Richard Ford - The Lay of the Land

“Are you Mr. Fruank?” Dixie’s definitely alight in the voice: bright, sweet and rising at the end to make everything a happy question; vowels that make you sound like yew, handle like handull. Central Virginia’s my guess.

“Hi. Yeah. I’m Frank.” I extend an affirming hand with a friendlier smile. I’m not a leering crotch-clutcher or a dampened-panty faddist. Sponsors omit last names — which is simpler when you leave.

“Well, Ah’m Marguerite Purcell, Mr. Fruank. Why don’t you come in out of this b-r-r-r we’re havin’.” Marguerite Purcell, who’s dressed in a two-piece suit that must be raw silk of the rarest French-rose hue, with matching Gucci flats, steps back in welcome — the most cordial-confident of graceful hostesses, clearly accustomed to all kinds, high to low, entering her private home on every imaginable occasion. Haddam has always absorbed a small population of dispirited, old-monied southerners who can’t stand the South yet can only bear the company of one another in deracinated enclaves like Haddam, Newport and Northeast Harbor. You catch glimpses of their murmuring Town Cars swaying processionally out gated driveways, headed to the Homestead for golf-and-bridge weekends with other white-shoed W&L grads, or turning north to Naskeag to spend August with Grandma Ni-Ni on Eggemoggin Reach — all of them iron-kneed Republicans who want us out of the UN, nigras off the curbs and back in the fields, the Suez mined, and who think the country missed its chance by not choosing ole Strom back in ’48. Hostesses like Marguerite Purcell never have problems money can’t solve. So what am I doing here?

“Ahm just astonissshed by this weathuh.” Marguerite’s leading me through the parquet foyer into a living room “done” like no living room I’ve seen (and I’ve seen a few) and that the staid Quaker exterior gives no hint of. The two big front windows have been sheathed with shiny white lacquered paneling. The walls are also lacquered white. The green-vaulted ceiling firmament has tiny recessed pin lights shining every which way, making the room bright as an operating theater. The floors are bare wood and waxed to a fierce sheen. There are no plants. The only furnishings are two immense, hard-as-granite rectilinear love seats, covered in some sort of dyed-red animal skin, situated on a square of blue carpet, facing each other across a thick slab-of-glass coffee table that actually has fish swimming inside it (a dozen lurid, fat, motionless white goldfish), the whole objet supported by an enormous hunk of curved, polished chrome, which I recognize as the bumper off a ’54 Buick. The air is odorless, as if the room had been chemically scrubbed to leave no evidence of prior human habitation. Nothing recalls a day when regular people sat in regular chairs and watched TV, read books, got into arguments or made love on an old braided rug while logs burned cheerily in a fireplace. The only animate sign is a white CO 2detector mid-ceiling with its tiny blinking red beacon. Though on the wall above where a fireplace ought to be, there’s a gilt-framed, essentially life-size oil portrait of an elderly, handsome, mustachioed, silver-haired, capitalist-looking gentleman in safari attire, a floppy white-hunter fedora and holding a Mannlicher.50 in front of a stuffed rhino head (the very skin used to make the couch). This fellow stares from the wall with piercing, dark robber-baron eyes, a cruel sensuous mouth, uplifted nose and bruising brow, but with a mysterious, corners-up smirk on his lips, as if once a great, diminishing joke has been told and he was the first one to get it.

“This wuss my husbund’s favorite room,” Marguerite says dreamily, still primly smiling. She establishes herself on the front edge of one of the red love seats, facing me across the aquarium table, squeezing together, then shifting to the side her shiny stockinged knees. She possesses thin, delicately veined ankles, one of which wears a nearly invisible gold chain flattened beneath the nylon. She is all Old Dominion comeliness, the last breathing female you’d think could stomach a room as weird as this. Obviously, she married it, but now that the Mister’s retreated to his place on the wall, she doesn’t know what in the fuck to do with it. This may be what she wants me to tell her. Anyone — but me — couldn’t resist asking her a hundred juicy, prying, none-of-your-business questions. But, as with all Sponsor visits, I heed the presence of an invisible privacy screen between Sponsoree and self. That works out best for everybody.

From where I sit, Marguerite seems to have the lens softened all around her — a trick of the pin lights in the celestial green ceiling. She’s maybe mid-fifties but has a plush, young-appearing face she’s applied a faint rouging to, a worry-free forehead, welcoming blue eyes, with an obviously sizable bustage under her rose suit jacket, and an amorous full-lipped mouth, through which her voice makes a soft whistling sound (“ssurely,” “hussbund’s”), as if her teeth were in the way. My guess is she’s the hoped-for result of a high-end makeover — a length somebody might gladly go to for the chance of an enduring (and rich) second marriage. Her hair, however, is the standard bottle-brown southern do with a wide, pale, scalp-revealing middle part going halfway back, with the rest cemented into a flip that only elderly hairdressers in Richmond know how to properly mold. Southern socialites — my schoolmates’ mothers at Gulf Pines Academy, who’d drive down from Montgomery and Lookout to speak briefly to their villainous sons through lowered windows of their Olds Ninety Eights — wore exactly this hair construction back in 1959. I actually find it sexy as hell, since it reminds me of my young and (I felt) clearly lust-driven fourth-grade teacher, Miss Hapthorn, back in Biloxi.

When she led me into the lifeless and over-heated living room, I noticed Marguerite stealing two spying looks my way as if I, too, might’ve reminded her of somebody and wasn’t the only one searching time’s vault.

And she’s now examining me again. And not like the beguiling Virginia hostess who sparkles at the guest, hoping to find something she can adore so she can decide to change her mind about it later, but with the same submerged acknowledging I detected before. These magnolia blossoms, of course, can be scrotum-cracking, trust-fund bullies who secretly smoke Luckies, drink gin by the gallon, screw the golf pro and don’t give an inch once money’s on the table. Only they never act that way when you first make their acquaintance. I’m wondering if I sold her a house back in the mists.

Though all at once my heart, out ahead of my brain, exerts a boul-derish, possibly audible whump-whoomp-de-whomp. I know Marguerite Purcell. Or I did.

The knees. The good ankles. The ghosty anklet. The bustage. The plump lips. The way the peepers fasten on me, slowly close, then stay closed too long, revealing an underlying authority making decisions for the composed face. (The lisp is new.) She may remember me, too. Except if I admit it, Sponsorship loses all purchase and I’ll have to beat it, just when I got here.

Marguerite reopens her small pale blue eyes, looks self-consciously down, arranges her pretty hands on her rose skirt hem, flattens the fabric across her knee-tops, smiles again and recrosses her ankles. No one’s spoken since we sat down. Maybe she’s also having a day when everybody looks like somebody else and thinks nothing of this moment of faulty recognition. And maybe she’s not the woman I “slept” with how many years back (sleep did eventually come), when her name was Betty Barksdale—“Dusty” to her friends — then the beleaguered, abandoned wife of Fincher Barksdale, change-jingling local M.D. and turd. He left her to join some foreign-doctors outfit in deepest Africa, where he reportedly went native, learned the local patois, took a fat African bride with tribal scarrings, began doctoring to the insurgents (the wrong insurgents) and ended up in a fetid, lightless, tin-sided back-country prison from which he eventually found his way to a public square in a regional market town, where he was roped to a metal no-parking post and hacked at for a while by boy soldiers hepped up on the amphetamines he’d been feeding them.