Richard Ford - The Lay of the Land

“I’m a big fan of his,” I say. Jill exudes a faint lilac sweetness, though the air’s gone musty as a ship’s hold down here. Jill lets her friendly dark eyes roam all around the low-ceilinged basement and sniffs. She smells it, too. I amiably swallow my last bit of bacon — left in plain sight (by who?) on a paper towel in the kitchen. I want to say something forward-thinking about my son, but being up close to his sweet-smelling, pulchritudinous squeeze is far from what I thought would be happening, and I’m not exactly sure what’s appropriate to say. Physical closeness to an abject (and smaller) stranger, however, doesn’t seem to faze her one bit. Clarissa’s the same — relaxed, defensible boundaries — something my age group didn’t understand. I could ask Jill how she likes New Jersey so far or how everything went with Ann last night (though I don’t want to mention Ann’s name), or what’s a bounteous beauty like her doing with an oddment like my son. But what I do say, for some reason, is, “What happened to your hand?”

Which doesn’t faze her one bit more. She looks down at the vacant sleeve end, then raises it to eye level. She is still very close to me. A pink stump becomes visible, starting (or ending) where her carpal bone would be, the flesh finely stitched to make a smooth flap. Jill’s happy demeanor seems undiminished by a hand being conspicuously not there. “If everybody would just ask like that,” she says happily, “my life’d be easier.” We both look straight at the stump like surgeons. “I was in the Army, in Texas,” she says, “training for land mine work. And I guess I got the worst-possible grade. I shouldn’t have been doing it, as big as I am. It’s better if you’re small.” She moves the appendage around in a tight little orbit to exhibit its general worthiness and I suppose to permit me to touch it, which I don’t think I’ll do. I’ve never knowingly been this close to or conversant with an amputee. Doctors get used to these things. But no one much gets anything cut off in normal real estate goings-on. Without meaning to, I inch back and give her what I hope is an affirming nod. “So when I got to Hallmark,” she goes on chattily, “they thought, Well, here’s a natural for the sympathy-card department.” I knew it. “Which I was, but not because of my hand, but because I’m really sympathetic.” She rolls her eyes and shakes her head as though getting rid of that ole hand was the best-possible luck.

“So, is that where you two met, then?” I say. Out the corner of my eye, I uncomfortably spy Paul crawling back out of his hole, dusting off his knees, looking as if he’d just invented fluid mechanics. His silver capsule lies in the beach grass. He begins speaking toward the hole as if someone, a member of his crew, was still down there doing last-minute deepening and manicuring.

“We really met on the Internet,” Jill says, “though I’d already seen him at a film series and knew he’d be interesting. Which he is.” She stows her stump in her red coveralls pocket and warmly regards my son, who’s still outside talking away. I should go out there. Though my instinct is to stay where I am and chat up the big blondie, even if the big blondie belongs to my son and only has one hand. “We were really shocked when we finally met face-to-face at a bookstore”—conceivably the place where I got into hot water last spring—“and realized we were both writers at Hallmark.” In a bikini, Jill probably looks like young Anita Ekberg (minus a hand). It’s difficult to envision Paul, who’s a lumpy five ten, raree-ing around with her in his little Charlotte Street billet. Though no doubt he does. “Odd couple’s redundant is what we think,” Jill says. I’ve begun to think about what Paul, in his rage last spring, told me about his job — that it was the same as what Dostoyevsky or Hemingway or Proust or Edna St. Vincent Millay did: supplied useful words to ordinary people who don’t have enough of them. I, of course, thought he was nuts.

But suddenly, here is something crucial. I could spend the next six weeks locked in a room with these two, learn how Jill felt about boot camp, learn the mascot’s name of her girls’ basketball team, where she was the center, learn how she found her star-crossed way to K.C., how she came to write Ross Perot’s name in on her presidential ballot; and possibly at the same time get to know Paul’s closely guarded ideas about matrimony (coming as he does from a broken home), get his overview about parity in the NFL, hear his long-term thoughts for leaving Hallmark and joining Realty-Wise — things most fathers hear. But I still wouldn’t know much more that’s important about them as a couple than I do after these five perfectly good minutes. It’s electrifying to think Jill’s a lusty young Anita Ekberg, and interesting to know that Paul is interesting. But they are what they seem — which is enough to be. I don’t want to change them. I’m willing and ready to jump right to the climax, confer fatherly blessings on their union (if that’s what this is) before Paul makes it back inside. If they make each other happy for two seconds, then they can probably last decades — longer than I’ve lasted. I bless you — I say these words silently in anticipation of leaving. I bless you. I bless you. Sum quod eris, fui quod sis.

“Did you really go to Michigan?” Jill steps back and takes a look at my block-M, a studious cleft formed between her dark eyebrows. She leans forward and gives me the sensation of being loomed over. Obviously, she doesn’t see my outfit as comical.

“Did I what?”

“My dad went to U of M,” she says.

“Did he? Great.”

“I’m from Cheboygan.” She holds up her right hand to exhibit how much the state of Michigan — lower peninsula only — resembles a hand. With her stunted left arm, she taps the hand at about where the town of Cheboygan lies, near the top. “Right there on Lake Huron,” she says, making Huron sound like Hyurn. I knew a boy from Cheboygan back in the icy mists. Harold “Doodlebug” Bermeister, defenseman on our pledge hockey team, who longed to return to Cheboygan with his B.S. and buy a Chevy franchise. Doodlebug got blown to cinders in Vietnam the year he graduated and never saw Cheboygan again. No way this Jill is Doodlebug’s daughter. She’s twice as tall as he was. But if she is a wandering Bermeister and life’s a long journey leading to my son, it doesn’t need any explaining. I accept. Though you could work up a good greeting card out of the whole improbability, something on the order of “Happy Birthday, son of my third marriage to my foster sister of Native American descent.”

“I never really got up there,” I say in re Cheboygan.

“It’s where they have the snowmobile hall of fame,” she says earnestly.

Paul’s letting himself back in through the sliding glass door, his capsule wedged under his arm pigskin-style, wiping his bare feet on the rug and still talking away as if we’d all been outside doing things together. With his smudged glasses, mullet, his beard-stache and general unkempt belly-swell under his Chiefs shirt, Paul looks oddly elderly and therefore ageless — less like the Asbury Press guy and more like one of the beach loonies who occasionally walk into your house, sit down at your dinner table and start babbling about Jesus running for president, so you have to call the police to come haul them away. These people never harm anything, but it’s hard to see them (or Paul) as mainstream.

“So. You got it all set?” I say and give him one of our sly-shrewd chivvying looks, meant to draw attention to my Bay City orthodontist outfit. Such greeting is our oldest workable code: common phrasings invested with secret double, sometimes quadruple “meanings” that are by definition hilarious — but only to us. As a troubled boy of tender years, Paul was forever anticipating, keeping steps ahead, as if the left-behind brother of a dead boy had to be two boys, doubly, even triply aware of everything, could not just be a single yearning heart. Other priorities tended to get overlooked, and our code became our only way to converse, to keep love fitfully in sight and the world beneath us. In adulthood, of course, this fades, leaving just a vapor of lost never would-bes.