The Lay of the Land (22 page)

“I don’t know. The election. People get pissed off. Doctors are all Republicans.”

“How’s real estate?”

“Always a good investment. They aren’t making any more of it.” I smile and round my eyes as a gesture of geniality.

Ann sets her Reeboks, toes out, under the bench atop the miserable green turf. She disapproves of my selling houses (Sally loved it, loved it that I think of real estate as related to Keatsian negative capability, with the outcome being not poetry but generalized social good with a profit motive). Ann fell in love with me when I was an aspiring (and failing) novelist, but since then has lived in Connecticut, grown rich and may have no use for negative capability. She may consider selling real estate to be like selling hubcaps on Route 1. She could be a Republican herself, though when I married her, she was a Soapy Williams Democrat.

I step all the way inside the warmed, dazzling, wood-scented room and let the door suck closed behind me. I don’t know where to go or what to do. I need a golf club to hold. Though it’s not so bad in here—unexpectedly satisfying, strangely intimate. We’re at least alone for once.

“I have something I want to say to you, Frank.” Ann leans back against the white wall, which has been recently repainted. She looks straight at me, her pale cheeks tightened and the downward tug at the corners of her mouth signifying importance of an ominous kind. Using my name always means “serious.” I feel my hands and lips spontaneously (I hope invisibly) tremble. I do not need bad news now.

Ann wiggles her sock feet on the phony turf and looks down.

“Great”—my smile my only defense. Maybe it
is
great news. Maybe Ann’s marrying Teddy Fuchs, the gentle-giant math teacher who everybody thought was a queer but was just shy and had to wait (till age sixty) for his camps-survivor mother to pass on. Or maybe Ann’s decided to cash in Charley’s annuity and live on the Costa del Sol. Or maybe she’s figured out a meaningful new way to explain to me what an asshole I am. I’m all ears for any of that. Just nothing medical. I’ve had it with medical.

“Can I tell you a story?” She’s still looking down at her pink sock-lets as if she drew assurance from them.

“Sure,” I say. “I like stories. You know me.” Her gray eyes dart up, warning against familiarity.

“I went into Van Tuyll’s Cleaners the other day to check on a damage claim about a pair of pants they’d stained and hadn’t paid me for. I was mad, and you can’t really sue your dry cleaners over a pair of pants, but I thought of going in the shop and doing something disruptive to punish them. They really aren’t very nice people.”

Bring in some deer urine or maybe set a skunk loose behind the counter. I’ve thought of doing that. Just not a “device.” I haven’t moved an inch from where I’ve been under the too-warm lights.

“Anyway,” Ann says. “When I got to the shop, down that little Grimes Street alley”—fine address for a dry cleaners—“a typed card was taped inside the door that said, ‘We’re closed due to the tragic death of our daughter Jenny Van Tuyll, who lost her life last Saturday in a traffic accident in Belle Fleur. She was eighteen. Our life will never be the same. The Van Tuyll family.’ I actually had to sit down on the edge of the shop window to keep myself from fainting. It just overtook me. That poor Jenny Van Tuyll. I’d talked to her fifty times. She was as sweet as she could be. And that poor family. And there I was, mad about my goddamned Armani pants. It seemed so stupid.” Ann squints at her feet, then raises her eyes to me.

Sad news. But not as bad as “I’ve got a fast-growing encephaloblasty and probably only about a month to keep breathing.” “It’s bad,” I say gravely. Though I think: But you really can’t feel worse about it just because of your Armani pants. They
are
a dry-cleaners. You wouldn’t even know about this if you weren’t already mad at them.

Ann lowers her ocean-gray eyes, then lifts them to me significantly, and all the remembered shock and grief and impatience with me are absent from her gaze. An indoor driving range is an odd place to have this conversation. We have had a child to die, of course—in the very hospital where someone exploded a bomb today. Surely there’s no need to talk about that now. For a while after Ralph’s death, Ann and I met at the grave on his birthday. This being after our divorce. But eventually we just quit.

“Do you wonder, Frank, if when you feel something really forcefully—so forcefully you know it’s true—do you ever wonder if how you feel is just how you feel that particular day and tomorrow it won’t matter as much?”

