by Richard Ford
“I encouraged Paul to come work with you. I think that would be good.”
I’m stunned silent by this preposterous prospect. Anger? If I spoke, I would possibly start cursing in an alien tongue. This is the stress Dr. Psimos advised me to avoid. The kind that burns out my soldier isotopes like they were Christmas lights and sends PSA numbers out of the ballpark. I’d like to say something apparently polite and platitudinous yet also shrewdly scathing. But for the moment, I can’t speak. It is entirely possible I do hate Ann’s guts. Odd to know that so late along. Life is a long transit when you measure how long it takes you to learn to hate your ex-wife.
“Maybe we just don’t need to say anything else, Frank.”
Mump-mump, mump. Mump. Silence.
I hear her chair squeak, her footsteps sounding against hardwood flooring. I picture Ann walking to the window of 116 Cleveland, a house where I once abided and before that where she abided, following our divorce, when our children were children. She is once again its proprietor, fee simple absolute. The big eighty-year-old tupelo out front is now spectral but lordly in its leaflessness, its rugged bark softened by the damp balmy air of false spring. I’ve stood at that window, my breathing shallowed, my feet heavy, my hands cold and hardened. I’ve calculated my fate on the slates of the neighbors’ roofs, their mirroring windowpanes, roof copings and short jaunty front walks. This can be both consoling (You’re here, you’re not dead), and unconsoling (You’re here, you’re not dead. Why not?). The past just may not be the best place to cast your glance when words fail.
Mump-mump.
My silence speaks volumes. I hear it. My voice is trapped within.
Mumpety-mump. Mump. Mump.
“Well,” I hear Ann say. More steps across the hardwood. Fatigue shadows her voice. “I don’t know,” I hear her say. Then ping-ping. I hear a truck in the street, outside her window—in Haddam (this I can picture)—backing up. Miles from where I stand. Ping! Ping! Ping! If you can’t see me, I can’t see you. I wait, breathe, say nothing. “Well,” Ann says again. Then I believe she puts the phone down, for the line goes empty and our call in that way ends.
My darling Frank,
I would like to write you something truly from my heart that would reveal me, good and bad, and make you feel better about things. But I’m not sure I am capable. I’m not sure I know my truest feelings, even though I have some. I don’t have any idea what you could be thinking. I guess I have Thanksgiving envy, since I’ve been thinking about you, and about that nice Lake Laconic we went to before. I bet you’re doing something really interesting and good for T’giving. I hope you’re not alone. I bet you’re not, you rascal. Maybe you’ve connected with some snappy realtor type and are headed somewhere out of town (I hope not to Moline). What I’m feeling now, true feelings or not, is that everything in my life is just all about me, and I can’t find a way to change the pronouns. I’m aware of myself, without being very self-aware. My kids would agree—if they spoke to me, which they don’t. But does that make any sense? (Possibly I won’t send this letter.) I think I should apologize for all that happened last June—and May. I am sorry for the difficulty it caused you. It’s probably hard to understand that someone can love you and feel great about everything, and then leave with her ex. I always thought people decided they were unhappy first, and then left. But maybe things in life are just fine and then you do some crazy thing, and decide later if you were. Unhappy, that is. What’s that the evidence of? But I can’t really be sorry for doing it, so why apologize only for half? This sounds like something you would say maybe about selling a house to somebody, some house you didn’t approve of, except you knew the people needed a home. If I’m right (about you), you’ll think this is funny and not very interesting—something a person from south-central Ohio would do. You are like that.
When I left with Wally last June, I just wasn’t feeling enough. I couldn’t take others in. You, for instance—hardly at all. It was so shocking to experience Wally. I made him come, by the way. He didn’t want to and was pretty embarrassed, you might’ve noticed. I think I just left on an idea—to go back and experience something I never got to experience before. (That word’s coming up a lot.) I’ve never even been stupid enough to think anyone can do that. You really ought to leave some things where they lay, whether you got to feel them or not. I think that now. I don’t think I’m sounding breezy here, do you? I don’t want to. I’m not breezy at all. Coming to the end of the millennium year, I wonder if I’ve been affected by it at all? Or if all this tumult and upset is the effect of it. Has it affected you yet? It hadn’t last spring, I don’t think. We’re both “only children.” Maybe I just fear death. Maybe I feared that you and I weren’t going anywhere and never realized it before. I am not very reflective. You know that. Or at least I wasn’t before. I ask questions but don’t always answer them or think about the answers.
