasonable requests, late excuses, heart stabbings that must be withstood but are better defeated in advance. It’s what communication becomes between the insufficiently loved. “I’m not coming,” Ann says, seemingly without emotion. It’s the same voice she’d use to cancel a hair appointment. “I think we are who we are, Frank.”

  “Yeah. I sure am.”

  “Since Charley died, I’ve had this feeling of something about to happen. I was waiting for something. Moving down from Connecticut seemed to be getting close to it. But I don’t think I thought it was you.” I am entombed in the silence she was just entombed in. Now comes revised testimony (including Charley’s) of my foul, corrupt and unacceptable nature. I wonder if she’s pacing her living room like an executive or sitting on a bench with her clubs, awaiting her tee time, while she dispenses with me again. “But then you got sick.”

  “I wasn’t sick. Not sick sick. I had prostate cancer. Have. That’s not sick.” It’s just fatal. SBD. I’m still the census taker, weakened by illness but still in need of reproval and some lessons.

  “I know,” Ann says officiously. I hear her footsteps on a hard floor surface. “Anyway, I didn’t really think it was you.”

  “I get it.” A stack
of mail’s on my desktop under my Realtor of the Year paperweight. It’s unopened since Tuesday—a measure of my distraction, since I’m usually eager to read the mail, even if it’s steak-knife catalogs or a pre-approved platinum-club membership. I don’t think I’m going to be allowed to say what I want to say, which is all right. “What do you think it was? Or who?” I’m staring at the cover of the AARP magazine—a full-color (staged) photograph showing a silver-haired gent lying on a city street looking dead, but being worked on by heavy-suited firemen in fireman hats, equipped with oxygen cylinders, defibrillator paddles, with intubation paraphernalia standing at the ready. A silver-haired old lady in an electric blue pantsuit looks on, horrified. The headline reads RISK. WILL THERE BE TIME?

  “Gee, I don’t know,” Ann says. “It’s strange.”

  “Maybe you missed Charley. Didn’t you meet him at Haddam CC? Maybe you thought you’d find him again.” No use mentioning her thoughts of the seminary.

  “You didn’t like Charley. I understand that. But I did. You were jealous of him. But he was a fine man.”—In death, and when he thought my name was Mert. “He was the love of my life. You don’t like hearing that. You’re not a very good judge of people.” Whip. Crack. Pow! But I’m ready for it. The slow-rhythm meticulousness of Ann’s rhetorical style is always an indicator that I’m coming in for a direct hit. All bad roads lead to Frank. We have, of course, never talked about Sally—my wife—in the entire eight years I’ve been married to her. Now might be the optimum moment to set me straight about that misstep, since it’s led me where it’s led me: to this conversation. I’m not surprised to learn that I don’t win the “love of my life” gold medal. Except in rogue bands of lower primates, you don’t abandon the love of your life. Death has to intervene.

  Out my front window, beyond the low hedgement of arborvitae, I spy Mr. Oshi moving in quickened, mechanized Japanese banker steps along Poincinet Road, hustling back to his own house to bolt the door. His business suit still looks neat, though he’s holding one Dachshund under his arm like a newspaper and he still has both plastic bags of dog shit. His other wiener’s prancing at his feet. Mr. Oshi takes a quick, haunted look toward my front door, as if something might rush out at him, then hastens his steps on to home.

  I have not spoken into the receiver since Ann fingered me as a bad judge of human flesh, in preparation for apprising me that my marriage to Sally was a lot of foolishness that led to no good, whereas hers to architect Charley was the stuff myth and legend are made of.

  “I have something I want to say to you,” Ann says, then sighs heavily through her nose. I believe she’s stopped pacing. “It’s about what I said when you were at De Tocqueville on Tuesday.”

  “What part?”

  “About wanting to live with you again. And then when I left a message that night.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’m sorry. I don’t think I really meant all that.”

  “That’s okay.” An unexpected wrench in my heart, with no pain associated.

  “I think I just wanted to come to a moment, after all these years, when I could say that to you.”

  “Okay.” Three okays in a row. The gold standard of genuine acceptance.

  “But I think I just wanted to say it for my own purposes. Not because I really needed to. Or need to.”

  “I understand. I’m married anyway.”

  “I know,” Ann says. Once again, it’s good there’re telephones for conversations like this. None of us could stand it face-to-face. Hats off to Alexander Graham Bell—great American—who foresaw how human we are and how much protection we need from others. “I’m sorry if this is confusing.”

  “It’s not. I guessed if I wasn’t a good choice once, I’m probably not now, either.” For every different person, love means something different.

  “Well, I don’t know,” she says disapprovingly but not sadly. A last disapproval of me as I genially disapprove of myself.

  It’s tempting to wonder if a new goodly swain’s now in her picture, with a more attractive lunch invitation. That’s usually what these recitations mean but don’t get around to admitting. Teddy Fuchs, maybe. Or a friendly, widowed Mr. Patch Pockets, a gray-maned De Tocqueville Colonial history teacher, someone “youthful” (doesn’t need Viagra), coaches lacrosse and feels simpatico with her golfing interests. Amherst grad, Tufts M.A., a summer retreat in Watch Hill and whose grown kids are less enigmatic than our two. It would be a good end to things. They can be “life companions” and never marry except when one of them gets brain cancer, and then only as encouragement for life’s final lap. I approve.

