Independence Day (30 page)

Message five is from Ann (strained, businesslike, a tone for the plumber who fixed her pipes wrong). “Frank, call me, please. All right? Use my private number: 203 526–1689. It’s important. Thanks.” Click.

Message six, Ann again: “Frank. Call me please? Anytime tonight, wherever you are—526–1689.” Click.

Message seven, another hang-up.

Message eight, Joe Markham: “We’re on our way to Vermont. So fuck you, asshole. You prick! You try to do—“ Clunk! Good riddance.

Message nine, Joe again (what a surprise): “We’re on our way to Vermont right now. So stick this message up your ass.” Clunk.

Message ten, Sally: “Hi.” A long, thought-organizing pause, then a sigh. “I should’ve been better tonight. I just … I don’t know what.” Pause. Sigh. “But—I’m sorry. I wish you were still here, even if you don’t. Wish, wish, wish. Let’s … umm … Sure. Just call me when you get home. Maybe I’ll come for a visit. Bye-bye.” Clunk.

Except for the last, an unusually unsettling collection of messages for 11:50 p.m.

I dial Ann and she answers immediately.

“What’s going on?” I say, more anxious than I care to sound.

“I’m sorry,” she says in an unsorry-sounding voice. “It’s gotten a little out of hand here today. Paul flipped out, and I thought maybe you could get up here early and take him off, but it’s okay now. Where are you?”

“At the Vince Lombardi.”

“The fence what?”

“It’s on the turnpike.” She has in fact used the facilities here. Years ago, of course. “I can make it in two hours,” I say. “What happened?”

“Oh. He and Charley got into a fracas in the boathouse, about the right way and the wrong way to varnish Charley’s dinghy. He hit Charley in the jaw with an oarlock. I think maybe he didn’t mean to, but it knocked him down. Almost knocked him out.”

“Is he all right?”

“He’s all right. No bones broken.”

“I mean is
Paul
all right?”

A pause for adjustment. “Yes,” she says. “He is. He disappeared for a while, but he came home about nine—which breaks his court curfew. Has he called you?”

“He left me a message.” No need for details: barking, hysterical laughter. (To be great is to be misunderstood.)

“Was he crazy?”

“He just seemed excited. I guessed he was with Stephanie.” Ann and I are of one mind about Stephanie, which is that
their
chemistry is wrong. In our view, for Stephanie’s parents to send her to a military school for girls—possibly in Tennessee—would be good.

“He’s very upset. I don’t really know why.” Ann takes a sip of something that has ice cubes in it. She has changed her drinking habits since moving to Connecticut, from bourbon (when she was married to me) to vodka gimlets, over whose proper preparation Charley O’Dell apparently exercises total mastery. Ann in general is much harder to read these days, which I assume is the point of divorce. Though on the subject of
why now
for Paul, my belief is that on any given day there’re truckloads of good excuses for “flipping out.” Paul, in particular, could find plenty. It’s surprising we all don’t do it more.

“How’s Clary?”

“Okay. They’ve gone to sleep in his room now. She says she wants to look out for him.”

“Girls mature faster than boys, I guess. How’s Charley? Did he get his dinghy waxed right?”

“He has a big lump. Look, I’m sorry. It’s all right now. Where is it you’re taking him again?”

“To the basketball and baseball halls of fame.” This suddenly sounds overpoweringly stupid. “Do you want me to call him?” My son with his own line, a proper Connecticut teen.

“Just come get him like you planned.” She’s ill at ease now, itchy to get off.

“How are you?” Comes to my mind that I haven’t seen her in weeks. Not so long, but long. Though for some reason it makes me mad.

“All right. Fine,” she says wearily, avoiding the personal pronoun.

“Are you spending enough time in skiffs? Getting to see the morning mist?”

“What’re you indicating with that tone?”

“I don’t know.” I actually don’t know. “It just makes me feel better.”

