Richard Ford - Independence Day

“Frank, I don’t know what to say.” I hear something made of glass being knocked over and broken into a lot of pieces. “Oh, shit,” Phyllis says. “This isn’t, by the way, a realtor in Haddam. She’s more in the East Brunswick area.” A portion of central New Jersey resembling the sere suburban scrub fields of Youngstown. It’s also where Skip McPherson rents ice time before daylight.

“Well, that’ll have a whole new feel for you guys” (the Youngstown feel).

“It’s sort of starting over, though, isn’t it?” Phyllis says, giving in to bewilderment.

“Well, maybe Joe’ll picture himself better up there. And there really isn’t any starting over involved, Phyllis. It’s all part of your ongoing search.”

“What do you think’s going to happen to us, Frank?”

The Canadians are now bustling into the lobby, elbowing each other and yucking it up like hockey fans — men and women alike. They are big, healthy, happy, well-adjusted white people who aren’t about to miss any meals or get dressed up for rio good reason. They break off into pairs and threes, guys and gals, and go yodeling off through the metal double doors to the rest rooms. (The best all-around Americans, in my view, are Canadians. I, in fact, should think of moving there, since it has all the good qualities of the states and almost none of the bad, plus cradle-to-grave health care and a fraction of the murders we generate. An attractive retirement waits just beyond the forty-ninth parallel.)

“Did you hear me, Frank?”

“I hear you, Phyllis. Loud and clear.” The last of the laughing Canadian women, purses in hand, disappear into the women’s, where they immediately start unloading on the men and gassing about how “lucky” they were to hook up with a bunch of cabbage-heads like these guys. “You and Joe are just overwrought about happiness, Phyllis. You should just buy the first house you halfway like from your new realtor and start making yourselves happy. It’s not all that tricky.”

“I’m just in a black mood because of my operation, I guess,” Phyllis says. “I know we’re pretty lucky. Some young people can’t even afford a home now.”

“Some older people too.” I wonder if Phyllis visualizes herself and Joe as among the nation’s young. “I gotta get a move on here,” I say.

“How’s your son? Didn’t you tell me he had Hotchkin’s or brain damage or something?”

“He’s making a comeback, Phyllis.” Until this afternoon. “He’s quite a boy. Thanks for asking.”

“Joe needs a lot of maintenance right now too,” Phyllis says, to keep me on the phone. (Some woman in the rest room lets out an Indian whoop that sets the rest of them howling. I hear a stall door bang shut. “Yew-guyz … Jeeeeez-us,” one of the men answers from next door.) “We’ve seen some changes in our relationship, Frank. It’s not easy to let someone into your inner circle if you’re both second-timers.”

“It’s not easy for first-timers either,” I say impatiently. Phyllis seems to be angling for something. Though what? I once had a client — the wife of a church history professor and a mother of three, one of whom was autistic and got left in the car in a restraining harness — who asked me if I had any interest in getting naked with her on the polished floor of a ranch-style home in Belle Mead, a house her husband liked but she wanted a second look at because she felt the floor plan lacked “flow.” An instance of pure transference. Though no one in the realty business isn’t clued in to the sexual dimension: hours spent alone in close quarters (front seats of cars, provocatively empty houses); the not-quite-false aura of vulnerability and surrenderment; the possibility of a future in the same grid pattern, of unexpected, tingly sightings at the end of the lettuce rack, squirmy, almost-missed eye contact across a hot summer parking lot or through a plate-glass window with a spouse present. There have been instances in these three years and a half when I haven’t been a model citizen. Except you can lose your license for that kind of stunt and become a bad joke in the community, neither of which I care to risk as much as I might once have.

Still, for some reason, I find myself imagining fleshy Phyllis not in a pink petunia print but a skimpy slip over her bare underneath, holding a tumbler of warm Scotch while she talks, and peeking out the blinds at the grainy-lit Sleepy Hollow parking lot as the innkeeper’s eighteen-year-old half-Polynesian son, Mombo, shirtless and muscles bulging, hauls a garbage bag around to the dumpster outside their bathroom in which sluggo Joe is grouchily tending to more of nature’s unthrilling needs behind closed doors. This is the second time today I’ve thought of Phyllis “in this way,” her health situation notwithstanding. My question, however, is: why?

“So you live alone?” Phyllis says.

“What’s that?”

“Because Joe had at one time thought you might be gay, that’s all.”

“Nope. A frayed knot, as my son says.” Though I’m baffled. In two hours I have been suspected of being a priest, a shithead and now, a homo. I’m apparently not getting my message across. I hear another round-bell go ding , as Joe turns up the TV from Mexico.

“Well,” Phyllis says, whispering, “I just wished for a second I was going wherever you were going, Frank. That might be nice.”

“You wouldn’t have a good time with me, Phyllis. I can promise that.”

“Oh. It’s just crazy. Crazy, crazy talk.” Too bad she can’t get on the bus with the Canadians. “You’re a good listener, Frank. I’m sure it’s a plus in your profession.”

“Sometimes. But not always.”

“You’re just modest.”

“Good luck to you two,” I say.

“Well, we’ll see you, Frank. You be good. Thanks.”

Clunk.

T he truckers who’ve been glowering at me have wandered off. And both sets of Canadians now emerge from their comfort stations, hands damp, noses blown, faces splashed, hair wet-combed, shirttails for the moment tucked, yaw-hawing about whatever nasty secrets were shared around inside. They march off into Roy’s, their skinny, uniformed bus driver standing just outside the glass doors, having a smoke and some P&Q in the hot night. He cuts his eyes my way, sees me down the phone bank watching him, shakes his head as if we both knew all about it, tosses his smoke and walks out of view.

Without as much as one guarded thought left from dinner, I punch in Sally’s number, feeling that I’ve made a bad decision where she’s concerned, should’ve stayed and wooed my way out of the woods like a man who knows how to get messages across. (This of course may turn out to be a worse decision — tired, half drunk, fretful, not in control of my speech. Though sometimes it’s better to make a bad decision than no decision at all.)

But Sally, from her message, must be in a similar frame of mind, and what I’d like to do is turn around and beat it back to her house, scramble into bed with her and have us go slap to sleep like old marrieds, then tomorrow haul her along, and begin instilling proper wanting practices into my life, and fun to boot, and quit being the man holding out. Forty psychics able to find Jimmy Hoffa in a landfill, or to tell you what street your missing twin Norbert’s living on in Great Falls, couldn’t tell me what’s a “better deal” than Sally Caldwell. (Of course, one of the Existence Period’s bedrock paradoxes is that just when you think you’re emerging, you may actually be wading further in.)

“Uffda, ya goddamn knucklehead,” one of the Canadians yorks out as I listen intently to Sally’s phone ring and ring and ring.

Though I’m quick to the next decision: leave a message saying I would’ve zoomed back but didn’t know where she was, yet I stand prepared to charter a Piper Comanche, zoom her up to Springfield, where Paul and I’ll pick her up in time for lunch. Zoom, zoom.