Richard Ford - The Lay of the Land

I, of course, assumed Sally’s strange state had to do with her kids, the little devil Christians out in Idaho — that one of them was in detox, or jail, or was a fugitive or self-medicating or in the nut house, or the other was planning a lawsuit to attach my assets now that therapy had unearthed some pretty horrendous buried episodes of abuse in which I was somehow involved and that explained everything about why his life had gone to shit-in-a-bucket, but not before some hefty blame could be spread around. My fear, of course, is every second husband’s fear: that somebody from out of the blue, somebody you won’t like and who has no sense of anything but his or her own entitlement to suffering — in other words, children — will move in and ruin your life. Sally and I had agreed this would not be our fate, that her two and my two needed to think about life being “based” elsewhere. Our life was ours and only ours. Their room was the guest room. Of course all that’s changed now.

When we reached #7 Poincinet Road, the sky was already resolving upon sunset. The western heavens were their brightest-possible faultless blue. Pre-Memorial Day beach enthusiasts were packing up books and blankets and transistors and sun reflectors, and heading off for a cocktail or a shrimp plate at the Surfcaster or a snuggle at the Conquistador Suites as the air cooled and softened ahead of night’s fall.

I put on my favorite Ben Webster, made a pair of Salty Dogs, thought about a drive later on up to Ortley for a grilled bluefish at Neptune’s Daily Catch Bistro and conceivably a snuggle of our own to the accompaniment of nature’s sift and sigh and the muttered voices of the striper fishermen who haunt our beach after the tide’s turn.

And then she simply told me, just as I was walking into the living room, ready for a full debriefing.

Something there is in humans that wants to make sure you’re doing something busying at the exact instant of hearing unwelcome news — as though, if your hands are full, you’ll just rumble right on through the whole thing, unfazed. “Wally? Alive? Really? Here, try a sip of this, see if I put in too much Donald Duck. Happy to add more Gilbey’s. Well, ole Wall — whadda ya know? How’d The Wall seem? Don’t you just love how Ben gets that breathy tremolo into ‘Georgia on My Mind.’ Hoagy’d love it. Give Wally my best. How was it to be dead?”

I should say straight out: Never tell anyone you know how she or he feels unless you happen to be, just at that second, stabbing yourself with the very same knife in the very same place in the very same heart she or he is stabbing. Because if you’re not, then you don’t know how anybody feels. I can barely tell you how I felt when Sally said, “Frank, when I got to Lake Forest, Wally was there.” (Use of my name, “Frank,” as always, a harbinger of things unpopular. I should change my name to Al.)

I know for a fact that I said nothing when I heard these words. I managed to put my Salty Dog down on the glass coffee-table top and lower myself onto the brown suede couch beside her, to put both my hands on top of my knees and gaze out at the darkening Atlantic, where the ghostly figures of the high-booted fishermen faced the surf and, far out to sea, the sky still showed a brilliant reflected sliver of azure. Sally sat as I did and may have felt as I did— surprised.

Sometimes simple words are the best, and better than violent images of the world cracking open; or about how much everything’s like a sitcom and what a pity William Bendix isn’t still around to play Wally — or me; or better than the ethical-culture response, that catastrophe’s “a good thing for everybody,” since it dramatizes life’s great mystery and reveals how much all is artifice — connected boxes, world-within-worlds — the trap Clarissa’s trying to break free of. How we express our response to things is just made-up stuff anyway — unless we tip over dead — and is meant to make the listener think he’s getting his money’s worth, while feeling relief that none of this shit is happening to him personally. Surprised is good enough. When I heard Wally Caldwell, age fifty-five, missing for thirty years, during which time many things had happened and substantial adjustments were made about the nature of existence on earth — when I heard Wally was alive in Lake Forest and had spent the weekend doing God knows what with my wife, I was surprised.

Sally knew I might be surprised (and again, I was surprised), and she wanted to make this news not cause the world to crack open, for me to go hysterical, etc. She’d had three days with Wally already. She had gotten over the shock of an older, bearded, avuncular and strange Wally hiding out in his parents’ house like some scary older brother with a terrible wound, whom you only see fleetingly behind shadowy chintz curtains in an upstairs dormer window, but who may be heard at night to moan. Her attitude was — and I liked it, since it was typical of her get-up-and-fix-things attitude — that while, yes, Wally’s reappearance had caused some tricky issues to pop up, needing to be resolved, and that while she understood how “this whole business” maybe put me in an awkward position (vis-à-vis, say, the past, the present and the future), this was still a “human situation,” that no one was a culprit (of course not), no one had bad will (except me) and we would all address this as a threesome, so that as little damage as possible would be done to as few a number of innocent souls and lives (I might’ve known who the left-unprotected innocent soul would turn out to be, but I didn’t).

Wally’s story, she told me, sitting on the suede couch that faced out to the darkened springtime Atlantic, as our Salty Dogs turned watery and dark descended, was “one of those stories” fashioned by war and trauma, sadness, fear and resentment, and by the chaotic urge to escape all the other causes, aided by (what else?) “some kind of schizoid detachment” that induced amnesia, so that for years Wally wouldn’t remember big portions of his prior life, although certain portions were crystal clear.

Wally, it seems, couldn’t put everything all together, though he admitted he hadn’t just gone out to pick up the Trib thirty years ago, bumped his head getting into his Beetle and suffered a curtain to close. It had to have been — this, he no doubt admitted on one of their cozy Lake Michigan beach tête-à-têtes — that “something unconscious was working on him,” some failure to face the world he confronted as a Viet vet with a (minor) head wound, and a family, and a future as a horticulturist looming, the whole undifferentiated world just flooding in on him like a dam bursting, with cows and trees and cars and church steeples swirling away in the gully-wash, and him in with it. (There are good strategies for coping with this, of course, but you have to want to.)

Cutting (blessedly) to the chase, Wally’s trauma, fear, resentment and elective amnesia had carried him as far away from the Chicago suburbs, from wife and two kids, as Glasgow, in Scotland, where for a time he became “caught up” in “the subculture” that lived communally, practiced good feeling for everything, experimented with cannabis and other mind-rousing drugs, fucked like bunny rabbits, made jewelry by hand and sold it on damp streets, practiced subsistence farming techniques, made their own clothes and set their communal sights on spiritual-but-not-mainstream-religious revelation. In other words, the Manson Family, led by Ozzie and Harriet.

Eventually, Wally said, the “petrol” had run out of the communal subculture, and with a satellite woman — a professor of English, naturally — he had migrated up to the wilds of Scotland, first to the Isle of Skye, then to Harris, then to Muck, and finally to Mull, where he found employment in the Scottish Blackface industry (sheep) and finally — more to his talents and likings — as a gardener on the laird’s estate and, as time went on, as head gardener and arborist (the laird was wild for planting spruce trees), and eventually as the estate manager for the entire shitaree. A complete existence was there, Wally said, a long way from Lake Forest “and that whole life” (again meaning wife and kids), from the Cubs, the Wrigley Building, the Sears Tower, the river dyed green— again, the whole deluging, undifferentiated crash-in of modern existence American-style, whose sudsy, brown tree-trunk-littered surface most of us somehow manage to keep our heads above so we can see our duty and do it. I’m not impartial in these matters. Why should I be?