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Authors: Richard Ford

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Our poor son's woeful death and my wondrous wanderings were both sad contributors to our marriage's demise—no argument there. Guilty as charged. But it's as much what was unquenchable and absent in
her
that's left her, for all these years, with an eerie, nagging sensation of life's falseness and failure to seat properly on bedrock. Possibly at heart Ann's a Republican.

Since she was diagnosed and moved herself to Carnage Hill, Ann has become a dedicated adept of all things mystical and holistic. In particular, she's been driven to find out what “caused” her to come down with a dose of Parkinson's. Plain bad luck and her old man's busted-up genes don't provide explanation enough. Here, I fit nicely into one theoretical construct: she got Parkinson's
because
I never loved her. She hasn't said this, but I know she's thought it, and I show up expecting it each time.

She does, however, specifically incriminate the hurricane, which she considers a “super-real change agent,” which it surely was. The blogs she reads (I'm not sure what a blog even is) are full of testimonials about things-events-changes-dislocations-slippages-into-mania-and-slippings-out which have all been “caused” by the storm. You wouldn't necessarily
know
it was the cause, since conveniently there was no
direct
relationship—no straw follicles piercing telephone poles; no Boston Whalers found in trees twenty miles inland with their grinning, dazed owners inside but safe; no talking animals or hearing restored when before it'd been hopeless. But to these hurricane conspirators, the storm is responsible and will go on being responsible for any damn thing they need it to be. Since who's to say they're wrong?

Agency is, of course, what Ann and all these zanies are seeking. She believes—she's told me so—that the hurricane
was a hurricane long before it was a hurricane; when it only
seemed
to be a careless zephyr off the sunny coast of Senegal, which, nonetheless, heated up, brewed around and found its essential self, then headed across the Atlantic to do much mischief. Somehow along the way, due to atmospheric force fields to which Ann was peculiarly susceptible—sitting, a widow in her condo, above the beach in Belmar, looking out at what she thought was a pancake sky and blemish-less horizon—the coming storm ignited within her personal nerve connectivity a big data dump that made her chin start vibrating and her fingers tingle, so that now they won't be still. Ann believes the hurricane, which blew away the Mar-Bel condos like a paper sack, was a bedrock agent. A true thing. “We need to think about calamity in our own personal terms, don't we?” she's said to me imperiously. (I'm not sure why so many people address me with sentences that end in question marks. Am I constantly being interrogated? Does this happen to everyone? I'll tell you. The answer is no.)

“I don't know,” I said. “Maybe.”

Ann is not as scary as this makes her sound. Normally she's a pert, sharp-eyed, athletic, sixty-nine-year-old-with-a-fatal-disease who you'd be happy to know and talk to about most anything—golf, or what a goofball Mitt Romney is. (The Romneys and the Dykstras were social acquaintances in the old, halcyon Michigan days, before Detroit rolled over
and died.) This is the Ann I mostly encounter. Though we're never all that far from bedrock matters. And she has a knack of getting me under her magnifying glass for the sun to bake me a while before I can exit back home to second-marriage deniability.

The Default Self, my answer to all her
true-thing
issues, is an expedient that comes along with nothing more than being sixty-eight—the Default Period of life.

Being an essentialist, Ann believes we all have
selves
, characters we can't do anything about (but lie). Old Emerson believed the same. “. . . A man should give us a sense of mass . . . ,” etc. My mass has simply been deemed deficient. But I believe nothing of the sort.
Character
, to me, is one more lie of history and the dramatic arts. In my view, we have only what we did yesterday, what we do today, and what we might still do. Plus, whatever we think about all of that. But nothing else—nothing hard or kernel-like. I've never seen evidence of anything resembling it. In fact I've seen the opposite: life as teeming and befuddling, followed by the end.

Therefore, where Ann's concerned, to harmonize these dissonants, I mean to come before her
portraying
as close to human
mass
as I'm able—my Default Self—and hope that's acceptable.

