Let Me Be Frank With You

The New Normal

OUT THE HADDAM GREAT ROAD, JUST PAST five, freezing rain has turned the blacktop into after-hours, dodge-em cars. Only a few of us are braving it, our headlights glaring off the pavement like sheeny novas. A Ford Explorer (why is it always a Ford Explorer?) has already gone in the ditch, its driver waving me on with a shrug. A wrecker’s on its way.

Off in the trees on both sides, immense, manorial houses twinkle through. Yuletide spruces framed in picture windows blaze outward, sharing Christmas cheer with the less monied. Years ago, I drove out here on just such a gloomy-wintry night to hand-deliver a two-million-dollar, full-price offer on a slant-roof, architect-designed monstrosity that’s long since been torn down, and calamitously hit a dog, precisely next door to the house I was hoping to sell. As with the Explorer, I went straight in the ditch, but clambered out, up, and across the black-ice road to bring whatever helpless help I could to the poor wrecked beast, who’d made a whump when I hit it, boding ill. (I, of course, feared it was my clients’ dog.) There the poor thing lay, in the ice-crusted grass in front of number 2605, breathing deep, rasping, not-long-for-this-world breaths, its sorrowing eyes resigned and open to the snowy night — its last — not offering to move or even to notice me beside it on my knees, my cold hand on its hairy, hard ribs, feeling them rise and fall, rise and fall. It was a hound, a black and tan, somebody’s old lovebug — a wiggly crotch sniffer and shoe muncher bought for the kids yet surviving on after they’d gone, and prime now to be hit. “What can I do for you, ole Towser?” I said these absurd words, knowing their answer—“Nothing, thanks. You’ve done enough.” After minutes, I hiked up to the house I was selling, shamefaced and in shock. I informed my clients what I’d terribly done. We all three walked down to the road in the snow, but the old boy had passed beyond us and was (because it was damn cold) grown stiff and peaceful and perfect. They didn’t know whose dog it was — a hunter’s, strayed away in the night, they thought, though it was past the season for that. My clients — the Armentis, long since beyond life’s pale themselves — felt a sorrow for me and my plight, and let me go home with the promise to “do something about the dog” in the morning. I shouldn’t worry. It was a terrible night to be out — which it was. In my realtor’s memory they accepted the offer following some testy back-and-forths with the young Bengali buyers — I often recollect such matters more positively than was true. It was a long time ago. Twenty years, at least. The dog, of course, lives on.

I’M ON MY PILGRIM’S WAY TONIGHT — IT’S ONLY 5:10 but could easily be midnight — to visit my former wife, Ann Dykstra, a resident now of the Beth Wessel Wing at the Community at Carnage Hill, a state-of-the-art, staged-care facility, out here in what was once, when we were married, forty years ago, the verdant Haddam hinterlands. The “Community” today borders a Robert Trent Jones faux links course, hidden from the road by a swatch of woods, the leaves now down. A birch-bark canoe “institute” sits off to the left in deeper timber, its lights busily yellowing the snow-flittery night. Other grand houses are semivisible, accessible by gates with uniformed protection. Once it was possible to cast my eye over almost any piece of settled landscape here-around and know how it would look in the future; what uses it’d be set to by succeeding waves of human purpose — as if a logic lay buried within, the genome of its later what’s-it. Though out here, now, all is frankly enigma. Probably it’s my age — which explains more and more about me, like a master decryption code. In New Jersey we’ve now built to the edge of the last million acres of remotely developable land. We’re on track to use it up by midcentury. Property taxes are capped, but no one wants to sell, since no one wants to buy. All of which keeps prices high but values low. (I’ve seen only one lonely Sotheby’s sign the whole way here.) Householders of many of these expensive piles are now renting their eight-thousand-foot trophy villas to Rutgers students with rich parents — taking the long view about upkeep and wear and tear when the lease comes up.

Meanwhile Haddam itself is countenancing service cutbacks. Too much money’s “lost” to wages, the Republicans on the Boro council say. The budget gap’s at fifteen mil. Many old town-fixture employees have been pink-slipped in these days before Christmas. The previous manger scene, mothballed a decade ago, the wise men all portrayed as strapping Aryans instead of dusky Levantines and Negroes, has been revived — the rental company for the race-appropriate manger having upped their prices. Holly boughs now adorn only every third lamppost on Seminary Street. Santa’s magic sleigh on the Square now has a smaller driver at the reins — the original, life-size Santa was stolen, possibly by the Rutgers students. Three prime storefronts are currently sitting empty (unthinkable in earlier days). Townhouse construction — a well-known morbid sign — goes on apace across from where my son Ralph Bascombe lies buried in the cemetery under a linden tree, lately broken off by the hurricane. Rumor has it a Dollar Store and an Arby’s are buying in where Laura Ashley and Anthropologie once thrived. “The middle isn’t holding” was The Packet’s Yeatsian assessment.

Though every Haddam citizen I have a word with — not that many, admittedly — seems on board with the new austerity, even if it promises a dead stop to what was once our reality. “Feeling the pinch,” “cinching the family belt up two notches,” appear to make us feel at one with the rest of the world’s economic downturn — which we know to be bad, but not that bad, not yet, not here.

Possibly I’m the only one paying close attention. I still possess a municipal memory from my years of selling and reselling, mortgaging and re-mortgaging, eventually overseeing the razing and replacing of many a dream home. Clearly, though, some wound has scarred our psyche. And it’s a mystery how it will sort out before the last sprawl-able acre’s paved over and there’s no place left to go but away and down.

MY MISSION INTO THE NIGHT’S SINISTER WEATHER, four days before Christmas, is to deliver to Ann a special, yoga-approved, form-fitted, densely foamed and molded orthopedic pillow, which she can sleep on, and that’s recommended by neurologists in Switzerland to homeopathically “treat” Parkinson’s — of which she’s a new sufferer — by reducing stress levels associated with poor sleep, which themselves are associated with neck pain, which is associated with too-vivid dreams, all associated with Parkinson’s. Ann has resided in the Beth Wessel, able-bodied/independent wing since last June. She has her own two-bedroom, Feng-Shui-approved apartment, does her own cooking, drives her own Focus, occasionally sees old friends from De Tocqueville Academy, where she once coached the Lady Linksters, and has even acquired a “boyfriend”—a former Philadelphia cop named “Buck.” (He has a last name, but I can’t pronounce it, since it’s Polish.) Buck’s a large, dull piece of cordwood in his seventies, given to loose-fitting permanently-belted trousers, matching beige sweatshirts of the kind sold at Kmart, big galunker, imitation-suede shoes, and the thinnest of thin pale hosiery. Somewhere, someone convinced Buck that a sculpted “imperial” and a pair of black horn-rimmed Dave Garroway specs would make him look less like a Polish meatball, and make people take him more seriously, which probably never happens — though he’s officially on the record as “handsome.” He could pass as the “good” cop who genially interrogates the poor black kid from the projects, until he suddenly loses his temper, bulges his eyes, balls up his horseshoe fists in the kid’s face, and scares the shit out of him. Buck’s carrying around a different John Grisham book every time I see him and refers to himself only as a “first responder.” (I’ve seen his old Blazer in the parking lot with “Frst Rspndr” on his yellow Jersey plate.) I regularly encounter him lurking in the big public “living room”—he doesn’t have enough to do, with no robberies and home invasions to get his mitts into. He likes the idea that Ann (who he infuriatingly calls “Miss Annie”)… that Ann and I “go way back,” which isn’t quite the word for it; and that he and I share private, implicitly sexual understandings about her that men such as we are would never speak about, but that in the aggregate are “special,” possibly symbolic, and render us both lucky-to-have-lived-this-long foot soldiers in Miss Annie’s army.

Like me, Buck’s a prostate “survivor,” and his personal talk is the sort that would drive Ann straight to the rafters. It includes his rank disdain for Viagra (“… no need for that junk. I prize my stiffy, lemme tell ya…”); his die-hard fandom for the Flyers; the existence of a “horse pill,” obtainable online that makes “us prostate guys piss like Percherons,” thereby avoiding the “men’s room blues.” Needless to say he doesn’t like Obama and blames him for shit-canning the American dream by creating a “lost decade” when it came to “little people keeping up.” “He’s a nice enough guy”—meaning the President—“but he wasn’t ready to assume the mantle…” Yippity, yippity, yippity. Bush of course was ready. Ann, I’m convinced, spends time with him only to display for me the limitless variety of Homo sapiens who can easily fill my long-empty shoes. Though why should affairs of his heart (and hers) be less inscrutable than the affairs of my own?

It’s not, however, the simplest of emotional transits to be driving out four days before Christmas to visit my ex-wife (we’ve been divorced thirty years!) in an extended-care facility, suffering an incurable and fatal disease, and with whom I’ve not been all that friendly, but who’s now a twenty-minute drive away and somehow or other presenting issues. Relations end nowhere, as the poet said.

