The Lay of the Land

1

Toms River, across the Barnegat Bay, teems out ahead of me in the blustery winds and under the high autumnal sun of an American Thanksgiving Tuesday. From the bridge over from Sea-Clift, sunlight diamonds the water below the girdering grid. The white-capped bay surface reveals, at a distance, only a single wet-suited jet-skier plowing and bucking along, clinging to his devil machine as it plunges, wave into steely wave. “Wet and chilly, bad for the willy,” we sang in Sigma Chi, “Dry and warm, big as a baby’s arm.” I take a backward look to see if the NEW JERSEY’S BEST KEPT SECRET sign has survived the tourist season — now over. Each summer, the barrier island on which Sea-Clift sits at almost the southern tip hosts six thousand visitors per linear mile, many geared up for sun ’n fun vandalism and pranksterish grand theft. The sign, which our Realty Roundtable paid for when I was chairman, has regularly ended up over the main entrance of the Rutgers University library, up in New Brunswick. Today, I’m happy to see it’s where it belongs.

New rows of three-storey white-and-pink condos line the mainland shore north and south. Farther up toward Silver Bay and the state wetlands, where bald eagles perch, the low pale-green cinder-block human-cell laboratory owned by a supermarket chain sits alongside a white condom factory owned by Saudis. At this distance, each looks as benign as Sears. Each, in fact, is a good-neighbor clean-industry-partner whose employees and executives send their kids to the local schools and houses of worship, while management puts a stern financial foot down on drugs and pedophiles. Their campuses are well landscaped and policed. Both stabilize the tax base and provide locals a few good yuks.

From the bridge span I can make out the Toms River yacht basin, a forest of empty masts wagging in the breezes, and to the north, a smooth green water tower risen behind the husk of an old nuclear plant currently for sale and scheduled for shutdown in 2002. This is our westward land view across from the Boro of Sea-Clift, and frankly it is a positivist’s version of what landscape-seascape has mostly become in a multi-use society.

This morning, I’m driving from Sea-Clift, where I’ve lived the last eight years, across the sixty-five-mile inland passage over to Haddam, New Jersey, where I once lived for twenty, for a day of diverse duties — some sobering, some fearsome, one purely hopeful. At 12:30, I’m paying a funeral-home visitation to my friend Ernie McAuliffe, who died on Saturday. Later, at four, my former wife, Ann Dykstra, has asked to “meet” me at the school where she works, the prospect of which has ignited piano-wire anxiety as to the possible subjects — my health, her health, our two grown and worrisome children, the surprise announcement of a new cavalier in her life (an event ex-wives feel the need to share). I also mean to make a quick stop by my dentist’s for an on-the-fly adjustment to my night guard (which I’ve brought). And I have a Sponsor appointment at two — which is the hopeful part.

Sponsors is a network of mostly central New Jersey citizens — men and women — whose goal is nothing more than to help people (female Sponsors claim to come at everything from a more humanistic/ nurturing angle, but I haven’t noticed that in my own life). The idea of Sponsoring is that many people with problems need nothing more than a little sound advice from time to time. These are not problems you’d visit a shrink for, or take drugs to cure, or that require a program Blue Cross would co-pay, but just something you can’t quite figure out by yourself, and that won’t exactly go away, but that if you could just have a common-sense conversation about, you’d feel a helluva lot better. A good example would be that you own a sailboat but aren’t sure how to sail it very well. And after a while you realize you’re reluctant even to get in the damn thing for fear of sailing it into some rocks, endangering your life, losing your investment and embittering yourself with embarrassment. Meantime it’s sitting in gaspingly expensive dry dock at Brad’s Marina in Shark River, suffering subtle structural damage from being out of the water too long, and you’re becoming the butt of whispered dumb-ass-novice cracks and slurs by the boatyard staff. You end up never driving down there even when you want to, and instead find yourself trying to avoid ever thinking about your sailboat, like a murder you committed decades ago and have escaped prosecution for by moving to another state and adopting a new identity, but that makes you feel ghastly every morning at four o’clock when you wake up covered with sweat.

Sponsor conversations address just such problems, often focusing on the debilitating effects of ill-advised impulse purchases or bad decisions regarding property or personal services. As a realtor, I know a lot about these things. Another example would be how do you approach your Dutch housekeeper, Bettina, who’s stopped cleaning altogether and begun sitting in the kitchen all day drinking coffee, smoking, watching TV and talking on the telephone long-distance, but you can’t figure out how to get her on track, or worst case, send her packing. Sponsor advice would be what a friend would say: Get rid of the boat, or else take some private lessons at the yacht club next spring; probably nothing’s all that wrong with it for the time being — these things are built to last. Or I’ll write out a brief speech for the Sponsoree to deliver to Bettina or leave in the kitchen, which, along with a healthy check, will send her on her way without fuss. She’s probably illegal and unhappy herself.

Anybody with a feet-on-the-ground idea of what makes sense in the world can offer advice like this. Yet it’s surprising the number of people who have no friends they can ask sound advice from, and no capacity to trust themselves. Things go on driving them crazy even though the solution’s usually as easy as tightening a lug nut.

The Sponsor theory is: We offer other humans the chance to be human; to seek and also to find. No donations (or questions) asked.

A drive across the coastal incline back to Haddam is not at all unusual for me. Despite my last near decade spent happily on the Shore, despite a new wife, new house, a new professional address — Realty-Wise Associates — despite a wholly reframed life, I’ve kept my Haddam affiliations alive and relatively thriving. A town you used to live in signifies something — possibly interesting — about you: what you were once. And what you were always has its private allures and comforts. I still, for instance, keep my Haddam Realty license current and do some referrals and appraisals for United Jersey, where I know most of the officers. For a time, I owned (and expensively maintained) two rental houses, though I sold them in the late-nineties gentrification boom. And for several years, I sat on the Governor’s Board of the Theological Institute — that is, until fanatical Fresh Light Koreans bought the whole damn school, changed the name to the Fresh Light Seminary (salvation through studied acts of discipline) and I was invited to retire. I’ve also kept my human infrastructure (medical-dental) centered in Haddam, where professional standards are indexed to the tax base. And quite frankly, I often just find solace along the leaf-shaded streets, making note of this change or that improvement, what’s been turned into condos, what’s on the market at what astronomical price, where historical streets have been revectored, buildings torn down, dressed up, revisaged, as well as silently viewing (mostly from my car window) the familiar pale faces of neighbors I’ve known since the seventies, grown softened now and re-charactered by time’s passage.

Of course, at some unpredictable but certain moment, I can also experience a heavy curtain-closing sensation all around me; the air grows thin and dense at once, the ground hardens under my feet, the streets yawn wide, the houses all seem too new, and I get the williwaws. At which instant I turn tail, switch on my warning blinkers and beat it back to Sea-Clift, the ocean, the continent’s end and my chosen new life — happy not to think about Haddam for another six months.

What is home then, you might wonder? The place you first see daylight, or the place you choose for yourself? Or is it the someplace you just can’t keep from going back to, though the air there’s grown less breathable, the future’s over, where they really don’t want you back, and where you once left on a breeze without a rearward glance? Home? Home’s a musable concept if you’re born to one place, as I was (the syrup-aired southern coast), educated to another (the glaciated mid-continent), come full stop in a third — then spend years finding suitable “homes” for others. Home may only be where you’ve memorized the grid pattern, where you can pay with a check, where someone you’ve already met takes your blood pressure, palpates your liver, slips a digit here and there, measures the angstroms gone off your molars bit by bit — in other words, where your primary care-givers await, their pale gloves already pulled on and snugged.

My other duty for the morning is to act as ad hoc business adviser and confidant to my realty associate Mike Mahoney, about whom some personal data is noteworthy.

Mike hails from faraway Gyangze, Tibet (the real Tibet, not the one in Ohio), and is a five-foot-three-inch, forty-three-year-old realty dynamo with the standard Tibetan’s flat, bony-cheeked, beamy Chinaman’s face, gun-slit eyes, abbreviated arm length and, in his case, skint black hair through which his beige scalp glistens. “Mike Mahoney” was the “American” name hung on him by coworkers at his first U.S. job at an industrial-linen company in Carteret — his native name, Lobsang Dhargey, being thought by them to be too much of a word sandwich. I’ve told him that one or the other — Mike Lobsang or Mike Dhargey — could be an interesting fillip for business. But Mike’s view is that after fifteen years in this country he’s adjusted to Mike Mahoney and likes being “Irish.” He has, in fact, become a full-blooded, naturalized American — at the courthouse in Newark with four hundred others. Yet, it’s easy to picture him in a magenta robe and sandals, sporting a yellow horn hat and blowing a ceremonial trumpet off the craggy side of Mount Qomolangma — which is often how I think of him, though he never did it. You’d be right to say I never in a hundred years expected to have a Tibetan as my realty associate, and that New Jersey homebuyers might turn skittish at the idea. But at least about the second of these, what might be true is not. In the year and a half he’s worked for me, since walking through my Realty-Wise door and asking for a job, Mike has turned out to be a virtual lion of revenue generation and business savvy: unceasingly farming listings, showing properties, exhibiting cold-call tenacity while proving artful at coaxing balky offers, wheedling acceptances, schmoozing with buyers, keeping negotiating parties in the dark, fast-tracking loan applications and getting money into our bank account where it belongs.

Which isn’t to say he’s a usual person to sell real estate alongside of, even though he’s not so different from the real estate seller I’ve become over the years and for some of the same reasons — neither of us minds being around strangers dawn to dusk, and nothing else seems very suitable. Still, I’m aware some of my competitors smirk behind both our backs when they see Mike out planting Realty-Wise signs in front yards. And though occasionally potential buyers may experience a perplexed moment when a voice inside them shouts, “Wait. I’m being shown a beach bungalow by a fucking Tibetan!”—most clients come around soon enough to think of Mike as someone special who’s theirs, and get over his unexpected Asian-ness as I have, to the point they can treat him like any other biped.

Looked at from a satellite circling the earth, Mike is not very different from most real estate agents, who often turn out to be exotics in their own right: ex-Concorde pilots, ex-NFL linebackers, ex-Jack Kerouac scholars, ex-wives whose husbands ran off with Vietnamese au pairs, then wish to God they could come back, but aren’t allowed to. The real estate seller’s role is, after all, never one you fully occupy, no matter how long you do it. You somehow always think of yourself as “really” something else. Mike started his strange life’s odyssey in the mid-eighties as a telemarketer for a U.S. company in Calcutta, where he learned to talk American by taking orders for digital thermocators and moleskin pants from housewives in Pompton Plaines and Bridgeton. And yet with his short gesturing arms, smiley demeanor and aggressively cheerful outlook, he can seem and act just like a bespectacled little Adam’s-appled math professor at Iowa State. And indeed, in his duties as a residential specialist, he’s comprehended his role as being a “metaphor” for the assimilating, stateless immigrant who’ll always be what he is (particularly if he’s from Tibet) yet who develops into a useful, purposeful citizen who helps strangers like himself find safe haven under a roof (he told me he’s read around in Camus).

Over the last year and a half, Mike has embraced his new calling with gusto by turning himself into a strangely sharp dresser, by fine-tuning a flat, accentless news-anchor delivery (his voice sometimes seems to come from offstage and not out of him), by sending his two kids to a pricey private school in Rumson, by mortgaging himself to the gizzard, by separating from his nice Tibetan wife, driving a fancy silver Infiniti, never speaking Tibetan (easy enough) and by frequenting — and probably supporting — a girlfriend he hasn’t told me about. All of which is fine. My only real complaint with him is that he’s a Republican. (Officially, he’s a registered Libertarian — fiscal conservative, social moderate, which makes you nothing at all.) But he voted for numbskull Bush and, like many prosperous newcomers, stakes his pennant on the plutocrat’s principle that what’s good for him is probably good for all others — which as a world-view and in spite of his infectious enthusiasm, seems to rob him of a measure of inner animation, a human deficit I usually associate with citizens of the Bay Area, but that he would say is because he’s a Buddhist.

But as for my role as his business adviser, Mike’s name has gotten around some in our mid-Shore real estate circles — it’s no longer possible for any single human act to stay long out of the public notice — and as of last week he was contacted by a subdivision developer up in Montmorency County, close to Haddam, with a proposition to enter a partnership. The developer has obtained a purchase option on 150 acres currently planted in Jersey yellow corn, but that lies slap in the middle of the New Jersey wealth belt (bordering the Delaware, bordering Haddam, two hours to Gotham, one from Philly). Houses there — giant mansionettes meant to look like Versailles — go for prices in the troposphere, even with current market wobbles, and anybody with a backhoe, a cell phone and who isn’t already doing hard time can get rich without even getting up in the morning.

What Mike brings to the table is that he’s a Tibetan and an American and therefore qualifies as a bona fide and highly prized minority. Any housing outfit that makes him its president automatically qualifies for big federal subsidy dollars, after which he and his partner can become jillionaires just by filling out a few government documents and letting a bunch of Mexicans do the work.

I’ve explained to him that in any regular business situation, a typical American entrepreneurial type might let him act as substitute towel boy at his racket club — but probably not. Mike, however, believes the business climate’s not typical now. Many arrivees to central Jersey, he’s told me, are monied subcontinentals with luxury fever — gastroenterologists, hospital administrators and hedge-fund managers — who’re sick of their kids not getting into Dalton and Spence and are ready to buy the first day they drive down. The thinking is that these beige-skinned purchasers will look favorably on a development fronted by a well-dressed little guy who sorta looks like them. He and I have also discussed the fact that house sales are already leveling and could pancake by New Year’s. Corporate debt’s too high. Mortgage rates are at 8.25 but a year ago were at six. The NASDAQ’s spongy. The election’s going in the toilet (though he doesn’t think so). Plus, it’s the Millennium, and nobody knows what’s happening next, only that something will. I’ve told him now might be a better time to spend his ethnic capital on a touchless car wash on Route 35, or possibly a U-Store-It or a Kinko’s. These businesses are cash cows if you keep an eye on your employees and don’t invest much of your own dough. Mike, of course, reads his tea leaves differently.

This morning, Mike has offered to drive and at this moment has his hands cautiously at ten and two, his eyes hawking the Toms River traffic. He’s told me he never got enough driving time in Tibet — for obvious reasons — so he enjoys piloting my big Suburban. It may make him feel more American, since many vehicles in the thick holiday traffic on Route 37 are also Suburbans — only most are newer.

Since we rolled out of Sea-Clift and over the bridge toward the Garden State Parkway, he has spoken little. I’ve noticed in the office that he’s recently exhibited broody, deep-ponder states during which he bites his lower lip, sighs and runs his hand back across his bristly skull, frowning apparently at nothing. These gestures, I assume, are standard ones having to do with being an immigrant or being a Buddhist, or with his new business prospects, or with everything at once. I’ve paid them little attention and am happy to be silently chauffeured today and to take in the scenery while shifting serious thoughts to the outer reaches of my brain — a trick I’ve gotten good at since Sally’s departure last June, and since finding out during the Olympics in August that I’d become host to a slow-growing tumor in my prostate gland. (It is a gland, by the way, unlike your dick, which is often said to be, but isn’t.)

Route 37, the Toms River Miracle Mile, is already jammed at 9:30 with shopper vehicles moving into and out of every conceivable second-tier factory outlet lot, franchise and big-box store, until we’re mostly stalled in intersection tie-ups under screaming signage and horn cacophony. Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, when merchants hope to inch into the black, is traditionally the retail year’s hallowed day, with squadrons of housewives in housecoats and grannies on walkers shouldering past security personnel at Macy’s and Bradlees to get their hands on discounted electric carving knives and water-filled orthopedic pillows for that special arthritic with the chronically sore C6 and C7. Only this year — due to the mists of economic unease — merchants and their allies, the customers, have designated “gigantic” Black Tuesday and Black Wednesday Sales Days and are flying the banner of EVERYTHING MUST GO! — in case, I guess, the whole country’s gone by Friday.

Cars are everywhere, heading in every direction. A giant yellow-and-red MasterCard dirigible floats above the buzzing landscape like a deity. Movie complexes are already opened with queues forming for Gladiator and The Little Vampire. Crowds press into Target and International Furniture Liquidator (“If we don’t have it, you don’t want it”). Christmas music’s blaring, though it’s not clear from where, and the traffic’s barely inching. Firemen in asbestos suits and Pilgrim hats are out collecting money in buckets at the mall entrances and stoplights. Ragged groups of people who don’t look like Americans skitter across the wide avenue in groups, as though escaping something, while solitary men in gleaming pickups sit smoking, watching, waiting to have their vehicles detailed at the Pow-R-Brush. At the big Hooper Avenue intersection, a TV crew has set up a command post, with a hard-body, shiny-legged Latina, her stiff little butt turned to the gridlock, shouting out to the 6:00 p.m. viewers up the seaboard what all the fuss is about down here.

Yet frankly it all thrills me and sets my stomach tingling. Unbridled commerce isn’t generally pretty, but it’s always forward-thinking. And since nowadays with my life out of sync and most things in the culture not affecting me much — politics, news, sports, everything but the weather — it feels good that at least commerce keeps me interested like a scientist. Commerce, after all, is basic to my belief system, even though it’s true, as modern merchandising theory teaches, that when we shop, we no longer really shop for anything. If you’re really looking for that liquid stain remover you once saw in your uncle Beckmer’s basement that could take the spots off a hyena, or you’re seeking a turned brass drawer pull you only need one of to finish refurbishing the armoire you inherited from Aunt Grony, you’ll never find either one. No one who works anyplace knows anything, and everyone’s happy to lie to you. “They don’t make those anymore.” “Those’ve been backordered two years.” “That ballpoint company went out of business, moved to Myanmar and now makes sump pumps…All we have are these.” You have to take what they’ve got even if you don’t want it or never heard of it. It’s hard to call this brand of zero-sum merchandising true commerce. But in its apparent aimlessness, it’s not so different from the real estate business, where often at the end of the day, someone goes away happy.

We’ve now made it as far as the Toms River western outskirts. Motels are all full here. Used-car lots are Givin’ ’em Away. A bonsai nursery has already moved its tortured little shrubs to the back, and employees are stacking in Christmas trees and wreaths. Flapping flags in many parking lots stand at half-staff — for what reason, I don’t know. Other signs shout Y2K MEMORABILIA SCULPTURE! INVEST IN REAL ESTATE NOT STOCKS! TIGHT BUTTS MAKE ME NUTS! WELCOME SUICIDE SURVIVORS. Yellow traffic cones and a giant blinking yellow arrow are making us merge right into one lane, alongside a deep gash in the freshly opened asphalt, beside which large hard-hatted white men stand staring at other men already down in the hole — putting our tax dollars to work.

“I really don’t understand that,” Mike says, his chin up alertly, the seat run way forward so his toes can reach the pedals and his hands control the wheel. He eyes me as he navigates through the holiday tumult.

I, of course, know what’s bothering him. He’s seen the WELCOME SUICIDE SURVIVORS sign on the Quality Court marquee. My having cancer makes him possibly worry about me in this regard, which then makes him fret about his own future. When I was at Mayo last August, I left him in charge of Realty-Wise, and he carried on without a hitch. But on his desk last week I saw a New York Times article he’d downloaded, explaining how half of all bankruptcies are health-related and that from a purely financial perspective, doing away with oneself’s probably a good investment. I’ve explained to him that one in ten Americans is a cancer survivor, and that my prospects are good (possibly true). But I’m fairly sure that my health is on his mind and has probably brought about today’s sudden test-the-waters probing into suburban land-development. Plus, in exactly a week from today I’m flying to Rochester for my first post-procedure follow-up at Mayo, and he may sense I’m feeling anxious — I may be — and is merely feeling the same himself.

Buddhists are naturally unbending on the subject of suicide. They’re against it. And even though he’s a free-market, deregulating, Wall Street Journal-reading flat-taxer, Mike has also remained a devotee of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. His screen saver at the office actually shows a beaming color photograph of himself beside the diminutive reincarnate, taken at the Meadowlands last year. He’s also displayed three red-white-and-blue prayer flags on the wall behind his desk, with a small painting of the thousand-armed Chenrezig and beside these a signed glossy of Ronald Reagan — all for our clients to puzzle over as they write out their earnest money checks. In the DL’s view, utilizing a correct, peaceful-compassionate frame of mind will dissolve all impediments, so that karmically speaking we get exactly what we should get because we’re all fathers of ourselves and the world’s the result of our doing, etc., etc., etc. Killing yourself, in other words, shouldn’t be necessary — about which I’m in complete agreement. Apparently, the smiling-though-exiled precious protector and the great communicating Gipper line up well on this, as on many issues. (I knew nothing about Tibet or Buddhists and have had to read up on it at night.)

It’s also true that Mike knows something about my Sponsoring work, which has made him decide I’m spiritual, which I’m not, and prompted him to address all sorts of provocative moral questions to me and then purposefully fail to understand my answers, thereby proving his superiority — which makes him happy. One of his recent discussion topics has been the Columbine massacre, which he believes was caused by falsely pursuing lives of luxury, instead of by the obstinance of pure evil — my view. In the otherwise-pointless Elián González controversy, he sided with the American relatives in a show of immigrant solidarity, while I went with the Cuban Cubans, which just seemed to make sense.

Mike’s moral principles, it should be said, have had to learn to operate in happy tandem with the self-interested consumer-mercantile ones of the real estate business. Working for me he gets one-third of 6 percent on all home sales he makes himself (I take two-thirds because I pay the bills), a bonus on all big-ticket sales I make, plus 20 percent on the first month of all summer rentals, which is nothing to bark at. There’s another bonus at Christmas if I feel generous. And against that, I pay no benefits, no retirement, no mileage, no nothing — a good arrangement for me. But it’s also an arrangement that allows him to live good and buy swanky sporting-business attire from a Filipino small-man shop in Edison. Today he’s shown up for his meeting in fawn-colored flared trousers that look like they’re made of rubber and cover up his growing little belly, a sleeveless cashmere sweater in a pink ice-cream hue, mirror-glass Brancusi tassel-loafers, yellow silk socks, tinted aviators, and a mustard-colored camel hair blazer currently in the backseat — none of which really makes sense on a Tibetan, but that he thinks makes him credible as an agent. I don’t mention it.

And yet there’s much about America that baffles him still, in spite of fifteen years’ residence and patient study. As a Buddhist, he fails to understand the place of religion in our political doings. He has never been to California or even to Chicago or Ohio, and so lacks the natives’ intrinsic appreciation of history as a function of landmass. And even though he’s a real estate salesman, he doesn’t finally see why Americans move so much, and isn’t interested in my answer: because they can. However, during the time he’s been here, he’s taken a new name, bought a house, cast three presidential ballots and made some money. He’s also memorized the complete New Jersey Historical Atlas and can tell you where the spring-loaded window and the paper clip were invented — Millrun and Englewood; where the first manure spreader was field-trialed — in Moretown; and which American city was the first nuclear-free zone — Hoboken. Such readout, he believes, makes him persuasive to home buyers. And in this, he’s like many of our citizens, including the ones who go back to the Pilgrims: He’s armed himself with just enough information, even if it’s wrong, to make him believe that what he wants he deserves, that bafflement is a form of curiosity and that these two together form an inner strength that should let him pick all the low-hanging fruit. And who’s to say he’s wrong? He may already be as assimilated as he’ll ever need to be.

More interesting landscape for the citizen scientist now passes my window. A Benjamin Moore paint “test farm,” with holiday browsers strolling the grassy aisles, pointing to this or that pastel or maroon tile as if they were for sale. More significant signage: SUCCESS IS ADDICTIVE (a bank); HEALTHY MATE DATING SERVICE; DOLLAR UNIVERSITY INSTITUTE FOR HIGHER EARNING. Then the cement-bunker Ocean County Library, where holiday offerings are advertised out front — a poetry reading on Wednesday, a CPR workshop on Thanksgiving Day, two Philadelphia Phillies players driving over Saturday for an inspirational seminar about infidelity, “the Achilles’ heel of big-league sports.”

“I just don’t understand it,” Mike says again, because I haven’t answered him the first time he said it. His pointed chin is still elevated, as if he’s seeing out the bottom of his expensive yellow glasses. He looks at me, inclining his head toward his shoulder. He’s wearing a silver imitation Rolex as thick as a car bumper and looks — behind the wheel — like a pint-sized mafioso on his way to a golf outing. He is a strange vision to be seen from other Suburbans.

“You don’t understand ‘Tight butts make me nuts’?” I say. “That’s pretty basic.”

“I don’t understand suicide survivors.” He keeps careful eyes on the Parkway entrance, a hundred yards ahead of us.

“It just wouldn’t work as well if it said ‘Welcome Suicide Failures,’” I say. The names Charles Boyer, Socrates, Meriwether Lewis and Virginia Woolf tour my mind. Exemplary suicide success stories.

“Natural death is very dignified,” he says. This is the kind of “spiritual” conversation he likes, in which he can further prove his superiority over me. “Avoiding death invites suffering and fear. We shouldn’t mock.”

“They’re not avoiding it and they’re not mocking it,” I say. “They like getting together in a multipurpose room and having some snacks. Haven’t you ever thought about suicide? I thought about it last week.”

“Would you attend a suicide survivors meeting?” Mike roams his tongue around the interior of his plump cheek.

“I might if I had time on my hands. I could make up a good story. That’s all they want. It’s like AA. It’s all a process.”

Mike’s bespectacled face assumes a brows-down ancient look. He doesn’t officially approve of self-determination, which he considers to be non-virtuous action and basically pointless. He believes, for instance, that Sally’s sudden leaving last June put me in a state of vulnerable anxiety, which resulted from the specific, non-virtuous activity of divisive speech, which was why I got cancer and have titanium BBs percolating inside my prostate, a body part I’m not sure he even believes in. He believes I should meditate myself free of the stressful idea of love-based attachments — which wouldn’t be that hard.

A state police blue flasher’s now in sight where the on-ramp angles up to enter the Parkway. Cars are backed up all the way down to 37. An ambulance is somewhere behind us, whoop-whooping, but we can’t pull over due to the road construction. A police copter hovers above the southbound lanes toward Atlantic City. Traffic’s halted there in both lanes. Some of the ramp cars are trying to turn around and are getting stuck. People are honking. Smoke rises from somewhere beyond.

“Did you seriously think about suicide?” Mike says.

“You never know if you’re serious. You just find out. I’ve survived to be in Toms River this morning.”