Phone silence descends. Video arcade and Roy Rogers clatter rises and encapsulates me. Another plaid-shirted, blue-jeaned wavy-haired, big-wallet trucker is now waiting midway of the lobby, glomming a sheaf of businessy-looking papers, staring hatchets at me as if I were on his private line.

“Tell me something that’s the truth,” I say to Ann. I have no idea why, but my voice to me sounds intimate and means to ask intimacy in return.

I, however, know the look on Ann’s face now. She has closed her eyes, then opened them so as to be looking in an entirely different direction. She has elevated her chin to stare next at the lacquered ceiling of whatever exquisite, architecturally
sui generis
room she’s occupying. Her lips are pursed in an unyielding little line. I’m actually happy not to see this, since it would shut me up like a truant. “I don’t really care what you mean by that,” she says in an icy voice. “This isn’t a friendly conversation. It’s just necessary.”

“I just wished you had something important to tell me, or something interesting or wholehearted. That’s all. Nothing personal.” I’m fishing for a sign of the argument, the one Paul said she’d had with Charley. Nothing more innocent.

Ann says nothing. So I say meagerly, “I’ll tell
you
something interesting.”

“Not wholehearted?” she says crossly.

“Well …” I, of course, have opened my mouth without knowing what words to bring forth, what beliefs to proclaim or validate, what human condition to hold under my tiny microscope. It’s frightening. And yet it’s what everybody does—learning how you stand by hearing yourself talk. (Locution, locution, locution.)

What I
almost
say is: “I’m getting married.” Though I somehow stop myself after “I’m,” which sounds enough like “Um.” Except it
is
what I want to say, since it announces something important to
do
, and the only reason I don’t say it (other than that it’s not true) is that I’d end up responsible for the story and later have to invent a series of fictitious “subsequent” events and shocking turns of fate to get me off the hook. Plus I’d risk being found out and looking pathetic to my children, who already have reservations about me.

The hillbilly trucker is still glaring at me. He is a tall, hip-sprung guy with depressed cheekbones and beady sunken eyes. Probably he is another lime-cologne devotee. His watchband, I notice, is formed by linked, gold-plated pull-tabs, and he in fact points to the watch face and mouths the words I’
m late
. I, though, simply mouth some nonsense words back, then turn into the stale little semi-cubicle separating me from the other humans.

“Are you still there?” Ann says irritably.

“Umm. Yeah,” my heart whomping once, unexpectedly. I am staring at my undrunk coffee. “I was thinking,” I say, still slightly confused (perhaps I’m still buzzed), “that when you get divorced you think everything changes and you shed a lot of stuff. But I don’t think you shed a goddamn thing; you just take more on, like cargo. That’s how you find out the limits of your character and the difference between
can’t
and
won
V. You might find out you’re a little cynical too.”

“I have to tell you I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about. Are you drunk?”

“I might be. But what I said is still true.” My right eye flutters, along with my heartbeat going bim-bam. I have scared myself.

“Well, who knows,” she says.

“Do you feel like a person who was ever married before?” I wedge my shoulder farther up into my little metal phone coffin for whatever quiet there is.

“I don’t
feel
like I was married,” Ann says, even more irritable. “I was. A long time ago. To you.”

“Seven years ago on the eighteenth,” I say, though all at once there’s the ice-water-down-the-back recognition that I am actually
talking
to Ann. Right now. Rather than doing what I do most all the time—
not
talking to her, or hearing recorded messages of her voice, yet having her on my mind. I’m tempted to tell her how peculiar this feels, as a way of trying to woo her back to me. Though after that, what? Then, loud enough to make me jump out of my shoes,
Boom-boom-boom-ding-ding-ding! Crrraaaaaash!
Somebody in the hellhole video chamber across the concourse has hit some kind of lurid jackpot. Other players—spectral, drugged-looking teens—drift nearer for a gander. “I’m beginning not to feel like I used to feel.” I say this under the noise.

