Aloft

eight

HERE AT MY SHARED DESK at Parade Travel, the foe is always inertia.

No one mentions it by name, certainly not me, but every trip or vacation I book for my customers is one more small victory for those of us who believe in the causes of motion and transit.

This morning, for instance, I set up a December holiday for Nancy and Neil Plotkin, sending them first on a ten-day cruise of Southeast Asia, ports of call to include Bali, Singapore, and Phuket, where they will disembark and switch to overland on the Eastern Oriental Express for an escorted railway tour of the famous Silk Road, snaking up through Bangkok and to Chiang Mai, after which they'll fly back to Hong Kong for a two-night stay at the venerable Mandarin Oriental, to shop for trinkets and hike Victoria's Peak and take a junk ride across the harbor to the outdoor markets of Kowloon.

Pretty damn nice. The Plotkins, like me, are semi-retired, Nancy now periodically substituting at the middle school where she taught for thirty years, Neil actively managing their own retirement portfolio instead of the institutional mutual fund he ran since Johnson was president. They're pleasant enough people, which is to say typical New Yorkers, charming when they have to be and surprisingly generous and warm when they don't, though instantly skeptical and pit-bullish if in the least pushed or prodded. And they're easy customers to work with (this is the fourth big trip I've arranged for them), not just because they have plenty of time and disposable income and have varied touristical interests, but more that they seem to understand that a primary aspect of traveling is not just the destination and its native delights, but the actual process of getting there, the literal travail, which is innately difficult and laborious but also absolutely essential to create any true sense of journey.

Unlike most customers, who naturally demand the shortest, most direct, pain-free routings, the Plotkins are willing to endure (and so savor, too) the periods of conveyance and transit, even when it's not a fancy ocean liner or antique train. For they don't dread the cramped quarters of capacity-filled coach, they don't mind arranging their own taxi transfers in unfamiliar ports, they don't balk at climbing aboard a rickety locals-only bus in some subtropical shanty-opolis, or an eight-hour layover at always grim Narita. Of course they needn't suffer any of the aforementioned, but rather, as I gather they have in the past, they could buy a package deal and take whatever direct charter to any number of esteemed beaches and deposit themselves on cushy towel-wrapped chaise longues and enjoy plenty enough seven no-brainer days of wincingly sweet piña coladas and a satchel of sexy paperbacks bought by the pound, choosing their own spiny lobsters for dinner and maybe on the last full day taking a back country four-wheeler ride to a secluded freshwater falls, where they might sneak a quick skinny dip beneath the lush canopy of jacaranda and apple palm, all of which I must say is perfectly laudable stuff, and nothing to be ashamed of.

And yet I feel especially eager to get Nancy and Neil's itiner-ary just right, not for the purpose of "challenging" them and making the trip strenuous for its own sake, but to remind them of what it is they're really doing as they jet and taxi about the world, let them feel that special speed and ennui and lag in the bones. In the future there will be no doubt some kind of Star Trek transporter device by which travelers will be beamed to their destinations, so that some Plotkin in the year 3035 might step into a light box in his own living room and appear a few seconds later in a hotel lobby in Osaka or Rome or the Sea of Tranquility, but I think that will be a shame for most save perhaps businesspeople and families with small children, as this instantaneous not-travel will effectively reduce the uncommon out there to the always here, to become like just another room in the house, nothing special at all, so that said Plotkin might not even bother going anywhere after a while.

Nancy and Neil, in the meantime, will indeed bother, arm themselves to the teeth with guidebooks and maps and travel-ogues of those who forged the paths before them, critiquing each other constantly (as they do whenever they show up at my desk) about what routing and accommodations and dining will prove most compelling, take them furthest and farthest, these two Dix Hills stratospheronauts by way of Delancey Street.

They're plucky and sharp and understand at this most bemus-ing time in their lives that above all else they crave action, they need the chase as the thing, and when Neil handed me his credit card to pay for the trip he sighed presciently and moaned sweetly to his wife, "Ah, the miseries ahead."

Lucky you, I wanted to say.

Because in fact I don't know if I myself could manage any of these big trips anymore, as I used to do with (though mostly without) Rita tagging along, this when business at Battle Brothers was humming on autopilot and the kids were both in college and my wanderlust was at its brimming meniscal peak- Back then (not so many years, frighteningly), I would actually plan my next trip during the flights home, carrying along an extra folio of unrelated guidebooks and maps so that I could chart my next possible movements as if I'd already gone, play out scenarios of visited sites and cities, all the traversed topographies, basically string myself along, as it were, on my neon Highlighter felt-tip, to track, say, the Volga or the Yangtze or the Nile. Such planning quickened my heart, it offered the picture-to-be, and I can say with confidence that it was not because I dreaded being home or back in my life. This was not about dread, or regret, or some sickness of loathing. This was not about escape even, or some sentimentalist suppression. I simply wanted the continued promise of lift, this hope that I could in my own way challenge gravity's pull, and feel for whatever moments while touring the world's glories the mystery and majesty of our brief living.

A lot to ask, I admit, from a rough ferryboat ride from Dover to Calais.

And yet, even now, when I don't much travel anymore, and just get up top every so often in my not-so-fleet Donnie (who, I can try to believe now, was never in danger of being manned by Richie Coniglio, whose V-12 Ferrari sits with quiet menace in my garage, like a big cat in the zoo), I will still peer down on this my Island and the shimmering waters that surround and the plotted dots of houses and cars and the millions of people I can't see and marvel how genuinely intimate it all feels, a part of me like it never is on the ground.

And perhaps that's the awful, secret trouble of staying too well put, at least for those of us who live in too-well-put places like this, why we need to keep taking off and touch landing and then taking off again, that over the years the daily proximities (of your longtime girlfriend, or your kids, or your fellow suckers on the job) can grind down the connections to deadened nubs, when by any right and justice they ought only enhance and vitalize the bonds. It's why the recurring fantasy of my life (and maybe yours, and yours) is one of perfect continuous travel, this unending hop from one point to another, the pleasures found not in the singular marvels of any destination but in the constancy of serial arrivals and departures, and the comforting companion knowledge that you'll never quite get intimate enough for any trouble to start brewing, which makes you overflow with a beatific acceptance and love for all manner of humanity. On the other hand, the problem is you end up having all this gushing good feeling 10,000 feet from the nearest warm soul, the only person to talk to being the matter-of-fact guy or gal in the field tower, who might not mean to but whose tight-shorn tones of efficiency and control literally bring you back down.

