Richard Ford - The Lay of the Land

“I’ll commit suicide before I keep a fucking diary. Diaries are for weaklings and old queer professors. Which I’m not.”

“Okay,” she said. She was never sensitive to insensitive language. We were starting to stroll up Poincinet Road, past the fronts of my neighbors’ houses — all similarly handsome board-and-batten edifices with green hydrangeas ready to sprout their showy blooms. Ahead, where our newer settlement stopped and where the old mansions had been blown away, there was open, sparsely populated beach and grass and sea. I could see a tiny ant in the hazy distance. It was Cookie. Poot, the Egyptian dog, had found her and was trotting along.

“I thought life isn’t supposed to be like this when you love someone and they love you,” I said to Clarissa, more speculative than I felt. “That intelligence won’t get you very far. That’s your father’s perspective.”

“I knew that.” She kicked road sand with her rubied toenail. Already things with her and Cookie were wearing through. I couldn’t have known, but she could. “What do you think’s gonna happen?”

“With Sally and Wally?” I gave myself a moment to wonder, letting sea breeze make my ears feel wiggly, my view of the beach grown purposefully wide and generous. Such views are supposedly good for the optic muscle, and the soul. Something seemed to be riding on what I said, as if I was the cause of whatever happened to us all. “I can guess,” I said breezily, “but I tend to guess bad outcomes. Most horses don’t win races. Most dogs finally bite you.” I smiled. I felt foolish in the situation I was in.

“Let’s hear it anyway,” Clarissa said. “It’s good to pre-vision things.”

“Well. I think Wally’ll stay around a few days. I’ll forget exactly why I don’t like him. We’ll talk a lot about real estate and spruce trees. We’ll be like conventioneers in town from Iowa. Men always do that. Sally’ll get sick of us. But then by accident, I’ll walk into a room where they are, and they’ll immediately shut up some highly personal conversation. Maybe I’ll catch them kissing and order Wally out of the house. After which, Sally’ll be miserable and tell me she has to go live with him.”

Cookie was waving to us from out on the beach, waving a stick that Poot expected her to throw. I waved back.

Clarissa shook her head, scratched into her thick hair and looked at me with annoyance, her pretty mouth-corners fattened in disapproval. “Do you really believe that?”

“It’s what anybody’d think. It’s what Ann Landers would tell you — if she isn’t dead.”

“You’re crazy-hazy,” she said and punched me too hard on the shoulder, as if a slug in the arm would cure me. “You don’t know women very well, which isn’t news, I guess.”

Cookie’s clear, happy voice was already talking over the distance, telling something she’d seen out in the ocean — a shark’s fin, a dolphin’s tail, a whale’s geyser — something the dog had gone after, trusting his Egyptian ancestry against impossible odds. “I don’t believe it,” Cookie said gaily. “You guys. You should’ve seen it. I wish you could’ve seen.”

I wouldn’t have been wrong about Sally, even not knowing women very well, and never having said I did. I’d always been happy to know and like them one at a time. But about some things, even men can’t be wrong.

W ally was in my house in Sea-Clift for five uncomfortable days. I tried to go about my diurnal duties, spending time early-to-late in the office where I had summer renters arriving, plumbers and carpenters and cleaning crews and yard-maintenance personnel to dispatch and lightly supervise. I sold a house on the bay side of Sea-Clift, took a bid on but failed to sell another. Mike sold two rental houses. He and I drove to Bay Head to inspect an old rococo movie house, the Rivoli Shore — where Houdini had made himself disappear in 1910. Maybe we wanted to buy it, find somebody to run it, go into limited partnership with a local Amvets group, using state preservation money and turn it into a World War II museum. We passed.

Normally, I’d have been home for lunch, but in grudging deference to what was going on in my house, I ate glutinous woodsman’s casserole one day, Welsh rarebit another, ham and green beans a third at the Commodore’s table at the Yacht Club, where I’m a non-boating member. Two times, I ate at Neptune’s Daily Catch, where I had the calzone, flirted with the waitress, then spent the afternoon at my desk, burping and thinking philosophically about acid reflux and how it eats potholes in your throat. I explained to Mike that Sally was having an “old relative” to visit, though another time I said an “old friend,” which he noticed, so he knew something was weird.

Each evening I went home, tired and ready for a renewing cocktail, supper and an early-to-bed. Wally was most times in the living room reading Newsweek, or on the deck with my binoculars, or in the kitchen loading up a dagwood or outside having a disapproving look at the arborvitae and hydrangeas or staring out at the shorebirds. Sally was almost never in sight when Wally was, leaving the impression that whatever they were carrying on between them during the day and my absence — hugging, face slapping, laughing that ended in tears — was all pretty trying, and I wouldn’t like seeing her face then, and in any case she needed to recover from it.

Toward Wally — who’d taken to wearing gray leisure-attire leather shorts that exposed his pasty bulldog calves above thick black ankle brogues and another rugby shirt, this time with Mackays printed on front — toward Wally, I dealt entirely in “So, okay, howzit goin’?” “Did you get to do some walking?” “Are they feeding you enough in here?” “Thought of going for a swim?” And to me, Wally — large, sour earth-smelling, full-cheeked, with a tired, timid smile I disliked — toward me, Wally dealt in “Yep.” “Super.” “Oh yeah, hiked up to the burger palace.” “Great spread here, looverly, looverly.”

I certainly didn’t know what the hell any of us were doing — though who would? If you’d told me the two of them never so much as spoke, or went for polka lessons, or read the I Ching together, or shot heroin, I’d have had to believe it. Was it, I wondered, that everything was just too awkward, too revealing, too anxious-making, too upsetting, too embarrassing, too intimidating, too intrusive or just too private to exhibit in front of me — the husband, the patient householder, the rate-payer, the sandwich-bread buyer? And also now a stranger?

Sally made dinner for us all three on night two. A favorite — lamb chops, Cajun tomatoes and creamed pearl onions. This was not the worst dinner I ever attended, although conceivably it was the worst in my own house. Sally was nervous and too smiley, her limp worsening notably. She cooked the lamb chops too long, which made her mad at me. Wally said his was “astounding” and ate like a horse. I had three stout martinis and observed the dinner was “perfect, if not astounding.” And, as I’d predicted, I forgot more or less who Wally was, let myself act like he was one or the other of Sally’s cousins, talked at length about the history of Sea-Clift, how it had been founded in the twenties by upstart Philadelphia real estate profiteers as a summer resort for middle-middle citizens from the City of Brotherly Love, how its basic populace and value system — Italians with moderate Democratic leanings — hadn’t changed since the early days, except in the nineties, when well-heeled Gothamites with Republican preferences who couldn’t afford Bridgehampton or Spring Lake started buying up land from the first settler’s ancestors, who pretty quick wised up and started holding on to things. “Okay. Sure, sure,” Wally said, mouth full of whatever, though he also said “thas brillian” a few times when nothing was brilliant, which made me hate him worse and made Sally get up and go to bed without saying good night.