A wide, swaying orange-and-white Ocean County EMS meat wagon, bristling with silver strobes, shushes past us on the shoulder, rollicking and roaring. Lights are on inside the swaying box, figures moving about behind the windows, making ready for something.

“Don’t go up there,” I say, meaning the Parkway. “Take the surface road.”

“Shit!” Mike says, and cranes around at the traffic behind us so he’s not forced up onto the ramp. “A pain in the ass.” Buddhists have no swear words, though cursing in English pleases him because it’s meaningless and funny and not non-virtuous. He looks at me in the sly, secret way by which we’ve come to communicate. He has no real interest in suicide. A significant portion of the essential Mike may now have gone beyond the selfless Buddhist to be the solid New Jersey citizen-realtor. “In your lifetime, you’ll spend six and a half years in your car,” he says, merging us into the left lane that goes under the Parkway overpass. All the traffic’s going there now. “Half the U.S. population lives within fifty miles of the ocean.”

“Most of them are right here with us today, I’d say.”

“It’s good for business,” he says. And that is nothing but the truth.

Surface roads are never a pain in the ass, no matter where we roam. And I’m always interested in what’s new, what’s abandoned, what’s in the offing, what will never be.

Route 37 (after we make a wrong turn onto 530, then correct to 539 and head straight as a bullet up to Cream Ridge) offers rare sights to the conscientious observer. The previous two drought years have rendered the sand-scrubby New Jersey pine flats we’re passing a harsh blow, having already been deserted by the subdivision builders in search of better pickings. Vestigial one-strip strip commercials go by now and then, usually with only one store running. Travelers have dumped piles of 24-pack Bud empties in many of the turn-outs, as well as porcelain sinks, washer-dryers, microwaves, serious amounts of crumpled Kleenexes and a clutter of defunct car batteries. Several red-stenciled posters are nailed to roadside oaks, announcing long-forgotten paint-ball battles in the pines. (We’re near the perimeter of Fort Dix.) At the turn-off for Collier’s Mills Wildlife Management Area, a billboard proclaims a WILD WEST CITY — MASTODON EXHIBIT AND WATER SLIDE. A few cars, dust-caked green Plymouths and a rusted-out Chevy Nova with white shoe-polish 4-$ales on their windshields, sit on the dry shoulder at the woods’ edge. One lonely-guy sex shop lurks back in the trees with a blinking red-and-yellow roof sign, awaiting whoever’s out here to abandon his pet but finds himself in the mood for some nasty. The White Citizen’s Action Alliance has “adopted” the highway. The only car we pass is an Army Humvee driven by a soldier in a helmet and a camo suit.

And though all seems forsaken, back in the pines are occasional tracts of weathered pastel ranch-looking homes on curved streets with fireplugs, curbs and power poles in place. Most of these residences have windows and front doors ply-boarded and spray-painted KEEP OUT, their siding gone gray as a battleship, foundations sunk in grass that’s died. It’s not clear if these were once lived in or were abandoned brand-new. Although on one of the winding streets that opens onto the highway, Paramour Drive, I make out as we flash by, two boys — twelve-year-olds — side-by-side together on the empty asphalt. One sits on a dirt bike, one’s on foot. They’re talking while a mopish fluffy dog sits and watches them. The pink house they’re in front of has a fallen-in wheelchair ramp to the front door. All its windows are out. No cars are in evidence, no garbage cans, no recycle tubs, no amenities.

In sum, this part of Route 37’s the right place to go through a gross of rubbers, shoot.22s, drink two hundred beers, drive fast, toss out an old engine or a load of snow tires or a body. Or, of course, to become a suicide statistic — which I don’t mention to Mike, who’s sitting forward, paying zero attention to the landscape. It might as well be time travel to him, though he clicks on the radio once for the ten o’clock news. He’s, I know, worried that Gore might push through in the Florida Supreme Court, but there’s no rumor of that, so that he goes back to silently dry-running his meeting in Montmorency County, and fidgeting over trading in his minority innocence for the chance to wade into the heavy chips — something any natural-born American wouldn’t think twice about.

The morning’s plan is that once we make contact with Mike’s land developer — at the proposed cornfield site — I’m to take an expert read on the character. Then he and Mike will hie off for a shirtsleeve, elbows-on-the-table, brass-tacks business lunch and afternoon platmap confab, where Mike’ll hear the pitch, look him in the eye and attempt his own cosmic assessment. He and I’ll then hook up at 6:45 at the August Inn in Haddam and drive back to Sea-Clift, during which time I’ll offer my “gut,” take the gloves off, connect some dots, do the math and everything’ll come clear. Mike believes I have a “knack for people,” a matter in dispute among the actual people who’ve loved me. Our scheme, of course, is the sort of simple one that makes perfect sense to everybody, and then goes bust no matter how good everyone’s intentions were. For that reason, I’m going in with earnest good feeling but little or no expectation of success.

I’ve said nothing so far about my own Thanksgiving plans, now just two days away and counting, and that involve my two children. My reticence in this matter may owe to the fact that I’ve organized events to be purposefully unspectacular — consistent with my unspectacular physical state — and to accommodate as much as possible everyone’s personal agendas, biological clocks, comfort zones and need for wiggle room, while offering a pleasantly neutral setting (my house in Sea-Clift) for nonconfrontational familial good cheer. My thought is that by my plan’s being unambitious, the holiday won’t deteriorate into apprehension, dismay and rage, rocketing people out the doors and back to the Turnpike long before sundown. Thanksgiving ought to be the versatile, easy-to-like holiday, suitable to the secular and religious, adaptable to weddings, christenings, funerals, first-date anniversaries, early-season ski trips and new romantic interludes. It often just doesn’t work out that way.

As everyone knows, the Thanksgiving “concept” was originally strong-armed onto poor war-worn President Lincoln by an early-prototype forceful-woman editor of a nineteenth-century equivalent of the Ladies’ Home Journal, with a view to upping subscriptions. And while you can argue that the holiday commemorates ancient rites of fecundity and the Great-Mother-Who-Is-in-the-Earth, it’s in fact always honored storewide clearances and stacking ’em deep ’n selling ’em cheap — unless you’re a Wampanoag Indian, in which case it celebrates deceit, genocide and man’s indifference to who owns what.

Thanksgiving also, of course, signals the beginning of the gloomy Christmas season, vale of aching hearts and unreal hopes, when more suicide successes, abandonments, spousal thumpings, car thefts, firearm discharges and emergency surgeries take place per twenty-four-hour period than any other time of year except the day after the Super Bowl. Days grow ephemeral. No one’s adjusted to the light’s absence. Many souls buy a ticket to anyplace far off just to be in motion. Worry and unwelcome self-awareness thicken the air. Though strangely enough, it’s also a great time to sell houses. The need to make amends for marital bad behavior, or to keep a wary eye on the tax calendar or to deliver on the long-postponed family ski outing to Mount Pisgah — all make people itchy to buy. There’s no longer a real off-season for house sales. Houses sell whether you want them to or not.

In my current state of mind, I’d, in fact, be just as happy to lose Christmas and its weak sister New Year’s, and ring out the old year quietly with a cocktail by the Sony. One of divorce’s undervalued dividends, I should say, is that all the usual dismal holiday festivities can now be avoided, since no one who didn’t have to would ever think about seeing the people they used to say they wanted to see but almost certainly never did.

And yet, Thanksgiving won’t be ignored. Americans are hard-wired for something to be thankful for. Our national spirit thrives on invented gratitude. Even if Aunt Bella’s flat-lined and in custodial care down in Ruckusville, Alabama, we still “need” her to have some white meat and gravy and be thankful, thankful, thankful. After all, we are — if only because we’re not in her bedroom slippers.

And it is churlish not to let the spirit swell — if it can — since little enough’s at stake. Contrive, invent, engage — take the chance to be cheerful. Though in the process, one needs to skirt the spiritual dark alleys and emotional cul-de-sacs, subdue all temper flarings and sob sessions with loved ones. Get plenty of sleep. Keep the TV on (the Lions and Pats are playing at noon). Take B vitamins and multiple walks on the beach. Make no decisions more serious than lunch. Get as much sun as possible. In other words, treat Thanksgiving like jet lag.

Once I’d moved from Haddam, married Sally Caldwell and set up life on a steadier footing in Sea-Clift (where, of course, there is no actual clift), the two of us would spend our Thanksgivings together in a cabin in New Hampshire, near where the first Thanksgiving occurred. Sally’s former in-laws — parents of her former (AWOL) husband, Wally, and salt-of-the-earth Chicago-North-Shore old New Dealers — owned a summer cottage on Lake Laconic, facing the mountains. Fireplaces were all the heat there was. These were the last bearable days before the pipes were drained, phones turned off, windows shuttered and china locked in the attic. The Caldwells — Warner and Constance, then in their seventies — thought of Sally as a beloved but star-crossed family member, and for that reason anything they could do for her couldn’t be enough, even with me in attendance, as the ambiguous new presence.

Sally and I would drive up from New Jersey on Wednesday night, sleep like corpses, stay in bed under a big tick comforter until we were brave enough to face the morning chill, then scramble around for sweaters, wool pants and boots, making coffee, eating bagels we’d brought from home, reading old Holidays and Psychology Todays before embarking on a moderately strenuous hike to the French-Canadian massacre site halfway up Mount Deception, after which we took a nap till cocktail hour.

We watched moose in the shallows, eagles in the tree tops, made comical efforts to fish for trout, watched the outfitter’s seaplane slide onto the lake, considered getting the outboard going for a trip out to the island where a famous painter had lived. Once, I actually took a dip, but never again. At night we listened to the CBC on the big Stromberg-Carlson. I read. Sally read. The house had plenty of books by Nelson DeMille and Frederick Forsyth. We made love. We drank gin drinks. We found pizzas in the basement freezer. The one rustic restaurant that stayed open offered a Thanksgiving spread on Thursday and Friday — for hunters. We each felt this vacation strategy was the best solution, with so many worse solutions available. In other words, we loved it. By Saturday noon, we were bored as hammers (who wouldn’t be in New Hampshire?) and antsy to get back to New Jersey. Happy to arrive; happy to leave — the traveler’s mantra.

This past Labor Day, when I was far from chipper from my Mayo siege, it occurred to me that the smart plan for the millennial Thanksgiving, with the Caldwells’ cottage no longer mine, was to lead a family party back to Lake Laconic, be tourists, take over a B&B, go on walks, wade in cold shallows, paddle canoes, skip rocks, watch for eagles and drink wine (not gin) in the late-autumn splendor. A low-impact holiday for a low moment in life, with my family convened around me.

Except, my son Paul Bascombe, now twenty-seven and leading a fully-embedded, mainstreamed life in Kansas City, where he writes laughable captions for the great megalithic Hallmark greeting-card entity (“an American icon”), said he wouldn’t come if he had to drive all the way to “piss-boot New Hampshire.” He had to be at work on Monday, and in any case wanted to see his mother, my former wife, now living in Haddam.

My daughter, Clarissa, twenty-five, agreed a soft-landing Lake Laconic holiday might be “restorative” for me and help me get over “a pretty intense summer.” She and her girlfriend, the heart-stoppingly beautiful Cookie Lippincott, her former Harvard roommate, took charge when I flew back from Mayo in a diaper and in no mood for laughs. (Lesbians make great nurses, just like you’d think they would: serious but mirthful, generous but consistent, competent but understanding — even if yours happens to be your daughter.) During my early recovery days, I took her and Cookie to the Red Man Club, my sportsman’s hideout on the Pequest, where we shot clay pigeons, played gin rummy, fished for browns till midnight and slept out on the long screen porch on fragrant canvas army cots. We took day trips to the Vet for the last days of the Phillies’ season. We visited Atlantic City and lost our shirts. We hiked Ramapo Mountain — the easy part. We went on self-guided tours to every passive park, vernal pond and bird refuge in the guidebook. We read novels together and talked about them over meals. We managed to assemble a family unit — not your ordinary one, but what is? — one that got me back on my feet and pissing straight, took my mind off things and made me realize I didn’t need to worry much about my daughter (which doesn’t go for my son).

But then in the midst of all, Clarissa decided she should take a sudden, divergent “new” path, and parted with Cookie to “try men” again before it was too late — whatever that might mean. Though what it meant at the moment was that with her brother not attending, my New Hampshire Thanksgiving idyll fell through in an afternoon, with my house in Sea-Clift elected by default.

For this Thursday, then, I’ve ordered a “Big Bird et Tout à Fait” Thanksgiving package from Eat No Evil Organic in Mantoloking, where they promise everything’s “so yummy you won’t know it’s not poisoning you.” It comes with bone china, English` cutlery, leaded crystal, Irish napkins as big as Rhode Island, a case of Sonoma red, all finished with “not-to-die-for carob pumpkin pie”—no sugar, no flour, lard or anything good. Two thousand dollars cheap.

I’ve devised a modest guest list: Clarissa, with possibly a new boyfriend; Paul with his significant other, driving in from K.C.; a refound friend from years gone by, widower Wade Arsenault, who’s eighty-something and a strange father-in-law figure to me (being father to an old flame). I’ve also invited two of my men friends from Haddam, Larry Hopper and Hugh Wekkum, good fellows of my own vintage, former charter members of the Divorced Men’s Club and comrades from the bad old days, when we were all freshly singled and at wits’ end to know how to tie our shoes. Unlike me — and maybe wiser — neither Hugh nor Larry has married again. At some point they both realized they never would — just couldn’t find the low-gear pulling power to mount another love affair, couldn’t even imagine kissing women. “I felt like a homeless man groping at a sandwich,” Larry has confided with dismay. So with no patience or interest in the old dating metronome, he and Hugh figured out they were seeing more of each other than they were of anybody else. And after Hugh had a by-pass, Larry moved him into his big white Stedman House with attached slave quarters on South Comstock. They’ve ended up playing golf every day, and Hugh hasn’t had any more heart flare-ups. There’s no hanky-panky, they assure me, since both are on blood thinners and couldn’t hanky the first panky even if the spirit was in them.

I’ve also thought about inviting my former wife, Ann Dykstra, now a well-provided widow living, as mentioned (of all places), in Haddam, having purchased back her own former house from me at 116 Cleveland (no commission), a house she’d lived in previously, then abandoned and sold to me when she married her second husband, Charley O’Dell, and moved to Connecticut, following which I lived there for seven years, then moved to the Shore for my own second try at happiness. Aldous Huxley said — after reading Einstein — that the world is not only stranger than we know but a lot stranger than we can know. I don’t know if Huxley was divorced, but I’m betting he had to be.

Since Sally’s departure in June, and my life-modifying trip to Mayo in August, I’ve spoken with Ann a few times. Nothing more than business. She conducted the house re-resale using the same vicious little lawyer she’d used to divorce me back in ’83, and didn’t come to the closing, to which I’d grinningly brought a bouquet of nasturtiums to commemorate (in a good way) life’s imperial strangeness. But then, one warm evening in September, just as I’d constructed a forbidden martini and was sitting down in the sunroom to watch the campaign coverage on CNN, Ann called up and just said, “So, how are you?” It was as if she was holding a policy on my life and was checking on her investment. We’ve always kept our contacts restricted to kid subjects. She didn’t understand what Paul was doing in K.C., and wouldn’t discuss the concept that her daughter was a lesbian (which I assume she blames me for). Once before, she’d inquired about my health, I lied, and then we didn’t know what else to say. And to her more recent question about how I was, I lied again that I was “fine.” Then she told me about her mother’s Christmas letter describing trouble with her dental implants, and about her once giving holy hell to Ann’s since-deceased father, for failing to leave Detroit with her in ’72 (when she divorced him) and come enjoy the sunsets in Mission Viejo.

We hung up when that was over.

But. But. Something had been opened. A thought.

Since September, we’ve had coffee once at the Alchemist & Barrister, exchanged calls about the children’s trajectories and plights, gone over house eccentricities only I, as former owner, would know about — furnace warranty, water-pressure worries, inaccurate wiring diagrams. We have not gone into my medical situation, though obviously she’s wise to plenty. I don’t know if she thinks I’m impotent or have continence issues (not that I know of, and no). But she’s exhibited a form of interest. In her husband Charley’s last grueling days on earth — he had colon cancer but had forgotten about it because he also had Alzheimer’s — I agreed to sit with him and did, since none of his Yale friends were brave enough to. (Life never throws you the straight fastball.) And since then, two years ago, some sort of low ceiling of masking clouds that had for years hung over me where Ann was concerned has slowly opened, and it’s almost as if she can now see me as a human being.

Not that either of us wants a “relationship.” What’s between us is almost entirely clerical-informative in nature and lacking the grit of possibility. Yet there are simply no further grievances needing to be grieved, no final words needing to be spoken, then spoken again. We are what we are — divorced, widowed, abandoned, parents of two adults and one dead son, with just so much of life left to live. It is another facet in the shining gem of the Permanent Period of life that we try to be what we are in the present — good or not so good — this, so that accepting final credit for ourselves won’t be such a shock later on. The world is strange, as old Huxley noticed. Though in my view, my and Ann’s conduct is also what you might reasonably hope of two people who’ve known each other over thirty years, never gotten completely outside the other’s orbit and now find the other still around and able to make sense.

But the final word: Ann would say no to my invitation if I extended it. She’s recently gone to work — just to keep busy — as an admissions high-up at De Tocqueville Academy, where I’m meeting her today, and where she has, Clarissa says, made some new friends among the gentle, introverted, over-diploma’d folk there. She’s also, Clarissa reports, been appointed coach of the De Tocqueville Lady Linksters (she captained at Michigan in ’69), and, I’m sure, feels life has taken a good turn. None of this, of course, specifically explains why she wants to see me.

Political placards sprout along Route 206 when we detour around Haddam toward the north. Local contests — assessor, sheriff, tax collector — were settled weeks back, though a feeling of unfinality hangs in the suburban air. Here, now it’s fat yellow Colonial two-of-a-kinds and austere gray saltboxes with the odd redwood deck house peeping through leafless poplars, ash and bushy mountain laurels. Some recidivist Bush sentiment is alive on a few lawns, but mostly it’s solid-for-Gore in this moderate, woodsy, newer section of the township (when Ann and I were young newcomers down from Gotham in 1970, it was woods, not woodsy). The placards all insist that we the voters who voted (I went for Gore) really meant it this time and still mean it and won’t stand for foolishness. Though of course we will. And indeed, cruising past the uncrowded, familiar roads late in my favorite season, these bosky, privileged precincts feel punky and lank, swooning and ready for a doze. As we used to say, yukking it up in the USMC about recruits who weren’t going to make it, “You’ll have to wake him up just to kill him.” In these parts, it’s a good time for an insurrection.

No real commerce flourishes on this stretch of 206. Haddam, in fact, doesn’t thrive on regular commerce. Decades of Republican councilmen, building moratoriums, millage turn-downs, adverse zoning reviews, traffic studies, greenbelt referendums and just plain shit-in-your-hat high-handedness have been disincentives for anything more on this end of town than a Forestview Methodist, the odd grandfathered dentist’s plaza, a marooned Foremost Farms and one mediocre Italian restaurant the former Boro president’s father owns. Housing is Haddam’s commerce. Whereas the real business — Kia dealerships, muffler shops, twenty-screen movie palaces, Mr. Goodwrench and the Pep Boys — all that happy horseshit’s flourishing across County Line Road, where Haddamites jam in on Saturday mornings before scurrying back home, where it’s quiet.

I never minded any of that when I sold houses here. I voted for every moratorium, against every millage to extend services to the boondocks, supported every not-in-my-neighborhood ordinance. In-fill and gentrification are what keep prices fat and are what’s kept Haddam a nice place to live. If it becomes the New Jersey chapter of Colonial Williamsburg, with surrounding farmlands morphed into tract-house prairies, carpet outlets and bonsai nurseries, then I can take (and did take) the short view, since the long view was forgone and since that’s how people wanted it.

What exactly happened to the short view and that drove me to the Shore like a man in the Kalahari who sees a vision of palm trees and sniffs water in the quavery distance — that’s another story.

Since we’ve crossed into Haddam Township, Mike’s fallen to sighing again, raking his hand back through his buzzed-off hair, squinting and looking fretful behind his glasses as we head out toward the Montmorency County line. His driving has devolved into fits and spurts in the lighter township traffic. Two times we’ve been honked at and once given the finger by a pretty black woman in a Jaguar, so that his piloting’s begun to get on my nerves.

I again know what he’s on about. Mike’s belief, and I subscribe to it myself, is that at the exact moment any decision seems to be being made, it’s usually long after the real decision was actually made — like light we see emitted from stars. Which means we usually make up our minds about important things far too soon and usually with poor information. But we then convince ourselves we haven’t done that because (a) we know it’s boneheaded, and no one wants to be accused of boneheaded-ness; (b) we’ve ignored our vital needs and don’t like to think about them; (c) deciding but believing we haven’t decided gives us a secret from ourselves that’s too delicious not to keep. In other words, it makes us happy to bullshit ourselves.

What Mike does to avoid this bad practice — and I know he’s fretful about his up-coming meeting — is empty his mind of impure motives so he can communicate with his instincts. He often performs this head-rubbing, frowning ritual right in the realty office before presenting an offer or heading off to a closing. He does this because he knows he frequently holds the power to tip a sale one way or the other and wants things to work out right. I’m sure if you’re a Buddhist, you do this all the time about everything. And I’m also sure it doesn’t do any good. They teach this brand of soggy crappolio in the “realty psychology” courses that Mike took to get his license. I just came along years too early — back when you only sold houses because you wanted to and it was easy and you liked money.

The other scruple I’m sure is thrumming in Mike’s brain is that during his fifteen years in our country he’s swung rung to rung up the success ladder, departing one cramped circumstance for a slightly less cramped next one. He arrived from India to his Newark host family, segued on to Carteret and the industrial-linen industry, then to a less nice section of South Amboy, where he worked for an Indian apartment finder. From there to Neptune, Neptune to Lavallette — both times as a realty associate. And from there to me — an impressive climb most Americans would think was great and that would get them started filling up their garages with Harleys and flame-sided Camaros and snow machines and straw deer targets, their front yards sprouting Bush-Cheney placards, their bumpers plastered with stickers that say: I TAKE MY ORDERS FROM THE BIG GUY UPSTAIRS.

But to Mike, the assumption that Lavallette, New Jersey, ought to seem like Nirvana to a smiling little brown man born in a wattle hut in the Himalayas is both true and not true. Deep in his hectic night’s sleep, with his estranged wife in her estranged home in the Amboys, his teenagers up late noodling on their laptops with SAT reviews, his Infiniti safely “clubbed” in the driveway, Mike (I would bet) wonders if this is really it for him. Or, might there not be just a smidgen more to be clutched at? Real estate, the profession of possibility, can keep such dreams fervid and winy for decades.

Haddam, therefore, makes him as nervous as a debutante. It makes plenty of people feel that way. All that serenely settled, arborial, inward-gazing good life, never confiding about what it knows (property values), so near and yet so far off. All that pretty possibility set apart from the regular social frown and growl. Haddam’s rare rich scent is sweetly breathable to him — as we drive past out here on 206—there behind its revetment of Revolutionary oaks and survivor elms, from its lanes and cul-de-sacs, its wood ricks, its leaf rakage, its musing, insider mutter-mutter conversations passed across hedges between like-minded neighbors who barely know one another and wouldn’t otherwise speak. Haddam rises in Mike’s mind, a citadel he could inhabit and defend.

It’s just not likely to happen. Which is fine as long as he doesn’t venture too close — which he’s almost done — so that his immigrant life flashes up in grainy black and white and not quite good enough. This, of course, happens to all of us; it’s just easier to accept when the whole country’s already your own.

“You know, when Ann and I moved to Haddam thirty years ago, none of this was out here,” I say to be encouraging as we pass a woodlot soon to be engulfed beside Montmorency Mall. COMMERCIAL SPACE FOR SALE is advertised. “Not even a deer-crossing sign.” I smile at him, but he frowns out ahead, his seat pressed close-up to the wheel, his mind in another place, across a gulf from me. “If you lived here then, you wouldn’t be home now.”

“Ummm,” Mike grunts. “I can see that, yes.” My attempt doesn’t work, and we are for a time sunk in reverential silence.

A mile into Montmorency County, 206 drops into a pleasant jungly sweet-gum and red-clay creek bottom no one’s quite figured how to bulldoze yet, and the old road briefly takes on a memorial, country-highway feel. Though we quickly rise again into the village of Belle Fleur, old-style Jersey, with a tall white Presbyterian steeple beside a sovereign little fenced cemetery, and just beyond that, a seventies-vintage strip development, with two pizza shops, a laundrette, a closed Squire Tux and an H&R Block — and across on the facing side of the road two deserted, dusty-screened redbrick Depression houses (homes to humans once) from when 206 was a scenic rural pike as innocent and pristine as any back road in Kentucky. Another double-size wooden sign with big red lettering spells an end to the houses: OWNER WILL SELL, REMOVE OR TRADE. It’s a perfect site for a Jiffy Lube.

Mike takes a left past the church and commences west. And right away the atmosphere changes, and for the better. Somewhere out ahead of us lies the Delaware, and all can feel the relief. Though Mike’s now consulting his watch and a scribbled-on pink Post-it while the road (Mullica Road) leaves the strip development for the peaceable town ’n country housing pattern New Jersey is famous for: deep two-acre lots with curbless frontage, on which are sited large but not ominous builder-design Capes, prairie contemporaries and Dutch-door ranches, with now and then an original eighteenth-century stone farmhouse spruced up with copper gutters and an attached greenhouse to look new. Yews, bantam cedars and mountain laurels that were scrubby in the seventies are still young-appearing. The earth is flat out here, poorly drained and clayey. Plus, it’s dry as Khartoum. Still, a few maples and red oaks have matured, and paint jobs look fresh. Kids’ plastic gym sets and chain-link dog runs clutter many back lawns. Subarus and Horizons stand in new asphalt side drives (the garages jammed with out-of-date junk). Everything’s exactly as they pictured it when it was all a dream.