Theresa, I wish to and should mention now, is in no imminent danger, at least as she characterizes the situation. Although of course I'm relieved, even thrilled, I'm not sure 1100

percent believe her, as she isn't at all willing to go into the same ornate levels of jargony detail that typically mark much of her and Paul's talk, their specialized language whose multihorned relativistic meanings I feel I should but don't much understand.

Thus it worries me that all she'll say to me now, in referring to the neoplasms perhaps growing right along beside her developing child, is that "the whole thing" is "totally manageable," exactly the sort of linguistically lame and conversation-ending phrasing I myself instinctively revert to whenever I'm in a pinch.

Even more unsettling than this is that she has already named the baby (Barthes, after a famous literary critic), a step that clearly signifies her rather strict intention to push through, and to whatever end. Naturally I've tried to extract more detailed information out of Paul, but he, too, has been frustratingly vague and blocking. But I know something is askew. For instance: for the past month now that Theresa and Paul have been back at home I've found their company, though always a pleasure, oddly unstimulating (a modifier I never imagined applying to them), as they've been unusually antic and adolescent when together. When I got home from Parade Travel the other day they were actually wrestling in the family room (fully clothed and nonsexually, thank goodness), and when I wondered aloud whether such activity was advisable they paused for a second and then burst out laughing, as if they'd been smoking weed all afternoon.

But there's a deep seam of mopiness there, too, which becomes apparent whenever one of them is out, the other just heading for their bedroom and the stacks of novels and texts of literary criticism they've brought along and also buy almost daily, this play-fort made of other people's words. I've tried to remain on the periphery, not forcing any issues or criticizing, consciously conducting myself like any other happy soon-to-be-grandfather sporting a solicitous and mild demeanor, though I'm beginning to wonder if I'm doing us any good service, while we all let the time pass, and pass some more, everything swelling unseen. If nothing else I assumed that I would always be included, in the big matters at least, and not simply contracted to wait for my bit part to come up, a small supporting role that I've depended upon over the years for easy entrances and exits but seems awfully skimpy to me now.

Another odd happening is that Paul is cooking up a storm.

Though I'm not complaining here. I never knew him to be a cook, at least not a fancy one. He could always throw together a decent pasta dish or some baked stuffed trout when I once visited them out in their ever-misty coastal Oregon town, but his tastes and skills have evolved impressively in these past few years he's been in the academic world with Theresa (lots of free time, enough money, discerning, always ravenous colleagues).

Theresa, I should mention, has been eating like a grizzly bear during a salmon spawn, being absolutely insatiable whenever she's awake, though lately her hunger seems to have subsided.

This is the one clue that makes me think she's all right, and so okay to be doing what they're doing. Each morning after a huge breakfast of oatmeal and eggs and fruit and pastries, she and Paul will roll out the Ferrari (why the hell not, as I don't like to drive it anyway; the sitting position is a bit too squat for my longish legs and it revs too hotly such that I can't make it do anything but jerk forward in ten-yard bursts) and lay down that fourteen-inch-wide rubber around the county in search of or-ganic meats and vegetables and craft cheeses and breads, foodstuffs Eunice of course has FedExed in daily but that I had no idea could be had out here in Super Shopper land, where there are always nine brands of hot dogs available but only one kind of lettuce (guess which). They only buy what we'll be eating that evening, which works out because the Testarossa doesn't have any trunk space to speak of, only a tiny nook behind the two seats (which, by the way, is just enough room for a couple of tennis racquets). My sole complaint is the might-as-well-eat-at-a-restaurant cost of the supplies, not to mention the premium gasoline they're burning at the rate of a gallon every seven miles, but once you've had seared foie gras with caramelized-shallot-and-Calvados-glace, or wild salmon tartare on homemade wasabi Ry-Krisps, and eaten it right at your own dreary suburban kitchen table where you've probably opened more bottles of ketchup than imported beer, you happily fan out the fresh twenties each morning and utter nary a word, counting yourself lucky that you can tag along, and in an odd way I feel as if we three are moving quite fast through the world, consuming whatever we can.

And yet the trouble pools on our plates. The other morning, while sitting at the kitchen table, with Theresa sleeping in, Paul at the counter mixing a whole-grain batter for pancakes with raspberries, I let down my mug with enough oomph to make the coffee splash up and over onto my Newsday, to which Paul said, "Just another minute, Jerry."

"It's not about the chow," I said.

Paul pretended not to hear me, decanting the oil into the skillet and lighting the burner beneath it.

Since they've moved in and Paul's been cooking with high heat like a pro, the house gets heavy with a savory smoke that makes me think Rita's been around, a redolence all the more dear and confusing and depressing at present, as she's not returned any of my phone messages since the brunch at Richie's two weeks ago. Maybe a guy like me has to figure he's got just a couple chances in this life for full-on love with a woman he's respected every bit as much as physically desired, and if I've really squandered my allotment I probably ought to be hauled off to the woods in back and shot in the name of every woman who was surely meant to enjoy more loving than she got but didn't, mostly because of some yea-saying bobblehead, who semi-tried as hard as he could but always came up short.

"Look, Paul," I said, "it's time to start clueing me in."

"I agree," he answered, carefully ladling in three pancakes.

He put a ramekin of maple syrup in the above-range microwave to warm. "But you know, Jerry, I really don't know anything either."

"Gimme a break, huh?"

"I'm not kidding you," he said.

"Now you're pissing me off."

"Well that's goddamn tough," he said, bang-banging his ladle against the edge of the mixing bowl. The microwave stopped beeping and he popped the door button too hard and it flung open, hitting him in the face. He plucked out the syrup and slammed the door, which popped back out, and so he slammed it again. For a second I thought he might come over and jump me, as I could see him gripping and regripping the spatula; and to tell you the truth I would have been fine with it, not because I wanted a fight but simply to initiate something. I thought maybe his plonking me might loosen the clamps of all this goddamn Eastern restraint ratcheting in on us, which is no doubt an easy lazy pleasure to abide most of the time but is, of late, becoming a kind of torture to me.

