Two thousand dollars cheap.

I’ve devised a modest guest list: Clarissa, with possibly a new boyfriend; Paul with his significant other, driving in from K.C.; a refound friend from years gone by, widower Wade Arsenault, who’s eighty-something and a strange father-in-law figure to me (being father to an old flame). I’ve also invited two of my men friends from Haddam, Larry Hopper and Hugh Wekkum, good fellows of my own vintage, former charter members of the Divorced Men’s Club and comrades from the bad old days, when we were all freshly singled and at wits’ end to know how to tie our shoes. Unlike me—and maybe wiser—neither Hugh nor Larry has married again. At some point they both realized they never would—just couldn’t find the low-gear pulling power to mount another love affair, couldn’t even imagine kissing women. “I felt like a homeless man groping at a sandwich,”

Larry has confided with dismay. So with no patience or interest in the old dating metronome, he and Hugh figured out they were seeing more of each other than they were of anybody else. And after Hugh had a by-pass, Larry moved him into his big white Stedman House with attached slave quarters on South Comstock. They’ve ended up playing golf every day, and Hugh hasn’t had any more heart flare-ups.

There’s no hanky-panky, they assure me, since both are on blood thinners and couldn’t hanky the first panky even if the spirit was in them.

I’ve also thought about inviting my former wife, Ann Dykstra, now a well-provided widow living, as mentioned (of all places), in Haddam, having purchased back her own former house from me at 116 Cleveland (no commission), a house she’d lived in previously, then aban-30 Richard Ford

doned and sold to me when she married her second husband, Charley O’Dell, and moved to Connecticut, following which I lived there for seven years, then moved to the Shore for my own second try at happiness. Aldous Huxley said—after reading Einstein—that the world is not only stranger than we know but a lot stranger than we can know. I don’t know if Huxley was divorced, but I’m betting he had to be.

Since Sally’s departure in June, and my life-modifying trip to Mayo in August, I’ve spoken with Ann a few times. Nothing more than business. She conducted the house re-resale using the same vicious little lawyer she’d used to divorce me back in ’83, and didn’t come to the closing, to which I’d grinningly brought a bouquet of nasturtiums to commemorate (in a good way) life’s imperial strangeness. But then, one warm evening in September, just as I’d constructed a forbidden martini and was sitting down in the sunroom to watch the campaign coverage on CNN, Ann called up and just said, “So, how are you?” It was as if she was holding a policy on my life and was checking on her investment. We’ve always kept our contacts restricted to kid subjects.

She didn’t understand what Paul was doing in K.C., and wouldn’t discuss the concept that her daughter was a lesbian (which I assume she blames me for). Once before, she’d inquired about my health, I lied, and then we didn’t know what else to say. And to her more recent question about how I was, I lied again that I was “fine.” Then she told me about her mother’s Christmas letter describing trouble with her dental implants, and about her once giving holy hell to Ann’s since-deceased father, for failing to leave Detroit with her in ’72 (when she divorced him) and come enjoy the sunsets in Mission Viejo.

We hung up when that was over.

But. But. Something had been opened. A thought.

Since September, we’ve had coffee once at the Alchemist & Barrister, exchanged calls about the children’s trajectories and plights, gone over house eccentricities only I, as former owner, would know about—furnace warranty, water-pressure worries, inaccurate wiring diagrams. We have not gone into my medical situation, though obviously she’s wise to plenty. I don’t know if she thinks I’m impotent or have continence issues (not that I know of, and no). But she’s exhibited a form of interest.