Richard Ford - The Lay of the Land

After my sad divorce seventeen years ago, and before I was summoned to the bar of residential realty, I found myself on a stool here many a night, enjoying a croque monsieur from the upstairs kitchen, plus seventy or eighty highballs, sometimes with a “date” I could smooch up in the shadows, then later slithering (alone or à deux) up the steps out onto Hulfish Street and into a warm Jersey eventide with not a single clue about where my car might be. I frequently ended up lurching home to Hoving Road (avoiding busier streets, and cops), and diving straight into bed and towering sleep. I may have experienced my fullest sensation of belonging in Haddam on those nights, circa 1983. By which I mean, if you saw a fortyish gentleman stepping unsteadily out of a bar into a dark suburban evening, staring around mystified, looking hopefully to the heavens for guidance, then careening off down a silent, tree-bonneted street of nice houses where lights are lit and life athrum, one of which houses he enters, tramps upstairs and falls into bed with all his clothes on — wouldn’t you think, Here’s a man who belongs, a man with native roots and memory, his plow deep in the local earth? You would. What’s belonging all about, what’s its quiddity, if not that drunk men “belong” where you find them?

It’s 6:25 and Mike is not yet in evidence. Hard to imagine what a diminutive Tibetan and a macaroni land developer could do together for an entire afternoon of rotten weather. How many plat maps, zoning ordinances, traffic projections, air-quality regulations, floodplain variances and EEOC regs can you pore over without needing sedation, and on the first day you ever laid eyes on each other?

From the elderly bartender, I order a Boodles, eighty proof, straight up, take a tentative lick off the martini-glass rim and feel exactly the way I want to feel: better — able to face the world as though it was my friend, to strike up conversations with total strangers, to see others’ points of view, to think most everything will turn out all right. Even my jaw relaxes. My eyes attain good focus. The bothersome belly sensation that I probably erroneously associate with my prostate has ceased its flickering. For the first time since I woke at six in Sea-Clift and knew I could sleep another hour, I breathe a sigh of relief. A day has passed intact. It’s nothing I take for granted.

My fellow patrons are all Haddam citizens I’ve seen before, may even have done business with, but who, because of my decade’s absence, pretend never to have laid eyes on me. Ditto the bean-pole, white-shirted, green-plastic-bow-tied bartender, Lester, who’s stood the bar here thirty years. He’s a Haddam townie, a slope-shouldered, high-waisted Ichabod in his late sixties, a balding bachelor with acrid breath no woman would get near. He’s given me the standard, noncommittal “Whatchouhavin,” even though years ago I listed his mother’s brick duplex on Cleveland Street, next door to my own former house, where Ann now lives, presented him two full-price offers in a week, only to have him back out (which he had every right to do) and turn the place into a rental — a major financial misreading in 1989, which I pointed out to him, so that he never forgave me. Often it’s the case that no matter how successful or pain-free a transaction turns out — and in Haddam there was never a bad one — once it’s over, clients often begin to treat the residential agent like a person who’s only half-real, someone they’ve maybe only dreamed about. When they pass you in a restaurant or mailing Christmas cards at the PO, they’ll instantly turn furtive and evade your eyes, as if they’d seen you on a sexual-predators list, give a hasty, mumbled, noncommittal “Howzitgoin?” and are gone. And I might’ve made them a quick two mil or ended a bad run of vein-clogging hassles or saved them from pissing away all in a divorce or a Chapter 11. At some level — and in Haddam this level is routinely reached — people are embarrassed not to have sold their own houses themselves and resentful about paying the commission, since all it seems to involve is putting up a sign and waiting till the dump truck full of money stops out front. Which sometimes happens and sometimes doesn’t. Looked at from this angle, we realtors are just the support group for the chronically risk-averse.

Lester’s begun using the remote to click channels away from the hockey game, staring up turkey-necked, gob open at the Sanyo bracketed above the flavored schnapps. He’s carrying on separate dialogues with the different regulars, desultory give-and-takes that go on night to night, year to year, never missing a beat, just picked up again using the all-purpose Jersey conjunction, So. “So, if you put in an invisible fence, doesn’t the fuckin’ dog get some kinda complex?” “So, if you ask me, you miss all the fuckin’ nuance using sign language.” “So, to me, see, flight attendants are just part of the plane’s fuckin’ equipment — like oxygen masks or armrests. Not that I wouldn’t schtup one of them. Right?” Lester nibbles his lip as he flips past sumo wrestling, cliff divers in Acapulco, two people who’ve won a game-show contest and are hugging, then on past several channels with different people dressed in suits and nice dresses, sitting behind desks, talking earnestly into the camera, then past a black man in an ice-cream suit healing a fat black woman in a red choir robe by making her fall over backward on a big stage — more things than I can focus on in my relaxed, not-all-in, not-all-out state of mind.

Then all at once, the President, my president — big, white-haired, smiling, puffy-faced and guileless— his face and figure fill the color screen. President Clinton strolls casually, long-strided, across a green lawn, suppressing an embarrassed smile. He’s in blue cords, a plain white shirt, a leather bomber jacket and Hush Puppies like mine. He’s doing his best to look shy and undeserving, guilty of something, but nothing very important — stealing watermelons, driving without a learner’s permit, taking a peek through a hole in the wall of the girls’ locker room. He’s got his Labrador, Buddy, on a leash and is talking and flirting with people off-camera. Behind him sits a big Navy copter with a white-hatted Marine at attention by the gangway. The President has just saluted him — incorrectly.

“Where’s the fuckin’ Mafia when you need them bastards?” Lester’s growling up at the tube. He makes a pistol out of his thumb and index finger and assassinates the man I voted for with a soft pop of his lizard lips. “Ain’t he havin’ the time of his fuckin’ life with this election bullshit. He loves it.” Lester swivels around to his patrons, his mouth sour and mean. “Country on its fuckin’ knees.”

“Easier to give blow jobs,” one of the regulars says, and thumbs his glass for a fill-up.

“And you’d know about that,” Lester says, and grins evilly.

The couple in the back booth, who’ve been doing whatever away from everybody’s notice, unexpectedly stands up, moving their banquette table noisily out of the way, as if they thought a fight was about to erupt or their sexual shenanigans required more leg room. All five of us, plus an older woman at the bar, have a gander at these two getting their coats on and shuffling out through the tables. Happily, I don’t know them. The woman’s young and thin and watery-blond and pretty in a sharp-featured way. He’s a short-armed, gangsterish meatpie with dark curly hair, stuffed into a three-piece suit. His trousers are unzipped and part of his shirttail’s poked guiltily through the fly.

“What’s your hurry there, folks?” Lester yaps, and leers as the couple heads for the red EXIT lozenge and up to the street.