by Richard Ford
I give a wistful thought to Paul and wonder where he could be in a strange but peril-free town after dark. Possibly he and the Hacky Sack gang from Main and Chestnut have forged lifelong bonds and removed to a dingy diner for cottage fries, waffles and burgers at his expense. He may, after all, lack precise peer grouping in Deep River—where everyone’s at least old enough to be an adult. In Haddam he’ll do better.
“Jeepers,” I hear someone—a woman’s nasally voice say, mounting the creaky stairs to floor three. “I told Mark”—Merk—“why can’t she just move to the Cities, where we can keep an eye on her, then Dad won’t have to drive so far for his dialysis? He’s completely helpless without her.”
“So then what’d Mark say to that?” another woman’s equally nasally voice says without true interest—heavy treading down the hall away from my door.
“Oh, you know Mark. He’s such a clod.” A key in a lock, a door opening back. “He didn’t say too much.” Slam.
Since I have napped in my clothes (an irresistible luxury), I change only my shirt, slip on shoes, stretch my spine backward and forward, tramp woozily down to the communal bathroom for a visit and a face washing, then amble downstairs to have a look at things, locate Paul and get a tip on dinner; I’ve by now missed the inn’s: spaghetti, salad, garlic bread, tapioca, all highly praised on the “Weekly Score Card” left on my dressertop (“Mmmmmm,” one penciled-in comment by a previous guest).
In the long, brown-carpeted parlor all the old parchment lamps are burning cheerily and several guests are engrossed in gin games or Clue or reading newspapers or books out of the library, but saying little. A too-strong cinnamon candle is somewhere smoldering, and above the cold fireplace hangs a shadowy six-foot-tall portrait of a man in full leather gear with a silly, compromised expression on his U-shaped face. This is the Deerslayer himself. A big, elderly, long-eared, ham-handed Swede-looking guy is yakking away to a Japanese man in confidential tones about “invasive surgeries” and the extremes he’d be willing to suffer to avoid them. And across the room a horsey, middle-aged southern-sounding woman in a red-and-white polka-dot dress is seated at the piano, talking too loudly to another woman, in a foam neck brace. The polka-dot woman’s eyes roam the long room, wanting to know who might be listening and being wildly entertained by what she’s yammering about, which is whether you can ever trust a handsome man married to a not-so-pretty woman. “Clampin’ a big padlock on my china cabinet’d be my first official move,” she says in a loud voice. She spies me in the doorway contentedly watching the tableau of easygoing inn life (exactly how any prospective proprietor would fantasize it: every room filled, everybody’s credit card slip salted away in the safe, no refunds offered, everybody in bed by ten). Her eyes snap at me. She offers me a long-toothed, savage stare and waves my way as if she knew me from Bogalusa or Minter City—maybe she simply recognizes a fellow southerner (something in the submissive, shruggy set of my shoulders). “Hey, you! All right! Come on down here, I see you,” she shouts toward the door, rings flashing, bracelets banging, dentures a-twinkle. I wave good-naturedly, but fearing I’ll end up piano-side having my brains turned to suet, I step discreetly back and out of the doorway, then hustle down the front under-the-stairs hallway to make some calls.
I would certainly like to call Sally and should call for messages. The Markhams could’ve come back from around the bend, and there might be an all-clear from Karl. These subjects have blessedly slipped my mind for several hours, but I haven’t noticed much relief in the bargain.
Someone (no doubt the old southern number) has begun playing “Lullaby of Birdland” at a slow, lugubrious pace, so that the whole atmosphere on floor one suddenly feels calculated to drive everyone to bed.
I wait for messages, staring at a diagram illustrating the five steps that will save someone from choking, and fingering a stack of pink tickets from a dinner theater in Susquehanna, PA. Annie Get Your Gun is playing this very night, and the stack of playbills on the telephone table rings with the critics’ kudos: “Everybody’s first rate”—Binghamton Press & Sun Bulletin; “Move over ‘Cats’ “—Scranton Times; “This baby’s got legs under her”—Cooperstown Republican. I can’t help conjuring up Sally’s review: “My team of death’s-door opening-nighters simply couldn’t get enough of it. We laughed, we cried, we damn near died”— Curtain Call Newsletter.
