Richard Ford - The Lay of the Land

The drive out to De Tocqueville minds the woodsy curves of King George Road away from Haddam centre ville, along the walled grounds of the Fresh Light Seminary, now (in the view of local alarmists) under the control of South Korean army factions. The tall, gaunt, flat-roofed old buildings the Presbyterians built loom beyond the darkening, oak-clustered Great Lawn like a New England insane asylum, though within, all souls are saved instead of lost. Single yellowed windows glow high up the building fronts. Fall classes are ended. Foreign students far from Singapore and Gabon, with no chance of travel home, are locked in their dorm rooms front-loading Scripture into their teeming brains, fine-tuning their homiletic techniques in front of the closet mirror, experiencing, no doubt, the first intimation that most believers aren’t real believers and don’t care what you say if you just take their minds off their woes. Some motivated seminarians, I see, have stretched a brash white-red-and-blue banner between two sentinel oaks, proclaiming BUSH IS GOD’S PRESIDENT AND CHARLTON HESTON IS MY HERO.

Traffic out King George has slackened to a trickle, as though a get-out-of-town-now whistle had sounded, whereas normally it’s bumper-to-bumper down to Trenton, three to seven. But the nearing holiday and worsening weather have returned Haddam to its later-after-hours, nothing-happening somnolence, which all would love to legislate, with day workers, secretaries and substitute teachers broomed out back to their studio apartments and double-wides in Ewingville and Wilburtha.

Possibly it’s a side effect of the Millennium (which doesn’t seem to have other effects), or else it’s my recent indisposed passage in life, but often these days I’m thunderstruck by the simplest, most commonplace events — or nonevents — as if the regular known world had suddenly illuminated itself with a likable freshness, rendering me pleased. Geniuses must experience this every day, with great inventions and discoveries the happy results. (“Isn’t it neat how birds fly. Too bad we can’t….” “If you just rounded off the sides of this granite block, you could maybe move it a mite easier….” etc., etc.) My recent fresh realizations were on the order of being amazed that someone thought to put a yellow light in between the green and the red ones, or that everybody takes the road from Haddam to Trenton for granted but nobody thinks what a stroke of brilliance it was to build the first road. None of these has made me feel I could invent anything myself, and I don’t share my perceptions with others, for fear of arousing suspicions that I’ve gone crazy due to my treatment. And of course I don’t have anybody to share perceptions with anyway. (Clarissa would be bored to concrete.) And to be truthful, my feeling of low-wattage wonder is usually tinged with willowy sadness, since these alertings and sudden re-recognitions carry with them the sensation of seeing all things for the final time — which of course could be true, though I hope not.

Not long ago, I was in my Realty-Wise office, at my desk with my sock feet up, reading the National Realty Roundtable Agents’ Bulletin — a tedious article from their research department about locked, float-down mortgage rates being the wave of the future — when my eye slipped down to a squib at the end that said, “When asked what practical value there is in knowing if neutrinos possess mass, Dr. Dieter von Reichstag of the Mains Institute, Heidelberg, admitted he didn’t have the foggiest idea, but what really amazed him was that on a minor planet that circles an average-size star (earth), a species has developed that can even ask that question.”

I’m sure this had some interesting connections to locked, float-downs and to what amazing product enhancements they are in the residential mortgage market (I didn’t read to the end). But the amazement Dr. von Reichstag admitted to is more or less what I feel with frequency these days, albeit about less weighty matters. Dr. von Reichstag may also feel the same sensation of last-go-round somberness that I feel, since all new sensations carry in their DNA intimations of their ending. Viewing the new in this way almost certainly relates to having cancer, and with being an older fast-fading star myself.

But driving out King George, on the road to meet my ex-wife — a meeting I have trepidations about — I experience in this late-day gloom another of my illuminations, one that interests me, even though it strikes me as tiresome. Simply stated: What an odd thing it is to have an ex-wife you have to have a meeting with! Millions, needless to say, do it day in and day out for legions of good reasons. Chinamen do it. Swahilis do it. Inuits do it. Anytime you see a man and woman sitting having coffee in a food court at the mall, or having a drink together in the Johnny Appleseed Bar, or walking side-by-side out of the Foremost Farms into a glaring summer sun holding Slurpees, and you instinctively force onto them your own understanding of what they could be up to (adulterers, lawyer-client, old high school chums), it’s much more likely you’re seeing an ex-wife and ex-husband engaged in contact that all the acrimony in the world, all the hostility, all the late payments, the betrayals, the loneliness and sleepless nights spent concocting cruel and crueler punishments still can’t prevent or not make inevitable.

What is it about marriage that it won’t just end? I’ve now had two go on the fritz, and I still don’t get it. Sally Caldwell may be asking this question wherever she is with the shape-shifting Wally. I hope it’s true.

But is this how life is supposed to be — loving someone, but knowing with certainty you’ll never, never, never (because neither of you remotely wants it) have that person except in this sorry ersatz way that requires a “meeting” to discuss who the hell knows what? Clarissa doesn’t agree and believes all things can be adjusted and made better, and that Ann and I can finally blubbety, blub, blub. But we can’t. And, in fact, if we could, doing so would represent the very linked boxes Clarissa herself claims to hate. Only they’d be mine and Ann’s boxes. A lot of life is just plain wrong. And the older I get, the more clearly and often wrong it seems. And all you can do about it — which is what Clarissa is trying to pre-vision — is just start getting used to it, start selecting amazement over bewilderment. This whole subject, you might say, is just another version of fear of dying. But my bet is 80 percent of divorced people feel this way — bewildered yet possibly also amazed by life — and go on feeling it until the heavy draperies close. The Permanent Period is, of course, the antidote.

The turn-off to De Tocqueville Academy is like the entrance to a storied baronial game preserve — a lichenous, arched stone gate carved with standing stags holding plaques with Latin mottoes on them. The gate alone would cause any parent driving little Seth or little Sabrina, in the backseat of the Lexus reading Li Po and Sartre three levels above their age group, to feel justly served and satisfied by life. “Seth’s at De Tocqueville. It’s rilly competitive, but worth every sou. His fifth-grade teacher’s got a Ph.D. in philosophy from Uppsala and did his post-doc at the Sorbonne—”

Inside the gate, the road, murky in early-dark and drizzle, narrows and passes into first-growth hardwood, dense and primordial. Yellow speed moguls proliferate. Roadside signs let the uninitiated know what sort of place he or she’s entering: We’re Liberal! GORE FOR PRESIDENT placards just like out on Route 206 clutter the grassy verge as my headlights pass, while others demand that someone GET US OUT! that PEACE IS WORTH VIOLENCE, that we all should STOP THE CARNAGE! I’m not sure which carnage they have in mind. There’s one lonely Bush sign, which I’m sure has been put up to preserve the endowment, since no one here would vote for Bush any more than they’d vote for a chimp.