Richard Ford - Let Me Be Frank With You

But in six years of no work, Eddie ran right through all his insulator money, lost everything but his Haddam house, and had to sell his patent to the Japanese. Jalina stuck around to be sure the last dollar was gone, then departed back to the cold countries (she didn’t ask for alimony. She’d spent it all). Eddie came back to his house, down the street from me. He had fresh offers to pitch in at Bell as a senior something-or-other, or in one of the think tanks sprouting up then in what had been farmers’ fields. But he still lacked a taste for work. He’d managed to squirrel away some offshore money the IRS (and Jalina) didn’t know about. He had no dependents. He concluded his acuity about women was probably suspect and that a life without that hair shirt was worth trying on. He took a job for a while as the science librarian at the Haddam Public. And when that became unbearable, he hung out an unusual shingle as the “Prince of Electronic Repair” and made house calls to fix people’s hi-fis or re-boot their alarm systems or program their remotes. When even that began to seem too much like work, he decided what thousands of Americans decide — people who have halfway winning personalities, no burning need for money, no aptitude for work or boredom, yet who have a willingness to think that driving around looking at other people’s houses is a reasonable way to pass a life when you can’t think of anything else. In other words, he became a realtor — at Recknun and Recknun, one of my competitors at the Lauren-Schwindell firm, where I worked until I married Sally and moved to The Shore in nineteen ninety-something. It’s not an unusual American story. Just as there’s no right way to plan a life and no right way to live one — only plenty of wrong ways.

For a time, when Eddie was back to Haddam in the mid-’80s after Jalina had left, he became an energetic member of the Divorced Men’s group, which a few of us sad sacks started out of a lack of imagination plus spiritlessness. Eddie was keen for us all to do things together — climb Mount Katahdin, take a cycling trip around Cape Breton, canoe the Boundary Waters, attend the French Open (Eddie was inept but fanatical). We Divorced Men, however, had zero interest in any of these activities and preferred just meeting in shadowy bars in Lambertville or at The Shore, getting quietly schnockered on vodka gimlets, nattering inconsequentially about sports, then eventually feeling shitty about life and critical of each other, and heading on home.

Eddie, though, didn’t own a suffering bone. He clattered on enthusiastically about his departed wife, waxed nostalgic about his growing-up life in the Mohawk Valley, the glory days in Cambridge where he was smarter than anybody and helped the other engineers with their matrix-vector multiplications; then about the flash years when nothing was too good or too much or too expensive, and how rewarded he felt to have had the patience to discover the one and only thing that would make Jalina (briefly) happy — wondrous excess. It was Eddie who gave us all nicknames, whether we liked them or not. “Ole Knot-head” for Carter Knott; “Ole Tomato” for Jim Warburton; “Ole Basset Hound” for me. Even one for himself, “Ole Olive”—after an appetizer-menu item he thought was hilarious in a dockside eatery where we’d fetched up one night in Spring Lake, after a desultory deep-sea fishing exploit where most of us got seasick. “Olive Medley.” As in, “I’ll have the olive medley and a scotch.” Eddie always made me like him by being the irrepressible tryer , something I then liked to think I’d been in my life but was almost certainly wrong about.

At a certain point, though, I just stopped seeing Eddie. He wandered away from the Divorced Men. He and I didn’t sell the same caliber of homes and were never in jousting contest. He was never all that keen about real estate to begin with. He had enough money. I heard he started a divinity degree at the Seminary, then quit. I heard later he’d gone abroad with the Friends Service and contracted dengue, causing his twin sister to move down from Herkimer and nurse him back to health. Once or twice I saw him riding an old Schwinn Roadmaster down Seminary Street. Then somebody said — Carter Knott — that Eddie was writing a novel (the last outpost for a certain species of doomed optimist). Eventually I met Sally, and we moved away to Sea-Clift, after which I never thought another thought about Olive Medley — so much was I both in and of my life by then, and in no mood to keep current with a blear past of divorce, distant children, death, and my own personal fidget-’n’-drift along life’s margins.

Until a phone call last week or possibly ten days ago; then a phone message that Sally heard but I didn’t — although I didn’t intend to do anything about either of them. Eventually she said, “… I think it’s someone who knows you. He doesn’t sound all that well…”

Later in the day I listened.

“Yeah. Okay. It’s Olive, Frank. Are you there? Olive Medley. Eddie. Haven’t seen you in some time. Years ago, I think. You live over on Wilson Lane, right. Number sixty.” I recognized Eddie, but then again I didn’t recognize him. He was the hoarse, rattling voice I later heard on the radio. A reedy emanation of thin-ness and debility wheezing down the fiber-optic highway. Not the tryer I liked once. And not sounds I wanted to hear more of. “Give me a call, Frank. I’m dying.” (Cough!) “Love to have a visit before that happens. It’s Olive.” (Could he have still called himself Olive?) “Call me.”

I had no intention of calling him. I’m of the view that calling me doesn’t confer an obligation that I have to respond — the opposite model from when I was in the realty business.

Approximately five days later, however, as Sally was leaving for South Mantoloking to resume her grief-counseling duties — her “giveback” to the hurricane relief (a source of growing wonderment and low-grade anxiety for me) — she stopped and stared at me where I was standing in the bathroom, combing my hair in the mirror after a shower. “Whoever that was who called twice last week called back,” she said. “It sounds important. Is his name Arthur?” Sally often starts conversations with me as if they were continuations of talks we’d been having two minutes ago, only it could be three weeks ago, or could have been only in her mind. She lives in her own head much of the time since the hurricane.

“Olive,” I said, frowning at a new dark spot on my temple. “Olive Medley.”

“Is that a name?” She was at the door, watching me.

“It was a nickname. Years ago.”

“Women never give each other nicknames,” she said, “except mean ones. I wonder why?” She turned and started down the stairs. I didn’t say I had no intention of calling Eddie back. Sally and I maintain different views of life ongoing, divergences that may not precisely fortify our union as committed second-time spouses, but don’t do harm — which can be the same as good. Sally views life as one thing leading naturally, intriguingly on to another; whereas I look at life in terms of failures survived, leaving the horizon gratifyingly — but briefly — clear of obstructions. To Sally, it would always be good to encounter an old friend. To me, such matters have to be dealt with case by case, with the outcome in doubt to the last.

Indeed, for months now — and this may seem strange at my late moment of life (sixty-eight) — I’ve been trying to jettison as many friends as I can, and am frankly surprised more people don’t do it as a simple and practical means of achieving well-earned, late-in-the-game clarity. Lived life, especially once you hit adulthood, is always a matter of superfluity leading on to less-ness. Only (in my view) it’s a less-ness that’s as good as anything that happened before — plus it’s a lot easier.