Independence Day

6

Up the ink-dark seaboard, into the stillborn, ocean-rich night, my windows open wide for wakefulness: the Garden State, Red Bank, Matawan, Cheesequake, the steep bridge ascent over the Raritan and, beyond, the sallow grid-lights of Woodbridge.

There’s, of course, a ton of traffic. Certain Americans will only take their summer jaunts after dark, when “it’s easier on the engine,” “there’re fewer cops,” “the gas stations lower the rates.” The interchange at Exit 11 is aswarm with red taillights: U-Hauls, trailers, step vans, station wagons, tow dollies, land yachts, all cramming through, their drivers restless for someplace that can’t wait till morning: a new home in Barrington, a holiday rental on Lake Memphrémagog, an awkward reunion at a more successful brother’s chalet at Mount Whiteface — everyone with kids on board and screaming, a Port-a-Crib lashed to the top carry, desert bag harnessed to the front bumper, the whole, damn family belted in so tight that an easy breath can’t be drawn.

And, too, it’s that time of the month — when leases expire, contracts are up, payments come due. Car windows in the turnpike line reveal drawn faces behind steering wheels, frowns of concern over whether a certain check’s cleared or if someone left behind is calling the law to report furniture removed, locks jimmied, garages entered without permission — a license number noted as a car disappears down a quiet suburban street. Holidays are not always festive events.

Cops, needless to say, are out in force. Up ahead of me on the turnpike, blue lights flash far and near as I clear the toll plaza and start toward Carteret and the flaming refinery fields and cooling vats of Elizabeth. I have had, I realize, one glass of Round Hill too many and am now squinting into the shimmer lights and MERGE LEFT arrows, where road repavers are working late under banks of da-brite spots — our highway taxes at work here too.

It would’ve been smart, of course, just to pack Sally in with me, lock the house, activate the alarm, inaugurate a new stratagem for the rescue of collapsing love, since I’m at this moment positive that no matter what decision was entered an hour ago, it’ll never happen that way. Beyond an indistinct but critical point in life (near my own age, to be sure), most of your latter-day resolves fall apart and you end up either doing whatever’s damn well easiest or else whatever you feel strongest about. (These two in fact can get mixed up and cause plenty of mischief.) At the same time it also gets harder and harder to believe you can control anything via principle or discipline, though we all talk as if we can, and actually try like hell. I feel certain, batting past Newark airport, that Sally would’ve dropped everything and come with me if I’d as much as asked. (How this would go over with Ann would be another bridge to cross.) Paul, I’m sure, would’ve thought it was fine. He and Sally could’ve become secret pals in league against me, and who knows what might’ve been in store for the three of us. For starters, I wouldn’t be alone in this traffic-gunk metallurgic air shaft, bound for an empty set of sheets in who knows what motel in who knows what state.

An important truth about my day-to-day affairs is that I maintain a good share of flexibility, such that my personal time and whereabouts are often not of the essence. When poor sweet Clair Devane met her three o’clock at Pheasant Meadow and got pulled into a buzz saw of bad luck, a whole network of alarms and anguish cries bespeaking love, honor, dependency immediately sounded — north to south, coast to coast. Her very moment as a lost human entity was at once seismically registered on all she’d touched. But on any day I can rise and go about all my normal duties in a normal way; or I could drive down to Trenton, pull off a convenience-store stickup or a contract hit, then fly off to Caribou, Alberta, walk off naked into the muskeg and no one would notice much of anything out of the ordinary about my life, or even register I was gone. It could take days, possibly weeks, for serious personal dust to be raised. (It’s not exactly as if I didn’t exist, but that I don’t exist as much) So, if I didn’t appear tomorrow to get my son, or if I showed up with Sally as a provocative late sign-up to my team, if I showed up with the fat lady from the circus or a box of spitting cobras, as little as possible would be made of it by all concerned, partly in order that everybody retain as much of their own personal freedom and flexibility as possible, and partly because I just wouldn’t be noticed that much per se. (This reflects my own wishes, of course — the unhurried nature of my single life in the grip of the Existence Period — though it may also imply that laissez-faire is not precisely the same as independence.)

Where Sally’s concerned, however, I take responsibility for how things went tonight. Since, in spite of other successful adjustments, I have yet to learn to want properly. When I’ve been with Sally for longer than a day — plowing over the Green Mountains, or snug-a-bug in a big matrimonial suite at the Gettysburg Battlefield Colonial Inn, or just sitting staring at oil rigs and trawler lights riding the Atlantic, as we were tonight, what I always think is, Why don’t I love you? — which instantly makes me feel sorry for her and, after that, for myself, which can lead to bitterness and sarcasm or just evenings like tonight, when bruised feelings lurk below surface niceties (though still well above deep feelings).

But what bothers me about Sally — unlike Ann, who still superintends everything about me just by being alive and sharing ineluctable history — is that Sally superintends nothing, presupposes nothing and in essence promises to do nothing remotely like that (except like me, as she admitted she does). And whereas in marriage there’s the gnashing, cold but also cozy fear that after a while there’ll be no me left, only me chemically amalgamated with another, the proposition with Sally is that there’s just me. Forever. I alone would go on being responsible for everything that had me in it; no cushiony “chemistry” or heady synchronicity to fall back on, no other, only me and my acts, her and hers, somehow together — which of course is much more fearsome.

This is the very source of the joint feeling we both had sitting on the dark porch: that we weren’t waiting for anything to happen or change. What might’ve seemed like hollow, ritual acts or ritual feelings between us were, in fact, neither hollow nor ritual, but real acts and honest feelings — not nullity, not at all. That was the way we actually felt tonight at the actual time we felt it: simply present, alone and together. There was nothing really wrong with it. If you wanted to you might call our “relationship” the Existence Period shared.

Obviously what I need to do is simply “cut through,” make clear and understood what it is I do like about Sally (which is damn plenty), give in to whatever’s worth wanting, accept what’s offered, change the loaded question from “Why don’t I love you?” to the better, more answerable “How can I love you?” Though if I’m successful it would probably mean resuming life at about the point, give or take, where a good marriage would’ve brought me, had I been able to last at it long enough.

Past Exit 16W and across the Hackensack River from Giants Stadium, I curve off into the Vince Lombardi Rest Area to gas up, take a leak, clear my head with coffee and check for messages.

The “Vince” is a little red-brick Colonial Williamsburg-looking pavilion, whose parking lot this midnight is hopping with cars, tour buses, motor homes, pickups — all my adversaries from the turnpike — their passengers and drivers trooping dazedly inside through a scattering of sea gulls and under the woozy orange lights, toting diaper bags, thermoses and in-car trash receptacles, their minds fixed on sacks of Roy Rogers burgers, Giants novelty items, joke condoms, with a quick exit peep at the Vince memorabilia collection from the great man’s glory days on the “Six Blocks of Granite,” later as win-or-die Packer headman and later still as elder statesman of the resurgent Skins (when pride still mattered). Vince, of course, was born in Brooklyn, but began his coaching career at nearby Englewood’s St. Cecilia’s, which is why he has his own rest area. (Sportswriting leaves you with such memories as these.)

As there’s a lull at the pumps, I gas up first, then park oh the back forty, among the long-haul trucks and idling buses, and hike across the lot and into the lobby, where it’s as chaotic as a department store at Christmas yet also, strangely, half asleep (like an old-time Vegas casino at 4 a.m.), with its dark video arcade bing-jinging, long lines at the Roy’s and Nathan’s Famous and families walking around semi-catatonically eating, or else sitting arguing at plastic tables full of paper trash. Nothing suggests the 4th of July.

I make my visit to the cavernous men’s room, where the urinals flush the instant you’re done and on the walls, appropriately enough, there’re no pictures of Vince. I pass through the “Express Coffee Only” line at Roy’s, then carry my paper cup over to the phone bank, which as usual is being held hostage by twenty truckers in plaid shirts with big chained-on wallets, all leaning into the little metal phone cubbies, fingers sealing their ears, maundering to someone time zones away.

I wait till one of them hauls up on his jeans and saunters off like a man who’s just committed a secret sex act, then I set up shop and call for my messages, which I haven’t heard since three — nearly nine hours and counting. (My receiver holds onto the gritty warmth of the trucker’s grip as well as the lime-cologne odor from the rest room dispensers, a smell many women must find it possible to get used to.)

Message one (of ten!) is from Karl Bemish: “Frank, yeah. So’s you know. The little Frito Banditos just cruised through. CEY 146. Note that down in case they kill me. Another Mexican’s in the back seat this time through. I phoned the sheriff. Nothing to worry about.” Clunk.

Message two is another call from Joe Markham: “Look, Bascombe. Goddamn it. 259–6834. Call me. 609 area code. We’ll be here tonight.” Clunk.

Message three is a hang-up — undoubtedly Joe, going ballistic and becoming speechless.

Message four, though, is from Paul, in a mood of fierce hilarity. “Boss? Hello dere, boss?” His less than perfect Rochester voice. Someone else’s squeaky laughter is in the background. “If you needs to get laid, crawl up a chicken’s ass and wait!” Louder hilarity, possibly Paul’s girlfriend, the troubling Stephanie Deridder, though also possibly Clarissa Bascombe, his accomplice. “Okay, okay now. Wait.” He’s starting a new routine. This is not very good news. “You insect, you parasite, you worm! It’s Dr. Rection here. Dr. Hugh G. Rection, calling with your test results. It doesn’t look good for you, Frank. Oncology recapitulates ontogeny.” He couldn’t know what this means. “Bark, bark, bark, bark, bark.” This, of course, is very bad, though they’re both laughing like monkeys. Change clicks in a pay phone slot. “Next stop the Black Forest. I’ll have the torte, pleeeezzz. Bark, bark, bark, bark, bark. Make that two, t-o-o, doc-tah.” I hear the sound of the receiver being dropped, I hear them walking away giggling. I wait and wait and wait for them to come back (as though they were really there and I could speak to Paul, as though it wasn’t all recorded hours ago). But they don’t, and the tape stops. A bad call, about which I feel at a complete loss.

Message five is from Ann (strained, businesslike, a tone for the plumber who fixed her pipes wrong). “Frank, call me, please. All right? Use my private number: 203 526–1689. It’s important. Thanks.” Click.

Message six, Ann again: “Frank. Call me please? Anytime tonight, wherever you are—526–1689.” Click.

Message seven, another hang-up.

Message eight, Joe Markham: “We’re on our way to Vermont. So fuck you, asshole. You prick! You try to do—“ Clunk! Good riddance.

Message nine, Joe again (what a surprise): “We’re on our way to Vermont right now. So stick this message up your ass.” Clunk.

