Independence Day (72 page)

I, of course, was simply relieved she wasn’t sitting back with her long legs parked on a silken footrest, ordering tins of Beluga caviar and thousand-dollar bottles of champagne and calling up everybody she knew from Beardsville to Phnom Penh and regaling them at length about what a poor shiftless specimen I was—really just pathetic when you got right down to it—and actually comical (something I’d already admitted to), given my idiotic and juvenile attempts to make good. Just such narrowly missed human connections as this can in fact be fatal, no matter who’s at fault, and often result in unrecoverable free fall and a too-hasty conclusion that “the whole goddamn thing’s not worth bothering with or it wouldn’t be so goddamn confusing all the goddamn time,” after which one party (or both) just wanders off and never thinks to look toward the other again. Such is the iffiness of romance.

Sally, however, seemed willing to take a longer look, a deeper breath, blink hard and follow her gut instincts about me, which meant looking for good sides (making me up with the brighter facets out). All of which was damn lucky for me since, standing there by the dark gas station in Long Eddy, I could sense like a faint, sweet perfume in the night the
possibility
of better yet to come, only I had no list of particulars to feel better about, and not much light on my horizon except a keyhole hope to try to
make
it brighter.

And indeed, before I finally climbed back in my car and headed off into the lush night toward Jersey, she began talking at first about whether or not it would ever be possible for
her
to get married after all these years, and then about what kind of permanent epoch might be dawning in
her
life. (Such thoughts are apparently infectious.) She went on to tell me—in much more dramatic tones than Joe Markham had on Friday morning—that she’d had dark moments of doubting her own judgment about many things, and that she worried about not knowing the difference between risking something (which she considered morally necessary) and throwing caution to the winds (which she considered stupid and, I supposed, had to do with me). In several electrifying leaps and connections that made good sense to her, she said she wasn’t a woman who thought other adults needed mothering, and if that’s what I wanted I should definitely look elsewhere; she said that making her up (which she referred to then as “reassembling”) just to make love appealing was actually intolerable, no matter what she’d said yesterday, and that I couldn’t just keep switching words around indefinitely to suit myself but needed instead to accept the unmanageable in others; and finally that while she might understand me pretty well and even like me a lot, there was no reason to think that necessarily meant anything about true affection, which she again reminded me I’d said I was beyond anyway. (These accounted, I’m sure, for the feelings of congestion she experienced early Friday morning and that prompted her call to me while I was in bed snuffling over my Becker and the difference between making history and writing it.)

I told her, raptly watching while the last of the night’s anglers waded back across the ever darker but still brilliant surface of the Delaware, that I once again had no expectations for reassembling her, or for mothering either, though from time to time I might need a facilitator (it didn’t seem necessary to give in on everything), and that I’d thought in these last days about several aspects of an enduring relationship with her, that it didn’t seem at all like a business deal, and that I liked the idea plenty, in fact felt a kind of whirring elevation about her and the whole prospect—which I did. Plus, I had a strong urge to make her happy, which didn’t seem in the least way smooth (or cowardly, as Ann had said), and wished in fact she’d take the train to Haddam the next day, by which time the Markhams and the parade would be in the record books and we could resume our speculations into the evening, lie out in the grass on the Great Lawn of the Institute (where I still had privileges as temporal consultant without portfolio) and watch Christian fireworks, after which we might ignite some sparks of our own (a borrowed idea, but still a good one).

“That all sounds nice,” Sally said from her suite on West Forty-fourth. “It seems reckless, though. Doesn’t it to you? After the other night, when it seemed all so over with?” Her voice suddenly sounded mournful and skeptical at once, which wasn’t the tone I’d exactly hoped for.

“Not to me it doesn’t,” I said out of the dark. “To me it seems great. Even if it
is
reckless it seems great.” (Supposedly I was the one tarred with the “caution” brush.)

“Something about all those things I said to you about myself and about you, and now taking the train down and lying in the grass watching fireworks. It’s suddenly made me feel like I don’t know what I’m getting into, like I’m out of place.”

