Richard Ford - Independence Day

“Ted, I don’t know what to say.” The noisy eaters in the next room have started back tink-tink-tinking their flatware, mouths full of pancakes, blabbing about how the berm-improvements work between here and Rochester’ll “impact” on driving times to the Falls. Suddenly my chill is over and I’m hot as a sauna bath.

“You might just feel happy for me, Frank, instead of suing me. I’ll probably be dead in a year. So it’s good I sold my house. I can go live with my son now.”

“I really just wanted to sell it for you, Ted.” I am made lightheaded at the unexpected arousal of death. “I’ve got it sold, in fact,” I say faintly.

“You’ll find them another house, Frank. I didn’t think they much liked it here.”

I push my fingertips hard onto the stack of year-old Annie Get Your Gun tickets. Someone, I see, has slid the copy of Achieve Super Marital Sex underneath the stack, with old Mr. Pleasure Unit’s happy face peeking upward. “They liked it a lot,” I say, thinking about Betty Hutton in a cowboy hat. “They were cautious, but they’re sure now. I hope your Koreans are that reliable.”

“Twenty thousand clams. No contingencies,” Ted says. “And they know there’s other parties interested, so they’ll follow up. These people don’t throw money away, Frank. They own a sod farm down around Fort Dix, and they want to move up in the world.” He would like to burble on about his good fortune now that he’s started, but doesn’t out of politeness to me.

“I’m just really disappointed, Ted. That’s all I can say.” Though I’m inventorying my mind for an acceptable fallback, sweat beginning to prickle out of my forehead. I’m to blame for this, for getting diverted from standard practices (though I don’t know that I have any practice I could class as standard).

“Who you voting for this fall?” Ted says. “You guys all pull for business, I guess, don’t you?” I’m wondering if some computer wizard at Bohemia has hacked into our office circuitry. Or possibly Julie Loukinen, who’s new, is double-dipping on our potentials list. I try to remember if I’ve ever seen her with a scruffy Eastern European-looking boyfriend. Though most likely Ted just listed his house as “exclusive” with everybody who came to the door. (And who can be surprised in a free country? It’s laissez-faire: serve your granny to the neighbors for brunch.) “You know neither Dukakis or Bush wants to put out a budget. They don’t want to deliver any unhappy news in case it might offend somebody. I’d much rather they told me they were about to fuck me so I wouldn’t tense up.” Randy new lingo for Ted, the successful house seller. “You want me to take that sign down, by the way?”

“We’ll send somebody out,” I say glumly.

Then suddenly my line to Penns Neck goes loud with fierce papery static so that I can barely hear Ted jibbering on, half gassed, about fin de siècle qualms and something or other, I don’t know what.

“I can’t hear you now, Ted,” I say into the old gunk-smelling receiver, frowning at the stick-figure man signaling me he’s choking, his own hands at his throat, a look of rounded dismay on his balloon face. Then the static stops and I can hear Ted starting in about Bush and Dukakis not being able to tell a good joke if their asses depended on it. I hear him laugh at the whole idea. “So long, Ted,” I say, sure he can’t hear me.

“I read where Bush accepted Christ as his personal savior. Now there’s a joke …,” Ted’s saying extra loud.

I set the receiver gently in its cradle, understanding this bit of life — his and mine — is now over with. I’m almost grateful.

M y sworn duty is of course to call the Markhams in a timely manner and break the news, which I try to do, though they’re not in their room at the Raritan Ramada. (No doubt they’re going through the brunch buffet a second time, cocky for making the right decision — too late.) No one comes on the line after twenty-five rings. I call back to leave a message, but a recording puts me on hold, then leaves me out in murky “hold” purgatory, where an FM station is playing “Jungle Flute.” I count to sixty, my hands getting clammy, then decide to call back later since nothing’s at stake anymore.

There are other calls I should make. A hectoring, early-bird “business” call to the McLeods, with an innuendo of unspecified pending actions regarding matters of rent irrespective of personal financial pinches; a call to Julie Loukinen just to let her know “somebody” has let Ted swim through the net. A call to Sally to reaffirm all feelings and say whatever comes into my head, no matter how puzzling. None of these, though, do I feel quite up to. Each seems too complicated on a hot morning, none likely to be rewarding.

But just as I turn to go shake Paul loose from his dreams again, I feel a sudden, flushed, almost breathless urge to call Cathy Flaherty in Gotham. Plenty of times I’ve considered just how welcome (and gratifying) it would be were she just to appear on my doorstep with a bottle of Dom Perignon, demanding an instant barometer reading on me, take my temperature, get the lowdown on how I’ve really been since we last made contact, having naturally enough thought about me no fewer than a million times, with multiple what-ifs embedded everywhere, finally deciding to hunt me down via the Michigan Alumni Association and show up unannounced but “hopefully” not unwelcome. (In my first-draft of the script, we only talk.)

As I was thinking in my room at Sally’s two days ago, few things are as pleasing as being asked to do basically nothing but having all good things come to you as if by right. It’s exactly what poor Joe Markham wanted to happen with his Boise “friend,” except she was too smart for him.

As it happens, I still have Cathy’s number committed to memory from the last time I heard her voice, after Ann announced four years ago that she and Charley were tying the knot and taking the kids, and I was tossed for several loop-the-loops, landing me in the realty business. (Back then I only heard Cathy’s recorded message and couldn’t think of one of my own to leave other than to shout “Help, help, help, help!” and hang up, which I decided against.)

But almost before I know it, I’ve dialed the old number in old 212—a place once guaranteed to work a strange, funkish, double-whammy of low self-regard on me when I worked there as a sportswriter and life was coming unglued the first time. (Now it seems no stranger than Cleveland; such are the freeing, desanctifying fringe benefits of selling real estate.)

More avid cafeteria-eating noises, commingled with mirthless laughter, rise and ebb from next door. I wait for the 212 circuits to lock in on a ring and an answer to occur to someone — honey-haired, honey-skinned Cathy, I’m happily hoping, by now a bona fide M.D., doing her something-or-other, highly competitive specialty whatchamacallit up at Einstein or Cornell, and conceivably willing (it’s also my hope) to take me on for a few moments’ out-of-context, ad hominem-pro bono phone “treatment.” (I’m actually counting on reverse spin here, by which the sound of Cathy’s voice will at once make me feel smart — as can happen — but also feel that I’d better get cracking or face being plowed under by advancing generations with ice water in their veins.)

Ring-ring-ring-a-jing. Ring-ring-ring. Then click. Then a brusque mechanical whir, then another click. It’s not promising. Then, finally, a voice — male, young, smug, as yet undisappointed, an insufferable smart aleck for whom outgoing messages are nothing but chances to gloatingly entertain himself, while demonstrating what an asshole he is to us blameless callers-in. “Hi. This is Cathy and Steve’s answering mechanism. We’re not home now. Really. I promise. We’re not lounging in bed making faces and laughing. Cathy’s probably at the hospital, saving lives or something like that. I’m probably down at Burnham and Culhane, slicing out a bigger piece of the pie for myself. So just be patient and leave us a message, and when time permits one of us will call you back. Probably it’ll be Cathy, since answering machines really kind of bug me. See ya. Bye. Of course wait for the beep.”