The Lay of the Land

by Richard Ford

  To my shock, I can’t suppress the aching suspicion that the helmeted, steel-thighed honey, high on the passenger perch, gloved hands clutching Terry’s lats, knees pincering his buns, inner-thigh hot place pressed thrillingly to his coccyx, was Bernice Podmanicsky, my almost-savior from the day’s woolly woes, and who I was just thinking might still be reachable. Wouldn’t she know I’d sooner or later be calling? The Harley, already a memory up Route 35, stays audible a good long time, passing through its gears until it attains its last.

  I’ve handed back Detective Marinara’s “We’re Pregnant” card. He studies it a moment, as though he’d never really looked before, then effects a mirthless, comprehending smile at all the grinning brides and beaming grooms. This is not what Paul had in mind: vague amusement. I’m close enough to smell Marinara’s QUIT SMOKING gum, his breath, cigarette-warm and medicine-sweet. He dyes his hair its shiny shade of too-black black, and down in his bristly chest hair, tufted out of his brown polo, he wears a gold chain—finer than his watchband—with a gold heart and tiny gold cross strung together. My original guess was Dutch Neck, but now I think Marinara hails from the once all-Italian President streets of Haddam—Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Cleveland, etc.—a neighborhood where I once resided, where Ann resides today and where once Paul and Clarissa were sweet children.

  “Maybe you want to come in and try that organic turkey,” I say. “And some organic dressing and mock pumpkin pie with plain yogurt for whipped cream.” Paul and Jill grin warm encouragement for this idea, as if Detective Marinara was a homeless man we’d discovered to have been a first violinist with the London Symphony and can nurse back to health by adopting him into our lives and paying for his rehab.

  “Yeah. No,” Marinara says—proper Jersey syntax for refusal. He cranes his fine-featured head all around and winces, as if his neck’s stiff. “I gotta get back to my sister’s to get in on the fighting. This is just, you know—” He smiles a professional, closed-mouth smile and plunges both hands in his brown jacket pockets, giving Paul’s “We’re Pregnant” card a good crunching. “You’ll still come over and do our show-and-tell for us, will you?” He now reminds me of a young Bob Cousy in his Celtic heyday, all purpose and scrap, maximizing his God-givens but strangely sad behind his regular-Joe features.

  “Absolutely. Just tell me when. I’m always happy to come to Haddam.” (Not at all true.)

  “Like I said. We think we got him. But you never know.”

  “No, you don’t.” I’m not asking who’s the culprit, in case I sold him a house or he was once a fellow member in the Divorced Men’s Club.

  “You go to Michigan?” Marinara side-eyes my maize-and-blue block-M as if it was worthy of esteem.

  “I did.”

  He sniffs and looks around as Nick Feenster’s entering his house, carrying his buffing supplies clutched to his electric blue chest. At the door, he turns and gives us all a look of warning, as if we were gossiping about him, then regards his twin Corvettes the same way. It’s cold as steel out here. I’m ready to get inside.

  “I wanted to go there,” Marinara says, wagging his shoulders an inch back and forth with the thought of Michigan.

  “What stopped you?”

  “I was a Freehold kid, you know?” Wrong again. “I got all intoxicated with the band and the neat football helmets and the fight song. Saturday afternoons, leaves turning. All that. I thought, Man, I could go to Michigan, I’d be, you know. All set forever.”

  “But you didn’t go?”

  “Naaaa.” Marinara’s bottom lip laps over the top one and presses in. It is a face of resignation, which no doubt strengthens his aptitude for police work. “I was the wrong color. Scuse my French.”

  “I see,” I say. I’m of course the wrong color, too.

  “I did my course over at Rutgers-Camden. Prolly was better, given, you know. Everything. It isn’t so bad.”

  “Seems great to me.” I shiver through my thighs and knees from the accumulating cold. It’s just as well, I think, that Detective Marinara has his family to go back to. Police, by definition, make incongruous guests and he could turn unwieldy with a glass of merlot, once he got talking. Though he doesn’t seem to want to leave, and I don’t want to abandon him out here.

