Independence Day (28 page)

“Of course.” She nods, staring over the porch banister toward small yellow dots embedded in darkness at an incomprehensible distance. I think again of us Divorced Men, huddled for safety’s sake on our bestilled vessel, staring longingly at the mysterious land (possibly at this very house), imagining lives, parties, cool restaurants, late-night carryings-on we ached to be in on. Any one of us would’ve swum ashore against the flood to do what I’m doing. “I have this odd feeling about seeing other men,” Sally says meticulously. “That I
do
it but I’m not planning anything.” To my huge surprise, though I’m not certain, I think she scoops a tear from the corner of her eye and massages it dry between her fingers. This is why we are staying on the porch. I of course didn’t know she was
actually
“seeing” other men.

“What would you like to be waiting on?” I say, too earnestly.

“Oh, I don’t know.” She sniffs to signify I needn’t worry about further tears. “Waiting’s just a bad habit. I’ve done it before. Nothing, I guess.” She runs her fingers back through her thick hair, gives her head a tiny clearing shake. I’d like to ask about the anchor, ball and chain, but this is not the moment, since all I’d do is find out. “Do you think
you’re
waiting for something to happen?” She looks up at me again, skeptically. Whatever my answer, she’s expecting it to be annoying or deceitful or possibly stupid.

“No,” I say, an attempt at frankness—something I probably can’t bring off right now. “I don’t know what it’d be for either.”

“So,” Sally says. “Where’s the good part in anything if you don’t think something good’s coming, or you’re going to get a prize at the end? What’s the good mystery?”

“The good mystery’s how long anything can go on the way it is. That’s enough for me.” The Existence Period par excellence. Sally and Ann are united in their distaste for this view.

“My oh my oh
my!”
She leans her head back and stares up at the starless ceiling and laughs an odd high-pitched girlish
ha-ha-ha
. “I underestimated you. That’s good. I … never mind. You’re right. You’re completely right.”

“I’d be happy to be wrong,” I say, and look, I’m sure, goofy.

“Fine,” Sally says, looking at me as if I were the rarest of rare species. “Waiting to be proved wrong, though—that’s not exactly taking the bull by the horns, is it, Franky?”

“I never really understood why anybody’d take a bull by its horns in the first place,” I say. “That’s the dangerous end.” I don’t much like being called “Franky,” as though I were six and of indeterminate gender.

“Well, look.” She is now sarcastic. “This is just an experiment. It’s not personal.” Her eyes flash, even in the dark, catching light from somewhere, maybe the house next door, where lamps have been switched on, making it look cozy and inviting indoors. I wouldn’t mind being over there. “What does it mean to you to tell somebody you love them? Or her?”

“I don’t really have anybody to say that to.” This is not a comforting question.

“But if you did? Someday you might.” This inquiry suggests I have become an engaging but totally out-of-the-question visitor from another ethical system.

“I’d be careful about it.”

“You’re always careful.” Sally knows plenty about my life—that I am sometimes finicky but in fact often not careful. More of irony.

“I’d be
more
careful,” I say.

“What would you mean if you said it, though?” She may in fact believe my answer will someday mean something important to her, explain why certain paths were taken, others abandoned: “It was a time in my life I was lucky enough to survive;” or “This’ll explain why I got out of New Jersey and went to work with the natives in Pago Pago.”

“Well,” I say, since she deserves an honest answer, “it’s provisional. I guess I’d mean I see enough in someone I liked that I’d want to make up a whole person out of that part, and want to keep that person around.”

“What does that have to do with being in love?” She is intent, almost prayerful, staring at me in what I believe may be a hopeful manner.

“Well, we’d have to agree that that was what love was, or is. Maybe that’s too severe.” (Though I don’t really think so.)

“It
is
severe,” she says. A fishing boat sounds a horn out in the ocean dark.

“I didn’t want to exaggerate,” I say. “When I got divorced I promised I’d never complain about how things turned out. And not exaggerating is a way of making sure I don’t have anything to complain about.” This is what I tried explaining to smushed-dick Joe this morning. With no success. (Though what can it mean for one’s desideratum to come up twice in one day?)

