Richard Ford - Let Me Be Frank With You

“What’s the guy offering?” Arnie’s a few feet up the berm. I’m not sure I’m being heard.

“Five and change. I told you,” Arnie says bitterly. “I was leavin’ the place to the kids. My daughter’s a diplomat in India. Got her own car and a fuckin’ armed driver.”

“Do you need the money?” I’ve come to within a few feet of him, but I’m still talking up .

The cotton-y whiteness of the fog has made a cloud of vitreous swimmers swarm my vision, slightly disorienting me. Tiny tadpoles of blood cells, like space junk, shift and subside in my vision — the result of an old Marine Corps cudgel-stick blow to the eye that sent me reeling. They’re harmless and would be pretty if they didn’t feel like vertigo.

Arnie obviously believes that the money question doesn’t require an answer, because he’s stuck his hands in his pockets and extended his big chin like Mussolini.

“Was the place paid off, Arnie?” As I said, I haven’t consulted my records. I believe cash was exchanged — though a second mortgage is possible.

“Nah,” Arnie says. “F-N-C. I paid you cash. You’re slippin’, Frank.” He swivels around and looks at me dismissively, a few paces back down the berm from him. There’s, of course, a standard calculator for “calamity expense”: take the rebuild off the value of the house the day before disaster struck (October 28th); add twenty-five K as an inconvenience surcharge, then don’t sell the sucker for a farthing less. That, of course, may not work if you can’t be certain the ground will be ground and not seawater in ten years. Normally I counsel patience in most things. Patience, though, is a pre-lapsarian concept in a post-lapsarian world.

“If one of these speculators suffered what I’ve suffered here, you know what would happen to him?” Arnie’s turned and started back down the berm, his loafers taking on sand. He’s stared at his ruin for long enough. He doesn’t really want my advice.

“He’d get richer, Arn,” I say.

“So fuck it,” Arnie says. “F-U-C-K.” Like most conversations between consenting adults, nothing crucial’s been exchanged. Arnie just needed someone to show his mangled house to. And there’s no reason that someone shouldn’t be me. It’s a not-unheard-of human impulse.

Arnie walks right past me in the direction of my car. “You’re well out of it, Frank,” he says. Close up, I can see better the elements of his new feminized visage. Possibly he forgets how he looks, then remembers and feels skittish and starts looking for an exit. He realizes everyone’s seeing the new Arnie, the same way he does in the mirror every morning, and that it’s weird as hell. The smoothed-out, previously raveled Gumper forehead, the stupid tree-line hair implantation, the re-paved cheeks and un-ruckled neck. I don’t look in mirrors anymore. It’s cheaper than surgery.

“Here’s what I’d do, Arnie,” I say to Arnie’s back, heading down the berm. “Sell the son of a bitch and let somebody else worry about it. It’s OPM. Other people’s money.” I don’t know why, but I’m now talking like a Jersey tough guy.

Arnie’s not hearing me. He’s already down by my car in the shifting fog. It’s gotten colder than I want to expose myself to in just my light jacket. My toes are stinging up through my shoe soles.

Arnie stops by my blue car, turns to look at me, where I’m still halfway up the sandy-weedy extrusion, the house shambles behind me. The foghorn emits its baleful call from nowhere. The striper fisherman’s long gone. Likewise the Glucks (we always called them the “Clucks”). It’s just us. Two men alone, not gay, on an indeterminate mission of consoling and being consoled, which has suddenly revealed itself to be pointless.

Which means trouble could be brewing. Arnie’s a man who answers his phone by just saying his name — as though to say, “Yeah? What? Speak your piece or get lost.” These men have hair-trigger tempers and can’t be trusted to do the right thing. How many women answer their phones by saying their names? So much for “I’m here.”

“What’s this, a fucking Honda? An itchy pussy?” Arnie leans against my car door, as if he’s amused by its sky-blue paint job and plastic fenders.

“Hyundai,” I say uncomfortably, but take a wrong step on the sandy incline, my toes prickly-numb, my socks damp with sand, my hands clammy. I pitch then half over onto my side, though not all the way onto my face. Not a true fall. “Shit. This fucking sand.” I’m balanced like Arnie’s house — half on my ass, half on my hand — trying to get my feet under me so I can get off this goddamn sand pillar. I’m afraid of wrenching my neck. Possibly I should roll the rest of the way down.

Arnie’s taken no notice. “A hybrid, I suppose.” He’s still appraising my car. “Like you, Frank.” He’s all of a sudden supremely satisfied — with something. Dismay and house grief have vanished in the fog. I’m getting myself back on my feet. But has something happened? Is it what I feared — Arnie’s turning on me? Possibly he’s packing a PPK and will simply shoot me for once selling him a house that’s now worth chicken feed. I’ve let myself in for this. Men are a strange breed.

“A hybrid of what, Arnie,” I say with difficulty. “What am I a hybrid of?”

“I’m yanking your schwantz, Frank. You look a little peakèd. You takin’ care of yourself?” I’m down off this berm now, my shoes full of cold sand, my ass damp. Arnie, for his part, looks robust, which was what his cosmetic work was in behalf of. He looks to have swelled out his chest a few centimeters and deepened his voice. I don’t like being said to be peakèd. “You oughta do yoga, Frank.”

I’m back on his level, though unsteady. “I let the machine maintain itself, Arnie.”

“Okay,” Arnie says. “Probably smart.” He’s possibly thinking about his cosmetic work in contrast to peakèd me. New grille. New bumpers. In my view, though, Arnie looks like somebody who used to be Arnie Urquhart. Age and change have left him squirrelly, and unpredictable — to himself. This is what I witness.

I come to stand beside my Sonata’s front headlamp. I’m Christmas cold. Arnie’s blocking my path back inside now — unless I want to go around and crawl in the passenger door. I’d like to get in and crank up the heat. But I don’t want to seem to want to leave. Arnie — wax-works weirdness and all — is still a man who’s lost his house, endured an insult I haven’t. He’s deserving of a little slack being cut. Our sympathies are most required when they seem least due.

Fog’s retreated toward the water’s edge, as if the tide change has created a vacuum. A tangy fish stink is all around. I look up through the blue-white mist and can see another Air-Tran jet spiriting upward. I’ve heard it but haven’t registered.

“I need to act quick, I guess,” Arnie says, back to his house and the charade that I’m here for real reasons. “That’s the way, isn’t it?”

“Sometimes,” I say, finding the warm hood surface with my hand.

“Fish business is the same. ‘Let it sit, you might as well quit. Then you’re in the shit.’”

I smile, as if that idea sized up all of life. “It’s better than ‘hurry up and wait.’”

“That’s the old man’s mantra.” Arnie sniffs, looks down at his own spoiled shoes.

At this small distance of five feet, not looking at him, but letting my eyes roam anywhere but into contact with his, Arnie (in my fervid mind) has magically become not himself, but another boy I also went to Michigan with — Tapper Spitz. I used to bump into Tap in the strangest of places over the years. The Mayo Clinic urology waiting room. The Philadelphia airport cell-phone lot. On the sidewalk outside the My Office bar on Twenty-First and Madison. Tap was likewise a Wolverine puckster. He and Arnie probably knew each other. What did the poet tell us? “All memory resolves itself in gaze.” It’s much easier at this stressed, empty moment to imagine I’m out here with ole Tapper than that I’m out here with ole Arn. I happen to know Tapman L. Spitz died doing the thing he loved best — para-skiing down the Eiger on his sixty-fifth birthday. RIP ole Tapper.