Beeeeep. “Hello, Mr. Bascombe, this is Fred Koeppel calling again from Griggstown. I know it’s a holiday weekend, but I’d like to get a little action going on my house right away. Maybe show it on Monday if we can get the commission worked out….” Click. Ditto.
Beeeeep. “Hello, Frank, it’s Phyllis.” Pause while she clears her throat, as though she’s been asleep. “East Brunswick was a total nightmare. Total. Why’n’t you tell us, for God’s sake? Joe got depressed after one house. I think he may be headed for a big cavein. So anyway, we’ve reconsidered about the Hanrahan place, which I’m ready to change my mind about it, I guess. Nothing’s forever. If we don’t like it we can just sell it. Joe liked it anyway. I’ll get over worrying about the prison. I’m at a phone booth here.” A deepening change comes into her voice (signifying what?). “Joe’s asleep. Actually I’m having a drink at the bar at the Raritan Ramada. Quite a day. Quite a day.” Another long pause, representing possible stocktaking within the Markham ménage. “I wish I could talk to you. But. I hope you get this message tonight and call us up in the morning so we can get our offer over to old man Hanrahan. I’m sorry about Joe being such a butt. He’s not easy, I realize that.” A third pause, during which I hear her say, “Yeah, sure,” to someone. Then: “Call us at the Ramada. 201-452-6022. I’m probably going to be up late. We couldn’t stand that other place anymore. I hope you and your son are getting to share a lot.” Click.
Except for the boozy longing (which I ignore), there’s no shocker here. East Brunswick’s well known for dreary, down-market, cookie-cutter uniformity. It is not a viable alternative even to Penns Neck, though I’m surprised the Markhams came around so soon. It’s too bad they couldn’t have taken the evening, shot up to Susquehanna for Annie and chicken piccante. They’d have laughed, they’d have cried, and Phyllis could’ve found ways to start getting over worrying about the prison in her back yard. Of course, it won’t surprise me if “old man Hanrahan’s” house is realty history by now. Good things don’t hang around while half-wits split hair follicles, even in this economy.
I instantly put in a call to Penns Neck, to get Ted on the alert for an early-morning offer. (I’ll get Julie Loukinen to deliver it.) But the phone rings and rings and rings and rings. I repunch it, taking care to mentally picture each digit, then let it ring possibly thirty times while I stare down the front hall past the old grandfather clock and the portrait of General Doubleday and through the open screen door into the night and farther through trees to the diamond-twinkle lights of another, grander inn across on the lakeshore, a place I didn’t see this afternoon. All the ranked windows there are warmly lit, car headlights coming and going like some swank casino in a far-off seaside country. Out on the Deerslayer’s porch the high backs of the big Adirondack rockers are swaying as my fellow guests snooze away their spaghetti dinners, murmur and chuckle about the day—something bust-a-gut hilarious somebody’s son has piped up with in front of the Heinie Manusch bust, something else about the pros and cons of opening a copy shop in a town this size, something further about Governor Dukakis, whom someone, probably a fellow Democrat, laughingly refers to as “that Beantown Jerkimo.”
But nothing in Penns Neck. Ted may have slipped off to an Independence Day open house across the fence.
I try Sally’s number, since she said to call and since I intend to renew our amorous connections the instant I let Paul off in Gotham, a time that now feels many miles and hours from now but isn’t. (With one’s children everything happens in a flash; there’s never a now, only a then, after which you’re left wondering what took place and trying to imagine i
f it can take place again so’s you’ll notice.)
“Hello-o,” Sally says in a happy, airy voice, as if she’d just been in the yard, pinning up clothes on a sunny line.
“Hi,” I say, relieved and cheered for an answer somewhere. “It’s me again.”
“Me again? Well. Good. How are you, Me? Still pretty distracted? It’s a wonderful night at the beach. I wish you could distract yourself down to here. I’m on the porch, I can hear music, I ate radicchio and mushrooms tonight, and I’ve had some nice Duck’s Wing fumé blanc. I hope you two’re having as splendid a time wherever you are. Where are you?”
“In Cooperstown. And we are. It’s great. You should be here.” I picture one long, shiny leg, a shoe (gold, in my mind) dangling out over her porch banister into darkness, a big sparkling glass in her lounging hand (a banner night for women tipplers). “Have you got any company?” Apprehension’s knife enters my voice; even I hear it.