HOW ANN DYKSTRA CAME TO RESIDE TWENTY MINUTES from my doorstep is a bittersweet tale of our time and should serve as cautionary — if one’s “long-ex-wife” constitutes a demographic possible to comprehend and thus beware of.

When Ann retired off the athletic faculty at De Tocqueville (it was not long after my Thanksgiving injury in 2000, from which I was a god’s own time recovering; two to the thoracic bull’s-eye leaves a mark), she’d begun keeping time but expecting nothing serious, with one of her De Tocqueville colleagues, the lumbering, swarthy-skinned, curly-haired ex — Harvard math whiz and life-long mother’s boy, Teddy Fuchs. Years before, Teddy had been headed for celestial math greatness, but had suffered a “dissociative episode” on the eve of his thesis defense on rectilinear quadratic equations and been banished to prep-school teaching at De Tocqueville, a not-long drive from where his parents lived on The Shore in Belmar. At De Tocqueville, Teddy was regarded by all as profound and gentle and (what else?) super-bright, and as having “this special connection” with kids, which persuaded everybody that prep-school teaching was his true métier, rather than being a chaired professor at Cal-Tech with a clear shot at a Nobel, but possibly never being “rilly, rilly” happy like the rest of high school teachers.

Teddy, at age sixty, had never married, but had avoided the standard smirks and yorks and back-channel eye rollings about “his sexuality,” by being benign. There were no rumors or Greenwich Village à deux sightings, or mysterious “friends” brought to faculty cookouts. Some people really are what they seem to be — though not that many. Teddy and Ann began “seeing each other,” began being a couple, taking trips (Turks and Caicos, Tel Aviv, the Black Sea port of Odessa) and speaking exclusively in terms of the other (“I’ll have to ask Ann about that…”; “You know, back when Ted was at Harvard…”; “Ann has a tee time…”; “Teddy wrote an influential paper about that his junior year, which caused a lot of stir…”). These are mostly things she would never have said about me, since flogging suburban houses on cul-de-sacs that once were cornfields in West Windsor rarely gets you noticed by the folks at the Stanford linear accelerator.

I know any of this only because our daughter, Clarissa Bascombe, now a veterinarian in Scottsdale, told me. Clarissa has always kept semi-taut lines with her mother — though much tauter with me and her brother. Back when it was all getting started with Teddy, Clarissa believed her mom could “tolerate” only a “platonic relationship,” and that there was neither hanky nor panky afoot; that Teddy, though large, Levantine, hairy, and apparently sensual, was in fact harmless and “remote from his body” (lesbians think they know everything). And that after Ann’s two marriages to two unsatisfactory men — one of them me — being with a man like Teddy (thoughtful, hopelessly reliable, obedient, occasionally mirthful but not that much, no bad history with women, a good cook, and most important—Jewish, guaranteeing, Clarissa believed, no unwanted sexual advances)… Teddy was all but perfect. Like most explanations, it’s as plausible as anything else. Plus Clarissa liked Teddy (I only met him twice, by accident). They had Harvard in common and for all I know sat up late nights singing the fucking songs.

Long story short (it’s never short enough), Ann retired and so did Teddy, whose mother had conveniently died at age ninety. Ann had dough from her second marriage. Teddy had his dead parents’ three-thousand-square-foot condo overlooking the sea in Belmar. A charmed coming-together, it seemed, was forged for both parties: an acquaintance that hesitantly blossomed into “something more,” instead of the usual less; a mutually acknowledged, if somewhat not-fully-shared sense of life’s being better when not spent dismally alone; a willingness to try to take an interest in the other (learn golf, learn calculus). Plus the condo.

Ann and Teddy sent around at home announcements — one actually came to me — declaring “the uniting of all our assets — real, spiritual and virtual.” I took note, but not serious note. As far as I was concerned, Ann had simply embarked on another new course in life, the main source of interest and primary selling point of which was that it carried her further away from being my wife and nearer to becoming just another person I might never have known, whose obituary my eye might pass over without the slightest pause or twinge. Which is the goal and most perfect paradigm of what we mean when we say divorce.

Though of course that’s crazy. The kids see to it. As does memory — which, short of Alzheimer’s, never lets you off the mat.

Following which, and after four years of landing on glaciers in minuscule airplanes, walking the Via Dolorosa barefoot, two trips to the Masters — a life-long dream of Ann’s — back-country treks into the Maghreb, plus any number of books-on-tape, videos of Harvard lectures on neuroplasticity, trips to Chautauqua to hear washed-up writers squawk about “what it’s like to be them,” plus four visits to Mayo to keep up with heart anomalies Teddy believed he’d inherited from his Harvard experience — following all that, Teddy simply died one morning while sitting, an oversized baby, in the Atlantic surf wearing pink bathing trunks. An aneurysm. “Dead. At sixty-four,” as Paul Harvey used to say. Ann, who was on the tenth-floor balcony watching him with pleasure, saw him topple over face-into-the-sea. She thought he was playing a joke and laughed and waited for him to right himself. He had a comic side.

Ann lived on in the condo after Teddy’s death. I had no idea what she did or how she did it. “Mom’s fine,” was the most Clarissa would allow, as if I was not to know. Paul Bascombe, our son — an unusual man-apart on his best day, and now happily running a garden supply in KC — maintains only a distant fondness for his mother, and so had nothing to inform me about her. Complications and unfathomables in “dealing with” one or another aging parent seem now to be the norm for modern offspring.

SALLY AND I SOLD OUR BEACH HOUSE ON POINCINET Road, Sea-Clift, in the late selling-season of ’04. We’d thought about it for a while. Someone, though, just came driving past the house one day in a Mercedes 10-million SEL, saw me on the deck glassing striper fishermen with my Nikons. The guy came to the foot of the side stairs, shading his eyes, and asked out of the blue what it’d take to buy the place. I told him a lordly figure (this kind of thing’s not unusual; I was always expecting it). The guy, Arnie Urquhart from Hopatcong, said that number sounded reasonable. I came halfway down the steps. He came halfway up. I said my name. We shook hands. He wrote a check for the earnest right on the spot. And in three weeks Sally and I were outside supervising Mayflower men, getting our belongings into storage or off to the auctioneers in Metuchen.

Our move to Haddam, a return to streets, housing stocks and turbid memories I thought I’d forever parted with, was like many decisions people my age make: conservative, reflexive, unadventurous, and comfort-hungry — all posing as their opposite: novel, spirited, enlightened, a stride into the mystery of life, a bold move only a reckless few would ever chance. As if I’d decided to move to Nairobi and open a Gino’s. Sadly, we only know well what we’ve already done.

And yet, it’s been fine — with a few surprises. The hurricane. The recession. Nothing, though, Sally or I consider embittering or demoralizing. Ann Dykstra (Ann Dykstra-Fuchs — she and Teddy tied the knot on one of their glaciers, in Greenland) was not in our thinking. She was “someplace” nearby, but out of sight. I couldn’t have said precisely where. In time I knew about Teddy’s departure, the renewed widowhood made somberer by the feeling (I filled this in) that Teddy was the best she’d ever have. Divorcing me decades back, leaving the children stranded, marrying a turd like Charley O’Dell — her second husband — and ending up alone… all that had been prologue to a door opening on a long beautiful corridor and to a much more cleanly lighted place where she’d ever been lucky enough to live, if only for a precious few years. I was happy not to think any of these things. Though I think them now. She was fine — just the way her daughter put it.

But then Ann began to “notice her body” in a way she hadn’t. Athletes, of which Ann is a classic example, notice goings-on in their muscular-skeletal underpinning long before the rest of us, and long before they notice depression, despondency, psychic erosion or anything “soft-tissue” in nature.

“I realized I would only swing one arm when I walked down the fairway,” she said when we went for Mexican lunch at Castillo’s in Trenton. I now see her more, which Sally thinks is “appropriate,” though I have less good feelings about it. “I thought, ‘Well, what in the hell is this about? Did I wrench my arm going to the bathroom at night and forget all about it? I guess I’m losing it.’” She grinned a big, amazed, open-faced June Allyson grin across our two plates of chiles rellenos. Discovering the disease that’s going to kill you can apparently be an exhilarating tale of late-in-life discovery — if only because genuine late-in-life discoveries are fewer and fewer.

There, however, turned out to be “just the slightest tremor,” which was confined to her “off hand” (she’s a righty), something she attributed to age and the stress of widowhood. Her penmanship (the numbers she penciled onto her scorecard) had grown smaller and less clear. Plus, she wasn’t sleeping well, and sometimes felt more tired the longer she slept. “And I was constipated.” She rolled her eyes, shook her head and looked up. “You know me. I’m never constipated.” When we were married we didn’t talk about this little-known fact.

An entirely scheduled physical proved “concerning.” Abominable “tests” (I’ve had ’em) were performed. “Nothing really conclusive,” she told me. “You can’t diagnose Parkinson’s. You eliminate everything it’s not, and Parkinson’s is what’s left.”