“You can probably be talked out of your severe view of love, though, can’t you? Maybe that’s what you meant by being happy to be wrong.” Sally stands as she says this, once again raises her arms, wine glass in hand, and twists herself side to side. The fact that one leg is shorter than the other is not apparent. She is five feet ten. Almost my height.

“I haven’t thought so.”

“It really wouldn’t be easy, I guess, would it? It’d take something unusual.” She is watching the beach where someone has just started an illegal campfire, which makes the night for this moment seem sweet and cheerful. But from sudden, sheer discomfort, and also affection and admiration for her scrupulousness, I’m compelled to grab my arms around her from behind and give her a hug and a smoochy schnuzzle that works out better than the last one. She is no longer humid underneath her caftan, where she seems to my notice to be wearing no clothes, and is sweeter than sweet. Though her arms stay limp at her side. No reciprocation. “At least you don’t need to worry how to trust all over again. All that awful shit, the stuff my dying people never talk about. They don’t have time.”

“Trust’s for the birds,” I say, my arms still around her. I live for just these moments, the froth of a moment’s pseudo-intimacy and pleasure just when you don’t expect it. It is wonderful. Though I don’t believe we have accomplished much, and I’m sorry.

“Well,” Sally says, regaining her footing and pushing my cloying arms off in a testy way without turning around, making for the door, her limp now detectable. “Trust’s for the birds. Isn’t it just. That’s the way it has to be, though.”

“I’m pretty hungry,” I say.

She walks off the porch, lets the screen slap shut. “Come in then and eat your bow ties. You have miles to go before you sleep.”

Though as the sound of her bare feet recedes down the hall, I am alone in the warm sea smells mixed with the driftwood smoke, a barbecue smell that’s perfect for the holiday. Someone next door turns on a radio, loud at first, then softer.
E-Z Listn’n
from New Brunswick. Liza is singing, and I myself drift like smoke for a minute in the music: “Isn’t it romantic? Music in the night … Moving shadows write the oldest magic … I hear the breezes playing … You were meant for love … Isn’t it romantic?”

A
t dinner, eaten at the round oak table under bright ceiling light, seated either side of the vase sprouting purple irises and white wisteria and a wicker cornucopia spilling summery legumes, our talk is eclectic, upbeat, a little dizzying. It is, I understand, a prelude to departure, with all memory of languor and serious discussion of love’s particulars off-limits now, vanished like smoke in the sea breeze. (The police have since arrived, and the firemakers hauled off to jail the instant they complained about the beach being owned by God.)

In the candlelight Sally is spirited, her blue eyes moist and shining, her splendid angular face tanned and softened. We fork up bow ties and yak about movies we haven’t seen but would like to (Me—
Moonstruck, Wall Street;
she—
Empire of the Sun
, possibly
The Dead);
we talk about possible panic in the soybean market now that rain has ended the drought in the parched Middle West; we discuss “drouth” and “drought;” I tell her about the Markhams and the McLeods and my problems there, which leads somehow to a discussion of a Negro columnist who shot a trespasser in his yard, which prompts Sally to admit she sometimes carries a handgun in her purse, right in South Mantoloking, though she believes it will probably be the instrument that kills her. For a brief time I talk about Paul, noting that he is not much attracted to fire, doesn’t torture animals, isn’t a bed-wetter that I know of, and that my hopes are he will live with me in the fall.

Then (from some strange compulsion) I charge into realty. I report there were 2,036 shopping centers built in the U.S. two years ago, but now the numbers are “way off,” with many big projects stalled. I affirm that I don’t see the election mattering a hill of beans to the realty market, which provokes Sally to remember what rates were back in the bicentennial year (8.75%), when, I recall to her, I was thirty-one and living on Hoving Road. While she mixes Jersey blueberries in kirsch for spooning over sponge cake, I try to steer us clear of the too-recent past, talk on about Grandfather Bascombe losing the family farm in Iowa over a gambling debt and coming in late at night, eating a bowl of berries of some kind in the kitchen, then stepping out onto the front porch and shooting himself.

