The Lay of the Land

  “Do you wonder, Frank, if when you feel something really forcefully—so forcefully you know it’s true—do you ever wonder if how you feel is just how you feel that particular day and tomorrow it won’t matter as much?”

  “No doubt about it,” I say. “It’s a good thing. We need to question our strong feelings, though we still need to be available to feel them. It’s like buyer’s remorse. One day you think if you don’t have a particular house, your whole life’s ruined. Then the next day you can’t imagine why the hell you ever considered it. Though plenty of times people see a house, fall in love with it, buy it, move in and never leave till they get taken out in a box.” For some reason, I’m grinning. I wonder if the video camera that’s pointed at me is operating, since something’s making me uneasy, so that I’m racketing on like Norman Vincent Peale.

  Ann has taken her red sunglasses out of her matron-athlete’s hair and carefully folded them while I’m blabbering, as if whatever I’m saying must be endured.

  “It’s just hard to know,” I say, and inch back against the door through which I spied Ann a while ago teaching a stern lesson to an innocent Titleist.

  “I know I’ve told you this, Frank,” she says, carefully laying her Ray-Bans on the pine seat beside her as a means of shutting me up about buyer’s remorse. “But when Charley was so bad off, and you drove up those times to sit with him in Yale-New Haven, when his real friends got preoccupied elsewhere, that was a very, very excellent thing to have done. For him. And for me.”

  It only lasted six weeks; then off he went to heaven. Through his haze, Charlie thought I was someone named Mert he’d known at St. Paul’s. A few times he talked to me about his first wife and about important twelve-meter races he’d attended, and once or twice about his current wife’s former husband, whom he said was “rather sweet at times” but “ineffectual.” “A Big-Ten graduate,” he said, smirking, though he was nutty as a coon. “You couldn’t imagine her ever marrying that guy,” he said dreamily. I told Charley the fellow probably had some good qualities, to which Charley, from his hospital bed, handsome face drained of animation and interest, said, “Oh, sure, sure. You’re right. I’m too tough. Always have been.” Then he said the whole thing over again, and in a few days he died.

  Why would I do such a thing? Sit with my ex-wife’s dying husband? Because it didn’t bother me. That’s why. I could imagine someone having to do it to me—a total stranger—and how nice it would be to have someone there you didn’t have to “relate” to. I don’t want to visit the subject again, however, and fold my arms across my chest and look down like a priest who’s just heard an insensitive joke.

  “It made me see something about you, Frank.”

  “Oh.” Noncommittal. No question mark. I don’t intend asking what it might be, because I don’t care.

  “It’s something I think you would’ve said was always true about you.”

  “Maybe.”

  “I don’t think I’ve always thought so. I might’ve when we were kids. But I quit about 1982.” She picks up her white golf glove and folds it into a small package.

  “Oh.”

  “You’re a kind man,” Ann says from the team bench.

  I blink at her. “I am a kind man. I was a kind man in 1982.”

  “I didn’t think so,” she says stoically, “but maybe I was wrong.”

  I, of course, resent being declared something I’ve always been and should’ve been known to be by someone who supposedly loved me, but who wasn’t smart or patient or interested enough to know it when it mattered and so divorced me, but now finds herself alone and it’s Thanksgiving and I conveniently have cancer. If this is leading to some sort of apology, I’ll accept, though not with gratitude. It could also still be a clear-the-decks declaration before announcing her engagement to oversized Fuchs. Our bond is nothing if not a strange one.

  “You can’t live life over again,” Ann says penitently. She smiles up and across at me, as if telling me that I’m kind has gotten something oppressive off her chest. All dark clouds now are parting. For her anyway.

  “Yeah. I know.” A pearl of sweat has slid out of my hairline. It’s hot as hell in here. What I’d like to do is leave.

  “I didn’t know if you really did know that.” Ann nods, still smiling, her eyes sparkling.

  “I understand conventional wisdom,” I say. “I’m a salesman. Placebos work on me.”

  Ann’s smile broadens, so that she looks absolutely merry. “Okay,” she says.

  “Okay,” I say. “Okay what?” I glance at the tri-podded Sony, useful for showing Lady Linksters hitches in their backswings. “Is that goddamn thing turned on?”

  Ann looks up at the black box and actually grins. Many years have elapsed since I’ve seen her so happy. “No. Would you like me to turn it on?”

  “What’s going on?” I’m feeling dazed in this fucking oven. It must be what a hot flash feels like. First you get hot; then you get mad.

  “I have something to say.” She is solemn again.

  “You told me. I’m kind. What else? I accept your apology.” Ungiven.