“Surveillance” drugs were administered, which, if successful in eliminating the tremor, the fatigue and the bowel issues, meant (perversely) Parkinson’s was likely the ticket. And Parkinson’s was indeed the ticket. Continuing the drugs, however, would keep the symptoms at bay, though there might be some nausea (she’s had it) and some bp drops. But life as we know it — the elusive gold standard — could be anticipated, she told me, possibly for years, assuming continued exercise and patience with dosage adjustments. For all of which she’s a natural.

“Who knows,” she said the day she told me the whole story at lunch, “in a year they may figure the whole goddamn thing out and I’ll be good as new — for sixty-nine.” In later years, Ann’s begun talking like her late father, Henry, a man I dearly loved long after Ann and I went in the drink. Henry was a feeder-industry magnate for the automotive monolith (he produced a thing that made a metal thing that caused a smaller third thing not to get too hot, and work better; these were days when people still made things and used machines, instead of the opposite). Henry was a tile-back, tough-talking, little banty-rooster Dutchman, not above carrying a loaded pistol onto the shop floor to face down a union steward. Coarse talk, sexual parts, bodily functions were never in his daughter’s repertoire when she and I were experiencing marital bliss in the ’70s. But they seem to be her choices now. I’d be lying, though, if I said I didn’t miss the softer, callow girl Ann was before our son died and everything went flying apart like atoms splitting — our civilized etiquettes along with it.

The other unexpected news come to light since Ann moved to Carnage Hill is that I’ve learned she’s lied about her age the entire time I’ve known her — a long time now. When I met her in New York and we were a pair around town circa 1969, I was a sophisticated (I thought) twenty-four, and Ann Dykstra of Birmingham, Michigan, a winsome, athletic, somewhat skeptical twenty-two. Except in truth, she was a winsome, athletic twenty-five, having run away to Ireland her sophomore year with a boy from Bally O’Hooley who had more distance on his fairway woods than anybody on the men’s squad, and to whom she dedicated eighteen months of less than ideal life, before coming back humiliated to Ann Arbor. When I married her, at City Hall, Gotham, in February 1970, our marriage license clearly stated her age as twenty-three (I was by then twenty-five). I still have the diploma and over the years have had occasions to take it out of its green-leather envelope and to give it good, longing-filled lookings-at. I never saw her birth certificate, and she didn’t show me her passport. But when she asked me to look at her Parkinson’s work-up — she wanted me to know all about things for reasons of her own — there in the fine print at the top of page one was DOB. 1944! “Look,” I said (a dumb-bell), “they made a mistake on your birth date.” “Where?” Ann said. We were at Pete Lorenzo’s. She gave the paper a quick, absent look. “No, they haven’t,” she said impatiently. “It says ‘1944,’ though,” I said (a dumbbell). “You weren’t born in 1944.” “I certainly was. When did you think I was born?” “Nineteen forty-six,” I said, somewhat meekly. “Why did you think that?” “Because that’s what you said when we got married, and that’s what’s on our marriage license. And when I met you, you said you were twenty-two.” “Oh, well.” She dabbed her lips with her napkin. “What difference does it make?” “I don’t know,” I said. “It does.” “Why, exactly,” Ann said dryly. “Have you lost all respect for me now?” “No,” I said. “That’s a relief,” she said. “I don’t think I could stand that.” It was then that she told me about long-driver Donnie O’Herlihy or O’Hanrahan or O’Monagle, or whatever the hell his name was, and of her flight across the sea to Ireland and the ill-starred passions on the Bay of Bally O’Whatever.

Ann was right, of course. Did I lose respect for her (if that’s in fact what I had and have)? No. Does it make any difference to the global price of turnips? No. Is any part of my life different because I now know her legal age thirty years after she divorced me? I don’t think so. But. Something’s different. Possibly only a poet would know what it is and be able to set it prettily out. But I would say that when the grand inquisitor frowns at me over the top of his ledger and growls, “Bascombe, before I send you where you know you’re going, tell me what it feels like to be divorced. Boil it all down to one emotion, a final assay, something that says it all. And be quick because there’s a line of lost souls behind you and it’s cruel to make them wait…” What I’d say to him (or her) is, “Let me put it this way: I loved my wife, we got divorced, then thirty years later she told me she’d always lied about her age. It’s vital information, Your Honor. Though there’s nothing at all I can do with it.” I can hear the oven doors clanking, feel on my cheek the lick of flame. “Next!”

AS SOON AS ANN GOT THE OFFICIAL “BIG P” DIAGNOSIS, which she accepted as if she’d failed her driver’s test — except there was no re-test, and instead she’d soon wither and die, and there was nothing much anyone could do — she decided in brisk fashion that things had to change, and now. No putting anything off.

She put Teddy’s mother’s condo on the market (with my old realty nemesis, Domus Isle Homes in Ortley Beach). Like Sally and me, she auctioned all her furniture. She traded her Volvo XC-90 for a sensible Focus. She began efforts to have her old Labradoodle, Mr. Binkler, “surrendered” to a rescue family in Indiana (a sad story lies there). She began to think hard about where to “go.” Scottsdale was a thought. Her daughter lived there, good facilities were on hand, Mayo had an outlet. Switzerland was possible, since there was “interesting” deep-brain-stimulation research going on, and she could get into a program. Back to Michigan came up. She hadn’t lived there in forty years, though a cousin’s son was a clinical MD at U of M, and knew about some experimental double-blind studies he could get her in on. She counseled with Clarissa — the way I did when I faced my prostate issues (different “P”). She made no effort to speak to me about any of it. I only got the story back through the belt-loops from my daughter.

Then one day the phone rang at my house on Wilson Lane. It was last May the fifteenth. Forsythia was past its rampant array. The playoffs were in full tilt (Pacers had beat the Heat). Obama was getting his little black booty spanked by Romney about fiscal stewardship. Iran had executed someone, and “W” was paying a sentimental visit back to DC, site of all his great triumphs.

“Mom’s moving to Haddam. She wanted me to tell you,” Clarissa said from Arizona. Dogs were yapping in the background. She was in her clinic.

“Why?” I said. Possibly I shouted this, as if I was in the kennels with her. Though I was stunned.

“It’s convenient,” she said. “Medical care’s the same everywhere for what she’s got.” (Which isn’t true.) “She says she wants to be buried close to Ralph.” (Our son who died of Reye’s, when people still did that.) “She said she started adult life in Haddam, so she wants to finish it there. She knows you won’t like it. But she says you don’t own Haddam, and she can do whatever she wants without your permission. So fuck you. She said that. Not me.”

“When?”

“Next month, apparently. Teddy’s condo sold for a lot.”

“Where,” I said, struggling with monosyllables, like a perp in a jumpsuit on a video court appearance.

“Someplace called Carnage Hill. Nice name. It’s out of town in some woods. Supposedly it’s the state of somebody’s art. I guess the Amish run it.”

“Quakers,” I said. “Not Amish. They’re different.”

“Whatever,” Clarissa said. “Don’t do that…” She was speaking to someone where she was, no doubt about getting the Chihuahua shaved for surgery.

“It’s a high-end old folks’ home,” I said.

“She’s a high-end old folks. And she’s got Parkinson’s.

And it’s not an old folks’ home. It’s a staged extended-care community. She’ll have her own apartment. It’ll be nice. Get over it.”

“For how long?”

“For how long is she staying? Or how long do you have to get over it?”

“Both.”

“Forever. The answer’s the same.”

“Forever?”

“Whichever comes first,” Clarissa hit the phone against something hard. “I said don’t do that,” she said again to somebody else. Yap, yap, yap.

“What?” I said.

“Try not to be an asshole, Frank. She’s dying.”

“Not any faster than I am. I have prostate cancer — or I did have.”

“Maybe you two’ll have something to talk about finally. Though maybe not.”

“We’re divorced.”

“Right. I seem to remember that. I think that was called my whole fucking life. And Paul’s, too. Thank you very much.” She was only being hostile because she didn’t like giving me unpopular news, and this was the way she could do it. As if she hated me.

I said nothing then. Nothing seemed like enough.

“Don’t shoot the messenger,” she said.

“Then who can I shoot?”

“I can shoot you the bird,” she said to regain our moment. I love her. She apparently loves me but can be difficult. Both my children can be. “I’m giving you the thumbs-down all the way from Scottsdale. Do yourself a favor.”

“What’s that?”

“I already said. Get over it.”

“Okay. Bye,” I said.

“Okay bye, yourself.”

And that was basically that.

EVEN BEFORE I’D TURNED THE CORNER AT THE END of my block on Wilson, my neck had started zapping me, and I’d begun feeling the first burning-needles-prickle-stabs in the soles of my feet, sensations that now, outside the Carnage Hill gated entry — rich, golden lights shining richly through the naked hardwoods like a swanky casino — had traveled all the way up into my groinal nexus and begun shooting Apache arrows into my poor helpless rectum. It’s classic pelvic pain (I’ve been diagnosed), which, though its true origins are as mysterious as Delphi, is almost certainly ignited by stress. (What isn’t ignited by stress? I didn’t know stress even existed in my twenties. What happened that brought it into our world? Where was it before? My guess is it was latent in what previous generations thought of as pleasure but has now transformed the whole psychic neighborhood.)