  “Okay. So. Good to meet you. I’ll be in touch tomorrow.” He smiles, proffers a hand to me, a hand as soft as calfskin and delicate—not large enough to palm a basketball. I have yet to hear his first name. Possibly it’s Vincent. He extends his smile to Paul and Jill, but not a hand. “Thanks for the card,” he says, and seems pleased. Detective Marinara is, in fact, a regular Joe, could’ve been my little brother in Sigma Chi, done well in management or marketing, settled in Owosso, become a Michiganian. He might never have given the first thought to carrying a shield or a gun. It’s often the case that I don’t know whether I like fate or hate it.

  “Great to meet you,” I say. “Have a happy Thanksgiving.”

  “Yeah. That’d be different.” He shrugs, his smile become sun-less but mirthful. Then he’s on his way, back to his cruiser, his radio (hidden somewhere on his person) crackling unexpectedly with cop voices. He doesn’t look back at us.

  17

  Inside, behind the coffered front door of the steam bath that’s become my residence, in the candle-lit dining room that’s too small and boxy and windowless (a design flaw fatal to resale), arrayed on the Danish table accoutred with bone china, English cutlery, Belgian crystal, Irish napkins as wide as Rhode Island, two opened bottles of Old Vine Healdsburg merlot, all courtesy of Eat No Evil, who’ve arrived early and paved every available table inch with pricey ethical food, including an actual, enormous, glistening turkey, is: Thanksgiving, broadcasting its message through the house with a lacquered richness that instantly makes my throat constrict, my cheeks thicken, my saliva go ropy and my belly turn bilgy. It’s exactly the way I ordered it. But just for the moment, I can’t go in the room where it is. No doubt my condition’s asserting itself through the belly and up the gorge.

  “Isn’t it great?” Jill’s ahead, beaming, peeking in at the flickering festive room, not wanting to enter before I do, eyes wide back to Paul and me like a daughter-in-law, her prosthesis tucked behind her.

  “Yeah,” I say, though the whole spread looks like a wax feast in a furniture store showroom. If you put a knife to the turkey or a spoon to the yellow squash or a fork to the blamelessly white spuds, it would all be as hard as a transistor radio. And at the last second before entering, I swerve right, and into the kitchen, where there are windows, big ones, and a door out, giving air, which is what I need before I chuck up. “Yeah, it is,” I say as I push open the sliding door and struggle onto the deck for the ocean’s chill that’ll save a big mess (I’m also dying to grab a leak). You can say yours is a “nontraditional” Thanksgiving when you have cancer and the sight of food makes you sick and you nearly piss your pants and the police check in and your wife’s split to England—which isn’t counting your kids. From out here, Drilla Feenster’s in view, deck to deck, alone in her hot tub—naked, it would seem—listening to “The March of the Siamese Children” (clearly her favorite) on the boom box, drinking some kind of milky white drink from a tall glass and staring out past the owl decoy to the sea. Bimbo sits on the hot tub ledge beside her, staring in the same direction. I must be invisible to her.

  “Who turned the fucking heat up to bake?” I say back through the open doorway into the kiln of a kitchen, where Jill and Paul have stopped, looking concerned by the fact that I am (I can feel it) pale as a sheet. “Where’s Clarissa?”

  The beach and ocean are oily-smelling, the sand stained lifeless brown and packed by the tide. Long yellow seaweed garlands are strewn from the turbulence at sea (these are what stink). Two hundred yards out, a black-suited surfer sits his board, prow-up, on the barely rising sheen of ocean. Nothing’s happening. Paul’s time-capsule hole and pile of sand are the only things of note close by.

  “There’s a kind of story invo
lved in that,” Paul says from the kitchen, through the door out to the deck. A small bird-like female is visible behind the stove island in the kitchen, holding a dish towel, insubstantial through the mirroring glass. She’s got up in a floppy white chef’s toque and a square-front tunic that engulfs her.

  “Who’s that?” I say. The sight of this tiny woman makes me unexpectedly agitated—and also enervated. I’m sure this is the way the dying man feels as his final breaths hurry away and word goes through the house: “It’s time, it’s time, he’s going, better come now.” The room fills with faces he can’t recognize, all the fucking air he’d hoped to salvage is quickly sucked up. It’s the feeling of responsibility colluding with pointlessness, and it isn’t good.

