Richard Ford - Independence Day

“We’re trying, Frank,” Phyllis says, blinking pathetically at the idea of my son who’s an epileptic, but not wanting to mention it. “We’re really trying here.”

“I can tell,” I lie, and turn and give her a contrite smile, which for some reason drives her right out of the doorway and across the hot little crumbling motel lot in search of her unlikely husband.

I now find myself in a whir to get back into town, and so split the breeze over the steamy pavement up Route 1, retaking King George Road for the directest route to Seminary Street. I have more of the day returned to me than I’d expected, and I mean to put it to use by making a second stop by the McLeods’, before driving out to Franks on Route 31, then heading straight down to South Mantoloking for some earlier than usual quality time with Sally, plus dinner.

I’d hoped, of course, to be back in the office, running the numbers on an offer or already delivering same to Ted Houlihan, hustling to get various balls rolling — calling a contractor for a structural inspection, getting the earnest money deposited, vetting the termite contract, dialing up Fox McKinney at Garden State Savings for a fast track through to the mortgage board. There’s absolutely nothing an owner likes better than a quick, firm reply to his sell decision. Philosophically, as Ted said, it indicates the world is more or less the way we best feature it. (Most of what we unhappily hear back from the world being: “Boy, we’re back-ordered on that one, it’ll take six weeks;” or, “I thought they quit making those gizmos in ’58;” or, “You’ll have to have that part milled special, and the only guy who does it is on a walking trip through Swaziland. Take a vacation, we’ll call you.”) And yet if an agent can pry loose a well-conceived offer on an entirely new listing, the likelihood of clear sailing all the way to closing is geometrically increased by the simple weight of seller satisfaction, confidence, a feeling of corroboration and a sense of immanent meaning. Real closure in other words.

Consequently, it’s a good strategy to set the Markhams adrift as I just did, let them wheeze around in their clunker Nova, brooding about all the houses in all the neighborhoods they’ve sneered at, then crawl back for a nap in the Sleepy Hollow — one in which they doze off in daylight but awake startled, disoriented and demoralized after dark, lying side by side, staring at the greasy motel walls, listening to the traffic drum past, everyone but them bound for cozy seaside holiday arrangements where youthful, happy, perfect-toothed loved ones wave greetings from lighted porches and doorways, holding big pitchers of cold gin. (I myself hope shortly to be arriving for just such a welcome — to be a cheerful, eagerly awaited addition to the general store of holiday fun, having a million laughs, feeling the world’s woe rise off me someplace where the Markhams can’t reach me. Possibly bright and early tomorrow there’ll either be a frantic call from Joe wanting to slam a bid in by noon, or else no call — confoundment having taken over and driven them back to Vermont and public assistance — in which case I’ll be rid of them. Win-win again.)

It’s perfectly evident that the Markhams haven’t looked in life’s mirror in a while — forget about Joe’s surprise look this morning. Vermont’s spiritual mandate, after all, is that you don’t look at your- selfy but spend years gazing at everything else as penetratingly as possible in the conviction that everything out there more or less stands for you, and everything’s pretty damn great because you are. (Emerson has some different opinions about this.) Only, with home buying as your goal, there’s no real getting around a certain self-viewing.

Right about now, unless I miss my guess, Joe and Phyllis are lying just as I pictured them, stiff as planks, side by side, fully clothed on their narrow bed, staring up into the dim, flyspeck ceiling with all the lights off, realizing as silent as corpses that they can’t help seeing themselves. They are the lonely, haunted people soon to be seen standing in a driveway or sitting on a couch or a cramped patio chair (wherever they land next), peering disconcertedly into a TV camera while being interviewed by the six o’clock news not merely as average Americans but as people caught in the real estate crunch, indistinct members of an indistinct class they don’t want to be members of — the frustrated, the ones on the bubble, the ones who suffer, those forced to live anonymous and glum on short cul-de-sac streets named after the builder’s daughter or her grade-school friends.

And the only thing that’ll save them is to figure out a way to think about themselves and most everything else differently; formulate fresh understandings based on the faith that for new fires to kindle, old ones have to be dashed; and based less on isolating, boneheaded obstinance and more, for instance, on the wish to make each other happy without neutralizing the private self — which was why they showed up in New Jersey in the first place instead of staying in the mountains and becoming smug casualties of their own idiotic miscues.

With the Markhams, of course, it’s hard to believe they’ll work it out. A year from now Joe would be the first person to kick back at a summer solstice party in some neighbor’s new-mown hay meadow, sipping homemade lager and grazing a hand-fired plate full of vegetarian lasagna — naked kids a-frolic in the twilight, the smell of compost, the sound of a brook and a gas generator in the background — and hold forth on the subject of change and how anybody’s a coward who can’t do it: a philosophy naturally honed on his and Phyllis’s own life experiences (which include divorce, inadequate parenting practices, adultery, self-importance, and spatial dislocation).

Though it’s change that’s driving him crackers now . The Markhams say they won’t compromise on their ideal. But they aren’t compromising! They can’t afford their ideal. And not buying what you can’t afford’s not a compromise; it’s reality speaking English. To get anywhere you have to learn to speak the same language back.

And yet they may find hidden strengths: their fumbling, lurching Sistine Chapel touch across the car seat was a promising signal, but it’s one they’ll need to elaborate over the weekend, when they’re on their own. And inasmuch as I’m not in possession of their check, on their own’s where they’ll be — sweating it but also, I hope, commencing the process of self-seeing as a sacred initiation to a fuller later life.

It might be of some interest to say how I came to be a Residential Specialist, distant as it is from my prior vocations of failed short-story writer and sports journalist. A good liver would be a man or woman who’d distilled all of life that’s important down to a few inter-related principles and events, which are easy to explain in fifteen minutes and don’t require a lot of perplexed pauses and apologies for this or that being hard to understand exactly if you weren’t there. (Finally, almost nobody else is ever able to “be there,” and in many cases it’s too bad you have to be.) And it is in this streamlined, distilled sense that it’s possible to say my former wife’s getting remarried and moving to Connecticut is what brought me to where I am.

Five years ago, at the end of a bad season that my friend Dr. Catherine Flaherty described as “maybe a kind of major crisis,” or “the end of something stressful followed by the beginning of something indistinct,” I one day simply quit my job at a large sports magazine in New York and moved myself to Florida, and then in the following year to France, where I had never been but decided I needed to go.