Independence Day (27 page)

“Me too,” I lie.

She gives me the look then. Her features are narrow, her nose is sharp, her chin angular and freckled—a sleek package. She is wearing thin silver earrings and heavy turquoise bracelets. “You
did
say something about Ann—speaking of wives, or former wives.” This is the reason for the look, not my lying about de Tocqueville.

“I only remember dreaming about somebody not getting his insurance premiums paid on time, and then about if it was better to be killed or tortured and then killed.”

“I know what I’d choose.” She takes a sip of wine, holding the round glass in both palms and focusing into the dark that has taken over the beach. New York’s damp glow brightens the lusterless sky. Out on the main drag cars are racing; tires squeal, one siren goes
woop
.

Whenever Sally turns ruminant, I assume she’s brooding over Wally, her long-lost, now roaming the ozone, somewhere amongst these frigid stars, “dead” to the world but (more than likely) not to her. Her situation is much like mine—divorced in a generic sense—with all of divorce’s shaky unfinality, which, when all else fails, your mind chews on like a piece of sour meat you just won’t swallow.

I sometimes imagine that one night right at dusk she’ll be here on her porch, wondering away as now, and up’ll stride ole Wal, a big grin on his kisser, more slew-footed than she remembered, softer around center field, wide-eyed and more pudding-faced, but altogether himself, having suddenly, in the midst of a thriving florist’s career in Bellingham or his textile manufacturer’s life in downstate Pekin, just waked up in a movie, say, or on a ferry, or midway of the Sunshine Bridge, and immediately begun the journey back to where he’d veered off on that long-ago morning in Hoffman Estates. (I’d rather not be present for this reunion.) In my story they embrace, cry, eat dinner in the kitchen, drink too much vino, find it easier to talk than either of them would’ve thought, later head back to the porch, sit in the dark, hold hands (optional), start to get cozy, consider a trek up the flight of stairs to the bedroom, where another candle’s lit—thinking as they consider this what a strange but not altogether supportable thrill it would be. Then they just snap out of it, laugh a little, grow embarrassed at the mutually unacknowledged prospect, then grow less chummy, in fact cold and impatient, until it’s clear there’s not enough language to fill the space of years and absence, plus Wally (aka Bert, Ned, whatever) is needed back in Pekin or the Pacific Northwest by his new/old wife and semi-grown kids. So that shortly past midnight off he goes, down the walkway to oblivion with all the other court-appointed but not-quite dead (not that much different from what Sally and I do together, though I always show up again).

Anything more, of course, would be too complex and rueful: the whole bunch of them ending up on TV, dressed in suits, sitting painfully on couches—the kids, the wives, the boyfriend, a family priest, the psychiatrist, all there to explain what they’re feeling to bleachers full of cakey fat women eager to stand up and say they themselves “would prolly have to feel a lot of jealousy, you know?” if they were in either wife’s place, and really “no one could be sure if Wally was telling the truth about where …” True, true, true. And who cares?

Somewhere on the water a boat neither of us can see suddenly becomes a launch pad for a bright, fusey, sparkly projectile that arcs into the inky air and explodes into luminous pink and green effusions that brighten the whole sky like creation’s dawn, then pops and fizzles as other, minor detonations go off, before the whole gizmo weakens and dies out of view like an evanescing spirit of nighttime.

Invisible on the beach, people say
Ooooo
and
Aaahhh
in unison and applaud each pop. Their presence is a surprise. We wait for the next boomp, whoosh and burst, but none occurs. “Oh,” I hear someone say in a falling voice. “Shit.” “But one was nice,” someone says. “One ain’t enough a-nuthin,” is the answer.

“That was my first official ‘firework’ of the holiday,” Sally says cheerfully. “That’s always very exciting.” Where she’s looking the sky is smoky and bluish against the black. We are, the two of us, suspended here as though waiting on some other ignition.