Message ten, Sally: “Hi.” A long, thought-organizing pause, then a sigh. “I should’ve been better tonight. I just … I don’t know what.” Pause. Sigh. “But — I’m sorry. I wish you were still here, even if you don’t. Wish, wish, wish. Let’s … umm … Sure. Just call me when you get home. Maybe I’ll come for a visit. Bye-bye.” Clunk.

Except for the last, an unusually unsettling collection of messages for 11:50 p.m.

I dial Ann and she answers immediately.

“What’s going on?” I say, more anxious than I care to sound.

“I’m sorry,” she says in an unsorry-sounding voice. “It’s gotten a little out of hand here today. Paul flipped out, and I thought maybe you could get up here early and take him off, but it’s okay now. Where are you?”

“At the Vince Lombardi.”

“The fence what?”

“It’s on the turnpike.” She has in fact used the facilities here. Years ago, of course. “I can make it in two hours,” I say. “What happened?”

“Oh. He and Charley got into a fracas in the boathouse, about the right way and the wrong way to varnish Charley’s dinghy. He hit Charley in the jaw with an oarlock. I think maybe he didn’t mean to, but it knocked him down. Almost knocked him out.”

“Is he all right?”

“He’s all right. No bones broken.”

“I mean is Paul all right?”

A pause for adjustment. “Yes,” she says. “He is. He disappeared for a while, but he came home about nine — which breaks his court curfew. Has he called you?”

“He left me a message.” No need for details: barking, hysterical laughter. (To be great is to be misunderstood.)

“Was he crazy?”

“He just seemed excited. I guessed he was with Stephanie.” Ann and I are of one mind about Stephanie, which is that their chemistry is wrong. In our view, for Stephanie’s parents to send her to a military school for girls — possibly in Tennessee — would be good.

“He’s very upset. I don’t really know why.” Ann takes a sip of something that has ice cubes in it. She has changed her drinking habits since moving to Connecticut, from bourbon (when she was married to me) to vodka gimlets, over whose proper preparation Charley O’Dell apparently exercises total mastery. Ann in general is much harder to read these days, which I assume is the point of divorce. Though on the subject of why now for Paul, my belief is that on any given day there’re truckloads of good excuses for “flipping out.” Paul, in particular, could find plenty. It’s surprising we all don’t do it more.

“How’s Clary?”

“Okay. They’ve gone to sleep in his room now. She says she wants to look out for him.”

“Girls mature faster than boys, I guess. How’s Charley? Did he get his dinghy waxed right?”

“He has a big lump. Look, I’m sorry. It’s all right now. Where is it you’re taking him again?”

“To the basketball and baseball halls of fame.” This suddenly sounds overpoweringly stupid. “Do you want me to call him?” My son with his own line, a proper Connecticut teen.

“Just come get him like you planned.” She’s ill at ease now, itchy to get off.

“How are you?” Comes to my mind that I haven’t seen her in weeks. Not so long, but long. Though for some reason it makes me mad.

“All right. Fine,” she says wearily, avoiding the personal pronoun.

“Are you spending enough time in skiffs? Getting to see the morning mist?”

“What’re you indicating with that tone?”

“I don’t know.” I actually don’t know. “It just makes me feel better.”

Phone silence descends. Video arcade and Roy Rogers clatter rises and encapsulates me. Another plaid-shirted, blue-jeaned wavy-haired, big-wallet trucker is now waiting midway of the lobby, glomming a sheaf of businessy-looking papers, staring hatchets at me as if I were on his private line.

“Tell me something that’s the truth,” I say to Ann. I have no idea why, but my voice to me sounds intimate and means to ask intimacy in return.

I, however, know the look on Ann’s face now. She has closed her eyes, then opened them so as to be looking in an entirely different direction. She has elevated her chin to stare next at the lacquered ceiling of whatever exquisite, architecturally sui generis room she’s occupying. Her lips are pursed in an unyielding little line. I’m actually happy not to see this, since it would shut me up like a truant. “I don’t really care what you mean by that,” she says in an icy voice. “This isn’t a friendly conversation. It’s just necessary.”

“I just wished you had something important to tell me, or something interesting or wholehearted. That’s all. Nothing personal.” I’m fishing for a sign of the argument, the one Paul said she’d had with Charley. Nothing more innocent.

Ann says nothing. So I say meagerly, “I’ll tell you something interesting.”

“Not wholehearted?” she says crossly.

“Well …” I, of course, have opened my mouth without knowing what words to bring forth, what beliefs to proclaim or validate, what human condition to hold under my tiny microscope. It’s frightening. And yet it’s what everybody does — learning how you stand by hearing yourself talk. (Locution, locution, locution.)

What I almost say is: “I’m getting married.” Though I somehow stop myself after “I’m,” which sounds enough like “Um.” Except it is what I want to say, since it announces something important to do, and the only reason I don’t say it (other than that it’s not true) is that I’d end up responsible for the story and later have to invent a series of fictitious “subsequent” events and shocking turns of fate to get me off the hook. Plus I’d risk being found out and looking pathetic to my children, who already have reservations about me.

The hillbilly trucker is still glaring at me. He is a tall, hip-sprung guy with depressed cheekbones and beady sunken eyes. Probably he is another lime-cologne devotee. His watchband, I notice, is formed by linked, gold-plated pull-tabs, and he in fact points to the watch face and mouths the words I’m late. I, though, simply mouth some nonsense words back, then turn into the stale little semi-cubicle separating me from the other humans.

“Are you still there?” Ann says irritably.

“Umm. Yeah,” my heart whomping once, unexpectedly. I am staring at my undrunk coffee. “I was thinking,” I say, still slightly confused (perhaps I’m still buzzed), “that when you get divorced you think everything changes and you shed a lot of stuff. But I don’t think you shed a goddamn thing; you just take more on, like cargo. That’s how you find out the limits of your character and the difference between can’t and won V. You might find out you’re a little cynical too.”

“I have to tell you I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about. Are you drunk?”

“I might be. But what I said is still true.” My right eye flutters, along with my heartbeat going bim-bam. I have scared myself.

“Well, who knows,” she says.

“Do you feel like a person who was ever married before?” I wedge my shoulder farther up into my little metal phone coffin for whatever quiet there is.

“I don’t feel like I was married,” Ann says, even more irritable. “I was. A long time ago. To you.”

“Seven years ago on the eighteenth,” I say, though all at once there’s the ice-water-down-the-back recognition that I am actually talking to Ann. Right now. Rather than doing what I do most all the time— not talking to her, or hearing recorded messages of her voice, yet having her on my mind. I’m tempted to tell her how peculiar this feels, as a way of trying to woo her back to me. Though after that, what? Then, loud enough to make me jump out of my shoes, Boom-boom-boom-ding-ding-ding! Crrraaaaaash! Somebody in the hellhole video chamber across the concourse has hit some kind of lurid jackpot. Other players — spectral, drugged-looking teens — drift nearer for a gander. “I’m beginning not to feel like I used to feel.” I say this under the noise.

“And how is that?” Ann says. “You mean you can’t feel what it’s like to feel married?”

“Right. Something like that.”

“It’s because you’re not married. You should get married. We’d all feel better.”

“It’s pretty nice being married to ole Charley, is it?” I’m glad I didn’t blub out I was getting married. I’d have missed this.

“Yes, it is. And he’s not old. And it’s not any of your business. So don’t ask me about it, and please don’t think because I won’t answer you that that means anything.” Silence again. I hear her glass tinkle and get set firmly down on some solid surface. “My life’s private,” she says after swallowing, “and it’s not that I can’t discuss it; I won’t discuss it. There’s no subject to discuss. It’s just words. You may be the most cynical man in the world.”

“I hope I’m not,” I say, with what feels like an idiotic smile emerging unbidden onto my features.

“You should go back to writing stories, Frank. You quit too soon.” I hear a drawer open and close wherever she is, my mind ablaze with possibility. “You could have everybody saying what you wanted them to, then, and everything would work out perfectly — for you anyway. Except it wouldn’t really be happening, which you also like.”

“Do you think that’s what I want?” Something like this very thought, of course, is what put me to sleep at Sally’s today.

“You just want everything to seem perfect and everybody to seem pleased. And you’re willing to let seem equal be. It makes pleasing anybody be an act of cowardice. None of this is new news. I don’t know why I’m bothering.”

“I asked you to.” This is a sneak frontal assault on the Existence Period.

“You said to tell you something that was the truth. This is simply obvious.”

“Or reliable. I’d settle for that too.”

“I want to go to sleep. Please? Okay? I’ve had a trying day. I don’t want to argue with you.”

“We’re not arguing.” I hear the drawer open and close again. Back in the gift-shop complex, a man shouts, “I brake for beer,” and laughs like hell.

“Everything’s in quotes with you, Frank. Nothing’s really solid. Every time I talk to you I feel like everything’s being written by you. Even my lines. That’s awful. Isn’t it? Or sad?”

“Not if you liked them.”

“Oh, well …,” Ann says, as if a bright light had flashed somewhere outside a window in an otherwise limitless dark, and she had been moved by its extraordinary brilliance and for a moment become transported. “I guess so,” she says, seemingly amazed. “I’ve just gotten very sleepy. I have to go. You wore me out.” These are the most intimate words she’s addressed to me in years! (I have no idea what might’ve inspired them.) Though sadder than what she thinks is sad is the fact that hearing them leaves me nothing to say, no lines I even can write for her. Moving closer, even slightly, even for a heartbeat, is just another form of storytelling.

“I’ll be there in the morning,” I say brightly.

“Fine, fine,” Ann says. “That’ll be fine, sweetheart.” (A slip of the tongue.) “Paul’ll be glad to see you.” She hangs up before I can even say good-bye.

A number of travelers have now cycled out of the Vince heading back to the night, awake enough for another hour of driving before sleep or the police catch up. The trucker who’s been fish-eyeing me is now talking to another of his ilk, also wearing a plaid shirt (in green; shirts only available in truck stops). The second guy is gigantic with a huge Milwaukee goiter, red suspenders, a piggy crew cut and an oversize silver-and-gold rodeo-champeen belt buckle to keep his jeans cinched up over his, I’m sure, minuscule private parts. They’re both shaking their heads disgustedly at me. Clearly their business is more important than mine — a 900 number for finding out which of their favorite hookers are working the BP lot on Route 17 north of Suffern. I’m sure they’re Republicans; I probably seem like the most obvious caller to intimidate.

I decide, though, in a moment of discomposure over Ann, to call the Markhams, since my bet is Joe’s all talk about clearing out, and he and Phyllis are right now sitting up stolidly watching HBO, the very thing they lack but yearn for in Island Pond.

The switchboard rings for a long time before it’s answered by a woman who was asleep one moment before and who says Sleepy Hollow so it sounds like “slippery olive.”

