Richard Ford - The Lay of the Land

“I’d love to, but I’ve got a house-full back home,” I say, easing into the Fuddruckers’ lot across from the streaming Parkway. Wade’s Olds sits nosed under the faded yellow awning. A blue-and-white Asbury Park PD cruiser with a Bush sticker is parked across the lot, its hatless occupant observing traffic through the intersection. Technically, I have no one waiting at home. Paul and the unusual Jill have checked into the Beachcomber and are dining at Ann’s. Clarissa’s off on her heterosex escapade with honey-voiced Thom. My house is ringingly empty on Thanksgiving eve. How does that happen?

“But how ’bout I mention there’s somebody back at my place who’d love to lay eyes on you?” Wade’s damp mouth wallops shut, suppressing a smile. He’s up to mischief, stroking his Caesarish comb-down like an old Arab. One of his wrinkle-cheeked old squeezes no doubt has a freshly widowed sister from the Wildwoods who’s a “young sixty-eight” and on the hunt.

“I need to get this window fixed, Wade.”

“It’s what?” Wade looks affronted. His tongue darts in and out like a viper’s.

“My window.” I motion backward with my thumb. “It’s trying to rain.”

“You’re cracked! You need a new connection, mister. There’s something hollow under you, you know that?” Wade’s suddenly talking way too loud and vehement for our close quarters. He’s been sneaking up on this with his questions about hoping and my sexual problems and barbs about my absent wife.

We’re stopped alongside his Olds. I check in the rearview to see if the cop’s surveilling us, which of course he is. Possibly the empty Fuddruckers’ lot is a rendezvous point in the white-slave market.

Wade’s eyes fix on me accusingly, making me feel accused. “I don’t think that’s true, Wade.”

“You’re a goddamn house peddler. You hang around with strangers all the time. You’re gonna be poopin’ in a bag one of these days — if you live long enough. Which you may not.” His old mouth does something between a terrible grin and a furious frown. It’s close to the look my son Paul turned on me last spring in K.C. Only Wade’s upper falsie set sinks a millimeter, so he has to clack it back up with his lowers. I’m happy Wade’s still in touch with who I am.

“Well.” I glance again at the Asbury cop.

“Well what?” Wade dips his head like a goose, snorts, then suddenly stares down at his big watchband as if he was on a tight schedule.

Cold air is still drawing in on my neck. “It may not seem like it, Wade,” I say softly, “but I’m connected enough. Real estate’s a good connecter.”

“Bullshit. It’s putting stitches in a dead man’s arm.” He blinks, ducks, saws his wrist — the one with his Medi-Ident — across his red nose, then grabs his Panasonic off the seat. “You’re an asshole.”

“I just told you how I feel about things, Wade. I wasn’t trying to piss you off. My belief is we all have an empty spot underneath us. It doesn’t hurt anything.” I tap my foot on the brake. This needs to end now.

“You’re in a dangerous spot, Franky.” Wade pops open his big door. “However old you are. Fifty-what?”

“Two.” Which feels better than fifty-five. I gently bite down on a welt of my left cheek — a bad sign. I’m not going to the Grove with Wade and make woo-woo with some retired reference librarian from Brigantine. I’d end up driving home to Sea-Clift with black vanquishment filling my car like cyanide.

“Fifty-two doesn’t mean anything !” Wade croaks. “You’re between everything good when you’re fifty-two. You need to get hooked up or you’re screwed. I married Lynette when I was fifty-two. Saved my ass.”

Wade of course has told me never to get married again, and Lynette, after all, left him for the Lord. Plus, I believe I’m still married. “You were lucky.”

“I was smart. I wasn’t lucky.” Wade levers one trembling sockless white-shoed foot out and down onto the pavement, then the other, then cautiously scoots his scrawny ass off the seat, holding the door handle for support, emitting a tiny effortful grunt.

“I guess we might as well think our life’s the way it is ’cause that’s how we want it, Wade.”

“Haw!” He’s studying down at his feet as if to be sure they know their assignments. “That’s in your brain.”

“That’s where a lot of stuff goes on.”

“Think, think, thinky, think. In your life it does. Not mine.” Wade gives my car door a fearsome, dismissive bang shut.

I power down the passenger window so he’s not shut out. “Don’t think I don’t appreciate your thinking about me.” Think, think, thinky, think.

“I’ll tell my daughter you gotta think about gettin’ your window fixed instead of seein’ her.” Wade’s mouth wrinkles up bitterly as he starts his staggering departure.

Daughter?

“Which daughter?” I say through the window.

“Which daughter?” Wade’s red-rimmed eyes glare in at me, as if I knew we’d been talking about his daughter this whole time, and why was I being such a stupe? Stupe, stupe, stupey, stupe. “I only have one, you nunce. Your girlfriend. You farted around with her till you ran her off right in my front yard. You’re a nunce, you know that? You like being a nunce. You get to do a lot of good thinking that way.” Wade starts struggling toward the front of my car, heading toward his Olds, his Panasonic bumping my fender panels he’s holding onto for balance. I can only see the upper half of him, but he’s not looking at me, as if I’d stopped existing in here.

But. Daughter!

For these weeks, traveling to the odd implosion here, another there, a cup of chowder or a piece of icebox pie in a Greek diner, I’ve all but expunged from my thoughts the truth that Wade is father to Vicki (now Ricki), my long-gone dream of a lifetime from when I, as a divorced man, wrote for a glossy New York sports magazine, horsed around with women, suffered dreaminess both night and day and had yet to list my first house. I rashly, wrongly loved nurse Arsenault with my whole heart and libido, was ready to tie the knot, move to Lake Havasu and live in an Airstream off savings (I had none). Only she lacked the necessary whatever (love for me) and sent me packing. So Wade’s wrong about who heave-ho’d who. Vicki shortly afterward married a handsome, clean-cut Braniff pilot, moved to Reno, became a trauma nurse at St. Crimonies, eventually was widowed when Darryl Lee crashed his spotter plane in Kuwait under the command of Bush #1.

I haven’t seen, spoken to or thought much about Vicki/Ricki, who I guarantee was a yeasty package, since ’84, and wouldn’t recognize her if she shot out of Fuddruckers on a pair of roller skates. Although daughter sets loose deep space-clearing stirrings. Not that I want to see her any more than I want to see the reference librarian from Brigantine. But the thought of Vicki/Ricki — once a bounteous, boisterous, fine-thighed and raven-haired dreamboat — sets my ribs atremble, I’m not ashamed to say it. On the other hand, driving to the Grove on the night before Thanksgiving for a surprise face-to-face, followed by an unwieldy intime in some ennui-drenched south Jersey “steak place,” at the conclusion of which she and I disappear in opposite directions into the teeming night, is far from anything I want to happen to me. Even though I have nothing else to do: early to bed amid sea breezes after maybe getting my window fixed.

“Maybe Ricki and I can have lunch once the holiday’s over,” I say insincerely out the window to where Wade has navigated around the front of my car. I don’t want him to feel condescended to on the topic of his marriageable daughter. I have some experience there.