Richard Ford - The Lay of the Land

He brought with him a bottle of twenty-year-old Glen Matoon and a box of Cohiba Robustos —for me. I still have the cigars at the office and occasionally consider smoking one as a joke, though it’d probably explode. He also brought — for Sally — a strange assortment of Scottish cooking herbs he’d obviously gotten for his parents at the Glasgow airport plus a tin of shortcakes for “the house.” He was at least six feet two, newly beardless and nearly bald, weighed a fair seventeen stone and spoke English in a halting, swallowing, slightly high-pitched semi-brogue with a vocabulary straight out of the seventies U.S. He said Chicago Land, as in “We left Chicago Land at the crack of dawn.” And he said “super,” as in “We had some super tickets to Wrigley.” And he said “z’s,” as in “I copped some righteous z’s on the plane.” And he said “GB,” as in “I banged down a GB” (a gut bomb) “before we left Chicago Land, and it tasted super.”

He was, this once-dead Wally, not the strangest concoction of Homo sapiens genetic material ever presented to me (Mike Mahoney has retired that jersey number), but he was certainly the most complexly pathetic and ill-starred — a strangely wide-eyed, positive-outlook type, ill at ease and conspicuous in his lumpy flesh, but also strangely serene and on occasion pompous and ribald, like the downstate SAE he was back when life was simpler. How he made it in Mull is a mystery.

Needless to say, I loathed him (warm feelings aside), couldn’t comprehend how anybody who could love me could ever have loved Wally, and wanted him out of the house the second he was in it. We shook hands limply, in the manner of a cold prisoner exchange on the Potsdam bridge. I stared. He averted his small eyes, so I couldn’t feel good about being insincerely nice to him and show Sally this was worthy of my patience — which I know she hoped.

I spoke tersely, idiotically. “Welcome to Sea-Clift, and to our home,” which I didn’t mean. He said something about “whole layout’s…super,” and that he was “chuffed” to be here. Clarissa instantly took me by the crook of my elbow and led me out to the road in front of the house, where we stood without speaking for a while in the thick spring breeze that stirred the vivid shoreline vegetation toward Asbury Park and points north. Dust from the town front-loader far up the beach, its yellow lights flashing, indicated civic efforts to relocate mounds of sand that had drifted over the promenade during the winter. We were making ready for Memorial Day.

Arthur Glück’s dog, Poot, part Beagle, part Spitz, that looks like a dog from ancient Egypt and scavenges everyone’s house (except the Feensters’), waited in the middle of Poincinet Road, staring at Clarissa and me as though it was clear even to him that something very wrong was underway, since events had driven all the humans out to the road in the morning, where it was his turf, his time, and where he knew how things worked.

Clarissa let go of my arm and just sat down in the middle of the sandy roadway — her gesture for separating us two from Sally and Wally, who’d already by fits and starts disappeared inside the house, though the door was left open. No one would’ve been driving down the road. Still, her gesture was a stagy, unplanned one I appreciated, even though it made me nervous and I wished she’d get up. Cookie, wise girl, had decided on a walk up the beach. I should have gone with her.

“You’re a way too tolerant dude,” Clarissa said casually, keeping her seat in the road, leaning back on one elbow and shielding her eyes from the noon-time sun. I felt even more awkward because of where she was and what she wasn’t feeling. “Which isn’t to say Mr. Wally isn’t pretty much a Wind in the Willows kind of character in need of a good ass-kicking. It’s pretty zen of you. In the girl community, this wouldn’t stand up.” Clarissa’s nose stud sparkled in the brassy light, and made me touch my nose, as though I had one in mine. She was wearing tissue-thin Italian sandals that exhibited her long tanned feet and ankles, and a pair of cream-colored Italian harem pants with a matching tank top that showed her shoulders. She was like a mirage, languorous but animated.

“I’m not zen at all.” Mike’s hooded-eye, scrunched face appeared in my mind like one of the Pep Boys. He knew nothing of this day’s events, but definitely would’ve approved of what I was doing.

“Don’t you feel strange? It’s pretty strange to have old Wally down here for a visit.” Clarissa wrinkled her nose and squinted up at me as if I was the rarest of vanishing species.

“I had a good picture in my mind of how this would all happen,” I said. “But now that he’s here, I can’t remember it.” I looked at the house, my house, felt stupid being out in my road. “I think that’s very human, though, to expect something and then have the expected event supplant the expectation. That’s interesting.”

“Yep,” Clarissa said.

What I didn’t say was even odder. That while I felt officially pissed off and deeply offended, I was not feeling that this fiasco was a real fiasco, or that my life was fucked up, or that any of the important things I hoped to do before I was sixty were going to be impossible to do. In other words, I felt tumult, but I also felt calm, and that I’d probably feel different again in another thirty minutes — which is why I don’t pay fullest attention to how I feel at any given moment. If I’d told this to Clarissa, she would’ve thought I was suffering from stress-induced aphasia, or maybe having a stroke. Maybe I was. But what I knew was that you’re stuck with yourself most of the time. Best make the most of it.

Clarissa struggled onto her feet like a kid at school after recess. She dusted off the seat of her pants and gave her hair a shake. It would’ve been a perfect day for a flight to Flint. Maybe by cocktail hour all would be settled, Wally packed off in another yellow taxi and happy to be, life resumable back at the Salty Dog stage, where I’d departed it a few days before.

“Is Sally a second child?” We were still standing in the middle of the road, as though expecting something. I was taking pleasure in the flashing yellow light of the town’s front-loader, a half mile up the beach.

“She had a brother who died.”

“I’m trying to be sympathetic to her. Second children have a hard time getting what they need. I’m a second child.”

“You’re a third child. You had a brother who died when you were little.” Clarissa has scant memory of her dead brother and no patience with trying to feel what she doesn’t really feel. Me, I feel like I’m Ralph’s earthly ombudsman and facilitator to the living. It is my secret self. I give (mostly) silent witness.

“That’s right.” She was briefly pensive then, in deference to “my loss,” which was her loss but different. “If Mom came back from the dead, would you invite her over for a visit?”

“Your mother’s not dead,” I said irritably. “She’s living in Haddam.”

“Divorce is kind of like death, though, isn’t it? Three moves equal a death. A divorce equals probably three-quarters of a death.”

“In some ways. It never ends.” And how would this day rate, I wondered. Six-sixteenths of a death? About the same for Sally. And who cared about The Wall? Morbid dimness had always complicated his life, landing him over and over in strange situations, and not knowing what to do about it.

“I’m just trying to distract you,” Clarissa said. “And humor you.” She rehooked her arm through mine and bumped me with her girlathlete’s shoulder. She smelled of shampoo and clean sweat. The way you’d want your daughter to smell. “Maybe you should keep a diary.”