Richard Ford - Let Me Be Frank With You

“Are you happy?” Ann says, chin mercilessly on the move. She shakes her head as if to make it stop. I wish I could help her.

“Yes,” I say. I am the Yeti in the forest. A brute.

“Marriage is just one story that pretends to be the only story, isn’t it, sweetheart.” Her old pet name. Her pale eyes stare at me as if she’s lost the thread.

“I suppose.”

She stands unexpectedly, her bearing erect, hands clasped in front, eyes blinking. I think she’s clenching her molars the way I sometimes do. These visits are worse for her than me. I have Sally’s birthday to look forward to.

“Well. Thank you for bringing me my pillow,” she says, her voice rising, affecting a smile. She turns her head to animate her face like a glamor girl. The pillow is where I left it.

“I was glad to,” I say, saving a lie for the end.

“Tell Sally how proud I am of her.”

“I will,” I say and smile. “She’ll be flattered. I’ll tell her.”

“It’s time for you to go, I believe.” Ann opens her eyes widely, but doesn’t move her feet.

“I know,” I say.

There is no urge to touch, to kiss, to embrace. But I do it just the same. It is our last charm. Love isn’t a thing, after all, but an endless series of single acts.

YESTERDAY, TWO DAYS BEFORE CHRISTMAS, as I was eating breakfast on the sunporch, a strange thing happened, which was also a coincidence. I regularly tune in to WHAD-FM while I’m eating my All-Bran. The Yeah? What’s It To You? community squawk box comes on between eight and nine, and I enjoy listening to the views and personal life evaluations of my anonymous fellow citizens — as nutty as they sometimes are. For a man in retirement, these brief immersions offer a fairly satisfying substitute to what was once plausible, fully lived life.

Since October it’s been pretty much non-stop hurricane yak, in particular focusing on the less-acknowledged consequences of the killer storm — revelations that don’t make it to CBS but still need airing in order that an innocent public can be fully protected and informed. Much of the content, of course, turns out to be highly speculative. President Obama comes in for a fair amount of clobber. A surprisingly large segment of our Haddam population (traditionally Republican; recently asininely Tea Party) believes the President either personally caused Hurricane Sandy, or at the very least piloted it from his underground “boogy bunker” on Oahu, to target the Jersey Shore, where there are a lot of right-wing Italian Americans (there actually aren’t) who were all primed to vote for Romney, only their houses got blown away and they could no longer prove residency. The Boro of Haddam, it should be said, barely sustained a scratch in the storm, though that doesn’t stop people from voicing strong opinions.

Other callers have pointed out a “strange ether” the storm is suspected of having unearthed from the sea’s fundament, and that’s now become a permanent part of our New Jersey atmosphere, causing an assortment of “effects” we’ll all only know about many years from now, but that won’t be good.

Many, of course, express concerns that are fairly enough related to the storm’s aftermath, but that seem portentous as life signage. The sudden anxiety-producing appearance of the Speckled Siberian Warbler never before seen in these parts (what’s happening?). An old girlfriend phoning, after years of estrangement in now-demolished Ortley Beach, hoping to reconnect with “Dwayne,” who might be listening and harboring feelings of longing about how love broke down back in ’99. One woman with a subcontinental accent calls often and simply reads a different, slightly ominous Tagore poem about the weather.

Most of these citizen concerns express nothing but the anxious williwaws that snap us all into wakefulness at 3 A.M. — a worry that something’s happening, we don’t know what, but it’s bad; we could do something about it (move to the Dakotas), except we can’t face further upset in our lives. Though we can sound the alarm for others.

All this diverse palaver is interesting both as a measure of our national mood and humor — neither of which is soaring — and because it makes me realize how remote I am, this far inland, from such worries myself. As I say, nothing bad befell my house when the hurricane wreaked its vengeance. Though I feel that for most people, me included, this seemingly pointless speculation allows us to share a sense of consequence with the real sufferers, feel that something can be “shaken loose” in ourselves that wouldn’t get acknowledged otherwise. At the very least, it’s an interesting “tool kit” in empathy and agency — two things we should all be interested in.

Yesterday morning, however, as I stood washing my bowl at the sink and hearing the first footfalls of my wife treading to the bathroom upstairs, I heard on the radio what I believed was a voice I knew, and in fact had heard as recently as just days before. This was the coincidence.

It began, “… Yeah. Okay. I’m just, uh, calling to say I’m a dying man here in Haddam. I mean actually dying. And I’ve been listening for weeks to you people complaining and feeling sorry for yourselves about just being alive . I mean I’ve lived with my self a helluva long time now — same shoe size, same ears, same eye color, same nose, same dick dimensions.” (There’s no “delay” on WHAD; we depend on people to self-censor.) “And I’ve been…” (a cough) “… satisfied with all that. But I’ll tell you. I’m ready to turn the whole goddamn thing in. No rain checks. No do-overs. Since the goddamn Internet got started, nobody knows anything new to say anyway. Last year, I read — or maybe it was the year before — that two point four million people died in the U.S. That’s thirty-six thousand fewer than the year before. You all know this. I understand. I don’t know why I’m telling you. But it’s worrisome. We have to clear our desks and get out of the way.” (cough then a wheeze) “That’s what this goddamn hurricane’s telling us. I’m almost out of the office myself, here. And I’m not a bit sorry. But we have to pay attention! We…” Click.

“O- kay! ” the show’s host said, rustling papers close to the microphone. “I guess… there are… ummm… all kinds of ways we can celebrate… ummm… Christmas together. Let’s get Dire Straits cued up here while I take a little break.”

I knew the caller’s voice. It was hoarser and thinner — and fragiler — than the Eddie Medley voice I’d known back in the ’70s, when my first wife, Ann, and our son Ralph moved to Haddam from New York so I could pursue a promising career as a novelist — a venture that promptly came unraveled. Eddie at that time had been about the happiest man anybody ever knew. Smart as Einstein (MIT chemical engineer), he’d laughed off an academic career in favor of being one of the Bell Labs wonder boys. His itch, though, was to get out in the world and start inventing stuff and making a shitload of dough. Which he did — a light, high-density polymer bond that kept a computer off-on switch from exploding. Eddie liked money and liked spending it. In fact, he liked to spend it more than he liked inventing things. And once he’d made his bundle, he realized what he really didn’t like was work. He promptly married a tall, buxom Swedish girl — Jalina (a head taller than he was, which Eddie thought was spectacular), and the two of them set off barging around the globe, scattering houses — in Val d’Isère, Västervick (where Jalina came from), London, and the South Island. He bought sports cars, collected African art and diamond bracelets, had a vast bespoke Savile Row wardrobe. He kept a Tore Holm in Mystic, owned a millionaire’s flat in Greenwich Village (plus his big “first house” in Haddam, on Hoving Road, where I first knew him). A scratch under five eight, jolly as a jester and handsome as Glenn Ford, Eddie reminded me and everybody at that time of an old-fashioned movie director/playboy, in a beret and jodhpurs, talking through a megaphone.