  “I wanted to tell you that I love you.” Both her hands are flat down beside her on the bench, as if she or the bench were exerting an upward force. Her gray eyes have trapped me with a look so intent I may never have seen it before. “You don’t have to do anything about it.” Two small tears wobble out of her eyes, although she’s smiling like June Allyson. Sweat, tears, what next? Ann sniffles and wipes her nose with the side of her hand. “I don’t know if it’s again, or still. Or if it’s something new. I don’t guess it matters.” She turns her head to the side and dabs at her eyes with the heel of her hand. She breathes in big, breathes out big. “I realized,” she says mournfully, “it’s why I came back to Haddam last year. I didn’t really know it, but then I did. And I was actually prepared to do nothing about it. Ever. Maybe just be your friend in proximity. But then Sally left. And then you got sick.”

  “Why are you telling me this now?” My mouth’s been ajar. These are not the words I want to say. But the words I want to say aren’t available.

  “Because I went to Van Tuyll’s cleaners, and their pretty daughter was dead. And that seemed so unchangeable—dying just blotting things out. And I thought I’d invented ways to be toward you that let me pretend that being mad at you wasn’t changeable, either—or whatever it is. But those ways can be blotted out, too. I guess there are degrees of unchangeableness. Love’s a terrible word. I’m sorry. You seem upset. I decided I’d just tell you. I’m sorry if you’re upset.” Ann hiccups, but catches her hiccup in her throat as a little burp, just like Clarissa. “Sorry,” she says.

  “Are you just telling me this because you’re afraid I’m going to die, and you’ll feel terrible?”

  “I don’t know. You don’t have to do anything about it.” She picks up her sunglasses and puts them back up in her hair. She reaches beneath the bench, produces a pair of brown penny loafers she puts on over her pink socks. She looks around where she’s sitting for something she might be leaving, then stands in the blaring lights, facing me. “My coat’s behind you.” She’s fast receding into the old protocols that she, for one moment, had gotten beyond and out into the open air, where she caught a good whiff and held it in her lungs. The poet promised, “What is perfect love? Not knowing it is not love, some kind of interchange with wanting, there when all else is wanting, something by which we make do.” I’m not making do well at all. Not achieving interchange. I am the thing that is wanting. After so long of wanting.

  I turn clumsily, and there is Ann’s jacket on a coat-rack I hadn’t seen, a thin brown rayon-looking short topcoat with a shiny black lining—catastrophically expensive but made to look cheap. I take it off the old-fashioned coat tree and hand it over. Heavy keys swag inside a pocket. Its smell is the sweet powdery scent of womanly use.

  “I’ll let you walk me out to my car.” She smiles, putting her brown coat on over her golfing uniform. She m
oves by, but I am not ready with a touch. She pulls open the air-sucking squash-court door. A breath of cool floods in from the corridor, where it’d seemed warm before. She turns, assesses the room, then reaches beyond me and snaps off the light, throwing us into complete, studdering darkness, closer together than we have been in donkey’s years. My fingers begin to twitch. She moves past me into the shadowy hall. I almost touch the blousy back of her coat. I hear a boy’s voice down the long hall. “You asshole,” the voice says, then laughs—“hee, hee, hee, hee.” A basketball again bounces echoingly on hardwood. Splat, splat, splat. A ker-chunk of a gym door opening, then closing. A girl’s voice—lighter, sweeter, happier—says, “You give love a bad name.” And then our moment is, alas, lost.

  It’s only 5:30, but already dead-end nighttime in New Jersey. Nothing good’s left of the day. Heading across the cold, peach-lit parking lot, Ann at first walks slowly, but then picks it up, going briskly along toward her Accord. The sulfur globes atop the curved aluminum stanchions light the damp asphalt but do not warm. All here seems deserted except for our two vehicles side-by-side, though of course we’re still being watched. Nothing goes unobserved on this portion of the planet.

  We have said nothing more, though we understand that saying nothing’s the wrong choice. It is for me to declare something remarkable and remarkably important. To add to the sum of our available reality, be the ax for the frozen sea within us, yik, yik, yik, yik. Though I’m for the moment unable to fit my thoughts together plausibly or to know the message I need to get out. Ann and I are on a new and different footing, but I don’t know what that footing might be. The Permanent Period and its indemnifying sureties are in scattered retreat out here in the post-rain De Tocqueville lot. They have sustained too many direct hits for one day and have lost some potency.

  “I’ve lived here almost a whole year now.” Ann walks resolutely beside me. “I can’t say I love Haddam. Not anymore. It’s odd.”

  “No,” I say. “Me, either. Or, me, too.”

