Richard Ford - The Lay of the Land

Depth may be all that Sponsoring really lacks — with sincerity as its mainstay. Most people already feel in-deep-and-dense enough with life involvement, which may be their very problem: The voice is strangled by too much woolly experience ever to make it out and be heard. I know I’ve felt that way more in this fateful year than ever before, so that sometimes I think I could use a Sponsor visit myself. (This very fact may make me a natural Sponsor, since just like being a decent realtor, you have to at least harbor the suspicion that you have a lot in common with everybody, even if you don’t want to be their friend.)

My other reason for getting involved in Sponsoring is that Sponsoring carries with it a rare optimism that says some things can actually work out and puts a premium on inching beyond your limits, while rendering Sponsorees less risk-averse on a regular daily basis and less like those oldsters in their blue New Yorkers who won’t make a mistake for fear of bad results that’re coming anyway.

And of course the final reason I’m a Sponsor is that I have cancer. Contrary to the TV ads showing cancer victims staring dolefully out though lacy-curtained windows at empty playgrounds, or sitting alone on the sidelines while the rest of the non-cancerous family stages a barbecue or a boating adventure on Lake Wapanooki or gets into clog dancing or Whiffle ball, cancer (little-d death, after all), in fact, makes you a lot more interested in other people’s woes, with a view to helping with improvements. Getting out on the short end of the branch leaves you (has me, anyway) more interested in life — any life — not less. Since it makes the life you’re precariously living, and that may be headed for the precipice, feel fuller, dearer, more worthy of living — just the way you always hoped would happen when you thought you were well.

Other people, in fact — if you keep the numbers small — are not always hell.

The last thing I’ll say, as I pull up in front at #24 Bondurant Court, residence of a certain Mrs. Purcell, where I’m soon to be inside Sponsoring a better outcome to things, is that even though other people are worth helping and life can be fuller, etc., etc., Sponsoring has never actually produced a greater sense of connectedness in me, and probably not in others — the storied lashing-together-of-boats we’re all supposed to crave and weep salty tears at night for the lack of. It could happen. But the truth is, I feel connected enough already. And Sponsoring is not about connectedness anyway. It’s about being consoled by connection’s opposite. A little connectedness, in fact, goes a long way, no matter what the professional lonelies of the world say. We might all do with a little less of it.

N umber 24, where lights are on inside, is built in the solid, monied, happy family-home-as-refuge style, houses Haddam boasts in fulsome supply, owing to its staunch Dutch-Quaker beginnings and to a brief nineteenth-century craving for ornamental English-German prettiness. Vernacular, this is sometimes called — neat, symmetrical, gray-stucco, red-doored Georgians with slate roofs, four shuttered front windows upstairs and down, a small but fancy wedding-cake entry, curved fanlight with formal sidelights, dentil trim and squared-off (expensive) privet hedges bolstering the front. Intimations of heterodoxy, but nothing truly eye-catching. Thirty-five hundred square feet, not counting the basement and four baths. A million-two, if you bought it this very afternoon — complete with the platinum BMW M3 sitting in the side drive — though with the risk that a surveilling neighbor will come along before you sign the papers and snake it away for a million-two-five so he can sell it to his former law partner’s ex-wife.

Bondurant Court is actually a cul-de-sac off Rosedale Road. Three other residences, two of them certifiable Georgian stately homes, lurk deep within bosky, heavily treed lawns on which many original willows and elms remain. The third home-like structure is a pale-gray flat-roofed, windowless concrete oddity with a Roman-bath floor plan built by a Princeton architect for a twenty-five-year-old dot-com celebrity who no one speaks to for architectural reasons. Children aren’t allowed to go there on Halloween or caroling at Christmas. Rumors are out that the owner’s moved back to Malibu. I’m surprised not to see a Lauren-Schwindell sign out front, since one of my former colleagues sold him the lot.

Number 24—the great neighbor-houses’ little sister — would be a great buy for a new divorcée with dough, or for a newly-wed lawyer couple or a discreet gay M.D. with a Gotham practice who needs a getaway. If I could’ve sold easy houses like this, instead of overpriced mop closets you couldn’t fart in without the whole block smelling it, I might’ve stayed.

And like clockwork, as I stride up the flagstones toward the brass-knockered red door — two shiny brass carriage lamps turning on in unison — I experience the anti-Permanent Period williwaws lifting off of me and the exhilaration of whatever’s about to open up here streaming into my limbs and veins like a physic. One could easily wonder, of course, about a Mr. Definitely Wrong being set to spring out from the other side of the heavy door — John Wayne Gacy in clown gear, waiting to eat me with sauerkraut. What would the termite guy or the Culligan Man do, faced as they are with the same imponderables on a daily basis? Just use the old noodle. Stay alert for the obviously weird, attend your senses, drink and eat nothing, identify exits. I’ve, in fact, never really feared anything worse than being bored to bits. Plus, if they’re gonna, they’re gonna — like the little town in Georgia the tornado ripped a hole through when everybody was at church on Sunday, believing such things didn’t happen there.

Everything happens everywhere. Look at the fucking election.

Ding-dong. Ding-dong. Ding-dong.

A melodious belling. I turn and re-survey the cul-de-sac — wet, cold, bestilled, its other ponderous residences all bearing lawn signs: WARNING. THIS HOUSE IS PATROLLED. The big Georgians’ many leaded windows glow through the trees with antique light, as though lit by torches. No humans or animals are in view. A police car or ambulance wee-up, wee-ups in the distance. Cold air hisses with the rain’s departure. A crow calls from a spruce, then a second, but nothing’s in sight.

Noises become audible within. A female throat is cleared, a chain lock slid down its track. The brass peephole darkens with an interior eye. A dead bolt’s conclusively thrown. I rise a quarter inch onto my toes.

“Just a moment, pu-lease.” A rilling, pleasant voice in which, do I detect, the undertones of Dixie? I hope not.

The heavy door opens back. A smiling woman stands in its space. This is the best part of Sponsoring — the relief of finally arriving to someone’s rescue.

But I sense: Here is not a complete stranger. Though from out on the bristly welcome mat, the back of my head feeling a breeze flood past into the homey-feeling house, I can’t instantly supply coordinates. My brow feels thick. My mouth is half-open, beginning to smile. I peer through the angled door opening at Mrs. Purcell.

It couldn’t be a worse opening gambit, of course, for a Sponsor to stare simian-like at the Sponsoree, who may already be fearful the visitor will be a snorting crotch-clutcher escapee from a private hospital, who’ll leave her trussed up in the maid’s closet while he makes off with her underthings. The risk for doing Sponsor work in Haddam is always, of course, that I might know my Sponsoree: a face, a history, a colorful story that defeats disinterest and ruins everything. I should’ve been more prudent.

Except maybe not. Some days, I see whole crowds of people who look exactly like other people I know but who’re, in fact, total strangers. It’s my age and age’s great infirmity: overaccumulation — the same reason I don’t make friends anymore. Sally always said this was a grave sign, that I was spiritually afraid of the unknown — unlike herself, who left me for her dead husband. Though I thought — and still do — that it was actually a positive sign. By thinking I recognized strangers I, in fact, didn’t recognize, I was actually reaching out to the unknown, making the world my familiar. No doubt this is why I’ve sold many, many houses that no one else wanted.