I have noticed, however, throughout dinner that Sally and I have continued to make long and often unyielding eye contact. Once, while making coffee using the filter-and-plunger system, she’s stolen a glimpse at me as if to acknowledge we’ve gotten to know each other a lot better now, have ventured closer, but that I’ve been acting strange or crazy and might just leap up and start reciting Shakespeare in pig Latin or whistling “Yankee Doodle” through my butt.

Toward ten, though, we have kicked back in our captain’s chairs, a new candle lit, having finished coffee and gone back to the Round Hill. Sally has bunched her dense hair back, and we are launched into a discussion of our individual self-perceptions (mine basically as a comic character; Sally’s a “facilitator,” though from time to time, she says, “as a dark and pretty ruthless obstructor”—which I’ve never noticed). She sees me, she says, in an odd priestly mode, which is in fact the worst thing I can imagine, since priests are the least self-aware, most unenlightened, irresolute, isolated and frustrated people on the earth (politicians are second). I decide to ignore this, or at least to treat it as disguised goodwill and to mean I, too, am a kind of facilitator, which I would be if I could. I tell her I see her as a great beauty with a sound head on her shoulders, who I find compelling and unsusceptible to being made up in the way I explained earlier, which is true (I’m still shaken by being perceived as a priest). We venture on toward the issue of strong feelings, how they’re maybe more important than love. I explain (why, I’m not sure, when it’s not particularly true) that I’m having a helluva good time these days, refer to the Existence Period, which I have mentioned before, in other contexts. I fully admit that this part of my life may someday be—except for her—hard to remember with precision, and that sometimes I feel beyond affection’s grasp but that’s just being human and no cause for worry. I also tell her I could acceptably end my life as the “dean” of New Jersey realtors, a crusty old bird who’s forgotten more than the younger men could ever know. (Otto Schwindell without the Pall Malls or the hair growing out my ears.) She says quite confidently, all the while smiling at me, that she hopes I can get around to doing something memorable, and for a moment I think again about bringing up the Marine cuff links and their general relation to things memorable, and possibly dropping in Ann’s name—not wanting to seem unable to or as if Ann’s very existence were a reproach to Sally, which it isn’t. I decide not to do either of these.

Gradually, then, there comes into Sally’s voice a tone of greater gravity, some chin-down throatiness I’ve heard before and on just such well-wrought evenings as this, yellow light twiny and flickering, the summer heat gone off, an occasional bug bouncing off the front screen; a tone that all by itself says, “Let’s us give a thought to something a little more direct to make us both feel good, seal the evening with an act of simple charity and desire.” My own voice, I’m sure, has the same oaken burr.

Only there’s the old nerviness in my lower belly (and in hers too, it’s my guess), an agitation connected to a thought that won’t go away and that each of us is waiting for the other to admit—something important that leaves sweetly sighing desire back in the dust. Which is: that we’ve both by our own private means decided not to see each other anymore. (Though “decided” is not the word. Accepted, conceded, demurred—these are more in the ballpark.) There’s plenty of everything between us, enough for a lifetime’s consolation, with extras. But that’s somehow not sufficient, and once that is understood, nothing much is left to say (is there?). In both the long run and the short, nothing between us seems to matter enough. These facts we both acknowledge with the aforementioned throaty tones and with these words that Sally actually speaks: “It’s time for you to hit the road, Bub.” She beams at me through the candle flicker as though she were somehow proud of us, or for us. (For what?) She’s long since taken off her turquoise bracelets and stacked them on the table, moving them here and there as we’ve talked, like a player at a Ouija board. When I stand up she begins putting them on again. “I hope it all goes super with Paul,” she says smilingly.

The hall clock chimes 10:30. I look around as though a closer timepiece might be handy, but I’ve known almost the exact minute for an hour.