Let Me Be Frank With You by Richard Ford

back on his level, though unsteady. “I let the machine maintain itself, Arnie.”
    â€œOkay,” Arnie says. “Probably smart.” He’s possibly thinking about his cosmetic work in contrast to peakèd me. New grille. New bumpers. In my view, though, Arnie looks like somebody who used to be Arnie Urquhart. Age and change have left him squirrelly, and unpredictable—to himself. This is what I witness.
    I come to stand beside my Sonata’s front headlamp. I’m Christmas cold. Arnie’s blocking my path back inside now—unless I want to go around and crawl in the passenger door. I’d like to get in and crank up the heat. But I don’t want to seem to want to leave. Arnie—wax-works weirdness and all—is still a man who’s lost his house, endured an insult I haven’t. He’s deserving of a little slack being cut. Our sympathies are most required when they seem least due.
    Fog’s retreated toward the water’s edge, as if the tide change has created a vacuum. A tangy fish stink is all around. I look up through the blue-white mist and can see another Air-Tran jet spiriting upward. I’ve heard it but haven’t registered.
    â€œI need to act quick, I guess,” Arnie says, back to his house and the charade that I’m here for real reasons. “That’s the way, isn’t it?”
    â€œSometimes,” I say, finding the warm hood surface with my hand.
    â€œFish business is the same. ‘Let it sit, you might as well quit. Then you’re in the shit.’”
    I smile, as if that idea sized up all of life. “It’s better than ‘hurry up and wait.’”
    â€œThat’s the old man’s mantra.” Arnie sniffs, looks down at his own spoiled shoes.
    At this small distance of five feet, not looking at him, but letting my eyes roam anywhere but into contact with his, Arnie (in my fervid mind) has magically become not himself, but another boy I also went to Michigan with—Tapper Spitz. I used to bump into Tap in the strangest of places over the years. The Mayo Clinic urology waiting room. The Philadelphia airport cell-phone lot. On the sidewalk outside the My Office bar on Twenty-First and Madison. Tap was likewise a Wolverine puckster. He and Arnie probably knew each other. What did the poet tell us? “All memoryresolves itself in gaze.” It’s much easier at this stressed, empty moment to imagine I’m out here with ole Tapper than that I’m out here with ole Arn. I happen to know Tapman L. Spitz died doing the thing he loved best—para-skiing down the Eiger on his sixty-fifth birthday. RIP ole Tapper.
    â€œMy wife doesn’t like it down here.” Arnie/Tapper snuffles his big, as-yet-unaltered schnoz, then folds his thick arms—not easy in his severely tailored mafia coat. He’s staring again up at his house, as if it was where it belonged. I’m supposed to know he means his new wife, not the nice, plump-pastie Ishpeming girl I met at the closing, who seemed pleased with life. He shakes his head. “She won’t even come down here.”
    â€œA reason to cut it loose,” I say. Tapper’s already sadly fading back where he came from. His service rendered.
    â€œOh yeah.” Arnie’s voice is lonely. He’s still leaning on my car door, blocking me. A gull has spied us and begun a savage, rhythmical screeching. Get off the beach, you assholes! It’s ours! We want it back. You did your worst. BEAT IT! “What’s the most mysterious thing you know, Frank?” Arnie says, and looks speculative, his lacquered cheeks fattened. He’s ready for our conversation to be over, he just doesn’t know how to end it—his brain speeding ahead to thoughts of growing his fish business, luring his diplomat daughter home to run things, getting his young wife to take more interest in his interests, having things work out better than his