“Those left, I think,” she says in an achy, light-in-your-eyes voice. “I saw ‘em packin’ their vehicle around nine, I guess. But lemme ring it.”

And in an instant, Joe is on the line.

“Hi, Joe, it’s Frank Bascombe,” I say, arch-cheerful. “Sorry to fall out of touch. I’ve had some family problems I couldn’t get out of.” (My son poleaxed his mother’s hubby with an oarlock, then started barking like a Pomeranian, which has caused us all to drop back a couple of squares.)

“Who do you think this is?” Joe says, obviously gloating to Phyllis, who’s no doubt parked beside him in a swampy TV glow, bingeing on Pringles. I hear a bell ding on Joe’s end and someone jabbering in Spanish. They’re apparently watching boxing from Mexico, which has probably put Joe in a fighting mood. “I thought I told you we were gettin’ out of here.”

“I hoped I’d catch you before you got away, just see if there’re any questions. Maybe you’d made a decision. I’ll call back in the morning if that’s better.” I ignore the fact that Joe has called me an asshole and a prick on my machine.

“We already got another realtor,” Joe says contemptuously.

“Well, I’ve shown you what there is out there that I know about. But the Houlihan house is worth a serious thought. We’ll see some movement there pretty quick if the other agencies are on the case. It may be a good time to make an offer if you thought you wanted to.”

“You’re talking to yourself,” Joe sneers. I hear a bottle clink the rim of a glass, then another glass. “Go, go, go,” I hear him say in a brash voice — obviously to Phyllis.

“Let me talk to him,” she says.

“You’re not going to talk to him. What else do you want to tell me?” Joe says, so I can hear the receiver scrape his dopey goatee. “We’re watching the fights. It’s the last round. Then we’re leaving.” Joe’s forgotten already about the supposed other realtor.

“I’m just checking in. Your message sounded a little agitated.”

“That was three hundred and fifty years ago. We’re seeing a new person tomorrow. We would’ve made an offer six hours ago. Now we won’t.”

“Maybe seeing someone else is a good strategy at this point in time,” I say — I hope — infuriatingly.

“Good. I’m glad you’re glad.”

“If there’s anything I can do for you and Phyllis, you know my number.”

“I know it. Zero. Zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero.”

“In 609. Be sure to tell Phyllis I said good-bye.”

“Bascombe sends you warm greetings, dear,” Joe says snidely.

“Lemme talk,” I hear her say.

“A two letter word ending in 0.” Joe stretches 0 out to a long diphthongal uhhoouu, just the way the bozos do in the Beaver Valley.

“You don’t have to be such a turd,” she says. “He’s doing the best he can.”

“You mean he’s a shithead?” Joe says, partly covering the mouthpiece so I can hear what he’s called me but still pretend not to, and he can say what he pleases but pretend not to have said it. After a certain point, which may be a point I’ve already passed, I don’t give a rusty fuck anymore.

Though their situation is pretty much what I imagined this morning: that they’d enter a terrible trial-by-fire period having to do with their sense of themselves, a period which they’d exit disoriented. Afterward they’d wander in a fog until they reached a point of deciding something, which is when I’d wanted to talk to them. As it is, I’ve called while they’re still disoriented and merely seem decisive. If I’d waited until tomorrow, they’d both be in straitjackets and ready to roll; inasmuch as what’s true for them is true for any of us (and a sign of maturer years): you can rave, break furniture, get drunk, crack up your Nova and beat your knuckles bloody on the glass bricks of the exterior wall of whatever dismal room you’re temporarily housed in, but in the end you won’t have changed the basic situation and you’ll still have to make the decision you didn’t want to make before, and probably you’ll make it in the very way you’d resented and that brought on all the raving and psychic fireworks.

Choices are limited, in other words. Though the Markhams have spent too long in addlebrained Vermont — picking berries, spying on deer and making homespun clothes using time-honored methods — to know it. In a sense, I provide a service somewhat wider in scope than at first it might seem — a free reality check.

“Frank?” Phyllis is now on the line. Bumping and scraping of motel furniture starts in the background, as if Joe were loading it all in the car.

“Still here,” I say, though I’m thinking I’ll give Sally a call. Conceivably I can fly her up to Bradley in the morning, where Paul and I could nab her on the way to the Basketball Hall of Fame, then proceed to Cooperstown in a new-dimensional family modality: divorced father, plus son living in another state and undergoing mental sturm und drang, plus father’s widowed girlfriend, for whom he feels considerable affection and ambiguity, and whom he may marry or else never see again. Paul would view it as right for our times.

“I guess Joe and I have sort of pulled together on this whole thing now,” Phyllis says. Phyllis sounds to me like she’s having to exert physical force to talk, as if she’s being stuffed in a closet or having to squeeze between big rocks. I imagine her in a pink granny gown, her arms plump above the elbows, possibly wearing socks due to unaccustomed air-conditioning.

“That’s just great.” Bing, bing, bingety-bing. Kids are racking up big numbers on the Samurai Showdown across in the arcade. The Vince operates more like a small-town mall than a part-time sports shrine.

“I’m sorry it’s turned out this way after all the work you put in,” she says, somehow and with effort freeing herself from whatever’s restraining her. Possibly she and Joe are arm-wrestling.

“We’ll fight on another day,” I say cheerfully. I’m sure she means to tell me her and Joe’s complex reasoning for changing boats midstream. Though I’m only willing to hear her spiel it out because telling it will make her feel desperate the instant she’s finished. For donkeyish clients like the Markhams, the worst option is having to act on your own advice; whereas letting a paid professional like me tell you what to do is much easier, safer and more comforting, since the advice will always be to follow convention. “Just so you feel like you’ve made the right decision,” I say. I’m still thinking vividly about Sally flying up to meet me: a clear mental picture of her getting in a small plane, in high spirits, carrying an overnight bag.

“Frank, Joe said he could see himself standing in the driveway being interviewed by a local TV reporter,” Phyllis says sheepishly, “and he didn’t want to be that person, not in the Houlihan house.” I must’ve already talked to Joe about my theory of seeing yourself and learning to like it, since he’s now claimed it as his own patented wisdom. Joe has apparently left the room.

“What was he being interviewed about?” I say.

“That didn’t matter, Frank. It was the whole situation.”

Outside the glass doors in the orange-lit parking lot, a big gold-and-green cruiser bus pulls past the entrance, Eureka written on its side in lavish, curving scripted letters. I’ve seen these buses while driving to Sally’s via the Garden State. They’re usually crammed with schnockered Canucks headed for Atlantic City to gamble at Trump Castle. They motor straight through, arrive at 1 a.m., gamble forty-eight hours without cease (eats and drinks on the cuff), then hustle back on board and sleep the whole way back to Trois-Rivières, arriving in time for half a day’s work on Monday. Someone’s idea of fun. I’d like to get on my way before a crew of them comes storming in.

Phyllis, though, has won a round, somehow letting Joe convince himself he’s the bad-tempered, tight-fisted old noncompromiser who put the ki-bosh on the Houlihan house. “We also feel, Frank,” Phyllis drones, “and I feel this as strongly as Joe, that we don’t want to be bossed around by a false economy.”

“Which economy is that?” I say.

“The housing one. If we don’t get in now, it could be better later.”

“Well, that’s true. You never get in the river the same place twice,” I say dully. “I’m curious, though, if you know where you’re going to live by the time school starts.”

“Uh-huh,” Phyllis says competently. “We think if worse comes to worst, Joe can rent a bachelor place near his work and I can stay on temporarily in Island Pond. Sonja can go right on with her friends in school. We plan to talk to the other relator about that.” Phyllis actually says “relator,” something I’ve never heard her say, indicating to me she’s reverting to a previous personality matrix — more desperate, but more calculating (also not unusual).

“Well, that’s all pretty sound reasoning,” I say.

“Do you think that, really?” Phyllis says, undisguised fear suddenly working through her voice like a pitchfork. “Joe says he didn’t have a feeling anything significant ever happened in any of the places you showed us. But I wasn’t sure.”

“I wonder what he had in mind there?” I say. Possibly a celebrity murder? Or the discovery of a new solar system from an attic-window telescope?

“Well, he thinks if we’re leaving Vermont we should be moving into a sphere of more important events that would bring us both up in some way. The places you showed us he didn’t think did that. Your houses might be better for someone else, maybe.”

“They aren’t my houses, Phyllis. They belong to other people. I just sell them. Plenty of people do okay in them.”

“I’m sure,” Phyllis says glumly. “But you know what I mean.”

“Not really,” I say. Joe’s theory of significant events suggests to me he’s lost his new finger-hold on sanction. Though I’m not interested. If Joe rents a little dépendance in Manalapan, and Phyllis finds “meaningful” work substituting in the Island Pond alternative crafts school, gets into a new “paper group” with a cadre of acid-tongued but spiritually supportive women friends, while Sonja makes the pep squad at Lyndon Academy, marriage Markham-style will be a dead letter by Turkey Day. Which is the real issue here, of course (a pro-founder text runs beneath all realty decisions): Is being together worth the unbelievable horseshit required to satisfy the other’s needs? Or would it just be more fun to go it alone? “Looking at houses is a pretty good test of what you’re all about, Phyllis,” I say (the very last thing she wants to hear).

“I would’ve looked at your colored house, Frank — I mean your rental. But Joe just didn’t feel right about it.”

“Phyllis, I’m at a pay phone on the turnpike, so I better be going before a truck runs over me. But our rental market’s pretty tight, I think you’ll find.” I spy a phalanx of chortling Canadians, most of them in Bermudas, rumbling across the lot, all primed to hit the can, down a gut-bomb, have a sniff at the Vince trophy case, then grab one last en-route catnap before nonstop gaming commences.

“Frank, I don’t know what to say.” I hear something made of glass being knocked over and broken into a lot of pieces. “Oh, shit,” Phyllis says. “This isn’t, by the way, a realtor in Haddam. She’s more in the East Brunswick area.” A portion of central New Jersey resembling the sere suburban scrub fields of Youngstown. It’s also where Skip McPherson rents ice time before daylight.

“Well, that’ll have a whole new feel for you guys” (the Youngstown feel).

“It’s sort of starting over, though, isn’t it?” Phyllis says, giving in to bewilderment.

“Well, maybe Joe’ll picture himself better up there. And there really isn’t any starting over involved, Phyllis. It’s all part of your ongoing search.”

“What do you think’s going to happen to us, Frank?”

The Canadians are now bustling into the lobby, elbowing each other and yucking it up like hockey fans — men and women alike. They are big, healthy, happy, well-adjusted white people who aren’t about to miss any meals or get dressed up for rio good reason. They break off into pairs and threes, guys and gals, and go yodeling off through the metal double doors to the rest rooms. (The best all-around Americans, in my view, are Canadians. I, in fact, should think of moving there, since it has all the good qualities of the states and almost none of the bad, plus cradle-to-grave health care and a fraction of the murders we generate. An attractive retirement waits just beyond the forty-ninth parallel.)

