Richard Ford - Independence Day

Beeeeep. “Hello, Mr. Bascombe, this is Fred Koeppel calling again from Griggstown. I know it’s a holiday weekend, but I’d like to get a little action going on my house right away. Maybe show it on Monday if we can get the commission worked out….” Click. Ditto.

Beeeeep. “Hello, Frank, it’s Phyllis.” Pause while she clears her throat, as though she’s been asleep. “East Brunswick was a total nightmare. Total. Why’n’t you tell us, for God’s sake? Joe got depressed after one house. I think he may be headed for a big cavein. So anyway, we’ve reconsidered about the Hanrahan place, which I’m ready to change my mind about it, I guess. Nothing’s forever. If we don’t like it we can just sell it. Joe liked it anyway. I’ll get over worrying about the prison. I’m at a phone booth here.” A deepening change comes into her voice (signifying what?). “Joe’s asleep. Actually I’m having a drink at the bar at the Raritan Ramada. Quite a day. Quite a day.” Another long pause, representing possible stocktaking within the Markham ménage. “I wish I could talk to you. But. I hope you get this message tonight and call us up in the morning so we can get our offer over to old man Hanrahan. I’m sorry about Joe being such a butt. He’s not easy, I realize that.” A third pause, during which I hear her say, “Yeah, sure,” to someone. Then: “Call us at the Ramada. 201-452-6022. I’m probably going to be up late. We couldn’t stand that other place anymore. I hope you and your son are getting to share a lot.” Click.

Except for the boozy longing (which I ignore), there’s no shocker here. East Brunswick’s well known for dreary, down-market, cookie-cutter uniformity. It is not a viable alternative even to Penns Neck, though I’m surprised the Markhams came around so soon. It’s too bad they couldn’t have taken the evening, shot up to Susquehanna for Annie and chicken piccante. They’d have laughed, they’d have cried, and Phyllis could’ve found ways to start getting over worrying about the prison in her back yard. Of course, it won’t surprise me if “old man Hanrahan’s” house is realty history by now. Good things don’t hang around while half-wits split hair follicles, even in this economy.

I instantly put in a call to Penns Neck, to get Ted on the alert for an early-morning offer. (I’ll get Julie Loukinen to deliver it.) But the phone rings and rings and rings and rings. I repunch it, taking care to mentally picture each digit, then let it ring possibly thirty times while I stare down the front hall past the old grandfather clock and the portrait of General Doubleday and through the open screen door into the night and farther through trees to the diamond-twinkle lights of another, grander inn across on the lakeshore, a place I didn’t see this afternoon. All the ranked windows there are warmly lit, car headlights coming and going like some swank casino in a far-off seaside country. Out on the Deerslayer’s porch the high backs of the big Adirondack rockers are swaying as my fellow guests snooze away their spaghetti dinners, murmur and chuckle about the day — something bust-a-gut hilarious somebody’s son has piped up with in front of the Heinie Manusch bust, something else about the pros and cons of opening a copy shop in a town this size, something further about Governor Dukakis, whom someone, probably a fellow Democrat, laughingly refers to as “that Beantown Jerkimo.”

But nothing in Penns Neck. Ted may have slipped off to an Independence Day open house across the fence.

I try Sally’s number, since she said to call and since I intend to renew our amorous connections the instant I let Paul off in Gotham, a time that now feels many miles and hours from now but isn’t. (With one’s children everything happens in a flash; there’s never a now, only a then, after which you’re left wondering what took place and trying to imagine if it can take place again so’s you’ll notice.)

“Hello-o,” Sally says in a happy, airy voice, as if she’d just been in the yard, pinning up clothes on a sunny line.

“Hi,” I say, relieved and cheered for an answer somewhere. “It’s me again.”

“Me again? Well. Good. How are you, Me? Still pretty distracted? It’s a wonderful night at the beach. I wish you could distract yourself down to here. I’m on the porch, I can hear music, I ate radicchio and mushrooms tonight, and I’ve had some nice Duck’s Wing fumé blanc. I hope you two’re having as splendid a time wherever you are. Where are you?”

“In Cooperstown. And we are. It’s great. You should be here.” I picture one long, shiny leg, a shoe (gold, in my mind) dangling out over her porch banister into darkness, a big sparkling glass in her lounging hand (a banner night for women tipplers). “Have you got any company?” Apprehension’s knife enters my voice; even I hear it.

“Nope. No company. No suitors scaling the walls tonight.”

“That’s good.”

“I guess,” she says, clearing her throat just the way Phyllis did. “You’re extremely sweet to call me. I’m sorry I asked you about your old wife today. That was indiscreet and insensitive of me. I’ll never do it again.”

“I still want you to come up here.” This is not literally true, though it’s not far from true. (I’m certain she won’t come anyway.)

“Well,” Sally says, as though she were smiling into the dark, her voice going briefly weak, then coming back strong. “I’m thinking very seriously about you, Frank. Even though you were very rude or at least odd on the phone today. Maybe you couldn’t help it.”

“Maybe not,” I say. “But that’s great. I’ve been thinking seriously about you.”

“Have you?”

“You bet. I thought last night you and I came to a crossroads, and we went in the wrong direction.” Something in the South Mantoloking background makes me think I hear surf sighing and piling onto the beach, a blissful, longed-for sound here in the steamy Deerslayer hallway — though conceivably it’s only weak batteries in Sally’s cordless phone. “I think we need to do some things a lot differently,” I say.

Sally has a sip of her fumé blanc right by the receiver. “I thought over what you said about loving someone. And I thought you were very honest. But it seemed very cold too. You don’t think you’re cold, do you?”

“No one ever told me I was. I’ve been told about plenty of other faults.” (Some quite recently.) Whoever’s playing “Lullaby of Birdland” in the living room stops and switches straight into “The Happy Wanderer” at an allegretto clip, the heavy bass notes flat and metallic. Someone claps along for two bars, then quits. A man out on the porch laughs and says, “I think I’m a happy wanderer myself.”

“So I’ve just had this odd feeling all afternoon,” Sally says. “About what you said and what I said to you, about being noncommittal and smooth. That is how you are. But then if I have strong feelings about you, shouldn’t I just follow them? If I have a chance? I believe I could figure things out better when I was younger. I certainly always thought I could alter the course of things if I wanted to. Didn’t you say you had a tidal something or other about me? Tides were in it.”

“I said I had a tidal attraction to you. And I do.” Possibly we can move beyond smooth and noncommittal here. Someone — a woman — starts loudly singing “Balls-de-reee, balls-de-rah” in a quavery voice and laughing. Possibly it’s the loudmouth in polka dots who gave me the barbarous eyeball.

“What does that mean, tidal attraction?” Sally says.

“It’s hard to put into words. It’s just strong and persistent, though. I’m sure of that. I think it’s harder to say what you like than what you don’t.”