  “That’s Gretchen,” Paul says. I feel like I’ve entered a house not my own and encountered circus performers—the one-handed mountain woman, the midget chef, the wise-cracking pitchman in the horse-blanket suit. Everything’s gone queer. It wasn’t supposed to.

  “What’s she here for?” I’m now burning to piss. Were it not daylight and Drilla not in her hot tub in full view, I’d lariat out right here, the way I do all the time behind Kmart.

  “She’s part of the food,” Paul says, and looks uncomfortably at Jill, who’s beside him. “She’s nice. She’s from Cassville. She and Jill both do yoga.”

  “Where’s your sister?” I snap. “Did Sally call me?”

  “She did,” Paul says. “I told her that you were doing fine, that your prostate stuff was a lot better and probably in remission, and that you and I had—”

  “Did you say that to her?” My lips stiffen to a grimace. This was my news. My story to spin, to bill me as more than a penile has-been. Guilt, shame, regret will now cloud all Sally’s intentions toward me. Love will never have its second chance. She’ll be on a plane to Bhutan by sundown. I’ll become a pitiful thing in her horoscope (“Better watch your p’s and q’s on this one, hon”). I could strangle my son and never think of him again.

  “I just thought she prolly knew about it.” Paul elevates his chin semi-defiantly, thumbs over his belt cow-puncher-style. This is his new take-charge posture—somewhat compromised by his suit. Tiny Gretchen stares out at me apprehensively, as if I was being talked off a high ledge. She doesn’t know who I am. Introductions were neglected. “She said she’d be here tomorrow. She seemed a little distressed, I guess.”

  I, of course, was too busy not selling a cracker box on wheels to awards-store Bagosh and hunting for—and not finding—Bernice Podmanicsky. At the Next Level, the old standards vanish. You don’t know where your interests lie or how to contact them. “Where’s your sister. Did she call?”

  “Okay.” Paul casts a fugitive look around the kitchen. Jill is nowhere in sight now. Probably she’s snuffing the dining room candles so the smoke alarm doesn’t go off.

  “Okay? Okay what?” Paul stands his ground, separated by the open sliding doorway, his brow heavy, his damaged eye twitching but focused. What’s wrong here? What’s the story? Is she hurt, after all? Maimed? Dead? And everyone’s too embarrassed to tell me? Me, me, me, me. Why does so much have to be about me? That’s the part of life that makes you want to end it.

  “She, like, called right after you left and talked to Jill and said she’d be late because there were some issues with dumb-fuck whatever. Thom.”

  “Tell me what issues.” Atlantic City’s eighty miles south. I can be there in a twinkling (and be glad to go).

  “She didn’t say. Then half an hour later she called back and asked to talk to you, and you were gone, I guess.”

  “Yeah. So? What’d she say? What’s this about?”

  “I didn’t know then. She asked for Mom’s cell and I gave it to her.” Paul isn’t used to being the bearer of important news that doesn’t seek its source from his everlasting strangeness. For that reason, he’s reverted to talking like a halting seventeen-year-old.

  “Is that it?” It. It. It. And why am I hearing about it on the deck and not twenty minutes ago instead of “We’re Pregnant”? My fists ball up hard as cue balls. I’ve gratefully lost the urge to piss, though I might’ve pissed and not noticed. That’s happened. Little Gretchen’s still staring at me, dish towel in hand, as if I’m an intruder wandered in off the beach. “Is that it? Is there anything else to the fucking story? About your sister?”

  “Okay.” Paul blinks hard, as if he’s recognized I might do something he might not like. I may look frightening. But what I am is scared—that my son is about to calmly mention, “Well, like, um, I guess Clarissa got decapitated. It was pretty weird.” Or “Um…some guys wearing hoods sort of kidnapped her. One guy, I guess, saw her get shot. We aren’t too sure—” Or “She was, I guess, trying to fly off the thirty-first floor. But she didn’t really get too far. Except like down.” This is how real news is imparted now. Like reading ingredients off the fucking oatmeal box.

  “Would that ‘okay’ be the same ‘okay’ as the first ‘okay’ that meant not okay?” I say. I’m staring a hole in him. “What the fuck’s the matter with you, Paul? What’s happened to your sister?”