“And how is that?” Ann says. “You mean you can’t feel what it’s like to feel married?”

“Right. Something like that.”

“It’s because you’re
not
married. You should
get
married. We’d all feel better.”

“It’s pretty nice being married to ole Charley, is it?” I’m glad I didn’t blub out I was getting married. I’d have missed this.

“Yes, it is. And he’s not old. And it’s not any of your business. So don’t ask me about it, and please don’t think because I won’t answer you that
that
means anything.” Silence again. I hear her glass tinkle and get set firmly down on some solid surface. “My life’s private,” she says after swallowing, “and it’s not that I can’t discuss it; I
won’t
discuss it. There’s no subject to discuss. It’s just words. You may be the most cynical man in the world.”

“I hope I’m not,” I say, with what feels like an idiotic smile emerging unbidden onto my features.

“You should go back to writing stories, Frank. You quit too soon.” I hear a drawer open and close wherever she is, my mind ablaze with possibility. “You could have everybody saying what you wanted them to, then, and everything would work out perfectly—for you anyway. Except it wouldn’t really be happening, which you also like.”

“Do you think that’s what I want?” Something like this very thought, of course, is what put me to sleep at Sally’s today.

“You just want everything to seem perfect and everybody to seem pleased. And you’re willing to let
seem
equal
be
. It makes pleasing anybody be an act of cowardice. None of this is new news. I don’t know why I’m bothering.”

“I asked you to.” This is a sneak frontal assault on the Existence Period.

“You said to tell you something that was the truth. This is simply obvious.”

“Or reliable. I’d settle for that too.”

“I want to go to sleep. Please? Okay? I’ve had a trying day. I don’t want to argue with you.”

“We’re not arguing.” I hear the drawer open and close again. Back in the gift-shop complex, a man shouts, “I brake for beer,” and laughs like hell.

“Everything’s in quotes with you, Frank. Nothing’s really solid. Every time I talk to you I feel like everything’s being written by you. Even my lines. That’s awful. Isn’t it? Or sad?”

“Not if you liked them.”

“Oh, well …,” Ann says, as if a bright light had flashed somewhere outside a window in an otherwise limitless dark, and she had been moved by its extraordinary brilliance and for a moment become transported. “I guess so,” she says, seemingly amazed. “I’ve just gotten very sleepy. I have to go. You wore me out.” These are the most intimate words she’s addressed to me in years! (I have no idea what might’ve inspired them.) Though sadder than what she thinks is sad is the fact that hearing them leaves me nothing to say, no lines I even can write for her. Moving closer, even slightly, even for a heartbeat, is just another form of storytelling.

“I’ll be there in the morning,” I say brightly.

“Fine, fine,” Ann says. “That’ll be fine, sweetheart.” (A slip of the tongue.) “Paul’ll be glad to see you.” She hangs up before I can even say good-bye.

A
number of travelers have now cycled out of the Vince heading back to the night, awake enough for another hour of driving before sleep or the police catch up. The trucker who’s been fish-eyeing me is now talking to another of his ilk, also wearing a plaid shirt (in green; shirts only available in truck stops). The second guy is gigantic with a huge Milwaukee goiter, red suspenders, a piggy crew cut and an oversize silver-and-gold rodeo-champeen belt buckle to keep his jeans cinched up over his, I’m sure, minuscule private parts. They’re both shaking their heads disgustedly at me. Clearly their business is more important than mine—a 900 number for finding out which of their favorite hookers are working the BP lot on Route 17 north of Suffern. I’m sure they’re Republicans; I probably seem like the most obvious caller to intimidate.

I decide, though, in a moment of discomposure over Ann, to call the Markhams, since my bet is Joe’s all talk about clearing out, and he and Phyllis are right now sitting up stolidly watching HBO, the very thing they lack but yearn for in Island Pond.

The switchboard rings for a long time before it’s answered by a woman who was asleep one moment before and who says Sleepy Hollow so it sounds like “slippery olive.”