Richard Ford - The Lay of the Land

Faint fog drifts from sea to land, but I can see a shadowy triangular portion of the Feensters’ front yard, where the gay bankers planted animal topiary the Feensters have let go to hell in favor of aggressive signage. A grown-out boxwood rhino and part of a boxwood monkey are ghostly shapes in the mist. Seaward I can see the pallet of shadowed beach, with a crust of white surf disappearing into the sand. In the night sky, there’s the icebox glow of Gotham and, in the middle distance, the white lights and rigging lines of a commercial fisher alone at its toils. In these times of lean catches, local captains occasionally dispose of private garbage on their overnight flounder trips. A fellow in Manasquan even advertises burials at sea (ashes only) beyond the three-mile limit, where permits aren’t required. Many things seem thinkable that once weren’t.

From between the houses, the Glücks’ big tomcat, William Graymont, strolls toward the beach to scavenge what the shorebirds have left, or perhaps snare a plover for his midnight meal. When I tap the glass, he stops, looks around but not at me, flicks his tail, then continues his leisurely trek.

No one’s said my name again, so I’m wondering if I dreamed it. But all at once a light snaps on in the Feensters’ third-floor bathroom, the Grecian marble ablution sanctum off the spacious master suite. Television volume blaring yesterday’s news headlines goes on, then instantly goes silent. Drilla Feenster’s head and naked torso pass the window, then pass again, her bottle-blond hair in a red plastic shower cap, heading for the gold-nozzled shower. Possibly it’s their usual bathing and TV hour. I wouldn’t know.

But then rounding the front outside corner of the house in pajamas, slippers, a black ski parka and a knit cap, Nick Feenster appears, talking animatedly into a cell phone. One hand holds the instrument to his ear like a conch shell, the other a retractable leash attached to Bimbo, their pug. A big man with a tiny dog could signal a complex and giving heart, if not straight-out homosexuality, but not in Nick’s case. (Bimbo is the “pit bull” referred to on the sign.) Nick’s gesturing with the hand holding Bimbo’s leash, so that each time he gestures, Bimbo’s yanked off his little front paws.

Nick’s voice is loud but muffled. “Frankly, I don’t get it,” he seems to be saying, with gestures accompanying and Bimbo bouncing and looking up at him as if each jerk was a signal. “Frankly, I think you’re making a biiiig mistake. A biiiig mistake. Frankly, this is getting way out of control.”

Frankly. Frankly. Frank-ee. Frank-ee. There’s so little that’s truly inexplicable in the world. Why should it be such a difficult place to live?

The lighted bathroom square goes unexpectedly black — a purpose possibly interrupted. Nick, who’s a husky, heavy-legged, former power lifter and has toted prostrated victims out of smoke-filled tenement stairwells, goes on talking in the cold, fog-misted yard (to whom, I don’t even wonder). A yellow second-floor light square pops on. This in the cypress kitchen-cum-vu room — Mexican tile fireplace, facing Sonoran-style, silver-inlaid, hand-carved one-of-a-kind couches, Sub-Zero, commercial Viking, built-in Cuisinart and a Swiss wine cellar at cabinet level. Almost too fast, the first-floor window brightens. A sound, a seismic disturbance up through the earth’s crust, permeating Nick’s bedroom slippers — an intimation only misbehaving husbands can hear — causes Nick abruptly to snap his cell phone closed, frown a suspicious frown upwards (at me! He can’t see me but senses surveillance). Then, in a strange, bumpy, big man’s slightly balletic movement, reflecting the fact he’s freezing his nuts off, Nick, with Bimbo struggling to keep up, beats it back around the house, past the topiary monkey and out of sight. Whatever he intends to say he’s been up to outside — to Drilla, who’s noted his absence and thought, What the fuck? — is just now larruping around in his brain like an electron.

I stare down into the sandy, weedy non-space Nick has vacated in guilty haste. Something’s intensely satisfying about his absence, as if I’ll never have to see him again. I think I hear, but probably don’t hear, voices far away, buffered by interior walls, a door slammed hard. A shout. A breakage. The odd socketed pleasure of someone else’s argument — not your night shot to hell, not your heart crashing in your chest, not your head exploding in anger and hot frustration, as when Sally left. Someone else’s riot and bad luck. It’s enough to send anyone off to bed happy and relieved, which is where, after a pit stop, I return.

U ntil…music awakens me. Dum-dee-dum-dee-dum, dum-dee-dum-dee-dum.

My bedroom’s lit through with steely wintry luminance. I’m shocked to have slept till now—7:45—with light banging in, the day underway and noise downstairs. Rich coffee and bacon-fat aromas mix with sea smells. I hear a voice particle. Clarissa. Hushed. “We have to be…He’s still…not usually so…” Mutter, mutter. A clink of cup and saucer. Knife to plate. A kitchen chair scrapes. A car murmurs past on Poincinet Road. The sounds now of the ball getting rolling. I’ve clenched my teeth all night. Small wonder.

The music’s from the Feensters’. Show tunes at high volume out the vu-room sliding door, past the owl decoy that keeps seagulls at bay. My Fair Lady. “…And oooohhh, the towering fee-ling, just to kn-o-o-o-w somehow you are ne-ah. ” The Feensters often sit out on their deck in their hot tub during winter, drink Irish coffee and read the Post, wearing ski parkas, all as a way of smelling the roses. This morning, though, music’s needed to put some distance between now and last night, when Nick was “walking the dog” at 3:00 a.m.

I lie abed and stare bemused at the stack of books on my bedside table, most read to page thirty, then abandoned, except for The Road to the Open Heart, which I’ve read a good deal of. Much of it’s, of course, personally impractical, though you’d have to be a deranged serial killer not to agree with most of what it says. “On the one hand make concessions, on the other take the problem seriously.” It’s no wonder Mike does so well selling houses. Buddhism wrote the book on selling houses.

Recently I’ve also dipped into The Fireside Book of Great Speeches, a leftover from Paul’s HHS Oratory Club. I’ve sought good quotable passages in case a moment arises for valedictory words this Thursday. The speeches, however, are all as boring as Quaker sermons, except for Pericles’ funeral oration, and even he’s a little heavy-handed and patented: “Great will be your glory if you do not lower the nature that is within you.” When is that not ever true? Pericles and the Dalai Lama are naturals for each other. Convalescence is supposed to be a perfect time for reading, like a long stint in prison. But I assure you it isn’t, since you have too much on your mind to concentrate.

The sky I can see from bed is monochrome, high and lighted from a sun deep within cottony depths — not a disk, but a spirit. It is a cold, stingy sky that makes a seamless plain with the sea — decidedly not a “realty sky” to make ocean-front seem worth the money. I’m scheduled for a showing at 10:15; but the sky’s effect — I already know it — will not be to inspire and thrill, but to calm and console. For that reason I’m expecting little from my effort.

T he exact status of my marriage to Sally Caldwell requires, I believe, some amplification. It is still a marriage that’s officially going on, yet by any accounting has become strange — in fact, the strangest I know, and within whose unusual circumstances I myself have acted very strangely.