Richard Ford - The Lay of the Land

Which didn’t mean Sally had to be big-H happy or do anything except what she wanted to do. We’re only talking about explanations here, and whether anything’s my fault. It was. And it wasn’t.

My personal view is that Sally got caught unawares in the great, deep and confusing eddy of contingency, which has other contingency streams running into it, some visible, some too deep-coursing below the surface to know about. One stream was: That just as I was enjoying the rich benefits of the Permanent Period — no fear of future, life not ruinable, the past generalized to a pleasant pinkish blur— she began, in spite of what she might’ve said, to fear permanence, to fear no longer becoming, to dread a life that couldn’t be trashed and squandered. Put simply, she wasn’t prepared to be like me — a natural state that marriage ought to accommodate and make survivable, as one partner lives the Permanent Period like a communicant lives in a state of grace, while the other does whatever the hell she wants.

Only along galumphs Wally, turf-stained, resolutely un-handsome, vaguely clueless from his years in the grave (i.e., Scotland). And suddenly one of the prime selling points of second marriage — minimalization of the past — becomes not such a selling point. First marriages have too much past clanking along behind; but second ones may have too little, and so lack ballast.

Heavy-footed, un-nuanced, burping, yerping Wally may have reminded Sally there was a past that couldn’t be generalized, and that she had unfinished business in the last century and couldn’t reason it away in the jolly manner that I’d reasoned myself into a late-in-life marriage and lived happily by its easy-does-it house rules. (Millennium angst, if it’s anything, is fear of the past, not the future.) In fact, with Wally both behind and also suddenly lumped in front, it’s good odds Sally never experienced the Permanent Period, and so had no choice but to hand me her wedding ring like I was a layaway clerk at Zales and push herself out of the eddy of our life and take the current wherever it flowed.

Though I’ll admit that even on this day, the eve of Turkey Day, I’m no longer so blue about Sally’s absence, as once I was. I don’t feature myself living alone forever, just as I wouldn’t concede to staying a realtor forever and mostly tend to think of life itself as a made-up thing composed of today, maybe tomorrow and probably not the next day, with as little of the past added in as possible. I feel, in fact, a goodly tincture of regret for Sally. Because, even though I believe her sojourn on Mull will not last so long, by re-choosing Wally she has embraced the impossible, inaccessible past, and by doing so has risked or even exhausted an extremely useful longing — possibly her most important one, the one she’s made good use of these years to fuel her present, where I have found a place. This is why the dead should stay dead and why in time the land lies smooth all around them.

This morning, I’ve scheduled the 10:15 showing at my listing at 61 Surf Road, and following that, at 12:30, a weeks-planned meet-up in Asbury Park with Wade Arsenault, my friend from years back, to attend a hotel implosion — the hotel in question being the elegant old Queen Regent Arms, remnant of the stately elephants from the twenties, surrendering at last to the forces of progress (a high-end condo development). Wade and I have been to two other implosions this fall, in Ventnor and Camden, and each of us finds them enjoyable, although for different reasons. Wade, I think, just likes big explosions and the controlled devastation that follows. In his young life, he was an engineer, and watching things blow up is his way of coping with being now in his eighties, and of fortifying his belief that the past crumbles and that staring loss in the face is the main requirement for living out our allotment (this is as spiritual as engineers get). On the other hand, I’m gratified by the idea of an orderly succession manifesting our universal need to remain adaptable through time, a lesson for which cancer is the teacher, though my reason may not finally be any different from Wade’s. In any case, going along with Wade injects an interesting and unusual centerpiece activity into the course of my day, one that gives it shape and content but won’t wear me out, since at the end I’ll have Paul to contend with. (Business itself, of course, is the very best at offering solid, life-structuring agendas, and business days are always better than wan weekends, and are hands-down better than gaping, ghostly holidays that Americans all claim to love — but I don’t, since these days can turn long, dread-prone and worse.)

This morning, however, has already turned at least semi-eventful. Up and dressed by 8:30, I spent a useful half hour in my home office going over listing sheets for the Surf Road property, followed by a browse through the Asbury Press, surveying the “By Owner” offerings, estate auctions, “New Arrivals” and “Deaths,” all of which can be fruitful, if sometimes disheartening. The Press reported on the Peter Pan tour-bus accident Mike and I saw yesterday — three lives “eclipsed,” all Chinese-American females on an Atlantic City gaming holiday from their restaurant jobs on Canal Street, Gotham. Others were injured but lived.

The Press also reported that the presumptive (and devious) Vice-President-in-waiting for the Republicans has suffered a mild heart trembler, and farther down the page that the device that exploded at Haddam Doctors took the life of a security guard named Natherial Lewis, forty-eight — which startled me. Natherial is/was the uncle of young Scooter Lewis, who chauffeured Ernie McAuliffe to his resting ground yesterday, and so must have known nothing of his own loss at the time, although today he’s thinking on death with new realities installed. I knew Natherial when he himself was a young man. Several times when I was at Lauren-Schwindell, I employed him to retrieve wayward FOR SALE signs after Halloween pranksters had swiped them from front yards and set them up in front of area churches or their divorced parents’ condos. Nate always thought it was funny. I’ll phone in flowers through Lloyd Mangum, who’ll be overseeing. New Jersey is a small place, finally.

When I looked up from my paper, though, and out the window — my home office gives onto the front, and down Poincinet Road toward the state park where Route 35 ends and a few old seasonal businesses are in sight (a chowder house, the Sinker Swim Doughnut) — I couldn’t stop remembering something Clarissa was talking about on our after-Halloween beach walk: That she felt strangely insulated from contemporary goings on. Which, as I’ve said before, is also true for me. I watch CNN every night, but never afterward think much about anything I see — even the election, as stupid as it is. I’ve come to loathe most sports, which I used to love — a loss I attribute to having seen the same things over and over again too many times. Only death-row stories and sumo wrestling (narrated in Japanese) can keep me at the TV longer than ten minutes. My bedside table, as I’ve said, has novels and biographies I’ve read thirty pages into but can’t tell you much about. A couple of weeks ago, I decided I’d write a letter to President Clinton — the opposite of Marguerite’s letter — detailing the sorry state of national affairs (much of it his fault), suggesting he’d be wise to nationalize the Guard and protect the future of the Republic with regard to the “rogue state of Florida.” But I didn’t finish it and put it in a drawer, since it seemed to me the work of a crank that would’ve earned me a visit from the FBI.