Richard Ford - The Lay of the Land

But since there was still plenty of light left and I had my old orienteering feel for streets and cardinal points — realtors all think we have this, but can be calamitously wrong — I said I wanted to drive past my mother’s last address in Skokie, where she’d lived while I was in college, with Jake Ornstein, her good husband, and where she’d died in 1965. We got off at Dempster Avenue and drove east to where I thought it would intersect, via a tricky set of small-street maneuverings, with Skokie Boulevard. Everything felt familiar to me, equipped as I was with the sense of near-belonging I’d had from thirty-five years ago, when I used to ride over from Ann Arbor on the old New York Central and be picked up at the LaSalle Street Station by my mother. But when I got to where I thought Skokie Boulevard should’ve been (possibly my old-fashioned was working on me), there was a big but past-its-prime shopping mall, with an Office Depot and a poorly patronized Sears as its anchors and a lot of vacant store spaces in between. I realized then that somewhere toward the back of the employee-parking section of the Sears was where my mother and Jake’s house had been — a blue-roofed, single-dormer, center-stoop, quasi-Colonial Cape where my mother had lived out her last days, and where I’d gone to see her before being officially rendered an orphan at age nineteen.

“Do you know where your mom’s buried?” Sally was driving our renter Impala and wasn’t in a hurry, since her duties toward Wally and herself were now forever discharged. She’d happily have driven around all day.

I said, “It’s one of those places where you just see miles of granite headstones and freeways go by on three sides. I could probably find it from the air. She’s buried beside Jake.”

“We can look for it,” she said, widening her eyes like a challenge. “I think it’d be nice if you went there once before you died. Not that you’re in jeopardy of dying. At least you better not be. I have plans for you.” That was our sexual code in prior days. “I’ve got plans for you, buster.” An eyebrow cocked. I’d certainly like those plans to see good results again soon.

“I hope you do,” I said. We were again headed back toward the Edens and the route to the airport. “It’s enough that I tried to find it. She’d think that was good. It’s one of the ways life’s like horseshoes.”

“There’re more than you know, you know.” She smiled broadly at me, her eyes shiny in a way I hadn’t seen them shine in a while. This also clearly meant something amorous and made me happy, though also apprehensive that something close to amorous was all I was expected to manage. We got to the airport with two hours to spare.

I will say that in the days since Sally’s return, some of which time I was in the hospital in Toms River, before I walked out as a convalescing man, holey-chested as a minor-league saint, she has treated me — as I feared she might — with kid gloves, almost as if in some karmic way she believes she caused what happened to me. I probably have not objected enough, though Mike Mahoney says karma doesn’t work like that. Still, Sally often seems to be “attending” to me, and sometimes addresses me in an over-animated third-person manner — spirited attendant to fractious attendee: “So what does Frank have on his mind today?” “So is Frank going to clamber out of bed today?” I’ve heard this is what people do in therapy sessions when straight talk hits the wall. “Frank believes, or at least is willing to speculate, that Sally is overcompensating for prior behavior that requires no compensation, and Frank is wishing it would stop.” I actually said this to her. And for a day she turned silent and evasive, even a little testy. But by the second day, she was cheerful again, though still more solicitous than makes me happy.

I’m actually ready to believe that what any marriage might need is a good whacking abandonment or betrayal to test its tensile strength (most of them survive that and worse). In any case, I’m pretty well over being angry and feel an exhilarated sense of necessity just to be alive still and have her back. Marriage, in fact, does not even feel much like marriage anymore, even though Sally has asked for her wedding ring back (but has yet to put it on). Possibly it never really felt like marriage, and that in spite of two efforts I don’t know what marriage is. Maybe it’s not our natural human state, which is why Paul only smiled when I asked him about it.

But in these days since being shot in the chest, as this Millennial plague year ends and the confounding election’s finally resigned to, what I’ve begun to feel is a growing sense of enlightenment, even though I have plenty of pain from my bullet holes. Enlightenment often gets lost in intimate life with another person: the positive conviction, for instance, that the person you are now would make precisely the same choices you’re living with and that your life is actually the way you want it. That enlightened understanding can get lost. Life with Sally returned to Sea-Clift feels, in fact, less like a choice I made long ago, and more like the feeling of meeting someone you instantaneously like while on a walking trip along the Great Wall, and who seems sort of familiar and who by the end of the day you decide to share your pup tent with.

Not that I’m totally in the clear. If I intend to be healed and be a full participant more than an attendee, I believe I will have to become more interesting per se . Although being shot with a machine pistol by a fourteen-year-old assassin and living to tell about it gives me a good, unconventional story that most people probably won’t have. I may also need to become more intuitive, which I would’ve said I was anyway, until cancer got in the picture. And possibly I could stand an improved sense of spirituality — which Sally seems to have come home with, and Mike Mahoney sells like popsicles. “Faith is the evidence of things unseen” always seemed a reasonably reliable spiritual credo to have, and evoked me to myself in a secular sense — though you could also say it gave rise to problems. Or: “In an age of disbelief…it is for the poet to supply the satisfactions of belief in his measure and his style”—except of course I am not a poet, though I’ve read plenty of them and find their books easy to finish. But in the most purely personal-spiritual vein — since I took two slugs four inches above my own — the best motivational question in the spirituality catechism, and one seeking an answer worth remembering, may not be “Am I good?” (which is what my rich Sponsorees often want to know and base life on), but “Do I have a heart at all?” Do I see good as even a possibility? The Dalai Lama in The Road to the Open Heart argues I definitely do. And I can say I think I do, too. But anymore — as they say back down in New Jersey — anymore than that is more spiritual than I can get.

How any of this jibes with acceptance and the Next Level, I’m not sure. Self-improvement as a concept already smacks of the Permanent Period, of life you can live over again, which is a thought I’ve put behind me now but may be harder to outlive than it seems. Truly, at a certain point around the course, can you do much to change your chances? Isn’t it really more a matter of readying? Of life as prelude?

I n a purely itemized way, then, these things are now of record at the end.

I’ve always liked the joke about the doctor coming into the examining room, holding a clipboard, wearing his stethoscope and mirrored visor, and saying, “I’ve got good news and bad news. The bad news is you have cancer and you’ll be dead in a week. The good news is I fucked my nurse last night.”