"The Lay of the Land" by Richard Ford: a reader's journal (11)

Love as communication

...Which view I share at present. Could be the outcome of many miscommunication years or
the consequence of e-smooching. But it's where I stand these days.

Ford/Frank will give us his take on love, contradictory and candid at times, mostly sarcartic, much like anybody else. This is not a love novel, none of Ford's books are. Love is what got lost in suburban America. The love that is - is a tame affair, a matter of furniture arranging, co-existence, peaceful disposition of days and the writing of a coherent line of words that accounts for the agreement at the base of the relationship. We are made to be together, but we can never be together. The best deal possible comes by communicating: if there is enough of an honest exchange, then nothing more could be asked for. When the big D day comes, we are all alone.

I don't exactly believe this, or at least I live as if I didn't. "Let’s not worry about what tomorrow will amass. Fill my cup again, this night will pass, alas." (Rubaiyat, Omar Kayyam) Frank Bascombe, sitting heavily on his "Permanent Period" will not for his life fill his cup. Happy for sipping.

"It's the kind of shock that makes you realize that life only happens to you and you alone, and that any concept of togetherness, intimacy, union, abiding this and abiding that is a hoot and a holler into darkness." (p. 336)

"Which is to say we practiced the sweet legerdemain of adulthood shared. We formally renounced our unmarried personalities. We generalized the past in behalf of a sleek second-act mentality that stressed the leading edge of life to be all life was. We acknowledged that strong feelings were superior to original hapiness, and promissed never to ask the other if she or he really, really, really loved him or her, in faith that affinity was love, and we had affinity. We stressed nuance and advocated that however we seemed was how we were. We declared we were good in bed, and that lack of intimacy was usually self-imposed. (...)

In other words, we put in practice what the great novelist said about marriage (though he never quite had the genome for it himself). "If I should ever marry", he wrote, "I should pretend to think just a little better of life than I do." In Sally's case and mine, we thought a lot better of life that we ever imagined we could. In the simplest terms, we really, really loved each other and didn't do a lot of looking right or left - which, of course, is the first principle of the Permanent Period." (p.340-341)

On another hand, set of cards, this is the "stuff" you muse about at the beginning of your second.
Because after that, well, love gets beat up pretty hard.


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