Richard Ford - The Lay of the Land

Sad news. But not as bad as “I’ve got a fast-growing encephaloblasty and probably only about a month to keep breathing.” “It’s bad,” I say gravely. Though I think: But you really can’t feel worse about it just because of your Armani pants. They are a dry-cleaners. You wouldn’t even know about this if you weren’t already mad at them.

Ann lowers her ocean-gray eyes, then lifts them to me significantly, and all the remembered shock and grief and impatience with me are absent from her gaze. An indoor driving range is an odd place to have this conversation. We have had a child to die, of course — in the very hospital where someone exploded a bomb today. Surely there’s no need to talk about that now. For a while after Ralph’s death, Ann and I met at the grave on his birthday. This being after our divorce. But eventually we just quit.

“Do you wonder, Frank, if when you feel something really forcefully — so forcefully you know it’s true — do you ever wonder if how you feel is just how you feel that particular day and tomorrow it won’t matter as much?”

“No doubt about it,” I say. “It’s a good thing. We need to question our strong feelings, though we still need to be available to feel them. It’s like buyer’s remorse. One day you think if you don’t have a particular house, your whole life’s ruined. Then the next day you can’t imagine why the hell you ever considered it. Though plenty of times people see a house, fall in love with it, buy it, move in and never leave till they get taken out in a box.” For some reason, I’m grinning. I wonder if the video camera that’s pointed at me is operating, since something’s making me uneasy, so that I’m racketing on like Norman Vincent Peale.

Ann has taken her red sunglasses out of her matron-athlete’s hair and carefully folded them while I’m blabbering, as if whatever I’m saying must be endured.

“It’s just hard to know,” I say, and inch back against the door through which I spied Ann a while ago teaching a stern lesson to an innocent Titleist.

“I know I’ve told you this, Frank,” she says, carefully laying her Ray-Bans on the pine seat beside her as a means of shutting me up about buyer’s remorse. “But when Charley was so bad off, and you drove up those times to sit with him in Yale-New Haven, when his real friends got preoccupied elsewhere, that was a very, very excellent thing to have done. For him. And for me.”

It only lasted six weeks; then off he went to heaven. Through his haze, Charlie thought I was someone named Mert he’d known at St. Paul’s. A few times he talked to me about his first wife and about important twelve-meter races he’d attended, and once or twice about his current wife’s former husband, whom he said was “rather sweet at times” but “ineffectual.” “A Big-Ten graduate,” he said, smirking, though he was nutty as a coon. “You couldn’t imagine her ever marrying that guy,” he said dreamily. I told Charley the fellow probably had some good qualities, to which Charley, from his hospital bed, handsome face drained of animation and interest, said, “Oh, sure, sure. You’re right. I’m too tough. Always have been.” Then he said the whole thing over again, and in a few days he died.

Why would I do such a thing? Sit with my ex-wife’s dying husband? Because it didn’t bother me. That’s why. I could imagine someone having to do it to me — a total stranger — and how nice it would be to have someone there you didn’t have to “relate” to. I don’t want to visit the subject again, however, and fold my arms across my chest and look down like a priest who’s just heard an insensitive joke.

“It made me see something about you, Frank.”

“Oh.” Noncommittal. No question mark. I don’t intend asking what it might be, because I don’t care.

“It’s something I think you would’ve said was always true about you.”

“Maybe.”

“I don’t think I’ve always thought so. I might’ve when we were kids. But I quit about 1982.” She picks up her white golf glove and folds it into a small package.

“Oh.”

“You’re a kind man,” Ann says from the team bench.

I blink at her. “I am a kind man. I was a kind man in 1982.”

“I didn’t think so,” she says stoically, “but maybe I was wrong.”

I, of course, resent being declared something I’ve always been and should’ve been known to be by someone who supposedly loved me, but who wasn’t smart or patient or interested enough to know it when it mattered and so divorced me, but now finds herself alone and it’s Thanksgiving and I conveniently have cancer. If this is leading to some sort of apology, I’ll accept, though not with gratitude. It could also still be a clear-the-decks declaration before announcing her engagement to oversized Fuchs. Our bond is nothing if not a strange one.

“You can’t live life over again,” Ann says penitently. She smiles up and across at me, as if telling me that I’m kind has gotten something oppressive off her chest. All dark clouds now are parting. For her anyway.

“Yeah. I know.” A pearl of sweat has slid out of my hairline. It’s hot as hell in here. What I’d like to do is leave.

“I didn’t know if you really did know that.” Ann nods, still smiling, her eyes sparkling.

“I understand conventional wisdom,” I say. “I’m a salesman. Placebos work on me.”

Ann’s smile broadens, so that she looks absolutely merry. “Okay,” she says.

“Okay,” I say. “Okay what?” I glance at the tri-podded Sony, useful for showing Lady Linksters hitches in their backswings. “Is that goddamn thing turned on?”

Ann looks up at the black box and actually grins. Many years have elapsed since I’ve seen her so happy. “No. Would you like me to turn it on?”

“What’s going on?” I’m feeling dazed in this fucking oven. It must be what a hot flash feels like. First you get hot; then you get mad.

“I have something to say.” She is solemn again.

“You told me. I’m kind. What else? I accept your apology.” Ungiven.

“I wanted to tell you that I love you.” Both her hands are flat down beside her on the bench, as if she or the bench were exerting an upward force. Her gray eyes have trapped me with a look so intent I may never have seen it before. “You don’t have to do anything about it.” Two small tears wobble out of her eyes, although she’s smiling like June Allyson. Sweat, tears, what next? Ann sniffles and wipes her nose with the side of her hand. “I don’t know if it’s again, or still. Or if it’s something new. I don’t guess it matters.” She turns her head to the side and dabs at her eyes with the heel of her hand. She breathes in big, breathes out big. “I realized,” she says mournfully, “it’s why I came back to Haddam last year. I didn’t really know it, but then I did. And I was actually prepared to do nothing about it. Ever. Maybe just be your friend in proximity. But then Sally left. And then you got sick.”

“Why are you telling me this now?” My mouth’s been ajar. These are not the words I want to say. But the words I want to say aren’t available.

“Because I went to Van Tuyll’s cleaners, and their pretty daughter was dead. And that seemed so unchangeable — dying just blotting things out. And I thought I’d invented ways to be toward you that let me pretend that being mad at you wasn’t changeable, either — or whatever it is. But those ways can be blotted out, too. I guess there are degrees of unchangeableness. Love ’s a terrible word. I’m sorry. You seem upset. I decided I’d just tell you. I’m sorry if you’re upset.” Ann hiccups, but catches her hiccup in her throat as a little burp, just like Clarissa. “Sorry,” she says.