Richard Ford - The Lay of the Land

She doesn’t glance toward the door, which I’m safe behind in the corridor darkness, but begins placing a second ball onto a pink rubber tee fixed into a carpet of artificial grass, and re-commences the fateful protocol of striking.

I don’t want to go in. To enter will only ruin something that is and is perfect, by intruding a clamorous, troublesome, infuriating, chaotic something else. I’d forgotten, watching Ann through the peephole like a witness viewing a suspect, how much a perfect golf swing is an airtight defense against all bothersome “others.” Once I knew that, long ago when I wrote sports: That for all athletes — and Ann’s a good one — a perfect stroke protects against things getting over-complicated. I would actually slink away now if I could.

But just as I take an opportunistic look down the corridor with a thought to escape, Ann, I find, is staring at me — my partial, reluctant face obviously visible through the double-thick window. Her lips inside move in speech I can’t hear. I again have an urge to run, become an optical illusion, down the hall, around a corner, be no more. But it’s too late. Way too late for escape.

I push in the heavy, air-sucking door and Ann’s words come into my ears. “…thought you were the security guy, Ramon,” she says, and smiles cheerlessly at my presence. She has her driver in hand like a walking stick and goes back to addressing the new ball as if I were Ramon. “I don’t like to be watched when I’m in here. And he watches me.”

“You looked pretty solid.” I’m guessing this is the appropriate compliment.

“How are you?” Ann calmly lays her club face to the ball’s surface without touching it. I’m holding the heavy door open, barely inside. The brightly lit room smells like heated wood products.

“I’m great.” I mean to act vigorous even if I’m not. Ann and I haven’t seen each other in months. A chummy, hygienic phone chat would’ve been as good or better than this. The dense air is already thickening with ifs and what-ifs. “Nice place in here,” I say, and look up and around. A black video camera’s on a tripod to the left, a wooden team bench sits against the white squash court wall. The Scottish links course has been holographed right onto the plaster behind the catch-net. It could just as well be a chamber for a lethal injection.

“It’s okay. They rigged this place up for me.” Ann lightly taps her white ball off its tee, bends to retrieve it. She is turned out just as I’ve seen her all our life, married and apart — golf shorts (pink), white shoes (Reeboks with pink ankleless socks), a white polo with some kind of gold crest (De Tocqueville no doubt), white golf glove, and a pair of red sunglasses stuck in her hair like a country-club divorcée. She now exudes — unlike thirty years ago, when I couldn’t get enough of her — a more muscular, broader-backed, stronger-armed, fuller-breasted, wider-hipped aura of athleticized sexlessness, which is still bluntly carnal but isn’t helped by her blonded hair being cut in a tail-less ducktail a prison matron might wear, and her pale Dutch-heritage skin looking sweat-shiny and paper-thin. The fly of her shorts has inched down from the top button due to ungoverned belly force. I’m sorry to say there’s nothing very appealing about her except that she’s herself and I’m unexpectedly glad to see her. (Clenching has now made my third molar, left side, lower, begin to ache in a way that makes my jaw tighten. I should put in my night guard, which is in my pocket.)

Ann walks in a long, slightly up-on-toes gait over to the pine bench and leans her driver into a rack where other clubs stand. She sits on the pine and begins untying her golf shoes. I’m stationed in the doorway, feeling both reluctance and enthusiasm, longing and uxorious remorse. I don’t know why I’m here. I wish I knew a hilarious golf joke but can only think of one that involves a priapic priest, a genie in a bottle and a punch line she wouldn’t like.

“Somebody blew out the lunch room windows at the hospital,” I say. Not a great conversation starter. Though why did no one at the funeral home mention it? News in Haddam must travel more slowly than ever. Everyone in his own space. Even Lloyd Mangum.

“Why?” Ann looks up from her shoelaces, bent over her thick, shiny knees. Pushing through her polo-shirt back is the wide, no-nonsense imprint of a brawny sports bra.

“I don’t know. The election. People get pissed off. Doctors are all Republicans.”

“How’s real estate?”

“Always a good investment. They aren’t making any more of it.” I smile and round my eyes as a gesture of geniality.

Ann sets her Reeboks, toes out, under the bench atop the miserable green turf. She disapproves of my selling houses (Sally loved it, loved it that I think of real estate as related to Keatsian negative capability, with the outcome being not poetry but generalized social good with a profit motive). Ann fell in love with me when I was an aspiring (and failing) novelist, but since then has lived in Connecticut, grown rich and may have no use for negative capability. She may consider selling real estate to be like selling hubcaps on Route 1. She could be a Republican herself, though when I married her, she was a Soapy Williams Democrat.

I step all the way inside the warmed, dazzling, wood-scented room and let the door suck closed behind me. I don’t know where to go or what to do. I need a golf club to hold. Though it’s not so bad in here — unexpectedly satisfying, strangely intimate. We’re at least alone for once.

“I have something I want to say to you, Frank.” Ann leans back against the white wall, which has been recently repainted. She looks straight at me, her pale cheeks tightened and the downward tug at the corners of her mouth signifying importance of an ominous kind. Using my name always means “serious.” I feel my hands and lips spontaneously (I hope invisibly) tremble. I do not need bad news now.

Ann wiggles her sock feet on the phony turf and looks down.

“Great”—my smile my only defense. Maybe it is great news. Maybe Ann’s marrying Teddy Fuchs, the gentle-giant math teacher who everybody thought was a queer but was just shy and had to wait (till age sixty) for his camps-survivor mother to pass on. Or maybe Ann’s decided to cash in Charley’s annuity and live on the Costa del Sol. Or maybe she’s figured out a meaningful new way to explain to me what an asshole I am. I’m all ears for any of that. Just nothing medical. I’ve had it with medical.

“Can I tell you a story?” She’s still looking down at her pink sock-lets as if she drew assurance from them.

“Sure,” I say. “I like stories. You know me.” Her gray eyes dart up, warning against familiarity.

“I went into Van Tuyll’s Cleaners the other day to check on a damage claim about a pair of pants they’d stained and hadn’t paid me for. I was mad, and you can’t really sue your dry cleaners over a pair of pants, but I thought of going in the shop and doing something disruptive to punish them. They really aren’t very nice people.”

Bring in some deer urine or maybe set a skunk loose behind the counter. I’ve thought of doing that. Just not a “device.” I haven’t moved an inch from where I’ve been under the too-warm lights.

“Anyway,” Ann says. “When I got to the shop, down that little Grimes Street alley”—fine address for a dry cleaners—“a typed card was taped inside the door that said, ‘We’re closed due to the tragic death of our daughter Jenny Van Tuyll, who lost her life last Saturday in a traffic accident in Belle Fleur. She was eighteen. Our life will never be the same. The Van Tuyll family.’ I actually had to sit down on the edge of the shop window to keep myself from fainting. It just overtook me. That poor Jenny Van Tuyll. I’d talked to her fifty times. She was as sweet as she could be. And that poor family. And there I was, mad about my goddamned Armani pants. It seemed so stupid.” Ann squints at her feet, then raises her eyes to me.