Richard Ford - Let Me Be Frank With You

Like me, Buck’s a prostate “survivor,” and his personal talk is the sort that would drive Ann straight to the rafters. It includes his rank disdain for Viagra (“… no need for that junk. I prize my stiffy, lemme tell ya…”); his die-hard fandom for the Flyers; the existence of a “horse pill,” obtainable online that makes “us prostate guys piss like Percherons,” thereby avoiding the “men’s room blues.” Needless to say he doesn’t like Obama and blames him for shit-canning the American dream by creating a “lost decade” when it came to “little people keeping up.” “He’s a nice enough guy”—meaning the President—“but he wasn’t ready to assume the mantle…” Yippity, yippity, yippity. Bush of course was ready. Ann, I’m convinced, spends time with him only to display for me the limitless variety of Homo sapiens who can easily fill my long-empty shoes. Though why should affairs of his heart (and hers) be less inscrutable than the affairs of my own?

It’s not, however, the simplest of emotional transits to be driving out four days before Christmas to visit my ex-wife (we’ve been divorced thirty years!) in an extended-care facility, suffering an incurable and fatal disease, and with whom I’ve not been all that friendly, but who’s now a twenty-minute drive away and somehow or other presenting issues . Relations end nowhere, as the poet said.

HOW ANN DYKSTRA CAME TO RESIDE TWENTY MINUTES from my doorstep is a bittersweet tale of our time and should serve as cautionary — if one’s “long-ex-wife” constitutes a demographic possible to comprehend and thus beware of.

When Ann retired off the athletic faculty at De Tocqueville (it was not long after my Thanksgiving injury in 2000, from which I was a god’s own time recovering; two to the thoracic bull’s-eye leaves a mark), she’d begun keeping time but expecting nothing serious, with one of her De Tocqueville colleagues, the lumbering, swarthy-skinned, curly-haired ex — Harvard math whiz and life-long mother’s boy, Teddy Fuchs. Years before, Teddy had been headed for celestial math greatness, but had suffered a “dissociative episode” on the eve of his thesis defense on rectilinear quadratic equations and been banished to prep-school teaching at De Tocqueville, a not-long drive from where his parents lived on The Shore in Belmar. At De Tocqueville, Teddy was regarded by all as profound and gentle and (what else?) super-bright, and as having “this special connection” with kids, which persuaded everybody that prep-school teaching was his true métier, rather than being a chaired professor at Cal-Tech with a clear shot at a Nobel, but possibly never being “rilly, rilly” happy like the rest of high school teachers.

Teddy, at age sixty, had never married, but had avoided the standard smirks and yorks and back-channel eye rollings about “his sexuality,” by being benign. There were no rumors or Greenwich Village à deux sightings, or mysterious “friends” brought to faculty cookouts. Some people really are what they seem to be — though not that many. Teddy and Ann began “seeing each other,” began being a couple, taking trips (Turks and Caicos, Tel Aviv, the Black Sea port of Odessa) and speaking exclusively in terms of the other (“I’ll have to ask Ann about that…”; “You know, back when Ted was at Harvard…”; “Ann has a tee time…”; “Teddy wrote an influential paper about that his junior year, which caused a lot of stir…”). These are mostly things she would never have said about me, since flogging suburban houses on cul-de-sacs that once were cornfields in West Windsor rarely gets you noticed by the folks at the Stanford linear accelerator.

I know any of this only because our daughter, Clarissa Bascombe, now a veterinarian in Scottsdale, told me. Clarissa has always kept semi-taut lines with her mother — though much tauter with me and her brother. Back when it was all getting started with Teddy, Clarissa believed her mom could “tolerate” only a “platonic relationship,” and that there was neither hanky nor panky afoot; that Teddy, though large, Levantine, hairy, and apparently sensual, was in fact harmless and “remote from his body” (lesbians think they know everything). And that after Ann’s two marriages to two unsatisfactory men — one of them me — being with a man like Teddy (thoughtful, hopelessly reliable, obedient, occasionally mirthful but not that much, no bad history with women, a good cook, and most important— Jewish , guaranteeing, Clarissa believed, no unwanted sexual advances)… Teddy was all but perfect. Like most explanations, it’s as plausible as anything else. Plus Clarissa liked Teddy (I only met him twice, by accident). They had Harvard in common and for all I know sat up late nights singing the fucking songs.

Long story short (it’s never short enough), Ann retired and so did Teddy, whose mother had conveniently died at age ninety. Ann had dough from her second marriage. Teddy had his dead parents’ three-thousand-square-foot condo overlooking the sea in Belmar. A charmed coming-together, it seemed, was forged for both parties: an acquaintance that hesitantly blossomed into “something more ,” instead of the usual less; a mutually acknowledged, if somewhat not-fully- shared sense of life’s being better when not spent dismally alone; a willingness to try to take an interest in the other (learn golf, learn calculus). Plus the condo.

Ann and Teddy sent around at home announcements — one actually came to me — declaring “the uniting of all our assets — real, spiritual and virtual.” I took note, but not serious note. As far as I was concerned, Ann had simply embarked on another new course in life, the main source of interest and primary selling point of which was that it carried her further away from being my wife and nearer to becoming just another person I might never have known, whose obituary my eye might pass over without the slightest pause or twinge. Which is the goal and most perfect paradigm of what we mean when we say divorce .

Though of course that’s crazy. The kids see to it. As does memory — which, short of Alzheimer’s, never lets you off the mat.

Following which, and after four years of landing on glaciers in minuscule airplanes, walking the Via Dolorosa barefoot, two trips to the Masters — a life-long dream of Ann’s — back-country treks into the Maghreb, plus any number of books-on-tape, videos of Harvard lectures on neuroplasticity, trips to Chautauqua to hear washed-up writers squawk about “what it’s like to be them,” plus four visits to Mayo to keep up with heart anomalies Teddy believed he’d inherited from his Harvard experience — following all that, Teddy simply died one morning while sitting, an oversized baby, in the Atlantic surf wearing pink bathing trunks. An aneurysm. “Dead. At sixty-four,” as Paul Harvey used to say. Ann, who was on the tenth-floor balcony watching him with pleasure, saw him topple over face-into-the-sea. She thought he was playing a joke and laughed and waited for him to right himself. He had a comic side.

Ann lived on in the condo after Teddy’s death. I had no idea what she did or how she did it. “Mom’s fine,” was the most Clarissa would allow, as if I was not to know. Paul Bascombe, our son — an unusual man-apart on his best day, and now happily running a garden supply in KC — maintains only a distant fondness for his mother, and so had nothing to inform me about her. Complications and unfathomables in “dealing with” one or another aging parent seem now to be the norm for modern offspring.

SALLY AND I SOLD OUR BEACH HOUSE ON POINCINET Road, Sea-Clift, in the late selling-season of ’04. We’d thought about it for a while. Someone, though, just came driving past the house one day in a Mercedes 10-million SEL, saw me on the deck glassing striper fishermen with my Nikons. The guy came to the foot of the side stairs, shading his eyes, and asked out of the blue what it’d take to buy the place. I told him a lordly figure (this kind of thing’s not unusual; I was always expecting it). The guy, Arnie Urquhart from Hopatcong, said that number sounded reasonable. I came halfway down the steps. He came halfway up. I said my name. We shook hands. He wrote a check for the earnest right on the spot. And in three weeks Sally and I were outside supervising Mayflower men, getting our belongings into storage or off to the auctioneers in Metuchen.