The vision of a Default Self is one we've all wrestled with even if we've failed to find it and gone away frustrated. We've
eyed it hungrily, wishing we could figure it out and install it in our lives, like a hair shirt we could get cozy in. Though bottom line, it's not
that
different from a bedrock self, except it's
our
creation, rather than us being
its
. In the first place, where Ann's concerned, I come here sporting my Default Self, wanting to put her at ease and let her feel right about things. She's never going to discover she's been wrong about me all these years. But she could be more comfortable with me and so could I. Second, the Default Self allows me to
try
not to seem the cynical Joe she believes me to be and won't quit trying to prove.
Trying
to cobble up the appearance of a basic self that makes you seem a better, solider person than someone significant suspects you are—
that can count
. It counts as goodwill, and as a draw-down on cynicism, even if you fail—and you don't always—which is the
real
charmed union marriage should offer its participants. Third, the Default Self is just plain easier. As I've said, its requirements are minimal and boiled down in a behavioristic sense. And fourth—which is why it's the tiniest bit progressive—there's always the chance I'll have an epiphany (few as these are) and discover that due to this stripping away and Ann's essentialist rigor,
she'll be proved right
; that I
do
have a mass and a character peeping reluctantly out from behind the arras like Cupid—which is not a bad outcome at all.

The risk of this, of course, is that if I'm found to have
a self and character, Ann will decide I was even more false and uncaring when we were married, and loathe me even more for concealing myself—like Claude Rains, unwinding his bandages to disclose the invisible man. Worse than a mere nothing. Though I would argue that I would be an invisible man who loved Ann Dykstra all there was in me to love, even if she never really believed I was there. In the end, it's hard to win against your ex-wife, which is not new news.

A
GIGANTIC
D
OUGLAS FIR, A-SPARKLE AND A-SPANGLE
with a gold star on top and positioned with geometric precisioning, shines out through the great beveled-glass doors of Carnage Hill. All other side windows are alight with electric candles, like an old New England church. I've steered over to the shadowy side lot to avoid the venal valet boys, who go through your glove box, steal your turnpike change, eat your mints, change the settings on your radio, and drive your car to their girlfriends'—then expect a big tip when they return your car warm and odorous.

The freezing rain, when I get out, has become hard, popping snow pellets, stinging my cheeks and denting my Sonata hood and making it easy to fall down and bust my ass. Back down the hill, through the empty trees toward Mullica Pond, late-day light is surprisingly visible in the low
western sky—a streak of yellow above a stratum of baby blue. New Jersey's famous for its discordant skies. “The devil's beating his wife,” my father used to say when rain fell from a sunny firmament. It reminds me, though, that it's still before six and not midnight. My happy birthday dinner with Sally still lies ahead.

Carrying Ann's cumbersome pillow under-arm in its plastic sleeve, I hurry past the smirking valet twerps, on into the big boisterous, bright-lit foyer with the dazzling humongous Christmas fir scratching the cathedral ceiling, and where all is festive and in a commotion.

The chief selling point of Carnage Hill and all such high-end entrepôts isn't that sick, old, confused, lonely and fed up
don't
exist and aren't major pains; but, given that they are, it's better here. In fact, it's not only better than anywhere you could be under those circumstances, it's better than anywhere you've
ever
been, so that circumstances quit mattering. In this way, being sick to death is like a passage on a cruise ship where you're up on the captain's deck, eating with him and possibly Engelbert Humperdinck, and no one's getting Legionnaires' or being cross about anything. And you never set sail or arrive anywhere, so there're no bad surprises or disappointments about the ports of call being shabby and alienating. There
aren't
any ports of call. This is it.