  “Is that all right?” Ann says, self-consciously sorrowful.

  “It is all right.” I could let her know I’d already figured out that getting divorced after Ralph died just deprived the two of us of the chance to get properly divorced later on, and for simpler reasons: that we weren’t really made for each other, didn’t even love each other all that much, that the only lasting thing we did love about each other was that we each had a child who died (forgetting the two who didn’t die), which admittedly is a strange love and, in any case, wasn’t enough. Better, though, just to let her believe she’s the one who knows mystical truths, even if she doesn’t really know them, just feels them all these years later. Ann may be many good and admirable things, but a mystic is not one of them.

  In the stack of unopened letter-mail, beneath the Mayo newsletter, a Thank You from the DNC, circulars for a 5-K race and the Pow-R-Brush Holiday promotion in Toms River, I spy a square blue onionskin envelope—not the self-contained kind I always open wrong because it can’t be opened right, and end up tearing and reading in three damaged pieces, but a fuller, sturdier one—on whose pale tissue-y surface is writing I recognize, the writer’s firm hand flowing with small peaked majuscules and even smaller perfectly formed, peaked and leaning minuscules: Frank Bascombe, 7 Poincinet Road, Sea-Clift, New Jersey 08753. USA.

  “We just have to be who we are, Frank,” Ann is saying for the second time.

  “You bet.” I separate the letter from its cohort and stare at it.

  “You sound strange, sweetheart. Is this upsetting you? Are you crying?”

  “No.” I almost miss the “sweetheart.” But how did I miss this letter—of all letters? “I’m not crying, I don’t think.”

  “Well. I haven’t told you Irma’s ready to die. Poor old sweetie. She spent her life believing my father should’ve moved out with her from Detroit to Mission Viejo thirty years ago, which of course he never would’ve, because he was tired of her. She has Alzheimer’s. She thinks he’s arriving next week, which is nice for her. I wish she and the children could’ve been closer. They’re like you are about personal connections.”

  “Really?” The salmon-colored stamp bears a stern-looking profile of the Queen of England in regnal alabaster, framed in fluted molding. It’s the most exciting stamp I’ve ever seen.

  “They’re mostly okay without them, of course. At least not strong ones anyway.” Cookie never counted to her.

  “I understand.”

  “I’m sorry if all this is distressing you. I made a mistake and I regret it.”

  “Well—” Fingering the letter’s heft upon my fingertips, I raise it to my nostrils and breathe in, hoping for a telltale scent of its far-off sender. Though it bears only a starchy stationery odor and the unsweet aroma of stamp glue. I hold it to the window light—there’s no return address—and turn it front to back, bring it instinctively to my nose again, touch my tongue tip to its sealed flap, put its smooth blue finish to my chin, then my cheek and hold it there while Ann continues blabbing at me.

  “Paul said last night Clary has a new beau.”

  “I—” Thom. The multicultural cipher.

  “Has Paul told you yet that he wants to leave K.C. and come work in the realty office with you? He’s—”

  Whip. Crack. Pow! Again. I am not ready. My swelling heart as much as founders. I don’t hear the next thin
g she says, though my mind offers up “You know a heart’s not judged by how much you love, but by how much you’re loved by others.” I don’t know why.

  But. The mullet? My son? A promising second career after greeting cards? Chauffeuring clients around Sea-Clift? Holding court in the office? Farming listings? Catching cold calls? Wandering through other people’s precious houses, stressing the distance to the beach, the age of the roof, the lot-line dimensions, the diverse mix here in New Jersey’s Best Kept Secret? He could bring Otto out and sing a chorus of “Shine on, Harvest Moon,” like he used to do when he lived with me. “Realty-Wise. This is Paul. Our motto is, He Who Smelt It, Dealt It.”

  “I haven’t heard about that,” I say. Whip-sawed.

  “Well, you will. I assumed you’d asked him, since your surgery last summer and all of that. We talked a bit about that. I’m surprised you two hadn’t—”

  “I didn’t have surgery. I had a procedure. They’re different.” I was going to tell him about my condition. And I didn’t ask him to “join the firm,” because I’m not crazy. I realize what an ideal job writing greeting cards is for my son.

  “Women know about things like procedures, Frank.”

  “Good for women. I’m not a woman yet.”

  “I know you’re angry. I’m sorry again. I used to wonder if you ever got angry. You never seemed to. I always understood why you didn’t make it in the Marines.”

  “I was sick in the Marines. I had pancreatitis. You didn’t even know me then. I almost died.”

  “We don’t have to be angry at each other, do we? You may not realize it, but you don’t want to go any further with this, either.”

  “I realize it.” Sally’s blue letter is pinched between my thumb and forefinger as though it might float upward and I need to cling to it for my life’s sake. “That’s what I called to say. You just beat me to it.”

  “Oh,” Ann says. Ann my wife. Ann my not wife. Ann my never-to-be. The things you’ll never do don’t get decided at the end of life, but somewhere in the long gray middle, where you can’t see the dim light at either end. The Permanent Period tries to protect us from hazardous moments like this, makes pseudo-acceptance only a matter of a passing moment. A whim. Nothing that’ll last too long. Which is why the Permanent Period doesn’t work. Acceptance means that things, both good and sour, have to be accounted for. Relations, as the great man said, end nowhere.