Richard Ford - The Lay of the Land

No, no, no, no and no again.

We were happy. There was enough complex warp and woof in life to make a sweater as big as the fucking ocean. We lived. Together.

“But she couldn’t have been so happy if she left, could she?” said the little pointy-nose, squirrel-tooth, bubble-coifed grief counselor I sadly visited up in Long Branch just because I happened to drive by and saw her shingle one early June afternoon. She was used to advising the tearful, bewildered, abandoned wives of Fort Dix combat noncoms who’d married Thai bar girls and never come home. She wanted to offer easy solutions that led to feelings of self-affirmation and quick divorces. Sugar. Dr. Sugar. She was divorced herself.

But that’s not true, I told her. People don’t always leave because they’re unhappy, like they do in shitty romance novels written by lonely New England housewives or in supermarket tabloids or on TV. You could say it’s my fatal flaw to believe this, and to believe that Wally’s return to life, and Sally leaving with him, wasn’t the craziest, worst goddamn thing in the fucking world and didn’t spell the end of love forever. Yet that’s what I believed and still do. Sally could decide later that she’d been unhappy. But since she left, the two polite postcards I’ve received have made no mention of divorce or of not loving me, and that’s what I’m choosing to understand.

W hen Sally came down later that night and found me asleep on the couch beside the can of Planters with the TV playing The Third Man (the scene where Joseph Cotten gets bitten by the parrot), she wasn’t unhappy with me — though she certainly wasn’t happy. I understood she’d just come unexpectedly face-to-face with big contingency —the thing we’d schemed against and almost beaten, and probably the only contingency that could’ve risen to eye level and stared us down: the re-enlivening of Wally. And she didn’t know what to do about it — though I did.

All marriages — all everythings — tote around contingencies whether we acknowledge them or don’t. In all things good and giddy, there’s always one measly eventuality no one’s thought about, or hasn’t thought about in so long it almost doesn’t exist. Only it does. Which is the one potentially fatal chink in the body armor of intimacy, to the unconditional this ’n that, to the sacred vows, the pledging of troths, to the forever anythings. And that is: There’s a back door somewhere to every deal, and there a draft can enter. All promises to be in love and “true to you forever” are premised on the iron contingency (unlikely or otherwise) that says, Unless, of course, I fall in love “forever” with someone else. This is true even if we don’t like it, which means it isn’t cynical to think, but also means that someone else — someone we love and who we’d rather have not know it — is as likely to know it as we are. Which acknowledgment may finally be as close to absolute intimacy as any of us can stand. Anything closer to the absolute than this is either death or as good as death. And death’s where I draw the line. Realtors, of course, know all this better than anyone, since there’s a silent Wally Caldwell in every deal, right down to the act of sale (which is like death) and sometimes even beyond it. In every agreement to buy or sell, there’s also the proviso, acknowledged or not, that says “unless, of course, I don’t want to anymore,” or “that is, unless I change my mind,” or “assuming my yoga instructor doesn’t advise against it.” Again, the hallowed concept of character was invented to seal off these contingencies. But in this wan Millennial election year, are we really going to say that this concept is worth a nickel or a nacho? Or, for that matter, ever was?

S ally stood at the darkened thermal glass window that gave upon the lightless Atlantic. She’d slept in her clothes, too, and was barefoot and had a green L.L. Bean blanket around her shoulders in addition to the French sweater. I’d opened the door to the deck, and inside was fifty degrees. She’d turned off The Third Man. I came awake studying her inky back without realizing it was her inky back, or that it was even her — wondering if I was hallucinating or was it an optical trick of waking in darkness, or had a stranger or a ghost (I actually thought of my son Ralph) entered my house for shelter and hadn’t noticed me snoozing. I realized it was Sally only when I thought of Wally and of the despondency his renewed life might promise me.

“Do you feel a little better?” I wanted to let her know I was here still among the living and we’d been having a conversation earlier that I considered to be still going on.

“No.” Hers was a mournful, husky, elderly-seeming voice. She pinched her Bean’s blanket around her shoulders and coughed. “I feel terrible. But I feel exhilarated, too. My stomach’s got butterflies and knots at the same time. Isn’t that peculiar?”

“No, I wouldn’t say that was necessarily so peculiar.” I was trying my white investigator’s labcoat on for size.

“A part of me wants to feel like my life’s a total ruin and a fuck-up, that there’s a right way to do things and I’ve made a disaster out of it. That’s how it feels.” She wasn’t facing me. I didn’t really feel like I was talking to her. But if not to her, then to who?

“That’s not true,” I said. I could understand, of course, why she might feel that way. “You didn’t do anything wrong. You just flew to Chicago.”

“There’s no sense to spool everything back to sources, but I might’ve been a better wife to Wally.”

“You’re a good wife. You’re a good wife to me. ” And then I didn’t say this, but thought it: And fuck Wally. He’s an asshole. I’ll gladly have him big-K killed and his body Hoffa’d out for birdseed. “What do you feel exhilarated about?” I said instead. Mr. Empathy.

“I’m not sure.” She flashed a look around, her blond hair catching light from somewhere, her face appearing tired and marked with shadowy lines from too-sound sleep and the fatigue of travel.

“Well,” I said, “exhilaration doesn’t hurt anything. Maybe you were glad to see him. You always wondered where he went.” I put a single cocktail peanut into my dry mouth and crunched it down. She turned back to the cold window, which was probably making her cold. “What’s he going to do now,” I said, “have himself re-incarnated, or whatever you do?”

“It’s pretty simple.”

“I’ll keep that in mind. What about the being-married-to-you part? Does he get to do that again? Or do I get you as salvage?”

“You get me as salvage.” She turned and walked slowly toward me where I sat staring up at her, slightly dazzled, as if she was the ghost I’d mistook her for. Her little limp was pronounced because she was beat. She sat on the couch and leaned into me so I could smell the sweated, unwashed dankness of her hair. She put her hand limply on my knee and sighed as if she’d been holding her breath and didn’t realize it till now. Her coarse blanket prickled through my shirt. “He’d like to meet you,” she said. “Or maybe I want him to meet you.”

“Absolutely,” I said, and could identify a privileged sarcasm. “We’ll invite some people over. Maybe I’ll interest him in a summer rental.”

“That’s not really necessary, is it?”

“Yes. I’m in command of my necessaries. You be in command of yours.”

“Don’t be bad to me about this. It flabbergasts me as much as it does you.”

“That isn’t true. I’m not exhilarated. Why are you exhilarated? I answered that for you, but I don’t like my answer.”