But he didn't jump me, and I said, "You must have talked to the doctor, at least."

"Of course I have. A dozen times. But she's only telling me what Theresa allows her to."

"But you're her fiance! It's your baby. This definitely can't be ethical, or Hippocratical, or whatever."

"It's Theresa's call, Jerry, whether I like it or not."

"Well, you can't just sit by. Don't you have rights?"

"What would you have me do, take her to court?"

"Maybe. You could sue her, over her treatment decisions. Or maybe I should do that. You could just threaten to leave her."

"She'd know I was just bluffing," he said. He flipped the pancakes, one by one by one. "Or else she might turn around and leave me."

I didn't answer, because it occurred to me that Theresa could very well do that, if only temporarily. When she was a teenager she only had one boyfriend (that I can remember), a lanky, melancholic, semi-creepy kid who wore a black scarf no matter the weather and wrote science-fictional love poems to her, a few of which I found in the pockets of my old letterman's jacket (which she liked to wear with the sleeves pushed up); for whatever inexplicable reason she was madly in love with the kid, as she'd spontaneously burst into tears at the mere mention of him, regularly enough that before I could even say anything she herself began refusing his phone calls, and because of nothing he did, which made her even more miserable for a while (and him as well, the poor goth neuralgic), but soon enough she'd cured herself of the crying jags and they went steady until she dropped him, she told me later, because she was really tiring of

"his work."

"You know what the doctor finally said to me when I talked to her on Friday?" Paul said, handing me my plate of flapjacks, syrup on the side. "Theresa and I had a bad little fight, so after she went to take a nap, I called. They wouldn't put me through but I pretty much freaked out and the doctor came on. So I gave her a whole speech about responsibility and the benefits of shared knowledge but it was like she didn't hear a word."

"Some lady doctors, you know. ."

"Well, whatever it was. She didn't have time to talk, so she just said that perhaps I ought to consider getting us to couples therapy, if our 'communication levels' weren't where they should be."

"What a superbitch! I hope you told her off."

"Unfortunately, I did. I told her she could go fuck herself."

"Really?"

"I shouldn't have."

"Good for you!"

"It was stupid. She's our doctor. But you know what, Jerry?

She might be right, about our communication."

"What the hell are you talking about? All you two do is talk."

"Yeah," he said wearily, slumping down in the chair. He wasn't eating yet. "But maybe not in any way that counts."

"Let's not get ridiculous here. It's not a great situation, by any stretch. That, and you're someone who's definitely got a reserve of patience and faith in people that's larger than the next guy's."

"You don't have to sugarcoat it, Jerry. I know I'm a pushover."

"You're not!" I told him, firmly holding on to his arm, not letting go until I'd made my point. "You love her, and love her dearly. As her father, I couldn't be happier about how obvious that is. It's all I'd ever worried about for her if you know what mean. Theresa isn't the easiest gig around. Okay, okay, so maybe you could push back a little more, because people like Theresa respond to shoves more than nudges. But if you really can't it's only because you think the world of her. And maybe I'm not the guy who deserves to say it, but there's nothing else of any worth."

Paul then said, "I'm scared to death here, Jerry. You know, I'd give her up now if someone promised me that nothing would happen to her."

"Nothing will. And you're never going to give her up. Just keep busy, like you're doing."

"Me? I can't do anything."

"Is the writing still on pause?"

"It's full stop. I haven't even thought about one line of poetry since the diagnosis, much less written one. I've officially quit the novel I was already not writing. You'd think I'd have all this determination and energy left over to focus on this thing, but I seem to have less and less every minute."

"You're sure cooking a helluva lot."

"Theresa seems like she wants to eat, so it's easy."

He smiled, but then he looked stricken again. He got up.

"You want more?"

"Maybe just one, if you're making some anyway."

"It's no problem."

Paul clicked on the burner, and just then Theresa came padding into the kitchen in her bare feet, wearing summer weight men's pajamas, short-sleeve Black Watch plaid. She crooned, "Morning, Jerry."

"Morning, dear."

She kissed Paul on the mouth, goosing him slightly in the butt. The tired pinch of his eyes seemed to soften. "Those for me?"

"Yeah," I said.

Paul asked, "How many you want?"

"Just two, today. I'm not feeling so hungry."

"I'll make you an extra, just in case."

"Okay. "

And soon enough we were back to our customary places at the kitchen table, Paul and I sitting on either side of Theresa, who's generally been settling down in yours truly's place at the head since they've moved in, the new array of which doesn't feel in the least awkward or wrong. Maybe it's even right, as Paul and I seem ever balanced in our need to glance over constantly at her, to keep a tab on how it's all going down, whether she's eating a little less today than yesterday, which in fact appears the case, though the gleaned quantities must be minus-cule, in our inexact but somehow confident science.

I'm definitely on the warpath, eating everything that comes my way. Unbidden, Paul packs me a lunch on the days I come into the office here at Parade. Yesterday it was some vegetarian maki rolls, today a panini with prosciutto and mozzarella di bu-fala and a tub of roasted sweet peppers sprinkled with extra-virgin olive oil and fresh basil.

Miles Quintana now enters, carrying his own lunch of two bulging fast-food bags, and shoots me a "S' up, bro?"

I S'-up-bro him back. He's a little early for his 3 P.M. to 9 P.M.

shift (I work until 5), and as is customary he'll eat one of his meals now before getting into the routine of checking fares for his clients and greeting the walk-in browsers and booking impulse vacations for the fed-up after-work crowd, then heat up the other bag later in the office microwave, for a quick break/

snack. Being technically still a teenager Miles requires the triple-meat cheeseburger with ultrasized fries and chocolate milkshake value meal, 4000 calories of pure pleasure and doom, though of course none of it appears to be slowing him now, as he's maybe 150 pounds fully optioned in his slick Friday night dancing slacks and wine-red silk shirt and black-and-white bowling-style shoes. At the close of the evening his ever-silent baby-faced buddy Hector will pick him up in his low-riding hi-rev tuner Honda waxed to a mirror finish, and then they'll streak up and down the Northern Parkway dusting bored family men in their factory Audis and Saabs and afterward hit some under-twenty-one club, where they'll pick up unruly rich girls from Roslyn and Manhasset and ferry them to Manhattan for a couple of hours of real drinking and dancing before each taking (if the girls are willing, which they always are) a half-night room at a truckers' motel on the Jersey side of the Lincoln Tunnel. They'll stay until dawn and then eat steak and eggs at a diner before cruising back through the conquered city, to drop the girls off at their parked car before heading back for their mothers' row houses in Spanish Huntington Station.