“Nope. No company. No suitors scaling the walls tonight.”
“That’s good.”
“I guess,” she says, clearing her throat just the way Phyllis did. “You’re extremely sweet to call me. I’m sorry I asked you about your old wife today. That was indiscreet and insensitive of me. I’ll never do it again.”
“I still want you to come up here.” This is not literally true, though it’s not far from true. (I’m certain she won’t come anyway.)
“Well,” Sally says, as though she were smiling into the dark, her voice going briefly weak, then coming back strong. “I’m thinking very seriously about you, Frank. Even though you were very rude or at least odd on the phone today. Maybe you couldn’t help it.”
“Maybe not,” I say. “But that’s great. I’ve been thinking seriously about you.”
“Have you?”
“You bet. I thought last night you and I came to a crossroads, and we went in the wrong direction.” Something in the South Mantoloking background makes me think I hear surf sighing and piling onto the beach, a blissful, longed-for sound here in the steamy Deerslayer hallway—though conceivably it’s only weak batteries in Sally’s cordless phone. “I think we need to do some things a lot differently,” I say.
Sally has a sip of her fumé blanc right by the receiver. “I thought over what you said about loving someone. And I thought you were very honest. But it seemed very cold too. You don’t think you’re cold, do you?”
“No one ever told me I was. I’ve been told about plenty of other faults.” (Some quite recently.) Whoever’s playing “Lullaby of Birdland” in the living room stops and switches straight into “The Happy Wanderer” at an allegretto clip, the heavy bass notes flat and metallic. Someone claps along for two bars, then quits. A man out on the porch laughs and says, “I think I’m a happy wanderer myself.”
“So I’ve just had this odd feeling all afternoon,” Sally says. “About what you said and what I said to you, about being noncommittal and smooth. That is how you are. But then if I have strong feelings about you, shouldn’t I just follow them? If I have a chance? I believe I could figure things out better when I was younger. I certainly always thought I could alter the course of things if I wanted to. Didn’t you say you had a tidal something or other about me? Tides were in it.”
“I said I had a tidal attraction to you. And I do.” Possibly we can move beyond smooth and noncommittal here. Someone—a woman—starts loudly singing “Balls-de-reee, balls-de-rah” in a quavery voice and laughing. Possibly it’s the loudmouth in polka dots who gave me the barbarous eyeball.
“What does that mean, tidal attraction?” Sally says.
“It’s hard to put into words. It’s just strong and persistent, though. I’m sure of that. I think it’s harder to say what you like than what you don’t.”
“Well,” Sally says almost sadly. “Last night I thought I was in a tide pulling me toward you. Only that isn’t what happened. So I’m not very sure. That’s what I’ve been thinking about.”
“It’s not bad if it’s pulling you toward me, is it?”
“I don’t think so. But I got nervous about it, and I’m not used to being nervous. It’s not my nature. I got in the car and drove all the way to Lakewood and saw The Dead. Then I had my radicchio and mushrooms by myself at Johnny Matassa’s, where you and I had our first encounter.”
“Did you feel better?” I say, fingering up two Annie ducats, wondering if a character in The Dead reminded her of me.
“Not completely. No. I still couldn’t understand if the unchangeable course was toward you or away from you. It’s a dilemma.”
“I love you,” I say, totally startling myself. A tide of another nature has just swirled me into very deep, possibly dark water. These words are not untrue, or don’t feel untrue, but I didn’t need to say them at this very moment (though only an asshole would take them back).
“I’m sorry,” Sally says, reasonably enough. “What is it? What?”
“You heard me.” The living room pianist is playing “The Happy Wanderer” much louder now—just banging away. The Japanese man who’s been hearing all about invasive surgeries walks out of the living room smiling, but immediately stops smiling when he hits the hall. He sees me and shakes his head as if he were responsible for the music but now it won’t stop. He heads up the front stairs. Paul and I will be happy to be on floor 3.
“What’s that mean, Frank?”
“I just realized I wanted to say it to you. And so I said it. I don’t know everything it means”—to put it mildly—“but I know it doesn’t mean nothing.”
“But didn’t you tell me you’d have to make somebody up to love them? And didn’t you say this was a time in your life you probably wouldn’t even remember later?”
