Richard Ford - The Lay of the Land

“I was sick in the Marines. I had pancreatitis. You didn’t even know me then. I almost died.”

“We don’t have to be angry at each other, do we? You may not realize it, but you don’t want to go any further with this, either.”

“I realize it.” Sally’s blue letter is pinched between my thumb and forefinger as though it might float upward and I need to cling to it for my life’s sake. “That’s what I called to say. You just beat me to it.”

“Oh,” Ann says. Ann my wife. Ann my not wife. Ann my never-to-be. The things you’ll never do don’t get decided at the end of life, but somewhere in the long gray middle, where you can’t see the dim light at either end. The Permanent Period tries to protect us from hazardous moments like this, makes pseudo-acceptance only a matter of a passing moment. A whim. Nothing that’ll last too long. Which is why the Permanent Period doesn’t work. Acceptance means that things, both good and sour, have to be accounted for. Relations, as the great man said, end nowhere.

“I encouraged Paul to come work with you. I think that would be good.”

I’m stunned silent by this preposterous prospect. Anger? If I spoke, I would possibly start cursing in an alien tongue. This is the stress Dr. Psimos advised me to avoid. The kind that burns out my soldier isotopes like they were Christmas lights and sends PSA numbers out of the ballpark. I’d like to say something apparently polite and platitudinous yet also shrewdly scathing. But for the moment, I can’t speak. It is entirely possible I do hate Ann’s guts. Odd to know that so late along. Life is a long transit when you measure how long it takes you to learn to hate your ex-wife.

“Maybe we just don’t need to say anything else, Frank.”

Mump-mump, mump. Mump. Silence.

I hear her chair squeak, her footsteps sounding against hardwood flooring. I picture Ann walking to the window of 116 Cleveland, a house where I once abided and before that where she abided, following our divorce, when our children were children. She is once again its proprietor, fee simple absolute. The big eighty-year-old tupelo out front is now spectral but lordly in its leaflessness, its rugged bark softened by the damp balmy air of false spring. I’ve stood at that window, my breathing shallowed, my feet heavy, my hands cold and hardened. I’ve calculated my fate on the slates of the neighbors’ roofs, their mirroring windowpanes, roof copings and short jaunty front walks. This can be both consoling (You’re here, you’re not dead), and unconsoling (You’re here, you’re not dead. Why not?). The past just may not be the best place to cast your glance when words fail.

Mump-mump.

My silence speaks volumes. I hear it. My voice is trapped within.

Mumpety-mump. Mump. Mump.

“Well,” I hear Ann say. More steps across the hardwood. Fatigue shadows her voice. “I don’t know,” I hear her say. Then ping-ping. I hear a truck in the street, outside her window — in Haddam (this I can picture) — backing up. Miles from where I stand. Ping! Ping! Ping! If you can’t see me, I can’t see you. I wait, breathe, say nothing. “Well,” Ann says again. Then I believe she puts the phone down, for the line goes empty and our call in that way ends.

M y darling Frank,

I would like to write you something truly from my heart that would reveal me, good and bad, and make you feel better about things. But I’m not sure I am capable. I’m not sure I know my truest feelings, even though I have some. I don’t have any idea what you could be thinking. I guess I have Thanksgiving envy, since I’ve been thinking about you, and about that nice Lake Laconic we went to before. I bet you’re doing something really interesting and good for T’giving. I hope you’re not alone. I bet you’re not, you rascal. Maybe you’ve connected with some snappy realtor type and are headed somewhere out of town (I hope not to Moline). What I’m feeling now, true feelings or not, is that everything in my life is just all about me, and I can’t find a way to change the pronouns. I’m aware of myself, without being very self-aware. My kids would agree — if they spoke to me, which they don’t. But does that make any sense? (Possibly I won’t send this letter.) I think I should apologize for all that happened last June — and May. I am sorry for the difficulty it caused you. It’s probably hard to understand that someone can love you and feel great about everything, and then leave with her ex. I always thought people decided they were unhappy first, and then left. But maybe things in life are just fine and then you do some crazy thing, and decide later if you were. Unhappy, that is. What’s that the evidence of? But I can’t really be sorry for doing it, so why apologize only for half? This sounds like something you would say maybe about selling a house to somebody, some house you didn’t approve of, except you knew the people needed a home. If I’m right (about you), you’ll think this is funny and not very interesting — something a person from south-central Ohio would do. You are like that.

When I left with Wally last June, I just wasn’t feeling enough. I couldn’t take others in. You, for instance — hardly at all. It was so shocking to experience Wally. I made him come, by the way. He didn’t want to and was pretty embarrassed, you might’ve noticed. I think I just left on an idea — to go back and experience something I never got to experience before. (That word’s coming up a lot.) I’ve never even been stupid enough to think anyone can do that. You really ought to leave some things where they lay, whether you got to feel them or not. I think that now. I don’t think I’m sounding breezy here, do you? I don’t want to. I’m not breezy at all. Coming to the end of the millennium year, I wonder if I’ve been affected by it at all? Or if all this tumult and upset is the effect of it. Has it affected you yet? It hadn’t last spring, I don’t think. We’re both “only children.” Maybe I just fear death. Maybe I feared that you and I weren’t going anywhere and never realized it before. I am not very reflective. You know that. Or at least I wasn’t before. I ask questions but don’t always answer them or think about the answers.

I don’t want to go into too much detail here. I know I went away with Wally for my own reasons, probably selfish. And by August, I knew I wouldn’t stay much longer. He was a strange man. I loved him once, but I think I may have driven him crazy at least twice. Because the whole thing thirty years ago was that he was just very unhappy living with me, and couldn’t tell me. So he left. It’s so simple. I can’t say what we both knew back then. Probably very little. We did try to enlist the children’s sympathies this time. But they are both crazy as bats and treated us as though we were lunatics and wouldn’t talk to us and receded into their nutty beliefs, even though we said to them, “But we’re your parents.” “Who says?” they said. I guess I think they’re lost to me.

I would’ve left then (late August), but I got concerned about Wally. He began eating very little and lost a lot of weight. He would sit in the bathtub until the water was freezing (we lived in his cottage, which was okay, if small). I would see him standing out in his little row of apple trees he loved, just talking and talking, to no one — though I guess it was to me. I would catch him looking strangely at me. And then he began going for swims in the ocean. He was a very large white figure out there, even with his lost weight. I think, as I said, I drove him crazy. Poor man.

I don’t want to tell all the rest of it. Sooner or later you’ll find out. The best way out may not be through, though. Whoever said that?