Tonight there are tons of Christmas visitors strewn
through the public rooms and toward the back out of sight—grandkids teasing grandpaw, married duos checking on the surviving parent, wives visiting staring husbands, a priest sitting with parishioners, offering up Advent benedictions, plus a pitch to leave it all to the church. There's a cheery murmur of voices and soft laughter and dishes tinkling and
oo'
s and
ahh'
s, along with a big fire roaring in a giant fireplace. It could be Yellowstone. A standing sign says a “book group” is meeting in the library, led by a Haddam High English teacher. They're discussing Dickens—what else? I can make out a herd of wheeled walkers and oxy-caddies clustered close around a holly-decked lectern, the aged owners trying to hear better. A wine-and-cheese social's being set up by the big picture window overlooking a pond and another Christmas tree afloat on a little island. Cinnamon/apple-cider odor thickens the atmosphere. Floors are polished. Chandeliers dusted. The Muzak's giving out Andy, singing
hot-digitty, dog-digitty . . .
I always feel I've shrunk two jacket sizes when I come inside—either because I feel “at one” with the wizened residents, or because I loathe it and aim to be as invisible as Claude Rains.

I am of course known here. I often spy old realty clients, though I can usually swerve and not be seen and get down the corridor of the Beth Wessel, where Ann's “flat” is, overlooking yet another decorative pond with real ducks. Though sometimes
I'm trapped by Ann's faux beau, the Philly flatfoot—Buck—who lies in wait for a chance to yak about “Miss Annie” and his stiffy, and what it sounds like when he takes a drug-aided “major whiz” in the visitor's john (like “a fuckin electric drill,” he said last time). I'm hoping with stealth to miss them all.

Though on the good side, I'm relieved finally just to be here. My pelvic pain has all but ceased, and my neck doesn't ache. Sally, who's performing valiant grief-counseling services over in South Mantoloking, attending to hurricane victims who've lost everything, told me last week she's begun feeling “grief undertow,” the very woe she's working hard to rid her clients of. We were lying in bed early one morning, listening to heat tick in the house. Expectancy, I told her, was the hardest part of most difficult duties—from a prostate biopsy to a day in traffic court; and since she was giving of herself so devotedly, the least she could do was put it out of her mind when she was home. The worst dreams I ever had were always worse than the coming events that inspired them. Plus, bad dreams, like most worries, never tell us anything we didn't know and couldn't cope with fine when the lights are on. I should heed my own advice.

“Hi,” a smiling refrigerator of a woman in a large green sports coat says (to me). She is suddenly, unexpectedly, extremely
present
just as I'm halfway past the big tree piled
around with phony gifts, heading for the entry of the Beth Wessel.
Hot-diggity, dog-diggity, Boom!
“Do you have a friend or loved one you're here to visit?” the refrigerator says, happy, welcoming, vividly glad to see me. She's wearing beige trousers, a Santa necktie, and form-fitting, black orthopedic shoes that mean she's on her feet all day and her dogs are probably killing her. She is security—but nothing says so. Though at her size, she could drag the whole, gigantic blazing Christmas tree—assuming it was on fire—all the way to the Great Road by herself. She's not Asian that I can tell.

I am
not
known to her. Which means she's new, or else there's been a “problem” in the Community—possibly an unwanted “guest”—for which measures have had to be taken. I will not be a problem.

“I do,” I say. I give her my own big smile that wants to say that a whole world of things have happened before she came to work today, and it's no fault of hers, but I'm a friendly so let me get on with my piddly-ass business—my pillow, etc.

“Who would that be?” she says, as if she can't wait to find out. Big smile back—bigger than mine. Likely she's a local phys-ed teacher picking up holiday hours before starting two-a-days with the girls' hoops squad over in Hightstown. Wide square face. Big laughing comical mouth. Though tiny, suspicious eyes and cell-block hair.

“Ann Dykstra,” I say. “Down in the Wessel.”

“Miss Annie,” she sings, as if the two of them have been friends forever. Conceivably she's De Tocqueville faculty—Ann's replacement with the golf squad.

A large man with his back to me, inching nearer the wine and cheese layout—which is not yet all the way set up—is Buck Pusylewski. I can see the Grisham novel and the Dave Garroway horn-rims on top of his head where his greasy hair will smudge them. I'm nervous he's going to spot me and come over.

“Whatcha got in
there
,” the big security woman says. She pokes a finger right into the plastic sleeve of the ortho-pillow, making it crackle.

“Pillow,” I say. “I'm bringing it.”

BOOK: Let Me Be Frank With You
5.97Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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