“Did you hear me, Frank?”

“I hear you, Phyllis. Loud and clear.” The last of the laughing Canadian women, purses in hand, disappear into the women’s, where they immediately start unloading on the men and gassing about how “lucky” they were to hook up with a bunch of cabbage-heads like these guys. “You and Joe are just overwrought about happiness, Phyllis. You should just buy the first house you halfway like from your new realtor and start making yourselves happy. It’s not all that tricky.”

“I’m just in a black mood because of my operation, I guess,” Phyllis says. “I know we’re pretty lucky. Some young people can’t even afford a home now.”

“Some older people too.” I wonder if Phyllis visualizes herself and Joe as among the nation’s young. “I gotta get a move on here,” I say.

“How’s your son? Didn’t you tell me he had Hotchkin’s or brain damage or something?”

“He’s making a comeback, Phyllis.” Until this afternoon. “He’s quite a boy. Thanks for asking.”

“Joe needs a lot of maintenance right now too,” Phyllis says, to keep me on the phone. (Some woman in the rest room lets out an Indian whoop that sets the rest of them howling. I hear a stall door bang shut. “Yew-guyz … Jeeeeez-us,” one of the men answers from next door.) “We’ve seen some changes in our relationship, Frank. It’s not easy to let someone into your inner circle if you’re both second-timers.”

“It’s not easy for first-timers either,” I say impatiently. Phyllis seems to be angling for something. Though what? I once had a client — the wife of a church history professor and a mother of three, one of whom was autistic and got left in the car in a restraining harness — who asked me if I had any interest in getting naked with her on the polished floor of a ranch-style home in Belle Mead, a house her husband liked but she wanted a second look at because she felt the floor plan lacked “flow.” An instance of pure transference. Though no one in the realty business isn’t clued in to the sexual dimension: hours spent alone in close quarters (front seats of cars, provocatively empty houses); the not-quite-false aura of vulnerability and surrenderment; the possibility of a future in the same grid pattern, of unexpected, tingly sightings at the end of the lettuce rack, squirmy, almost-missed eye contact across a hot summer parking lot or through a plate-glass window with a spouse present. There have been instances in these three years and a half when I haven’t been a model citizen. Except you can lose your license for that kind of stunt and become a bad joke in the community, neither of which I care to risk as much as I might once have.

Still, for some reason, I find myself imagining fleshy Phyllis not in a pink petunia print but a skimpy slip over her bare underneath, holding a tumbler of warm Scotch while she talks, and peeking out the blinds at the grainy-lit Sleepy Hollow parking lot as the innkeeper’s eighteen-year-old half-Polynesian son, Mombo, shirtless and muscles bulging, hauls a garbage bag around to the dumpster outside their bathroom in which sluggo Joe is grouchily tending to more of nature’s unthrilling needs behind closed doors. This is the second time today I’ve thought of Phyllis “in this way,” her health situation notwithstanding. My question, however, is: why?

“So you live alone?” Phyllis says.

“What’s that?”

“Because Joe had at one time thought you might be gay, that’s all.”

“Nope. A frayed knot, as my son says.” Though I’m baffled. In two hours I have been suspected of being a priest, a shithead and now, a homo. I’m apparently not getting my message across. I hear another round-bell go ding, as Joe turns up the TV from Mexico.

“Well,” Phyllis says, whispering, “I just wished for a second I was going wherever you were going, Frank. That might be nice.”

“You wouldn’t have a good time with me, Phyllis. I can promise that.”

“Oh. It’s just crazy. Crazy, crazy talk.” Too bad she can’t get on the bus with the Canadians. “You’re a good listener, Frank. I’m sure it’s a plus in your profession.”

“Sometimes. But not always.”

“You’re just modest.”

“Good luck to you two,” I say.

“Well, we’ll see you, Frank. You be good. Thanks.”

Clunk.

The truckers who’ve been glowering at me have wandered off. And both sets of Canadians now emerge from their comfort stations, hands damp, noses blown, faces splashed, hair wet-combed, shirttails for the moment tucked, yaw-hawing about whatever nasty secrets were shared around inside. They march off into Roy’s, their skinny, uniformed bus driver standing just outside the glass doors, having a smoke and some P&Q in the hot night. He cuts his eyes my way, sees me down the phone bank watching him, shakes his head as if we both knew all about it, tosses his smoke and walks out of view.

Without as much as one guarded thought left from dinner, I punch in Sally’s number, feeling that I’ve made a bad decision where she’s concerned, should’ve stayed and wooed my way out of the woods like a man who knows how to get messages across. (This of course may turn out to be a worse decision — tired, half drunk, fretful, not in control of my speech. Though sometimes it’s better to make a bad decision than no decision at all.)

But Sally, from her message, must be in a similar frame of mind, and what I’d like to do is turn around and beat it back to her house, scramble into bed with her and have us go slap to sleep like old marrieds, then tomorrow haul her along, and begin instilling proper wanting practices into my life, and fun to boot, and quit being the man holding out. Forty psychics able to find Jimmy Hoffa in a landfill, or to tell you what street your missing twin Norbert’s living on in Great Falls, couldn’t tell me what’s a “better deal” than Sally Caldwell. (Of course, one of the Existence Period’s bedrock paradoxes is that just when you think you’re emerging, you may actually be wading further in.)

“Uffda, ya goddamn knucklehead,” one of the Canadians yorks out as I listen intently to Sally’s phone ring and ring and ring.

Though I’m quick to the next decision: leave a message saying I would’ve zoomed back but didn’t know where she was, yet I stand prepared to charter a Piper Comanche, zoom her up to Springfield, where Paul and I’ll pick her up in time for lunch. Zoom, zoom.

But instead of her sweet voice and diversionary, security-conscious message—“Hi! We’re not here, but your call is important to us”—I get rings and more rings. I actually picture the phone vibrating all to hell on its table beside her big teester bed, which in my tableau is lovingly turned down but empty. I pound in the number again and try to visualize Sally dashing out of the shower or just coming in from a pensive midnight walk on Mantoloking beach, taking the front steps two at a time, forgetting her limp, hoping it’s me. And it is. Only, ring, ring, ring, ring.

An overcooked, nearly nauseating hot dog smell floats across the lobby from Nathan’s. “And your mind’s a sewer too,” one of the Canuck women sounds off at one of the men standing in line.

“So and what’s yers, eh? An operating room? I’m not married t’ya, okay?”

“Yet,” another man guffaws.

Defeated, I’m nonetheless ready to go, and take off striding right out through the lobby. Gaunt boys from Moonachie and Nutley are straying in toward the Mortal Kombat and Drug War machines, angling for the big kills. New weary-eyed travelers wander through the front doors, seeking relief of some stripe, ignoring the Vince trophy case — too much on a late night. I should, right here and now, buy something to bring Clarissa, but there’s nothing for sale but football crap and postcards showing the NJTpk in all four seasonal moods (I’ll have to find something tomorrow), and I pass out of the air-conditioning right by the Eureka driver, leaning one leg up on his idling juggernaut, surrounded now by white gulls standing motionless in the dark.

Up again onto the streaming, light-choked turnpike, my dash-board digital indicating 12:40. It’s tomorrow already, July 2, and my personal aspirations are now trained on sleep, since the rest of tomorrow will be a testing day if everything goes in all details perfectly, which it won’t; so that, I’m determined — late departure and all — to put my woolly head down someplace in the Constitution State, as a small token of progress and encouragement to my journey.

But the turnpike thwarts me. Along with construction slowdowns, entrance ramps merging, MEN WORKING, left-lane break-downs and a hot mechanical foreboding that the entire seaboard might simply explode, there’s now even more furious, grinding-mad-in-the-dark traffic and general vehicular desperation, as if to be caught in New Jersey after tonight will mean sure death.

At Exit 18E&W, where the turnpike ends, cars are stacked before, beyond, around and out of sight toward the George Washington Bridge. Automated signs over the lanes counsel way-worn travelers to EXPECT LONG DELAYS, TAKE ALTERNATE ROUTE. More responsible advice would be: LOOK AT YOUR HOLE CARD. HEAD FOR HOME. I envision miles and miles of backup on the Cross Bronx (myself dangled squeamishly above the teeming hellish urban no-man’s-land below), followed by multiple-injury accidents on the Hutch, more long toll-booth tie-ups on the thruway, a blear monotony of NO VACANCYS clear to Old Saybrook and beyond, culminating in me sleeping on the back seat in some mosquito-plagued rest area and (worst case) being trussed and maimed, robbed and murdered, by anguished teens — who might right now be following me from the Vince — my body left for crows’ food, silent on a peak in Darien.

So, as ill advised, I take an alternate route.

Though there is no truly alternate route, only another route, a longer, barely chartable, indefensible fool’s route of sailing west to get east: up to 80, where untold cars are all flooding eastward, then west to Hackensack, up 17 past Paramus, onto the Garden State north (again!), though eerily enough there’s little traffic; through River Edge and Oradell and Westwood, and two tolls to the New York line, then east to Nyack and the Tappan Zee, down over Tarrytown (once home to Karl Bemish) to where the East opens up just as the North must have once for old Henry Hudson himself.

What on a good summer night should take thirty minutes — the G.W. to Greenwich and straight into a pricey little inn with a moon-shot water view — takes me an hour and fifteen, and I am still south of Katonah, my eyes jinking and smarting, phantoms leaping from ditches and barrow pits, the threat of spontaneous dozing forcing me to grip the wheel like a Le Mans driver having a heart attack. Several times I consider just giving in, pulling off, falling over sideways from fatigue, surrendering to whatever the night stalkers lurking on the outskirts of Pleasantville and Valhalla have dreamed up for me — my car down on its rims, my trunk jimmied, luggage and realty signs strewn around, my wallet lifted by shadowy figures in Air Jordans.

But I’m too close. And instead of staying on big, safe, reliable 287 up to big, safe, reliable 684 and pushing the extra twenty miles to Danbury (a virtual Motel City, with maybe an all-night liquor outlet), I turn north on the Sawmill (its homespun name alone makes me sleepy) and head toward Katonah, checking my AAA atlas for the quickest route into CT.

Then, almost unnoticeable, a tiny wooden sign — CONNECTICUT — with a small hand-painted arrow seeming to point right out of the 1930s. And I make for it, down NY 35, my headlights vacuuming its narrow, winding, stone-walled, woods-to-the-verge alleyways toward Ridgefield, which I calculate (distances that look long on the map are actually short) to be twelve miles. And in ten minutes flat I’m there, the sleeping village rising into pretty, bucolic view, meaning that I’ve somehow crossed the state line without knowing it.