  “But…”

  “But what?” We’re back to our old intractable, defensible selves. Asking “What?” means nothing.

  “But nothing.” She fishes the clump of jingly keys out of her topcoat pocket and fingers through them beside her car. It was this way when we visited Ralph’s grave on his birthday in the spring: a negotiated peace of little substance or duration, pleasing no one, not even a little. Then she says, “I suppose I should say one more thing.” It’s cold. Clouds are working against the moon’s disk. I’m tempted to put a hand on her shoulder, ostensibly for warmth’s sake. She is wearing golfing clothes, after all, in falling temps.

  “Okay.” I do not put a hand on her shoulder.

  “All those things I said in there.” She quietly, self-consciously clears her throat. I smell her hair, which still hints of the warm wood inside and something slightly acidic. “I meant all that. And what’s more, I’d live with you again—where you live, if you wanted me to. Or not.” She sighs a businesslike little sigh. No more tears. “You know, parents who’ve lost a child are more likely to die early. And people who live alone are, too. It’s a toxic combination. For both of us, maybe.”

  “I already knew that.” Everybody reads the same studies, takes the same newspapers, exhibits the same fears, conceives the same obsessive, impractical solutions. Our intelligence doesn’t account for much that’s new anymore. Only, I don’t find that discouraging. It’s like reading cancer statistics once you’ve been diagnosed—they become a source of misplaced encouragement, like reading last night’s box scores. Misery may not love company. But discouragement definitely does. “Would-you-like-to-come-over-on-Thursday-and-have-Thanksgiving-with-me? I-mean-with-us-with-the-children?” With blinding swiftness these ill-conceived words leave my mouth, taking their rightful place among all the other ill-conceived things I’ve said in life and taking the place of something better I should’ve said but couldn’t say because I was paralyzed by the thought of living with Ann and that she’s now concluded I’m alone.

  She clicks her car unlocked and swings the door out. Clean, new-car bouquet floods our cold atmosphere. The dimly lit cockpit begins pinging.

  Ann turns her back to me as if to put something inside the car—though she’s carrying nothing—then turns back, chin down, eyes trained on my chest, not my (shocked) face. “That’s nice of you.” She’s smiling weakly, June Allyson-style again. Ping, ping, ping. It’s other than the invitation she wanted and a poor substitute—but still. “I think I’d like that,” she says, her smile become proprietary. A smile I haven’t seen trained on me in a hundred years. Ping, ping, ping.

  And just then, as when we are children sick at home with a fever in bed late at night, suddenly everything moves a great distance away from me and grows small. Softened voices speak from a padded tube. Ann, only two feet away, appears leagues away, her pinging Accord all but invisible behind her. The pinging, ping, ping comes as if from fresh uncovered stars high in the cold sky.

  “That’s great,” her distant voice says.

  Ann looks at my face and smiles. We are now not merely on different footings but on different planets, communicating like robots. “You’ll have to give me directions, I guess.”

  “I will,” I say robotically, cheeks and lips smiling a robot smile. “But not now. I’m cold.”

  “It is cold,” she says, ignition key in hand. “When’s Paul arriving?”

  “Paul who?”

  “Paul, our son.” Ping, ping.

  “Oh.” Everything’s smashing back into close quarters, the night hitting me on the nose. Real sound. Real invitation. Real disaster looming. “Tomorrow, I guess. He’s en route.” For some reason I say route to rhyme with gout, a way I never say it.

  “Is that a new jacket,” she asks. “I like it.”

  “Yeah. It is.” I’m stumped.

  She looks at me hard. “Do you feel all right, Frank?”

  “I do,” I say. “I’m just cold.”

  “There are a lot of things we haven’t talked about.”

  “Yeah.”

  “But maybe we will.” And instead of crossing the gulf of years to give my cold cheek a buss with cold lips, Ann gives me three pats on my barracuda jacket shoulder—pat, pat, pat—like a girl in a riding habit patting the shoulder of an old saddle nag she’s just had a pleasant but not especially eventful ride on. “Paul’s coming to my house for dinner tomorrow. I asked Clary, but she declined, of course.” Same proprietary equitational smile and voice. Time for your rubdown and a nose bag. Ping, ping, ping. “I guess I’ll see you for dinner Thursday.”

  “Okay.”

  “Call me. Tell me how to get there.”

  “Yes. I will. I’ll call you.” Ping, ping.

  She looks at me as if to say, I know you might die right here and now, but we’re going to pretend you won’t and everything’ll be fine, old fella. And it is in this manner we manage our good-bye.

