Richard Ford - The Lay of the Land

Neither Mike nor I speak as we slow and get directed by the deputy toward the left, in the direction of the bay bridge. Something about the accident requires a reining in on our conversation about Benivalle’s family sorrows. Tragedies, like apples and oranges, don’t compare.

Route 37 back through Toms River is changed from the Route 37 we traveled this morning. Road construction’s shut down and the sky’s low, mustard-colored and muffled, the long skein of traffic signals popping green, yellow, red through a salty seaside haze. Only it’s not a bit less crowded — due to the Ocean County mall staying open 24/7, and all other stores, chains, carpet outlets, shoe boutiques, language schools, fancy frame shops, Saturn dealerships and computer stores the same. Traffic actually moves more slowly, as if everyone we passed this morning is still out here, wandering parking lot to parking lot, ready to buy if they just knew what, yet are finally wearing down, but have no impulse to go home. The old curving neon marquee at the Quality Court has had its WELCOME amended. No longer SUICIDE SURVIVORS, but JERSEY CLOGGERS and the BLIND GOLFERS’ ASSOC are welcomed. The blind golfers have earned a CONGRATS, though they’re unlikely to know about it.

My neck, arms, jaw and knuckles have gone on throbbing and burning where miscreant Bob Butts throttled me. Bob should be thinking life over in the Haddam lockup, awaiting my decision to bring charges. I’ve been able to let the unhappy prospect of Ann coming to Thanksgiving sink out of mind. But the slow-motion consumer daze on the Miracle Mile has revived it. It’s the time of day in the time of year when things go wrong if they’re going to.

In Ann’s case, she simply didn’t have any attractive Thanksgiving plans (not my fault), wished she did and exerted her will (strong-woman-getting-to-the-bottom-of-things) on me, in a depleted state. She’s ignored Sally like temporary house help, played the sensitive dead-son card, the kind-man card, plus the L word, then stood back to watch how it all filters out. For years, I dreamed, shivered and thrilled at the idea of remarrying Ann. I pictured the whole event in Technicolor — though I could never (I wouldn’t admit it) work the whole thing through to its fantastical end. There was always a difficulty —a door I couldn’t find, words I got wrong — like in the dream in which you sing the national anthem at the World Series, except a lump of tar’s for some reason stuck to your molars and your mouth won’t open.

But this visit and all attached to it seem like the wrongest of wrong ideas even if I’m wrong as to motivation (I’ve had it with tonight). I don’t even know Ann’s politics anymore (Charley’s I knew: Yale). I could also be impotent — though no trial runs have been attempted. She and the children have grinding life issues I don’t want to share. And I have to piss too much to be perpetually amusing at dinner parties. Given Ann’s power-point certainty about everything, I’d end up a will-less sheep at De Tocqueville faculty do’s, a partial man who sees life from a couch in the corner. Plus, I have this sleeping-panther cancer that could roar back on me.

We all need to take charge of who we spend our last years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, seconds, final fidgeting eye-blinks with, who we see last and who sees us. Like the wise man said, What you think’s going to happen to you after you die is what’s going to happen. So you need to be thinking the right things in the run-up.

“They bundle up those Christmas trees so they look like torpedoes,” Mike says out of the blue, taking his glasses off and rubbing them on his blazer cuff, blinking eyes attentively. We’re passing the bonsai nursery, transformed now into a bulb-strung Christmas tree lot. “There’s a big machine that does it. Then they’re trucked out to vendors in Kansas. All Tommy’s customers’re in Kansas.” He’s thinking about commerce in general — if it’s a good idea or if it could possibly be his punishment for cheating someone out of his wattle ten centuries back. Belief, in Mike’s view, is not a luxury, but still needs to keep pace with known facts and established authority — in his case, the economy. It’s the theory-versus-practice rub that all religions fail to smooth over.

We’ve passed beyond the mall-traffic chaos and are headed toward the bay bridge, along the strip of elderly clam shacks, red-lit gravel-lot taverns, Swedish massage parlors, boat-propeller repairs and boss & secretary tourist cabins from the fifties, when it was a hoot to come to the Shore and didn’t cost a year’s pay. Out ahead spreads Barnegat Bay and across it the low sparse necklace lights of Sea-Clift, visible like a winter town on a benighted prairie seen from a jetliner. It’s as beckoning as heaven. New Jersey’s best-kept secret, where I’ll soon be diving into bed.

Mike goes reaching under his pink sweater as if reaching for a package of smokes, his gaze cast over the dark frigid waters toward the bull-semen lab. And from his inside blazer pocket he produces, in fact, a pack of smokes ! Marlboro menthols, in the distinctive green-and-white crushproof box — my parents’ favorites and my own fag of choice during my military school days of experimentation eons ago. I could never hack it, though I perfected the French inhale, learned to finger a fleck off my tongue tip à la Richard Widmark and to hold one clenched between my teeth without smoke getting in my eyes.

But Mike? Mike doesn’t smoke cigarooties! Buddhists don’t smoke. Virtuous thinking can’t possibly permit that. Does he know about his already-increased cancer susceptibility that comes with the oath of citizenship? To see him expertly strip open the pack like a fugitive is shocking. And revelatory — as if he’d started whistling “Stardust” out his butt.

I look over to be sure I’m not hallucinating, and for an instant veer into the other bridge lane and nearly wham us into a septic-service truck on its holiday way home. The truck’s horn blares into the background, leaving me strangely excited.

“You mind if I smoke?” Mike looks preoccupied and vaguely ridiculous in his little dandy’s threads. He even has his own matches.

“Not a bit.” My surprise is really just the surprise of waking up to the moment in life I’m currently in: I’m in my car, driving over the Barnegat bridge with a forty-three-year-old Tibetan real estate salesman who’s my employee and looking to me for advice about his business future and who’s now smoking a cigarette! An act I’ve never known him to perform in eighteen months. We’re a long way from Tibet out here. “I didn’t know you were a Marlboro man.”

He’s already fired up, cracked the window and blown a good lungfull into the slipstream. “I smoked when I worked in Calcutta.” He’s referring to his telemarketer days of selling Iowa beef and electronic gadgets to New Jersey matrons from bullpens in the subcontinent. What a life is his. “I quit. Then I started again when I got separated.” He takes another hungry suck. He already has it half-burned down, rich, stinging gray smoke hissing through the window crack. With one simple, indelible act he’s no longer strictly a Tibetan, but has become the classic American little-guy, struggling under a wagonload of tough choices and plagued by uncertainties he has no experience with — in his case, about whether to become a sleazy land developer. It’s our profoundest national conundrum: Are things getting better, or much worse? Poor devil. Welcome to the Republic.

“I was thinking when we were driving through Toms River.” Mike actually plucks a fleck of tobacco off his tongue tip Dick Widmark-style. “All that mess back there, those people driving around aimlessly.”