I make the turn through the gates, up winding Legacy Drive. Temperatures had risen by day’s end but now are falling. Freezing rain’s sticking and coating the trees my headlights sweep past. Ditto the road. When I leave I’ll be able to slide down to the Great Road and sluice across into Mullica Pond. “Bascombe went to deliver an orthopedic pillow to his ex-wife and somehow drowned getting home. Details are pending police investigation.” Old James thought death was a distinguished thing. I’m certain it’s not.

Up close, Carnage Hill looks like an over-sized Hampton Inn, with low-lit “grounds” and paved “contemplation paths” leading into the woods, instead of to a customers-only parking with special slots for 18-wheelers. Tonight, the inside’s all lit up, meaning to convey a special “There’s more here than meets the eye” abundance both to visitors and well-heeled residents alike. Nothing’s bleaker than the stingy, unforgiving one-dimensionality of most of these places; their soul-less vestibules and unbreathable antiseptic fragrances, the dead-eyed attendants and willowy end-of-the-line pre-clusiveness to whatever’s made life be life but that now can be forgotten. Sally’s mother, Freddy, walked ten feet past the door of a suburban “Presbyterian Village” out in Elgin, then turned around and walked back out to the car and died of a (willed) infarct right in the front seat. There are statistics about such things. “I guess she was telling us something,” Sally said.

Ann, though, is getting her money’s worth out here and is happy as a goldfish about it. Carnage Hill advertises anything but pre-clusive. On display in the foyer is their “Platinum Certification” from the Federation of Co-axial Senior Life-Is-A-Luxury-Few-Want-To-Leave Society, based in Dallas — the national death-savvy research center. The goal at Carnage Hill is to re-brand aging as a to-be-looked-forward-to phenomenon. Thus, no one working inside wears a uniform. Smart, solid-color, soft-to-the-touch casual-wear is supplied from Land’s End. No one’s called “staff” or treated like it. Instead, alert, friendly, well-dressed, well-groomed “strangers” just seem to happen by, acting interested and offering to help whoever needs it. Half of the caregivers are Asian — who’re better at this type of thing than Anglo-Saxons, Negroes, and regular Italian Jersey-ites. Everything inside’s sustainable, solar, green, run by sensors, paperless, or hands-off and is pricey beyond imagining. Loaner Priuses are available in an underground geo-heated garage. Wireless pill boxes inform residents when to take their meds. Computer games in the TVs chart residents’ cognitive baseline (if they can remember to play). There are even Internet cemeteries that invite residents to make videos of themselves, so loved ones can see Aunt Ola when she still had a brain. “Aging is a multidisciplinary experience,” the corporate brochure, Muses, wants applicants to know. Carnage Hill, following the theme, is thus a “living laboratory for Gray Americans.”

I’m frankly surprised Ann’s practical-minded, Michigan-Dutch, country-club upbringing and genetic blueprint would let her stand one minute for all this baloney. Her father wouldn’t have and didn’t give a fart for retirement. Clarissa flew in from Arizona to help her mother move in, then went immediately back, referring to the whole “community” as strange and savage. Sally went to see Ann once in October, before the hurricane. (I feared an odorless, colorless bond would form between them — against me.) But Sally came home “thoughtful,” remarking it was like visiting someone in the home-decor department at Nordstrom. She couldn’t imagine — she’d said this before — how I could ever have fallen for Ann, much less married her. “You’re a very strange man,” she said and walked away to fix dinner, while I wondered what that meant. It was enough that she never went back for another visit.

When I drive to see Ann, as I am tonight (once a month — no more — since I don’t consider it good for me), I usually find her in stagily effervescent spirits, with over-sharpened wits and “good” humor that often targets me as its goat. Her tremor has “progressed” to an almost undetectable circular motion at her chin point, her glacial eyes darting, her lips movable and actress-ish, her hands busy to animate herself and make her chin more like normal and still beautiful — which it is. Visiting the sick is really a priest’s line of work, not an ex-realtor’s. Priests have something to bring — ceremony, forgetfulness, a few stale, vaguely off-color jokes leading to forgiveness. I only have an orthopedic pillow.

What I’ve attempted in my visits, and will try once again tonight, is to offer Ann what I consider my “Default Self”; this, in the effort to give her what I believe she most wants from me — bedrock truth. I do this by portraying for her the self I’d like others to understand me to be, and at heart believe I am: a man who doesn’t lie (or rarely), who presumes nothing from the past, who takes the high, optimistic road (when available), who doesn’t envision the future, who streamlines his utterances (no embellishments), and in all instances acts nice. In my view, this self plausibly represents one-half of the charmed-union-of-good-souls every marriage promises to convene but mostly fails to — as was true of ours long ago. I’m proceeding with this on the chance that long years of divorce, plus the onset of old age, and the value-added of fatal disease, will put at least a remnant of that charm back within our reach. We’ll see. (Sally Caldwell’s birthday, her sixty-fifth, is tomorrow, and later tonight, no matter what else happens, I’m spiriting her to Lambertville for a festive dinner, and later a renewal of our own charmed, second-marriage promises. I’m not long for Carnage Hill tonight.)

Ann’s preoccupation with bedrock truth is, of course, what most divorced people are deviled by, especially if the leftover spouse is still around. Ann’s is basically what the ethicists at the Seminary call an essentialist point of view. Years ago, when our young son Ralph died, and I was for a period struck wondrous by life and bad luck and near-institutional-grade distraction, so that our marriage went crashing over the cliff, it became Ann’s belief that I essentially didn’t love her enough. Or else we would’ve stayed married.

Imbedded in this belief is the eons-old philosopher’s quest for what’s real and what’s not, with marriage as the White Sands proving ground. If Ann (this is my view of her view) could just maneuver me around to conceding that yes, it’s true, I didn’t really love her — or if I did, I didn’t love her enough way back when — then she’d be able once and for all, before she dies, to know something true; one thing she can completely rely on: my perfidy. Her essence, of course, being perfidy’s opposite — bedrock goodness — since she believes she certainly loved me enough.

Only, I don’t concede it. Which makes Ann irritable, and worry it and me like a sore that won’t heal. Though it would heal if she’d just stop worrying it.

My view is that I loved Ann back in those long-ago vicious days all there was in me to love. If it wasn’t enough, at least she mined out the seam. What really was essential back then (I never like the sound of really; I’d be happy to evict it from the language along with many other words) was her own unquenchable need to be… what? Assured? Affirmed? Attended to? All of which she defines as love.

Our poor son’s woeful death and my wondrous wanderings were both sad contributors to our marriage’s demise — no argument there. Guilty as charged. But it’s as much what was unquenchable and absent in her that’s left her, for all these years, with an eerie, nagging sensation of life’s falseness and failure to seat properly on bedrock. Possibly at heart Ann’s a Republican.

Since she was diagnosed and moved herself to Carnage Hill, Ann has become a dedicated adept of all things mystical and holistic. In particular, she’s been driven to find out what “caused” her to come down with a dose of Parkinson’s. Plain bad luck and her old man’s busted-up genes don’t provide explanation enough. Here, I fit nicely into one theoretical construct: she got Parkinson’s because I never loved her. She hasn’t said this, but I know she’s thought it, and I show up expecting it each time.

She does, however, specifically incriminate the hurricane, which she considers a “super-real change agent,” which it surely was. The blogs she reads (I’m not sure what a blog even is) are full of testimonials about things-events-changes-dislocations-slippages-into-mania-and-slippings-out which have all been “caused” by the storm. You wouldn’t necessarily know it was the cause, since conveniently there was no direct relationship — no straw follicles piercing telephone poles; no Boston Whalers found in trees twenty miles inland with their grinning, dazed owners inside but safe; no talking animals or hearing restored when before it’d been hopeless. But to these hurricane conspirators, the storm is responsible and will go on being responsible for any damn thing they need it to be. Since who’s to say they’re wrong?

Agency is, of course, what Ann and all these zanies are seeking. She believes — she’s told me so — that the hurricane was a hurricane long before it was a hurricane; when it only seemed to be a careless zephyr off the sunny coast of Senegal, which, nonetheless, heated up, brewed around and found its essential self, then headed across the Atlantic to do much mischief. Somehow along the way, due to atmospheric force fields to which Ann was peculiarly susceptible — sitting, a widow in her condo, above the beach in Belmar, looking out at what she thought was a pancake sky and blemish-less horizon — the coming storm ignited within her personal nerve connectivity a big data dump that made her chin start vibrating and her fingers tingle, so that now they won’t be still. Ann believes the hurricane, which blew away the Mar-Bel condos like a paper sack, was a bedrock agent. A true thing. “We need to think about calamity in our own personal terms, don’t we?” she’s said to me imperiously. (I’m not sure why so many people address me with sentences that end in question marks. Am I constantly being interrogated? Does this happen to everyone? I’ll tell you. The answer is no.)

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe.”