“Maybe that time’s over, or it’s changing.” I feel jittery and squeamish saying so. “But I wouldn’t make you up anyway. It isn’t even possible. I told you that this afternoon.” I’m wondering, though, what if I’d said “don’t” in front of the verb? Then what? Could that be the way life progresses at my age? A-stumble into darkness and out of the light? You discover you love someone by trying it without “don’t” in front of the verb? Nothing vectored by your self or by what is? If so, it’s not good.
There’s a pause on the line, during which Sally is, understandably, thinking. I’m mightily interested in asking if she might love me, since she’d mean something different by it, which would be good. We could sort out the differences. But I don’t ask.
“The Happy Wanderer” comes to a crashing end, followed by complete, relieved silence in the living room. I hear the Japanese man’s feet treading the squeaky hall above me, then a door click closed. I hear pots being banged and scrubbed beyond the wall in the kitchen. Out on the dark porch the big rockers are rocking still, their occupants no doubt staring moodily across at the nicer inn that’s too ritzy for them and probably not worth the money.
“It’s very odd,” Sally says, clearing her throat again as though changing the subject away from love, which is okay with me. “After I talked to you today from wherever you were, and before I went to see The Dead, I walked up the beach a while—you’d asked me about Wally’s cuff links, and I just got this idea in my head. And when I came home I called his mother out in Lake Forest, and I demanded to know where he is. It just occurred to me for some reason that she’d always known and wouldn’t tell me. That was the big secret, in spite of everything. And I’ve never even been a person who thought there was a big secret.” (Unlike, say, Ann.)
“What did she tell you?” This would be an interesting new wrinkle in the tapestry. Wally: The Sequel.
“She didn’t know where he was. She actually started crying on the phone, the poor old thing. It was terrible. I was terrible. I said I was sorry, but I’m sure she doesn’t forgive me. I certainly wouldn’t forgive me. I told you I can be ruthless sometimes.”
“Did you feel better?”
“No. I just have to forget it, that’s all. You can stil
l see your ex-wife even if you don’t want to. I don’t know which is better.”
“That’s why people carve hearts on trees, I guess,” I say, and feel idiotic for saying it, but for a moment also desolate, as if some chance has been once again missed by me. Ann seems all the more insubstantial and distant for being substantial and not even very distant.
“I sound very un-smart to myself,” Sally says, ignoring my remark about trees. She takes a drink of wine, bumping the phone with the glass rim. “Maybe I’m undergoing the early signs of something. Self-pitying failure to make a significant contribution in the world.”
“That’s not true a bit,” I say. “You help dying people and make them happier. You make a hell of a contribution. A lot more than I make.”
“Women don’t usually have midlife crises, do they?” she says. “Though maybe women who’re alone do.”
“Do you love me?” I say rashly.
“Would you even like that?”
“Sure. I’d think it was great.”
“Don’t you think I’m too mild? I think I’m very mild.”
“No! I don’t think you’re mild. I think you’re wonderful.” The receiver for some reason is tightly pinned to my ear.
“I think I’m mild.”
“Maybe you feel mild about me.” I hope not, and my eyes fall again upon the little stack of pink dinner-theater tickets. They are, I see, for July 2, 1987—exactly a year ago. “If it’s free, how good could it be?”—F. Bascombe.
“I would like to know something.” She could very well want to know plenty.
“I’ll tell you anything. No holding back. The whole truth.”
“Tell me why you’re attracted to women your own age?” This harks back to a conversation we had on our gloom-infested fall excursion to Vermont to peep at leaves, eat overcooked crown roasts and wait in stationary lines of bus traffic, later to retreat homeward in a debrided, funky silence. On the way up and in soaring early spirits, I explained, off the cuff and unsolicited, that younger women (who I’d had in mind I can’t remember, but somebody in her middle twenties and not very smart) always wanted to cheer me up and sympathize with me, except that finally bored the socks off me, since I didn’t want to be sympathized with and was cheerful enough on my own. We were whizzing up the Taconic, and I went on to say it seemed like a textbook definition of adulthood that you gave up trying to be a cheerleader for the person you loved and just took him or her on as he or she was—assuming you liked him (or her). Sally made no reply at the time, as though she thought I was just making something up for her benefit and wasn’t interested. (In fact, I might already have been coaching myself against making people up for the purpose of loving them.)
