Independence Day (16 page)

The other feeling, the one that balanced the first, was a sensation that everything I then contemplated was limited or at least underwritten by the “plain fact of my existence”: that I was after all only a human being, as untranscendent as a tree trunk, and that everything I might do had to be calculated against the weight of the practical and according to the standard considerations of: Would it work? and, What good would it do for me or anybody?

I now think of this balancing of urgent forces as having begun the Existence Period, the high-wire act of normalcy, the part that comes
after
the big struggle which led to the big blow-up, the time in life when whatever was going to affect us “later” actually affects us, a period when we go along more or less self-directed and happy, though we might not choose to mention or even remember it later were we to tell the story of our lives, so steeped is such a time in the small dramas and minor adjustments of spending quality time simply with ourselves.

Certain crucial jettisonings, though, seemed necessary for this passage to be a success—just as Ted Houlihan mentioned to Joe Markham an hour ago but which probably didn’t register. Most people, once they reach a certain age, troop through their days struggling like hell with the concept of completeness, keeping up with all the things that were ever part of them, as a way of maintaining the illusion that they bring themselves fully to life. These things usually amount to being able to remember the birthday of the first person they “surrendered” to, or the first calypso record they ever bought, or the poignant line in
Our Town
that seemed to sum life up back in 1960.

Most of these you just have to give up on, along with the whole idea of completeness, since after a while you get so fouled up with all you did and surrendered to and failed at and fought and didn’t like, that you can’t make any progress. Another way of saying this is that when you’re young your opponent is the future; but when you’re not young, your opponent’s the past and everything you’ve done in it and the problem of getting away from it. (My son Paul may be an exception.)

My own feelings were that since I’d jettisoned employment, marriage, nostalgia and swampy regret, I was now rightfully a man a-quiver with possibility and purpose—similar to a way you might feel just prior to taking up the sport of, say, glacier skiing; and not for sharpening your acuities or tempting grisly death, but simply to celebrate the hum of the human spirit. (I could not, of course, have told you what my purpose actually was, which probably meant my purpose was just to have a purpose. Though I’m certain I was afraid that if I didn’t use my life, even in a ridiculous way, I’d lose it—what people used to say about your dick when I was a kid.)

My qualifications for a new undertaking were, first, that I was not one bit preoccupied with how things
used to be
. You’re usually wrong about how things used to be anyway, except that you used to be happier—only you may not have known it at the time, or might’ve been unable to seize it, so stuck were you in life’s gooeyness; or, as is often the case, you might never have been quite as happy as you like to believe you were.

The second of my qualifications was that intimacy had begun to matter less to me. (It had been losing ground since my marriage came to a halt and other attractions failed.) And by intimacy I mean the real kind, the kind you have with only one person (or maybe two or three) in a lifetime; not the kind where you’re willing to talk to someone you’re close to about laxative choices or your dental problems; or, if it’s a woman, about her menstrual cycle, or your aching prostate. These are private, not intimate. But I mean the real stuff—
silent intimacies
—when spoken words, divulgences, promises, oaths are almost insignificant: the intimacy of the fervently understood and sympathized with, having nothing to do with being a “straight shooter” or a truth teller, or with being able to be “open” with strangers (these don’t mean anything anyway). To
none
of these, though, was I in debt, and in fact I felt I could head right into my new frame of reference—whatever was beginning—pretty well prepared and buttoned up.

Third, but not last, I wasn’t actually worried that I was a coward. (This seemed important and still does.) Years earlier, in my sportswriting days, Ann and I were once walking out of a Knicks-Bullets night game at the Garden, when some loony up ahead began brandishing a pistol and threatening to open up on everybody all around. Word went back like a windstorm over wheat stalks. “Gun! He’s got a GUN! Watch it!” I quickly pulled Ann inside a men’s room door, hoping to get some concrete between the gun muzzle and us. Though in twenty seconds the gunman was tackled and kicked to sawdust by a squad of New York’s quick-witted finest, and thank God no one was hurt.