  “She’s in Absecon.” His gray eyes behind his lenses roll almost out of sight in their sockets, as if under slightly different circumstances this information could be hilarious. Paul sways back on his heels and drops his hands to his sides.

  “Why?” My heart’s going thumpa-thumpa.

  “She and Thom got into some kind of fight. I don’t know. Clary took his keys and went and got his car”—the Healey—“and started driving back up here. But then shit-for-brains called the police and said it was stolen. And the police in Absecon, I guess, tried to pull her over. And she panicked and drove into one of those lighted merge-lane arrows on a trailer at Exit Forty, and knocked it into a highway guy and broke his leg.” Paul runs his left hand back through his mullet, and for an instant closes his eyes, then opens them as if I might be gone, suddenly, blessedly.

  “How do you know this?” My chest is twittering.

  “Mom told me.” His hands slip nervously down into his baggy plaid suit-pants pockets.

  “Is she in Absecon, too?” Where the fuck is Absecon?

  “I guess. Yeah.”

  “Is your sister hurt?” Thumpa-thumpa-thump, thump.

  “No, but she’s in jail.”

  “She’s in jail?”

  “Well. Yeah. She hit that guy.” Paul’s gray eyes fix on me as though to render me immobile. They blink. He coughs a tiny unwarranted cough and begins to say something else, his hands in his pockets.

  But I’m already moving. “Well, Jesus Christ—”

  I shoulder past him into the kitchen, past Gretchen and go for the stairs, skinning off my block-M, already contemplating how I will portray myself as a good, solid, not-insane-but-still-distressed father to all of ranked Absecon officialdom justifiably angry about one of their own being mowed down by my daughter. Ann, I absolutely know, will bring a lawyer. It’s in her DNA. My job will be simply to get there—down there, over there, wherever.

  Standing shirtless in my closet, I immediately understand that regulation realtor clothing’s what’s called for—attire that causes the wearer to look positive-but-not-over-confident, plausible, capable but mostly bland on first notice; suitable for meeting a client from Clifton, or the FBI. In the real estate business, an agent’s first impression is as an attitude, not a living being. And for that, I’m well provided. Chinos (again), pale blue oxford button-down, brown loafers, nondescript gray socks, brown belt, navy cotton V neck. My uniform.

  From inside my closet, I can hear the high-pitched nazzing, ratcheting, gunning, insect-engine noise of a dirt bike out on the beach. Local ball-cap hooligans, younger siblings of the prep school kids from yesterday, freed up—due to relaxed holiday police staffing—to go rip shit over our fragile shore fauna and pristine house-protecting dunes. If I weren’t on a dire mission, I’d call the cops or go put a stop to things myself. Possibly they’ll drive into Paul’s time-capsu
le bunker.

  As I tie my shoes, I meditate darkly (and again) upon the very model of young manhood I once had in mind for my daughter—not to marry necessarily, or run away with, but to seek out as a good starter boyfriend. There was just such a staunch fellow when she was at Miss Trustworthy’s. A small, wiry, bespectacled, slate blue–eyed, blinking Edgar-of-Choate, who went on to read diplomatic history at Williams and Oxford but chose the family maritime law practice on Cape Ann, who coxed the heavyweight eight, could do thousands of knuckle push-ups, had an intense, scratchy, yearning voice, dressed more or less like me, and who I liked and encouraged (and who Clarissa humored and also liked), even though we all knew she was destined for a sage older man (who also remarkably resembled me), a fact that young Edgar didn’t seem to mind the hopelessness of, since a chassis like Clarissa Bascombe was way beyond the planet Pluto in terms of his life’s hopes. All seemed safe and ideal. Clarissa would begin adult life believing men were strange, harmless beings who couldn’t always be taken completely for granted, needed to be addressed seriously (now and then), but ultimately were hers for the taking—low-hanging fruit for a girl who’d seen some things. Edgar is now a hang ’em high prosecutor out in Essex County in Mass.—and a Republican, natch. I hardly have to say that a perilously bogus over-oiled character like van Ronk-the-equestrian is not the safe finish line for which good, solid Edgar was ever the starting gate. Beware when you have children that your heart not be broken.