Not a bad life, if you ask me, and once Miles even suggested tag along sometime, just for the hell of it, but I knew better than to take him up on it, as my presence would certainly obliterate his evening and probably our good working friendship, which depends in part on our mutual view that the other is somehow exotic and thus a little bit glorious.

There's no one here but us (it's slow in the summer, especially in the afternoons, and Chuck the manager is at a travel seminar in Mineola), and so Miles pulls up a chair to my desk and we eat together. I naturally filch a few sticks from his mountain of fries.

"So what's up with our gal Kelly?" Miles says, already halfway through his burger. "Is she ever coming back to work?"

"Maybe today. The plan is today."

"No shit. You talked to her? How is she?"

"She's doing all right," I say, though more wishful than sure.

I had indeed talked to her, at the hospital and then at her place after I brought her back home, but I can't say we conversed, as Kelly was pretty much mum about everything, and after I fetched her some basic groceries she ushered me out with a weak embrace and promised that she would definitely be in touch, which she has not been. So a few days ago I went over to her apartment and spoke with her through her door, which she wouldn't open because she wasn't, as she said, her "pulled-together self," and when I reminded her that I'd seen her plenty of times in all her preablutionary glory she emphatically shouted, "Well, you're not going to see any more of that, Jerry Battle!" The sharp response unnerved me, and I literally stepped back from the door, for a second imagining Kelly with her hair on fire, carving knives in her hands, waiting for me to try something heroic.

Miles says, "I don't see why she tried to off herself."

"She didn't. She's just confused. It's a tough time in her life."

"Doesn't seem so tough to me," Miles says. "She's got a decent job and a nice place to live and she's still pretty good-looking, for an old lady."

"Forty-five isn't old, Miles."

"Sounds old to me."

"It isn't. She's a baby."

"Yeah, sure."

"She is," I say again, insistently enough that Miles actually stops chewing for a second. I tell him, "You have to understand something here, buddy. You've got another twenty-five years before you're that age, so it's hard for you to fathom. But it's going to go quick. Before you even know it, you'll look up and suddenly your buddies will have beer guts and will be getting gray all over and they'll be talking about sex but not in great anticipation, but with dread."

"Now that's some crazy-ass shit, Jerry. You're creeping me out, man."

"I'm not trying to scare you. That'll only be the surface. But what I'm really saying to you, Miles, is that, mostly, you won't change. At least not in the way you think of yourself. You'll stay in a dream, the Miles-dream."

"The what?"

"The Miles-dream. Maybe you'll have more than one. It's like this. You'll have an idea of yourself being a certain age, and for years and years when people ask you'll still think you're twenty-five, or thirty-five, or whatever age that seems right to you because of certain important reasons, because that will be the truth of your feeling inside."

"Oh yeah? So what's the Jerry-dream?"

"I don't know. Maybe I'm thirty-two, thirty-three, something like that."

"What, were you getting a lot of pussy back then?"

"I wouldn't put it that way, exactly."

"Yo, I was just kidding! I'm just fucking with you, man. But hey, you were happy, right?"

"Actually not really too happy, either."

Miles looks somewhat confused, as he should be, because I haven't explained myself very well. To do so I'd have to back up, tell him the whole messy story of Jerry Battle, for all he knows of me is that I work here a few days a week, and that I live in the area, and that I was dating our coworker Kelly for a couple of months before things fell apart; I'd have to tell him all about Rita, and about Theresa and Jack, and then of my marriage to Daisy, the time of which, at least in the beginning, was how I thought of myself for a long, long time, even after she died.

Miles revisits his burger, maybe thinking that the 01' Gringo is finally losing it, and that he ought to just humor me while I'm on the loose out here in the world. Though often enough he hears this kind of midbrow poetic phooey from me, which he never appears to mind. Miles is in fact seriously bright and sensitive beneath his resplendent El Cojones exterior, always telling me about his classes at the community college where he's forever taking a part-time load and working toward no particular degree. He'll take whatever odd course or two strikes his fancy, from Topics in the Internal Combustion Engine to Femi-nist Archaeology to his current favorite, Greatest Hits of the Romantic Poets (I note that I should definitely hook him up with Theresa and Paul, as I'm sure they'd intrigue and delight one another with their varied approaches to all manner of Material and Text), where he says his professor gets downright weepy over "all that natural beauty and shit" in Keats and By-ron and Wordsworth.

0 there is blessing in this gentle breeze, I even overheard Miles say recently to a visiting client, in sealing the deal on a large corporate group trip to the Bahamas.

Miles asks, "So how 'bout now, man? Did the Jerry-dream ever change?"

"I guess not. I just felt that way when I was in my early thirties," I say. "That was it for me."

But of course that's not true. For I am sure, absolutely, that in twenty years (if I'm still around) I'll think of myself as being in this very time, the last Jerry-dream I'll probably ever have.

The strange thing is that maybe I'm having the Jerry-dream right now, too, this prescient sense of the present, this unsettling prenostalgia whose primary effect is to lay down a waxen rime of both glimmer and murk upon everything that is happening with Theresa and Rita and probably very soon with Pop; this is why I'm suddenly hesitant to say anything more to my young friend Miles, because you can reach a point in your life when The Possible promises not so much heady change and opportunity but too frequent rounds of unlucky misery. We want action and intensity, we want the bracing scent of the acrid, but only if it's "totally manageable," which most times it's not.

Then it's just plain woe and trouble, which is apropos of the present moment, as who drives up and parks and now stands outside the office entrance but Kelly Stearns, with no less a per-sonage in tow than the stout little guy and our mutual friend Jimbo, wearing a big gold necklace in the shape of his name and a shiny emerald-colored track suit and thus looking all in all very much like a steroidal leprechaun.