“Look,” I said, “if Wally shows up, I’ll do the honorable thing, assuming I know what it is or who he is.”

“Well, that’s sweet,” she said. “You’re sweet. I know you’d try to do that. I’m not going to think about Wally showing up anymore, though.”

“That’s a good idea,” I said. “That’s what I’m doing too. So don’t worry about feeling out of place. That’s what I’m here for.”

“That’s an encouraging start,” she said. “It
is
. It’s always encouraging to know what you’re here for.”

And in that way last night it all began to seem promising and doable, if lacking in long-term specifics. I finished our talk by telling her not that I loved her but that I wasn’t beyond affection, which she said she was glad to hear. Then I beat it back down the road toward Haddam as fast as humanly possible.

O
ut in the unshaded center of the Haddam green, I notice all citizens beginning to look up. Young moms with prams and jogger pairs in Lycra tights, cadres of long-haired boys with skateboards on shoulders, men in bright braces wiping sweat off their brows, all gaze into heaven’s vault beyond linden, witch hazel and beech limbs. The Dutch dancers stop their bustle and hurry off the floor, the police and firemen step out of their tent to the grass, seeking to see. Everick and Wardell, Uncle Sam and I (fellow townsman, alone in my car with the sunroof back), each raise eyes to the firmament, while the honky-country music comes to a stop, just as if there were one special moment of portent in this day, to be overseen by some infallible Mr. Big with a knack for coincidence and surprises. Not so far away, still on their practice field, I hear the Haddam band lock down on one sustained note in perfect major-key unison. Then the crowd—as random minglers, they have not precisely
been
a crowd—makes a hushed, suspiring “Ohh” like an assent to a single telepathic message. And suddenly down out of the sky come four men
en parachute!
smoke canisters bracketed to their feet—one red, one white, one blue, one (oddly) bright yellow like a caution to the other three. They for a moment make me dizzy.

The helmeted parachutists, wearing stars ‘n’ stripes, jumpsuits and cumbersome packs binding their torsos and backsides, all come careening to earth within five seconds, landing semi-gracefully with a hop-skip-jump close by the Dutch dance floor. Each man—and I only guess they’re men, though reason would have it they’re not
just
men; conceivably they’re also kidney-transplant survivors, AIDS patients, unwed mothers, ex-gamblers or the children of any of these—each
apparent
man promptly flourishes a rakish hand like a circus performer, does a partly-smoke-obscured but still stylish star turn to the crowd and, after a smattering of stunned and I can only say is sincere and relieved applause, begins strenuously reefing in his silks and lines, and sets about getting the hell on to the next jump, in Wickatunk—all this before my momentary dizziness has really begun to clear. (Possibly I’m more drained than I thought.)

Though it is wonderful: a bright and chancy spectacle of short duration enhancing the day’s modest storage of fun. More of this would be better all around, even at the risk of someone’s chute not opening.

The crowd begins straying apart again, becoming single but gratified minglers. The dancers—skirts bunched in front like frontier women—return to their dance floor, and someone reignites the hillbilly music, with a strutting fiddle and steel guitar out ahead and a throaty female singing, “If you loved me half as much as I loved you.”

I climb out of my car onto the grass and stare at the sky to glimpse the plane the jumpers have leaped free of, some little muttering dot on the infinite. As always, this is what interests me: the jump, of course, but the hazardous place jumped
from
even more; the old safety, the ordinary and predictable, which makes a swan dive into invisible empty air seem perfect, lovely, the one thing that’ll do.
This
provokes butterflies, ignites danger.

Needless to say, I would never consider it, even if I packed my own gear with a sapper’s precision, made friends I could die with, serviced the plane with my own lubricants, turned the prop, piloted the crate to the very spot in space, and even uttered the words they all must utter at least silently as they go—right? “Life’s too short” (or long). “I have nothing to lose but my fears” (wrong). “What’s anything worth if you won’t risk pissing it away?” (Taken together, I’m sure it’s what “Geronimo” means in Apache.) I, though, would always find a reason not to risk it; since for me, the wire, the plane, the platform, the bridge, the trestle, the window ledge—these would preoccupy me, flatter my nerve with their own prosy hazards, greater even than the risk of brilliantly daring death. I’m no hero, as my wife suggested years ago.

Nothing’s up there to see anyway, no low-flying Cessna or Beech Bonanza recircling the drop site. Only, miles and miles high, the silver-glinting needle’s-eye flash of a big Boeing or Lockheed inches its way out to sea and beyond, a sight that on most days would make me long to be anywhere but where I am, but that on this day, with near disaster so close behind me, leaves me happy to be here. In Haddam.

And so I continue my bystander’s cruise around town for the purpose of my own and civic betterment.

A loop through the Gothic, bowery, boxwood-hedged Institute grounds and out the “backs” and around and down onto the Presidents Streets—oak-dappled Coolidge, where I was bopped on the head, wider and less gentrified Jefferson, and on to Cleveland, where the search is under way for signs of history and continuance in the dirt in front of my house and the Zumbros’. Though no one’s digging this morning. A yellow “crime scene” tape has been stretched around two mulberries and the backhoe, and serves to define the orange-clay hole where evidence has been uncovered. I look down and in from my car window, for some reason not wanting to get out but willing to see something, anything, conclusive—my own dwelling being just to starboard. Yet only a cat stands in the open trench, the McPhersons’ big black tom, Gordy, covering up his private business with patience. Time, forward and back, seems suddenly not of the essence on my street, and I ease away having found out nothing, but not at all dissatisfied.

I take a sinuous drive across Taft Lane and up through the Choir College grounds, where it’s tranquil and deserted, the flat brick buildings shut tight and echoless for the summer—only the tennis courts in use by citizens in no humor for a parade.

A slow turn then past the high school, where the sixty-member Hornet band is wandering off the practice field, sweltering red tunics slung over their sweaty shoulders, trombones and trumpets in hand, the brawnier instruments—bass drums, sousaphones, cymbals, a bracketed Chinese gong and a portable piano—already strapped atop their waiting school bus, ready for the short trip to the Shop Rite.

On down Pleasant Valley Road along the west boundary fence of the cemetery, wherein tiny American flags bristle from many graves and my first son, Ralph Bascombe, lies near three of the “original signers,” but where I will not rest, since early this very morning, in a mood of transition and progress and to take command of final things, I decided (in bed with the atlas) on a burial plot as far from here as is not totally ridiculous. Cut Off, Louisiana, is my first choice; Esperance, New York, was too close. Someplace, though, where there’s a peaceful view, little traffic noise, minimum earthly history and where anyone who comes to visit will do so just because he or she means to (nothing on the way to Six Flags or Glacier) and, once arrived, will feel I had my head on straight as to location. Otherwise, to be buried “at home,” behind my own old house and forever beside my forever young and lost son, would paralyze me good and proper and possibly keep me from maximizing my remaining years. The thought would never leave me as I went about my daily rounds of house selling: “Someday, someday, someday, I’ll be right out there….” It would be worse than having tenure at Princeton.

The strongest feeling I have now when I pass along these streets and lanes and drives and ways and places for my usual reasons—to snapshot a listing, dig up a comp for a market analysis, accompany an appraiser to his tasks—is that holding the line on the life we promised ourselves in the Sixties is getting hard as hell. We want to
feel
our community as a fixed, continuous entity, the way Irv said, as being anchored into the rock of permanence; but we know it’s not, that in fact beneath the surface (or rankly all over the surface) it’s anything but. We and it are anchored only to contingency like a bottle on a wave, seeking a quiet eddy. The very effort of maintenance can pull you under.

On the brighter side, and in the way that good news can seem like bad, being a realtor, while occasionally rendering you a Pollyanna, also makes you come to grips with contingency and even sell it as a source of strength and father to true self-sufficience, by insisting that you not give up the faith that people have to be housed and will be. In this way, realty is the “True American profession coping hands-on with the fundamental spatial experience of life: more people, less space, fewer choices.” (This, of course, was in a book I read.)