“No doubt about it,” I say. “It’s a good thing. We need to question our strong feelings, though we still need to be available to feel them. It’s like buyer’s remorse. One day you think if you don’t have a particular house, your whole life’s ruined. Then the next day you can’t imagine why the hell you ever considered it. Though plenty of times people see a house, fall in love with it, buy it, move in and never leave till they get taken out in a box.” For some reason, I’m grinning. I wonder if the video camera that’s pointed at me is operating, since something’s making me uneasy, so that I’m racketing on like Norman Vincent Peale.

Ann has taken her red sunglasses out of her matron-athlete’s hair and carefully folded them while I’m blabbering, as if whatever I’m saying must be endured.

“It’s just hard to know,” I say, and inch back against the door through which I spied Ann a while ago teaching a stern lesson to an innocent Titleist.

“I know I’ve told you this, Frank,” she says, carefully laying her Ray-Bans on the pine seat beside her as a means of shutting me up about buyer’s remorse. “But when Charley was so bad off, and you drove up those times to sit with him in Yale-New Haven, when his real friends got preoccupied elsewhere, that was a very, very excellent thing to have done. For him. And for me.”

It only lasted six weeks; then off he went to heaven. Through his haze, Charlie thought I was someone named Mert he’d known at St. Paul’s. A few times he talked to me about his first wife and about important twelve-meter races he’d attended, and once or twice about his current wife’s former husband, whom he said was “rather sweet at times” but “ineffectual.” “A Big-Ten graduate,” he said, smirking, though he was nutty as a coon. “You couldn’t imagine her ever marrying that guy,” he said dreamily. I told Charley the fellow probably had some good qualities, to which Charley, from his hospital bed, handsome face drained of animation and interest, said, “Oh, sure, sure. You’re right. I’m too tough. Always have been.” Then he said the whole thing over again, and in a few days he died.

Why would I do such a thing? Sit with my ex-wife’s dying husband? Because it didn’t bother me. That’s why. I could imagine someone having to do it to me—a total stranger—and how nice it would be to have someone there you didn’t have to “relate” to. I don’t want to visit the subject again, however, and fold my arms across my chest and look down like a priest who’s just heard an insensitive joke.

“It made me see something about you, Frank.”

“Oh.” Noncommittal. No question mark. I don’t intend asking what it might be, because I don’t care.

“It’s something I think you would’ve said was always true about you.”

“Maybe.”

“I don’t think I’ve always thought so. I might’ve when we were kids. But I quit about 1982.” She picks up her white golf glove and folds it into a small package.

“Oh.”

“You’re a kind man,” Ann says from the team bench.

I blink at her. “I
am
a kind man. I was a kind man in 1982.”

“I didn’t think so,” she says stoically, “but maybe I was wrong.”

I, of course, resent being declared something I’ve always been and should’ve been known to be by someone who supposedly loved me, but who wasn’t smart or patient or interested enough to know it when it mattered and so divorced me, but now finds herself alone and it’s Thanksgiving and I conveniently have cancer. If this is leading to some sort of apology, I’ll accept, though not with gratitude. It could also still be a clear-the-decks declaration before announcing her engagement to oversized Fuchs. Our bond is nothing if not a strange one.

“You can’t live life over again,” Ann says penitently. She smiles up and across at me, as if telling me that I’m kind has gotten something oppressive off her chest. All dark clouds now are parting. For her anyway.

“Yeah. I know.” A pearl of sweat has slid out of my hairline. It’s hot as hell in here. What I’d like to do is leave.

“I didn’t know if you really did know that.” Ann nods, still smiling, her eyes sparkling.

“I understand conventional wisdom,” I say. “I’m a salesman. Placebos work on me.”

Ann’s smile broadens, so that she looks absolutely merry. “Okay,” she says.

“Okay,” I say. “Okay what?” I glance at the tri-podded Sony, useful for showing Lady Linksters hitches in their backswings. “Is that goddamn thing turned on?”

Ann looks up at the black box and actually grins. Many years have elapsed since I’ve seen her so happy. “No. Would you like me to turn it on?”

“What’s going on?” I’m feeling dazed in this fucking oven. It must be what a hot flash feels like. First you get hot; then you get mad.

“I have something to say.” She is solemn again.

“You told me. I’m kind. What else? I accept your apology.” Ungiven.

