Richard Ford - Independence Day

The hall clock chimes 10:30. I look around as though a closer timepiece might be handy, but I’ve known almost the exact minute for an hour.

“Yep,” I say, “me too,” and stretch my own arms upward and yawn.

She’s standing now beside the table, fingers just touching the grain, smiling still, like my most steadfast admirer. “Do you want me to make more coffee?”

“I drive better asleep,” I say, and produce a witless grin.

Then off I go, rumbling right down the hall past the winking green security panel — which might as well have changed to red.

Sally follows at a distance of ten feet and not fast, her limp pronounced for her being barefooted. She’s allowing me to let myself out.

“So, okay.” I turn around. She’s still smiling, no less than eight feet back. But I am not smiling. In the time taken to walk to the screen door I’ve become willing to be asked to stay, to get up early, have some coffee and beat it to Connecticut after a night of adieus and possible reconsiderations. I close my eyes and fake a little weaving stagger meant to indicate Boy, I’m sleepier than I thought and conceivably even a danger to myself and others . But I’ve waited too long expecting something to happen to me; and if I were to ask, I’m confident she’d simply phone up the Cabot Lodge in Neptune and check me in. I can’t even have my old room back. My visit has become like a house showing in which I leave nothing but my card in the foyer.

“I’m real glad you came,” Sally says. I’m afraid she might even “put ‘er there” and with it push me out the door I came through months ago in all innocence. Worse treatment than Wally.

But she doesn’t. She walks up, grasps my short shirtsleeves above my elbows — we are at eye level — and plants one on me hard but not mean, and says in a little breath that wouldn’t extinguish a candle, “Bye-bye.”

“Bye-bye,” I say, trying to mimic her seductive whisper and translate it possibly into hello. My heart races.

But I’m history. Out the door and down the steps. Along the sandy concrete beach walk in the fading barbecue aroma, down sandy steps to Asbury Street at the lighted other end of which Ocean Avenue streams with cruising lovers on parade. I crawl into my Crown Vic; though as I start up I crane around and survey the shadowy cars behind me on both sides, hoping to spy the other guy, whoever he is, if he is, someone on the lurk in summer khakis, waiting for me to clear out so he can march back along my tracks and into my vested place in Sally’s house and heart.

But there’s no one spying that I can see. A cat runs from one line of parked cars to the one I’m in. A porch light blinks down Asbury Street. Lights are on in most all the houses, TVs warmly humming. There’s nothing, nothing to be suspicious of, nothing to think about, nothing to hold me here another second. I turn the wheel, back out, look up briefly at my empty window, then motor on.

Up the ink-dark seaboard, into the stillborn, ocean-rich night, my windows open wide for wakefulness: the Garden State, Red Bank, Matawan, Cheesequake, the steep bridge ascent over the Raritan and, beyond, the sallow grid-lights of Woodbridge.

There’s, of course, a ton of traffic. Certain Americans will only take their summer jaunts after dark, when “it’s easier on the engine,” “there’re fewer cops,” “the gas stations lower the rates.” The interchange at Exit 11 is aswarm with red taillights: U-Hauls, trailers, step vans, station wagons, tow dollies, land yachts, all cramming through, their drivers restless for someplace that can’t wait till morning: a new home in Barrington, a holiday rental on Lake Memphrémagog, an awkward reunion at a more successful brother’s chalet at Mount Whiteface — everyone with kids on board and screaming, a Port-a-Crib lashed to the top carry, desert bag harnessed to the front bumper, the whole, damn family belted in so tight that an easy breath can’t be drawn.

And, too, it’s that time of the month — when leases expire, contracts are up, payments come due. Car windows in the turnpike line reveal drawn faces behind steering wheels, frowns of concern over whether a certain check’s cleared or if someone left behind is calling the law to report furniture removed, locks jimmied, garages entered without permission — a license number noted as a car disappears down a quiet suburban street. Holidays are not always festive events.

Cops, needless to say, are out in force. Up ahead of me on the turnpike, blue lights flash far and near as I clear the toll plaza and start toward Carteret and the flaming refinery fields and cooling vats of Elizabeth. I have had, I realize, one glass of Round Hill too many and am now squinting into the shimmer lights and MERGE LEFT arrows, where road repavers are working late under banks of da-brite spots — our highway taxes at work here too.

It would’ve been smart, of course, just to pack Sally in with me, lock the house, activate the alarm, inaugurate a new stratagem for the rescue of collapsing love, since I’m at this moment positive that no matter what decision was entered an hour ago, it’ll never happen that way. Beyond an indistinct but critical point in life (near my own age, to be sure), most of your latter-day resolves fall apart and you end up either doing whatever’s damn well easiest or else whatever you feel strongest about. (These two in fact can get mixed up and cause plenty of mischief.) At the same time it also gets harder and harder to believe you can control anything via principle or discipline, though we all talk as if we can, and actually try like hell. I feel certain, batting past Newark airport, that Sally would’ve dropped everything and come with me if I’d as much as asked. (How this would go over with Ann would be another bridge to cross.) Paul, I’m sure, would’ve thought it was fine. He and Sally could’ve become secret pals in league against me, and who knows what might’ve been in store for the three of us. For starters, I wouldn’t be alone in this traffic-gunk metallurgic air shaft, bound for an empty set of sheets in who knows what motel in who knows what state.

An important truth about my day-to-day affairs is that I maintain a good share of flexibility, such that my personal time and whereabouts are often not of the essence. When poor sweet Clair Devane met her three o’clock at Pheasant Meadow and got pulled into a buzz saw of bad luck, a whole network of alarms and anguish cries bespeaking love, honor, dependency immediately sounded — north to south, coast to coast. Her very moment as a lost human entity was at once seismically registered on all she’d touched. But on any day I can rise and go about all my normal duties in a normal way; or I could drive down to Trenton, pull off a convenience-store stickup or a contract hit, then fly off to Caribou, Alberta, walk off naked into the muskeg and no one would notice much of anything out of the ordinary about my life, or even register I was gone. It could take days, possibly weeks, for serious personal dust to be raised. (It’s not exactly as if I didn’t exist, but that I don’t exist as much) So, if I didn’t appear tomorrow to get my son, or if I showed up with Sally as a provocative late sign-up to my team, if I showed up with the fat lady from the circus or a box of spitting cobras, as little as possible would be made of it by all concerned, partly in order that everybody retain as much of their own personal freedom and flexibility as possible, and partly because I just wouldn’t be noticed that much per se . (This reflects my own wishes, of course — the unhurried nature of my single life in the grip of the Existence Period — though it may also imply that laissez-faire is not precisely the same as independence.)