Richard Ford - The Lay of the Land

Next day I assumed — believed — matters would begin shifting back toward normal. I wanted us to drive over to the Red Man Club for an outing of fishing, fiddlehead hunting and a trek along the Pequest to seek out Sampson’s Warbler pairs that nest in our woods and nowhere else in New Jersey. I intended to put in an order for a new Lexus at Sea Girt Imports — a surprise for Sally’s birthday in three weeks. I’d already made a trip up there to consult color charts and take a test drive.

Sally, though, seemed still pale and drained on Saturday, so that I canceled the Red Man Club and (thank goodness) didn’t get around to the Lexus.

She stayed in bed all day, as if she herself had been on a long and arduous journey. Though the journey that had left her depleted had left me exhilarated and abuzz, my head full of plans and vivid imaginings, the way somebody’d feel who’d gotten happy news from the lab, a shadow on an X ray that proved to be nothing, bone marrow that “took.” While she rested, I drove myself over to the movies at the Ocean County Mall and saw Charlie’s Angels, then bought lobsters on the way home and cooked them for dinner — though Sally barely rallied to work on hers, while I demolished mine.

She went to bed early again — after I asked if maybe she should call Blumberg on Monday and schedule a work-up. Maybe she was anemic. She said she would, then went to sleep at nine and slept twelve hours, emerging downstairs into the kitchen Sunday morning, weak-eyed, sallow and sunk-shouldered — where I was sitting, eating a pink grapefruit and reading about the Lakers in the Times —to tell me she was leaving me to live with Wally in Mull, and that she’d decided it was worse to let someone you love be alone forever than to be with someone (me!) who didn’t need her all that much, even though she knew I loved her and she loved me. This is when she said things about the “circumstances” and about importance. But to this day, I don’t understand the calculus, though it has a lot in common with other things people do.

She was wearing an old-fashioned lilac sateen peignoir set with pink ribbonry stitched around the jacket collar. She was thin-armed, bare-legged, her skin wan and blotchy from sleep, her eyes colorless in their glacial blue. She was barefoot, a sign of primal resolution. She blinked at me as if sending me a message in Morse code: Good-bye, good-bye, good-bye.

Oh, I protested. May it not be said I failed of ardor at that crucial moment (the past, critics have attested, seems settled and melancholy, but I was boisterous in that present). I was, by turns, disbelieving, shocked, angry, tricked-feeling, humiliated, gullible and stupid. I became analytical, accusatory, revisionist, self-justifying, self-abnegating and inventive of better scenarios than being abandoned. Patiently (I wasn’t truly patient; I wanted to slit Wally open like a lumpy feed sack) and lovingly (which I surely was), I testified that I needed her the way hydrogen needs oxygen — she should know that, had known it for years. If she needed time — with Wally, in Mull — I could understand. I lied that I found it all “interesting,” although I admitted it didn’t make me happy — which wasn’t a lie. She should go there and do that. Hang out. Plant little trees in little holes. Go native. Act married. Talk, slap, hug, giggle, groan, cry.

But come home!

I’d tear down conventional boundaries if we could just keep an understanding alive. Did I say beg? I begged. I already said I cried (something Clarissa chided me for). To which Sally said, shoulders slack, eyes lowered, slender hands clasped on the table top, her little finger lightly touching the covered Quimper butter dish she at one time had felt great affection for, and that I subsequently winged across the room and to death by smithereens, “I think I have to make this permanent, sweetheart. Even if I regret it and later come crying to you, and you’re with some other woman, and won’t talk to me, and my life is lost. I have to.”

Strange grasp on “permanent,” I thought, though my eyes burbled with tears. “It’s not like we’re dealing with hard kernels of truth here,” I said pitiably. “This is all pretty discretionary, if you ask me.”

“No,” she said, which is when she took her wedding ring off and laid it on the glass pane of the table top, causing a hard little tap I’ll never, ever, forget, even if she comes back.

“This is so terrible,” I said in full cry. I wanted to howl like a dog.

“I know.”

“Do you love Wally more than you love me?”

She shook her head in a way that made her face appear famished and exhausted, though she couldn’t look at me, just at the ring she’d a moment before relinquished. “I don’t know that I love him at all.”

“Then what the fuck!” I shouted. “Can you just do this?”

“I don’t think I can’t do it,” Sally — my wife — said. And essentially that was that. Double negative makes a positive.

She was gone by cocktail hour, which I observed alone.

S omewhere once I read that harsh words are all alike. You can make them up and be right. The same is true of explanations. I never caught them smooching. Probably they didn’t smooch. Neither did they stop mid-sentence in an intimate moment just when I strode through a door (I never strode through any without whistling a happy tune first). Sally and I never visited a counselor to hash out problems, or ever endured any serious arguments. There wasn’t time before she left. Apart from when I first knew Sally, Wally had never been a feature of our daily converse. Everybody has their casualties; we get used to them like old photographs we glance at but keep in a trunk. To understand it all in the way we understand other things, I would have to make an explanation up. The facts, as I knew them, didn’t say enough.

For the first week after Sally left, I cried (for myself) and brooded (about myself) as one would cry and brood upon realizing that marriage to oneself probably hadn’t been so great; that I maybe wasn’t so good in bed — or anywhere — or wasn’t good at intimacy or sharing or listening. My completelys, my I love yous, my my darlings, my forevers weighed less than standard issue, and I wasn’t such an interesting husband, in spite of believing I was a very good and interesting husband. Sally, possibly, was unhappy when I thought she was ecstatic. Any person — especially a realtor — would wonder about these post-no-sale issues just as a means of determining what new homework he was now required to do.

What I decided was that I may never have seemed to Sally to be “all in,” but that “all in” is what I goddamn was. Always. No matter how I felt or described my feelings. Anything more “all in” than me was just a fantasy of the perfidious sort manufactured by the American Psychiatrists Association, that Sisyphus of trade groups, to keep the customers coming back.

Bullshit, in other words.

I was intimate. I was as amorous and passionate as the traffic would bear. I was interesting. I was kind. I was generous. I was forbearing. I was funny (since that’s so goddamned important). I shared whatever could stand to be shared (and not everything can). Women both hate and love weakness in men, and I’d had positive feedback to think I was weak in the right ways and not in the wrong. Of course, I wasn’t perfect at any of these human skills, having never thought I had to be. In the fine print on the boilerplate second-marriage license, it should read: “Signatories consent neither has to be perfect.” I did fine as a husband. Fine.