They appear to talk with happy animation, his hands bracing her shoulders, coachlike, though he only comes up to Kelly's chin, and Kelly is no towering Amazon. She nods meekly to his instructions, like they're going over a play at the time-out and she's his ungainly backup center. To my surprise she is all gussied up, in a toffee-colored skirt and blazer and white cotton blouse, and quite possibly looking more glamorous than I've ever seen her before, though not in an entirely fetching way, with her goldenrod locks glazed-tipped and pinned up and off her pale neck, her face powdered and painted more colorfully than usual, and today set off by glittery pendant earrings and a necklace that must surely be costume, given the sizes of the stones. There's also a fat, inulticlustered ring, also not in the least keeping with her style, and I realize that this may prove yet one more instance in which I'll have to partake in a testy social challenge/display with a rival du jour.

I should be perfectly happy for Kelly, as I desperately want to be, but there's something about this new guy that irks me, nothing innately to do with him but whatever he is/does that makes Kelly not quite herself. Maybe our brief love affair wasn't exactly ideal but I know that she never had to change her spots for me, inside or out, I never once asked her to be anything else but who she was, a decorously sweet, affable Southern lady with honey eyes and a broad firm bottom and just enough pluck to soldier through the big messes. She is not someone, I still think, who would take too much OxyContin and try to crash her car into an ER entrance. She is not, I think, someone who would shout and holler through closed doors. She is not, I still hope, a woman who would relinquish her strength and will to anyone, me included, but especially to some Micro-Mafioso (with both a neck and trouser inseam size of 21) who will probably just get harder and meaner the longer they're together. But what do I really know, because the two of them are now kissing in the parking lot like it's VE Day on the Place Charles-de-Gaulle, Jimbo practically dipping her to the ground and laying one on her so long and wet that even Miles has to say, "The little dude's going deep."

When they finally come up for air Jimbo walks her to the entrance and opens the door for her, casting me a scathing look, as if I'm the one who gave her the "pain" pills, and as ridiculous as it is I can't help but glare back at him like we're on WWF

Smackdown or some such, both of us madly flexing the small muscles of the face, The Little Green Giant versus Jerome

"The Bulge" Battle. But it stops there, as he heads back toward his car and makes a call on his cell phone while Kelly walks in, bearing along her usual tutti-frutti scent of hard candies but then, too, more than a hint of his musky aftershave, which sours me. She plunks down her handbag on her side of our double desk.

"Okay, Jerry, I'm here. You can go home now. Please just wait a minute for Jimbo to leave."

"I still have another two hours."

"I'll cover for you."

Miles gives me the bug eyes and mutters, "Got to get to work," and ferries the remains of his lunch back to his desk. His phone rings and he picks it up but he keeps an eye on us as he talks.

"Listen, Kel," I say. "Just hold on. Why don't you sit down and let's talk."

"Let's not bother, please?"

"I know I should have come by your place more, after you left the hospital. I was feeling that way, but then the other day, I guess, you pretty much suggested you wanted privacy."

"That's a real funny way to look at it."

"Maybe it is. Anyway, I'm sorry. I really am."

"Oh, Jerry!" she says. "You don't even know what you're sorry about!"

"Sure I am. I'm sorry about all that's happened."

"And what do you think has happened?"

"Well, for starters, how about the pills, or crashing into the ER, or that ham hock standing out there by the car. ."

"Don't you say a word about him, Jerry. You of all people don't deserve to."

"Okay, fair enough," I say. "But just because you're deciding again that I didn't do right by you last year, doesn't mean we can't talk like we always have, does it? You can despise me a little, but you don't have to hate me forever."

Kelly groans. "You just think everything's your fault, don't you? Well, let me tell you buster, I'm sick of it. Sick of it." She leans over the desk and starts to push at my shoulder and chest.

"I didn't try to hurt myself because of you. I wouldn't do that.

Never ever."

"Fine. Then for God sakes, why?"

"I did it for me, you big dope. Me and me alone."

"That makes no sense at all! Attempting suicide isn't exactly therapy, Kel."

"Maybe it is, when Jerry Battle's involved."

This one stings, and certainly more deeply than she intended, one of those special heavy metal — tipped rounds that penetrate the armor and wickedly bounce around inside, for maximal flesh damage.

"I'm sorry, Jerry. See? You better just lay off."

"I'm not going to lay off, because you're my friend," I say, adding, "Maybe my only friend."

"An ex-girlfriend who can hardly stand the sight of you is your only friend?"

"I know it's pathetic."

"Oh, Jerry," she sighs, heavily, terribly. "I love you sort of and I hope I will always love you sort of but I definitely can't stand you anymore."

This almost soothes, but really it's no great news, for yours truly, and after a brief moment I take gentle hold of her arm and say, "Come on. What do you think things would be like for all of us if you really went through with it?"

"Not so different. And I'm not being sorry for myself. Everyone would be suitably upset. Maybe Chuck would have to find another agent and Jimbo another girlfriend and you'd be down in the dumps for a few days. But like all the bad weather in your life, Jerry, it would quickly pass. Or if it didn't, you'd take up that plane of yours and just fly right above it."

"It's not like that."

"Yes it is."

She looks away from me but I see her eyes are shimmery and as she gasps a little I bring her close, and she hugs me, with Miles flashing a "go for it" hand signal as he jabbers Spanglish into the handset; and although I have to admit that it feels squarely, preternaturally good to hold Kelly once again in all her big-framed honey biscuit-smelling glory, I remind myself not to cling too long or too tightly, lest one (or both) of us gets what would certainly end up being the wrong idea of trying to do something right, which would be emotionally lethal for us, or worse. But Kelly apparently has the same notion, as she pinches me very hard where she was holding me on the love handles, holding and pinching before pushing away. This hurts, and not so good. But just then the metal-framed glass door bangs open and it's Jimbo, still clutching his cell, his pixie face all pinched up and flushed, like he's been holding his breath out there this whole time, and now heading toward me like I was the one clamping off his airway, this mad, mad little missile. A funny sound comes out of Kelly, an airy bleat, and for a nanosecond I can't help but think of a night in Phuket when I was almost killed on a side street by one of those crazy-looking pickup-truck taxis called tuk-tuks, the thing screaming to a stop about three inches from me, and then innocently honking: bleat-bleat And perhaps that is why I don't, or can't, now move, this false sense of (160_ vu, for when Jimbo's pointed shoulder hits me in the gut I am practically giddy with astonishment and wonder for this unusual world, and I am ready to decline.