Passing on the left now, opposite the houses, lies a perfect, well-tended cut cornfield extending prettily down to Mullica Creek, remnant of uses that predate memory but a plus to home buyers prizing atmosphere. Though you can be sure its pristine prettiness is giving current owners across the road restless nights for fear some enterpriser (such as the one driving my car) will one day happen along, stop for a look-see, make a cell-phone call and in six months throw up a hundred minimansions that’ll kick shit out of everybody’s tax bills, fill the roads, jam the schools with new students who score eight million on their math and verbal, who steal the old residents’ kids’ places at Brown, and whose families won’t speak to anybody because for religious reasons they don’t have to. Town ’n country takes a hike.

Every morning, these original settlers who bought in at 85K — on what was Mullica Farm Road — frown down at their mutual-fund numbers, retotal their taxes against retirement investitures and wonder if now might be the time to roll over their 401s, move to the Lehigh Valley and try consulting before beating it to Phoenix at age sixty-two. Median house prices out here are at 450K, the fastest market in the land — last year. Only, that’s not holding. One or two neighbors already have BY OWNER signs up, which is worrisome. Though to me it’s all as natural as pond succession, and no one should regret it. I like the view of landscape in use.

Small, dark-skinned yard personnel with backpack blower units that make them look like spacemen are busy in many yards here, whooshing oceans of late-autumn leaves and heaping them in piles beside great black plastic bags, before hauling them away in their beater trucks. The cold sky has gone cerulean and untroubled (weather being what passes for drama in the suburbs). I don’t miss Haddam, but I miss this — the triggering sense of emanation that a drive in what was once the country ratchets up in me. And today especially, since I’m not risking or pitching anything, am off duty and only along for moral support.

“Is Michigan in Lansing or Ann Arbor?” Mike says, blinking expectantly, hands again in the prescribed steering positions. We are nearing our rendezvous and he’s on the alert.

He knows I bleed Michigan blue but doesn’t really know what that means. “Why?”

“I guess there’re some pretty interesting things going on at Michigan State right now.” He is speaking officially. Practicing at being authentic.

“Did they discover a featherless turkey in time for Thanksgiving?” I say. “That’s what they’re good at over there.”

A man stands alone on the wide grassy lawn of a bright yellow bay-windowed Dutch contemporary where Halloween pumpkins still line the front walk. He’s barefoot, wearing a white tae kwon do suit and is performing stylized Oriental exercises — one leg rising like a mantis while his arms work in an overhand swimming motion. Possibly it’s a form of pre-Thanksgiving stress maintenance he’s read about in an airline magazine. But something about my Suburban, its rumbling, radiant alien-ness, has made him stop, put palm to brow to shade the sun and follow us as we go past.

“In my new-product seminar last week”—Mike nods as if he’s quoting Heraclitus (I, of course, pay for this)—“I saw some interesting figures about the lag between the top of the housing market and the first downturn in askings.” His narrow eyes are fixed stonily ahead. I used to eat that kind of computer spurtage for breakfast, and made a bundle doing it. But since I arrived at the Shore, I’m happy to list ’em ’n twist ’em. When man stops wanting ocean-front, it’ll be because they’ve paved the ocean. “I guess they’ve got a pretty good real estate institute over there,” Mike blathers on about Moo-U. “Using some pretty sophisticated costing models. We might plug into their newsletter.” Mike can occasionally drone like a grad student, relying on the ritual-reflexive “I guess” to get his most significant points set in concrete. (“I guess Maine’s pretty far from San Diego.” “I guess a hurricane really whips the wind up.” “I guess it gets dark around here once the sun sets.”)

“Did you read any reports from Kalamazoo College?”

Mike frowns over at me. He doesn’t know what Kalamazoo means, or why it would be side-splittingly hilarious. His round, bespectacled, over-serious face forms a suspicious tight-lipped question mark. Sense of humor can become excess baggage for immigrants, and in any case, Mike’s not always great company for extended periods.

Ahead on the left rises an ancient white concrete silo standing in the cornfield, backed by third-growth hardwood through which mid-day light is flashing. A weathered roadside vegetable stand, years abandoned, sits at the road shoulder, and alongside it a pale blue Cadillac Coupe de Ville. When Ann and I arrived to Haddam blows ago, it was our standard Saturday outing to drive these very county roads, taking in the then-untouched countryside up to Hunterdon County and the river towns, stopping at a country store where they cooked a ham and eggs breakfast in the back, buying a set of andirons or a wicker chair, then pulling over for squash and turnips and slab-sided tomatoes in a place just like this, taking it all home in brown paper sacks. It was long before this became a wealth belt.

I’m thinking this old roadside stall may actually have been one of our regulars. MacDonald’s Farm or some such place. Though it wasn’t run by a real farmer, but a computer whiz from Bell Labs, who’d taken an early buyout to spend his happy days yakking with customers about the weather and the difference between rutabagas and turnips.

This dilapidated vegetable stand is also clearly our rendezvous point. Mike, pink Post-it in his fist, swerves us inexpertly straight across the oncoming lane and rumbles into the little dirt turn-out. The Caddy’s driver-door immediately swings open, and a large man begins climbing out. He is a square-jawed, thick-armed, tanned and taut Mediterranean, wearing clean and pressed khakis, a white oxford shirt (sleeves rolled Paul Bunyan-style), sturdy work boots and a braided belt with a silver tape measure cube riding his hip like a snub-nose. He looks like he just stepped out of the Sears catalog and is already smiling like the best, most handsome guy in the world to go into the sprawl business with. His Caddy has a volunteer fire department tag on its bumper.

My gut, however, instantly says this is a man to be cautious of — the too neatly rolled sleeves are the giveaway — a man who is more or less, but decidedly not, what he seems. My gut also tells me Mike will fall in love with him in two seconds due to his large, upright, manly American-ness. If I don’t watch out, the deal’ll be done.

“What’s this guy’s name again?” I’ve heard it but don’t remember. We’re climbing out. The big Caddy guy’s already standing out in the dusty breeze, laving his big hands as if he’d just washed them in the car. Outside here, the wind’s colder than at the Shore. The barometer’s falling. Clouds are fattening to the west. I have on only my tan barracuda jacket, which isn’t warm enough. Money says this guy’s Italian, though he’s all spruced up and could be Greek, which wouldn’t be better.

“Tom Benivalle.” Mike frowns, grabbing his blazer from the backseat.

I rest my case.

“Mr. Mahoney?” the big guy announces in a loud voice. “Tom Benivalle, gladda meetcha.” Gruff, let’s-cut-the-bullshit Texas Hill Country drawl resonates in his voice. He’s seemingly not disturbed that a tiny forty-three-year-old Tibetan dressed like a Mafia golfer and with an Irish name might be his new partner.

Though it’s all an act. Benivalle is a storied central New Jersey name with much colorful Haddam history in tow. A certain Eugene (Gino) Benivalle, doubtless an uncle, was for a time Haddam police chief before opting for early retirement to Siesta Key, just ahead of a trip to Trenton on a statutory rape charge brought by his fourteen-year-old niece. Tommy, clean-cut, helmet-haired, big schnoz, tiny-dark-eyed good groomer, looks like nothing as much as a cop, up to and including a gold-stud earring. This could be a sting operation. But to catch who?

Mike thrusts himself forward, his face flushed, and gives Benivalle a squinch-eyed, teeth-bared, apologetic grin, along with a double-hander handshake I’ve counseled him against, since Jerseyites typically grow wary at free-floating goodwill, especially from foreigners who might be Japanese. Though Mike isn’t having it. He reluctantly introduces me as his “friend” while buttoning his blazer buttons. We’ve agreed to keep my part in this hazy, though I already sense he wishes I’d leave. Tom Benivalle enfolds my hand in his big hairy-backed one. His palm’s as soft as a puppy’s belly, and he transmits an amiable sweet minty smell I recognize as spearmint. He’s applied something lacquer-ish to his forehead-bordering hair that makes it practically sparkle. The prospect that Benivalle might represent shadowy upstate connections isn’t unthinkable. But face-to-face with him, my guess is not. My guess is Montclair State, marketing B.A., a tour with Uncle Sam, then home to work for the old man in the wholesale nursery bidnus in West Amwell. Married, then kids, then out on his own, tearing up turf and looking around for new business opportunities. He’s probably forty, drives his Caddy to mass, drinks a little Amarone and a little schnapps, plays racquetball, pumps minor iron, puts out the odd chimney fire and voted for Bush but wouldn’t actually hurt a centipede. Which is no reason to go into business with him.

Benivalle turns from our handshake and strides off as a gust of November breeze raises grit off Mullica Road and peppers my neck. He’s cutting to the chase, heading to the edge of the cornfield to showcase the acreage, demonstrate he’s done his homework, before sketching out the business plan. Put the small talk on hold. It’s how I’d do it.

Mike and I follow like goslings — Mike flashing me a deviled look meant to stifle early judgment. He’s already in love with the guy and doesn’t want the deal queered. I round my eyes at him in phony surprise, which devils him more.

“Okay. Now our parcel runs straight south to Mullica Creek,” Benivalle’s saying in a deeper but less LBJish voice, raising a long arm and pointing out toward the silo and the pretty band of trees that follows the water’s course (when there’s water there). “Which is in the floodplain.” He glances at me, heavy brows gathering over his black eyes. He knows I know he knows I know. Still, full disclosure, numbers crunched, regulations read and digested: My presence has been registered. It’s possible we’ve met somewhere. Benivalle bites his bottom lip with his top teeth — familiar to me as the stagecraft of our current President. Sharp wind is gusting but fails to disturb a follicle of Benivalle’s dense black do. “So,” he goes on, “we establish our south lot lines a hundred feet back from the mean high-water mark — the previous hundred-year flood. The creek runs chiefly west to east. So we have about a hundred twenty-five available acres if we clear the woods and grade it off.”

Mike is smiling wondrously.

“How many units do you get on a hundred and twenty-five?” I say this because Mike isn’t going to.

Benivalle nods. Great question. “Average six thousand with a footprint of about sixty-two per.” This means a living room the size of a fifties tract home. Benivalle tucks his big thumb in under his braided belt, rears back delicately on his boot heels and continues staring toward Mullica Creek as if only in that way can he say what needs saying next. “The state’s got its setback laws — you prob’ly know all that — for homes this size. You got some wiggle room on your street widths, but there’s not that much you can fudge. So. I’m expecting a density of forty on three-acre lots, leaving some double lots for presale or all-cash offers. Maybe if you got a friend who’s interested in building a ten-thousand-footer.” A smile at the prospect of such a Taj Mahal. He is now addressing me more than Mike, whom he seems to want to treat benevolently, instead of as just some little foreign team-mascot type who can probably do a good somersault.

“How much do they cost?” Mike finally says.

“High-end, a buck-twenty per,” Benivalle answers quick. He, I see, has old, smoothed-over acne craters in both cheeks. It gives him a Neville Brand stolidness, suggesting old humiliations suffered. It also gives him a Neville Brand aura of untrustworthiness that’s oddly touching but isn’t helped by the earring. No doubt Mrs. B. talks about his face to her girlfriends. He also has extremely regular, straight white teeth, which make him look dull.

“That’s seven hundred twenty thousand,” I say.

“A-bout.” Benivalle laps his bottom lip over his top one and nods. “We don’t see much high-end fluctuation out here, Mr. Baxter.” Why not Mr. Bastard? “They see it, they buy it, or else they don’t. They’ve all got the dough. Down in Haddam last year, they got a double-digit spike in million-dollar deals. Our problem’s the same as theirs.”

“What’s that?”

Benivalle unaccountably smiles at the luck of it. “Inventory. Used to be it was location in this business, Frank. If I can call you that.”

“You bet.” I make my cheeks smile.

“Now go over to Hunterdon County and Warren, it’s way different. Prices rose twenty-three, twenty-four percent here this year. Median price is four-fifty.” Benivalle brusquely scratches his rucked neck like Neville Brand would, and in a way that makes him look older.

“You don’t own the land, do you?” Mike suddenly says, forgetting that he’s supposed to help buy it. He’s been in a swoon since his two-hander was reciprocated. The thought that this out-of-date farmland, this comely but useless woods, this silted, dry creek could be transformed into a flat-as-a-griddle housing tract, on which behemoth-size dwellings in promiscuous architectural permutations might sprout like a glorious city of yore and that it could all be done to his bidding and profit is almost too much for him.

“I’ve got an option.” Benivalle nods again, as though this was news not to be bruited. “The old guy who used to operate this vegetable stand”—his big mitt motions toward the tumbledown gray-plank produce shack—“his family owns it.”

“MacDonald,” I suddenly realize — and say.

“Okay,” Benivalle says, like a cop. “You know him? He’s dead.”

“I used to buy tomatoes from him twenty-five years ago.”

“I used to pick those freakin’ tomatoes,” Benivalle says matter-offactly. “I worked for him. Like—”

“I probably bought tomatoes from you.” I can’t keep from grinning. Here is a human being from my certifiable past — not all that common if you’re me — who may actually have laid his honest human eyes on my dead son, Ralph Bascombe.

“Yeah, maybe,” Benivalle says.

“What happened to ole MacDonald?” I’m forgetting the option, the floodplain, inventory, footprint, usable floor space. Memory rockets to that other gilded time — red mums, orange pumpkins, fat dusty tomatoes, leathery gourds, sunlight streaming through the roof cracks in the warm, rich-aired produce stand. Ralph, age five or six, would march up to the counter and somebody — Tommy Benivalle, acned, furiously masturbating high schooler and reserve on the JV wrestling squad — would look gravely down, then slip my son a root beer rock candy on condition he tell no one, since Farmer MacDonald got a “pretty penny” for them. It became Ralph’s first joke. Every penny a pretty penny.

“He passed.” Meaning ole MacDonald. “Like I said. A few years ago.” Tom Benivalle’s not at ease sharing the past with me. He brushes a speck of phantom road grit off his oxford cloth shirtsleeve. On his breast pocket there’s stitched a tiny colorful pheasant bursting into flight. He buys his shirts from the same catalog I buy mine — minus the pheasant.

Silence momentarily becalms us while Benivalle refinds the skein of business talk. He is not the bad guy I thought. I could mention my son. He could say he remembered him. “He’s got a daughter up in Freylinghuysen,” he says about the now dead owner. “I approached her about this. She was okay.”

“You must’ve known her when you were kids.”

Mike’s still staring at the acreage in his mustard blazer, dreaming conquest dreams. A whole new it has bumped up onto his horizon. Lavallette no longer the final it. He and Mrs. Mahoney might see eye-to-eye again.

“Yeah, I sorta did,” Benivalle says scratchily. “He worked at Bell Labs, the old man. My dad had a decorative-pottery place up in Frenchtown. They did some business.” How do I know these natives? I should’ve been an FBI profiler. Sometimes no surprise can be a blessing. I, however, am not the business partner here. My job is to be the spiritual Geiger counter, and see to it Benivalle understands Mr. Mahoney has serious (non-Asian) backers who know a thing or two. I’m sure I’ve done that by now. Thoughts of my son go sparkling away.

“I’m going to take off,” I say, turning toward Mike, who’s still staring away, dazzled. “I’ve gotta see a man about a horse.”

Benivalle blinks. “So, then, are you in the horse business?” It’s his first spontaneous utterance to me — besides my name — and it causes him to ravel his brow, turn the corners of his mouth up in a non-smile, touch a finger to the stud in his earlobe and let his eyes examine me.

I smile back. “It’s just an expression.” Mike unexpectedly turns and looks to me as if I’d spoken his name.

“I get it,” Benivalle says. He’s ready for me to get going, for it to be just the two of them, so he can start making his spiel to Mike about having himself certified for all that government moolah so they can start moving Urdu speakers down from Gotham and Teaneck. He may think Mike’s a Pakistani. My work here is done, and fast.

Mike and I begin our walk back across the gusty turn-out toward my Suburban. Sweet pungence of leaf-burn swims in the air from the linked back yards across Mullica Road, where a homeowner’s daydreaming against his rake, garden hose at the ready, peering into the cool flames and curling smoke, indifferent to the good-neighbor ordinances he’s breaching, woolgathering over how things should most properly be, and how they once had been when something he can’t exactly remember was the rule of the day and he was young. It could all be put back into working order, he knows, if the Democrats could be kept from boosting the goddamned fucking election that he, because he was on a business trip to Dayton and had jury duty in Pennington the second he got home, somehow forgot to vote in. “Whatever It Takes” should be the battle hymn of the republic.

“So, I’ll see you later,” Mike says, nose in the breeze as we come to my parked vehicle. He’s feeling tip-top about everything now, even though seeming eager is incautious.

“I’ll be at the August,” I say. Benivalle has already headed toward his Caddy. He has no inclination for good-byes with strangers. “Gladda meetcha,” I shout to him in the stiff wind, but he’s already mashing a little cell phone to his ear and can’t hear me. “Yeah. I’m out here at the parcel,” I hear him say. “It’s all great.”

“What do you think?” Mike says barely under his breath. His flat freckled nose has gone pale in the cold, his small pupils shining with hope for a thumbs-up. His spiffy business outfit — expensive shoes and blazer — makes him seem helpless. His lapel, I see, sports a tiny American flag in the buttonhole. A new addition.

“You just better be careful.” My fingers are on the cold door handle.

Mike hands me the keys he’s removed. “No choices are ever absolutely right,” he says and frowns, trying to be confident.

“Plenty are absolutely crazy, though. This isn’t Buddhism, it’s business.”

“Oh, yes! I know!” He consults the sky again. A front, maybe cold New Jersey rain, true harbinger of winter, is coming in now. I’m colder already, my hands frozen. My barracuda jacket is water-resistant, not waterproof. “Just don’t let him talk you into signing anything.” I’m climbing stiffly into the driver’s side, where the seat’s too far forward. “If you don’t sign, they can’t put you in prison.”

Prison scares the crap out of him. Our bold, new-concept American lockups are the stuff of his nightmares, having seen too many documentaries on the Discovery Channel and knowing what happens on the inside to gentle souls like him.

“We’ll talk about it tonight,” I say out my window, which I’d like to close.

“You think belief’s a luxury, I know.” Breeze flaps his trouser legs. He’s fidgeting with his gold pinkie ring without seeking my eye. Benivalle starts up his Coupe de Ville with a noisy screech of fan-belt slippage.

“I guess if you think it is, it is,” I say, getting the seat resituated and not entirely sure what I mean by that.

“You talk like a Buddhist.” He actually giggles, then narrows his little lightless eyes and hugs his blazered shoulders in the cold.

Anyone, of course, can talk like a Buddhist. You just turn every cornpone Will Rogers cliché on its ear and pretend it’s Spinoza. It wouldn’t be hard to be a Buddhist. What’s hard is to be a realist. “Buddhism-schmuddhism,” I say.

Mike enjoys coarse American talk for the same reason he enjoys random cursing — because it’s meaningless. You can’t insult the Buddha, only yourself for trying. “So, we can talk later?” He looks down at his big fake Rolex, as if time was what mattered now.

“We’ll talk later, yep.” My window’s going up. He’s retreating. Possibly the wind’s chasing him, because he begins half-skipping, half-running/shuffling, everything but a cartwheel toward the waiting blue Cadillac. For a man of his size, race, age, religion and manner of fussy dress, he is a funny spectacle — though spirited, which can take you a far distance.

As I pull away, I take a departing look at the cornfield stretching down to Mullica Creek, its gentle fall and charming hardwood copse, soon to be overwhelmed by grumbling, chuffing, knife-bladed Komatsus and Kubotas, cluttered with corrugated culverts, rebar and pre-cut king posts, ready-mixers lined up to 206, every inch flattened and staked with little red flags prophesying megahouses waiting on the drawing boards. The neighbor across the road, watching his dreams go up in smoke, has his point: Someone should draw the line somewhere.

I say silent adieu to the ground my son trod and will no more. The old lay of the land. E-eye, E-eye, OOOOOOO.

2

Driving the scenic route back to Haddam — Preventorium Road to the rock quarry (where certified mafiosos once dumped their evidence), past the SPCA and the curvy maple-lined lane along the mossy old Delaware Canal, past the estate where retired priests snooze away days in tranquilized serenity and hopeful non-reflection — I’m for an instant struck: What would real scientists, decades on, say about us here on our own patch of suburban real estate?

I knew a boy back at Michigan, Tom Laboutalliere, who dedicated his whole life to “reading” little birds-feet scratch marks on ossified clods of ancient tan-colored mud and possibly turds. From such evidence, he conjured what the ancient Garbonzians were doing back in 1000 B.C. in their little square of earth. By studying cubic tons of dirt — his field data — what he got his hands on and sifted through screens were the Garbonzians’ precious laundry receipts. The little birds-feet tracks were actually their writings, which made it unassailable, using infrared spectroscopy and carbon dating, that a mighty lot of army uniforms had needed repair and entrail despotting and caustic herbal soaks between about 1006 and 1005. So that he concluded (everyone was amazed) that a considerable amount of nonstop pulverizing, disemboweling and tearing limb from limb had gone on during that period, and — his great, tenurable discovery — that’s why we now think of those long-ago, far-distant folk as “warlike.”

None of us should suppose that this type of years-on digging won’t winkle out our own naked truths. Because it will. Which merits some consideration.

Most evidence, of course, will just be the stuff Mike and I cruised past on Route 37 this morning, strewn along the road shoulder, in the pine duff and dusty turn-outs. This civilization, future thinkers will conclude, liked beer. They favored wood-paper products as receptacles for semen and other bodily excretions. They suffered hemorrhoids, occasional incontinence and erectile dysfunctions not known to subsequent generations. They thought much about their bowel movements. Sex was an activity they isolated as much as possible from daily life. They disliked extraneous metal things. They were faltering in their resolve about permanence vis-à-vis possibility and change, as evidenced by their shelters being in good condition but frequently abandoned, with others seemingly meant to last only five years or less. I’m not certain what the signs about paint-ball wars will teach them, or, for that matter, Toms River itself, should it last another year. Fort Dix they’ll understand perfectly.

But future delvers will also think — and Mike’s and Tom Benivalle’s plans lie in my brain like a piece of heavy driftwood — how much we all lived with, banked and thrived on, got made happy or sad by what was already there! And how little we ourselves invented! And by how little we had to invent, since you could get anything you wanted — from old records to young boys — just by giving a number and an expiration date to an electronic voice, then sitting back and waiting for the friendly brown truck. Our inventions, it’ll be clear, were only to say yes or no, like flipping off a light switch or flipping it on. Future scholars might also conclude that if we ever did think of trying something different — living in the Allagash and eating only tubers; becoming a mystic, taking a vow of poverty and begging on the roadside in Taliganga; if we considered having six wives, never cutting our hair or bathing and holing up in an armed compound in Utah; in other words, if we ever gave a thought to worming our way outside the box to see what was out there — we must’ve realized that we risked desolation and the world looking at us with menace, knew we couldn’t stand that for long, and so declined.

Possibly I tend toward this glum future perspective because, like millions of other journeying souls, I’ve lately received the call — from my Haddam urologist, possibly phoning from the golf course or his Beemer, casually commenting that my PSA “values” were “still higher than we like to see…so we’d better get you in for a closer looky-look.” That can change your view, let me tell you. Or maybe it’s because I’ve graduated to the spiritual concision of the Permanent Period, the time of life when very little you say comes in quotes, when few contrarian voices mutter doubts in your head, when the past seems more generic than specific, when life’s a destination more than a journey and when who you feel yourself to be is pretty much how people will remember you once you’ve croaked — in other words, when personal integration (what Dr. Erikson talked about but secretly didn’t believe in) is finally achieved.

Or possibly I take the view I do just because I’ve been a real estate agent for fifteen years, and can see that real estate’s a profession both spawned by and grown cozy with our present and very odd state of human development. In other words, I’m implicated: You have a wish? Wait. I’ll make it come true (or at least show you my inventory). If you’re a Bengali ophthalmologist with your degree from Upstate and have no desire to return to Calcutta to “give back,” and prefer instead to expand life, open doors, let the sun in — well, all you have to do is travel down Mullica Road, let your wishes be known to a big strapping guinea home builder and his smiling, nodding, truth-dispensing, dusky-skinned sidekick, and you and civilization will be on the same page in no time. They’ll even name your street after your daughter — which those same scientists can later puzzle over.

Up to now I’ve thought this basic formula was a good thing. But lately I’m less sure I’m right — at least as right as I used to be. I can take the matter up with Mike in the car later, when home’s in sight.

Mike’s handoff to Benivalle has taken less time than expected, and it’s only noon when I merge onto westbound Brunswick Pike, the corner where once stood a big ShopRite when I lived nearby but which now contains a great silver and glass Lexus palace with wall-to-wall vehicles and a helipad X for buyers on the go, and across from it a giant Natur-Food pavilion where formerly stood a Magyar Bank. If I shake a leg and don’t attract a speeding ticket, I can make the funeral home before they begin shooing mourners out to ready Ernie McAuliffe’s casket for its last ride.

The Haddam cemetery — which I intend to avoid — lies directly behind where I once resided at 19 Hoving Road, and is the resting place of my aforementioned son Ralph, who died of Reye’s at age nine and would be almost thirty now. He “rests” there behind the wrought-iron fence among the damp oaks and ginkgoes, alongside three signers of the Declaration, two innovators of manned flight and innumerable New Jersey governors. I don’t go there anymore, as the saying has it. I’ve learned by trial and much error to accept that Ralph is not coming back to his mother and me. Though every time I venture near the cemetery, I dreamily imagine he still might — which I deem to be a not-good thought pattern, and to violate the Permanent Period’s rule of the road about the past. Mike has told me the Dalai Lama contends that young people who die are our masters who teach us impermanence, and I’ve tried to think of things this way.

In truth, it’s no longer even physically possible to cruise past my old Hoving Road house — a sweet, sagging, old Tudor half-timber on a well-treed lot, which I sold to the Theological Institute in the eighties, and who then transformed it into an ecumenical victims’ rights center. (Land-mine victims, children-soldier victims, African-circumcision victims, families of strangled cheerleaders, all became regular sights on the sidewalkless street.) However, due to fierce nineties property-value wars, my former residence was demo’d the instant the Korean Fresh Lighters took over, and the ground sold for a fortune. Efforts were made to recycle the old pile using chain saws and flatbed trucks. Some ecumenicists wanted it hauled to Hightstown and rechartered as a hospice, whereas others wanted it moved to Washington’s Crossing and turned into an organic restaurant. For a week, the neighborhood association, fearing the worst, stood a vigil and actually erected a human chain against the recycling people. But without notice, one night the Koreans dispatched a jumpsuited wrecking crew, trucked in dismantling equipment, trained two big klieg lights on the house, lighting up the neighborhood like an invasion from space. And by seven in the morning all four walls — within which I’d started a family, experienced joy, suffered great sadness, became lost to dreaminess, but through it all slept many nights as peaceful as a saint under the sheltering beeches and basswoods — were gone.