Ann is not as scary as this makes her sound. Normally she’s a pert, sharp-eyed, athletic, sixty-nine-year-old-with-a-fatal-disease who you’d be happy to know and talk to about most anything — golf, or what a goofball Mitt Romney is. (The Romneys and the Dykstras were social acquaintances in the old, halcyon Michigan days, before Detroit rolled over and died.) This is the Ann I mostly encounter. Though we’re never all that far from bedrock matters. And she has a knack of getting me under her magnifying glass for the sun to bake me a while before I can exit back home to second-marriage deniability.

The Default Self, my answer to all her true-thing issues, is an expedient that comes along with nothing more than being sixty-eight — the Default Period of life.

Being an essentialist, Ann believes we all have selves, characters we can’t do anything about (but lie). Old Emerson believed the same. “… A man should give us a sense of mass…,” etc. My mass has simply been deemed deficient. But I believe nothing of the sort. Character, to me, is one more lie of history and the dramatic arts. In my view, we have only what we did yesterday, what we do today, and what we might still do. Plus, whatever we think about all of that. But nothing else — nothing hard or kernel-like. I’ve never seen evidence of anything resembling it. In fact I’ve seen the opposite: life as teeming and befuddling, followed by the end.

Therefore, where Ann’s concerned, to harmonize these dissonants, I mean to come before her portraying as close to human mass as I’m able — my Default Self — and hope that’s acceptable.

The vision of a Default Self is one we’ve all wrestled with even if we’ve failed to find it and gone away frustrated. We’ve eyed it hungrily, wishing we could figure it out and install it in our lives, like a hair shirt we could get cozy in. Though bottom line, it’s not that different from a bedrock self, except it’s our creation, rather than us being its. In the first place, where Ann’s concerned, I come here sporting my Default Self, wanting to put her at ease and let her feel right about things. She’s never going to discover she’s been wrong about me all these years. But she could be more comfortable with me and so could I. Second, the Default Self allows me to try not to seem the cynical Joe she believes me to be and won’t quit trying to prove. Trying to cobble up the appearance of a basic self that makes you seem a better, solider person than someone significant suspects you are—that can count. It counts as goodwill, and as a draw-down on cynicism, even if you fail — and you don’t always — which is the real charmed union marriage should offer its participants. Third, the Default Self is just plain easier. As I’ve said, its requirements are minimal and boiled down in a behavioristic sense. And fourth — which is why it’s the tiniest bit progressive — there’s always the chance I’ll have an epiphany (few as these are) and discover that due to this stripping away and Ann’s essentialist rigor, she’ll be proved right; that I do have a mass and a character peeping reluctantly out from behind the arras like Cupid — which is not a bad outcome at all.

The risk of this, of course, is that if I’m found to have a self and character, Ann will decide I was even more false and uncaring when we were married, and loathe me even more for concealing myself — like Claude Rains, unwinding his bandages to disclose the invisible man. Worse than a mere nothing. Though I would argue that I would be an invisible man who loved Ann Dykstra all there was in me to love, even if she never really believed I was there. In the end, it’s hard to win against your ex-wife, which is not new news.

A GIGANTIC DOUGLAS FIR, A-SPARKLE AND A-SPANGLE with a gold star on top and positioned with geometric precisioning, shines out through the great beveled-glass doors of Carnage Hill. All other side windows are alight with electric candles, like an old New England church. I’ve steered over to the shadowy side lot to avoid the venal valet boys, who go through your glove box, steal your turnpike change, eat your mints, change the settings on your radio, and drive your car to their girlfriends’—then expect a big tip when they return your car warm and odorous.

The freezing rain, when I get out, has become hard, popping snow pellets, stinging my cheeks and denting my Sonata hood and making it easy to fall down and bust my ass. Back down the hill, through the empty trees toward Mullica Pond, late-day light is surprisingly visible in the low western sky — a streak of yellow above a stratum of baby blue. New Jersey’s famous for its discordant skies. “The devil’s beating his wife,” my father used to say when rain fell from a sunny firmament. It reminds me, though, that it’s still before six and not midnight. My happy birthday dinner with Sally still lies ahead.

Carrying Ann’s cumbersome pillow under-arm in its plastic sleeve, I hurry past the smirking valet twerps, on into the big boisterous, bright-lit foyer with the dazzling humongous Christmas fir scratching the cathedral ceiling, and where all is festive and in a commotion.

The chief selling point of Carnage Hill and all such high-end entrepôts isn’t that sick, old, confused, lonely and fed up don’t exist and aren’t major pains; but, given that they are, it’s better here. In fact, it’s not only better than anywhere you could be under those circumstances, it’s better than anywhere you’ve ever been, so that circumstances quit mattering. In this way, being sick to death is like a passage on a cruise ship where you’re up on the captain’s deck, eating with him and possibly Engelbert Humperdinck, and no one’s getting Legionnaires’ or being cross about anything. And you never set sail or arrive anywhere, so there’re no bad surprises or disappointments about the ports of call being shabby and alienating. There aren’t any ports of call. This is it.

Tonight there are tons of Christmas visitors strewn through the public rooms and toward the back out of sight — grandkids teasing grandpaw, married duos checking on the surviving parent, wives visiting staring husbands, a priest sitting with parishioners, offering up Advent benedictions, plus a pitch to leave it all to the church. There’s a cheery murmur of voices and soft laughter and dishes tinkling and oo’s and ahh’s, along with a big fire roaring in a giant fireplace. It could be Yellowstone. A standing sign says a “book group” is meeting in the library, led by a Haddam High English teacher. They’re discussing Dickens — what else? I can make out a herd of wheeled walkers and oxy-caddies clustered close around a holly-decked lectern, the aged owners trying to hear better. A wine-and-cheese social’s being set up by the big picture window overlooking a pond and another Christmas tree afloat on a little island. Cinnamon/apple-cider odor thickens the atmosphere. Floors are polished. Chandeliers dusted. The Muzak’s giving out Andy, singing hot-digitty, dog-digitty… I always feel I’ve shrunk two jacket sizes when I come inside — either because I feel “at one” with the wizened residents, or because I loathe it and aim to be as invisible as Claude Rains.

I am of course known here. I often spy old realty clients, though I can usually swerve and not be seen and get down the corridor of the Beth Wessel, where Ann’s “flat” is, overlooking yet another decorative pond with real ducks. Though sometimes I’m trapped by Ann’s faux beau, the Philly flatfoot — Buck — who lies in wait for a chance to yak about “Miss Annie” and his stiffy, and what it sounds like when he takes a drug-aided “major whiz” in the visitor’s john (like “a fuckin electric drill,” he said last time). I’m hoping with stealth to miss them all.

Though on the good side, I’m relieved finally just to be here. My pelvic pain has all but ceased, and my neck doesn’t ache. Sally, who’s performing valiant grief-counseling services over in South Mantoloking, attending to hurricane victims who’ve lost everything, told me last week she’s begun feeling “grief undertow,” the very woe she’s working hard to rid her clients of. We were lying in bed early one morning, listening to heat tick in the house. Expectancy, I told her, was the hardest part of most difficult duties — from a prostate biopsy to a day in traffic court; and since she was giving of herself so devotedly, the least she could do was put it out of her mind when she was home. The worst dreams I ever had were always worse than the coming events that inspired them. Plus, bad dreams, like most worries, never tell us anything we didn’t know and couldn’t cope with fine when the lights are on. I should heed my own advice.

“Hi,” a smiling refrigerator of a woman in a large green sports coat says (to me). She is suddenly, unexpectedly, extremely present just as I’m halfway past the big tree piled around with phony gifts, heading for the entry of the Beth Wessel. Hot-diggity, dog-diggity, Boom! “Do you have a friend or loved one you’re here to visit?” the refrigerator says, happy, welcoming, vividly glad to see me. She’s wearing beige trousers, a Santa necktie, and form-fitting, black orthopedic shoes that mean she’s on her feet all day and her dogs are probably killing her. She is security — but nothing says so. Though at her size, she could drag the whole, gigantic blazing Christmas tree — assuming it was on fire — all the way to the Great Road by herself. She’s not Asian that I can tell.

I am not known to her. Which means she’s new, or else there’s been a “problem” in the Community — possibly an unwanted “guest”—for which measures have had to be taken. I will not be a problem.

“I do,” I say. I give her my own big smile that wants to say that a whole world of things have happened before she came to work today, and it’s no fault of hers, but I’m a friendly so let me get on with my piddly-ass business — my pillow, etc.

“Who would that be?” she says, as if she can’t wait to find out. Big smile back — bigger than mine. Likely she’s a local phys-ed teacher picking up holiday hours before starting two-a-days with the girls’ hoops squad over in Hightstown. Wide square face. Big laughing comical mouth. Though tiny, suspicious eyes and cell-block hair.

“Ann Dykstra,” I say. “Down in the Wessel.”

“Miss Annie,” she sings, as if the two of them have been friends forever. Conceivably she’s De Tocqueville faculty — Ann’s replacement with the golf squad.

A large man with his back to me, inching nearer the wine and cheese layout — which is not yet all the way set up — is Buck Pusylewski. I can see the Grisham novel and the Dave Garroway horn-rims on top of his head where his greasy hair will smudge them. I’m nervous he’s going to spot me and come over.

“Whatcha got in there,” the big security woman says. She pokes a finger right into the plastic sleeve of the ortho-pillow, making it crackle.

“Pillow,” I say. “I’m bringing it.”

A big I’m-with-you-on-this-one smile. “A Christmas gift,” she says jovially. Everything makes her happy. People are milling nearer us. Eyes are darting my way. They know who she is. But not me, now. What’s the problem? What’s going on? Who’s he? What’s that? “These are awesome. I’ve got one.” She’s agreeing about the pillow. “They really ease the neck pain.”

“My wife has Parkinson’s.” Though she’s not technically my wife.

“Well, we all know that,” the security amazon says, as if Parkinson’s was a condition anybody would want. “Lemme just give you a little squeeze.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Not you, you old charmer. The pillow. Lemme give her a little poofety-poof.”

Obviously I’m getting no farther without submitting. It’s not usually like this. I offer up the heavier-than-you’d-expect, plastic-encased pillow, which hasn’t been opened since I bought it yesterday at the Bed Bath & Beyond at the Haddam Mall. Unwelcome Indonesian spores perhaps wait inside its factory-sealed sleeve, intent on mayhem. I wouldn’t have one of these things.

The security woman hefts the pillow like a medicine ball, brings it to the side of her big face as if she was listening for something inside — an Uzi or a sarin gas micro-cylinder. She squeezes it like a dog toy. It makes no noise. Most terrorists don’t have ex-wives with Parkinson’s whom they visit once a month. Though who knows?

“O-kay!” She prinks her eyebrows as if we’re both in on something. She wakes up grinning, is my guess. She has alarmingly large hands. And then of course I catch on — I’m always the last to notice such things. “She’s” not a “she” but a “he.” She’s a Doug who’s become a Doris, an Artie an Amy — now free, thanks to an enlightened electorate, to assume her rightful place in the growing health-care industry, whereas before he was dying inside selling farm machinery in Duluth. My heart goes out to her/him. My life is piffles by comparison. I wish I could make Ann’s pillow a present to big Amy, and head to Sally’s birthday dinner, having done the good deed the season aspires to — instead of the deed I’m destined for.

The big galoot hands me back the pillow as if she’s used to strangers taking just about this long to wise up to the whole gender deal, but is happy to have it copacetic between us now. She used to be me. She knows what that’s all about — not as great as it’s cracked up to be. Otherwise she’d still be there.

“You must be Frank.” Amy-Doris for the first time trades in the bozo grin for a mulling stare, making her look like nothing as much as a farm machinery salesman, only with breasts, lipstick and a beard shadow down her jawline.

“Right,” I say, as if I’m the one in drag. Hot-diggity, dog-diggity…

“Annie talks about you sometimes,” A-D says. Her mulling look means I’ve long ago been determined to be in the wrong about many things, and it’s too late to fix any of them. It’s all just sad, sad, etc. Big Doug was probably a flop selling Caterpillars.

“What does she say?” I can’t keep from asking, though I don’t want to know. Boom! What you do to me!

“She says you’re okay. Sometimes you’re kind of an asshole. But that’s pretty rare.” Doug is just Doug now. We’re hombre-to-hombre. Perhaps his surgery’s not quite done and he’s still in the stage where you wake up not knowing who the hell’s living in your skin.

“That’s probably true,” I say, wedging the pillow back under my elbow. Buck, I see, is treating himself to a glass of the Malbec, getting ahead of when the book-clubbers let out. Possibly he and Miss Annie have plans for later. In the distant public rooms people are applauding. The sounds of pure delight. Granny Bea’s just opened her big present and been surprised as a betsy bug on a cabbage leaf.

“Hard not to be who you are,” big Doug observes, nodding. He should know. She should know.

“I keep trying to do better.”

“Well, you have to.” Big smile again. “You have yourself a merry one, Franky. Knock yourself out.”

“You have one, too.” Franky.

“Oh, I’m on my way to that. Don’t worry about me.” Something cheerlessly sexual’s crept into his/her voice. Though no more than with most things we say, do, think about and long to be true. Poor devil. But I’ve cleared customs now, am free to go. Free to find my way to the genuine woman who once was my wife.

BUCK, BY AN EXCELLENT STROKE, HAS NOT NOTICED me. An encounter with him would zero out my Default Self before it even had its chance. The Beth Wessel corridor, which I now enter, is like a swank hallway in the Carlyle. No hint of infirmity or decline. Nothing wheelchair width, no wall grips, no SOS phones or defibrillator paks. Illness abides elsewhere. The walls are rich, shadowed wainscot and with an aroma of saddle leather, the above-part done in hand-painted murals of the Luxembourg, the Marais, the Seine and the Place des Vosges. Ann’s told me these are all re-done yearly and there’s a competition. Brass sconces add tasteful low-light accents. The carpet’s gray with a green undertone you don’t notice and lush as a sheep meadow. Every few feet there’s a framed, spot-lit photograph — a Doisneau, a Cartier-Bresson, an Atget — or at least their imitators. Sounds are as hushed as deep space. You expect the next person you see to be Meryl Streep in a Mets cap and shades, making a discreet exit out onto a side street off the Boulevard St. Germain — not the Great Road in Haddam Township.

Ann’s flat is at the end. 8-B, though there’s no 8-B on the door. Doris-Doug will already have announced me by wireless means — possibly a message transmitted direct into Ann’s deep-cranial band width. There are, of course, cameras, though I can’t see them.

I’m ready to ring the bell, but the door opens before my finger can touch the brass-and-wood buzzer button. Ann Dykstra stands suddenly before me. It’s ten before six. I know where my children are. They’re grown up and far away. Thank goodness.

“I’ve just been watching the local news about these poor hurricane people,” Ann’s saying, without a hello, a hug, a peck, just stepping back as if I was the grocery boy with sacks and can find my own way to the kitchen. “It just doesn’t end, does it?” I take one step back, then come forward inside, and have to fight off pantomiming that it’s cold as Alaska outside her door, and I’m lucky to be inside for warmth and a fire. There’s no fire, and I’m not cold, or lucky. I’m simply here, with no reason to be except this ridiculous, crinkly, clear-plastic sack with its lifesaving pillow, which I’ve been instructed to fetch and now have done. “No, it doesn’t,” I say. “It’s cold outside.”

“I guess your Sally’s over there and seeing it firsthand, isn’t she?” Ann regularly refers to Sally as my Sally as if there were hundreds of identical Sallys, and I just happen to have one. It could seem friendly but isn’t. It makes Ann seem like my grandmother. “Those poor, poor people. They have nothing left. And they’re paying property taxes on homes that’ve washed away. I’m lucky I’m not there anymore.”

“You are lucky.” Ann’s living room’s like a crisp stage set, and I feel too large to be in it. (Five minutes ago I felt too small.) I also feel like I don’t smell good — like sweat or onions — and that my feet have cow shit on them and my hands are grimy. Ann was always a neatnik and has become more of one since she got Parkinson’s and moved to smaller quarters. Feng Shui rules all here — promoting tastefully optimum healing propensities. No metal lampshades (too yang). Tree energy wall colors — for calm. The bed, which I’ve never seen and never will, has its headboard oriented north to conquer insomnia (Ann’s told me). What Feng Shui has on its mind about constipation, I don’t know. The living room has a big mullioned picture window with a single candle facing the flood-lit woods and the duck pond (good yin). Tiny lights from the birch-bark canoe institute prickle invitingly through the tree limbs. The apartment looks like a model home in The AARP Journal. Pale green couch. Bamboo floors. Floral-print side chairs. Lots of clean, shining surfaces with plants, ceramic fragrant-liquid containers, and a fishless aquarium — small but new, and everything in its ordinal position to placate the gods by making the whole space as uncomfortable and un-lived-in as possible. I know there are also tiny soundless sensors all around. These track Ann’s movements, tabulate her steps, record her heartbeats, check her blood pressure and brain functions, possibly digitize her relative empathy levels depending on stimuli — me in this case. Low. All are S.O.P. for the “Living Laboratory for Gray Americans Plan” she’s opted for — and that drove down the purchase price. She can check any of these by accessing her “life profile” on the TV — though I can’t see a TV. Ann was always a devotée of the Golf Channel. But golf on TV may be bad yang.

I set the crinkly pillow sack down on one of the floral prints and am instantly sure I shouldn’t. Pillows on chairs, plastic on textiles, plastic on anything conceivably dilutes the chi.

“Did you see Buck?” Ann closes the door with a clunk. Buck the flatfoot.

“I didn’t,” I say, not entirely literally.

“He was wanting to brainstorm with you about buying on The Shore now that prices are whatever they are. Less, I guess now.”

“Less’s not really the word for it. I retired from that line of work, though.” So much for those poor, poor people.