I decline, Mini-Jim. I really do.

But the next thing I know, Miles and Kelly are pulling the homunculus off me, though not quite in time to spare me a serious new-fashioned "bitch slapping," at least according to Miles. Apparently Jimbo stunned me with the tackle to the solar plexus, knocking the breath out of me, and as he wailed away with his cub paws while straddling my chest, all yours truly was able to manage was to cover up his overrated mug and plead a misunderstanding. After what seemed to me a lethal fifteen rounds but was probably a quarter minute at most, Miles finally got him to desist and drive off (with Kelly) by wielding a Parade Travel paperweight, an etched, solid-glass globe the size of a grapefruit that we sometimes present to our best customers (the Plotkins have one), and yelling in a puffed-up, profanity-laced Spanish. It was as good a language display as I ever heard from him, though probably it was all in the delivery, the ornate hormonal tone, and I must say I felt a warm rush of what was almost parental pride and gratitude from down in my sorry hor-izontal position, hearing his flashy street defense of me. And while I'm sure Tack would have pummeled my assailant silly, I'm pretty certain he would have done so with little of Miles's relish or animation.

WHICH IS NOW PART of what I'm noodling about, as I drive slowly home from Parade, my face tingling and raw, my gut muscles tightly balled and sore, acridity abounding, because when anything squarely intense happens these days I get to thinking about la famiglia, as most people might, though in my case it's not just to count heads and commune in absentia but to wonder in a blood-historical mode about how we got to be the way we are, whether okay or messed-up or deluded or, as usual, just gently gliding by. In this sense maybe I should thank Jimbo for providing some contour to the day, though of course I should ultimately thank myself for being an utterly serviceable, com-panionable boyfriend to a more-fragile-than-it-appears woman like Kelly caught in an eddy of middle life, a combination that meant I was mostly useless and lame. And as. I cross over the ceaselessly roaring Expressway and turn into my aging postwar development just now beginning to look and feel like a genuine neighborhood, the trees finally grown up in a vaulted loom over the weathered ranches and colonials, I wish I could have certain countless moments back again, not for the purpose of doing or fixing or righting anything but instead to be simply there once more, present again, like watching a favorite movie for a third or fourth time, when you focus on different though important things, like that stirring, electric moment in To Kill a Mocking-bird when the upstairs gallery of black folk stand up to honor Atticus Finch after the verdict goes against Tom Robinson, their expressions of epic suffering and dignity laying me low and then more generally instructing me that there are few things in this life as heartbreaking as unexpected solidarity.

A chance for which I'll maybe have once more today, for as I coast down the driveway I see Jack's Death Star — style luxury Blackwood pickup parked to one side of the turnaround, which is a surprise in itself, and boosts my spirits. He rarely comes by like this during the workweek, if ever, and when the garage door curls open I see the Ferrari parked inside, Theresa's and Paul's driving caps tossed on the seats. I tuck the broad-fendered old Chevy snugly in the other bay, the family gas guzzlers at rest, the clan all here except for Rita Reyes, who should have long been Rita Battle, and may yet be Rita Coniglio if yours truly doesn't conjure up some serious voodoo very soon.

The sound of familiar voices echoes from the backyard. I pause for a long moment before stepping around the corner of the house, to listen, I suppose, though I'm not sure for what or why, and I hear Jack explaining something about the prime rate and the state of the economy in the dry unmodulated way he talks about everything having to do with business. Paul asks about home mortgages, whether the rates will be lower in the fall; this is good to hear — they're still planning ahead. While Jack responds I don't hear a peep from Theresa, though, which deflates me a little, for maybe what I was hoping for was to happen upon some easeful sibling exchange, some cheery, smart-alecky shorthand that they'd pepper each other with, to no harm. And I even hoped she wasn't present, but when I step into the back I see that the three of them are there, sitting out beneath the umbrellaed patio table with soft drinks and salsa and chips.

"Hey, what happened to you?" Theresa says, in mid-dip.

"Nothing," I say, all of them examining me. "Why?"

"Looks like you just had an all-day facial," she says, patting her cheeks. "I think maybe I should try that."

"You don't need a thing, sweetheart," Paul tells her. "You're perfect."

"I just never had one, you know."

Jack is the only one drinking a beer, and I murmur that I could use a cold one, to which he dutifully rises and steps inside to the kitchen.

"You do look a little puffy, Jerry," Paul now says, looking at me with concern. Paul can feature the unruffled manner of a seasoned doctor sometimes, a mien he clearly gets from his parents. "You may be allergic to something."

"Dad's allergic to workplaces," Jack says as he returns, with uncharacteristic sharpness, I might add, sounding like his sister in her youth. He hands me an icy bottle, holding two others that must be for him.

"Here you go, old fella. The swelling should go down soon enough."

I look into Jack's eyes and they seem to laugh a little, and suddenly I realize he may in fact be inebriated. This is not at all the usual. I glance at Theresa and she gives the slightest shrug.

I say, "Jack's half right. It's probably all the dust kicked up by the power blowers. I guess after all these years I've finally developed a sensitivity. In our day, we used to rake and then sweep up with gym brooms."

"You mean you had me and the guys raking," Jack says.

"I guess that's true, too. But I did my fair share."

"The noise of those blowers is incredible," Theresa says. "I never realized how loud it is in the suburbs. Paul and I are the only ones here all day, and it seems like the landscapers never quit. Not to mention all the renovation and construction crews.

You're practically the only one on the block not doing work to the house, Jerry."

"Cheers to all the work," Jack says, finishing up his bottle and opening a fresh one. "Every one of those remodels needs new lighting and plumbing fixtures and tiles and cabinetry.

And it's all high-end stuff, exactly our Battle Brothers Excalibur products. How do you think I keep Eunice living in the style to which she's accustomed?"

