Richard Ford - The Lay of the Land

“I see,” I say. I’m of course the wrong color, too.

“I did my course over at Rutgers-Camden. Prolly was better, given, you know. Everything. It isn’t so bad.”

“Seems great to me.” I shiver through my thighs and knees from the accumulating cold. It’s just as well, I think, that Detective Marinara has his family to go back to. Police, by definition, make incongruous guests and he could turn unwieldy with a glass of merlot, once he got talking. Though he doesn’t seem to want to leave, and I don’t want to abandon him out here.

“Okay. So. Good to meet you. I’ll be in touch tomorrow.” He smiles, proffers a hand to me, a hand as soft as calfskin and delicate — not large enough to palm a basketball. I have yet to hear his first name. Possibly it’s Vincent. He extends his smile to Paul and Jill, but not a hand. “Thanks for the card,” he says, and seems pleased. Detective Marinara is, in fact, a regular Joe, could’ve been my little brother in Sigma Chi, done well in management or marketing, settled in Owosso, become a Michiganian. He might never have given the first thought to carrying a shield or a gun. It’s often the case that I don’t know whether I like fate or hate it.

“Great to meet you,” I say. “Have a happy Thanksgiving.”

“Yeah. That’d be different.” He shrugs, his smile become sun-less but mirthful. Then he’s on his way, back to his cruiser, his radio (hidden somewhere on his person) crackling unexpectedly with cop voices. He doesn’t look back at us.

Inside, behind the coffered front door of the steam bath that’s become my residence, in the candle-lit dining room that’s too small and boxy and windowless (a design flaw fatal to resale), arrayed on the Danish table accoutred with bone china, English cutlery, Belgian crystal, Irish napkins as wide as Rhode Island, two opened bottles of Old Vine Healdsburg merlot, all courtesy of Eat No Evil, who’ve arrived early and paved every available table inch with pricey ethical food, including an actual, enormous, glistening turkey, is: Thanksgiving, broadcasting its message through the house with a lacquered richness that instantly makes my throat constrict, my cheeks thicken, my saliva go ropy and my belly turn bilgy. It’s exactly the way I ordered it. But just for the moment, I can’t go in the room where it is. No doubt my condition’s asserting itself through the belly and up the gorge.

“Isn’t it great?” Jill’s ahead, beaming, peeking in at the flickering festive room, not wanting to enter before I do, eyes wide back to Paul and me like a daughter-in-law, her prosthesis tucked behind her.

“Yeah,” I say, though the whole spread looks like a wax feast in a furniture store showroom. If you put a knife to the turkey or a spoon to the yellow squash or a fork to the blamelessly white spuds, it would all be as hard as a transistor radio. And at the last second before entering, I swerve right, and into the kitchen, where there are windows, big ones, and a door out, giving air, which is what I need before I chuck up. “Yeah, it is,” I say as I push open the sliding door and struggle onto the deck for the ocean’s chill that’ll save a big mess (I’m also dying to grab a leak). You can say yours is a “nontraditional” Thanksgiving when you have cancer and the sight of food makes you sick and you nearly piss your pants and the police check in and your wife’s split to England — which isn’t counting your kids. From out here, Drilla Feenster’s in view, deck to deck, alone in her hot tub — naked, it would seem — listening to “The March of the Siamese Children” (clearly her favorite) on the boom box, drinking some kind of milky white drink from a tall glass and staring out past the owl decoy to the sea. Bimbo sits on the hot tub ledge beside her, staring in the same direction. I must be invisible to her.

“Who turned the fucking heat up to bake?” I say back through the open doorway into the kiln of a kitchen, where Jill and Paul have stopped, looking concerned by the fact that I am (I can feel it) pale as a sheet. “Where’s Clarissa?”

The beach and ocean are oily-smelling, the sand stained lifeless brown and packed by the tide. Long yellow seaweed garlands are strewn from the turbulence at sea (these are what stink). Two hundred yards out, a black-suited surfer sits his board, prow-up, on the barely rising sheen of ocean. Nothing’s happening. Paul’s time-capsule hole and pile of sand are the only things of note close by.

“There’s a kind of story involved in that,” Paul says from the kitchen, through the door out to the deck. A small bird-like female is visible behind the stove island in the kitchen, holding a dish towel, insubstantial through the mirroring glass. She’s got up in a floppy white chef’s toque and a square-front tunic that engulfs her.

“Who’s that?” I say. The sight of this tiny woman makes me unexpectedly agitated — and also enervated. I’m sure this is the way the dying man feels as his final breaths hurry away and word goes through the house: “It’s time, it’s time, he’s going, better come now.” The room fills with faces he can’t recognize, all the fucking air he’d hoped to salvage is quickly sucked up. It’s the feeling of responsibility colluding with pointlessness, and it isn’t good.

“That’s Gretchen,” Paul says. I feel like I’ve entered a house not my own and encountered circus performers — the one-handed mountain woman, the midget chef, the wise-cracking pitchman in the horse-blanket suit. Everything’s gone queer. It wasn’t supposed to.

“What’s she here for?” I’m now burning to piss. Were it not daylight and Drilla not in her hot tub in full view, I’d lariat out right here, the way I do all the time behind Kmart.

“She’s part of the food,” Paul says, and looks uncomfortably at Jill, who’s beside him. “She’s nice. She’s from Cassville. She and Jill both do yoga.”

“Where’s your sister?” I snap. “Did Sally call me?”

“She did,” Paul says. “I told her that you were doing fine, that your prostate stuff was a lot better and probably in remission, and that you and I had—”

“Did you say that to her?” My lips stiffen to a grimace. This was my news. My story to spin, to bill me as more than a penile has-been. Guilt, shame, regret will now cloud all Sally’s intentions toward me. Love will never have its second chance. She’ll be on a plane to Bhutan by sundown. I’ll become a pitiful thing in her horoscope (“Better watch your p’s and q’s on this one, hon”). I could strangle my son and never think of him again.

“I just thought she prolly knew about it.” Paul elevates his chin semi-defiantly, thumbs over his belt cow-puncher-style. This is his new take-charge posture — somewhat compromised by his suit. Tiny Gretchen stares out at me apprehensively, as if I was being talked off a high ledge. She doesn’t know who I am. Introductions were neglected. “She said she’d be here tomorrow. She seemed a little distressed, I guess.”

I, of course, was too busy not selling a cracker box on wheels to awards-store Bagosh and hunting for — and not finding — Bernice Podmanicsky. At the Next Level, the old standards vanish. You don’t know where your interests lie or how to contact them. “Where’s your sister. Did she call?”

“Okay.” Paul casts a fugitive look around the kitchen. Jill is nowhere in sight now. Probably she’s snuffing the dining room candles so the smoke alarm doesn’t go off.

“Okay? Okay what?” Paul stands his ground, separated by the open sliding doorway, his brow heavy, his damaged eye twitching but focused. What’s wrong here? What’s the story? Is she hurt, after all? Maimed? Dead? And everyone’s too embarrassed to tell me? Me, me, me, me. Why does so much have to be about me? That’s the part of life that makes you want to end it.