Ann presses her back to the closed door, hands behind her. She gives me a purposefully pained and thin smile. I’m irritable. I don’t know why. “Do you real estate people ever really retire?”

“I’m not a ‘real estate people.’ And we do. A lot in the last few years.”

Ann’s wearing a soft, aqua-velour pants-and-top ensemble and a pair of day-glo orange Adidas that have never seen out-of-doors. Both, I assume, have the Feng Shui thumbs-up, as though she was a contemplated piece of furniture in her own living room. She’s also accessorized using a gaudy gold-and-diamond teardrop necklace that husband number two picked up at Harry Winston back in the foggy past, and which she’s brought out to remind me how women were once treated in a civilized world. Her hair, always athletically short, has been even more severely cropped — into a kind of pixie that no longer hides the gray, and which I find unexpectedly appealing. Her whole affect has grown smaller, trimmer, more intense, just, it seems, since I last saw her — sized down near to the dimensions of her girlhood, when I met her in ’69, and we listened to jazz and took the boat to see Miss Liberty and made whirlwind drives to Montauk and didn’t think about jewelry, and had the time of our lives, which just never got better after that. Her skin is shiny though mottled, her facial bones more visible, her glacial blue eyes clear and strangely bright, and her once-soft nose gone beaky and sharpened, as if in concentration. Her breasts seem smaller. She’s, in fact, prettier than I remember her, as if having a progressive, fatal disease agrees with her. Though there is the circular tremor ghosting her chin, the source of her concentration. It may be more pronounced than in November. She is brave to have me here, since I record the progress of her ailment like one of the sensors charting her decline from the prime that seemed always to be hers. Indeed, the whole Feng Shui deal, the velour, the Adidas, the bamboo, the floral prints, the necklace — they all speak of illness, the way an old-fashioned drawing room with damask draperies, shaded lamps, full bookshelves, and a fireplace speak to me of our first precious son being dead in the funeral parlor. The world gets smaller and more focused the longer we stay on it.

I’m still gazing round the over-cogitated room, wishing something would take place: a smoke alarm going off. The phone to ring. The figure of a Yeti striding through the snowy frame of the picture window, pausing to acknowledge us bestilled within, shaking his woolly head in wonder, then continuing into the forest where he’s happiest. There’s not even a Christmas tree here, nor a mirror. Rules restrict such things. Vanities.

Moments of bestillment are not unusual for Ann or me. What can I get from her, after all? What can she get from me? A pillow. (She could’ve easily purchased it online.) All we share is the click of reflex, a hammer falling on an empty chamber, like a desperado whose luck’s run out.

“Has Clarissa told you about…” Ann begins to say.

But I’m struck by three things at once, none of which I’ve noticed before. There’s not one photo anywhere — not the children, not Teddy, not her garrulous dad or sorrowing mom. Not me, natch. My face is recorded only in the grainy capture of some camera in the ceiling. The bedroom might have pictures. Or the bathroom. Speaking of which I could stand a leak, but won’t be asking. Old Buck’s Percheron comes uncomfortably to mind.

The second presence (the photos’ absence is a presence) is the clutter of Christmas cards on the teak coffee table — also an issue of the Carnage Clarion, a copy of USA Today, and underneath all, snugged out of disapproving Feng Shui sight, the silver shaft of a putter! Ann still engages in the Republican national pastime, tremor and all, with the bamboo carpet as her “green.” I wonder if she has the pop-up cup that ejects her ball each time she drains one. She used to.

The Clarion headline reads “Life in the Post-Antibiotic Era”—something we all need to be interested in. I wish I could see who’s sending Christmas cards. Undoubtedly the inmates draw lots for who to befriend. Plus Haddam merchants tapping into the money trove a place like this betokens. I see a card with our son Paul Bascombe’s return address in KC. 919 Dunmore — a name he loves. He “builds” his own cards with skills honed as an apprentice joke-meister at Hallmark. Mine this year bore a plain front, inside which was printed “An invisible man marries an invisible woman. Their kids are nothing to look at. Merry Xmas. Preston D. Service.” Ann’s, I’m sure, is something different.

The last room-addition of note are three new oil paintings — of fruit — framed and hung on the green wall (for optimism), above the big cherrywood cabinet inside which probably lurks a big LG for when the Masters gets going in April. One by one the paintings portray: a sliced red apple, a sliced-open honeydew, a sliced green kiwi — all with backgrounds of rustic wood table tops, rough-hewn chairs, crisp white napkins, spilled wheat grains and tempting nuts of varying brown, yellow and purple hues. All could fit perfectly in a suburban ophthalmologist’s office — non-confronting, non-anxiety-producing, toothsome, and straight out of the Feng Shui central office in Youngstown… if all three sliced fruits didn’t look like glistening, delving vaginas, cracked open and ready for business. At first glance you could believe they’re not what I say. But not twice. I’m unable to take my eyes off them. They’re far from anybody’s version of “suggestive” (I’m thinking of Buck again and his stiffy). They’re, in fact, an in-your-face, front-and-center manifesto requiring those who enter here to be on speaking terms with what the pictures depict, since the person living here damn sure is, and life’s too short to beat around the shrubbery.

Ann’s just said something about our daughter. But I’m unable to say anything. The least wrong remark would be met with a steely gaze, as though I held certain “views” about how things should be art-wise. I don’t have views how things should be art-wise. Mature women, I know, can get pretty hardware-store candid about sex. (Sally’s an exception.) Years of sexual oppression at the rough hands of men, men and more men finally get brought to an end by our untimely deaths; only by then there’s not much time left to do much more than talk in mixed company about gynecological issues, and hang paintings of glistening pussies on the wall in the old folks’ home. Possibly that’s why many become lesbians late in life. Who blames them?

Though Ann’s new wall art produces an instantaneous non-verbal response. Faint stirrings below-decks; shiftings in the apparatus, brought on not only by the fruit painting over the TV cabinet, but by their frankness as expressions of Ann’s new bedrock reality and straight-on determination to let life — hers, Buck’s, everybody’s, mine — be what the hell it’s going to be. Put color pictures of genitalia on the wall and see what happens to your social life. It may all be a drug reaction, of course, and not destined to last.

“Did she?” Ann’s looking at me displeased, her chin destabilized, her mouth drawn into a tight line of effort.

“Hm?”

I’m concentrating hard on my Default Self. Streamline my utterances. Nothing from the past. Optimistic high road. The future’s a blank. Be nice. I’m not worried about my own rudimentary stiffy. They’re not as prompt as they once were — though never unwelcome. But I’m suddenly burning up in my heavy coat, as if somebody’d turned on the steam. It may be more pelvic pain beginning.

“I asked you if Clarissa’d spoken to you about Paul’s ‘great new idea.’” Paul — he of the mercurial Christmas cards and suburban garden-supply (A Growing Concern is his company’s name) — has decided he needs to “grow” his business into the vacant building next door (a former Saturn dealership) and to open a rent-to-own operation, dispensing common household goods to deserving young people just starting out and who don’t want to go into killer debt for a dinette set, cheap oriental carpets, a veneer bedroom suite, and fake hunting prints for the walls. Rent-to-own, Paul believes, is genius. His sister and I, however, are his silent partners and money bags. And I have done my homework on this. He has no idea of the initial outlay, about how stingy are the profit margins, and how much time he’d spend hiring and supervising repo gorillas to shadow his customers’ houses and trailers to get his shit back when they stop paying — which they always do. I don’t intend throwing away a penny at his nut-brain scheme, since I’m reasonably sure his “need” has only to do with the phrase “rent-to-own,” which he thinks is side-splitting — like A Growing Concern. Paul, in my view, is best off wrestling sacks of sphagnum moss and toting flats of nasturtiums and bleeding hearts to the backs of Volvos, then standing by cracking wise with his female customers. I sometimes think of my son as being disabled, though he’s not. He, in fact, pays his bills and taxes, votes Democratic, owns a car and drives it, is sadly divorced, reads books, attends Chiefs’ and Royals’ games, and manages to arrive to work each day in complex, rising spirits. He merely possesses what’s been described (clinically) as an “unusual executive function.” Thus, like most parents of adult children, I’m often wrong about him. From outer space, his life’s as normal as mine, and it is enough that we love each other. Though if I don’t hurry up and die, I fear he’ll end up sleeping in my living room.

“It’s a non-starter,” I say relative to Paul’s plan — my utterances kept to a minimum. My boner’s stalled out already — disappointing, but a relief. My jacket had it camouflaged.

But I’m sweating inside my shirt. It’s a hundred degrees in this apartment. My heart does one of those juddering things that aren’t A-fib but scare the shit out of you by reminding you they could be — and will be if you live long enough. Possibly it’s not pelvic pain.

“Are you all right?” Ann’s keeping her distance at the door I’ve entered through. She’s giving me a pseudo-concerned stare, which probably means she wants me to leave. Paul’s business plans are come and gone.

“I am. Yeah.”

“You look a little tissue-y. Do you want me to call someone? We have doctors here.”

“It’s hot as a fucking kiln in here,” I say. “Why do you keep it that way?”