But Ann said to me when we were in the car, waiting in a drizzle to enter the bleak tunnel back to New Jersey, “Did you realize you jumped
behind
me when that guy had his gun?” She smiled at me in a tired but sympathetic way.

“That’s not what I did!” I said. “I jumped in the rest room and pulled you in with me.”

“You did that too. But you also grabbed me by my shoulders and got behind me. Not that I blame you. It happened in a hurry.” She drew a wavy vertical line in the window fog and put a dot at the bottom.

“It did happen in a hurry. But you’re wrong about
what
happened,” I said, flustered because in fact it
had
all happened fast, I’d acted solely on instinct and couldn’t remember much.

“Well, if that’s what happened,” she said confidently, “then tell me if the man—if it was a man—was colored or white.” Ann has never gotten over her old man’s Michigan racial epithets.

“I don’t know,” I said as we made the curve down into the lurid world of the tunnel. “It was too crowded. He was too far up ahead. We couldn’t see him.”

“I could,” she said, sitting straighter and flattening her skirt across her knees. “He wasn’t actually that far. He might’ve shot one of us. He was a small brown-colored man, and he had a small black revolver. If we passed him on the street I’d recognize him again. Not that it matters. You were trying to do the right thing. I’m happy I was no less than the second person you thought to protect when you thought you were in danger.” She smiled at me again and patted my leg infuriatingly, and we were all the way to Exit 9 before I could think of anything to say.

But for years it bothered me (who wouldn’t be bothered?). My belief had always been with the ancient Greeks, that the most important events in life are physical events. And it bothered me that in (I now realize) the last opportunity I might’ve had to throw myself in front of my dearest loved one, it appeared I’d pushed my dearest loved one in front of myself as cravenly as a slinking cur (appearances are just as bad when cowardliness is at issue).

And yet I found that when Ann and I divorced because she couldn’t put up with me and my various aberrations of grief and longing owing to the death of our first son, and just flew the coop (a physical act if there ever was one), I quit worrying about cowardice almost immediately and decided she’d been wrong. Though even if she’d been right, I felt it was braver to live with the specific knowledge of cowardice and look for improvements than never to know anything about myself on that front; and better, too, to go on believing, as we all do in our daydreams, that when the robber jumps out of the alley brandishing the skinning knife or the large-caliber pistol, terrorizing you and your wife and plenty of innocent bystanders (old people in wheelchairs, your high-school math teacher, Miss Hawthorne, who was patient when you couldn’t get the swing of plane geometry and thus changed your life forever), that there’ll be time for you (me) to act heroically (“I just don’t think you’ve got nuts big enough to use that thing, mister, so you might as well hand it over and get out of here”). Better to wish the best for yourself; better also (and this isn’t easy) that others wish it too.

I
t would be of no great interest to hear me expound on all I tried and started out to do during this time—1984, the Orwellian year, when Reagan was reelected to the term soon to end, the one he has more or less napped through when he wasn’t starting wars or lying about it and getting the country into plenty of trouble.

For the first few months, I spent three mornings a week reading to the blind down at WHAD-FM (98.6). Michener novels and
Doctor Zhivago
were the blind people’s favorites, and it is still something I occasionally stop off and do when I have time, and take real satisfaction in. I also looked briefly into the possibility of becoming a court reporter (my mother had always thought that would be a wonderful job because it served a useful purpose and you’d always be in demand). Later, and for one entire week, I attended classes in heavy-equipment operation, which I enjoyed but didn’t finish (I was determined to aim at less predictable choices for a man with my background). I likewise tried getting a contract to write an “as told to” book but couldn’t get my former literary agency interested since I had no particular subject in mind and they by then were only interested in young writers with surefire projects. And for three weeks I actually worked as an inspector for a company that certified as “excellent” crummy motels and restaurants across the Middle West, though that didn’t work because of all the lonely time spent in the car.