Legal remedies were sought — to enjoin something, punish someone. The neighborhood has many lawyers. But the Koreans instantly cashed in the lot for two million to a thoroughbred breeder from Kentucky with big GOP connections. In a year, he’d put up a lot-line to lot-line three-quarter-size replica of his white plantation-style mansion in Lexington, complete with fluted acacia-leaf columns, mature live oaks from Florida, an electric fence, mean guard dogs, a rebel flag on the flagpole and two Negro jockey statues painted his stable colors, green and black. “Not Furlong” is what he called the place, though the neighbors have found other names for it. All problems were deemed my fault for selling out originally back in ’85. So mine is not a popular face around there now, though many of my old neighbors have also moved on.

Brunswick Pike glides me in through Rocky Ridge, back into Haddam Township, and becomes Seminary Street along the banks of the widened stream referred to by locals as Lake Bimble, for the German farmer who owned the river bank and, as a Tory in the Revolution, gave aid and comfort to Colonel Mawhood’s troops, and who for his trouble got bound to a sack of ballast rocks and tossed in the stream — Quaker Creek — by General Washington’s men, there to stay.

Since I lived here for twenty years, I know what to expect farther in on Seminary two days before Thanksgiving. A melee. People stocking up and leaving for Vermont and Maine, the cozy Thanksgiving states; others arriving for family at-homes, students back from Boulder and Reed, divorcées visiting children, children visiting divorcées — the customary mid-day automotive hector brought about by a town become a kind of love-it/hate-it paragon of suburban amplitude gone beyond self-congratulation to the point of entropy. (Greenwich minus the beach, times three.)

Plus, there’s the further complication of the town fathers’ decision to mount a Battle of Haddam re-enactment right in town. I read this in the Haddam Packet, which I still receive in Sea-Clift. Uniformed Redcoats and tattered Continentals in homespun, carrying period musketry, eating homemade hardtack and wearing tricorn hats, jerkins and knee pants, their hair in pigtails, will be setting up drill fields, redoubts and headquarters all around the Boro, staging assaults and retreats, bivouacs and drumhead courts-martial, digging latrines and erecting tenting at the sites where these occurrences actually occurred back in 1780—though the current sites may now be Frenchy’s Gulf, Benetton or Hulbert’s Classic Shoes. This was done once before, for the bicentennial, and it’s all happening again for the Millennium in an effort to rev up sidewalk appeal. Though some merchants — I heard this at the bank last week — are already sensing retail disaster, and have retained counsel and are computing lost revenue as damages. This includes the bank itself.

The other distraction making movement into the Square near-impossible is that the Historical Society, in a fit of Thanksgiving spirit and under the rubric of “Sharing Our Village Past,” has converted the entire Square in front of the August Inn and the Post Office into a Pilgrim Village Interpretive Center. Two Am. Civ. professors from Trenton State with time on their hands have constructed a replica Pilgrim town with three windowless, dirt-floor Pilgrim houses, trucked-in period barnyard animals, and lots of authentic but unhandy Pilgrim implements, built a hand-adzed paled fence, laid in a subsistence garden and produced old-timey clothes and authentically inadequate footwear for the Pilgrims themselves. Inside the village they’ve installed a collection of young Pilgrims — a Negro Pilgrim, a Jewish female Pilgrim, a wheelchair-bound Pilgrim, a Japanese Pilgrim with a learning disability, plus two or three ordinary white kids — all of whom spend their days doing toilsome Pilgrim chores in drab, ill-fitting garments, chattering to themselves about rock videos while they hew logs, boil clothes, rip up sod, make soap in iron caldrons and spin more coarse cloth, but now and then pausing to step forth, just like soap-opera characters on Christmas Day, to deliver loud declarations about “the first hard days of 1620” and how it’s impossible to imagine the character and dedication of the first people and how our American stock was cured by tough times, blab, blab, blab, blab — all this to whoever might be idle enough to stop on the way to the liquor store to listen. Every night the young Pilgrims disappear to a motel out on Route 1, fill their bellies with pizza and smoke dope till their heads explode, and who’d blame them?

Merchants on the Square — the Old Irishman’s Kilt, Rizzutto’s Spirits, Sherm’s Tobacconist — have taken a more tolerant view of the Pilgrim shenanigans than they have of the battle re-enactors, who whoop and carry weapons, and stay out at the actual battlefield in Winnebagos and bring their own food and beer and never buy anything in town. The Pilgrims, on the other hand — which is probably how they were always viewed — are seen as a kind of peculiar but potentially attractive business nuisance. It’s hoped that passing citizens who pause to hear the overweight paraplegic girl give her canned speech about piss-poor medical facilities in seventeenth-century New Jersey, and how someone in her state of body wouldn’t have lasted a weekend, will then be moved by an urge to buy a Donegal plaid vest or a box of toffees or Macanudos or half a case of Johnnie Walker Red.

There’s even talk that a group representing the Lenape Band — New Jersey’s own redskins, who believe they own Haddam and always have — is setting up to picket the Pilgrims on Thursday, wearing their own period outfits and carrying placards that say THANKS FOR NOTHING and THE TERRIBLE LIE OF THANKSGIVING and stirring up a bad-for-business backlash. There’s likewise a rumor that a group of re-enactors will go AWOL, march to the Pilgrims’ defense and reenact a tidy massacre on the front steps of the Post Office. This is all probably skywriting by the boys at United Jersey and represents less truth than their wish that something out of the ordinary could happen so they can quit boring themselves to death approving mortgage after mortgage.

What it all comes down to, though, as with so many vital life issues and blood-boiling causes, is traffic and more traffic. An ambulance carrying our President and Pope John Paul couldn’t make it the two blocks from the Recovery Room Bar to Caviar ’n Cashmere in less than three-quarters of an hour, by which time both these tarnished exemplars would be out on the street walking.

Long manorial lawns sweep down to the north side of Brunswick Pike, facing the lake, with heavy hemlock growth and rhododendron splurge giving the white, set-back, old-money mansions their modesty protection. In my years selling houses here, I sold three of these goliaths, two twice, once to a famous novelist. Still, I take my first chance to turn off, to avoid the town traffic, and pass along onto bosky, stable, compromise-with-dignity Gulick Road — winding streets, mature plantings, above-ground electric, architect-design “family rooms” retrofitted onto older reasonable-sized Capes and ranches a year beyond their paint jobs. (I sold twenty of these.) Yukons and Grand Cherokees sit in driveways. Older tree houses perch in many oaks and maples. New mullions have been added to old seventies picture windows and underground sprinklers laid in. It’s the suburban sixties grown out, with many original owner-pioneers holding fast to the land and happy to be, their “new development” now become solidly in-town, with all the old rawness ironed out. It’s now a “neighborhood,” where your old Chesapeake, Tex, can take his nap in the street without being rumbled over by the bottled-water truck, where once-young families have become older but don’t give a shit, and where fiscal year to fiscal year everybody’s equity squeezes up as their political musings drift to the right (though it feels like the middle). It’s the height of what’s possible from modest beginnings, and as near to perfection as random settlement patterns and anxiety for permanence can hope for. It’s where I’d buy in if I moved back — which I won’t.

Though passing down these quiet, reserved streets — not splashy but good — I sometimes think I might’ve left for the Shore and Sea-Clift a bit too soon in 1992, since I missed the really big paydays (I still made a pot full). But by then I had an unusual son in my care, clinging precariously to his hold on Haddam High. (He actually graduated and left for college at Ball State — his odd choice.) I had a girlfriend, Sally Caldwell, who was giving me the old “now or never.” I was forty-seven. And I was experiencing the early, uneasy symptoms — it pretty quickly got better — of the Permanent Period of life. I couldn’t have told you what that was, only that after Paul left for Muncie, I began to feel a sort of clanking, mechanistic, solemn sameness about flogging these very houses, whereas earlier in my realty life I’d felt involved in, even morally committed to, getting people into the homes they (and the economy) wanted themselves to be in (at least for a while). Though what had always accompanied my long state of real estate boosterism was a sensation I’ve described in differing ways using differing tropes, but which all speak to the dulling complexity of the human organism. One such sensation was of constantly feeling offshore, a low-level, slightly removed-from-events, wooing-wind agitation that doing for others, in the frank, plain-talk way I was able to as a house seller, generally assuaged but never completely stilled. Experiencing the need for an extra beat was another of my figures. This I’d felt since military school in Mississippi — as if life and its directives were never quite all they should be, and, in fact, should’ve meant more. Regular life always felt like an unfinished flamenco needing, either from me or a source outside me, a completing beat, after which tranquillity could reign. Women almost always did the trick pretty neatly — at least till the whole thing started up again.

There were other such expressions — some warriorlike, some sports-related, some hilarious, some fairly embarrassing. But they pointed to the same wearying instinct for becoming, of which realty is an obvious standard-bearer profession. I really did fantasize that if Clinton could just win the White House in ’92, then a renaissance spirit would open like a new sun, whereby through a mysterious but ineluctable wisdom I would be named ambassador to France — or at least the Ivory Coast. That and a lot more didn’t happen.

Only, neuron by neuron, over a period of months (this was nearing the middle of the doomed and clownish Bush presidency) I realized I was feeling different about things. I remember sitting at my desk at my former employer, the Haddam realty firm of Lauren-Schwindell, tracking down some computerized post-sale notes I’d made on a house on King George Road that had come back on the market six months later, sporting a 30 percent increase in asking, and overhearing a colleague three cubicles away saying, just loud enough for me to take an interest, “Oh, that was Mr. Bascombe. I’m sure he would never do or say that.” I never found out what she was talking about or to whom. She normally didn’t speak to me. But I went off to sleep that night thinking of those words—“Mr. Bascombe would never…”—and woke up the next morning thinking them some more. Because it occurred to me that even though my colleague (a former history professor who’d reached the end of her patience with the Compromise of 1850) could say what Mr. Bascombe would never do, say, drive, eat, wear, laugh about, marry or think was sad, Mr. Bascombe himself wasn’t sure he could. She could’ve said damn near anything about me and I would’ve had to give the possibility some thought — which is why I’d never take a lie-detector test; not because I lie, but because I concede too much to be possible.

But very little about me, I realized — except what I’d already done, said, eaten, etc. — seemed written in stone, and all of that meant almost nothing about what I might do. I had my history, okay, but not really much of a regular character, at least not an inner essence I or anyone could use as a predictor. And something, I felt, needed to be done about that. I needed to go out and find myself a recognizable and persuasive semblance of a character. I mean, isn’t that the most cherished pre-posthumous dream of all? The news of our premature demise catching everyone so unprepared that beautiful women have to leave fancy dinner parties to be alone for a while, their poor husbands looking around confused; grown men find they can’t finish their after-lunch remarks at the Founders Club because they’re so moved. Children wake up sobbing. Dogs howl, hounds begin to bark. All because something essential and ineffable has been erased, and the world knows it and can’t be consoled.

But given how I was conducting life — staying offshore, waiting for the extra beat — I realized I could die and no one would remember me for anything. “Oh, that guy. Frank, uh. Yeah. Hmm…” That was me.

And not that I wanted to blaze my initials forever into history’s oak. I just wanted that when I was no more, someone could say my name (my children? my ex-wife?) and someone else could then say, “Right. That Bascombe, he was always damn blank.” Or “Ole Frank, he really liked to blank.” Or, worst case, “Jesus Christ, that Bascombe, I’m glad to see the end of his sorry blank.” These blanks would all be human traits I knew about and others did too, and that I got credit for, even if they weren’t heroic or particularly essential.

Another way of saying this (and there’re too many ways to say everything) is that some force in my life was bringing me hard up against what felt like my self (after a lengthy absence), presenting me, if I chose to accept it, with an imperative that all my choices in recent memory — volitions, discretions, extra beats, time spent offshore — hadn’t presented me, though I might’ve said they had and argued you to the dirt about it. Here, for a man with no calculable character, was a hunger for necessity, for something solid, the thing “character” stands in for. This hunger could, of course, just as easily result from a recognition that you’d never done one damn substantial thing in your life, good or otherwise, and never would, and if you did, it wouldn’t matter a mouse fart — a recognition that could leave you in the doldrums’ own doldrum, i.e., despair that knows it’s despair.

Except, I’ll tell you, this period—1990–92—was the most exhilarating of my life, the likes of which I’d felt once, possibly twice, but not more and was reconciled perhaps never to feel again, just glad to have had it when I did, but whose cause I couldn’t really tell you.

What it portended — and this is the truest signature of the Permanent Period, which comes, by the way, when it comes and not at any signifying age, and not as a climacteric, not when you expect it, not when your ducks are in a row (as mine back in 1990 were not) — it portended an end to perpetual becoming, to thinking that life schemed wonderful changes for me, even if it didn’t. It portended a blunt break with the past and provided a license to think of the past only indistinctly (who wouldn’t pay plenty for that?). It portended that younger citizens might come up to me in wonderment and say, “How in the world do you live? How do you do it in this uncharted time of life?” It portended that I say to myself and mean it, even if I thought I said it every day and already really meant it: “This is how in the shit I am! My life is this way”—recognizing, as I did, what an embarrassment and a disaster it would be if, once you were dust, the world and yourself were in basic disagreement on this subject.

Following which I set about deciding how I should put the next five to ten years to better use than the last five — progress being the ancients’ benchmark for character. I’d by then started to worry that Haddam might be it for me — just like Mike sweats it about Lavallette — which frankly scared the wits out of me. As a result, I immediately resigned my job at Lauren-Schwindell. I put my house on Cleveland Street on the rental market. I proposed marriage to Sally Caldwell, who couldn’t have been more surprised, though she didn’t say no (at least not till recently). I cashed in the Baby Bells I’d been adding to since the breakup. I made inquiries about possibilities for real estate at the Shore and was able to buy Realty-Wise from its owner, who was retiring to managed care. I made an unrejectable offer on a big tall-windowed redwood house facing the ocean in Sea-Clift (the second-home boom hadn’t arrived there yet). Sally sold her Stick Style beach house in East Mantoloking. And on June 1, 1992, with Clinton nearing the White House and the world seeming more possible than ever, I drove Sally to Atlantic City and in a comical ceremony in the Best Little Marriage Chapel in New Jersey, a pink, white, and blue Heidi chalet on Baltic Avenue, we tied the knot — acted on necessity, opted for the substantial in one simple act. We ended up saying good-bye to the day, my second wedding day and Sally’s, too, and the first full day of the Permanent Period, eating fried clams and sipping Rusty Nails at a seaside fish joint, giggling and planning the extraordinary future we were going to enjoy.

Which we did. Until I came down with a case of cancer shortly after Sally’s first husband came back from the dead, where he’d been in safekeeping for decades. Following which everything got all fucked up shit, as my daughter, Clarissa, used to say, and the Permanent Period was put to its sternest test by different necessities, though up to now it’s proved durable.

Mangum & Gayden Funeral Home, on one-block, oak-lined Willow Street, is a big yellow-and-brown-shingled Victorian, with a full-gingerbread porch above a bank of vociferous yews, with dense pachysandra encircling a large, appropriately-weeping front-yard willow and a thick St. Augustine carpet out to the sidewalk. For all the world, M&G looks like a big congenial welcoming-family abode where people live and play and are contented, instead of a funeral parlor where the inhabitants are dead as mallets and you feel a chill the instant you walk in the front door. What distinguishes it as a mortuarial establishment and not somebody’s domicile is the discreet, dim-lit MANGUM & GAYDEN — PARKING IN REAR lawn sign, a side porte-cochère that wasn’t in the original house design and two or three polished black Cadillacs around back with apparently nothing to do. A recent Haddam sign ordinance forbids any use of the word funeral, though Lloyd Mangum got his grandfathered. But nobody flying over at ten thousand feet would ever look down and say, “There’s a funeral home,” since it’s nestled into a row of similar-vintage living-human residences that list for a fortune. Lloyd says his Haddam neighbors seem not to mind residing beside the newly dead, and proximity has never seemed to put the brakes on resale. Most new buyers must feel a funeral home is better than a house full of attention-deficit teens learning the snare drum. And Lloyd, who’s a descendant of the original Mangum, tells me that mourners routinely stop by for a visitation with Aunt Gracie, then throw down a huge cash as-is offer for building and grounds before they’re out the door. Lloyd and family, in fact, live upstairs.

I park a ways down Willow and walk up. The new weather announced in the skies over Mullica Road is quickly arriving. Metallic rain smell permeates the air, and clouds back over Pennsylvania have bruised up green and gray for a season-changing blow. In an hour it could be snowing — a sorry day for a funeral, though when’s a good day?

Outside on the bottom front step, having a smoke, are Lloyd and another man known to me, both friends of the deceased and possibly the only other mourners. Ernie McAuliffe, to be honest, took his good sweet time departing this earth. Everybody who cared about him got to say they did three times over, then say it again. His wife, Deb, had long ago moved back to Indiana, and his only son, Bruno, a merchant mariner, came, said his brief strangled good-bye, then beat it. Ernie himself took charge of all funerary issues, including terminal care out at Delaware-Vue Acres in Titusville, and set out notarized instructions about who, what and when to do this, that and the other — no flowers, no grave-side folderol, no funeral, really, just boxed up and buried, the way we’d all probably like it. He even made arrangements with an unnamed care-giver to ease him out when it all got pointless.

I am, I realize, violating Ernie’s wishes by being here. But his obit was in the Packet on Saturday, and I was coming over with Mike anyway. Why do we do things? For ourselves, mostly. Ernie, though, was a grand fellow, and I’m sorry he’s no more. Memento mori in a sere season.

Ernie was, in fact, the best of fellows, someone anybody’d be happy to sit beside at a bar, a wounded Viet vet who still wore his dog tags but didn’t let any of that bring him low or fill him with self-importance. He’d seen some ugly stuff and maybe did a bit of it himself. Though you wouldn’t know it. He talked about his exploits, about that war and his fellow troopers and the politicians who ran it, the way you’d describe how things had gone when your high school football squad went 11–0 but lost the state championship to a scrappy but inferior team of small-fry opponents.

Ernie was brought up on a dairy farm near La Porte, Indiana, and went to a state school out there. When he left the Army minus his left leg, he went straight into the prosthetic-limb business as a supersalesman and ended up “opening” New Jersey to modern prosthetic techniques, then managing some big accounts and finally owning the whole damn company. Something about the savagery of war and all the squandered youth, he said to me, had made him feel prosthetics, rather than dairy herding, was his calling in this life, his way of leaving a mark.

Ernie, even with a space-age leg, was a great tall drink of water who walked up on the ball of his one good foot, which was barge material, wore his brown hair long and pomaded, with a prodigious side part that made him resemble a forties Hollywood glamour boy. He also was said to possess the biggest dick anybody’d ever seen (he would sometimes show it around, though I never got to see it) and on certain occasions was given the nickname “Dillinger.” He had a superlative sense of humor, could do all kinds of howling European accents and wacky loose-jointed walks and was never happier than when he was on the golf course or sitting with a towel draped over his unit, with his fake leg leaned against the wall, playing pinochle in the nineteenth hole at the Haddam Country Club. Deb was said to have gone back to Terre Haute for sexual reasons — probably so she could sleep with a normal man. Ernie, however, only spoke of her with resolute affection, as though to say, You can’t know what goes on between a man and a woman unless you write the novel yourself. He never, for obvious reasons, lacked for female companionship.

Of my two fellow mourners on Mangum’s front steps, the other is Bud Sloat, known behind his back as “Slippery Sloat.” Both are in regulation black London Fogs, in tune to the weather. Lloyd is tall, bareheaded and solemn, though Bud’s wearing a stupid Irish tweed knock-about hat and saddle oxfords that make him look sporting and only coincidentally in mourning.

Both Lloyd and Bud are members of the men’s group that “stepped up” when Ernie found out he had lymphoma and started going down fast. They organized outings to the Pine Barrens and Island Beach (close to where I live) and down to the Tundra swan sanctuary on Delaware Bay, where they trekked the beach (as long as Ernie was up to it), then sat around in a circle on the sand or on the rocks and told stories about Ernie, sang folk songs, discussed politics and literature, recited heroic poems, said secularist prayers, told raunchy jokes and sometimes cried like babies, all the while marveling at life’s transience and at the strange beyond that all of us will someday face. I went along once in late October, before Ernie needed transfusions to keep himself going. It was an autumn morning of pale water-color skies and clear dense air — we were just down the beach from my house — five of us late middle-agers in Bermudas and sweaters and tee-shirts that said Harrah’s and Planned Parenthood, plus ever-paler one-legged “Whatcha” McAuliffe (his other nickname), looking green and limping along without much stamina or joie de vivre. I thought it would just be a manly hike down the beach, skimming sand dollars, letting the cold surf prickle our toes, watching the terns and kestrels wheel and dip on the shore breezes, and in that fashion we would re-certify life for those able to live it.

Only at a certain point, the four others, including Lloyd and Bud, circled round poor Ernie — stumping along on his space-age prosthesis but still game in spite of being nearly dead — and rapturously told him they all loved him and there was no one in hell who was a bit like him, that life was here and now and needed to be felt, that death was as natural as sneezing. Then to my shock, like a band of natives toting a canoe, they actually picked Ernie up and walked with him — peg leg and all — up on their shoulders right into the goddamn ocean and, while cradling him in their interlaced arms, totally immersed him while murmuring, “Ernie, Ernie, Ernie” and chanting, “We’re with you, my brother,” as if they had lymphoma, too, and in six weeks would be dead as he’d be.

Once such bizarre activities get going, you can’t stop them without making everybody feel like an asshole. And maybe calling a halt would’ve made Ernie feel lousier and even more foolish for being the object of this nuttiness. One of the immersion team was an ex-Unitarian minister who’d studied anthropology at Santa Cruz, and the whole horrible rigamarole was his idea. He’d e-mailed instructions to everyone, only I don’t have e-mail (or I wouldn’t have been within a hundred miles of the whole business). Ernie, however, because nobody had warned him, either, struggled to get the hell out of his captors’ grip. He may have thought they were going to drown him to save him from a drearier fate. But the defrocked minister, whose name is Thor, started saying, “It’s good, Ernie, let it happen, just let it happen.”

Ernie’s depleted blue eyes — his whites as yellow as cheap mustard — found me standing back on shore. For an instant, he gaped at me, his bony visage tricked and sad and too well loved. “What the fuck’s this, Frank? What’s going on?” He said this to me, but to everyone else, too. “What the fuck’re you assholes doing to me?” It was at this point that they immersed him in the cold water, cradling him like a man already dead. He howled, “Ooooooowwoooo. Goddamn it’s cold!”

“It’s good, Ernie,” Thor droned in his ear. “Just let it happen to you. Go down into it. It’s g-o-o-d.” Ernie’s mouth turned down like a cartoon character’s. His shoulders went limp, his head lolled, his dismayed gaze found the sky. Once they had him immersed, they touched his face, his chest, his head, his hands, his legs, I guess his ass.

“I’m dying of goddamn cancer,” Ernie suddenly cried out, as if his dignity had suddenly been refound. “Cut this shit out!”

I didn’t take part. Though there was a moment just as they lowered poor Ernie into the Atlantic’s damp grasp (nobody stopped to think he might catch pneumonia) when he looked back at me again on the beach, his eyes helpless and resigned but also full of feeling, a moment when I realized they were doing for Ernie all the living can do, and that it was stranger that I was on the sideline and, worse yet, that Ernie knew it. You usually don’t think about these things until it’s too late. Even so, I’d never let anything like that happen to me, no matter how far gone I was or how beneficial it might be for somebody else.

I mean, who let who down, for crap sake?” Bud Sloat says. “If you can’t win your own goddamn home state, and the Dow’s at ten forty-two, and your state’s as dumb-ass as Tennessee, I’d quit. I’d just fuckin’ quit.”

Bud’s not talking in the hushed tones appropriate to the dead-lying-inside-the-big-frosted-double-doors, but just jabbering on noisily about whatever pops into his head. The election. The economy. Bud’s a trained attorney — Princeton and Harvard Law — but owns a lamp company in Haddam, Sloat’s Decors, and has personally placed pricey one-of-a-kind designer lighting creations in every CEO’s house in town and made a ton of money doing it. He’s sixty, small, fattish and yellow-toothed, a dandruffy, burnt-faced little pirate who wears drug-store half glasses strung around his neck on a string. If he wasn’t wearing his Irish knock-about hat, you could see his strawberry-blond toupé, which looks about as real on his cranium as a Rhode Island Red. Bud is a hard-core Haddam townie and would ordinarily be wearing regulation Haddam summer dress: khakis, nubble-weave blue blazer, white Izod or else a pink Brooks’ button-down with a stained regimental tie, canvas belt, deck shoes and a little gold lapel pin bearing the enigmatic letters YCDBSOYA, which Bud wants everybody to ask him about. But the day’s chill and solemnity have driven him back to baggy green cords, the dumbbell saddle oxfords and an orange wool turtleneck under his London Fog, so he looks like he’s headed to a late-season Princeton game. He only lacks a pennant.

Bud’s a blue-dog Democrat (i.e., a Republican) even though he’s yammering, trying to act betrayed by fellow Harvard-bore Gore, as if he voted for him. Bud, though, absolutely voted for Bush, and if I wasn’t here, he’d admit right now that he feels damn good about it—“Oh, yaas, made the practical businessman’s choice.” Most of my Haddam acquaintances are Republicans, including Lloyd, even if they started out on the other side years back. None of them wants to talk about that with me.

“How’s old Mr. Prostate, Franklin?” Bud’s worked up an unserious glum-mouth frown, as if everybody knows prostate cancer’s a big rib tickler and we need to lighten up about it. My Mayo procedure came to light (regrettably) during our men’s “sharing session” on the cold beach with Ernie in October, just before he got dunked in the ocean for his own good. We all agreed to tell a candid story, and that was the only one I had, not wanting to share the one about my wife hitting the road with her dead husband. I know Bud wants to ask me how it feels to walk down the street with hot BBs in your gearbox, but doesn’t have the nerve. (For the most part it’s unnoticeable — except, of course, you never don’t know it.)

