Richard Ford - The Lay of the Land

Perfect for affairs is what these women are. They almost always know it (even if they’re married). They realize that given the kind of man they find attractive — usually ruminant loners with minimal but quite specific needs — to strive for anything more lasting would mean they’d soon be miserable and hoping to get things over with fast, and so are happy for the escapade and the cocktails and the rib-eye and the one-nighter where everything works out friendly, and then pretty quick to get back in their own beds again, which is where they (and many others) are happiest.

“Enlightened” thought by headshrinkers with their own rich broth of problems has twisted these normal human pleasures and delights into shabby, shameful perversions and boundary violations needing to be drummed out of the species because someone’s always seen as the loser-victim and someone’s definition of wholesome and nurturing doesn’t always get validated. But we all know that’s wrong, whether we have the spirit to admit it or don’t. Women are usually full participants in everything they do (including heading off to Mull), and I’m ready to say that when it comes to wholesome, nurturing and long-lasting, a frank, good-hearted roll in the alfalfa, or something close to it, with an enthusiastic and willing female is about as nurturing and wholesome as I can imagine. And if it doesn’t last a lifetime, what (pray tell me) does, except marriages where both parties are screaming inside to let light in but can’t figure out how to.

The old release-and-take-hold has worked its quickening magic on me and routed me north toward Neptune’s Daily Catch Bistro and (I hope) to Bernice Podmanicsky, who may be my savior for the day just when a savior’s needed. Sally’s call offers some things, but pointedly not others. And she herself authorized a female companion for the day. I’d be a fool to pass on the opportunity, should there be one.

Bernice Podmanicsky, who’s one of the wait-staff at Neptune’s, is my candidate for the aforementioned ideal woman. A lanky, full-lipped, wide-smiling brunette with big feet, a hint of dark facial hair, but oddly delicate hands with shiny pink nails, a proportionate bosom, solid posterior and runway-model ankles (always my weakness once the butt’s accounted for), Bernice would be considered pretty by some standards, though not by all: mouth too big (fine with me); hair taking root a sixteenth of an inch too far down the forehead (ditto); augmented eyebrows (neutral); libidinous chin dimple when she smiles, which is often; fortyish age bracket (I prefer women with adult experience). Altogether, hard not to like. I’ve known Bernice three years, ever since her long-standing love relationship in Burlington, Vermont, blew a tire and she came down to live in Normandy Beach with her sister Myrna, who’s a Mary Kay franchisee. Waitressing was what she’d always done since college at Stevens Point, where she took art (waitressing leaves time for drawing). She is a reader of serious novels and even abstruse philosophical texts, owing to her father, who was a high school guidance counselor in Fond du Lac, and her mother, who’s in her seventies and a serious painter in the style of Georgia O’Keeffe.

I actually like Bernice immensely, though there hasn’t been any but the most casual contact between us over the course of the three years. When Sally was my regular dinner companion, Bernice was gregarious and jokey and impudently friendly to both of us. “Oh, you two again. Somebody’s gonna get the wrong idea about you…. And I guess you’ll have the bluefish rare.” But when Sally left, and I was often alone at a window table with a gin drink, Bernice was more candid and curious and personal and (on occasion) clearly flirtatious — which I was happy about. But mostly she was interested and corroborative and even spontaneously complimentary. “I think it’s odd but completely understandable that a man with your background — writing short stories and writing sports and a good education — would be happy selling houses in New Jersey. That just makes sense to me.” Or “I like it, Frank, that you always order bluefish and pretty much dress the same way every time you come in here. It means you’re sure about the little things, so you can leave yourself open for the big ones.” She smiled so as to show her provocative dimple.

I told her about my Sponsoring activities and she said I seemed, to her experience, unusually kind and sensitive to others’ needs. Once she even said, “I bet you’ve got a big lineup at your door, handsome, now that you’re single again.” (I’ve heard her call other men “handsome” and could care less.) I decided not to tell her about the titanium BBs situation, for fear she’d feel sorry for me — I couldn’t see a use for pathos — but also because talking about the BBs can convince me I’ve lost the wherewithal even if I still have the wherefore.

Several times, I’ve stayed late at the Bistro, feeling better about myself and also about Bernice. Sometimes her shift would end and she’d come out from the kitchen in a pea jacket over her pink waitress dress and walk over and say, “So, Franklin”—not my name—“happy trails to you.” But then she’d sit and we’d talk, during which occasions I’d become the funniest, cleverest, the wisest, the most instructive, the most complex, enigmatic and strangely attractive of all men, but also the best, most attentive listener-back that anybody on earth had ever heard of. I’d quote Emerson and Rochefoucauld and Eliot and Einstein, remember incisive, insightful but obscure historical facts that perfectly fitted into our discussions but that I never remembered talking about to anyone else, all the while dredging up show-tune lyrics and Bud & Lou gags and statistics about everything from housing starts in Bergen County to how many salmon pass through the fish ladder up at Bellows Falls in a typical twenty-four-hour period during the spring run. I became, in other words, an ideal man, a man I myself was crazy about and in love with and anybody else would be, too. All because — though I never specifically said so to her — Bernice was herself an ideal woman. Not ideal per se, but ideal per diem, the only place ideal really makes much difference. I realize as I say all this that my “Bernice experience” and my current willingness to rekindle it represents another small skirmish into the Permanent Period and away from the strict confines of the Next Level. Sometimes, though, you have to seek help where you know you can find it.

On late after-shift evenings, I sometimes would walk outside the Bistro with Bernice onto the warm beach-town sidewalk, when the air was cooling and things were buzzing last summer and, later on, after my procedure, and when most visitors had gone home in September. We’d stand at the curb or walk, not holding hands or anything like that, down to the beach and talk about global warming or Americans’ inexplicable prejudice against the French or President Clinton’s sadly missed opportunities and the losses that won’t ever be recovered. I always had, when I was with Bernice, unusual takes on things, historical perspectives I didn’t even know I possessed, bits of memorized speeches and testimony I’d heard on Public Radio that somehow came back to me in detail and that made me seem as savvy as a diplomat and wise as an oracle, with total recall and flawless sense of context, all of it with a winning ability to make fun of myself, not be stuffy or world-weary, but then at a moment’s notice to be completely ready to change the subject to something she was interested in, or something else I knew more about than anybody in the world.

In all of this rather ordinary time together, Bernice had persistently positive things to say about me: that I was young for my age (without knowing my age, which I guessed she guessed was forty-five), that I led an interesting life now and had a damn good one in front of me, that I was “strangely intense” and intuitive and probably was a handful, but not really a type-A personality, which she knew she didn’t like.