Richard Ford - Independence Day

“Great. That’s great,” I say. “That’ll be a good end to the night for me.”

She stays seated, however, squeezes her eyes shut, then pops them open as if she’s just emerged from a trance, then woggles her head around to loosen everything up at the end of a long day’s hard chefing. “What line of work you in, Frank?” She’s not quite ready to get up, possibly deciding she needs more background on me.

“Residential realty.”

“Where at?” She fingers her Winston hard pack as though she’s thinking about something else.

“Down in Haddam, in New Jersey. About four hours from here.”

“Never hoid of it,” she says.

“It’s a pretty well-kept secret.”

“You in the Millionth Dollar Club? I’d be impressed if you were.” She raises her eyebrows.

“Me too,” I say. (In Haddam, of course, the Millionth Dollar Club had better be joined by Valentine’s Day, or you’re out of business by Easter.)

“I prefer to rent,” Char says, staring inertly at the distant Achieve Super Marital Sex where she’s shoved it away, with Mr. Standard Pleasure Unit’s happy face turned up. “Actually I want to get into a condo, but a car costs what a house used to cost. And I’m still paying off my car.” (Not a Harley.)

“You can rent these days,” I say cheerfully, “for about half the cost of buying and save money to boot.” (There’s in fact no use telling her that at her age — twenty-eight or thirty-three — she’s looking at a life of more of the same unless she robs a bank or marries a banker.)

“Well,” Char says, suddenly motivated by something — an idea, a memory, a determination not to bellyache to a stranger. “I guess I just need to find a rich husband.” She raps both sets of knuckles hard on the tabletop, grasps her pack of smokes and stands up (she is not very tall). “Let me get out of my Pillsbury doughgirl outfit.” She’s walking slowly away toward a little door off the kitchen, which when she opens it and snaps on the light within reveals a tiny, fluorescentlit bathroom. “I’ll meet you out on the piazza later,” she says.

“I’ll be there,” I say at the door as it closes and goes locked.

I wander back out into the foyer to wait in the cool breeze through the screen. The old bucket-eared Swede is now hunched over the tiny phone where I’d been, his big, rough finger jammed in his other cavernous ear for better hearing. “Well, what makes you a saint, ya satchel-ass sonofabitch?” I hear him say. “For starters, tell me that. I’d like to get that straight tonight.”

I look out through the screen, where all the chairs are now empty — everyone safe in bed, plans in motion for an all-out Sunday morning assault on the Hall of Fame.

From the darkness of new-mown grass I hear the distant yet close harmonies of a barbershop quartet, singing what sounds very much like “Michelle, ma belle, sont des mots qui vont très bien ensemble, très bien ensemble .” And back among the spruces and elm trunks I see a couple materializing in light-colored summery clothes, arms around, walking in step, returning (I’m certain) from a wonderful five-course dinner in some oak-paneled lakeside auberge now closed and locked up tight as Dick’s hatband. They’re laughing, which makes me realize that it is a good time of night to feel good, to be where you’ve been headed all day, blissful hours with a significant other still in front of you, half surprised that the day’s gone this well, inasmuch as the 4th is the summer’s pivotal day, when thoughts turn easily to fall and rapid change and shorter days and feelings of impendment that won’t give way till spring. These two are ahead of the game.

They come into view now, in the inn’s reflected window glow: he wearing white bucks, seersucker pants, a yellow jacket slung over his shoulder foreign-correspondent style; she in a flimsy pastel-green skirt and a pink Peter Pan blouse. By their flat Ohio vowels I recognize them as the couple from the parking lot back when I lay dozing and their interests lay in property values. Now they have other interests to pursue above floors.

“I ate way too much,” he says. “I shouldn’t have ordered that Cajun linguine. I’ll never get to sleep.”

“That’s no excuse,” she says. “You can sleep when you get home. I’ve got plans for you.”

“You’re the expert,” he says, not at all eager enough by my standards.

“You’re damn right I am,” she says, then laughs. “Hah.”

I want to be well out of their way when they come through — the lacquer of sex being suddenly too thick around me in the night air — want not to be standing behind the screen with a knowing, Now-you-two-have-a-real-good-sleep smirk on my mug. So, as their shoes hit the steps, I slip back into the living room to wait for my “date.”

Two red-shaded lamps have been left on in the long, warm, overfurnished, cinnamon-scented parlor. The Ohioans troop by without seeing me, their voices falling, becoming more intimate as they reach the first landing and then the hallway above. They are full silent as their key enters the lock.

I cruise around the old wainscoted parlor lined with oak bookshelves, a full complement of cast-off butler and drumhead tables, slipcovered couches, wobbly hassocks, nautical-looking brass lamps — all scavenged at antique fairs and roadside flea markets in the Cortland-Binghamton-Oneonta triangle. The scented candle has been extinguished, and bulky shadows encompass the wall art, which includes, in addition to Natty Bumppo himself, a framed, yellowed topo from the Twenties, showing “Lake Otsego and Environs,” several portraits of bewhiskered “founders”—doubtless all shopkeepers dressed up to look like presidential candidates — and a sampler hung over the main door, with good advice for the spiritual wanderer: “Confidences are easy to give, but hard to get back.”

I mouse over the various tabletops, fingering the reading matter — stacks of old MLS booklets for guests whose vacation idea is to consider putting down roots in an alien locale (the Ohioans, for example). The price of the fancy Federalist pile Paul and I passed this afternoon is eye-poppingly low by Haddam standards at 530K (something has to be wrong with it). Plenty of old Peoples and American Heritages and National Geographics are stacked up on the long library table by the back window. I browse down the shelf containing stiff bound editions of New York History , the Otsego Times, The Encyclopedia of Collectibles, American Cage Bird magazine, Mechanix Illustrated , Hersey’s Hiroshima in three different editions, two whole yards of matched Fenimore Coopers, a Golden Treasure of Quotable Poetry , two volumes of Rails of the World , surprisingly enough another Classic Holes of Golf , a stack of recent Hartford Courants —as if somebody had moved here from Hartford and wanted to stay in touch. And to my wonderment and out of all account, among the loose and uncategorized books, here is a single copy of my own now-old book of short stories, Blue Autumn , in its original dust jacket, on the front of which is a faded artist’s depiction of a 1968-version sensitive-young-man, with a brush cut, an open-collared white shirt, jeans, and an uncertain half smile, standing emblematically alone in the dirt parking lot of a country gas station with an anonymous green pickup (possibly his) visible over his shoulder. Much is implied.

I flinch as always when I see it, since in a panicky time-crunch the artist elected to paint my face from my author’s photo right onto the cover of my book, so that I see my young self now, made to look perplexed, forever staring out alone from the front of my very first (and only) literary effort.