Ridgefield, as I drive cautiously up and through, my eyes peeled for cops and motels, is a hamlet that even in the pallor of its barium-sulfur streetlights would remind anyone but a lifelong Ridgefielder of Haddam, New Jersey — only richer. A narrow, English high street emerges from the woodsy south end, leads through a hickory-shaded, lush-lawned, deep-pocketed mansion district of mixed architectural character, each mansion with big-time security in place, winds through a quaint, shingled, basically Tudor CBD of attached shops (rich realtors, a classic-car showroom, a Japanese deli, a fly-tiers shop, a wine & liquor, a Food For Thought Books). A walled war-memorial green lies just at village center, flanked by big Protestant churches and two more mansions converted to lawyers’ offices. The Lions meet Wednesday, the Kiwanis Thursday. Other, shorter streets bend away to delve and meander through more modest but still richly tree-lined neighborhoods, with lanes named Baldy, Pudding, Toddy Hill, Scarlet Oak and Jasper. Plainly, anyone living below the Cross Bronx would move here if he or she could pay the freight.

But if you’re driving through at 2:19, “town” slips by before you know it, and you’re too quick through it and out onto Route 7, having passed no place to stop and ask or caught no glimpse of a friendly motel sign — only a pair of darkened inns (Le Chateau and Le Perigord), where a fellow could tuck into a lobster thermidor across from his secretary, or a veal scarpatti and a baked Alaska with his son from some nearby prep school. But don’t expect a room. Ridgefield’s a town that invites no one to linger, where the services contemplate residents only, but which makes it in my book a piss-poor place to live.

Exhausted and disappointed, I make a reluctant left at the light onto 7, resigned to sag into Danbury, fifteen miles farther on and by now full to the brim with darkened cars nosed into darkened motel lots. I have done this all wrong. A forceful stand at Sally’s or at the very least tarrying in Tarrytown would’ve saved me.

Yet ahead in the gloom where 7 crosses the Ridgefield line and disappears back into the hinterland of scrub-brush Connecticut, I see the quavery red neon glimmer I’ve given up hoping for. MOTEL. And under it, in smaller, fuzzier letters, the life-restoring VACANCY. I aim at it like a missile.

But when I wheel into the little half-moon lot (it’s the Sea Breeze, though no sea’s near enough to offer breezes), there’s a commotion in progress. Motel guests are out of their rooms in bathrobes, slippers and tee-shirts. The state police are abundantly present — more blue flashers turning — while a big white-and-orange ambulance van, its strobes popping and its back door open, appears ready to receive a passenger. The whole lot has the backlit, half-speed unreality of a movie set (not what I’d hoped for) and I’m tempted just to drive on, though again that would mean conking out on the car seat and hoping no one kills me.

All the police activity is going on at one end of the lot, in front of the last unit in line; so I park near the other end, beyond the office, where lights are on and a customer counter is visible through the window. If I can be assigned a room away from the action, I may still get one-third night’s measure of sleep.

Inside the office the air-conditioning’s cranked up high, and a powerful cooking smell from a rear apartment beyond a red drapery makes the air dense and stinging. The clerk is a slender, dull-looking subcontinental whose eyes flicker up at me from a desk behind the counter. He’s talking on the phone at a blazing speed and in a language I recognize as not my own. Without pausing, he fingers a little registration card off a stack he has, slides it up onto the glass countertop, where a pen’s attached to a little chain. Several hand-lettered and unequivocal instructions have been pressed under the glass, relating to one’s use of one’s room: no pets, no calls charged, no cooking, no hourly rates, no extra guests, no operation of a business (none of these is currently in my plans).

The clerk, who has on a regulation dirty-collared, short-sleeved white shirt and black slacks, goes right on talking, even becoming at one point agitated and loudly vociferous while I finish filling out the guest card and slide it across with my Visa. At this instant he simply puts the receiver down, clears his throat, stands and starts scribbling on the card with his own ballpoint. My needs are apparently enough like other guests’ that we can skip pleasantries.

“So what’s happened down at the other end?” I say, hoping I’ll hear everything’s all over and wasn’t any great shakes to begin with. Possibly an on-site demo of police practices for the benefit of the Ridgefield town fathers.

“Don’t worry,” the clerk says in a fussy voice guaranteed to make anyone worry. “Everything is fine now.”

He whips my Visa through the credit-check box, glances at me, doesn’t smile, just takes a weary breath and waits for the green numbers to certify I’m a fair risk for $52.80.

“What happened, though?” I feign absolute no-worry.

He sighs. “It’s just best to stay away.” He’s used to answering questions only about room rates and checkout times. He has a long, slender neck that would look much better on a woman, and wisps of little mannish mustache hairs that shadow the corners of his mouth. He does not inspire wide trust.

“Just curious,” I say. “I wasn’t planning on wandering down there.” I look back through the window, where the police and ambulance lights are still buffeting the dark. Several gawker cars have stopped on Route 7, their drivers’ faces lit by the flashes. Two Connecticut state troopers in wide Stetsons are conferring beside their cruiser, arms folded, their stiff, tight-fitting uniforms making them seem brawny and stern though unquestionably even-handed.

“Some people maybe got robbed down there,” the clerk says, pushing a Visa receipt out for my Frank Bascombe. At this moment a short, round-waisted thick-haired woman in a red-and-black sari and a badgered expression appears at the doorway drapery. She buzzes something to the clerk, then vanishes. For some reason I sense she’s been talking via extension to whomever he was talking to, and he’s now required again — possibly to catch hell from relatives in Karachi about whatever’s happening outside.

“How’d it happen?” I say, putting my name on the dotted line.

“We don’t know.” He shakes his head, comparing signatures, then pulling the delicate leaves off the receipt, having never even acknowledged the woman who came and left. She, I’m sure, is the person responsible for the venomous cooking smell. “They check in. In a little while some big agitation in there. I don’t see what happened.”

“Anybody get hurt?” I stare at my Visa receipt in his hand, wishing I hadn’t signed it.

“Maybe. I don’t know.” He hands me my card, receipt and a key. “Get the key deposit when you check out. Ten o’clock is the time.”

“Swell,” I say, and smile hopelessly, thinking of heading to Danbury.

“It’s on the other end, okay?” he says, pointing toward the hoped-for wing, smiling perfunctorily and showing his straight little teeth. He has to be freezing in his short sleeves, though right away he returns to the phone and begins muttering in his tangly tongue, his voice going to a hush in case I might know a word or two of Urdu and spill some important beans.

Back out on the lot, night air feels even more electrified and stoked. Other motel guests have started to drift back, but police radios are crackling, the bugged-up red MOTEL sign hums and an even denser feeling of subsonic noises vibrates off the cruisers and the ambulance and the cars stopped along the highway. Somewhere close by a skunk has been aroused, its hot scent swarming out of the trees beyond the lights. I think of Paul, not so far from here now, and will him to be in bed asleep, as I should be.

The last door in the line of motel doors has been opened now, and harsh lights are on inside, with shadows passing quickly. Several policemen, local Joes, are standing around a two-tone blue Chevy Suburban parked directly in front of the room, all its five doors open, its interior lights on. A Boston Whaler is in tow behind the Suburban and is filled with recreation gear — a bicycle, water skis, some strapped-together lawn furniture, scuba tanks and a wooden doghouse. The local cops are shining flashlights around inside. A big leering Bugs has been stuck to a back side window with suction cups.

“Y’ain’t safe no mo’ nowhere,” a man’s thick voice says, and actually makes me jump. I look around fast and find an immense, heavy-breathing Negro standing behind me wearing a green Mayflower moving van uniform. He’s holding a black attaché case under his arm, and above his breast pocket, under a red Mayflower, the word Tanks is stitched within a yellow oval. He’s watching what I’m watching.

We’re right behind my parked Crown Victoria, and the instant I see him I also notice his Mayflower van parked across Route 7 in the turnout for a seasonal produce stand, closed at this hour.

“What’s going on down there?” I say.

“Kids broke on into some people’s room owns that Suburban, and robbed ’em. Then they killed the guy. They got ’em both over there”—he points—“in that po-lice car. Somebody oughta just go over there and pop ’em both in the melon and be done with it.” Mr. Tanks (first name, last, nickname?) breathes in again momentously. He has a lineman’s wide smudge-pot face, a huge big-nostril nose and all but invisible deep-set eyes. His uniform includes ludicrous green walking shorts that barely manage around his butt and thighs, and black nylon knee socks that show off his beefsteak calves. He is a head shorter than me, but it’s no chore to feature him bear-hugging an armoire or a new Amana down several flights of stairs.

The two troopers, I determine, are standing guard at their car, which is stopped in the precise middle of the lot with its headlights still on. Through the back window I can make out in the darkness first one white face and then a second one — boys’ faces, tilted forward to indicate both are handcuffed. Neither is talking, and both seem to be watching the troopers. The boy I can see more clearly seems to smile in reply to Mr. Tanks’s having pointed him out.

The sight of the two faces, though, causes me a sudden jittery interior flutter like a fan blade spinning in my belly. I wonder if I’m about to wince again, but I don’t. “How do they know they did it?”

“’Cause they run, that’s why,” Mr. Tanks says, confidently. “I was out on number seven. And the police car come around me going a hundred. And two miles on down, here they all were. Two of ‘em spread out on the hood. Hadn’t been five minutes. Trooper tol’ me about it.” Mr. Tanks breathes another threatening breath. His thick truckdriver’s smell is a nice leathery fragrance mingled with what must be the scent of moving pads. “Bridgeport,” he murmurs, making port sound like pote. “Killin’ to be killin’.”

“Where are the other people from?” I say.

“I guess Utah.” He is silent a moment. Then he says, “Pullin’ that little boat.”

Just then two male ambulance attendants in red shirts appear in the motel door, horsing a collapsible metal stretcher out into the night. A long black plastic bag that looks like it should hold a set of golf clubs is strapped on top and lumpy from the body inside. A moment later a small, thick-necked, tough-looking white man in a white short-sleeved shirt and tie, and wearing a pistol, and a badge on a string around his neck, escorts a blond woman in a thin blue flowered dress out the door, holding her upper arm as though she were under arrest. They walk quickly toward the state troopers’ car, where one of the troopers opens the back door and starts to pull out the boy who’s smiled before. But the detective speaks something out in front of him, and the trooper simply stands aside and lets the boy stay put, while the other trooper produces a flashlight.

The detective directs the blond woman to the open car door. She seems very light on her feet. The trooper shines his flash straight into the face of the boy closest. His skin is ghostly and looks damp even from here, his hair buzzed almost bare on the sides but left long in the back. He gazes up into the light as if he’s willing to expose everything there is to know about him.

