Richard Ford - The Lay of the Land

“That’d be great,” I say. “We’ve got plenty of free-range organic turkey.”

“Oh, no. I’m all set there. Thanks.” Marinara continues panning around. This is not a social visit. He pauses to give a lengthy disapproving stare at Nick Feenster, buffing his Vettes in his Lycra space suit, Pérez Prado banging up into the atmosphere, where a whoosh of blackbirds goes over in an undulant cloud. “That’s a plate-full over there, I guess.”

“It is,” I admit. Though the old sympathy again filters up for the poor all-wrong Feensters, who, I’m sure, suffer great needless misery and loneliness here in New Jersey with their Bridgeport social skills. My heart goes out to them, which is better than hoping they’ll die.

Nick has seen Detective Marinara and me observing him across the property line. He stands up from buffing, his Lycra further stressing his smushed genitals, and gives us back a malignant “Yeah? What?” stare, framed by topiary. He doesn’t know Marinara’s the heat. His lips move, but “Lisbon Antigua” blots out his voice. He jerks his head around to fire words off to Drilla — to crank up the volume, probably. She says something back, possibly “don’t be such an asshole,” and he waves his buffing pad at us in disgust and resumes rubbing. Drilla looks wistfully out toward where Poincinet curves to meet 35. She’d be a better neighbor married to someone else.

“I could flash my gold on that clown, tune him down a notch.” Marinara shoots his sweater cuffs out of his jacket sleeves. An encounter would feel good to him about now. Conflict, I’m sure, calms him. He’s a divorcé, under forty. He’s full of fires.

“He’ll quit,” I say. “He has to listen to it, too.”

Marinara shakes his head at how the world acts. “Whatever.” It is the policeman’s weltanschauung.

Exactly then, as if on cue, the music stops and airy silence opens. Drilla — Bimbo under one arm — stands and walks inside, carrying the boom box. Nick, his voice softened to indecipherability, speaks something appeasing to her. But she goes inside and closes the front door, leaving him alone with his buffing implements. It’s the way I knew it would happen.

I am thinking for this instant, and longingly, about Sally, whose call I’ve now missed. And about Clarissa. It’s 1:30 already. She should be home. The Eat No Evil people will be here soon. All this brings with itself a sinking sensation. I don’t feel thankful for anything. What I’d like to do is get in bed with my book of Great Speeches, read the Gettysburg Address out loud to no one and invite Jill and Paul to go find dinner at a Holiday Inn.

The mixed rich fragrance of salt breeze, Detective Marinara’s professional-grade leather coat and no doubt his well-oiled weapon tucked on his hip, all now enter my nostrils and make me realize once again that this is not a social call. Nothing can make a day go flat like a police presence.

Paul and Jill stand silent, side-by-side in their holiday get-ups. They say nothing, intend nothing. They are as I am — in the thrall of the day and the law’s arrival.

“This is not a social call, I don’t think.”

“Not entirely.” Detective Marinara adjusts his cop’s brogues in the driveway gravel. His precise, intent features have rendered him an appealing though slightly sorrowing customer — like a young Bobby Kennedy, without the big teeth. I have the keenest feeling, against all reason, that he could arrest me. He’s sensed “something” in my carriage, in my house’s too rich affect (the redwood, the copper weather vane), my car, my strange children, my white Nikes, something that makes him wonder if I’m not at least complicitous somewhere. Surely not in setting a bomb at Haddam Doctors and heedlessly taking the life of Natherial Lewis, but in something that still requires looking at. And maybe he’s exactly right. Who can say with certainty that he/she did or didn’t do anything? Why should I be exempted? Lord knows, I’m guilty (of something). I should go quietly. I don’t say these words, but I think them. This may be what Marguerite Purcell experienced, though I’ll never know.

What I do say apprehensively is, “What gives, then?” The corners of Paul’s mouth and also his bad eye twitch toward me. “What gives, then?” is gangster talk he naturally relishes.

“Just standard cop work, Mr. Bascombe.” Marinara produces a square packet of QUIT SMOKING, NOW gum from his jacket pocket, unsheathes a piece, sticks it in his mouth and thoughtlessly pockets the wrapper. Possibly he wears a nicotine “patch” below his BORN TO RUN tattoo. “We’re pretty sure we got this thing tied up. We know who did it. But we just like to throw all our answers out the window and open it up and look one last time. You were on our list. You were there, you knew the victim. Not that we suspect you.” He is chewing mildly. “You know?”

“I tell people the same thing when they buy a house.” I do not feel less guilty.

“I’m sure.” Detective Marinara, chewing, looks appraisingly up at my house again, taking in its modern vertical lines, its flashings, copings, soffit vents, its board-and-batten plausibility, its road-facing modesty and affinity for the sea. My house may be an attractive mystery he feels excluded from, which silences him and makes him feel out of place now that he’s decided murderers don’t live here. Belonging is no more his metier than mine.

“Must be okay to wake up here every day,” he says. Paul and Jill have no clue what we’re talking about — my car window, an outstanding warrant, an ax murder. Children always hear things when they don’t expect it.

“It’s just nice to wake up at all,” I say, to be self-deprecating about living well.

“You got that right,” Marinara says. “I wake up dreading all the things I have to do, and every one of them’s completely do-able. What’s that about? I oughta be grateful, maybe.” He gazes up Poincinet Road, along the line of my neighbors’ large house fronts to where only empty beach stretches far out of sight. A few seaside walkers animate the vista but don’t really change its mood of exclusivity. The air is grainy and neutral-toned with moisture. You can see a long way. On the horizon, where the land meets the sea, small shore-side bumps identify the Ferris wheel Bernice and I admired on our evenings together months ago. I wonder again where and how my daughter is, whether I’ve missed Sally’s call. Important events seem to be escaping me.

“Detective Marinara was considerate enough to give me his business card to put in the time capsule.” Paul speaks these words abruptly and, as always, too loud, like someone introducing quiz-show contestants. Jill inches in closer, as if he might lift off like a bottle rocket. She touches her prosthesis to his hand for reassurance. “I gave him one of my Smart Aleck cards.” Paul, my son, mulleted, goateed, softish and strange-suited, again could be any age at this moment — eleven, sixteen, twenty-six, thirty-five, sixty-one.

“Okay, yeah. Okay.” Marinara jabs a hand (his wristwatch is on a gold chain bracelet) into his leather jacket pocket, where his QUIT SMOKING packet went, and fishes out a square card, which he looks at without smiling, then hands to me. I have, of course, seen Paul’s work before. My impolitic response to it was the flash point in last spring’s fulminant visit. I have to be cautious now. The card Marinara hands me seems to be a photograph, a black and white, showing a great sea of Asians — Koreans, Chinese, I don’t know which — women and men all dressed in white Western wedding garb, fluffy dresses and regulation tuxes, all beaming together up into an elevated camera’s eye. There must be no fewer than twenty thousand of them, since they fill the picture so you can’t see the edge or make out where the photograph’s taken — the Gobi Desert, a soccer stadium, Tiananmen Square. But it’s definitely the happiest day of their lives, since they seem about to be married or to have just gotten that way in one big bunch. Paul’s sidesplitting caption below, in red block letters, says “GUESS WHAT????” And when opened, the card, in bigger red Chinese-looking English letters, shouts “WE’RE PREGNANT!!!”