I don’t want to go into too much detail here. I know I went away with Wally for my own reasons, probably selfish. And by August, I knew I wouldn’t stay much longer. He was a strange man. I loved him once, but I think I may have driven him crazy at least twice. Because the whole thing thirty years ago was that he was just very unhappy living with me, and couldn’t tell me. So he left. It’s so simple. I can’t say what we both knew back then. Probably very little. We did try to enlist the children’s sympathies this time. But they are both crazy as bats and treated us as though we were lunatics and wouldn’t talk to us and receded into their nutty beliefs, even though we said to them, “But we’re your parents.” “Who says?” they said. I guess I think they’re lost to me.
I would’ve left then (late August), but I got concerned about Wally. He began eating very little and lost a lot of weight. He would sit in the bathtub until the water was freezing (we lived in his cottage, which was okay, if small). I would see him standing out in his little row of apple trees he loved, just talking and talking, to no one—though I guess it was to me. I would catch him looking strangely at me. And then he began going for swims in the ocean. He was a very large white figure out there, even with his lost weight. I think, as I said, I drove him crazy. Poor man.
I don’t want to tell all the rest of it. Sooner or later you’ll find out. The best way out may not be through, though. Whoever said that?
But I am not in Mull anymore. (Isn’t that a funny name? Mull.) I am in a place called Maidenhead, which is funny, too, and is in J.O.E. (Jolly Old England). Talk about wanting to go back in time! I’ve come all the way back to Maidenhead. From Mull to Maidenhead. That’s a hoot. It is just a suburb here, not very nice or very different than any other one. I am doing temporary work in a sweet little arts centre (their spelling), where they need my skills for organizing older citizens’ happiness. It is like Sponsoring, although old English people are easier than our old people by a lot. England is not a bad place to be alone (I was here twice before). People are nice. Everyone gives solid evidence of feeling alone a lot, but seems to think that’s natural, so that they don’t get terribly, terribly invested in it. Unlike America where it’s just one mad fascination after another one, but no one’s any more invested—or so it seems to me. I did not vote, by the way, and now things are in this terrible twist with Bush. Can you believe it? Can that numbskull actually win? Or steal it? I guess he can. I’m sure you voted, of course, and I’m sure I know who you voted for.
How are your kids? Are you and Paul still feuding? Is Clarissa still being a big lesbian? (I bet not.) Who else do you see? Are you selling a lot of houses? I bet you are. (You can tell I’m fishing.) I am fifty-four this year, which of course you know. And I am not a grandparent, which is very odd, even though my children dislike me so much—for what, I don’t know exactly. I am thinking of going to a retreat in Wales—something Druidic—since I feel I’m heading someplace but don’t feel too confident about it. Though I am pretty comfortable in my skin. Being fifty-four (almost) is also odd. It kind of doesn’t have an era, and I know you believe in all human a
ges having a spiritual era. This one I don’t know. I think everybody needs a definition of spirituality, Frank (you have one, I believe). You wouldn’t want to go on a quiz show, would you, and be asked your definition of spirituality and not know one. (Apropos this retreat.) June doesn’t seem that far back to me. Does it to you? I can’t say that how things are now is how I thought they would end up. Though maybe I did.
But I do want to say something to you (a good sign, maybe). I want to tell you one reason why I’m sure I love you. There are people we can be around, and we take them for granted sometimes, and who make us feel generous and kind and even smarter and more clever than we probably are—and successful in our own terms and the world’s. They are the ideal people, sweetheart. And that’s who you are for me. I’m sure I’m not that way for you, which bothers me, because I think I’m kind of a roadblock for you now. No one else is like that for me, and I don’t know why you are that way, but you are. So just in case you were wondering.