The woman only briefly looks at him, then turns her head away. The boy says something — I see his lips move — and the woman says something to the detective. Then they both turn and walk briskly back toward the room. The troopers quickly close the car door, then climb in the front seat, both sides. Their siren makes a loud wheep-whoop, their blue flasher flashes once, and their car — a Crown Vic just like mine — idles forward a few yards before it makes an engine roar, skitters its wheels and shoots out onto 7, where it disappears to the north, its siren coming on again but far out of sight.

“Where you tryin’ to get?” Mr. Tanks says gruffly. He is now carefully unfolding two sticks of Spearmint, which he inserts into his large mouth both at once. He goes on clutching his attaché case.

“Deep River,” I say, nearly silenced by what I’ve just witnessed. “I’m picking up my son.” The jittery flutter has stopped in my stomach.

The watchers out on Route 7 are starting to creep away. The ambulance, now closed, its interior lights out, backs cautiously away from the motel door, then eases off in the direction the troopers have gone — to Danbury is my guess — its silver and red lights turning but with no siren.

“Then where you two goin’?” He is crushing his gum wrapper and chewing vigorously. He wears a great chunky diamond-and-gold-crusted ring on his right ring finger, something a large person might design for himself or possibly get by winning the Super Bowl.

“We’re going to the Baseball Hall of Fame.” I look around at him amiably. “Did you ever go there?”

“Uh-uh,” he says, and shakes his head, his mouth emitting a loud Spearminty sweetness. Mr. Tanks’s hair is short and dense and black, but doesn’t grow on all parts of his head. Islands of his glistening black scalp appear here and there, making him look older than I’m sure he is. We’re probably the same age. “What line of work you do?”

The VACANCY sign goes silently off, then the MOTEL sign itself, leaving only a humming red NO illuminated. The clerk lowers the blinds inside the office, switches them closed, and the office lights go almost immediately out.

We aren’t socializing here, I realize, only bearing brief dual witness to the perilous character of life and our uncertain presences in it. Otherwise there’s no reason for us to stand here together.

“Real estate,” I say, “down in Haddam, New Jersey. About two and a half hours from here.”

“That’s a rich man’s town,” Mr. Tanks says, still chewing rapidly.

“Some rich people live there,” I say. “But some folks just sell real estate. Where do you live?”

“Divorced,” Mr. Tanks says. “I ‘bout live in that rig.” He swivels his big midnight face in the direction of his truck.

There in the shadows Mr. Tanks’s enormous trailer displays a jaunty good ship Mayflower in green, abreast a jaunty sea of yellow. It’s the most nearly patriotic sight I’ve seen in the Ridgefield area. I think of Mr. Tanks snugged up in his high-tech sleep cocoon, decked out (for some reason) in red silk pj’s, earphones plugged into an Al Hibbler CD, perusing a Playboy or a Smithsonian and munching a gourmet sandwich purchased somewhere back down the line and heated up in his mini-micro. It’s as good as what I do. Possibly the Markhams should consider long-haul trucking instead of the suburbs. “That must not be so bad,” I say.

“It gets old. Cramped gets old,” he says. Mr. Tanks must weigh 290. “I own a home out in Alhambra.”

“Does your wife live there, then?”

“Uh-uh,” Mr. Tanks grunts. “My furniture stays out there. I pay it a visit once in a while when I miss it.”

Down at the lighted room where a murder has taken place, the local cops shut the Suburban’s doors and wander inside, talking quietly, their local-cop hats pushed back on their heads. Mr. Tanks and I are the last observers left. I’m sure it’s close to three. I yearn for bed and sleep, though I don’t want to leave Mr. Tanks alone.

“Lemme just ask you a question.” Mr. Tanks is holding his attaché still under his giant arm and gravely chewing his Spearmint. “Since you’re into real estate now” (as if I’d only been in it a couple of weeks). He doesn’t look at me. It may embarrass him to address me in terms of my profession. “I’m thinking about selling my home.” He stares straight away into the dark.

“The one in Alhambra?”

“Uh-huh.” He breathes again noisily through his big nostrils.

“California’s holding onto its value is all I hear, if that’s what you want to know.”

“I bought in seventy-six.” Another big sigh.

“Then you’re in great shape,” I say, though why I’d say that I don’t know, since I’ve never been in Alhambra, don’t know the tax base, the racial makeup, the comp situation or the market status. I’ll probably visit the Alhambra before I visit Mr. Tanks’s Alhambra.

“What I’m wonderin’ is,” Mr. Tanks says and wipes his big hand over his face, “if I oughtn’t not to move out here.”

“To Ridgefield?” Not an obvious match.

“It don’t matter where.”

“Do you have any friends and family out here?”

“Naw.”

“Is the Mayflower home office out here someplace?”

He shakes his head. “They don’t matter where you live. You just drivin’ for them.”

I look at Mr. Tanks curiously. “Do you like it out here?” Meaning the seaboard, the Del-Mar-Va to Eastport, from the Water Gap to Block Island.

“It’s pretty good,” he says. His cavey eyes narrow and flicker at me, as if he’d caught a whiff suggesting I might be amused by him.

But I’m not! I understand (I think) perfectly well what he’s getting at. If he’d answered in the usual way — that his Aunt Pansy lived in Brockton, or his brother Sherman in Trenton, or if he was positioning himself for a managerial charge inside corporate Mayflower, home offices, say, in Frederick, MD, or Ayer, Mass., and needed to move nearer — that would make sound sense. Though it would be a whole lot less interesting on the human side. But if I’m right, his question is of a much more omenish and divining nature, having to do with the character of eventuality (not rust-belt economics or the downturn in per-square-foot residential in the Hartford-Waterbury metroplex).

Instead, his is the sort of colloquy most of us engage in alone with only our silent selves, and that with the right answers can give rise to rich feelings of synchronicity of the kind I came back from France full of four years ago: when everything is glitteringly about you, and everything you do seems led by a warm, invisible astral beam issuing from a point too far away in space to posit but that’s leading you to the place — if you can just follow and stay lined up — you know you want to be. Christians have their grimmer version of this beam; Jainists do too. Probably so do ice dancers, bucking-bronco riders and grief counselors. Mr. Tanks is one of the multitude seeking, with hope, to emerge from a condition he’s grown weary of in pursuit of something better, and wants to know what he should do — a profound inquiry.

I’d of course love to help with this alignment of small stars, and without making him worry I’m a loony or a realty shark or a homosexual with polyracial endomorphic appetites. In the most magnanimous sense, such assistance is the heart of the realty profession.

I fold my arms and let myself sway sideways so my thigh pushes against the back bumper of my Crown Victoria. I wait a few seconds, then say, “I think I know exactly what you’re getting at.”

“What about?” Mr. Tanks says suspiciously.

“About wondering where you ought to go,” I say in as unaggressive, unsharky, unhomophilic a way as possible.

“Yeah, but that don’t really matter,” Mr. Tanks says, instantly shying off the subject now that he’s raised it. “But okay,” he says, still showing interest. “I’d like to set down someplace else, you know? Like a neighborhood.”

“Would you live there?” I say in a helpful, professional voice. “Or would it just be someplace for your furniture to live?”

“I’d live there,” Mr. Tanks says, and nods, looking up at the sky as though wishing to envision a future. “If I liked it, I wouldn’t necessarily even mind being in someplace I’ve lived before. You understand what I mean?”

“Pretty much,” I say, meaning “perfectly.”

“The East Coast just seems sorta homey to me.” Mr. Tanks suddenly looks around at his truck as if he’s heard a sound and expects to see someone scaling the side, ready to break in and steal his TV. Though there’s no one.

“Where’d you grow up?” I say.

He continues staring at his truck and away from me. “Michigan. Old man was a chiropractor in the U.P. Wasn’t too many Negroes doing that work.”

“I bet not. Do you like it up there?”

“Oh yeah. I love it.”

There’s no use blabbing that I’m an old Wolverine or that we probably have experiences in common. Divorce, for starters. My memories, in any case, would probably conflict with his.

“Then why don’t you go back and buy a house? Or build one? That seems like a no-brainer to me.”

Mr. Tanks turns and gives me a wary look, as if I might’ve been referring to his brain. “My ex-wife stays up there now. That don’t work.”

“Do you have any children?”

“Uh-uh. That’s why I ain’t been to the Hall of Fame.” His big eyebrows lower. (What business is it of mine if he has children?)

“Well. I’ll just say this.” I would still like to encourage Mr. Tanks with some useful facts offered as data for his search for what to do next. I in fact feel some anxiety that he doesn’t know how specifically I appreciate how he feels and that I’ve felt the same way myself. No disappointment is quite like the failure to share a crucial understanding. “I just want to say this,” I begin again, correcting myself. “I’m selling houses these days. And I live in a pretty nice town down there. And we’re about to see a rise in prices, and I believe interest rates’ll head up by the end of the year and maybe even before.”

“That’s too rich down there. I been down there. I moved some basketball player’s mother into some big house. Then moved her out again a year later.”

“You’re right, it’s not cheap. But let me just say that most experts believe a purchase price two and a half times your annual pre-tax income is a realistic debt load. And I’ve got houses right now, in the village of Haddam”—all shown to the Markhams, all promptly trashed—“at two-fifty, and I’ll have more as time goes on. And I feel like in the long run, whether it’s Dukakis or Bush or Jackson”—fat chance—“prices are going to stay up in New Jersey.”

“Uh-huh,” Mr. Tanks says, making me feel exactly like a realty shark (which is possibly what you are if you’re a realtor at all).

Only my view is, if I sell you a house in a town where life’s tolerable, then I’ve done you a big favor. And if I try and don’t succeed, then you’ve got a view you like better (assuming you can afford it). Plus, I don’t cotton to the idea of raising the drawbridge, which Mr. Tanks probably has experience with. I mean to guarantee the same rights and freedoms for all. And if that means merchandising New Jersey dirt like dog-nuts so we all get our one sweet piece, then so be it. We’ll all be dead in forty years anyway.

I won’t (or can’t), in other words, be easily shamed. And Mr. Tanks would make a good addition and be as welcome on Cleveland Street as his pocketbook could make him (he’d, of course, have to stash his truck someplace else). And I’m not doing anybody a favor if I don’t try to get him interested.

“So what’s the worst part about being a realtor?” He’s staring around somewhere else again — above the Sea Breeze roofline, where the humpy moon has floated higher and wears a fuzzy halo. Mr. Tanks is now signaling me that he’s not ready to buy a house in New Jersey, which is fine. He may conduct conversations like this with everyone — his “thing” being to ramble on dolefully about wishing he could be someplace better — and I’ve spoiled the fun by trying to figure out where and how. He may feel fine dedicating his life to moving other people hither and yon.

