Richard Ford - The Lay of the Land

W hat I don’t expect to find in my driveway is activity. But activity is what I find. Next door at the Feensters’, as well. Thanksgiving, in my playbook, is an indoor event acted out between kitchen and table, table and TV, TV and couch (and later bed). Outdoor activity, particularly driveway activity, foreshadows problems and events unwanted: genies exiting bottles, dikes bursting, de-stability at the top — anti-Thanksgiving gremlins sending celebrants scattering for their cars. The outcome I didn’t want.

The Feensters appear unimplicated. Nick has set up shop in his driveway and is giving his twin ’56 vintage Vettes the careful hand-waxing they deserve and frequently get (cold-weather bonding issues, what the hell). Drilla, in a skirt and sweater, is seated on the front step, hugging her knees and petting Bimbo in her lap as if now was July. Nick is, as usual, luridly turned out in one of his metallic Lycra bodysuits — electric blue, showing off his muscles and plenty of bulgy dick — the same outfit the neighborhood is used to seeing during his and Drilla’s stern-miened beach constitutionals, when they each listen to separate Walkmen. Though because it’s wintry, Nick has added some kind of space-age silver-aluminum anorak you’d buy in catalogs only lottery winners from Bridgeport get sent for free. Seen through his derelict topiary, he is a strange metallic sight on Thanksgiving. Though if Nick wasn’t such an asshole, there’d be something touching about the two of them, since clearly they don’t know what to do with themselves today, and could easily end up gloomy and alone at the Ruby Tuesday’s in Belmar. Likewise, if Nick weren’t such an asshole, I’d walk over and ask them to come join our family sociality, since there’s too much food anyway. Possibly next year. I give him a noncommittal wave as I pass and turn in my own drive. Nick repays it with a black stare of what looks like disgust, though Drilla, clutching the dog, waves back smally and smiles in the invisible sunshine — her smile indicating that if a man like Nick is your husband, nothing’s easy in life.

However, it’s my own driveway that’s cause for concern. If I’d noticed in time, I might’ve driven back to the office, listened to Mike’s business proposal, sold the whole shitaree, then come home a half hour later in a changed frame of mind.

Paul and his lofty Jill are out on the pea-gravel drive in holiday attire and absorbed in an arms-folded, head-nodding confab with a man I don’t know but whose chocolate brown Crown Vic sits on the road by the arborvitae and Paul’s ramshackle gray Saab. Possibly this is a client prospect who’s tracked me down, holiday or no, in hopes I’ll have the key to the beach house he’s noticed in the Buyer’s Guide and can’t wait to see. Paul may be dry-running his new agent’s persona, gassing about time capsules, greeting-card pros and cons, the Chiefs’ chances for the Super Bowl and how special it is being a New Jersey native.

Only this guy’s no realty walk-up, nor is his car a usual car. His body language lacks the tense but casual hands-in-pockets, feet-apart posture of protective customer indecision. This man is dapper and small, with both hands free at his sides like a cop, with thick blunt-cut Neapolitan hair, a long brown leather jacket over a brown wool polo and heavy black brogues with telltale crepe soles. He looks like a cop because he is a cop. Plenty of ordinary Americans living ordinary citizen lives dress exactly this way, but nobody looks this way dressed this way but cops. It’s no wonder crime’s on the uptick. They’ve given away the element of surprise to the element — to the window bashers, hospital bombers and sign stealers of the world.

But why is a cop in my driveway? Why is his brown cop car with MUNICIPAL license plates conspicuously parked in front of my house on Thanksgiving, dragging my family outside when law-abiding citizens should be inside stuffing their faces and arguing?

Clarissa. A heart flutter, a new burning up my back. He is an emissary of doleful news. Like in The Fighting Sullivans, when the grief squad marches up the steps. Her re-entry to conventionality has already come to ruin. Not thinkable.

All three turn as I climb out, leaving Mike’s business plan on the seat, my gait hitched again and slowed. I’m smiling — but only out of habit. The Feensters — I couldn’t hear it from my car — have their boom box at its usual high decibels, apparently to aid in waxing. “Lisbon Antigua” again — their way of getting their Thanksgiving message out: Fuck you.

“Hi,” I say. “What’s the trouble here, Officer?” I intend this to be funny, but it isn’t. There can’t be bad news.

“This is Detective Marinara, Frank,” Paul says in the most normal of imaginable voices, tuned to the exquisite pleasure of saying “Detective Marinara.” I can smell cops. Though this, thanks to the signs above, will not be about Clarissa, but me.

Paul and Jill — she’s looking at me sorrowfully, as though I’m Paul’s crippled parent — have transubstantiated themselves since our basement get-together. Jill has severely pulled much of her long, dense yellow hair “back,” but left skimpy fringe bangs, plus a thick, concupiscent braid that swags down behind her like a rope. From her travel wardrobe, she’s chosen a green flare-bottomed pantsuit with some sort of shiny golden underhue and a pair of clunky black shoes that show off the length of her feet and that, as an ensemble, renders her basically gender-neutral. She’s also attached a flesh-tinted holiday hand prosthesis, barely detectable as not the real thing, though not flexible like a hand you’d want. Paul, from somewhere, has found a strange suit — a too-large summer-weight blue-gray-and-pink plaid with landing-strip lapels, gutter-deep cuffs and English vents — a style popular ten years before he was born and that everyone joked about even then. With his mullet, his uncouth beard-stache and ear stud, his suit makes him look like a burlesque comedian. He looks as if he could break out a ukelele and start crooning in an Al Jolson voice. Just seeing him makes me long for sweet and affirming Bernice. She could set things right in a heartbeat, though I don’t really know her.

“I’m impressed with your place here, Mr. Bascombe.” Detective Marinara scans around and grins at the way some people can live, but not him: ocean-front contemporary, lots of glass and light, high ceilings — the works. He’s a small, handsome, feline-looking man with long, spidery fingers, dark worried eyes and a small shapely nose. He could’ve been a sixth-man guard in Division III, maybe for Muhlenberg, who only heeded the call to police work because of his “soshe” degree and a desire to stay close to his folks in Dutch Neck. These guys make detective in a hurry and aren’t adept at cracking skulls.

“I’d be happy to sell it to you,” I say, and try to look happy. “I’ll move out today.” I’m not comfortable standing in front of my house with a cop, as if I’m soon to be leaving in handcuffs. Though it could happen to any of us.

“I was down at my sister’s,” Detective Marinara says. “I told you she lives in Barnegat Acres.” His interested eyes survey around professionally. They pass my busted duct-taped window, Sally’s LeBaron, pass the Feensters, my son, Jill. “They do the whole Italian spread,” he says. “You need to take a breather though. So I wandered down here. Your son happened to be outside.”

“We asked Detective Marinara to have Thanksgiving with us,” Paul says with barely suppressible glee at the discomfort this will cause me (it does). His fingers, I can see, are working. When he was a boy, he “counted” with his fingers — cars on the highway, birds on wires, individual seconds during our lengthy disciplinary discussions, breaths during his therapy sessions at Yale and Hopkins. He eventually quit. But now he’s counting again in his weird suit, his warty fingers jittering, jittering. Something’s wound him up again — a cop, of course. Jill is aware and smiles at him supportively. They are an even stranger pair all dressed up.