"I thought it was your style, too."

"It's fine," he answers her, "but I don't need it to be that way."

"I've never seen a house like yours," Paul says. "The kitchen is amazing. I love that folding faucet over the stove, so you can fill the pots right there."

"Eunice got the idea from a show on HGTV. That particular fixture is triple-nickel-plated, from a maker in Northern England. It retails for eighteen hundred. We just won the bid to be the exclusive dealer in the metro area. They supply all the European royalty, including Monaco."

"And now the whole North Shore of the Island," Theresa adds. "Just perfect."

"Hey, if people can afford it, they have a right to whatever they like."

"Well, I don't quite know about that," Theresa autoresponds, but then she somehow thinks better of it, and quickly recasts.

"But hey, Jack, it's no big deal."

"Yeah it is," he says, with an edge. There's a tenor to his voice I don't like, like he's not speaking to his baby sister, like he's never even had one. "I thought everything's a big deal with you. Isn't that what you do for a living? You criticize — excuse me, critique. Every little thing is so critiqued, so critical and important, life or death or purgatory. Everything can mean everything."

Theresa says, "That's in fact a good way of looking at it, though context is also everything "

"Whatever. I believe someone can pay his hard-earned money and buy a faucet he likes and it's perfectly okay if he doesn't think about all the possible injustices and implications of doing so. He doesn't have to think about anything."

"You must really believe that."

"Yeah, I do."

"Okay, then."

Jack says, "Okay what?"

"I said okay," she says, sounding suddenly weary, and not just of the conversation. She has sunglasses on, so I can't see her eyes, but there's a hunch to her shoulders that seems more pronounced than it should in anyone so young.

Jack says, "It's not like you to agree. Why are you agreeing?"

"Hey, hey, guys," Paul says, "we were enjoying the early evening sun here."

"That's right," I say, "let's cut it out now."

Jack says, "Pm in 'the sun' all day, okay, so I don't exactly need to enjoy it like all you people who are retired or might as well be. I came over to talk. But suddenly all the talkers don't want to talk"

Silence, except for the sound of the neighbor's electric waterfall, this blocked old-pisser trickle none of us noticed before.

"I think I need to lie down," Theresa says, getting up. Paul gets up, too, and holds her arm as they step into the house.

"See you later, Jack," Paul says. "We'll be by."

Jack mutters Yeah, Paul, like it's a Scandinavian language, and then downs the rest of his beer in one clean, long gulp.

He rises to leave, too, but I tell him to sit and stay awhile. He does, which is good, but this is again indicative of what sometimes irks me about him, his too-quick compliance, at least to me, no matter the situation. He's definitely been drinking before he got here, being a bit flushed about the cheek and ears and neck, a reaction he doesn't derive from me (I tend to get paler with every glass of jug-decanted Soave), and I wonder if he's doing this every afternoon at 4 o'clock, in some skanky out-of-the-way lounge or the polished wood-paneled men's grill room of his country club. Though this in itself would be neither surprising nor worrisome. In our business you can have a lot of empty time on your hands no matter how numerous and busy the jobs are, especially toward the end of the day when the guys are slowing down and just about to gather the tools and roll everything up into the backs of the trucks, and the clients are no longer so anxious and clingy, when there's just enough of a reason not to go straight home because after a long day of ordering and hollering and assuring and brownnosing you want to talk to someone (including your wife) without having to convince or sell them on anything. Sometimes this means you mostly choose to just sink deeper in the captain's chair of your smoked-glass truck, with not even the radio on. In my prime years with Battle Brothers I'd tell the guys I was going to do an estimate but instead I'd park my work truck in some random neighborhood off Jericho Turnpike and spread a Michelin map on the passenger seat, mentally tracing a slow route from Nice to Turin, every switchback like a sip of a cold one.

But Jack Battle really isn't Jerry Battle, which I should be glad for but am not, at least right now, because if he were perhaps it would be easier to say something to him that I could be sure was tidy and effective, an impartial communication, like a patriarchal Post-it note with simple, useful information (how to make a noose, how to pile up charcoal briquettes), or else something slightly chewier, some charming Taoist-accented aphorism bespeaking the endlessly curious circumstance and befuddlement of our lives.

But like everybody else around here (save maybe Paul) I can't quite help myself, and I say, without any delight, "What the hell is going on with you? I don't get it. With what your sister is going through right now?"

Jack twists the cap off another beer.

"Are you hearing me, Jack?"

He says, "To tell you the truth, Dad, I really shouldn't know.

I should know nothing. Because no one told me."

"Theresa didn't tell you?"

"No, she didn't," he says, roughly setting down the bottle, hard enough that it splashes and foams and spills through the metal mesh of the table. He stands up and shakes his workboots.

"Do you know how I know? I had to hear it from Rosario, who I suppose heard it from Paul. Come on, Dad, what the fuck is that?"

"It's not like them.. "

"You mean it's not like Paul. Your daughter is another story.

Eunice, if you care to know the truth, is furious. The worst part is she really feels like dirt, and I don't blame her. She went all out and threw a big party and offered to throw the wedding reception and now she feels like we're goddamn nobodies in this family."

"I thought they told you, or I would have, right away."

"Well, they didn't. You should have, automatically. Automatically. Paul is one thing, but you."

"I'm sorry," I say. "This won't make you feel any better but I found out mostly by accident, too. And I don't really know what's going on now, because she refuses to go into details. But I think we should give your sister some room here. She's no dummy, and we have to trust her to make the right calls."

"Would you be saying that if I were in her place?"

The question surprises me, both in its sharpness and implied self-criticism, and in the face of it I say (too automatically, perhaps), "Of course I would."

Jack mutters, "Yeah," and drinks some more of his beer.

"You don't think so?"

"Forget it," he says. He gazes out over the backyard, and though I feel like telling him he's being childish, I don't, not just because I only ever get dangerously close to doing such a thing but also because nothing he's saying is off the mark. And for the first time in a very long time I can see he might be genuinely hurt, this indicated by the pursed curl in his lower lip, the slight underbite that he would often feature when he was a boy, when his mother wasn't doing well, and then after she was gone.

"You should let me send the guys over and redo this place,"

Jack suddenly says. "It's getting to be a real dump, you know."