(The reason I’m writing this is to see how it comes out. If it seems okay, then you’re reading it “now.”) Finally (thank God, huh?), I don’t know if I want to be married to you anymore. But I don’t know if I want a divorce, or if I can’t live without you. Is there a precise word for that human state? Maybe you can make something up. Maybe New Jersey is it. Though here in Maidenhead (what a name!), where for some reason tourists come, I hear Americans saying they’re from all over. Iowa and Oregon and Florida. And I think—that doesn’t matter anymore. Maybe it would be good to move away from New Jersey. Maybe all we need is a change. Like the hippies used to say when there were so many of them, and they were begging quarters back in the Loop in Chicago: “Change is good.” I thought that was a riot. At least we don’t have cancer, Frank. So maybe we have some choices to make together still. I also want you to know—and this is important—that you were not boring in bed, if you ever worried about that. I’ll call you on Thanksgiving, which is not a holiday in Maidenhead so I can probably use the trunk line at the arts centre. Love with a kiss. Sally (your lost wife).
I’m shocked. Humbled. Emptied. Amazed. Provoked. Delighted. Thrilled to be all. If man be a golden impossibility, his life’s line a hair’s breadth across, what is woman? A golden possibility? Her life’s line a lifeline thrown to save me from drowning.
I’m ready to wire greenbacks—except it’s Thanksgiving. Mr. Oshi could be of service, though he’s probably huddled in his house. I’ll send solicitors out to Maidenhead in a black saloon car to spirit Sally down to Heathrow, provide a change of clothes, get her into the VIP lounge at BA and right into a first-class seat—on the Concorde, except it crashed. I’ll be waiting at Newark Terminal 3 with a dinner-plate smile, all slates cleaned, agendas changed for the future, bygones trooping off to being bygones. Cancer’s a dot we’ll connect in due time. Since she doesn’t know I have/had it, it’s almost as if I don’t/didn’t—so powerful is her belief, so unreal is cancer to begin with.
Except there’s no call-back number here. No 44+ bippety, bippety, bippety, bip. When I come back from Timbuktu, I’ll coax the Maidenhead Arts Centre number out of inquiries, where they’re always helpful (our information won’t give you the time of day). Or else I’ll declare an emergency.
I go to the window again in my terry-cloth robe, my heart pumping, a zizzy bee-sting quiver down my arms and legs, my bare feet cold on the floor planks. “Is this really happening?” I say to the window and the beach beyond, in a voice someone could hear in the room with me. Is this happening? Is there a celestial balance to things? A yin/yang? Do people come back once they’ve gone away to Mull? Life is full of surprises, a wise man said, and would not be worth having if it were not. My choice then, since I have a choice, is to believe they do come back.
Out upon the dun Atlantic, a Coast Guard buoy tender sits bestilled on the water’s roll, its orange sash promoting bright, far-flung hope—the same it gives to all sailors adrift and imperiled. I train my powerful U-boat-quality binoculars, given to me by Sally, on its decks, its steepled conning bridge, its single gray gunnery box, its spinning radar dish, the heavy red nun already winched aboard. Fast-moving miniature sailors are in evidence. A davit’s employed, a dory’s lowering off the landward side. Sailors are there, too. No doubt this is a drill, a dry run to pass the time on Thanksgiving, when all would be elsewhere if only our shores were safe. I pan across the swells (how do they ever find anything?), but there is nothing visibly afloat. I put the lens bottles to the window glass and lean into the ferrules, as if finding a foreign object was essential to a need of mine. Only nothing’s foreign. A second red buoy, whose bell I sometimes hear in the fog or when the wind blows in, rocks in the slow swell, its red profile low, its clapping now inaudible. I, of course, can’t find what they’re after. And maybe it’s nothing, a coordinate on a chart, a signal down deep they must track to be accomplished sailors. Nothing more.
I sweep down the beach and find the surfcasters—close-up—in their neoprenes and watch caps, their backs to the shore, up to their nuts in frigid, languid ocean, their shoulders intent and hunched, their long poles working. A blue Frisbee floats through my circled view. A white retriever ascends to snare it. I find the Sea-Clift Shore Police’s white Isuzu trolling back along its own tracks, the uniformed driver, as I am, glassing the water’s surface. For a shark fin. A body (these things happen when you live by the sea). A periscope. Icarus just entering the sea, wings molten, eyes astonished, feet spraddling down.
