Richard Ford - Independence Day

Except for the last, an unusually unsettling collection of messages for 11:50 p.m.

I dial Ann and she answers immediately.

“What’s going on?” I say, more anxious than I care to sound.

“I’m sorry,” she says in an unsorry-sounding voice. “It’s gotten a little out of hand here today. Paul flipped out, and I thought maybe you could get up here early and take him off, but it’s okay now. Where are you?”

“At the Vince Lombardi.”

“The fence what?”

“It’s on the turnpike.” She has in fact used the facilities here. Years ago, of course. “I can make it in two hours,” I say. “What happened?”

“Oh. He and Charley got into a fracas in the boathouse, about the right way and the wrong way to varnish Charley’s dinghy. He hit Charley in the jaw with an oarlock. I think maybe he didn’t mean to, but it knocked him down. Almost knocked him out.”

“Is he all right?”

“He’s all right. No bones broken.”

“I mean is Paul all right?”

A pause for adjustment. “Yes,” she says. “He is. He disappeared for a while, but he came home about nine — which breaks his court curfew. Has he called you?”

“He left me a message.” No need for details: barking, hysterical laughter. (To be great is to be misunderstood.)

“Was he crazy?”

“He just seemed excited. I guessed he was with Stephanie.” Ann and I are of one mind about Stephanie, which is that their chemistry is wrong. In our view, for Stephanie’s parents to send her to a military school for girls — possibly in Tennessee — would be good.

“He’s very upset. I don’t really know why.” Ann takes a sip of something that has ice cubes in it. She has changed her drinking habits since moving to Connecticut, from bourbon (when she was married to me) to vodka gimlets, over whose proper preparation Charley O’Dell apparently exercises total mastery. Ann in general is much harder to read these days, which I assume is the point of divorce. Though on the subject of why now for Paul, my belief is that on any given day there’re truckloads of good excuses for “flipping out.” Paul, in particular, could find plenty. It’s surprising we all don’t do it more.

“How’s Clary?”

“Okay. They’ve gone to sleep in his room now. She says she wants to look out for him.”

“Girls mature faster than boys, I guess. How’s Charley? Did he get his dinghy waxed right?”

“He has a big lump. Look, I’m sorry. It’s all right now. Where is it you’re taking him again?”

“To the basketball and baseball halls of fame.” This suddenly sounds overpoweringly stupid. “Do you want me to call him?” My son with his own line, a proper Connecticut teen.

“Just come get him like you planned.” She’s ill at ease now, itchy to get off.

“How are you?” Comes to my mind that I haven’t seen her in weeks. Not so long, but long. Though for some reason it makes me mad.

“All right. Fine,” she says wearily, avoiding the personal pronoun.

“Are you spending enough time in skiffs? Getting to see the morning mist?”

“What’re you indicating with that tone?”

“I don’t know.” I actually don’t know. “It just makes me feel better.”

Phone silence descends. Video arcade and Roy Rogers clatter rises and encapsulates me. Another plaid-shirted, blue-jeaned wavy-haired, big-wallet trucker is now waiting midway of the lobby, glomming a sheaf of businessy-looking papers, staring hatchets at me as if I were on his private line.

“Tell me something that’s the truth,” I say to Ann. I have no idea why, but my voice to me sounds intimate and means to ask intimacy in return.

I, however, know the look on Ann’s face now. She has closed her eyes, then opened them so as to be looking in an entirely different direction. She has elevated her chin to stare next at the lacquered ceiling of whatever exquisite, architecturally sui generis room she’s occupying. Her lips are pursed in an unyielding little line. I’m actually happy not to see this, since it would shut me up like a truant. “I don’t really care what you mean by that,” she says in an icy voice. “This isn’t a friendly conversation. It’s just necessary.”

“I just wished you had something important to tell me, or something interesting or wholehearted. That’s all. Nothing personal.” I’m fishing for a sign of the argument, the one Paul said she’d had with Charley. Nothing more innocent.

Ann says nothing. So I say meagerly, “I’ll tell you something interesting.”

“Not wholehearted?” she says crossly.

“Well …” I, of course, have opened my mouth without knowing what words to bring forth, what beliefs to proclaim or validate, what human condition to hold under my tiny microscope. It’s frightening. And yet it’s what everybody does — learning how you stand by hearing yourself talk. (Locution, locution, locution.)

What I almost say is: “I’m getting married.” Though I somehow stop myself after “I’m,” which sounds enough like “Um.” Except it is what I want to say, since it announces something important to do , and the only reason I don’t say it (other than that it’s not true) is that I’d end up responsible for the story and later have to invent a series of fictitious “subsequent” events and shocking turns of fate to get me off the hook. Plus I’d risk being found out and looking pathetic to my children, who already have reservations about me.

The hillbilly trucker is still glaring at me. He is a tall, hip-sprung guy with depressed cheekbones and beady sunken eyes. Probably he is another lime-cologne devotee. His watchband, I notice, is formed by linked, gold-plated pull-tabs, and he in fact points to the watch face and mouths the words I’ m late . I, though, simply mouth some nonsense words back, then turn into the stale little semi-cubicle separating me from the other humans.

“Are you still there?” Ann says irritably.

“Umm. Yeah,” my heart whomping once, unexpectedly. I am staring at my undrunk coffee. “I was thinking,” I say, still slightly confused (perhaps I’m still buzzed), “that when you get divorced you think everything changes and you shed a lot of stuff. But I don’t think you shed a goddamn thing; you just take more on, like cargo. That’s how you find out the limits of your character and the difference between can’t and won V. You might find out you’re a little cynical too.”

“I have to tell you I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about. Are you drunk?”

“I might be. But what I said is still true.” My right eye flutters, along with my heartbeat going bim-bam. I have scared myself.

“Well, who knows,” she says.

“Do you feel like a person who was ever married before?” I wedge my shoulder farther up into my little metal phone coffin for whatever quiet there is.

“I don’t feel like I was married,” Ann says, even more irritable. “I was. A long time ago. To you.”

“Seven years ago on the eighteenth,” I say, though all at once there’s the ice-water-down-the-back recognition that I am actually talking to Ann. Right now. Rather than doing what I do most all the time— not talking to her, or hearing recorded messages of her voice, yet having her on my mind. I’m tempted to tell her how peculiar this feels, as a way of trying to woo her back to me. Though after that, what? Then, loud enough to make me jump out of my shoes, Boom-boom-boom-ding-ding-ding! Crrraaaaaash! Somebody in the hellhole video chamber across the concourse has hit some kind of lurid jackpot. Other players — spectral, drugged-looking teens — drift nearer for a gander. “I’m beginning not to feel like I used to feel.” I say this under the noise.