Richard Ford - Independence Day

N ow look here, would you buy a used house from this man?” I hear a sly voice speak, and bolt around startled out of my wits to find the flat, grinning moon face of Carter Knott outside my window. Carter’s head is cocked to the side, his feet apart, arms crossed like an old judge. He’s in damp purple swimming trunks, wet parchment sandals and a short purple terry-cloth cabana jacket that exposes his slightly rounded belly, all of which means he’s gotten out of his pool down at #22 and snuck this far just to scare the piss out of me.

I would in fact be embarrassed as hell if anybody else had caught me twaddling away out here like a nutcase. But Carter is arguably my best friend in town, which means he and I “go back” (to my solitary, somber year in the Divorced Men’s Club in ’83) and also that we regularly bump into each other in the lobby at United Jersey and discuss bidnus, and that we’re willing to stand in most any weather outside Cox’s News, arms folded around our newspapers, yakking committedly about the chances of the Giants or the Eagles, the Mets or the Phils, whatever exchange won’t take longer than ninety seconds, after which we might not see each other for six months, by which time a new sports season and a new set of issues will have taken up. Carter, I’m positive, couldn’t tell me where I was born, or when, or what my father’s job was, or what college I attended (he would probably guess Auburn), though I know he attended Penn and studied, of all things, classics. He knew Ann when she still lived in Haddam, but he may not know we had a son who died, or why I moved from my old house across the street, or what I do in my spare time. It is our unspoken rule never to exchange dinner invitations or to meet for drinks or lunch, since neither of us would have the least interest in what the other was up to and would both get bored and depressed and end up ruining our relationship. And yet in the way known best to suburbanites, he is my compañero .

After the Divorced Men disbanded (I left for France, one member committed suicide, others just drifted off), Carter put together a good post-divorce rebound and was living a freewheeling bachelor’s life in a big custom-built home with vaulted ceilings, fieldstone fireplaces, stained-glass windows and bidets, out in some newly rich man’s subdivision beyond Pennington. Somewhere about 1985, Garden State Savings (which he was president of) decided to turn a corner and get into more aggressive instruments, which Carter couldn’t see the wisdom in. So that the other stockholders bought him out for a big hunk of change, after which he went happily home to Pennington, got to tinkering with some concepts for converting invisible-pet-fence technology into sophisticated home-security applications. And the next thing he knew, he was running another company, had fifteen employees, four million new dollars in the bank, had been in operation two and a half years and was being wholly bought out by a Dutch company interested in only one tiny microchip adaptation Carter’d been wily enough to apply for a patent on. Carter once again was only too happy to cash out, after which he took in another eight million and bought an outlandish, all-white, ultra-modern, Gothic Revival neighborhood nightmare at #22, married the former wife of one of the aggressive new S&L directors and essentially retired to supervise his portfolio. (Needless to say, his is not the only story in Haddam with these as major plot elements.)

“I figured I’d caught you out here pullin’ on old rudy in your red jacket and gettin’ teary about your old house,” Carter says, hooding his lower lip to look scandalized. He is small and tanned and slender, with short black hair that lies stiffly over on both sides of a wide, straight, scalp-revealing part. He is the standard for what used to be known as the Boston Look, though Carter actually hails from tiny Gouldtown in the New Jersey breadbasket and, though he doesn’t look it, is as honest and unpretentious as a feed-store owner.

“I was just doping out a market analysis, Carter,” I lie, “getting set to take in the parade. So I’m happy to have you startle the crap out of me.” It’s evident I have no such appraisal paperwork on the seat, only the Harrises’ junk mail and some leftovers from my trip with Paul, most of which are in the back: the basketball paperweight and earring gifts, the crumpled copy of Self-Reliance , his Walkman, my Olympus, his copy of The New Yorker , his odorous Happiness Is Being Single tee-shirt and his Paramount bag containing a copy of the Declaration of Independence and some brochures from the Baseball Hall of Fame. (Carter, though, isn’t close enough to see and wouldn’t care anyway.)

“Frank, I’m gonna bet you didn’t know John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died on the very same day.” Carter mimps his regular closed-mouth smile and spreads his tanned legs farther apart, as if this was leading up to a randy joke.

“I didn’t,” I say, though of course I do, since it came up in the reading for my just completed trip and now seems ludicrous. I’m thinking that Carter looks ludicrous himself in his purple ensemble, standing actually out in Hoving Road while he quizzes me about history. “But let me try a guess,” I say. “How ’bout July 4th, 1826, fifty years exactly after the signing of the Declaration, and didn’t Jefferson say as his last words, ‘Is it the Fourth?’”

“Okay, okay. I didn’t realize you were a history professor. And Adams said, ‘Jefferson still lives.’” Carter smiles self-mockingly. He loves this kind of stagy palaver and kept us all in stitches in the Divorced Men. “My kids let me in on it.” He flashes his big straight teeth, which makes me remember how much I like him and the nights with our bereft compatriots, hunched around late tables at the August Inn or the Press Box Bar or out fishing the ocean after midnight, when life was all fucked up and, as such, much simpler than now, and as a group we learned to like it.

“Mine too,” I lie (again).

“Both your rascals in fine fettle up in New London or wherever it is?”

“Deep River.” Carter is more in the know than I’d have guessed, though a retailing of yesterday’s events would cloud his sunny day. (I wonder, though, how he knows.)

I look up Hoving Road as a black Mercedes limo appears and turns right into the semicircular driveway of my old house and passes impressively around to the front door, where I have stood six thousand times contemplating the moon and mare’s tails in a winter’s sky and letting my spirits rise (sometimes with difficulty, sometimes not) to heaven. A surprising pang circuits through me at this very mind’s image, and I’m suddenly afraid I may yield to what I said I wouldn’t yield to over a simple domicile — sadness, displacement, lack of sanction. (Though by using Carter’s presence I can fight it back.)

“Frank, d’you ever bump into ole Ann?” Carter says soberly for my sake, sticking his two hands up his opposite cabana coat sleeves and giving his forearms a good rough scratching. Carter’s calves are as hairless as a turnip, and above his left knee is a deep and slick-pink dent I’ve of course seen before, where a big gout of tissue and muscle were once scooped violently out. Carter, despite his Boston banker’s look and his screwy cabana suit, was once a Ranger in Vietnam, and is in fact a valorous war hero and to me all the more admirable for not being self-conscious about it.

“Not much, Carter,” I say to the Ann question and blink my reluctance up at him. The sun is just behind his head.

“You know, I thought I saw her at the Yale-Penn game last fall. She was with a big crowd of people. How long you two been kaput now?”

“Seven years, almost.”