“My name’s Frank Bascombe, by the way.” A gesture of hello and good-bye, poking my hand toward Mr. Tanks’s strenuous green belly. He administers a halfhearted little jiggling of just my fingers. Mr. Tanks might look like a guard for old Vince back in the Bart Starr-Fuzzy Thurston gravy days, but he shakes hands like a debutante.

“Tanks,” is all he grunts.

“Well, really, I don’t know if it has a worst part,” I say, addressing the realtor question and feeling a sudden, brain-flattening fatigue and the painful need for sleep. I pause for a breath. “When I don’t like it so much, I try not to notice it and stay home reading a book. But I guess if it has to have a bad side, it’s having clients think I want to sell them a house they don’t like, or that I don’t care if they like it or not. Which is never true.” I pull my hand over my face and push my eyelids up to keep them open.

“You don’t like being misinterpreted, is that it?” Mr. Tanks looks amused. He makes an odd gurgly chuckle deep in his throat, which makes me self-conscious.

“I guess so. Or not.”

“I figured you guys was all crooks,” Mr. Tanks says as though talking about something else to someone else. “Like a used-car guy, only ‘cept with houses. Or burial insurance. Something like that.”

“Some people feel that way, I guess.” I’m thinking that we’re at this moment two feet away from my trunkful of realty signs, blank offer sheets, earnest money receipts, listing forms, prospect memos, PRICE REDUCED and SORRY, YOU MISSED IT stickers. Burglar’s tools, to Mr. Tanks. “Really, a main concern is avoiding misrepresentation. I wouldn’t want to do anything to you that I wouldn’t want done to me — at least as far as realty goes.” This did not come out sounding right (due to exhaustion).

“Hunh,” is all Mr. Tanks offers. Our time for bearing witness to life’s strangeness is nearly over.

Suddenly, at the end of the row of motel units, out the door of the lighted room we’ve been waiting a vigil over, come two uniformed local police, followed by the tough-nut detective, followed by a uniformed policewoman, holding the arm of the young blue-dressed wife who’s in turn holding the small hand of a tiny blond girl, who looks apprehensively all around in the dark and back behind her into the room she’s left, though suddenly, by dint of memory, she turns and looks up at ole Bugs, stuck to the window of the Suburban, leering his nutty brains out. She’s wearing neat little yellow shorts and tennies with white socks, and a hot-pink pullover that has a red heart on the front like a target. She is slightly knock-kneed. When she gazes around again and sees no one she recognizes, she fastens her eyes on Mr. Tanks as she’s led across the lot to an unmarked vehicle that will take her and her mother elsewhere, to some other Connecticut town, where a terrible-awful thing hasn’t happened. There, to sleep.

They have left their room standing open, the Whaler jammed with stealable gear somebody should see about locking up or storing. (This I would’ve waked up and worried about in the middle of the night back in 1984, even if it were my loved one who was killed.)

Though just as the young woman ducks into the dark car, she looks back at her room and at the Suburban and the Sea Breeze and then to the left at Mr. Tanks and me, her companions of a sort, watching her with distant compassion as she encounters grief and confusion and loss all alone and all at once. Her face comes up, light catches it so that I see the look of startlement on her fresh young features. It is her first scent, the first light-glimmer, that she’s no longer connected in the old manner of two hours ago but into some new network now, where caution is both substance and connector. (It is not so different from the look on the boy’s face who killed her husband.) I, of course, could connect with her — give a word or a look. But it would be only momentary, whereas caution is what she needs now, and what’s dawning. To learn a lesson of caution at a young age is not the worst thing.

Her face disappears into the squad car. The door closes hard, and in half of one minute they are all gone — the local boys in their Fairfield Sheriff’s cruiser, murmuring ahead, gumball flashing; the unmarked car with the policewoman driving — off in the direction opposite, where the ambulance has gone. Again, when they are all out of sight into the scrub-timber distance, a siren rises. They will not be back tonight.

“I bet they got their insurance paid up,” Mr. Tanks says. “Mormons. You know they’re paid up. Them people don’t let nothin’ slide.” He consults his wristwatch, sunk into his great arm. Time of day means nothing to him. I don’t know how he knows they were Mormons. “You know how to keep a Mormon from stealin’ your sandwich when you go fishin’, don’t you?”

“How?” It is an odd moment for a quip.

“Take another Mormon witchyou.” Mr. Tanks makes his deep-chested hunh noise again. This is his way of resolving the unresolvable.

I, though, have had it in mind — since his position on realtors is that we’re first cousins to odometer-spinning car dealers and burial plot scammers — to ask about his views on moving-van drivers. We hear plenty of adverse opinions of them in my business, where they’re generally considered the loose cannons of the removal industry. But I’m certain he wouldn’t have an opinion. I’d be surprised if Mr. Tanks practiced many analytical views of himself. He is no doubt happiest concentrating on whatever’s beyond his windshield. In this way he’s like a Vermonter.

In the thick trees behind the Sea Breeze I hear a dog barking, perhaps at the skunk, and somewhere else, faintly, a phone ringing. Mr. Tanks and I have not shared much, in spite of my wishing we could. We are, I’m afraid, not naturals for each other.

“I guess I’ll hit the hay,” I say as if the idea has just come to me. I offer Mr. Tanks a hopeful smile, which awards no closure, only its surface appeal.

“Talk about misinterpreted and not being misinterpreted.” Mr. Tanks still has in mind our conversation from before (a surprise).

“Right,” I say, not knowing what’s right.

“Maybe I’m gon’ come down there to New Jersey and buy a big house from you,” he announces imperially. I’m beginning to inch away toward my room.

“I wish you’d do that. That’d be great.”

“You got some expensive neighborhoods where they’ll let me park my truck?”

“That might take some time to find,” I say. “But we could work up something.” A ministorage up in Kendall Park, for instance.

“We could work on that, huh?” Mr. Tanks yawns a cavernous yawn and closes his eyes as he rolls his big furry head back in the moonlight.

“Absolutely. Where do you park in Alhambra?”

He turns, to notice I’m farther away now. “You got any niggers down there in your part of New Jersey?”

“Plenty of ’em,” I say.

Mr. Tanks looks at me steadily, and of course, even as sleepy as I am, I’m awfully sorry to have said that, yet have no way to yank the words back. I just stop, one foot up on the Sea Breeze walkway, and look helpless to the world and fate.

“’Cause I wouldn’t care to be the only pea in the pod down there, you understand?” Mr. Tanks seems earnestly if briefly to be considering a move, committing to a life in New Jersey, miles and miles from lonely Alhambra and lightless, glacial Michigan.

“I bet you’d be happy there,” I say meekly.

“Maybe I’ll have to call you up,” Mr. Tanks says. He, too, is walking away, striding off almost jauntily, his short beer-keg legs prized apart in his green spectator shorts but close together at the knees as if a rolling gait did not come easy for him, his big arms in motion despite his attaché case being mashed under one of them.

“That’d be great.” I need to give him my card so he can call me if he rumbles in late, finds no place to park and no one to be helpful. But he is already keying his way in. His room is three away from the murder scene. A light burns inside. And before I can call out and mention my card or say “Good night,” or say anything more, he has stepped inside his door and quickly closed it.

In my Sea Breeze double, I run the a/c up to medium, get the lights off and myself into bed as fast as possible, praying for quick sleep, which seemed so overpowering ten minutes or an hour ago. The thought nags me that I should call Sally (who cares if it’s three-thirty? I have an important offer to make). But the phone here circuits through the Pakistani switchboard, and everyone there’s long asleep.

And then — and not for the first time today but for the first time since my talk with Ann on the turnpike — I think a worrisome, urgent-feeling thought for Paul, under siege at this minute by phantom and real-life woes, and a court date as his official rite of passage into life beyond parent and child. I could want for better. Though I could also want him to stop braining people with oarlocks and blithely stealing condoms and struggling with security guards, to stop grieving for dogs a decade dead, and barking the case for their return. Dr. Stopler says (arrogantly) he could be grieving the loss of whoever we hoped he would be. But I don’t know who that boy is or was (unless of course it’s his dead brother — which it isn’t). My wish has consistently been to strengthen the constitution of whoever he is whenever I meet him — though that is not always the same boy, and because I’m only a part-timer, possibly I have been insufficient at my job too. So that clearly I must do better, must adopt the view that my son needs what only I can supply (even if it’s not true) and then try for all I’m worth to imagine just what that something might be.

And then a scant sleep comes, which is more sleep versus unsleep than true rest, but in which for reasons of proximity to death, I dream, half muse of Clair and our sweet-as-tea-cakes winter’s romance, commencing four months after she joined our office and ending three months down the road, when she met the older, dignified Negro lawyer who was perfect for her and made my small excitations excess baggage.

Clair was a perfect little dreamboat, with wide liquid-brown eyes, short muscular legs that widened slightly but didn’t soften in the high-ups, extra-white teeth with red-lipstick lips that made her smile as much as she could (even when she wasn’t happy) and a flipped, meringuey hair configuration she and her roomies at Spelman had borrowed from the Miss Black America pageant that stayed resilient through nights of ardent lovemaking. She had a high, confident, thick-tongued, singsongy Alabama voice, with the hint of a lisp, and wore tight wool skirts, iron-leg panty hose and pastel cashmere sweaters that showed off her wondrous ebony skin so that every time I saw an extra inch of it I squirmed and itched to get her alone. (She in many ways dressed and conducted herself exactly like the local white girls I knew in Biloxi when I was at Gulf Pines back in 1960, and for that sweet reason seemed to me quite old-fashioned and familiar.)

For reasons of her country-style, strict Christian family upbringing, Clair was unswerving in her demand to keep our little attachment just between us two, whereas I lacked a restraining self-consciousness of any kind and especially about being a forty-two-year-old divorced white man smitten to jibbers over a twenty-five-year-old black woman with kids (it’s arguable I might’ve avoided the whole thing for sound professional and crabby smalltown reasons, only of course I didn’t). To me it was all as natural as grass sprouting, and I floated along on its harmless effusions, enjoying it and myself the way you’d enjoy a high-school reunion where you meet a girl nobody ever thought was beautiful way-back-when, but who now looks like the prettiest girl you ever dreamed of, except you’re still the only one who thinks so and therefore get her all to yourself.

To Clair, though, the two of us together bore a “tinge” (her Alabama word meaning bad shadow), which naturally made us all the more giddy and distracting to me, but to her made us seem exactly wrong and doomed, and an item she absolutely didn’t want her ex-husband, Vernell, or her mother, in Talladega, ever getting wind of. So that for our most intimate moments we ended up skulking around on the sly: her blue Civic slipping into my Cleveland Street garage under cover of night, and she slipping in the back door; or worse yet, rendezvousing for dinner plus surreptitious hand-holding and smooching in angst-thick public places such as the Hojo’s in Hightstown, the Red Lobster in Trenton or the Embers in Yardley, spiritless venues where Clair felt completely invisible and comfortable and where she drank Fuzzy Navels till she was giggly, then slipped out to the car and made out with me in the dark till our lips were numb and our bodies limp.

