Richard Ford - A Multitude of Sins

“Nova Scotia’s a hundred and fifty miles across the Bay of Fundy,” Tom said, upbeat for some new reason.

“I once did a report about it in high school,” Nancy said. “They still speak French, and a lot of it’s backward, and they don’t much care for Americans.”

“Like the rest of Canada,” Tom said.

Route 1 followed the coast along the curvature of high tree-covered hills that occasionally sponsored long, breathtaking views toward the bay below. A few white sails were visible on the pure blue surface, though the late morning seemed to have furnished little breeze.

“It wouldn’t be bad to live up here,” Tom said. He hadn’t shaved, and rubbed his palm across his dark stubble. He seemed happier by the minute.

She looked at him curiously. “Where?”

“Here.”

“Live in Maine? But it’s mortifyingly cold except for today.” She and Tom had grown up in the suburbs of Chicago — she in Glen Ellyn, Tom in a less expensive part of Evanston. Their very first agreement had been that they hated the cold. They’d chosen Maryland for Tom to be a policeman because it was unrelentingly mild. Her feelings hadn’t changed. “Where would you go for the two months when you were renting the house to the Kennedy cousins just so you could afford to freeze here all winter?”

“I’d buy a boat. Sail it around.” Tom extended his estimable arms and flexed his grip on the steering wheel. Tom was in dauntingly good health. He played playground basketball with black kids, mountain-biked to his studio, did push-ups in his apartment every night before climbing into bed alone. And since he’d been away, he seemed healthier, calmer, more hopeful, though the story was somehow that he’d moved a mile away to a shitty apartment to make her happier. Nancy looked down disapprovingly at the pure white pinpoint sails backed by blue water in front of the faultlessly green-bonneted island where summer people sat on long white porches and watched the impoverished world through expensive telescopes. It wasn’t that attractive. In the public defender’s office she had, in the last month, defended a murderer, two pretty adolescent sisters accused of sodomizing their brother, a nice secretary who, because she was obese, had become the object of taunts in her office full of gay men, and an elderly Japanese woman whose house contained ninety-six cats she was feeding, and who her neighbors considered, reasonably enough, deranged and a health hazard. Eventually the obese secretary, who was from the Philippines, had stabbed one of the gay men to death. How could you give all that up and move to Maine with a man who appeared not to want to live with you, then be trapped on a boat for the two months it wasn’t snowing? These were odd times of interesting choices.

“Maybe you could talk Anthony into doing it with you,” she said, thinking peacefully again that Islesboro was Nova Scotia and everyone there was talking French and speaking ill of Americans. She had almost said, “Maybe you can persuade Crystal to drive up and fuck you on your yacht.” But that wasn’t what she felt. Poisoning perfectly harmless conversation with something nasty you didn’t even mean was what the people she defended did and made their lives impossible. She wasn’t even sure he’d heard her mention Anthony. It was possible she was whispering.

“Keep an open mind,” Tom said, and smiled an inspiriting smile.

“Can’t,” Nancy said. “I’m a lawyer. I’m forty-five. I believe the rich already stole the best things before I was born, not just twenty years ago in Wiscasset.”

“You’re tough,” Tom said, “but you have to let me win you.”

“I told you, you already did that,” she said. “I’m your wife. That’s what that means. Or used to. You win.”

This was Tom’s standard view, of course, the lifelong robbery-detective slash enthusiast’s view: someone was always needing to be won over to a better view of things; someone’s spirit being critically lower or higher than someone else’s; someone forever acting the part of the hold-out. But she wasn’t a hold-out. He’d fucked Crystal. He’d picked up and moved out. That didn’t make her not an enthusiast. Though none of it converted Tom Marshall into a bad person in need of punishment. They merely didn’t share a point of view — his being to sentimentalize loss by feeling sorry for himself; hers being to not seek extremes even when it meant ignoring the obvious. She wondered if he’d even heard her say he’d ever won her. He was thinking about something else now, something that pleased him. You couldn’t blame him.

When she looked at Tom he was just past looking at her, as if he’d spoken something and she hadn’t responded. “What?” she said, and pulled a strand of hair past her eyes and to the side. She looked at him straight on. “Do you see something you don’t like?”

“I was just thinking about that old line we used to say when I was first being a policeman. ‘Interesting drama is when the villain says something that’s true.’ It was in some class you took. I don’t remember.”

“Did I just say something true?”

He smiled. “I was thinking that in all those years my villains never said much that was true or even interesting.”

“Do you miss having new villains every day?” It was the marquee question, of course; the one she’d never actually thought to ask a year ago, during the Crystal difficulties. The question of the epic loss of vocation. A wife could only hope to fill in for the lost villains.

“No way,” he said. “It’s great now.”

“It’s better living by yourself?”

“That’s not really how I think about it.”

“How do you really think about it?”

“That we’re waiting,” Tom said earnestly. “For a long moment to pass. Then we’ll go on.”

“What would we call that moment?” she asked.

“I don’t know. A moment of readjustment, maybe.”

“Readjustment to exactly what?”

“Each other?” Tom said, his voice going absurdly up at the end of his sentence.

They were nearing a town. BELFAST, MAINE. A black and white corporate-limits sign slid past. ESTABLISHED 1772. A MAINE ENTERPRISE CENTER. Settlement was commencing. The highway had gradually come nearer sea level. Traffic slowed as the roadside began to repopulate with motels, shoe outlets, pottery barns, small boatyards selling posh wooden dinghies — the signs of enterprise.

“I wasn’t conscious I needed readjustment,” Nancy said. “I thought I was happy just to go along. I wasn’t mad at you. I’m still not. Though your view makes me feel a little ridiculous.”

“I thought you wanted one,” Tom said.

“One what? A chance to feel ridiculous? Or a period of readjustment ?” She made the word sound idiotic. “Are you a complete stupe?”

“I thought you needed time to reconnoiter.” Tom looked deviled at being called a stupe. It was old Chicago code to them. An ancient language of disgust.

“Jesus, why are you talking like this?” Nancy said. “Though I suppose I should know why, shouldn’t I?”

“Why?” Tom said.

“Because it’s bullshit, which is why it sounds so much like bullshit. What’s true is that you wanted out of the house for your own reasons, and now you’re trying to decide if you’re tired of it. And me. But you want me to somehow take the blame.” She smiled at him in feigned amazement. “Do you realize you’re a grown man?”

He looked briefly down, then raised his eyes to hers with contempt. They were still moving, though Route 1 took the newly paved by-pass to the left, and Tom angled off into Belfast proper, which in a split second turned into a nice, snug neighborhood of large Victorian, Colonial, Federal and Greek Revival residences established on large lots along an old bumpy street beneath tall surviving elms, with a couple of church steeples anchored starkly to the still-summery sky.