"I wouldn't say that."

"I would," he says, but not harshly, and he's already up out of his chair and out on the lawn. He's standing on the spot where the pool used to be, now just another unruly patch of grass, splotchy and scrubby, the erstwhile beds bordering the pool now unrecognizable as such, with the sod grown over so that they look like ski moguls in the middle of the lawn. All the surrounding trees and shrubs are in need of serious pruning, the brick patio having sunk in several spots and gone weedy in the seams, the yard appearing not at. all like a former professional landscaper's property but rather what a realtor might charitably appraise as "tired" or "in need of updating" or, in fact, if you were really looking hard at the place, a plain old dump.

"Listen," Jack says, gesturing with his long-necked beer, his tone unconsciously clicking into just the right register for what he does, what I call contractor matter-of-fact, assured and fraternal and with just enough of a promise of prickly umbrage to keep most customers at bay. "It wouldn't be a big deal. I'd shave these mounds flat and scrape away the whole surface and lay down fresh sod. Then we'd get into the trees and cull the under-growth and prune up top as well. I'd want to replace all the shrubs by the patio and maybe put in a few ornamental fruit trees over by the driveway, to create a little glade. The patio we'll do in bluestone, finished out with an antique brick apron, to match the siding of the house."

"Sounds pretty nice. But I wouldn't want to tie up a whole crew," I tell him, as I know Battle Brothers would never charge me a dime. "Especially when it seems there's so much work out there."

"It's actually slowed down a bit," he says, sipping his beer.

"Don't worry, we're at a good level now. We can spare a couple guys."

"Maybe I will have you do some work. I've been kicking around the idea of moving to a condo the last couple years, but I don't seem to be doing anything about it."

"Why should you?" Jack says. "The house is paid for, isn't it?

Pop is tucked away and taken care of. You're on Easy Street, Dad. I'd just enjoy the air, if I were you, and make this place nice for yourself. Nothing's in your way."

"Nothing's in your way, either," I tell him.

Jack says, "Nothing but a jumbo mortgage and two kids to send to private day school and a wife with exceptional taste."

"Eunice does like nice things," I say. "But you do, too."

"I go along."

By now I've joined him, and we walk around the inside perimeter of the property, bordered by those overgrown trees, Jack making suggestions to me and jotting notes on the screen of his electronic organizer. He doesn't seem even mildly drunk anymore; it pleases me to think that maybe the work mode en-livens him.

"What about there," I say, referring to the expansive swath in the center of the property. "Just leave it as lawn?"

"I don't know. Maybe you ought to put a pool back in."

"A pool? I don't need to swim anymore."

"Sure, but the kids would love it. Lately I've been wanting to put one in, but there's not enough room at my house for a nice-sized one. If you had a pool back here again, you'd see the kids all the time."

I nod and say, "That'd be good," even though I've already worried that I might not like his kids if I spent a lot of time with them (even if I'll always love them).

"Plus," he says, "maybe Theresa and Paul will move back to Long Island someday, with their kid, or kids."

"I was thinking of that, too."

"Sure. If you wanted, my pool guy could drop in an integrated hot tub for you, right alongside the regular pool. I'd have him install a slide instead of a diving board, though."

"Kids like slides."

"Definitely," Jack says. "I always wanted one."

"Really?" I say. "I never knew that. You should have asked me. I would have gotten you one, no problem."

"I know. I don't know why, but it never occurred to me to ask you. But then, I suppose, it was too late."

"I guess it was," I say, not quite understanding that we're all of a sudden talking about this, about which there's never been any great family prohibition or denial, any great family taboo, but still.

"I bet Mom would have had a blast with a slide," Jack says.

"Maybe," I answer, "but she'd have had to go down with her ring float on."

Jack looks at me like I'm crazy.

"You think?" he says.

"I guess not," I answer, realizing how stupid I must sound, talking about her float. So I say, "Your mother would have done whatever she liked."

"That's why we loved her, right?" Jack says brightly, with just the scantest tinge of edge and irony.

I can only nod, and just stand there with him in the middle of the big patch of messy lawn, and I don't have to try hard to recall how he and Theresa spent most of their time right here (at least up to a certain age), especially in the summer, turning as brown as coconuts as they hopped and raced and climbed atop everything in sight. Every parent says it, but they really were like those tiny tree monkeys you see at the zoo, their faces all eyes and their fingers and limbs impossibly narrow and lithe. They'd be crawling onto and off you and tugging at your shoulders, your ears, then (unlike most primates) leaping with abandon into the pool, even before they learned how to swim, thrashing about half-drowning before I'd pull them out.

And say right now it really was a very decent pool, just what you'd imagine for a solidly middle-class postwar family house, a 20-by-40 inground with a meter-high diving board and nice porcelain tile work around the lip, though after what happened to Daisy and with no one around during the work hours to supervise I decided to have the guys fill it in, which in fact none of us seemed to regret, not even Jack, who was a natural swimmer and the star of the neighborhood club swim team. In fact it amazed me how quickly he got past it all, how intensely he threw himself into his other sports, and to astounding success, in turn becoming socially confident and popular, the tight busy orbits of which allowed him, I suppose, to recover fully, even if these days everyone even half-witted thinks that to be a spurious notion or concept. But I'm not so sure. Maybe the key to returning to normalcy was my quick response, my instant re-newal of our little landscape, that I filled in and bulldozed over the offending site and rolled out perfect new sod that they could at least play upon without a care or thought, if never really frolic in the same way again.

"Tell Theresa I'm sorry," Jack finally says, gathering his things on the patio table, to head out. "I'll call her later, too."

"That would be good," I say, as I walk him to the driveway.

"So what about it?" he says, nodding back to the yard. "I'll send the guys around. But what about the pool?"

We'll see, 1 say to him, or I think I do anyway, and before he steps up into the saddle of his impossibly high-riding vehicle I give him a healthy pat or two on the back, to which my son grunts something satisfyingly low and approving, a clipped rumbling yyup, and I think of how good it is to have both of them here again, regardless of the terms, because (and you know who you are) you can reach a point in your life when it almost doesn't matter whether people love you in the way you'd want, but are simply here, nearby enough, that they just bother at all.