Though we also spent plenty of ordinary, cloudy-wintry Sundays with her kids, hauling up and down both sides of the Delaware, treading the towpath, viewing the pleasing but unspectacular river sights like any modern couple whose life of ups and downs had rendered them thus ‘n’ so, but whose remarkable equanimity in the face of uphill social odds made everyone who saw or sat across from us in Appleby’s in New Hope or stood in line behind us at yogurt shops feel good about themselves and all of life in general. I often remarked that she and I were impersonating the very complexly ethical, culturally diverse family unit that millions of liberal white Americans were burning to validate, and that the whole arrangement felt pretty good to me in addition to being hilarious. She, however, didn’t like this attitude since it made her feel — in her sweet Talladega lisp—“thstood-out.” And for that reason (and not that it’s a small one) we probably missed a longer run at bliss.

Race, of course, was not our official fatal defect. Instead, Clair insisted my helpless age was the issue that kept us from a real future that I from time to time couldn’t keep from wanting in the worst way. We therefore settled ourselves into a little ongoing pocket drama in which I created the role of avuncular but charmingly randy white professor who’d sacrificed a successful but hopelessly stodgy prior life to “work” for his remaining productive years in a (one-student) private college, where Clair was the beautiful, intelligent, voluble, slightly naive but feisty, yet basically kindhearted valedictorian, who realized we two shared lofty but hopeless ideals, and who in the service of simple human charity was willing to woogle around with me in private, hypertensive but futureless (due to our years) lovemaking, and to moon at my aging mug over fish-stick dinners and doughy pancakes in soulless franchise eateries while pretending to everybody she knew that such a thing was absolutely out of the question. (No one was fooled a minute, of course, as Shax Murphy informed me — with a discomforting wink — the day after Clair’s memorial service.)

Clair’s feeling was ironclad, simple and candidly set out: we were laughably all wrong for each other and wouldn’t last the season; though our wrongness served a good purpose in getting her through a bad patch when her finances were rocky, her emotions in a tangle and she didn’t know anyone in Haddam and was too proud to head back to Alabama. (Dr. Stopler would probably say she wanted to cauterize something in herself and used me as the white-hot tool.) Whereas for me, fantasies of permanence aside as she demanded, Clair made bachelor life interesting, entertaining and enticingly exotic in a hundred thrilling ways, aroused my keen admiration, and kept me in good spirits, while I acclimated myself to the realty business and my kids being gone.

“Now, when I was back in college, see,” Clair once said to me in her high, sweetly monotonous, lispy voice (we were butt naked, lounging in the evening-lit upstairs front bedroom of my former wife’s former house), “we all used to laaaaugh and laugh about hookin’ up with some rich ole white guy. Like some fat bank president or big politician. That was our cruel joke, you know? Like, ‘Now, when you marry that ole white fool,’ this or that thing was going to happen to you. He was s’posed to try to give you a new car or some trip to Europe, and then you were gonna trick him. You know how girls are.”

“Sort of,” I said, thinking of course that I had a daughter but didn’t know how girls were, except that mine would probably one day be just like Clair: sweet, certain of everything, basically untrusting for sound reasons. “What was so wrong about us ole white guys?”

“Oh well, you know,” Clair said, raising onto her sharp little elbow and looking at me as if I’d just shown up on the surface of the earth and needed harsh instruction. “Y’all are all boring. White men are boring. You’re just not as bad as the rest of them. Yet.”

“You get more interesting the longer you stay alive, is my view,” I said, wanting to put a good word in for my race and age. “Maybe that’s why you’ll learn to like me more, not less, and won’t be able to live without me.”

“Uh-huh, you got that wrong,” she said, thinking, I’m sure, about her own life, which to date hadn’t been that peachy but, I’d have argued, was looking up. It was true, though, she had very little facility for actually thinking about me and never in the time we knew each other asked me five questions about my children or my life before I met her. (Though I never minded, since I was sure some little personal exegesis would only have proved what she already expected.)

“If we didn’t get more interesting,” I said, happy to belabor a moot point, “all the other crap we put up with in life might drive us right out of it.”

“Us Baptists don’t believe that, now,” she said, flinging her arm across my chest and jamming her hard chin into my bare ribs. “What’s his name — Aristotle — Aristotle canceled his class today. He got sick of hearing his own voice and couldn’t make it.”

“I don’t have anything to teach you,” I said, thrilled as usual.

“That’s not wrong,” Clair said. “I’m not going to keep you that long anyway. You’ll start to get boring on me, start repeating yourself. I’ll be right out of here.”

Which was not very different from what happened.

One March morning I showed up at the office early (my usual) to type an offer sheet for a presentation later that day. Clair had nearly finished her classes to get her realtor’s certification and was at her desk, studying. She was never at ease addressing private-life matters in the office setting, yet as soon as I sat down she got up, wearing a little peach-colored skirt-and-sweater combo and red high heels, came right over to my desk by the front window, took a seat and said very matter-of-factly that she had met a man that week, bond lawyer McSweeny, whom she’d decided to start “dating,” and therefore had decided to stop “dating” me.

I remember being perfectly dazed: first, by her altogether firing-squad certainty; and then by how damned unhappy the whole prospect made me. I smiled, though, and nodded as if I’d been thinking along those lines myself (I definitely hadn’t) and told her that in my view she was probably doing the right thing, then went on smiling more disingenuously, until my cheeks ached.

She said she’d finally talked to her mother about me, and her mother had immediately told her, in what Clair said were actually “crude” terms, to get as far away from me as possible (I’m sure it wasn’t my age), even if it meant spending her nights home alone or moving away from Haddam or finding another job in another city — which I said was too strong a medicine. I would just obligingly step aside, hope she was happy and feel lucky to have had the time with her I’d had, though I told her I didn’t think we’d done anything but what men and women had done to and for each other through the ages. My saying this clearly made her aggravated. (She was not well practiced at being argued with, either.) So that I just finally shut up about it and grinned at her again like a half-wit, as a way of saying (I guessed) good-bye.

Why I didn’t protest, I’m not exactly sure, since I was stung, and surprisingly near to the heart, and spent days afterward tinkering with convoluted futuristic scenarios in which life would’ve been goddamned tough but that sheer off-the-map novelty and unlikelihood might’ve proved the final missing ingredients to true and abiding love — in which case she’d sacrificed to convention a type of mountaintop victory reserved for only the brave and enlightened few. It’s, however, undoubtedly true that my idyll with permanence was entirely founded on Clair’s being a total impossibility, which means she was finally never more than a featured player in some Existence Period melodrama of my own devising (nothing to be proud of, but not radically different from my cameo in her short life).

After our abrupt sayonara she returned to her desk, resumed studying her realty books — and with this new state of affairs in effect, we stayed on at our desks for another whole hour and a half, doing work! Our colleagues arrived and departed. We both entered into amused, even jocular, conversations with several different individuals. I once asked her about the disposition of a bank foreclosure, and she answered me as equably and cheerfully as you would expect in any well-run office bent on profit. Neither one of us said anything else of moment, and I eventually finished my offer sheet, made a couple of cold client calls, did part of a crossword, wrote a letter, put on my coat and wandered around in it for a few minutes, wisecracking with Shax Murphy, and finally just wandered out and down to the Coffee Spot, after which I did not come back — all the while (I suppose) Clair stayed at her desk, concentrating like a cleric. And basically that was that.

In short order she and lawyer McSweeny became a nice, viable, single-race item in town. (Though she began treating me, in my view, with unneeded correctness in the office, which became, of course, the only place I ever saw her.) Everybody agreed the two of them were lucky to find each other when attractive members of their race were scarce as diamonds. Predictable difficulties came up to prevent their speedy marriage: Ed’s grasping grown kids caused a ruckus about Clair’s age and financial situation (Ed, naturally, is my age, and loaded). Clair’s ex-husband, Vernell, declared Chapter 11 in Canoga Park and tried to reopen their divorce decree. Clair’s grandmother died in Mobile, her mother broke her hip, her younger brother got put in jail — the usual wearisome inventory of life’s encroachments. In the long run it all would’ve worked out, with Clair and Ed married to the tune of a clearly worded prenuptial agreement. Clair would’ve moved into Ed’s big late Victorian out on Cromwell Lane, would’ve had a flower garden and a nicer car than a Honda Civic. Her two kids would’ve grown to like going to school with white children and in time forgotten there was a difference. She would’ve gone on selling condos and gotten better at it. Ed’s grown children would’ve finally accepted her for the true-hearted, straight-talking, slightly overcertain girl she was, and not as just some hick gold-panner they needed to sic their own lawyers on. She and Ed, in time, would have enjoyed a somewhat isolated suburban existence, with a few but not many people regularly over for dinner, and even fewer close friends — a life spent with each other in a way most people would pay money to know how to pull off but can’t because their days are too full of rich opportunity they just can’t say no to.

Except that one spring afternoon Clair happened out to Pheasant Meadow and in an entirely professional way got trapped in a bad situation and ended up as dead as the Mormon traveler in the body bag down in room 15.

And as I lie in bed here, still alive myself, the Fedders blowing brisk, chemically cooled breezes across my sheets, I try to find solace against the way this memory and the night’s events make me feel, which is: bracketed, limbo’d, unable to budge, as illustrated amply by Mr. Tanks and me standing side by side in the murderous night, unable to strike a spark, utter a convincingly encouraging word to the other, be of assistance, shout halloo, dip a wing; unable at the sad passage of another human to the barren beyond to share a hope for the future. Whereas, had we but been able, our spirits might’ve lightened.

Death, veteran of death that I am, seems so near now, so plentiful, so oh-so-drastic and significant, that it scares me witless. Though in a few hours I’ll embark with my son upon the other tack, the hopeful, life-affirming, anti-nullity one, armed only with words and myself to build a case, and nothing half as dramatic and persuasive as a black body bag, or lost memories of lost love.

Suddenly my heart again goes bangety-bang, bangety-bangety-bang, as if I myself were about to exit life in a hurry. And if I could, I would spring up, switch on the light, dial someone and shout right down into the hard little receiver, “It’s okay. I got away. It was goddamned close, I’ll tell ya. It didn’t get me, though. I smelled its breath, saw its red eyes in the dark, shining. A clammy hand touched mine. But I made it. I survived. Wait for me. Wait for me. Not that much is left to do.” Only there’s no one. No one here or anywhere near to say any of this to. And I’m sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry.