Richard Ford - Let Me Be Frank With You

I’m frankly surprised Ann’s practical-minded, Michigan-Dutch, country-club upbringing and genetic blueprint would let her stand one minute for all this baloney. Her father wouldn’t have and didn’t give a fart for retirement. Clarissa flew in from Arizona to help her mother move in, then went immediately back, referring to the whole “community” as strange and savage. Sally went to see Ann once in October, before the hurricane. (I feared an odorless, colorless bond would form between them — against me.) But Sally came home “thoughtful,” remarking it was like visiting someone in the home-decor department at Nordstrom. She couldn’t imagine — she’d said this before — how I could ever have fallen for Ann, much less married her. “You’re a very strange man,” she said and walked away to fix dinner, while I wondered what that meant. It was enough that she never went back for another visit.

When I drive to see Ann, as I am tonight (once a month — no more — since I don’t consider it good for me), I usually find her in stagily effervescent spirits, with over-sharpened wits and “good” humor that often targets me as its goat. Her tremor has “progressed” to an almost undetectable circular motion at her chin point, her glacial eyes darting, her lips movable and actress-ish, her hands busy to animate herself and make her chin more like normal and still beautiful — which it is. Visiting the sick is really a priest’s line of work, not an ex-realtor’s. Priests have something to bring — ceremony, forgetfulness, a few stale, vaguely off-color jokes leading to forgiveness. I only have an orthopedic pillow.

What I’ve attempted in my visits, and will try once again tonight, is to offer Ann what I consider my “Default Self”; this, in the effort to give her what I believe she most wants from me — bedrock truth. I do this by portraying for her the self I’d like others to understand me to be, and at heart believe I am: a man who doesn’t lie (or rarely), who presumes nothing from the past, who takes the high, optimistic road (when available), who doesn’t envision the future, who streamlines his utterances (no embellishments), and in all instances acts nice. In my view, this self plausibly represents one-half of the charmed-union-of-good-souls every marriage promises to convene but mostly fails to — as was true of ours long ago. I’m proceeding with this on the chance that long years of divorce, plus the onset of old age, and the value-added of fatal disease, will put at least a remnant of that charm back within our reach. We’ll see. (Sally Caldwell’s birthday, her sixty-fifth, is tomorrow, and later tonight, no matter what else happens, I’m spiriting her to Lambertville for a festive dinner, and later a renewal of our own charmed, second-marriage promises. I’m not long for Carnage Hill tonight.)

Ann’s preoccupation with bedrock truth is, of course, what most divorced people are deviled by, especially if the leftover spouse is still around. Ann’s is basically what the ethicists at the Seminary call an essentialist point of view. Years ago, when our young son Ralph died, and I was for a period struck wondrous by life and bad luck and near-institutional-grade distraction, so that our marriage went crashing over the cliff, it became Ann’s belief that I essentially didn’t love her enough. Or else we would’ve stayed married.

Imbedded in this belief is the eons-old philosopher’s quest for what’s real and what’s not, with marriage as the White Sands proving ground. If Ann (this is my view of her view) could just maneuver me around to conceding that yes, it’s true, I didn’t really love her — or if I did, I didn’t love her enough way back when — then she’d be able once and for all, before she dies, to know something true; one thing she can completely rely on: my perfidy. Her essence , of course, being perfidy’s opposite — bedrock goodness — since she believes she certainly loved me enough.

Only, I don’t concede it. Which makes Ann irritable, and worry it and me like a sore that won’t heal. Though it would heal if she’d just stop worrying it.

My view is that I loved Ann back in those long-ago vicious days all there was in me to love. If it wasn’t enough, at least she mined out the seam. What really was essential back then (I never like the sound of really ; I’d be happy to evict it from the language along with many other words) was her own unquenchable need to be… what? Assured? Affirmed? Attended to? All of which she defines as love .

Our poor son’s woeful death and my wondrous wanderings were both sad contributors to our marriage’s demise — no argument there. Guilty as charged. But it’s as much what was unquenchable and absent in her that’s left her, for all these years, with an eerie, nagging sensation of life’s falseness and failure to seat properly on bedrock. Possibly at heart Ann’s a Republican.

Since she was diagnosed and moved herself to Carnage Hill, Ann has become a dedicated adept of all things mystical and holistic. In particular, she’s been driven to find out what “caused” her to come down with a dose of Parkinson’s. Plain bad luck and her old man’s busted-up genes don’t provide explanation enough. Here, I fit nicely into one theoretical construct: she got Parkinson’s because I never loved her. She hasn’t said this, but I know she’s thought it, and I show up expecting it each time.

She does, however, specifically incriminate the hurricane, which she considers a “super-real change agent,” which it surely was. The blogs she reads (I’m not sure what a blog even is) are full of testimonials about things-events-changes-dislocations-slippages-into-mania-and-slippings-out which have all been “caused” by the storm. You wouldn’t necessarily know it was the cause, since conveniently there was no direct relationship — no straw follicles piercing telephone poles; no Boston Whalers found in trees twenty miles inland with their grinning, dazed owners inside but safe; no talking animals or hearing restored when before it’d been hopeless. But to these hurricane conspirators, the storm is responsible and will go on being responsible for any damn thing they need it to be. Since who’s to say they’re wrong?

Agency is, of course, what Ann and all these zanies are seeking. She believes — she’s told me so — that the hurricane was a hurricane long before it was a hurricane; when it only seemed to be a careless zephyr off the sunny coast of Senegal, which, nonetheless, heated up, brewed around and found its essential self, then headed across the Atlantic to do much mischief. Somehow along the way, due to atmospheric force fields to which Ann was peculiarly susceptible — sitting, a widow in her condo, above the beach in Belmar, looking out at what she thought was a pancake sky and blemish-less horizon — the coming storm ignited within her personal nerve connectivity a big data dump that made her chin start vibrating and her fingers tingle, so that now they won’t be still. Ann believes the hurricane, which blew away the Mar-Bel condos like a paper sack, was a bedrock agent. A true thing. “We need to think about calamity in our own personal terms, don’t we?” she’s said to me imperiously. (I’m not sure why so many people address me with sentences that end in question marks. Am I constantly being interrogated? Does this happen to everyone? I’ll tell you. The answer is no.)

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe.”

Ann is not as scary as this makes her sound. Normally she’s a pert, sharp-eyed, athletic, sixty-nine-year-old-with-a-fatal-disease who you’d be happy to know and talk to about most anything — golf, or what a goofball Mitt Romney is. (The Romneys and the Dykstras were social acquaintances in the old, halcyon Michigan days, before Detroit rolled over and died.) This is the Ann I mostly encounter. Though we’re never all that far from bedrock matters. And she has a knack of getting me under her magnifying glass for the sun to bake me a while before I can exit back home to second-marriage deniability.