And then I see my son Paul again, wading out of the surf in his soaked cargo shorts, his pasty belly slack for age twenty-seven. He is shoeless, shirtless, his skull—visible through his mullet—rounder than I remember, his beard-stached mouth distorted in a smile, hands dangling, palms turned back like a percy man, his feet splayed and awkward as when he was a kid. He does not look the way you’d like your son to look. Plus, he must be frozen.
I track down to the hole he’s dug beyond the hydrangeas, and it’s there, “finished,” coffin-shaped, not large, ready for its casket to be borne down. My shovel stands in the sandpile to the side.
When I find Paul again, he’s seen me glassing him like a sub-captain and has fixed his gaze back on me, his red-lipped smile distorted, his feet caked with sand, pale legs wide apart like a pirate’s. He flags his bare arm like one of those drowners out of reach—lips moving, words of some sentiment, something possibly that any father would like to hear but I can’t at this distance. Paul cocks his fists up in a Charlie Atlas muscle man’s pose, jumps sideways and bears down stupidly and shows his soft abs and lats. The young Frisbee spinners, the elderly walkers in bright sweats, the metal-detector cornballs, a late-arriving fisherman just wading into the sea—all these see my son and smile an indulgent smile. I wave back. It’s not bad to wave at this remove as our first contact. On an impulse, I put down my binocs and give my own Charlie Atlas double-bicep flexer, still in my tartan robe. And then Paul does his again. And we are fixed this way for a moment. Why couldn’t we just stop here, not go on to what’s next—be two tough boys who’ve fought a draw, stayed unvanquished, each to leave the field a victor? Fat Chance.
In front of my closet mirror, I get into my 501s, my Nikes and my block-M sweatshirt with the yellow polo underneath. I am Mr. Casual Back to Campus, booster dude and figure of wholesome ridicule. I have called Clarissa and left a message: “Come home.” I have called Wade and left a message: “Where are you?” Clearly, I’m fated to wait for Sally’s call, at least until I’m back from Timbuktu and can make calls of my own. I have another full-out yearning for a cell phone, which would render me available (at all times) to hear her voice, answer a summons and go directly to Maidenhead if necessary—though she would need to know my number. I’d gladly forget Thanksgiving (like any other American). Most of my guests have been decommissioned anyway. I’d take the organic turkey, the tofu stuffing, the spelt, the whatever else, straight down to Our Lady of Effectual Mercy, where the K of C ministers to Sea-Clift’s neediest a
nd thankfulest. Or else I’d put it in Paul’s time capsule and bury it for later generations to puzzle over.
I am, however, exhilarated, and take a last scrutinizing look at myself. I look the way I want to—dopey but defended—the genial Tri-cities orthodontist. Though as usual, exhilaration doesn’t feel as good as I want it to—as it used to—since all sensation, good or bad, now passes through the damping circuitry of the cancer patient, victim or survivor. The tiramisu never tastes as sweet. The new paint job doesn’t shine as bright. Miss America’s glossy life-to-come wears a shadow of lurking despair, her smile a smile of struggling on in a dark forest. That’s what we survivors get as our good luck. Though think about the other poor bastards, the ones who get the real black spot—not just my gray one—and who’re flying home to Omaha this morning, urged to put their affairs in order.
I’ve, however, learned to let exhilaration be exhilaration, even if it only lasts a minute, and to fight the shadows like a boxer. Staring at the mirror, I give myself a slap, then the other side, then again, and once more, until my cheeks sting and are rosy, and a smile appears on my reflection’s face. I blink. I sniff. I throw two quick lefts at my block-M but hold back on the convincer right. I’m ready to step into the arena and meet the day. Once again, it’s Thanksgiving.
I’m taking this bad-boy outside to see how it fits,” Paul’s saying energetically. I’ve come down munching a piece of bacon, following voices to the daylight basement, chilly mausoleum of old Haddam furniture—my cracked hatch-cover table, my nubbly red hide-abed, my worn-through purple Persian rug, several non-working brass lamps bundled in the corner and a framed map of Block Island, where Ann and I once sailed when we were kids and thought we loved each other. I’ve thought of opening things up down here as a rumpus room.