“No, it’s not.” “Tissue-y” is one of her mother’s dagger words used to keep Ann’s libidinous father off his game. Unsuccessfully. It’s the same with me. Sometimes she says I look “fragile.” Sometimes it’s a crack about my “destination memory,” and how retirement lowers the IQ, or how having had cancer kills synapses like a roach motel. Sometimes she tells me I look like my own mother — whom she didn’t know. Sometimes it’s that I “lack discipline” (about everything), and that I should take a “genetics” test to see what fatal diseases lie ahead. I have to be on my guard. And am.

“Does Fang Schway prescribe the temperature?” I massacre the pronunciation to annoy her.

“No,” Ann says and smiles distastefully. “You should sit down. Take off that awful coat. Are your feet wet?”

“They’re fine. I’m fine. How are you?” The Default Self allows questions, but only ones for which you want an answer — the opposite of lawyers.

“I’m sorry?” Ann doesn’t hear as well as once she did. The Default Self also requires that I speak softly. Though sometimes I believe I’m thinking when actually I’m talking. Sally has pointed this out. I may actually have said that about lawyers and not just thought it. Ann, of course, knows nothing about the Default Self and would think it was stupid. Which it’s not.

“How are you!” I say, aiming for the optimistic high road. I’m still on my feet, hot as a poker, my heart racing. I’m not taking off my coat. I’m not here for that long, even though there’s no set time for me to stay. I just don’t want to stand here half-eyeing ripe vaginas. Whatever their mission, it’s accomplished.

“I’m just fine. Thank you.” Ann’s chin has become minorly stabilized. “Do you see what I bought?” She takes an appraising, curatorial step away from the door in the direction of the vaginal portraiture, regarding them as if she now saw something new she liked.

“What’d you buy those for?” I say. “They look like pussies.” Lying is forbidden.

“Oh.” Ann gives them a stagy moué then raises her chin in mock re-assessment. “Do you think so? I think they just look like fruit. I suppose I can see what you might mean. Do they make you uncomfortable?”

“They started to give me a boner. But it changed its mind.”

“I see,” Ann says and pretends to fan herself. She and I never experienced boner problems back when. “We should change the subject then.”

“Fine.” I glance out the picture window, thinking of the Yeti, plodding his or her slow way through the dark woods toward Skillman. Snow is sifting through the exterior light cone that brightens the duck pond. No ducks are there.

Ann sits on the front edge of one of the flower-print chairs, arranges her hands on her velour knee like a demure elderly lady — which she is. Boner and pussy talk are over. Her hands aren’t trembling. I feel like a man who’s just committed a violent act in his sleep and snapped awake. Though all I’ve done is drive out here in shit weather, deliver a pillow, and get unexpectedly hot and gamy feeling.

“I’ve been taking a class here called Deaths of Others,” Ann says.

“That’s interesting,” I say insincerely.

“It is,” she says. “Our topic has been whether suicide is a religious issue or a medical one. People talk about that all the time here.” She smiles at me savagely.

“I think it’s all a matter of space,” I say, looking around to find something — not her, not the venereal art, not the picture window with the lighted pond — to fasten onto. There’s really not much here, which is the Feng Shui way. “At some point you just need to leave the theater so the next crowd can see the movie.”

“Elderly white men are in the suicide demographic,” Ann says, “along with young American Indians, gun owners, residents of the Southwest, and people abused as children.”

“I’m one for five,” I say. “I’m safe.”

“I’d never find the nerve.”

“Most people who try to kill themselves fail, but then they’re pretty happy about it later. Nobody’s first choice is being dead, I guess.” We both read the same magazines, though I don’t see an Economist on the coffee table.

“Are you still donating your mortal remains to medical research?” Ann says, primly.

I know what she’s doing. She’s angling toward telling me she’s bought a cemetery plot in Haddam cemetery — near our son Ralph’s grave — in the “new part,” which is no longer new. She and I used to meet there on his birthday when we first were divorced. We read poems to console each other. Long, long ago. Ralph would be forty-three. I hardly remember him. Though I can hear his voice.

What Ann doesn’t remember, speaking of “destination memory,” is that I know all about her plans and have for months. Clarissa told me when she informed me Ann was moving back to Haddam. Ann herself has told me twice. We’ve talked about it — though only briefly. She talked. I listened. I’ve also twice told her I’ve decided not to leave my “mortal remains” to the Mayo Clinic. As the moment when that might actually happen grew closer, it began giving me the willies. The Mayo people were completely sporting about it. “Two out of six change their minds, anyway,” the woman said, clicking along merrily on her computer, erasing me off the donor list. “We manage fine, though. I don’t blame you. It seems pretty icky to me.”

“No,” I say. “I’m not.” This, pertinent to my mortal remains.

“I’ve decided to be buried near Ralph,” Ann says in a firm voice, hands still on knees, looking very pretty. If we knew what made women attractive all things would be very different.

I notice, though, she’s biting the inside of her cheek — hard enough to tighten the skin in her soft face and possibly quiet a tremor, which doesn’t quite work. The drugs she takes may make her do this. Her face looks suddenly despairing.

“That’s a good idea,” I say.

“Where are your arrangements?” She blinks. What else can I do but stand here?

“Same place,” I say. “Well. Not the precise same. But near enough. You know?”

“Okay,” she says. Ann Dykstra is (or was once) one of those staunch middlewestern females who, to any serious assertion, spontaneously says “okay.” By which she could mean, “Really?” Or “I’m not so sure I like that.” Or “I agree but not wholeheartedly.” Though also, “Sure. Why not.” Which is what she means now. Sure. Why not.

Only, when she says “okay” I catch, as if in my nostrils, the faint, rich whiff of our old life long ago. A whole world in a moment’s fragrance. It is not unwelcome.

Burial plans have now possibly become the new bedrock issue — not fruit paintings, not hurricanes, not whether I loved her once or didn’t. It’s an improvement.

“Sally’s working very hard over on The Shore, isn’t she?” Ann’s thinking of the hurricane even now, perhaps of the things it caused that no one quite realizes. Sally has told her about her work, including the proper use of the “empathy suit”—useful teaching tool in the grief-assuagement business.

When Ann decided to make the move to here, she spent extravagant time and effort to “surrender” old Mr. Binkler to “a family,” since he wouldn’t be welcome in “the community,” what with allergies and all the doggy business. The only taker was someone in Indiana. Ann insisted on driving to La Porte to interview old B’s prospective new parents. But that wasn’t allowed, the rescue people said. The next thing you knew, she’d want him back. It had happened before, with bad results. The plan fell quickly through, and Binkler was left without a port in his last storm. Ann then decided, after much agonizing and crying, to have poor old B “humanely put down.” Our daughter, of course, went ballistic. But Ann did it, speaking of empathy. This, too, I suppose, can be attributed to the hurricane’s fury.

“She is,” I say, referring to Sally’s efforts in South Mantoloking.

“She’s a great seeker, isn’t she, Frank?” Ann smiles at me warmly, no longer biting her cheek. Her chin is at it again. Though my name on her lips has made her happy. I, for this moment, cannot tolerate looking at her and have to stare around the room. It is only an instant — partly good, partly terrible — and will pass.

“She likes to help people,” I say. “Always has.” Don’t presume the past. Be nice.

“Second marriages don’t get all embroiled with the difficult first principle questions, do they?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’ve had two. Two second marriages. Both better than when I married you.”

Whip-crack-POW! I didn’t see that welling up. Though I should’ve. Remember Binkler.

“I see,” I say. “That’s good then, Ann.” Her name is bitter in my mouth. For years, I couldn’t speak it, avoided all opportunities when it came up — in particular when I spoke to her. Now, though, I can use it, as I have no reason to except as my instrument. A weapon. “You’re lucky if you’re happy once,” I say. Not a lie. My eyes fall sadly to the pillow I’ve dutifully brought. I wish I could just go to sleep on it.

“Are you happy?” Ann says, chin mercilessly on the move. She shakes her head as if to make it stop. I wish I could help her.

“Yes,” I say. I am the Yeti in the forest. A brute.

“Marriage is just one story that pretends to be the only story, isn’t it, sweetheart.” Her old pet name. Her pale eyes stare at me as if she’s lost the thread.

“I suppose.”

She stands unexpectedly, her bearing erect, hands clasped in front, eyes blinking. I think she’s clenching her molars the way I sometimes do. These visits are worse for her than me. I have Sally’s birthday to look forward to.

“Well. Thank you for bringing me my pillow,” she says, her voice rising, affecting a smile. She turns her head to animate her face like a glamor girl. The pillow is where I left it.

“I was glad to,” I say, saving a lie for the end.

“Tell Sally how proud I am of her.”

“I will,” I say and smile. “She’ll be flattered. I’ll tell her.”

“It’s time for you to go, I believe.” Ann opens her eyes widely, but doesn’t move her feet.

“I know,” I say.

There is no urge to touch, to kiss, to embrace. But I do it just the same. It is our last charm. Love isn’t a thing, after all, but an endless series of single acts.