“My mother used to buy little ones in Mississippi,” I offer, “and let them pop off in her fingers. ‘Teensies,’ she called them.” I’m still leaned amiably on the doorframe, glass dangling in my hand, like a movie star in a celebrity still. Two sips on a mostly empty stomach, and I’m mildly tipsy.

Sally looks at me doubtfully. “Was she very frustrated with life, your Mom?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Well. Somebody might say she was trying to wake herself up.”

“Maybe,” I say, made uncomfortable by thinking of my guileless parents in some revisionist’s way, a way that were I only briefly to pursue it would no doubt explain my whole life to now. Better to write a story about it.

“When I was a little girl in Illinois,
my
parents always managed to have a big fight on New Year’s Eve,” Sally says. “There’d always be yelling and things being thrown and cars starting late at night. They drank too much, of course. But my sisters and I would get terribly excited because of the fireworks display at Pine Lake. And we’d always want to bundle up and drive out and watch from the car, except the car was always gone, and so we’d have to stand in the front yard in the snow or wind and see whatever we could, which wasn’t much. I’m sure we made up most of what we said we saw. So fireworks always make me feel like a girl, which is probably pretty silly. They
should
make me feel cheated, but they don’t. Did you sell a house to your Vermont people, by the way?”

“I’ve got them simmering.” (I hope.)

“You’re very skillful at your profession, aren’t you? You sell houses when no one else sells them.” She rocks forward then back, using just her shoulders, the big rocker grinding the porch boards.

“It’s not a very hard job. It’s just driving around in the car with strangers, then later talking to them on the phone.”

“That’s what my job’s like,” Sally says happily, still rocking. Sally’s job is more admirable but fuller of sorrows. I wouldn’t get within a hundred miles of it. Though suddenly and badly now I want to kiss her, touch her shoulder or her waist or somewhere, have a good whiff of her sweet, oiled skin on this warm evening. I therefore make my way clump-a-clump across the noisy boards, lean awkwardly down like an oversize doctor seeking a heartbeat with his naked ear, and give her cheek and also her neck a smooch I’d be happy to have lead to almost anything.

“Hey, hey, stop that,” she says only half-jokingly, as I breathe in the exotics of her neck, feel the dampness of her scapula. Along her cheek just below her ear is the faintest skim of blond down, a delicate, perhaps sensitive feature I’ve always found inflaming but have never been sure how I should attend to. My smooch, though, gives rise to little more than one well-meant, not overly tight wrist squeeze and a willing tilt of head in my general direction, following which I stand up with my empty glass, peer across the beach at nothing, then clump back to take my listening post holding up the doorframe, half aware of some infraction but uncertain what it is. Possibly even more restrictions are in effect.

What I’d like is not to make rigorous, manly, night-ending love now or in two minutes, but to have
already
done so; to have it on my record as a deed performed and well, and to have a lank, friendly, guard-down love’s afterease be ours; me to be the goodly swain who somehow rescues an evening from the shallows of nullity—what I suffered before my nap and which it’s been my magician’s trick to save us from over these months, by arriving always brimming with good ideas (much as I try to do with Paul or anybody), setting in motion day trips to the
Intrepid
Sea-Air-Space Museum, a canoe ride on the Batsto, a weekend junket to the Gettysburg battlefield, capped off by a balloon trip Sally was game for but not me. Not to mention a three-day Vermont color tour last fall that didn’t work out, since we spent most of two days stuck in a cavalcade of slow-moving leaf-peepers in tour buses and Winnebagos, plus the prices were jacked up, the beds too small and the food terrible. (We ended up driving back one night early, feeling old and tired—Sally slept most of the way—and in no mood even to suffer a drink together when I let her off at the foot of Asbury Street.)

“I made bow ties,” Sally says very assuredly, after the long silence occasioned by my unwanted kiss, during which we both realized we are not about to head upstairs for any fun. “That’s your favorite, correct?
Farfalline
”

“It’s sure the food I most like to
see”
I say.

She smiles around again, stretches her long legs out until her ankles make smart little pops. “I’m coming apart at my seams, so it seems,” she says. In fact, she’s an aggressive tennis player who hates to lose and, in spite of her one leg being docked, can scissor the daylights out of a grown man.

“Are you over there thinking about Wally?” I say, for no good reason except I thought it.

“Wally Caldwell?” She says this as if the name were new to her.

“It was just something I thought. From my distance here.”

“The name alone survives,” she says. “Too long ago.” I don’t believe her, but it doesn’t matter. “I had to give up on that name. He left
me, and
his children. So.” She shakes her thick blond hair as if the specter of Weasel Wally were right out in the dark, seeking admission to our conversation, and she’d rejected him. “What I
was
thinking about—because when I drove all the way to New York today to pick up some tickets, I was also thinking it then—was you, and about you being here when I came home, and what we’d do, and just what a sweet man you always are.”

This is not a good harbinger, mark my words.

“I
want
to be a sweet man,” I say, hoping this will have the effect of stopping whatever she is about to say next. Only in rock-solid marriages can you hope to hear that you’re a sweet man without a “but” following along afterward like a displeasing goat. In many ways a rock-solid marriage has a lot to say for itself. “But what?”

“But nothing. That’s all.” Sally hugs her knees, her long bare feet side by side on the front edge of her rocker seat, her long body swaying forward and back. “Does there have to be a ‘but’?”

“Maybe that’s what I am.” I should make a goat noise.

“A butt? Well. I was just driving along thinking I liked you. That’s all. I can try to be harder to get along with.”

“I’m pretty happy with you,” I say. An odd little smirky smile etches along my silly mouth and hardens back up into my cheeks without my willing it.

Sally turns all the way sideways and peers up at me in the gloom of the porch. A straight address. “Well, good.”

I say nothing, just smirk.

“Why are you smiling like that?” she says. “You look strange.”

“I don’t really know,” I say, and poke my finger in my cheek and push, which makes the sturdy little smile retreat back into my regular citizen’s mien.

Sally squints at me as if she’s able to visualize something hidden in my face, something she’s never seen but wants to verify because she always suspected it was there.

“I always think about the Fourth of July as if I needed to have something accomplished by now, or decided,” she says. “Maybe that was one of my problems last night. It’s from going to school in the summers for so long. The fall just seems too late. I don’t even know late for what.”

I, though, am thinking about a more successful color tour. Michigan: Petoskey, Harbor Springs, Charlevoix. A weekend on Mackinaw Island, riding a tandem. (All things, of course, I did with Ann. Nothing’s new.)

Sally raises both her arms above her head, joins hands and does a slinky yoga stretch, getting the kinks out of everything and causing her bracelets to slide up her arm in a jangly little cascade. This pace of things, this occasional lapse into silence, this unurgency or ruminance, is near the heart of some matter with us now. I wish it would vamoose. “I’m boring you,” she says, arms aloft, luminous. She’s nobody’s pushover and a wonderful sight to see. A smart man should find a way to love her.

“You’re not boring me,” I say, feeling for some reason elated. (Possibly the leading edge of a cool front has passed, and everybody on the seaboard just felt better all at once.) “I don’t mind it that you like me. I think it’s great.” Possibly I should kiss her again. A real one.

“You see other women, don’t you?” she says, and begins to shuffle her feet into a pair of flat gold sandals.

“Not really.”

“What’s ‘not really’?” She picks her wine glass up off the floor. A mosquito is buzzing my ear. I’m more than ready to head inside and forget this topic.

“I don’t. That’s all. I guess if somebody came along who I wanted to see”—“see”: a word I hate; I’m happier with “boff” or “boink,” “roger” or “diddle”—“then I feel like that’d be okay. With me, I mean.”

“Right,” Sally says curtly.

Whatever spirit has moved her to put her sandals on has passed now. I hear her take a deep breath, wait, then let it slowly out. She is holding her glass by its smooth round base.

“I think you see other men,” I say hopefully. Cuff links come to mind.