  As if someone, someone else, someone in a panic, someone like me but not me, was piloting my dark capsule, I am down the drizzly midnight De Tocqueville entrance lane like a NASCAR driver, my tires barely registering the speed moguls, skidding on each curve, sending deer, possum and catamount leaping into the sheltering woods, until I’m out past the signage, out the gate and out, back onto 27, headed into town. I of course have to piss.

  And, no surprise, I am locked in a fury of regret, self-reproach and bafflement. Why, why, why, why, why did I have to ask? Why can’t I be trusted not to ask? What hysteria chip in my personal hard drive impels me to self-evident disaster? Does anything teach us anything? Do seventeen years of perfectly acceptable divorced life, following clear-cut evidence of incompatibility, not dictate steering wide of Ann Dykstra, no matter how much I love her? Does cancer make you stupid as well as sick? If there was a Sponsor, a palmist, a shrink open late, dispensing mercy and wisdom to drop-ins, I’d beg, write a big check, dedicate quality hours. As stated, our intelligence doesn’t account for
much.

  I wish, for the very first time, for a cell phone. I’d call Ann from the car and leave a cringing message: “Oh, I’m a terrible, terrible man. Mistake after mistake after mistake. You were always right about me. Just please don’t come for Thanksgiving. We’d have an appalling time. I’ve booked you an A-list banquette at the Four Seasons, selected the right Dom Pérignon, arranged for Paul Newman and Kate Hepburn to be on your either side (where they’ll definitely want to talk to you), ordered the baked Alaska in advance. Keep the limo, take a friend…. Just keep away on Thanksgiving. Even though you love me. Even if I’m dying. Even if you’re lonely. Take my word for it.”

  If we’d only had our just-finished conversation on the phone—from home, without the tears, the sock feet, the lonely, converted, over-heated squash court—none of this would be happening. When I was at Mayo I met a hog farmer from Nebraska up on the urology floor, same as me, but who’d had a stroke and could barely speak to anyone. His happy, fat, grinning, scrubbed-face farm wife did the talking while he worked his eyebrows and nodded and smiled at me furiously but in total silence. Except on the phone, the wife told me, old Elmer’d yak and laugh and philosophize hours on end and never miss a beat or a connection, could even tell dirty jokes. Something’s to be said for disembodied communication. Too much credit’s given to the desultory intime. It’s why the governor’s never at the prison when the deed’s being done.

  I stop on the darkened roadside in front of a big, well-treed, hedge-banked, wide-lawned Norman Tudor that was actually moved to its present site twenty years ago from the Seminary grounds. There are few cars on this stretch of 27, so I can shuffle unnoticed up against the dark, dripping cedar hedge, in the damp leaf duff, and piss out the two cups I’ve accumulated since I can’t remember when but which have suddenly begun to make me panicky. A diaper would be a fail-safe, but I’m holding the line there.

  Then I’m back in the car and headed into Haddam, relieved, vaguely exhilarated, as only a blessed leak can bestow, though with my jaw screwed down even tighter, a faint flicker-rill in my lower abdomen more or less where I calculate my aggrieved prostate to be, my blood pressure for sure spiked, my life shortened by another thirty seconds—all this because I have now traitorously returned myself to the everyday, detail-shot, worry-misery-gnawing mind-set that I hate: how to un-invite the unwisely invited dinner guest who’ll torpedo the otherwise-nice-enough family meal. This is what Clarissa experiences as linked boxes, the slippy-sliding world within worlds of everyone’s feelings being on the line all the time, of perfect evenings with perfect overachiever dinner partners, the world of keeping calendars straight, of not forgetting to call back, always sending a note, the world of ducks-in-a-row, i’s dotted, t’s crossed and recrossed, of making sure the wrong person is never invited, or else everything’s fucked up horrible and you’re to blame and no one gets one ounce of closure. It’s the world she’s fled, the social Pleistocene tar pit that the Permanent Period is dedicated to saving you from by canceling unwanted self-consciousness, dimming fear-of-the-future in favor of the permanent, cutting edge of the present. By this measure, I shouldn’t care if Ann comes to Thanksgiving dressed as Consuelo the Clown, squirts everybody with seltzer, honks her horn and sings arias till we’re ready to strangle her. Because, in a little while it’ll be over, no one will be any different and the day will end as it would’ve anyway: me half-asleep in front of the TV, watching the second game on Fox. It’d be a thousand times better—for my prostate, for my diastole and systole, for my life span, mandibular jaw muscles, embattled molars—for me just to rear back, har off a big guffaw, throw open the doors, push out the food, crack open my own big bottle of DP and turn ringmaster to the whole joyless tent-full.