“I’m all locked and loaded, Bud.” I stand beside them at the bottom of the steps and give Bud a mirthless line-mouth smile of no tolerance, which re-informs him I don’t like him. Haddam used to be full of schmoes like Bud Sloat, yipping little Princetonians who never missed New Year’s Eve at the Princeton Club, showed up for every P-rade, smoker, ball game and fund-raiser, and wore their orange-and-black porkpie hats and tiger pajamas to bed. These guys are all into genealogy and Civil War history, and like to sit around quoting Mark Twain and General Patton, and arguing that a first-rate education as prelude to a life in retail was exactly what old Witherspoon had in mind back in 17-whatever. Bud’s business card, in collegiate Old Gothic embossed with the Princeton crest and colors (I admit to admiring it), reads, There’s the Examined Life. And Then There’s the Lamp Business.

“Nothing’s really happening inside now, Frank,” Lloyd murmurs in his seasoned mourner’s voice, cupping a smoke down by his coat pocket and letting a drag leak out his big nose. From where I stand, I can see right inside Lloyd’s nostrils, where it’s as dark as bituminous coal. Lloyd buried my son Ralph from out of this same house nineteen years ago, and we’ve always shared a sadness (something he’s probably done with eight thousand people, many of whom he’s also by now been called on to bury). Every time he sees me, Lloyd lays a great heavy mitt on my shoulder, lowers his bluish face near mine and in a Hollywood baritone says, “How’re those kids, Frank?” As if Clarissa and Paul, my surviving children, had stayed eternally five and seven in the same way Ralph is eternally nine. Lloyd’s as big, tall, sweet and bulky as Bud is fat, weasly and lewd — a great, potato-schnozzed, coat hanger — shouldered galoot who years ago played defensive end for the Scarlet Knights, has soulful mahogany eyes deep-set in bony blue-shaded sockets and always smells like a cigarette. It’s as if Lloyd became an undertaker because one day he gazed in a mirror and noticed he looked like one. I’d be happy to be buried by Lloyd if I felt okay about being buried — which I don’t. “We put Ernie in a viewing room for an hour, Frank, just in case, but we need to get him along now. You know. Not that he’d care.” Lloyd nods professionally and looks down at his wide black shoe toes. A burning Old Spice cloud mingled with tobacco aroma issues from somewhere in the middle of Lloyd. I didn’t intend to view Ernie, or even the box he’s going out in.

From the side of the building, the headlights of a long black Ford Expedition glow out through the weather’s gloom, ready to transfer Ernie to the boneyard, where a grave’s probably already opened. Lloyd always uses SUVs for unattended interments. Without pageantry or a hushed ruffle, life’s last performance becomes as matter-of-fact as returning books to the library.

“Do you know what the death woman said?” Bud Sloat’s round pink face is tipped to the side, as though he’s hearing music, his shrewd retailer’s eyes hooded to convey self-importance.

“What woman? What’s a death woman?” I say.

Lloyd exhales a disapproving grunt, shifts back in his undertaker brogans. Squeaky, squeaky.

“Well, you know, Ernie agreed to let this psychologist woman from someplace out in Oregon be present when he died. Actually died.” Bud keeps his face cocked, as if he’s telling an off-color joke. “She wanted to ask him things right up to the last second, okay? And then say his name for ten minutes to see if she could detect any efforts of Ernie wanting to come back to life.” Bud frowns, then grins — his thin, purple and extremely un-kissable lips parted in distaste, indicating Ernie was indisputably not our sort (Old Nassau, etc.) and here’s final proof. “Great idea, huh? Wouldn’t you say?” Bud blinks, as if it’s too astonishing for words.

“I guess I’d have to think about that,” I say. Though not for long. This is news I don’t need to hear. Though, of course, it’s exactly what people who stand outside funeral homes while the body’s inside cooling always yak about. Now it can be told: Who he fucked, aren’t we glad we’re smarter, where’d the money go, isn’t it a credit to us he’s in there and we’re out here.

Bud wheezes a little laughlike noise down in his throat. “You need to hear what she said, though. This Professor Novadradski. Naturally it’d be a Ruskie.”

I think a moment about Ernie mugging his “Rooshan” accent and pounding the table at the Manasquan Bar years and years behind us now, when Russian meant something. “Nyet, nyet, nyet,” he’d growled and shouted that night about some crazy thing, took off one of his loafers and pounded it like Khrushchev, sweated and drank vodka like a Cossack. We all laughed till we cried.

“What she said was — and I got this from Thor Blainer” (the defrocked Unitarian minister). “He said the male nurse out at Delaware-Vue came in and gave Ernie the big shot because he’d been having a pretty rough time there for a day or so. Just walked in and did the deed. And in about three minutes, Ernie quit breathing, without ever saying anything. Then this Russian woman — right down in his face — starts saying his name over and over. ‘Er-nie, Er-nie. Vat’re you tinking? How dus you feel? Dus you see some colors? Vich vunz? Are you colt? Dus you hear dis voice?’ She said it, of course, in a soothing way, so she wouldn’t scare him out of coming back if he wanted to.”

Lloyd’s heard enough and heads off around the side of the building to check on the Expedition, its headlights still shining into the mist. Some sound audible only to undertakers has reached his ears, alerting him that a new matter needs his expertise. He ambles away, hands down in his topcoat pockets, leaning forward like he’s curious about something. Lloyd’s heard these stories a jillion times: corpses suddenly sitting up on the draining table; fingers clutching out for a last touch before the fluid gurgles in; bodies inexplicably rearranged in the casket, as if the occupant had been capering about when the lights were out. The human species isn’t supposed to go down willingly. Lloyd knows this better than Kierkegaard.

“Okay, Lawrence,” I hear Lloyd say from around the side. “Let’s get ’er going now.”

A tall young black man dressed in a shiny black suit, white shirt and skinny tie, and bundled into a bulky green-and-silver Eagles parka with a screaming eagle over the left breast, emerges from the porte-cochère beside the building. He’s flashing a big knowing grin, as if something supposed to be serious — but not really — has gone on inside. He stops and shares whatever it is with Lloyd, who’s facing down, listening, but who then just shakes his head in small-scale amazement. I know this young man. He is Lawrence “Scooter” Lewis, surviving son of the deceased Everick Lewis, and nephew of the now also deceased Wardell, enterprising brothers who made buckets of dough in the early nineties gentrifying beaten-up Negro housing in the Wallace Hill section of town and selling it to newcomer white Yuppies. I sold them two houses on Clio Street myself. Lawrence, I happen to know, went to Bucknell on a track scholarship but didn’t last, then entered the Army Airborne and came home to find his niche in town. It’s not an unusual narrative, even in Haddam. Scooter, who’s younger-looking than his years, gives me a sweet smile and a small wave of unexpected recognition across the lawn, then turns and walks back toward his waiting Expedition before he’s seen that I’ve waved back.

“Now hear me out, Frank.” Bud’s short upper lip begins to curl into a sneer. I’m not going to be glad to have heard this story, whatever it is. I hope Ernie has had the good grace in death to be still and not make a fool of himself. “The second this Ruskie gal quits saying ‘Ernie, Er-nie,’ she puts her ear down close to him, where she can hear the slightest sound. And when the room’s quiet, she hears — she swears — what sounds like a voice. But it’s coming from Ernie’s stomach!” Bud flashes another astonished smile, which wipes away his sneer. “I swear to God, Frank. She swears the voice was saying ‘I’m here. I’m still here.’ Out of his goddamn stomach.” Bud looks exactly like the old-time actor Percy Helton, round, raspy-voiced, craven and mean, his fishy eyes saucered in mock horror that is actually gleeful. “Doesn’t that beat the shit out of everything you ever heard?”

Bud, for some reason, opens his mouth as if a sound was meant to emerge, but none does, so that (having already looked in Lloyd’s nose) I now have to see his short, thick, mealy, café au lait — colored tongue, broad across as Maryland, and, I’m sure, exuding vapors I don’t want to get close to. Men. Sometimes the world is way too full of them. What I’d give this second for a woman’s ministering smell and touch. Men can be the worst companions in the world. Dogs are better.

“She also said he was alive in a sexual sense. What do you think about that?” Bud blinks his sulfurous little peepers while fingering his half-glasses-on-a-string outside his black overcoat.

“Death’s like turning off the TV, Bud. Sometimes a little light stays on in the middle. It’s not worth wondering about. It’s like where does the Internet live? Or can hermits have guests?”

“That’s bullshit,” Bud snarls.

“You probably hear more bullshit than I do, Bud.” I smile another mirthless, unwelcoming smile.

Snow of the thin, stinging variety has begun to skitter before the burly November wind, turning the St. Augustine greener and crunchy. Sharp bits nick my ears, catch in my eyelids, sprinkle the jaunty-angled top of Bud’s tweed hat. Contrary to expectation, I wish I was inside, standing vigil beside Ernie in his box, and not out here. I remember a night years past when a young, lean but no less an asshole Buddy Sloat — still practicing divorce law and before the unexamined life of lamps caught his fancy — started a row over, of all things, whether a deaf man who rapes a deaf woman deserves a deaf jury. Bud’s view was he didn’t. The other guy, an otolaryngologist named Pete McConnicky, a member of the Divorced Men’s Club, thought the whole thing was a joke and kept looking around the bar for someone to agree with him and ease the pressure Bud felt about needing to be right about everything. Finally, McConnicky just smacked Bud in the mouth and left, which made everybody applaud. For a while, we all referred to Bud as “Slugger Sloat,” and laughed behind his back. It’d be satisfying now to hit Bud in the mouth and send him back to the lamp store crying.

Bud, however, doesn’t want to talk to me anymore. He watches the Black-Mariah Expedition creep out from the porte-cochère, wipers flapping crusts of new snow, big headlight globes cutting the flurry, gray exhaust thickening in the cold. Ernie McAuliffe’s dark casket is in the windowed, curtained luggage-compartment, as lonely and uncelebrated as death itself — just the way Ernie wanted it, no matter how his belly ached to disagree. Scooter Lewis sits high in the driver’s seat, shining face solemn in self-conscious caution. Lloyd watches from the grass beside the driveway. He probably has another of these occasions in half an hour. The funeral business is not so different from running a restaurant.

Unexpectedly, though, before Scooter can navigate the big Expedition out onto the street and turn up toward Constitution and the cemetery, a squad of Battle of Haddam re-enactors (Continentals) comes higgledy-piggledy, hot-footing it around the corner at the bottom end of Willow Street. These “patriots” are running, muskets in hand, heavy-gaited, their homespun socks ragged down to the ankles, shirttails flapping, beating a hasty retreat, or so it seems, from a smaller but crisply organized company of red-coated British Grenadiers hurrying around the same corner in a stiff little formation, their muskets at order arms, bayonets glinting, black regimental belts and boots, crimson tunics and high furry hats catching what muted light there is. They present an impressive aspect. The Continentals have been whooping and shouting warnings and orders on the run. “Get to the cemetery and deploy.” One’s waving an arm. “Don’t fire till you see the whites of your eyes.” From the funeral home lawn, I see this man is an Asian and small and rounded in his homespuns, though his command voice has real authority.

The Redcoats, once onto the corner, very smartly form two lines of five, crosswise of the street, five kneeling, five standing behind. A tall, skeletal officer hurries up beside them and without any buildup barks an Englishy-sounding command, raises a bulky cutlass into the New Jersey air. The Grenadiers shoulder their weapons, cock their hammers, aim down their barrels and — right in the middle of Willow Street, in the cold misting snow, as it must’ve been back in 1780—cut loose up the street at the Americans, who’re just in front of Mangum & Gayden’s (in time to be shot) and blocking Scooter Lewis’s path in his Expedition.

The English musketry produces a loud, unserious cracking sound and gives out a preposterous amount of white smoke from barrel and breech. The Continentals, swarming past the funeral home, turn as the volley goes off, and from various positions — kneeling, standing, crouching, lying on the yellow-striped asphalt — fire back with similar unserious cracks and smoke expenditures. And right away, two Brits go right over as stiff as duckpins. Three Continentals also get it — one who’s taken cover behind the hearse’s fender, with Ernie in the back. The Americans make a much more anguished spectacle out of dying than the English, who seem to know better how to expire. (It’s a strange sight, I’ll admit.) The remaining Grenadiers calmly begin to reload, using ramrods and flinting devices, while the Continentals — forefathers to guerrillas and terrorists the world over — just turn and begin hightailing it again, whooping and hoo-hawing up to Constitution, where they clamber around the corner and are gone. It hasn’t taken two minutes to fight the Battle of Willow Street.

Lloyd Mangum, Bud Sloat and I, with Scooter behind the wheel of his hearse, have simply stood in the wet grass and borne silent witness. No humans have emerged from neighbor houses to inquire what’s what. Musket smoke drifts sideways in the snowy, foggy Willow Street atmosphere and engulfs for an instant my Suburban, parked on the other side. The sound of the Continentals, shouting orders and yahooing, echoes through the yards and silent sycamores. Other muskets discharge streets away, other manly shouts are audible above the muffled sound of campaign snares and a bugle. It is almost stirring, though I’m not in the mood. Ernie, once a combatant himself, would’ve gotten a charge out of it. He’d have wondered, as I do, if any of the soldiers were girls.

The British — minus two — have now re-formed as a moving square and begun marching back around the corner onto Green Street. The three “dead” Continentals have recovered life and begun strolling back down Willow, muskets on their shoulders, barrel ends forward, looking to join up with their enemies, who’re now waiting, dusting off their jodhpurs. A clattering blue New Jersey Waste truck lumbers around the corner. Two teenage black boys cling outside to the hold-on bars, making wagon-master noises to signal the stops. It’s “pickup Tuesday.” Oversized green plastic cans sit at the end of each driveway, beside red recycling tubs. Details I haven’t noticed.

The black kids on the garbage truck say something sassy to the Continentals that makes the boys crack up and swing outward on their handgrips like amazing acrobats. Neither of them is fazed when one irregular points a musket at them and simulates a volley, though it makes the soldiers laugh as they disappear around the corner.

“You know what Ernie’s putting on his gravestone?” Lloyd’s come to stand beside me, Old Spice gunk a halo around him. He has a wheeze deep down in his chest, and the coarse black follicles around the helix of his left ear are the same as in his nose. Lloyd is a man not much made in America now, though once there were plenty: men without preconditions or sharp angles the world has to contend with, men who go to work, entertain important, unsensational duties, get home on time, mix a hefty brown drink after six, enjoy the company of the Mrs. till ten, catch the early news, then trudge off to bed and blissful sleep. I don’t usually like being around men my age — since they always make me feel old — but Lloyd’s the exception. I like him immensely, with his somber, pensive, throwback visage of times and shaving lotions of yore. He is good value — earnest, sympathetic, solid to the bone and not overcomplicated — just the way you’d hope your undertaker would be. Tom Benivalle, in his secret best sense of himself, is Lloyd, which is what I found likable about him. He’s aware of who he pretends to be. Though Benivalle’s the modern version, with angles and twitchy cell-phone impatience that things might not turn out right. All of it in an Italian pasta box.

“What’s that?” I say to Lloyd about Ernie’s gravestone. Bud has wandered up the funeral home steps and is just entering the front door. Snow’s falling harder now, though it won’t last. My Philadelphia early-bird news channel didn’t even mention snow when I woke at six.

“He’s putting He suffered fools cheerfully.” Lloyd’s pale blue lantern-jaw face rearranges itself from somber to happy.

I look at Lloyd again but, due to the difference in our heights, am forced — again — to look right up his hairy spelunkle of a left nostril. “That’s great.”

Scooter Lewis, in the Expedition, has let the New Jersey Waste truck rumble past and begins negotiating a respectful turn onto Willow. He has another serious game face on. No winks or smiles or eye rolls. The garbage truck boys stare back at the hearse mistrustfully.

“Ernie’d have liked having a battle in the middle of his funeral, don’t you think, Frank? An un-funeral.” Ernie liked to put un in front of words to make fun of them. Un-drunk. Un-vacation. Un-rich. “It was at a time when I was still un-rich.” When he said it, we all said it. Un-fuck. Un-Jersey.

“I’m surprised everyone doesn’t ask for a battle,” I say. “Or at least a skirmish.” I’ve never discussed “arrangements” with Lloyd, but perhaps I should, since I have a deadly disease.

“I wouldn’t stay in business long if they did.” Lloyd exhales a breath he seems to have been holding in for some time. Lloyd has seen Ernie in the last hour, dead as a posthole digger, but seems to be none the worse for it.

“What business would you be in, Lloyd, if you weren’t in the dead-person business?”

“Oh, lord.” He’s watching the Expedition bearing our friend come to a stop at Constitution, red blinker flashing a left turn. Scooter, in the driver’s seat, cranes his neck both directions, then eases out and silently disappears toward the cemetery. Lloyd is satisfied. “I’ve sure thought about it, Frank. Hazeltine”—Lloyd’s well-upholstered wife, named for God only knows what tribe of abject Pennsylvania Kallikaks—“would like me to sell it out. To some chain. Quit livin’ in a funeral home. Her family are all potato farmers in PA. They don’t get this here. Kids’re in Nevada.”

One of Lloyd’s three is my son Paul’s age — twenty-seven — and, unlike my son, who has a career in the greeting-card industry, is a computer wizard who started his own mail-order business selling office furniture made from recycled organic food products and now owns six vintage Porsches and an airplane.

Lloyd frowns at the thought of Pennsylvania potatoes and retirement. “But I don’t know.”

“Is it the smell of the embalming fluid or the sob of the crowd, you think, Lloyd?” Lloyd doesn’t answer, though he has a good sense of humor and I know is letting these words silently amuse him. It is his gift. There’s no use having a somber day cloud everything.

“So what’s the plan for Thanksgiving, Frank? The family? The works?” Lloyd’s oblivious to what my “family” entails, except “those two kids.” I’ve, after all, been gone eight years. Lloyd’s likely picturing his own brood: Hazeltine, Hedrick, Lloyd, Jr., and Kitty — the funeral-directing Mangums of Haddam. “You’re living where right now?” (As if I was a Bedouin.)

“Sea-Clift, Lloyd.” I smile to let him know it’s a positive change and he’s asked me about it before. “Over on the Shore.”

“Yep, I get it. That’s nice. Real nice, over there.”

We both turn to a storm door closing, a cough, a footfall. Bud’s coming down the steps, walking a little gimpy, as if he’s worried about slipping. The snow’s sticking but no longer falling.

“Looks like you got some more business in there, Lloyd. The Van Tuyll girl. And who’s that old party?” Bud resettles his dick under his London Fog, which is why he was walking bowlegged. He went in for a piss, which is what I’d like to do, but not in there.

“Harvey Effing’s mother,” Lloyd says reluctantly. “She was ninety-four.”

“Oh my God,” Bud says. He’s been nosing around the other viewing rooms after his leak and without even taking off his Irish hat, having a whiff of different deaths. It’s made him giddy. “‘Paging Mr. Effing. Call for Mr. Effing. Effing party of two.’ We used to play that on Harvey up at the Princeton Club.” Bud the clubman is pleased by this memory. He’s done with the matter of noises from Ernie’s innards and their possible cosmic significance. We’re just three men out on the snowy front walk again, waiting for permission to disengage. To remain longer threatens divulgences, confidences, the connection of dots in no need of connecting. The job description for mourner is simply to stay on message.

I’m, however, hungry as a leopard and realize I’m standing with my mouth partway open in anticipation of food, just the way a leopard would. Having to piss a lot makes me not drink much, which makes me forget to eat. Though it’s also because I have no more words I want to speak.

“How’s the realty business, Frank?” Bud says insincerely.

“It’s great, Bud. How’s lamps?” I close my yap and try to smile.

“Couldn’t be brighter. But let me ask you something, Frank.” Bud pushes his little cold hands officiously down in his coat pockets and spaces his saddle oxfords wider apart and sways back like a racetrack tout.

The grassy ground is already turning bare again as the snow vanishes. It could easily begin to rain. I’m not sure I don’t detect the pre-auditory rumble of thunder. “I hope it’s simple, Bud.” I’m not in the mood for complexity. Or candor. Or honesty. Or anything, including jokes.

“It’s something I started asking people when I’m selling them a lamp, you know?” Bud beetles his brow in a look appropriate to philosophical inquiry.

I cast a wary eye Lloyd’s way. He’s looking at his brogans again, jeweled with dampness. I’m sure he’s already taken this quiz.

“What’ve you learned in the realty business, Frank? In how many years now?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Pretty long, though. Twenty years?”

“No. Or yes. I don’t remember.”

Bud sniffs back through his little ruby-veined nose, then wags his shoulders like a boxer. “A while, though.”

“I thought you liked the unexamined life, Bud.”

“For selling lamps,” Bud snaps. “I was at Princeton, Frank, with Poindexter and that crowd. Empirical all the way. I had a scholarship over to Oxford but went on and attended Harvard Law. It was the sixties.”

“I never believe people, Bud.”

“Well, you can sure as shit believe that.”

Bud’s translucent eyelids snap like a crow’s. He’s misunderstood me. He thinks I’ve deprecated his academic accomplishment, about which I couldn’t care less.

“That’s my answer to your question, Bud. How could I not know you went to Princeton? You probably haven’t told me more than four hundred times. I’m sure Harvey Effing’s mother knows you went to Princeton. You probably reminded her when you were in there.”

“Your answer is what?” Bud says.

“My answer is, I tend not to believe people.”

“About what?”

Lloyd groans down in his tussive chest. All day, death, and now questions.

“About anything. It lets people act freely. I realized it one day. A guy told me he was driving back to his motel for his checkbook then coming right back to where we’d been looking at a condo over in Seaside Park. He was going to write me a check for twenty-five thousand on the spot. I knew he exactly intended to. And I was going to stand there and wait till he came back. But I realized, though, that I didn’t believe a fucking thing he said. I just pretended to, to make him feel good. That’s what I’ve learned. It’s a big relief.”

“Did the guy come back,” Lloyd asks.

“He did, and I sold him the condo.”

Bud’s livery lips wrinkle in distaste meant to signify concern. “You’ve gotten deep since your prostate flare-up.”

“My prostate didn’t flare up, you asshole. It had cancer. I believe that, though. If you trust people unnecessarily, it incurs an obligation on everybody. Suspending judgment’s a lot easier. Maybe you can do that with lamps.”

“Makes sense,” Lloyd says quietly. “I probably feel the same way.” He lowers his big funereal brow at Bud as a warning.

“Whatever.” Bud makes a display of looking around the empty yard, as if Harvey Effing’s mother was calling him. The driveway’s empty. Water’s puddling from the melted snow. The postman, in his blue government sweater and blue twill pants, is just traversing the lawn from next door in some wiggly black galoshes he hasn’t bothered to snap. He radiates a wide, welcoming postal-carrier got-something-for-you smile and hands Lloyd a stack of letters bound with a red rubber band.

“That’s great,” Lloyd grunts, and smiles but doesn’t peek at his letters. Surely some are heart-warming thank-yous for all the above-and-beyond kindness by the M&G staff when Uncle Beppo was “taken,” and for the extra time needed so a long-estranged brother could arrive from Quito, especially since Uncle B. wasn’t discovered in his apartment until some time had passed. I wonder what Lloyd’s answer was to the what-have-you-learned question.

“Whatever’s about it,” I say to Bud, who’s still gooning around the yard at nothing. I believe I detect a ghostly Parkinson’s tremor in Bud’s chin, something he may not know about himself. His pudding chin is slightly oscillating, though it may be because I yelled at him and made him nervous. “I want you to understand, Bud. When I didn’t believe the guy’d come back, it wasn’t that I disbelieved him. I just decline to make people have to bear extra responsibility for their own insecure intentions. Having to be believed is too big a burden. I thought you studied philosophy. It isn’t so hard.”

“Okay, that’s fine.” Bud smiles faintly and pats me softly on the front of my barracuda jacket, as if I was about to start throwing punches and needed calming.

“Fuck you, Bud.”

“Yeah, yeah. Okay. That’s great. Fuck me.” Bud fattens his bunchy cheeks and smirks. The funeral contingent has now lost its funerary decorum. I’m, of course, largely to blame.

“Better get going.” Lloyd’s stuffing his mail into his overcoat pocket.

“Time to,” Bud says. He’s staring straight at Lloyd’s chest, so as not to have to face me. “Hope you feel better, Frank.”

“I feel great, Bud. I hope you feel better. You don’t look so good.”

“Chasing a cold,” Bud says, and commences walking in his gimpy gait across the damp lawn, heading down Willow, back toward Seminary and the unreflective lamp business. It’s why I hate men my age. We all emanate a sense of youth lost and tragedy-on-the-horizon. It’s impossible not to feel sorry for our every little setback.

“Those kids coming to visit, are they?” Lloyd’s happy to be upbeat.

“They sure are, Lloyd.” We’re watching Bud cross Willow, stamping grass and snow-melt off his oxfords, clutching his coat collar up around his neck. He doesn’t look back, though he thinks we’re talking about him.

“You can’t enter the same stream twice, can you, Frank?” Lloyd says.

I look squarely at Lloyd, as if by gazing on him I’ll come to know what he means, since I don’t have the vaguest idea, though I’m certain it has something to do with the life lessons we both know: takes all kinds; for every day, turn, turn, turn; life’d be dull if we were all the same. “Small blessings,” I say solemnly.

“Thanks for showing up. We needed some bodies.” This is not a pun to Lloyd. He is a born literalist and couldn’t survive otherwise.

“It was a good thing,” I lie, and think a thought about Ernie’s epitaph and how smart a cookie he was to know what to say at the end. We should all be that smart, all heed the lesson.

Surprisingly — though probably not that surprisingly — the inside of my Suburban when I climb in is gaseous with stinging, whanging anti-Permanent Period ethers that make me have to run the windows down to get a usable breath. Conceivably it’s low blood sugar from being starved, which makes me clench my jaw. When you have cancer in your nether part, plus a bolus of radiant heavy metal — most of which has spent its payload by now, though it’s my keepsake forever — your systems don’t run on autopilot like they used to. Everything begs for suspicious notice — a headache, loose bowels, erectile virtuosity or its opposite, bloodshot eyes, extra fingernail growth. Dr. Psimos, my Mayo surgeon, explained all this. Though once my procedure was over, he said, nothing on a daily basis would be caused per se by my condition, unless I went prospecting for uranium, in which case my needle would point out the mother lode up my butt.

