Richard Ford - The Lay of the Land

When I first knew Wade, sixteen years ago, he lived in the suburb of Barnegat Pines, with his now-deceased second wife, Lynette, and son, Cade. I was then lost in hapless but powerful love for his daughter, Vicki — an oncology nurse and major handful of daunting physical attainments. It was three years after my son died, and one after my divorce from Ann, a time when my existence seemed in jeopardy of fading into a pointless background of the onward rush of life. Wade was then a level-eyed, crew-cut engineer and truth seeker. He’d seen confusion in life, had looked the future in the eye and gotten down to being a solid citizen/provider who understood his limits, maintained codes and was glad to welcome me as a unique, slightly “older” son-in-law candidate. My present take on Wade comes mostly from those long-ago days. I didn’t see him at all for sixteen years and only refound him four months back when Cade presented me with a speeding ticket on my way back late from the Red Man Club and I noticed the ARSENAULT on his brass name plate. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah…I ended up calling Wade because as he wrote out the summons, Cade — thick-browed, fat-eared, wearing a black flak jacket and a flat-top — said that “Dad” had become “like a pretty sad case” and “maybe wouldn’t last a lot longer” and that they (Cade and Mrs. Cade) had “pretty much our own lives up in Pohatcong, kids and whatever,” and didn’t make it down to visit the old man as often as they should. “Things like that are too bad in a way,” he observed. And, oh, by the way, that’ll be ninety clams, plus costs, plus two points, have a nice day and keep ’er under fifty-five.

I ended up rendezvous-ing with Wade at Bump’s and reaffiliating. And in a short while, I managed to reconcile Wade years back— frontier Nebraskan with a trim physique and a Texas Aggie engineering degree, with Wade today— orange-skinned, obstreperous bang-wearer and sour-smelling, weirdly dressed crank; and, by the force of my will, to make a whole person out of the evidence. Aging requires reconciliations, and nobody said getting old would be pretty or the alternative better.

What Wade and I actually do for each other in the present tense, and that makes putting up with each other worth the aggravation, is a fair question. But when he’s in his right head — which is most of the time — Wade’s as sharp as a Mensa member, still sees the world purely as it is and for this reason is not a bad older friend for me, just as I’m not a bad younger companion to keep him on his toes. We share, after all, a piece of each other’s past, even if it’s not a past we visit. We also like each other, as only truly consenting adults can.

A sbury Park, which we pass through and where I’ve done some bank work, has unhappily devolved over the years into a poverty pocket amidst the pricey, linked Shore communities, Deal to Allenhurst, Avon to Bay Head. Those monied towns all needed reliable servant reserves a bus ride away, and Asbury was ceded to the task. Hopeful Negroes from Bergen County and Crown Heights, Somalis and Sudanese fresh off the plane, plus a shop-keeper class of Iranis for whom Harlem was too tough, now populate the streets we drive down. Occasionally, a shady Linden Lane or a well-tended Walnut Court survives, with its elderly owner-occupant tending his patch while values sink to nothing and the element pinches in. But most of the streets are showing it — windows out, mansions boarded, grass gone weedy, sidewalks crumbling, informal automotive work conducted curbside, while black men wait on corners, kids ply the pavements on Big Wheels, and large African-looking ladies in bright scarves lean on porch rails, watching the world slide by. Asbury Park could be Memphis or Birmingham, and nothing or no one would seem out of place.

“One in five non-English speakers, right?” Wade’s watching out his window, fingering his diabetic’s Medi-Ident bracelet and looking abstracted. He’s infected the interior of my car with his sour, citrusy elder-smell — mostly from his yellow sweater — that mingles with Mike’s stale Marlboro residue from last night, making me have to crack open my window. He shoots me a fiery glance when I don’t answer his non-English-speaker non-question, pink tongue working his dentures (his “falsies”) as if he’s warming up for verbal combat. Wade is of a generally conservative belief-base but wouldn’t vote for dumb-ass Bush if the world was ablaze and Bush had the bucket. He grew up poor, lucked into A&M, worked two decades in the oil patch in Odessa and views Republicans as trustees for keeping government on the sidelines, out of his boudoir, the classroom and the Lord’s house (where he’s not a frequenter). Isolation’s the way to go, keep the debt below zero, inflation nonexistent, blubbety-blubbety. Any kind of sanctimony’s for scoundrels — hence the hatred of Bush. Smiling Rocky was Wade’s hero, though he’s voted Democrat since Watergate. “Housing’s leveled off. D’you read that?” he says, just to make noise.

“Not where I live,” I say.

“Oh, well of course,” Wade says. “Being what you are, you’d know that. That’s the kind of stuff you’re the expert in. The rest of us have to read about it in the papers.”

A t straight-up one o’clock, the day’s turned warmer than in Sea-Clift. A pavement of gray clouds has streaked open up here to reveal febrile blue out over the ocean we’re approaching. The day no longer feels like the day before Thanksgiving, but a late-arriving Indian summer afternoon or a morning in late March when spring’s come in like a lamb. A perfect day for an implosion.

The Queen Regent sits opposite the boardwalk and the crumbling Art Deco convention hall — home to luckless club fights and poorly attended lite-rock record hops. Noisy gulls soar above and around the Queen’s battlements, where she stands alone on a plain against the sky, as if the old buff-colored hospital-looking pile of bricks was occupying space no longer hers. Though even from a distance she’s hardly an edifice to rate a big send-off: Nine stories, all plain (and gutted), with two U-shaped empty-windowed wings and a pint-size crenellated tower like a supermarket cake. A previously-canopied but now trashy glassed-in veranda faces the boardwalk and the Atlantic, and a wooden water tower with a giant TV antenna attached bumps above the roofline. Once it was a place where felt-hatted drummers could take their girlfriends on the cheap. Families with too many kids could go and pretend it was nice. Young honeymooners came. Young suicides. Oldster couples lived out their days within sound of the sea and took their meals in the dim coffered dining room. Standing alone, the Queen Regent looks like one of those condemned men from a hundred revolutions who the camera catches standing in an empty field beside an open grave, looking placid, resigned, distracted — awaiting fate like a bus — when suddenly volleys from off-stage soundlessly pelt and spatter them, so they’re changed in an instant from present to past.

All around the Queen Regent is a dry, treeless urban-renewal savanna stretching back to the leafless tree line of Asbury. Where we’re currently driving were once sweller, taller hotels with glitzier names, stylish seafood joints with hot jazz clubs in the basement, and farther down the now-missing blocks, tourist courts and shingled flophouses for the barkers and rum-dums who ran the Tilt-A-Whirl on the pier or waltzed trays in the convention hall, which itself looks like it could fall in with a rising tide and a breeze. Today it is all a PROGRESS ZONE! a sign says, with LUXURY CONDO COMMUNITY COMING!

Wade has his silver Panasonic up and trained tight on the Queen Regent through the wide windshield glass. His is the awkward kind you peer down into like a reverse periscope, and operating it through his bifocals makes him crank his mouth open moronically and his old lips go slack. He seems to believe the Queen is about to go down any instant.