“I wanted to tell you that I love you.” Both her hands are flat down beside her on the bench, as if she or the bench were exerting an upward force. Her gray eyes have trapped me with a look so intent I may never have seen it before. “You don’t have to do anything about it.” Two small tears wobble out of her eyes, although she’s smiling like June Allyson. Sweat, tears, what next? Ann sniffles and wipes her nose with the side of her hand. “I don’t know if it’s again, or still. Or if it’s something new. I don’t guess it matters.” She turns her head to the side and dabs at her eyes with the heel of her hand. She breathes in big, breathes out big. “I realized,” she says mournfully, “it’s why I came back to Haddam last year. I didn’t really know it, but then I did. And I was actually prepared to do nothing about it. Ever. Maybe just be your friend in proximity. But then Sally left. And then you got sick.”

“Why are you telling me this now?” My mouth’s been ajar. These are not the words I want to say. But the words I want to say aren’t available.

“Because I went to Van Tuyll’s cleaners, and their pretty daughter was dead. And that seemed so unchangeable—dying just blotting things out. And I thought I’d invented ways to be toward you that let me pretend that being mad at you wasn’t changeable, either—or whatever it is. But those ways can be blotted out, too. I guess there are degrees of unchangeableness.
Love
’s a terrible word. I’m sorry. You seem upset. I decided I’d just tell you. I’m sorry if you’re upset.” Ann hiccups, but catches her hiccup in her throat as a little burp, just like Clarissa. “Sorry,” she says.

“Are you just telling me this because you’re afraid I’m going to die, and you’ll feel terrible?”

“I don’t know. You don’t have to do anything about it.” She picks up her sunglasses and puts them back up in her hair. She reaches beneath the bench, produces a pair of brown penny loafers she puts on over her pink socks. She looks around where she’s sitting for something she might be leaving, then stands in the blaring lights, facing me. “My coat’s behind you.” She’s fast receding into the old protocols that she, for one moment, had gotten beyond and out into the open air, where she caught a good whiff and held it in her lungs. The poet promised, “What is perfect love? Not knowing it is not love, some kind of interchange with wanting, there when all else is wanting, something by which we make do.” I’m not making do well at all. Not achieving interchange. I am the thing that is wanting. After so long of wanting.

I turn clumsily, and there is Ann’s jacket on a coat-rack I hadn’t seen, a thin brown rayon-looking short topcoat with a shiny black lining—catastrophically expensive but made to look cheap. I take it off the old-fashioned coat tree and hand it over. Heavy keys swag inside a pocket. Its smell is the sweet powdery scent of womanly use.

“I’ll let you walk me out to my car.” She smiles, putting her brown coat on over her golfing uniform. She moves by, but I am not ready with a touch. She pulls open the air-sucking squash-court door. A breath of cool floods in from the corridor, where it’d seemed warm before. She turns, assesses the room, then reaches beyond me and snaps off the light, throwing us into complete, studdering darkness, closer together than we have been in donkey’s years. My fingers begin to twitch. She moves past me into the shadowy hall. I almost touch the blousy back of her coat. I hear a boy’s voice down the long hall. “You asshole,” the voice says, then laughs—“hee, hee, hee, hee.” A basketball again bounces echoingly on hardwood.
Splat, splat, splat.
A
ker-chunk
of a gym door opening, then closing. A girl’s voice—lighter, sweeter, happier—says, “You give love a bad name.” And then our moment is, alas, lost.

I
t’s only 5:30, but already dead-end nighttime in New Jersey. Nothing good’s left of the day. Heading across the cold, peach-lit parking lot, Ann at first walks slowly, but then picks it up, going briskly along toward her Accord. The sulfur globes atop the curved aluminum stanchions light the damp asphalt but do not warm. All here seems deserted except for our two vehicles side-by-side, though of course we’re still being watched. Nothing goes unobserved on this portion of the planet.

We have said nothing more, though we understand that saying nothing’s the wrong choice. It is for me to declare something remarkable and remarkably important. To add to the sum of our available reality, be the ax for the frozen sea within us, yik, yik, yik, yik. Though I’m for the moment unable to fit my thoughts together plausibly or to know the message I need to get out. Ann and I are on a new and different footing, but I don’t know what that footing might be. The Permanent Period and its indemnifying sureties are in scattered retreat out here in the post-rain De Tocqueville lot. They have sustained too many direct hits for one day and have lost some potency.