“It’ll be in your mind, Frank, but that’s about it,” Psimos said, leaning back, self-satisfied in his doctor chair, like a forty-year-old lab-coated Walter Slezak. His tiny Mayo seventh-floor pale-green office walls were full of diplomas — Yale, the Sorbonne, Heidelberg, Cornell, plus one designating him a graduate of the Suzuki Method of pianism. Those hirsute sausagey digits, capable of injecting hot needles into tender zones, also contained “The Flight of the Bumblebee” in their muscle memory.

It was our presurgical chat, the entire duration of which he sat teasing a bad backlash out of a tiny silver fly reel, using those same meaty fingers, assisted by a surgical clamp and some magnifying spectacles. Out his little window, the entire Mayo skyline — the bland tan hospital edifices, smokestacks, helipads, radar dishes, antennae, winking red beacons, everything but anti-aircraft batteries and ack-acks — projected the reassuring solidity of a health-care Pentagon to wayward pilgrim patients like me and the King of Jordan.

I didn’t know what to say back. I hadn’t had “a procedure” since once in the Marine Corps on my ailing pancreas, which got me out of Vietnam. I knew what was going to happen — the BBs, etc. — and figured the biopsy had already been worse. I wasn’t scared till I found out I shouldn’t be. “Most things that happen to me anymore happen in my mind,” I said pathetically. My knees were shaking. I had on red madras Bermudas and a Travel Is a Fool’s Paradise tee-shirt to try to look casual. I’m sure he knew what was happening.

It was a sunny, humid Minnesota Friday, last August. I’d watched the Olympic 4x100 relay that morning at the Travelodge. “Procedures,” it seems, only take place on Mondays. But terrifying doctor chats are all slated for Fridays, to ensure that the maximum stomach-churning, molar-crunching jimjams will fill up your weekend.

“I’m just an ole surgeon around here, Frank.” Psimos held his antique reel away from his jowly, mustachioed Walterish face and frowned at it through his magnifiers. “They don’t pay me millions to think, just cut ’n paste stuff. I’ll fix you up Monday so you’re back firing. But I can’t help what goes on in the brain department. That’s over on West Eleven, across the street.” He gave his heavy Greek brows a couple of insolent flicks.

“I’m looking forward to it,” I said idiotically, my asshole as hard as a peach pit.

“I bet you are.” He smiled. “I bet you really are.”

And that was that.

All this woolly, stinging, air-sucking breathlessness inhabiting my Suburban is about nothing but death, of course — big-D and little-d. The Permanent Period is specifically commissioned to make you quit worrying about your own existence and how everything devolves on your self (most things aren’t about “you” anyway, but about other people) and get you busy doin’ and bein’—the Greek ideal. Psimos, I bet, practices it to perfection, on the links, at the streamside, in the operating theater, at the Suzuki and over lamb patties on the Weber. Surgeons are past masters at achieving connectedness with the great other by making themselves less visible to themselves. Mike Mahoney would love them.

Still, too much death can happen to you before you know it, and has to be staved off like a bad genie and stuffed back in its bottle.

I motor slowly past the trudging, bescroffled, pre-Parkinsonian Bud Sloat, just crossing Willow in the mist, head down in his Irish topper and sad toupé, heading toward the back lot of the CVS and Seminary Street, where his lamporium sits next door to the Coldwell Banker. I have a thought to shove open the passenger door and haul him in out of the rain, put a better end to things between us. He’s possibly as death-daunted as I am (even assholes get the willies). A moment of unfelt fellowship might be just the ticket to save us from a bad afternoon. But Bud’s intent on missing the puddles and saving his saddle oxfords, his hands down in his topcoat pockets, and in any case he’s the sort of jerk who thinks every unrecognized vehicle contains someone inferior and worthy of disdain. I couldn’t stand the look on his face. In any case, I have nothing I could even lie about to make him feel better.

Though Bud’s question about the real estate business has set off belated silent alarms, and I feel a sudden cringe up near my diaphragm, brought on by the thought that real estate might be my niche the way undertaking’s Lloyd’s and Bud’s is lamps. A strangled voice within me croaks, Nooo, nooo-no-no, no. I should know that voice, since I’ve heard it before — and recently.

Tell a dream, lose a reader, the master said (I do my best to forget mine). But you can’t un-know what you know, as attractive as that might be.

In two consecutive weeks now, I’ve twice dreamed that I wake up in the middle of my prostate procedure just as the BBs — which in the dream are actually hot — go rolling down a lighted slot into my butt, a slot that looks like a pinball-machine gutter that Psimos, dressed in tails, has moved into the OR. In another one, I’m shooting baskets in a smelly old wire-windowed gym and I simply can’t miss — except the score on the big black-and-white scoreboard doesn’t change from 0–0. In a third, I somehow know jujitsu and am boisterously throwing little brown men around in a room full of mattresses. In another, I keep walking into a CVS like the one on Seminary, asking the pharmacist for a refill of my placebos. And in still another, I wake up and realize I’m forty-five, and wonder how I managed to fritter so much of my life away. And there are others.

Life-lived-over-again dreams, these are — no question; and the little no, no, no anti-Permanent Period voice, an alarm bespeaking a sharp downturn in outlook, for which I have God’s own plenty of excuses these days. When you start looking for reasons for why you feel bad, you need to stand back from the closet door.

However, one of the pure benefits of the Permanent Period — when you’re as nose-down and invisible to yourself as an actualized unchangeable non-becomer, as snugged into life as a planning-board member — is that you realize you can’t completely fuck everything up anymore, since so much of your life is on the books already. You’ve survived it. Cancer itself doesn’t really make you fear the future and what might happen, it actually makes you (at least it’s made me) not as worried as you were before you had it. It might make you concerned about lousing up an individual day or wasting an afternoon (like this one), but not your whole life. I try to impart this hopeful view to oldsters who wander down to the Shore in their blue Chrysler New Yorkers to “look at houses,” but then get squirrelly about making a mistake, and end up scampering home to Ogdensburg and Lake Compounce, thinking that what I’ve told them is nothing but a sales pitch and I won’t be around when the shit train pulls in and the house market bottoms out just as their adjustable mortgage starts to steeple (I certainly won’t). But once I’ve explained that it’s seashore property I’m showing them and God isn’t making any more of it, and you can get your money out any day of the week, I just want to say: Hey! Look! Take the plunge. Live once. You’re on the short end of this stick. He isn’t making any more of you, either.

What I usually see, though, is nervous, smirking, irritable superiority (like Bud Sloat’s) that’s convinced there’s something out there that I could never know about — or else I wouldn’t be a know-nothing real estate agent — but that they goddamn well know all about. Most humankind doesn’t want to give up thinking they can fuck up the whole works by taking the wrong step, by shoving the black checker over onto that wrong red square. It makes them feel powerful to believe they own something to be cautious about. These people make terrible clients and can waste weeks of your time. I’ve developed a radar for them. But in fairness to these reluctant home-seekers — their chins on their chests the way Bud’s is today — and who’re thinking more positively about having that aluminum siding installed instead of paying for a whole new place, or about buying that new pop-up camper or checking fares on Carnival Lines (however they can throw some money away, but not too much): There are legitimate downsides to the Permanent Period. Permanence can be scary. Even though it solves the problem of tiresome becoming, it can also erode optimism, render possibility small and remote, and make any of us feel that while we can’t fuck up much of anything anymore, there really isn’t much to fuck up because nothing matters a gnat’s nuts; and that down deep inside we’ve finally become just an organism that for some reason can still make noise, but not much more than that.

This you need to save yourself from, or else the slide off the transom of life’s pleasure boat becomes irresistible and probably a good idea.

3

Stopped at the red light at Franklin and Pleasant Valley, my Suburban interior musty-damp and my feet warming with the defroster on high, the outside day has turned gloomy. Wind gusts against the hanging traffic light, making it yaw and twist and sway. Rain sheets the street. My car thermometer says the outside temp’s dropped to thirty-six, and lights have prickled on inside houses. Haddamites are getting indoors, holding hats to heads. Pilgrims in the Square are packing it in. It’s 1:00 p.m.

Something to eat and somewhere to piss are now high priorities, and I turn down Pleasant Valley toward Haddam Doctors Hospital, which has become my best-choice solo-luncheon venue since I moved away — in spite of its being the sad setting of my son’s final hours so long ago. It’s odd, I’ll admit, to eat lunch in a hospital. But it’s no stranger than paying your light bill at the Grand Union, or buying your new septic tank from the burial-vault dealer. Form needn’t always follow function. Plus, it’s not strange at all if you can get a decent meal in the process.

Decades ago, when I arrived in Haddam, you could grab a first-rate cheese steak in a little chrome and glass, plastic-booth diner lined with framed sports glossies and presided over by muttering old townies who wouldn’t speak to you because you were an outsider. And there was still a below-street-level, red-walled Italian joint serving manicotti and fresh bluefish, where they’d let you read your paper, fill you up, then get you out for cheap. Cops ate there, as did seminary profs, ancient librarians and the storied old HHS baseball coach who’d had a cup of coffee with the Red Sox once, and who’d sneak over in his blue-and-white uniform for a double vodka and a smoke before afternoon practice.

I loved it here then. The town had the ambling, impersonal, middling pleasantness of an old commercial traveler in no real hurry to get anywhere. All of which has gone. Now either you’re forced into mega-expensive “dining” or to standing in a line behind hostile moms in designer sweats pushing strollers into the Garden of Eatin’ Health Depot and who’re fidgeting over whether the Roman ceviche contains fish on the endangered list or if the coffee’s from a country on the Global Oppression Hot 100. By the time you get your food, you’re pretty much ready to start a fistfight — plus, you’re not hungry anymore.

At Haddam Doctors, by contrast, strangers are always welcome, parking’s easy in the visitors lot and it’s cafeteria-style, so no waiting. There’s no soul-less plastic ware. Everything’s spotless, tables cleaned antibacterially in record time. The long apple-green dining hall has an attractive commissary busy-ness bespeaking serious people with serious things in mind. And the food’s cooked and served by big, smiling, no-nonsense, pillowy black women in pink rayon dresses, who can make a meat loaf so it’s better cold than hot, and who always slip a little ham bone into the limas so you get back to your car with a feeling you’ve just had a human, not an institutional, experience. The cooks’ husbands all eat there — always the sure sign.

At lunch, you often share your table with some elderly gentleman with a wife in for tests, or a worried young couple whose child’s there for back straightening, or just some ordinary citizen like me grabbing a plate lunch before hitting it again. Restrained but understanding smiles are all that’s ever shared. (“We’ve all got our woes, why blab ’em?”) Nobody opens up or vents (you might complain to some poor soul worse off than you). White-smocked M.D.’s and crisp-capped nurses sit together by the windows, chatting while patient families eye them hopefully, wondering if he’s the one and if they could interrupt for just one question about Grampa Basil’s EKG. Only they don’t. Stately decorum reigns. Occasionally, there’s an outburst of strange laughter, followed by a few Turkish words from the blue-trousered floor orderlies that break through the tinkle and plink of eating and surviving. Otherwise, all is as you’d want it. (Oddly, there’s no such positive ambience at Mayo — only an earth-tone, ergonomically-designed food court where patients stare wanly at other patients and pick at their green Jell-O.)

Plus, in Haddam Doctors, if anyone gets his Swiss steak down the wrong pipe or swallows an ice cube or suffers a grand mal, there’s plenty of help — Heimlich masters, wall-mounted defibrillators and Thorazine injections in all the nurses’ pockets. Beginning with when Ralph was a patient and his mother and I lived in the hospital days and nights, the most untoward thing I’ve witnessed was a streaker, a banker I knew who’d suffered reversals in the S&L crisis and ended up in the psycho ward, from which he made a brief but spectacular break (eventually, he got on at another bank).

However, when I wheel in toward Visitor Lot A, just after one, I see that something not at all regular’s afoot at the hospital. The big, usually glassed-in front windows of the cafeteria — inside which the doctors and nurses usually sit — are at this moment being ply-boarded over, with yellow crime-scene tape stretched across. Several uniformed Haddam police and detectives wearing badges on cords around their necks are standing out in the sorry weather, writing notes on pads, taking pictures and generally reconnoitering the scene. Glass from the empty windows is strewn out on the damp grass, and tan wall bricks and aluminum splinters and cottony insulation have been spewed as far as the visitors lot. Police and fire department vehicles with flashers flashing are nosed at all angles around the doctors parking lot and the ER entrance, along with two panel trucks from network affiliates. A man and a woman with ATF stenciled on the backs of their windbreakers are conferring with a large man in a fireman’s white hard hat and fireman’s coat. Yellow-slickered police are carefully outlining bits of debris with spray paint, while others use surgical gloves and what look like forceps to tweeze evidence into plastic bags they drop into larger black garbage bags that other cops are holding.

Up the four storeys of the hospital, faces are at all the windows, peering down. Two policemen in black commando outfits and holding automatic weapons stand at the lip of the roof like prison guards, watching the proceedings below.

What’s happened here, I don’t know. It can’t be good. That I do know.

Suddenly, a clack-clack on my passenger-side window scares me out of my pants. A round, inquisitive woman’s face, with a blue plastic-covered cop hat pulled down to her eyebrows, hangs outside the glass, staring in at me. An oversized black flashlight barrel shows above the window frame, its hard metal rim touching the glass, its beam shining over my head. The face’s mouth moves, says something I can’t make out, then a hand with pudgy fingers makes a little circular roll-’er-down motion, which I instantly perform from my side, letting in a gust of cold.

“Hi,” the woman says from outside. She smiles so as not to seem officially menacing. “How’re we doing, sir?” Her question intends that I need to be doing fine and be eager to say so. Rain mist has dampened her shiny black hat bill and made her cheeks shiny.

“I’m great,” I say. “What’s happened here?”

“Can you state your business here for me today, sir?” She blinks. She’s a thick, pie-faced woman who looks forty but is probably twenty-five. Her teeth are small and white, and her lips thin and unhabituated to smiling except in official ways. She’s undoubtedly been a law enforcement major somewhere and had plenty of practice looking in car windows, though her aspect isn’t alarming, only definite. I’m not doing anything illegal — seeking lunch. Though also wanting pretty seriously to take a leak.

“I just came for lunch.” I smile as if I’d divulged a secret.

The policewoman’s smooth face doesn’t alter, just processes info. “This is a hospital, sir.” She glances up at Haddam Doctors four-storey tan-brick facade as if to make sure she’s right. On her yellow slicker a black name tag says Bohmer over a stamped-on black police badge. A microphone is Velcro’d to her left shoulder so she can talk and still hold a gun on you.

I know it’s a hospital, ma’am, I’m tempted to say; my son died in it. Instead, I chirp, “I know it’s a hospital, but the cafeteria’s a super place for lunch.”

Officer Bohmer’s smile renounces a little of its definiteness and becomes amused and patronizing. She sees now that I’m one of those people, the ones who eat their lunch in the fucking hospital, who sit in libraries all day leafing through Popular Mechanics, World War II picture books and topless-native layouts in National Geographics. The ones who don’t fit. She’s rousted my type. We’re harmless when kept on a short leash.

“What happened inside there?” I ask again, and look toward the police goings-on, then back to Officer Bohmer, whose heifer eyes have fixed me again. Outside air is making my hands and cheeks cold. Her shoulder microphone crackles, but she doesn’t attend to it.

“Tell me again, sir, what your business here is,” she says in a buttoned-up way. She takes a peek through at the backseat, where I’ve got two Realty-Wise signs I’m taking to the office.

“I came for lunch. I’ve done it for years. The lunch is good. You should eat there.”

“Where do you live, sir?” Staring at my signs.

“Sea-Clift. I used to live here, though.”

Her eyes drift back to me. “You lived here in Haddam?”

“I sold real estate. I own my own company on the Shore. Realty-Wise.”

“And how long have you lived over there?”

“Eight years. About.”

“And you lived here before?”

“On Cleveland Street. And before that on Hoving Road.”

“And could I just have a look at your driver’s license?” Officer Bohmer is the picture of female resolve and patience. She glances up and over the hood of my Suburban, checking to see how quick her backup could arrive in case I produce a German Luger and not a billfold. “And your registration and proof of insurance.”

I get about retrieving these documents — first from my wallet, then, under Officer Bohmer’s interested eye, from the glove compartment, where a pistol would be if I had one.

She takes my documents in her pink digits, pinching the papers and getting them wet, looking up once to match my face to my picture. Then she hands them all back. More static crackles in her mike, a male voice says something that includes a number, and Officer Bohmer turns her chin to the little speaker and in a different, harder-edged voice snaps, “Negative on that. I’ll maintain a twenty.” The man’s voice replies something unintelligible but also authoritative, and the transmission is over. “Thanks, that’s great, Mr. Bascombe. Now I need you to turn ’er around and head on out again. Okay?”

“Can you tell me what happened over there?” I ask for the third time.

“Sir. A device detonated outside the cafeteria this morning.”

A device. “What kind of device? Anybody hurt?” I say this to Officer Bohmer’s raincoat belly.

“We’re trying to find out what happened, sir.”

In the blast area, I see police are huddling around something on the ground, and another uniformed officer is taking a photograph of it, the little digital camera held clumsily out in front of him.

Officer Bohmer’s slick yellow raincoat front and imposing black flashlight barrel are all I can see from inside as she steps back from my window and with the flash makes a tiny sweeping movement to indicate what she’d like to see my car do. “Just turn ’er around right here,” her police academy voice says again, “and take ’er right out the way you came.”

A gas leak is what I’m thinking. Some pressurized container for hospital use only, that got too close to a pilot light. Yet something that requires the ATF?

My tires squeeze and scrape as I make the tight turn-around in the hospital drive — a Suburban doesn’t change course easily. I take a look at the boarded cafeteria windows and the squads of police and firemen and hospital officials milling in the drizzle and the lights of their idling vehicles, the black-suited commandos standing roof guard just in case. The faces at the windows are all taking note of my car. “What’s he doing?” “Read the license number.” “Why are they letting him go?” “Who’s to blame? Who’s to blame? Who’s to blame?”

Officer Bohmer is now gone from sight as I “take ’er right out.” But another policeman in a yellow rain slicker and black cop’s hat is up ahead, stopping cars as they turn in and dispatching them elsewhere.

“Any idea who did this?” I say to this new man as I idle past. He is an older officer I know, or once did, a big Polack with heavy brows, a pale, smooth face and mirthful eyes — Sgt. Klemak, a Gotham PD veteran, escaped to the suburbs. He once gave me an unjustified yellow-light summons that set me back seventy bucks, but wouldn’t remember me now, which is just as well.

“We’re doing our best out here, sir!” Sgt. Klemak shouts over the traffic and rain hiss. He seems to be having fun doing his job.

“Are you sure something exploded?” I’m speaking upward, rain needles pelting my nose and chin.

“You can go ahead and turn right, sir!” Officer Klemak says with a big smile.

“I hope you guys take care of yourselves.”

“Oh, sure. Piece a cake. Just take ’er right around and have a splendid day. Get ’er home safely.”

“That’d be nice,” I say, then ease back out onto Pleasant Valley and put the hospital behind me.

I now have a fierce need to piss. Plus, violent crime, instead of dousing my appetite, has inflamed it to queasiness. I drive straight out 206 to the remodeled Foremost Farms Mike and I passed earlier. I park in front, hustle in for my leak (which I now do more than seems humanly possible), then find the cold case, pick out a cellophane-sealed beef ’n bean burrito, radiate it in the microwave, draw a diet Pepsi, pay the Pakistani girl in the purple sari, then hustle back to my car and consume all in three minutes with paper napkins spread over my lap and jacket front. The burrito’s been hecho a mano by the Borden Company down in Camden and is as hard as a cedar shingle, the interior as cold and pale as mucilage, and of course tastes wonderful. Although it’s 180 degrees off my prostate-recovery, tumor-suppressing Mayo diet of 20 percent animal product, 80 percent whole grains, tofu and green tea, which only monks can survive on.

When I’m finished, I stuff my garbage in the can provided, then climb back in and turn on the local FM station, in case there’s some news about the hospital incident. And indeed a metallic backyard-radio-station sound opens up — WHAD, the “Voice of Haddam,” where I once recorded novels for the blind. Static, static, static—the rain’s a problem. “…in Trenton have been dispatched…” Static, static, static. “…an average of ten threatening…a month…been…no name pending…” Crackle, snap, poppety-pop. “…all critical-care patients…mercy…a search is under way…Chief Carnevale stated…. credible…” Static, static, static. “…more on our regular…” Ker-clunk…“Stran-gers-in-the-night, dee-dah-dee-daaah-dah…”

Little help. But still. Hard to contemplate — a medium-anxiety, good-neighbor suburban care facility like Haddam Doctors, where the whole staff’s from Hopkins and Harvard (no one tops in his class), all sporting eight handicaps, all divorced a time or two, kids at Choate and Hotchkiss, everyone as risk-averse as concert cellists (no one does serious surgery) — hard to contemplate here being the target of a “device.” Unless somebody wanted his vasectomy reversed and couldn’t, or somebody’s tonsils grew back, or a set of twins got handed off to the wrong parents. Though these wrongs have tamer remedies than renting a U-Store-It, stockpiling chemicals and brewing up mayhem. You’d just sue, like the rest of humanity, and let the insurance companies take the hit. That’s what they’re there for.

When I start up and defrost the windshield, it’s suddenly 1:40. I’m due for my Sponsor visit on the affluent Haddam West Side at two.

Though as I wheel back out onto busy, rain-smacked 206 and head west, I recognize that while the willies I experienced after my funeral home visit certainly were due to a too-close brush with the Reaper (normal in all instances), they might also have been nothing more than the usual yellow caution flag, which signals that being marooned in your car on a dreary day in a cold town you once lived in, but don’t now, can be chancy. Especially if the town is this one, and especially if you’re in my state of repair. Activities may need to be curtailed.

I actually began experiencing adverse intimations about Haddam during my last years here, close to ten years ago (I always thought I loved it). And not that a realtor’s view would ever be the standard one, since realtors both live life in a town yet also huckster that place’s very spirit essence for whopper profits. We’re always likely to be half-distracted from regular life — like a supreme court justice who resides in a place as anonymously as a postal employee but constantly processes everybody else’s life in his teeming brain so he can know how to judge it. My life in Haddam always lacked the true resident’s naïve, relief-seeking socked-in-ed-ness that makes everyday existence feel like a warm bath you relax into and never want to leave. Surveying property lines, memorizing setback restrictions, stepping off footprint limits and counting curb-cuts all work a stern warp into what might otherwise be limitless, shapeless, referenceless — and happily thoughtless — municipal life. Realtors share a basic industry with novelists, who make up importance from life-run-rampant just by choosing, changing and telling. Realtors make importance by selling, which is better-paying than the novelist’s deal and probably not as hard to do well.

By 1991, the year before I left and the year my son Paul Bascombe graduated from HHS and headed off to Indiana to begin studies in Puppet Arts Management (he’d mastered ventriloquism, did a hundred zany voices, told jokes and had already staged several bizarre but sophisticated puppet shows for his classmates), by then Haddam — a town where I’d felt genuine residence and that’d been the mise-enscène for my life’s most solemn adult experiences — had entered a new, strange and discordant phase in its town annals.

In the first place, real estate went nuts, and realtors even nuttier. Expectations left all breathable atmosphere behind. Over-pricing, under-bidding, sticker shock, good-faith negotiation, price reduction, high-end flux were all banished from the vocabulary. Topping-price wars, cutthroat bidding, forced compliance, broken lease and realty shenanigans took their place. The grimmest, barely habitable shotgun houses in the previously marginal Negro neighborhoods became prime, then untouchable in an afternoon. Wallace Hill, where I sold my rental houses to Everick Lewis, was designated a Heritage Neighborhood, which guaranteed all the black folks had to leave because of taxes (many fled down south, though they’d been born in Haddam). Agents sold their own homes out from under their own families and moved spouses, dogs and kids to condos in Hightstown and Millstone. New college graduates passed up med and divinity school and buyers bought million-dollar houses from twenty-one-year-olds straight out of Princeton and Columbia with degrees in history and physics and who barely had their driver’s licenses.

In ’93, after I’d left, yearly price increases had hit 45 percent, there was no affordable housing anywhere and buyers were paying full boat for tear-downs and recyclables and in some instances were burning houses to the ground. Some Haddam companies (not Lauren-Schwindell) required out-of-town clients to submit their AmEx number and authorize thousand-dollar debits just to be shown a house. Though by Christmas, there was nothing to show anyway, not even a vacant lot.

The end came personally for me at the convergence of three completely different (and unusual) events. One Saturday afternoon I was at my desk, typing an offer sheet on a property situated on the rear grounds of the former seminary director’s residence, down the street from where I myself once lived on Hoving. The building was nothing but a rotting, ruined beaverboard shack that had once been the Basque gardener’s storage shed for toxic herbicides, caustic drain openers, banned termite and Asian beetle eradicators, and would’ve alerted the state’s environmental police except in Haddam, no inspection’s required. As I filled out the green blanks on my computer, occasionally staring longingly out the front window at traffic-choked Seminary Street, I began — because of the property I was selling and the preposterous price it was commanding — to muse that a malign force seemed to be in full control of every bit of real property on the seaboard, and possibly farther away. Possibly everywhere.

This force, I began to understand, was holding property hostage and away from the very people who wanted and often badly needed it and, in any case, had a right to expect to own it. And this force, I realized, was the economy. And the practical effect of this force — on me, Frank Bascombe, age forty-five, of ordinary, unexalted and, up to then, realizable aspirations — was to render everything too goddamn expensive. So much so that selling even one more house in Haddam — and especially the gardener’s toxic hovel, on whose site was planned a big-windowed, one-man live-in studio for a sculptor who mostly lived in Gotham and was willing to pay 500K — was going to be demoralizing as hell.

What I was thinking, of course, as cars edged thickly past the Lauren-Schwindell window and passengers stared warily in at me at my desk, knowing I was totaling figures that would give them a heart attack — what I was thinking was real estate heresy. I would get burned at the real estate stake by my agent colleagues (especially the twenty-one-year-olds) if they knew about it. What we were supposed to do if we had qualms — and surely some did — was douse them. On the spot. Take a deep breath, go wash your face, lease a new Z-car, buy a condo in Snowmass, learn to fly your own Beech Bonanza, maybe take instruction in violin making. But ship as much fresh money as possible to the Caymans, then spend the rest of the time putting your feet up on your desk and chortling about how work’s for the other ranks.

