Richard Ford - The Lay of the Land

But I am not in Mull anymore. (Isn’t that a funny name? Mull.) I am in a place called Maidenhead, which is funny, too, and is in J.O.E. (Jolly Old England). Talk about wanting to go back in time! I’ve come all the way back to Maidenhead. From Mull to Maidenhead. That’s a hoot. It is just a suburb here, not very nice or very different than any other one. I am doing temporary work in a sweet little arts centre (their spelling), where they need my skills for organizing older citizens’ happiness. It is like Sponsoring, although old English people are easier than our old people by a lot. England is not a bad place to be alone (I was here twice before). People are nice. Everyone gives solid evidence of feeling alone a lot, but seems to think that’s natural, so that they don’t get terribly, terribly invested in it. Unlike America where it’s just one mad fascination after another one, but no one’s any more invested — or so it seems to me. I did not vote, by the way, and now things are in this terrible twist with Bush. Can you believe it? Can that numbskull actually win? Or steal it? I guess he can. I’m sure you voted, of course, and I’m sure I know who you voted for.

How are your kids? Are you and Paul still feuding? Is Clarissa still being a big lesbian? (I bet not.) Who else do you see? Are you selling a lot of houses? I bet you are. (You can tell I’m fishing.) I am fifty-four this year, which of course you know. And I am not a grandparent, which is very odd, even though my children dislike me so much — for what, I don’t know exactly. I am thinking of going to a retreat in Wales — something Druidic — since I feel I’m heading someplace but don’t feel too confident about it. Though I am pretty comfortable in my skin. Being fifty-four (almost) is also odd. It kind of doesn’t have an era, and I know you believe in all human ages having a spiritual era. This one I don’t know. I think everybody needs a definition of spirituality, Frank (you have one, I believe). You wouldn’t want to go on a quiz show, would you, and be asked your definition of spirituality and not know one. (Apropos this retreat.) June doesn’t seem that far back to me. Does it to you? I can’t say that how things are now is how I thought they would end up. Though maybe I did.

But I do want to say something to you (a good sign, maybe). I want to tell you one reason why I’m sure I love you. There are people we can be around, and we take them for granted sometimes, and who make us feel generous and kind and even smarter and more clever than we probably are — and successful in our own terms and the world’s. They are the ideal people, sweetheart. And that’s who you are for me. I’m sure I’m not that way for you, which bothers me, because I think I’m kind of a roadblock for you now. No one else is like that for me, and I don’t know why you are that way, but you are. So just in case you were wondering.

(The reason I’m writing this is to see how it comes out. If it seems okay, then you’re reading it “now.”) Finally (thank God, huh?), I don’t know if I want to be married to you anymore. But I don’t know if I want a divorce, or if I can’t live without you. Is there a precise word for that human state? Maybe you can make something up. Maybe New Jersey is it. Though here in Maidenhead (what a name!), where for some reason tourists come, I hear Americans saying they’re from all over. Iowa and Oregon and Florida. And I think — that doesn’t matter anymore. Maybe it would be good to move away from New Jersey. Maybe all we need is a change. Like the hippies used to say when there were so many of them, and they were begging quarters back in the Loop in Chicago: “Change is good.” I thought that was a riot. At least we don’t have cancer, Frank. So maybe we have some choices to make together still. I also want you to know — and this is important — that you were not boring in bed, if you ever worried about that. I’ll call you on Thanksgiving, which is not a holiday in Maidenhead so I can probably use the trunk line at the arts centre. Love with a kiss. Sally (your lost wife).

I ’m shocked. Humbled. Emptied. Amazed. Provoked. Delighted. Thrilled to be all. If man be a golden impossibility, his life’s line a hair’s breadth across, what is woman? A golden possibility? Her life’s line a lifeline thrown to save me from drowning.

I’m ready to wire greenbacks — except it’s Thanksgiving. Mr. Oshi could be of service, though he’s probably huddled in his house. I’ll send solicitors out to Maidenhead in a black saloon car to spirit Sally down to Heathrow, provide a change of clothes, get her into the VIP lounge at BA and right into a first-class seat — on the Concorde, except it crashed. I’ll be waiting at Newark Terminal 3 with a dinner-plate smile, all slates cleaned, agendas changed for the future, bygones trooping off to being bygones. Cancer’s a dot we’ll connect in due time. Since she doesn’t know I have/had it, it’s almost as if I don’t/didn’t — so powerful is her belief, so unreal is cancer to begin with.

Except there’s no call-back number here. № 44+ bippety, bippety, bippety, bip. When I come back from Timbuktu, I’ll coax the Maidenhead Arts Centre number out of inquiries, where they’re always helpful (our information won’t give you the time of day). Or else I’ll declare an emergency.

I go to the window again in my terry-cloth robe, my heart pumping, a zizzy bee-sting quiver down my arms and legs, my bare feet cold on the floor planks. “Is this really happening?” I say to the window and the beach beyond, in a voice someone could hear in the room with me. Is this happening? Is there a celestial balance to things ? A yin/yang? Do people come back once they’ve gone away to Mull? Life is full of surprises, a wise man said, and would not be worth having if it were not. My choice then, since I have a choice, is to believe they do come back.

Out upon the dun Atlantic, a Coast Guard buoy tender sits bestilled on the water’s roll, its orange sash promoting bright, far-flung hope — the same it gives to all sailors adrift and imperiled. I train my powerful U-boat-quality binoculars, given to me by Sally, on its decks, its steepled conning bridge, its single gray gunnery box, its spinning radar dish, the heavy red nun already winched aboard. Fast-moving miniature sailors are in evidence. A davit’s employed, a dory’s lowering off the landward side. Sailors are there, too. No doubt this is a drill, a dry run to pass the time on Thanksgiving, when all would be elsewhere if only our shores were safe. I pan across the swells (how do they ever find anything?), but there is nothing visibly afloat. I put the lens bottles to the window glass and lean into the ferrules, as if finding a foreign object was essential to a need of mine. Only nothing’s foreign. A second red buoy, whose bell I sometimes hear in the fog or when the wind blows in, rocks in the slow swell, its red profile low, its clapping now inaudible. I, of course, can’t find what they’re after. And maybe it’s nothing, a coordinate on a chart, a signal down deep they must track to be accomplished sailors. Nothing more.

I sweep down the beach and find the surfcasters — close-up — in their neoprenes and watch caps, their backs to the shore, up to their nuts in frigid, languid ocean, their shoulders intent and hunched, their long poles working. A blue Frisbee floats through my circled view. A white retriever ascends to snare it. I find the Sea-Clift Shore Police’s white Isuzu trolling back along its own tracks, the uniformed driver, as I am, glassing the water’s surface. For a shark fin. A body (these things happen when you live by the sea). A periscope. Icarus just entering the sea, wings molten, eyes astonished, feet spraddling down.