At this same time, I also got busy shoring up my responsibilities with my two children (then ages eleven and eight), who were living with their mother on Cleveland Street and growing up between our two households in ordinary divorced-family style, which they seemed reconciled to, if not completely happy about. I joined the high-priced Red Man Club during this period, with a mind to teaching the two of them respect for nature’s bounty; and I was also planning a nostalgic update trip to Mississippi, for my old military school’s class reunion, as well as a trip to the Catskills for a murder-mystery weekend, a hike up the Appalachian Trail and a guided float down the Wading River. (I was, as I said, fully conscious that taking an extended flier to Florida, then France, had not been scrupulous fathering practice and I needed to do better; though I felt it was arguable that if one of my parents had done the same thing I’d have understood, as long as they said they loved me and hadn’t both vamoosed at once.)

All told, I felt I was positioning myself well for whatever good might come along and was even giving tentative thought to approaching Ann for an older-but-wiser reconsideration of the marriage option, when one evening in early June Ann herself called up and announced that she and Charley O’Dell were getting married, she was selling her house, quitting her job, putting the children in new schools, moving kit and caboodle, lock, stock and barrel, the whole nine yards up to Deep River and not coming back. She hoped I wouldn’t be upset.

And I simply didn’t know what in the hell to say or think, much less feel, and for several seconds I just stood holding the receiver to my ear as if the line had gone dead, or as if some lethal current had connected through my ear to my brain and struck me cold as a haddock.

Anybody, of course, could’ve seen it coming. I’d met Charley O’Dell, age fifty-seven (tall, prematurely white-haired, rich, big-boned, big-schnozzed, big-jawed, literal-as-a-dictionary architect), on various occasions having to do with the delivery and pickup of my children, and had at that time officially declared him a “no-threat.” O’Dell is commandant of his own pretentious one-man design firm, housed in a converted seamen’s chapel built on stilts (!) at the marsh edge in Deep River, and of course pilots his own 25-foot Alerion, built with his own callused hands and fitted with sails sewn at night while listening to Vivaldi, yakkedy, yakkedy, yak. We once stood one spring night, on the little front stoop of Ann’s house—now mine—and yammered for thirty minutes with not one grain of sincerity or goodwill about diplomatic strategies for corraling the Scandinavians into the EEC, something I knew not a fig about and cared less. “Now if you ask me, Frank, the Danes are the key to the whole square-headed pack out there”—one tanned, naked knobby knee hiked up on Ann’s stoop railing, one bespoke deck shoe dangling half off his long big toe, chin balanced pseudo-judiciously on big fist. Charley’s usual attire when he isn’t wearing a bow tie and a blazer is a big white tee-shirt and khaki canvas walking shorts, something they must hand out at graduation at Yale. I, that night, stared him straight in the eyes as if I were paying rapt attention, though in fact I was sucking one of my molars where I’d discovered a randy taste in an area I couldn’t floss, and was also thinking that if I could hypnotize him and will him into disappearing I could have some time alone with my ex-wife.

Ann, however (suspiciously), wouldn’t give in on the several evenings she and I paused together by my car in the silent dark of divorced former mates who still love each other, wouldn’t crack smirky jokes at Charley’s expense, the way she always had about all her other suitors—jokes about their taste in suits or their dreary jobs, their breath, the reported savage personalities of their ex-wives. Mum was always the word where Charley was concerned. (I guessed wrongly it was respect for his age.) But I should’ve paid closer attention and torpedoed him the way any man would who’s in charge of his senses.

As a result, though, when Ann gave me the bad news on the phone that June evening just at cocktail hour—the sun having cleared the yardarm in butler’s pantries all over Haddam, and trays of ice were being cracked into crystal buckets, leaded tumblers and slender Swedish pitchers, the vermouth hauled out wryly, the smell of juniper flaring the nostrils of many a bushed but deserving ex-hubby—I was kicked square in the head.