Except everyone’s entitled to some glimmering sense of right in his (or her) own heart. And part of that sense of right — for real estate agents anyway — involves not just what something ought to cost (here we’re always wrong) but what something can cost in a world still usable by human beings. Every time I heard myself pronounce the asking price of anything on the market in Haddam, I’d begun to feel first a sick, emptied-out, semi-nauseated feeling, and then an impulse to break into maniac laughter right in a client’s startled face as he sat across my desk in his pressed jeans, Tony Lamas and fitted polo shirt. And that growing sense of spiritual clamor meant to me that right was being violated, and that my sense of usefulness at being what I’d been being was exhausted. It was a surprise, but it was also a big relief. It was like the experience of the sportsman who’s shot ducks in the marsh all his life but one day, standing up to his ass in freezing water, with the sky silvered and dark specks on the horizon beginning to take avian shape, realizes he’s killed enough ducks for one lifetime.

The second way I knew I’d reached the end of my rope in Haddam was simpler, though more garish and immediately life-diverting.

During the summer of 1991—when the daffy elder Bush was still ruffling his own duck feathers in the aftermath of Desert Storm — a home sale, on tiny Quarry Street, opposite St. Leo the Great Catholic Church, culminated in a SWAT-team extraction when the owner-occupant refused to vacate the house he’d signed papers and already closed on. The man ran right out of the lawyer’s office, back across neighbors’ front lawns to his erstwhile family home, where he took a position in an attic dormer window and, using a varmint rifle, held off Haddam police, two hostage-negotiators and a priest from St. Leo’s for thirty-six hours before giving in, being led defiantly out the door in front of the same neighbors and the new owners, then riding off in chains to the state hospital in Trenton.

No one was hurt. But the reason for the behavior was the seller’s discovery that his house had appreciated 18 percent between offer-acceptance and the lawyers’ closing, which made the thought of all that lost money and the smirking ridicule from the neighbors, who were holding on for another season, just too much to bear. For weeks afterward, tension and threat hung over the town. Two new police officers were added. Threat sensitivity courses were made mandatory in our office, and a “conflict resolution half point” was added to closing costs when a bank approved super balloon notes to first-time buyers purchasing from sellers with greater than ten years’ longevity.

Nothing, however, prepared anyone for the outlandish worst. A trucking magnate of Lebanese extraction made a full-price offer on a rambling, walled monstrosity far out on Quaker Road, owned by the reclusive grandson of a south Jersey frozen-potpie magnate, who’d turned up his nose at the family business to become a competitive stamp collector. The house was a great weed-clogged Second Empire mishmash with a rotted roof, sagging floor joists, scaling paint, disintegrating masonry and cellar dampness due to being in the floodplain. It wasn’t even a candidate to be torn down, since regulations prohibited replacement. When I took the realtors’ cavalcade tour, I couldn’t find one timber or sill that wasn’t corrupted by something. Everybody who showed it presented it as uninhabitable. The land, we felt, was a write-off to some rich tree-hugger conservationist who’d turn it into “wetlands” and make himself feel virtuous.

The trucking magnate, however, wanted to come in with a big improvement budget, rebuild everything up to code, restore the house to mint condition, plus add a lot of exotic fantasy landscaping and even let tame animals roam the grounds for the grandkids.

But when he submitted his full-price bid, saw it accepted, put three-quarters down as earnest money, the hermetic owner, Mr. Windbourne, decided to take the house off the market for a rethink, then a week later listed it again with a 20 percent increase in asking and had five new full-price offers by noon of the first day — two of which he accepted. The trucking guy, Mr. Habbibi, who was known in the Paterson area as a patient man who didn’t mind using muscle when it was needed, naturally protested all this double-dealing, though none of it was illegal. He drove out to the Windbourne house in an agitated state but still in hopes of bettering the new offers and resuscitating his deal. Windbourne — wan, gaunt and blinking from long hours in the dark staring at stamps — came to the front door and said that the fantasy landscaping and tame animals sounded to him more suited to towns like Dallas or Birmingham, not Haddam. He laughed at Habbibi and closed the door in his face. Habbibi then drove to a marine supply in Sayreville (this is the strangest part, because Habbibi didn’t own a boat), bought two marine flare pistols and two flares, drove back to Quaker Road, confronted Windbourne at his door and offered him the deal they’d already agreed to, plus 20 percent. When Windbourne again laughed at him, informed him this was America and that Habbibi had “loser’s remorse,” Habbibi went back out to his car, got his flare pistols, stood out in the yard of what he’d hoped would be his dream oasis, shouted Windbourne’s name and shot him when he answered the door a third time. After which, Habbibi got back in his car, turned on the radio and waited for the police to show up.

Haddam house prices dropped 8 percent in one day (though that lasted less than a week). Habbibi was also trucked off to the loony bin. Windbourne’s relatives drove up from Vineland and completed the sale to one of the other buyers. Realtors started carrying concealed weapons and hiring bodyguards, and the realty board passed an advisory to raise commissions from 6 to 7 percent.

At about this time, I was experiencing the first airy intimations of the Permanent Period filtering through my nostrils like a sweet bouquet of new life promised. Things had also gotten to a put-up-or-leave stage with Sally Caldwell. Selling houses in Haddam had evolved to a point at which I couldn’t recognize my personal motives for even doing it. And on the waft of that bouquet and by the simple force of puzzlement, I decided it was time to get out of town.

But before I left (it took me to the sultry days of that election summer to get my affairs untangled), I noticed something about Haddam. It was similar to how the stolid but studious Schmeling saw something about the mute, indefatigable, but reachable Louis — in my case, something maybe only a realtor could see. The town felt different to me — as a place. A place where, after all, I’d dwelled, whose sundry homes and mansions I’d visited, wandered through, admired, marveled at and sold, whose inhabitants I’d stood long beside, listened to and observed with interest and sympathy, whose streets I’d driven, taxes paid, elections heeded, rules followed, whose story I’d told and burnished for nearly half my life. All these engraved acts of residence I’d dutifully committed, with staying-on as my theme. Only I didn’t like it anymore.

The devil is in the details, of course, even the details of our affections. We’d, by then, earned a new area code — cold, unmemorable 908 supplanting likable time-softened old 609. New blue laws had been set up to keep pleasure in check. Traffic was deranging — spending thirty minutes to go less than a mile made everyone reappraise the entire concept of mobility and of how important it could ever be to get anywhere. Seminary Street had become the preferred home-office address for every species of organization whose mission was to help groups who didn’t know they comprised a group become one: the black twins consortium; support entities for people who’d lost all their body hair; the families of victims of school-yard bullying; the Life After Kappa Kappa Gamma Association. Boro government had turned all-female and become mean as vipers. Regulations and ordinances spewed out of the council chamber, and litigation was on everyone’s lips. A new sign ordinance forbade FOR SALE signs on lawns, since they sowed seeds of anxiety and a fear of impermanence in citizens not yet moving out — this was rescinded. Empty storefronts were outlawed per se so that owners forced to sell had to seem to stay in business. An ordinance even required that Halloween be “positive”—no more ghosts or Satans, no more flaming bags of feces left on porches. Instead, kids went out dressed as EMS drivers, priests and librarians.

Meanwhile, new human waves were coming, commuting into Haddam instead of out to Gotham and Philly. A small homeless population sprouted up. Dental appointments averaged thirteen months’ advance booking. And residents I’d meet on the street, citizens I’d known for a generation and sold homes to, now refused to meet my eyes, just set their gaze at my hairline and kept trudging, as if we’d all become the quirky, invisible “older” town fixtures we’d encountered when we ouselves had arrived decades ago.

Haddam, in these devil’s details, stopped being a quiet and happy suburb, stopped being subordinate to any other place and became a place to itself, only without having a fixed municipal substance. It became a town of others, for others. You could say it lacked a soul, which would explain why somebody thinks it needs an interpretive center and why it seems like a good idea to celebrate a village past. The present is here, but you can’t feel its weight in your hand.

Back in the days when I got into the realty business, we used to laugh about homogeneity: buying it, selling it, promoting it, eating it for breakfast, lunch and dinner. It seemed good — in the way that everyone in the state having the same color license plate was good (though now that’s different, too). And since the benefits of fitting in were manifest and densely woven through, homogenizing seemed like a sort of inverse pioneering. But by 1992, even homogeneity had gotten homogenized. Something had hardened in Haddam, so that having a decent house on a safe street, with like-minded neighbors and can’t-miss equity growth — a home as a natural extension of what was wanted from life, a sort of minor-league Manifest Destiny — all that now seemed to piss people off, instead of making them ecstatic (which is how I expected people to feel when I sold them a house: happy). The redemptive theme in the civic drama had been lost. And realty itself — stage manager to that drama — had stopped signaling our faith in the future, our determination not to give in to dread, our blitheness in the face of life’s epochal slowdown.

In short, as I stood out on Cleveland Street watching green-suited Bekins men tote my blanketed belongings up the ramp under matching green-leaf, sun-shot oaks and chestnuts just showing the pastel stains of autumn 1992, I felt Haddam had entered its period of eralessness. It had become the emperor’s new suburb, a place where maybe someone might set a bomb off just to attract its attention. The mystics would say it had lost its crucial sense of East. Though east, to the very edge, was the direction I was then taking.

The circumstances of my Sponsor visit this afternoon — in Haddam, of all places — are not entirely the standard ones. Normally, my Sponsoring activity is centered on the seaside communities up Barnegat Neck, where I know practically no one and typically can swing by someone’s house or office, or maybe make a meeting in a mall or a sub shop, not use up a whole afternoon and be back at my desk in an hour and change. But yesterday, due to other volunteers wanting off for Thanksgiving, I received a call wondering if I might be going to Haddam today, and if so, could I make a Sponsor stop. I’ve kept my name on the Haddam list since I’m regularly in and out of town, know relatively few people anymore, and because — as I’ve said — I know the town can leave people feeling dismal and friendless, even though every civic nook, cranny and nail hole is charming, well-rounded and defended, and as seemingly caring, congenial and immune to misery as a fairy-tale village in Switzerland.

Sally actually prompted my first Sponsor visits four years back. She’d grown depressed by her own work — a company that mini-bused terminally ill Jerseyites to see Broadway plays, provided dinner at Mama Leone’s and a tee-shirt that said Still Kickin’ in NJ, then bused them home. Constant company with the dying, staying upbeat all the time, sitting through Fiddler on the Roof and Les Misérables, then having to talk about it all for hours, finally proved a draw-down on her spirits after more than a decade. Plus, the dying complained ceaselessly about the service, the theater seats, the food, the acting, the weather, the suspension system on the bus — which caused employee turnover and inspired the ones who stayed to steal from the oldsters and treat them sarcastically, so that lawsuits seemed just around the corner.

In 1996, she sold the business and was at home in Sea-Clift for a summer with not enough to do. She read a story in the Shore Plain Dealer, our local weekly, that declared the average American to have 9.5 friends. Republicans, it said, typically had more than Democrats. This was easy to believe, since Republicans are genetically willing to trust the surface nature of everything, which is where most friendships thrive, whereas Democrats are forever getting mired in the meaning of every goddamn thing, suffering doubts, regretting their actions and growing angry, resentful and insistent, which is where friendships languish. The Plain Dealer said that though 9.5 might seem like plenty of friends, statistics lied, and that many functioning, genial, not terminally ill, incapacitated or drug-addicted people, in fact, had no friends. And quite a few of these friendless souls — which was the local hook — lived in Ocean County and were people you saw every day. This, the writer editorialized, was a helluva note in a bounteous state like ours, and represented, in his view, an “epidemic” of friendlessness (which sounded extreme to me).

Some people over in Ocean County Human Services, in Toms River, apparently read the Plain Dealer story and decided to take the problem of friendlessness into their own hands, and in no time at all got an 877 “Sponsor Line” authorized that would get a person visited by another tolerant and feeling human not of their acquaintance within twenty-four hours of a call. This Sponsor-visitor would be somebody who’d been certified not to be a pedophile, a fetishist, a voyeur or a recent divorcée, and also not simply someone as lonely as the caller. The cost of a visit would be zilch, though there was a charities list on a Web site someplace, and contributions were anonymous.

Sally got wind of the Sponsor Line and called to inquire that very afternoon — it was in September — and went over for a screening interview and, probably because of her work with the dying, got right onto the Sponsors list. The Human Services people had figured out a digitized elimination system to ensure that the same Sponsor wouldn’t visit the same caller more than once, ever. Callers themselves were screened by psych grad students and a profile was worked up using a series of five innocuous questions that ferreted out lurkers, stalkers, weenie wavers, bondage aficionados, self-published poets, etc.

The idea worked well right from the start and, in fact, still works great. Sally started going on one but sometimes three Sponsor visits a week, as far away as Long Branch and as close in as Seaside Heights. The idea pretty quickly caught on in other counties, including Delaware County, where Haddam is. A cross-referenced list of people like me who operate in a wider than ordinary geographical compass was compiled. And after signing up, I made Sponsor visits as far away as Cape May and Burlington — where I do some bank appraisals — or, as here in Haddam today, when I just happen to be in the neighborhood and have some time to kill. I originally thought I might snag a listing or two, or even a sale, since people often need a friend to give them advice about selling their house, and will sometimes make a decision based on feeling momentarily euphoric. Though that’s never happened, and in any case, it’s against all the guidelines.

Nothing technical’s required to be a Sponsor: a willingness to listen (which you need in liberal quantities as a realtor), a slice of common sense, an underdeveloped sense of irony, a liking for strangers and a capacity to be disengaged while staying sincerely focused on whatever question greets you when you walk in the door. There have been concerns that despite the grad student screening, innocent callers would be vulnerable if a bad-seed Sponsor made it through the net. But it’s been generally felt that the gain is more important than the modest statistical risk — and like I said, so far, so good.

It turns out that the hardest thing to find in the modern world is sound, generalized, disinterested advice — of the kind that instructs you, say, not to get on the Tilt-A-Whirl at the county fair once you’ve seen the guys who’re running it; or to always check to see that your spare’s inflated before you start out overland in your ’55 roadster from Barstow to Banning. You can always get plenty of highly specialized technical advice — about whether your tweeter is putting out the prescribed number of amps to get the best sound out of your vintage Jo Stafford monaurals, or whether this epoxy is right for mending the sea kayak you rammed into Porpoise Rock on your vacation to Maine. And you can always, of course, get very bad and wrong advice about most anything: “This extra virgin olive oil’ll work as good as STP on that outboard of yours”; “Next time that asshole parks across your driveway, I’d go after him with a ball-peen hammer.” Plus, nobody any longer wants to help you more than they minimally have to: “If you want shirts, go to the shirt department, this floor’s all pants”; “We had those Molotov avocados last year, but I don’t know how I’d go about reordering them”; “I’m going on my break now or I’d dig up that rest room key for you.”

But plain, low-impact good counsel and assistance is at an all-time low.

I stress low-impact because the usual scope of Sponsor transactions is broad but rarely deep — just like a real friendship. “When you sharpen that hunting knife, do you run the stone with the cutting edge or against it?” For better or worse, I’m a man people are willing to tell the most remarkable things to — their earliest sexual encounters, their bankruptcy status, their previously unacknowledged criminal past. Though Sponsorees are not encouraged to spill their guts or say a lot of embarrassing crap they’ll later regret and hate themselves (and you) for the minute you’re gone. Most of my visits are, in fact, surprisingly brief — less than twenty minutes — with an hour being the limit. After an hour, the disinterested character of things can shift and problems sprout. Our guidelines specify every attempt be made to make visits as close to natural as can be, stressing informality, the spontaneous and the presumption that both parties need to be someplace else pretty soon anyway.

In my own case, my demeanor’s never grim or solemn or clergical, or, for that matter, not even especially happy. I steer clear of the religious, of sexual topics, politics, financial observations and relationship lingo. (On these topics, even priests’, shrinks’ and money analysts’ advice is rarely any good, since who has much in common with these people?) My Sponsor visits are more like a friendly stop-by from the bland State Farm guy, who you’ve run into at the tire store, asked over to the house to tweak your coverage, but who you then enlist to help get the lawn sprinkler to work. So far, my Sponsorees have done nothing to take extra advantage, and neither have I gone away once thinking a “really interesting” relationship has been unearthed. And yet if you impulsively blab to me that you stabbed your Aunt Carlotta down in Vicksburg back in 1951, or went AWOL from Camp Lejeune during Tet, or fathered a Bahamian baby who’s now fighting for life and is in need of a kidney transplant for which you are the only match, you can expect me to go straight to the authorities.

With all these provisos and safety nets and firewalls, you might expect most callers to be elderly shut-ins or toxic cranks who’ve savaged all their friends and now need a new audience. Or else cancer victims who’ve gotten sick of their families (it happens) and just need somebody new to stare intensely into the face of. And some are. But mostly they’re just average souls who need you to go out to their garage to see if their grandfather’s hand-carved cherry partners’ desk has been stolen by their nephew, the way it was foretold in a nightmare. Or who want you to write a dunning letter to the water department about the three-hour stoppage in June — while the main line was being repaired — demanding an adjustment in the next month’s bill.

There are also prosperous, affluent, young-middle-aged, 24/7 type A’s. These people are often the least at ease and typically want something completely banal and easy — to tell you a joke they think is hilarious but can’t remember to tell anybody they know because they’re too busy. Or women who want to yak about their kids for thirty minutes but can’t because it’s incorrect — in their set — to do that to their friends. Or men who ask me what color Escalade looks good against the exterior paint scheme of their new beach house in Brielle. But on three separate occasions — one woman and two men — the question I answered was (based on just two minutes’ acquaintance) did I think she or he was an asshole. In each case, I said I definitely didn’t think so. I’ve begun to wonder, since then, if this isn’t the underlying theme of most all my Sponsorees’ questions (especially the rich ones), since it’s the thing we all want to know, that causes most of our deflected worries and that we fear may be true but find impossible to get a frank opinion about from the world at large. Am I good? Am I bad? Or am I somewhere lost in the foggy middle?

I wouldn’t ordinarily have thought that I’d get within two football fields of anything like Sponsoring, since I’m not a natural joiner, inquirer or divulger. Yet I know the difficulty of making new friends — which isn’t that the world’s not full of interesting, available new people. It’s that the past gets so congested with lived life that anyone in their third quartile — which includes me — is already far enough along the road that making a friend like you could when you were twenty-five involves so much brain-rending and boring catching up that it simply isn’t worth the effort. You see and hear people vainly doing it every day — yakkedy, yakkedy, yakkedy: “That reminds me of our family’s trips to Pensacola in 1955.” “That reminds me of what my first wife used to complain about.” “That reminds me of my son getting smacked in the eye with a baseball.” “That reminds me of a dog we had that got run over in front of the house.” Yakkedy, yakkedy and more goddamn yakkedy, until the ground quakes beneath us all.

So — unless sex or sports is the topic, or it’s your own children — when you meet someone who might be a legitimate friend candidate, the natural impulse is to start fading back to avoid all the yakkedy-yak, so that you fade and fade, until you can’t see him or her anymore, and couldn’t bear to anyway. With the result that attraction quickly becomes avoidance. In this way, the leading edge of your life — what you did this morning after breakfast, who called you on the phone and woke you up from your nap, what the roofing guy said about your ice-dam flashings—that becomes all your life is: whatever you’re doing, saying, thinking, planning right then. Which leaves whatever you’re recollecting, brooding about, whoever it is you’ve loved for years but still need to get your head screwed on straight about — in other words, the important things in life — all of that’s left unattended and in need of expression.

The Permanent Period tries to reconcile these irreconcilables in your favor by making the congested, entangling past fade to beige, and the present brighten with its present-ness. This is the very deep water my daughter, Clarissa, is at present wading through and knows it: how to keep afloat in the populous hazardous mainstream (the yakkedy-yak and worse) without drowning; versus being pleasantly safe in your own little eddy. It’s what my more affluent Sponsorees want to know when they make me listen to their unfunny jokes or crave to know if they’re good people or not: Am I doing reasonably well under testing circumstances? (Thinking you’re good can give you courage.) It also happens to be precisely the dilemma my son Paul has settled in his own favor in the embedded, miniaturized mainstream life of Kanzcity and Hallmark. He may be much smarter than I know.

Depth may be all that Sponsoring really lacks — with sincerity as its mainstay. Most people already feel in-deep-and-dense enough with life involvement, which may be their very problem: The voice is strangled by too much woolly experience ever to make it out and be heard. I know I’ve felt that way more in this fateful year than ever before, so that sometimes I think I could use a Sponsor visit myself. (This very fact may make me a natural Sponsor, since just like being a decent realtor, you have to at least harbor the suspicion that you have a lot in common with everybody, even if you don’t want to be their friend.)

My other reason for getting involved in Sponsoring is that Sponsoring carries with it a rare optimism that says some things can actually work out and puts a premium on inching beyond your limits, while rendering Sponsorees less risk-averse on a regular daily basis and less like those oldsters in their blue New Yorkers who won’t make a mistake for fear of bad results that’re coming anyway.

And of course the final reason I’m a Sponsor is that I have cancer. Contrary to the TV ads showing cancer victims staring dolefully out though lacy-curtained windows at empty playgrounds, or sitting alone on the sidelines while the rest of the non-cancerous family stages a barbecue or a boating adventure on Lake Wapanooki or gets into clog dancing or Whiffle ball, cancer (little-d death, after all), in fact, makes you a lot more interested in other people’s woes, with a view to helping with improvements. Getting out on the short end of the branch leaves you (has me, anyway) more interested in life — any life — not less. Since it makes the life you’re precariously living, and that may be headed for the precipice, feel fuller, dearer, more worthy of living — just the way you always hoped would happen when you thought you were well.

Other people, in fact — if you keep the numbers small — are not always hell.

The last thing I’ll say, as I pull up in front at #24 Bondurant Court, residence of a certain Mrs. Purcell, where I’m soon to be inside Sponsoring a better outcome to things, is that even though other people are worth helping and life can be fuller, etc., etc., Sponsoring has never actually produced a greater sense of connectedness in me, and probably not in others — the storied lashing-together-of-boats we’re all supposed to crave and weep salty tears at night for the lack of. It could happen. But the truth is, I feel connected enough already. And Sponsoring is not about connectedness anyway. It’s about being consoled by connection’s opposite. A little connectedness, in fact, goes a long way, no matter what the professional lonelies of the world say. We might all do with a little less of it.

Number 24, where lights are on inside, is built in the solid, monied, happy family-home-as-refuge style, houses Haddam boasts in fulsome supply, owing to its staunch Dutch-Quaker beginnings and to a brief nineteenth-century craving for ornamental English-German prettiness. Vernacular, this is sometimes called — neat, symmetrical, gray-stucco, red-doored Georgians with slate roofs, four shuttered front windows upstairs and down, a small but fancy wedding-cake entry, curved fanlight with formal sidelights, dentil trim and squared-off (expensive) privet hedges bolstering the front. Intimations of heterodoxy, but nothing truly eye-catching. Thirty-five hundred square feet, not counting the basement and four baths. A million-two, if you bought it this very afternoon — complete with the platinum BMW M3 sitting in the side drive — though with the risk that a surveilling neighbor will come along before you sign the papers and snake it away for a million-two-five so he can sell it to his former law partner’s ex-wife.

Bondurant Court is actually a cul-de-sac off Rosedale Road. Three other residences, two of them certifiable Georgian stately homes, lurk deep within bosky, heavily treed lawns on which many original willows and elms remain. The third home-like structure is a pale-gray flat-roofed, windowless concrete oddity with a Roman-bath floor plan built by a Princeton architect for a twenty-five-year-old dot-com celebrity who no one speaks to for architectural reasons. Children aren’t allowed to go there on Halloween or caroling at Christmas. Rumors are out that the owner’s moved back to Malibu. I’m surprised not to see a Lauren-Schwindell sign out front, since one of my former colleagues sold him the lot.

Number 24—the great neighbor-houses’ little sister — would be a great buy for a new divorcée with dough, or for a newly-wed lawyer couple or a discreet gay M.D. with a Gotham practice who needs a getaway. If I could’ve sold easy houses like this, instead of overpriced mop closets you couldn’t fart in without the whole block smelling it, I might’ve stayed.

And like clockwork, as I stride up the flagstones toward the brass-knockered red door — two shiny brass carriage lamps turning on in unison — I experience the anti-Permanent Period williwaws lifting off of me and the exhilaration of whatever’s about to open up here streaming into my limbs and veins like a physic. One could easily wonder, of course, about a Mr. Definitely Wrong being set to spring out from the other side of the heavy door — John Wayne Gacy in clown gear, waiting to eat me with sauerkraut. What would the termite guy or the Culligan Man do, faced as they are with the same imponderables on a daily basis? Just use the old noodle. Stay alert for the obviously weird, attend your senses, drink and eat nothing, identify exits. I’ve, in fact, never really feared anything worse than being bored to bits. Plus, if they’re gonna, they’re gonna — like the little town in Georgia the tornado ripped a hole through when everybody was at church on Sunday, believing such things didn’t happen there.

Everything happens everywhere. Look at the fucking election.

Ding-dong. Ding-dong. Ding-dong.

A melodious belling. I turn and re-survey the cul-de-sac — wet, cold, bestilled, its other ponderous residences all bearing lawn signs: WARNING. THIS HOUSE IS PATROLLED. The big Georgians’ many leaded windows glow through the trees with antique light, as though lit by torches. No humans or animals are in view. A police car or ambulance wee-up, wee-ups in the distance. Cold air hisses with the rain’s departure. A crow calls from a spruce, then a second, but nothing’s in sight.

Noises become audible within. A female throat is cleared, a chain lock slid down its track. The brass peephole darkens with an interior eye. A dead bolt’s conclusively thrown. I rise a quarter inch onto my toes.

“Just a moment, pu-lease.” A rilling, pleasant voice in which, do I detect, the undertones of Dixie? I hope not.

The heavy door opens back. A smiling woman stands in its space. This is the best part of Sponsoring — the relief of finally arriving to someone’s rescue.

But I sense: Here is not a complete stranger. Though from out on the bristly welcome mat, the back of my head feeling a breeze flood past into the homey-feeling house, I can’t instantly supply coordinates. My brow feels thick. My mouth is half-open, beginning to smile. I peer through the angled door opening at Mrs. Purcell.

It couldn’t be a worse opening gambit, of course, for a Sponsor to stare simian-like at the Sponsoree, who may already be fearful the visitor will be a snorting crotch-clutcher escapee from a private hospital, who’ll leave her trussed up in the maid’s closet while he makes off with her underthings. The risk for doing Sponsor work in Haddam is always, of course, that I might know my Sponsoree: a face, a history, a colorful story that defeats disinterest and ruins everything. I should’ve been more prudent.

Except maybe not. Some days, I see whole crowds of people who look exactly like other people I know but who’re, in fact, total strangers. It’s my age and age’s great infirmity: overaccumulation — the same reason I don’t make friends anymore. Sally always said this was a grave sign, that I was spiritually afraid of the unknown — unlike herself, who left me for her dead husband. Though I thought — and still do — that it was actually a positive sign. By thinking I recognized strangers I, in fact, didn’t recognize, I was actually reaching out to the unknown, making the world my familiar. No doubt this is why I’ve sold many, many houses that no one else wanted.

“Are you Mr. Fruank?” Dixie’s definitely alight in the voice: bright, sweet and rising at the end to make everything a happy question; vowels that make you sound like yew, handle like handull. Central Virginia’s my guess.

“Hi. Yeah. I’m Frank.” I extend an affirming hand with a friendlier smile. I’m not a leering crotch-clutcher or a dampened-panty faddist. Sponsors omit last names — which is simpler when you leave.

“Well, Ah’m Marguerite Purcell, Mr. Fruank. Why don’t you come in out of this b-r-r-r we’re havin’.” Marguerite Purcell, who’s dressed in a two-piece suit that must be raw silk of the rarest French-rose hue, with matching Gucci flats, steps back in welcome — the most cordial-confident of graceful hostesses, clearly accustomed to all kinds, high to low, entering her private home on every imaginable occasion. Haddam has always absorbed a small population of dispirited, old-monied southerners who can’t stand the South yet can only bear the company of one another in deracinated enclaves like Haddam, Newport and Northeast Harbor. You catch glimpses of their murmuring Town Cars swaying processionally out gated driveways, headed to the Homestead for golf-and-bridge weekends with other white-shoed W&L grads, or turning north to Naskeag to spend August with Grandma Ni-Ni on Eggemoggin Reach — all of them iron-kneed Republicans who want us out of the UN, nigras off the curbs and back in the fields, the Suez mined, and who think the country missed its chance by not choosing ole Strom back in ’48. Hostesses like Marguerite Purcell never have problems money can’t solve. So what am I doing here?

“Ahm just astonissshed by this weathuh.” Marguerite’s leading me through the parquet foyer into a living room “done” like no living room I’ve seen (and I’ve seen a few) and that the staid Quaker exterior gives no hint of. The two big front windows have been sheathed with shiny white lacquered paneling. The walls are also lacquered white. The green-vaulted ceiling firmament has tiny recessed pin lights shining every which way, making the room bright as an operating theater. The floors are bare wood and waxed to a fierce sheen. There are no plants. The only furnishings are two immense, hard-as-granite rectilinear love seats, covered in some sort of dyed-red animal skin, situated on a square of blue carpet, facing each other across a thick slab-of-glass coffee table that actually has fish swimming inside it (a dozen lurid, fat, motionless white goldfish), the whole objet supported by an enormous hunk of curved, polished chrome, which I recognize as the bumper off a ’54 Buick. The air is odorless, as if the room had been chemically scrubbed to leave no evidence of prior human habitation. Nothing recalls a day when regular people sat in regular chairs and watched TV, read books, got into arguments or made love on an old braided rug while logs burned cheerily in a fireplace. The only animate sign is a white CO₂ detector mid-ceiling with its tiny blinking red beacon. Though on the wall above where a fireplace ought to be, there’s a gilt-framed, essentially life-size oil portrait of an elderly, handsome, mustachioed, silver-haired, capitalist-looking gentleman in safari attire, a floppy white-hunter fedora and holding a Mannlicher.50 in front of a stuffed rhino head (the very skin used to make the couch). This fellow stares from the wall with piercing, dark robber-baron eyes, a cruel sensuous mouth, uplifted nose and bruising brow, but with a mysterious, corners-up smirk on his lips, as if once a great, diminishing joke has been told and he was the first one to get it.

“This wuss my husbund’s favorite room,” Marguerite says dreamily, still primly smiling. She establishes herself on the front edge of one of the red love seats, facing me across the aquarium table, squeezing together, then shifting to the side her shiny stockinged knees. She possesses thin, delicately veined ankles, one of which wears a nearly invisible gold chain flattened beneath the nylon. She is all Old Dominion comeliness, the last breathing female you’d think could stomach a room as weird as this. Obviously, she married it, but now that the Mister’s retreated to his place on the wall, she doesn’t know what in the fuck to do with it. This may be what she wants me to tell her. Anyone — but me — couldn’t resist asking her a hundred juicy, prying, none-of-your-business questions. But, as with all Sponsor visits, I heed the presence of an invisible privacy screen between Sponsoree and self. That works out best for everybody.

From where I sit, Marguerite seems to have the lens softened all around her — a trick of the pin lights in the celestial green ceiling. She’s maybe mid-fifties but has a plush, young-appearing face she’s applied a faint rouging to, a worry-free forehead, welcoming blue eyes, with an obviously sizable bustage under her rose suit jacket, and an amorous full-lipped mouth, through which her voice makes a soft whistling sound (“ssurely,” “hussbund’s”), as if her teeth were in the way. My guess is she’s the hoped-for result of a high-end makeover — a length somebody might gladly go to for the chance of an enduring (and rich) second marriage. Her hair, however, is the standard bottle-brown southern do with a wide, pale, scalp-revealing middle part going halfway back, with the rest cemented into a flip that only elderly hairdressers in Richmond know how to properly mold. Southern socialites — my schoolmates’ mothers at Gulf Pines Academy, who’d drive down from Montgomery and Lookout to speak briefly to their villainous sons through lowered windows of their Olds Ninety Eights — wore exactly this hair construction back in 1959. I actually find it sexy as hell, since it reminds me of my young and (I felt) clearly lust-driven fourth-grade teacher, Miss Hapthorn, back in Biloxi.

When she led me into the lifeless and over-heated living room, I noticed Marguerite stealing two spying looks my way as if I, too, might’ve reminded her of somebody and wasn’t the only one searching time’s vault.

And she’s now examining me again. And not like the beguiling Virginia hostess who sparkles at the guest, hoping to find something she can adore so she can decide to change her mind about it later, but with the same submerged acknowledging I detected before. These magnolia blossoms, of course, can be scrotum-cracking, trust-fund bullies who secretly smoke Luckies, drink gin by the gallon, screw the golf pro and don’t give an inch once money’s on the table. Only they never act that way when you first make their acquaintance. I’m wondering if I sold her a house back in the mists.

Though all at once my heart, out ahead of my brain, exerts a boul-derish, possibly audible whump-whoomp-de-whomp. I know Marguerite Purcell. Or I did.

The knees. The good ankles. The ghosty anklet. The bustage. The plump lips. The way the peepers fasten on me, slowly close, then stay closed too long, revealing an underlying authority making decisions for the composed face. (The lisp is new.) She may remember me, too. Except if I admit it, Sponsorship loses all purchase and I’ll have to beat it, just when I got here.

Marguerite reopens her small pale blue eyes, looks self-consciously down, arranges her pretty hands on her rose skirt hem, flattens the fabric across her knee-tops, smiles again and recrosses her ankles. No one’s spoken since we sat down. Maybe she’s also having a day when everybody looks like somebody else and thinks nothing of this moment of faulty recognition. And maybe she’s not the woman I “slept” with how many years back (sleep did eventually come), when her name was Betty Barksdale—“Dusty” to her friends — then the beleaguered, abandoned wife of Fincher Barksdale, change-jingling local M.D. and turd. He left her to join some foreign-doctors outfit in deepest Africa, where he reportedly went native, learned the local patois, took a fat African bride with tribal scarrings, began doctoring to the insurgents (the wrong insurgents) and ended up in a fetid, lightless, tin-sided back-country prison from which he eventually found his way to a public square in a regional market town, where he was roped to a metal no-parking post and hacked at for a while by boy soldiers hepped up on the amphetamines he’d been feeding them.

But even if Marguerite is the metamorphosed Dusty from ’88, I may not be that easy to recollect. Most high jinks aren’t worth remembering anyway. Behind her warm, self-conscious smile, she might be silently saying, What is it now? This guy? Frank…um…something? Something about when my first husband, something, I guess, didn’t come back or some goddamn thing. Who cares?

I’d lobby for that. We don’t have to revisit a tepid boinking we boozily committed upstairs in her green-shingled Victorian on Westerly Road that Fincher stuck her with. Though if it is her, I’d like (silently) to compliment the impressive metamorphosis to magnolia blossom, since the Dusty I knew was a smirky, blond, slightly hard-edged, cigarette-smoking former Goucher girl who made fun of her husband’s blabbermouth east Memphis relatives and about what he’d think if he ever knew she was rogering the realtor. He never got to think anything.

Though the wellspring of transformation is almost always money. It works miracles. First Fincher’s big life-insurance policies, then the lavishments of old Clyde Beatty Purcell all worked their changes. Ex-friends who knew her as sorrowing, needful Dusty could all go fuck themselves. (I’d like to know if I look as old as she does. Possibly yes. I’ve had cancer, I’m internally radiated, in recovery. It happens.)

Marguerite’s warm society smile has faded to a querulous pert, designating confusion. I’ve become quiet and may have alarmed her. Her eyes elevate above my head to gaze toward the blocked-off front windows, as if she could see through them to the dying day. She wags her soft chin slowly, as though confirming something. “I don’t want to talk about our politics, Mr. Frank, it’s too depresssin’.” Politics is strictly verboten in Sponsoring anyway. Hard to think we could be on the same side. “In the New Yawk Times today, Mr. Bush said if Florida goes to the Dem-uh-crats, it could be ahrmed insurrection. Or worse. That rascal Clinton. It’ss shocking.” She frowns with disdain, then she sniffs, her nose darting upward as if she’d just sniffed the whole disreputable business out of the air forever.

But with this gesture, the Marguerite-Dusty-Betty deal is sealed. In our night of brief abandon, after I’d shown her a gigantic Santa Barbara hacienda on Fackler Road (she wanted to squander all Fincher’s money so he couldn’t come home), we two wound up on bar stools at the Ramada on Route 1, with one thing following fumblingly the next. I had a well-motivated prohibition against casual client boinking, but it got lost in the shuffle.

As the night spirited on and the Manhattans kept arriving, Dusty, who’d begun referring to herself as “the Dream Weaver,” gradually gave in to a strange schedule of abrupt smirks, fidgets, tics, brow-clenchings, lip-squeezings, cheek-puffings, teeth-barings and fearsome eye-rollings — as if life itself had ignited a swarm of nervous weirdness, attesting to the great strain of it all. It rendered our subsequent lovemaking a challenge and, as I remember it, unsuccessful, except for me, of course. Though the next morning when I was skulking out through the kitchen door (I thought before she could wake up), I encountered Dream Weaver Dusty, already at the sink in a faded red kimono, staring wanly out the window, hair askew and barefoot, but with an unaccountably graceful, empathetic welcome and a weak smile, wondering if I wanted an English muffin or maybe a poached egg before I disappeared. She was hollow-eyed and certainly didn’t want me to stay (I didn’t). But the night’s stress-plus-booze-inspired tangle of tics, warps and winces had also vanished, leaving her exhausted but calm. Vanished, that is, except for one — the one I just saw, the tiny heavenward flickage of nose tip toward ceiling, punctuating a subject needing to be put to rest. Its effect on me now is to inspire not what you’d think, but even franker admiration for her reincarnation and the proficient adaptation to the times. How many of us, faced with a bad part to play, wouldn’t like to slip offstage in act one, then reappear in act three as an entirely different personage? It’s a wonder it doesn’t happen more. My wife, Sally, did the exact opposite when, far along in the play, she went back to being the wife from act one who never got the ovation she deserved.

I look out the arched doorway to the parquet foyer and to closed doors leading farther into the house. Is anyone else in here with us? A loyal servant, a Cairn terrier, possibly old Purcell himself, hooked to tubes and breathing devices, up the back stairs, watching game shows.

“I don’t want to talk about politics, either.” I smile back like a kindly old GP with a pretty patient presenting with nonspecific symptoms that don’t really bother her all that much. Possibly there are indistinct rumblings happening inside her brain — an English-muffin moment without a place in time.

“I have a strange question to ask you, Frank.” Marguerite’s delicate shoulders go square, her back straightens, fingers unlace and re-lace atop her shiny knees. Perfect posture, as always, ignites the low venereal flicker. You never know about these things.

“Strange questions are our stock-in-trade,” I offer back genially.

“I don’t suppose you’re an expert in this.” Eyelids down and holding. I nod, expressing competence. Marguerite has worked a little free of her plantation accent. She’s more downtown Balmur. Her limpid blues rise again and seek the absent window behind me and blink in an inspiration-seeking way. “I have a very strange urge to confess something.” Her eyes stay aloft.

I am as noncommittal as Dr. Freud. “I see.”

The room’s glistening white walls, firmamental ceiling and aquarium table holding motionless, creepily mottled goldfish all radiate in silent stillness. I hear a heat source tick-tick-ticking. One of the crows outside issues a softened caw. It’s a Playhouse 90 moment, one interminable soundless shot. How do you get a room to smell this way, I wonder. Why would you want it to?

Marguerite’s slender left hand, on which there’s a ring supporting an emerald as big as a Cheerios box, wanders to above her left breast, fingertips just touching a pin made of two tiny finely joined golden apples, then returns to her knee. “But I really have nothing to confess. Nothing at all.” Her gaze falls to me plaintively. It is the look of someone who’s spent twenty-five years in customer service at the White Plains Saks, feels okay about it, but now realizes something more challenging might’ve been possible. It’s disheartening to encounter this look in a woman you like. “It’s a little unnerving,” she says softly. “What do you think, Frank?” Her full lips push tantalizingly outward to signify candor.

“How long have you been feeling this way?” I am still all doctorish-Sponsorish concern.

“Oh. Sixss months.”

“Did anything seem to cause it?”

Marguerite inhales a deep chest-swelling breath and lets it out. “No.” Two blue eye blinks. “I keep thinking whatever it is will just come to me while I’m boiling a putatuh. Somebody’d abused me as a child, or my mother’d been a woman of mixed blood.” Or you once fucked your realtor when you had a whole nuther identity. This trunk lid we won’t open. “I certainly don’t want something terrible to be true. If I’ve forgotten something terrible, I’m happy for it to stay that way.”

“I can’t blame you there.” My eyes fasten on her for the benefit of verisimilitude.

“I call it a need to confess. But it’s maybe something else.”

“What else could you maybe call it?”

Marguerite suddenly sits up even more erectly, her softened features alert. “I haven’t really thought about that.”

“You might just have to make it up, then.”

Her mouth now transforms into a mirthless almost-smile. I believe she may have quickly crossed her eyes and instantly uncrossed them — another of the eighties-era tics. “I don’t know, Frank. Maybe it’s an urge to clear sssomething up.”

My face, by practice, expresses nothing. Ann and I used to ask each other — when one of us would register a complaint the other couldn’t properly address: “What’s your neurosis allowing you to do that you couldn’t do otherwise?” Mostly the answer was to complain and enjoy it. This might be the urge that Marguerite’s experiencing. “Would you really like to know what to confess, no matter what?” I ask. “Or would you be happy to just quit feeling this way and never confess anything?”

“I guess the latter, Frank. Iss that horrible?”

“Maybe if you murdered somebody,” I say. Put arsenic in their smoothie at the health club. “Did you murder anybody?” Fincher wouldn’t count.

“No.” She clasps her hands and looks distressed, as if she sort of wished she could say she had murdered somebody, make me believe it, then take it all back, leaving behind a zesty fragrance of doubt. “I don’t think I have the right character for that,” she says wondrously.

My bet, though, is she’s never done anything wrong. Married a shit, been treated shabbily, forgettably rogered the realtor, but then reconstituted herself, married a better sod who left her well-off and didn’t stick around for forever. It’s not all that different from the story behind many doors I knock on, though it doesn’t make much of a climax and I’m not usually a ghost presence. But — the guy with the sailboat that’s driving him nuts; Bettina, the fractious Dutch housekeeper — there is the need to tell, which is its own virtue and complaint. That’s why I’m here — it could be the modern dilemma. But like many modern dilemmas, it’s susceptible to a cure.

“I’m not sure we have characters, Marguerite. Are you? I’ve thought a lot about it.” I press my lips together to signal this is my judgment in re her problem. Any suspicion that I might be the problem is entirely nugatory.

“No.” A quarter smile of recognition emerges onto her whole face. I wonder if I already said this to her sixteen years ago in some post-coital posturings. I hope not. “No, I’m not. I’m Epissscopalian, Frank, but I’m not religious.”

I give a wink of “me, neither” assurance. “We may think we have a character because it makes everything simpler.”

“Yes.”

“But what we do have for sure,” I say supremely, “is memories, presents, futures, desires, hatreds, et cetera. And it’s our job to govern those as much as we can. How we do that may be the only character we have, if you know what I mean.”

“Yes.” She is possibly stumped.

“Your job, I think, is to control your memory so it doesn’t bother you. Since from what you say, it shouldn’t bother you. Right? There isn’t even a bad memory there.”

“No.” She clears her throat, lets her eyes drop. I may be veering near privileged subjects, where I don’t want to veer, but the truth is the truth. “And how do I do that, Frank?” she says. “That’s the problem, isn’t it?”

“No. I don’t think that’s the problem at all.” I’m beaming. I certainly should have been able to explain this decades back, in the kitchen, over our muffin. Isn’t that where we want our casual couplings to lead us? To someone we can tell something to? Even if there isn’t anything to tell. Maybe it’s me who’s reincarnated. “I don’t think there is a problem,” I say enthusiastically. “You just have to believe this feeling of wanting to confess something is a natural feeling. And probably a good omen for the future.” My eyes roam up and catch the knowing gimlet eye of old Purcell, bearing down on me in his white-hunter outfit. I am your surrogate here, I think, not your adversary. It is the genius soul of Sponsoring.

“The future?” Marguerite clears her throat again, stagily. We’ve moved onto the bright future, where we belong.

“Sometimes we think that before we can go on with life we have to get the past all settled.” I am as soulful as a St. Bernard. “But that’s not true. We’d never get anyplace if it was.”

“Probably not.” She’s nodding.

Then neither of us says anything. Silences are almost always affirming. I cast a wary eye down into the aquarium, glass as thick as a bank window and beveled smooth all around its rhomboid to guard against gashed shins, snagged hems, toddlers and pets poking their eyes out. My face is mirrored back in the Buick bumper — as rubbery as the Elephant Man. I see one of the huge, glaucal goldfish looking at me. How would one feed them? Probably there’s a way. Possibly they’re not real—

“Ah yew plannin’ on a big Thanks-givin’?” I hear Marguerite say, Dixie, again, the music in her voice.

I smile stupidly across the table. When I first had my titanium BBs downloaded, I experienced all sorts of strange enervated zonings out and in, often at extremely unhandy moments — across the desk from a client who’d just signed an offer sheet obligating him to pay $75,000 if the deal fell through; or listening to a man tell me how the death of his wife made an instant sale a matter of highest priority. Then, ZAP, I’d be lost in a reverie about a Charlie Chan movie I saw, circa age ten, and whether it was Sidney Toler or Warner Oland in the title role. Again, Psimos says these “episodes” are not relatable to treatment. But I say baloney. I wouldn’t have them if I didn’t have what I do have. Either it was the BBs or the thought of BBs — a distinction that’s not a difference.

“Do you have childrun?” I’m sure she’s wondering what the hell’s wrong with me.

“Yeah. Absolutely.” I’m fuzzy-woozy. “They’re coming. For Thanksgiving. Two of ’em.” Sponsors aren’t supposed to tell our stories. Expanded human contexts lead to random personal assessments. We’re here to do a job, like the State Farm guy. Plus, now that we’ve gotten past it, I don’t want to risk a needless revisitus of who was who, when when was when. It’s not the key to Marguerite’s mystery. There is no key. There is no mystery. We all live with that revelation.

I abruptly stand right up, straight as a sentry as if on command, but am woozy still. Satisfactory visit. Needs to be over. Done and done well. If I had a clipboard, it’d now be under my arm. If I had a hat, I’d be turning it by its brim.

“Are you leavin’?” Marguerite looks up at me, surprised, but automatically rises (a little stiffly) to let me know it’s okay and not rude if I have to go. She looks hopefully across the strange aquarium table, then takes a hesitant turning step toward the foyer, her two feet going balky, as though they’d gone to sleep in their Guccis. “I ’magine you have other ssstops to make.” (Do I walk like that?)

I’m eager to go, though still light-headed. Sponsor visits are more demanding than they seem and adieus can be unwieldy. People of both genders sometimes need to lavish hugs on you. I’m nervous Marguerite’s going to spin round when we hit the parquet, take both my hands in her two warm ones, bull her way inside the invisible screen, peer into my bleary orbs, smile a smile of lost laughter and past regret and say something outrageous. Like: “We don’t have to pretend anymore.” Though we do! “…fate didn’t intend us…it’s true and it’s sssad…but you’ve counseled me so well…couldn’t you hold me for just a moment?…” I’ll have a heart attack. You think you’ll always be open to these impromptu clenches and whatever good mischief they lead to. But after a while you’re not.

However, Marguerite says, “This election’s made a mess out of everybody’s Thanksssgiving, hasn’t it, Fruank?” She turns to me in the entryway (I’m fearful) but is smiling ruefully, her veined hands folded at her rose pink waist like a schoolmarm. The little joined apples are glowing cheerfully. She clicks on the soft overhead globe, suffusing us in a deathly glow that guarantees, I trust, no smoochy-smoochy.

“I guess so.” My eyes find the brass umbrella stand beside the door, as if one of the umbrellas is mine and I want it back. I must be going, yes, I must be going.

“You know, when I called to assk for a visit today — and I have these vissits quite often — I intended to ask for help in drafting a letter to President Clinton explaining all we have to be thankful for in this country. And then this other funny old business just popped up.”

“Why’d you change your mind?” Why ask that! I’ve Sponsored so well up to now! I flinch and move my toes nearer the door. Cold breeze purrs beneath it, chilling my ankles and giving me a shiver. Heat does not reach front foyer. A prospective buyer wouldn’t notice this till it’s too late. I grasp the cold brass knob and twist-test it. Left, right.

“I’m really not sssure now.” Marguerite’s eyes cast down, as though the answer was on the floor.

I give the knob a quarter right twist, staring at the dark roots of Marguerite’s hairline, up the regimental center part to nowhere. She looks up at me brazenly, eyes shining not with stayed tears but with resolve and optimism. “Do you think life’s ssstrange, Frank?” At her waist, her fingers touch tips-to-tips. She’s smiling a wonderful, positivistic Margaret Chase Smith smile.

“Depends on what you compare it to.” If it’s death, then no.

“Oh my.” One eye narrows at me in tolerant ridicule. “That’s really not a very good ansswer. Not for a ssmart boy like yew.”

“You’re right. Sorry.”

“Let’s just ssay it isss strange. That’s the thought to ssay good-bye on, isn’t it?”

“Okay.” I give the ponderous door a ponderous tug. Cold damp instantly falls in on us like a tree.

“Thank you ssso much for coming.” Marguerite cocks her pretty head like a sparrow, her nose flicking up. In no way does she mean “Thanks for coming back finally.” She extends a soft, bonily mature hand for me to grasp. I take it like a Japanese businessman, give her a firm double-hand up-down up-down, the kind I counsel Mike never to do, then turn loose quick. She looks in my eyes, then down to regard her empty hand, then smiles, shaking her head at life’s weirdness. Women are stronger (and smarter) than men. Whoever doubted it? I attempt my manliest affirming smile, say good and bye between my lips and teeth, step out onto the bristly mat, into the frigid afternoon that looks like evening. Surprisingly, the red door closes hard behind me. I hear a lock go click, footsteps receding. Miraculously, and not a moment too soon, I’m history (again).

Back in the car, my heart — for reasons best known to Dr. DeBakey—again goes cavorting. Whumpetty, whump-de-whumps like a stallion in a stall when smoke’s in the air. My scalp seizes. My skin prickles. Metallic ozone tang’s in my mouth, as if something foreign had been in the car while I was inside. I sit and try to picture stillness, hold my cheek to the cold-fugged window glass, make myself simmer down so as not to lapse into “a state.” Possibly I should put in my night guard.

Everyone’s wondered: Will I know if I’m having a heart attack? The people who’ve had them — Hugh Wekkum, for one — say you can’t not know. Only goofballs mistake it for acid reflux or over-excitement when you open the IRS letter. Unless, of course, you want to be in the dark — in which case everything’s possible. EMS technicians testify — I read this in the Mayo newsletter I’m now sent whether I want it or not — that when they ask their patients, stretched out on sidewalks turning magenta, or doubled over in the expensive box seats at Shea, or being wheeled off a Northwest flight in Detroit, “What seems to be the trouble, sir?” the answer’s usually “I think I’m having a fucking heart attack, you dickhead. What d’you think’s wrong?” They’re almost always right.

I am not having a heart attack, although having a Sea Biscuit heartbeat may mean something’s not perfect, following on my partial fadeout inside Marguerite’s. (The beef ’n bean burrito on an empty stomach is a suspect.) I take a peek through the hazy glass out at #24, cast in shapeless shadows. Lights downstairs are off, though the carriage lamps still burn. But Marguerite is now standing at an upstairs window, looking down at my car, wherein I’m trying to stop my galloping heart. I believe she’s smiling. Enigmatic. Knowing. I’m willing to bet she has no friends, lives isolated in the world of her inventions — helpfully underwritten by gobs of dough. I could go back inside and be her friend. We could speak of matters differently. But instead, I turn the key, set the wipers flopping, the defrost whooshing, the wheels to rolling — the bass gur-murmur-murmur of my Suburban’s V-8 fortifying me just like the commercials promise. I am on my way to De Tocqueville and to Ann.

But. Let no man say here was not a successful Sponsoring — even if our present selves were under pressure from our past, which is what the past is good at. It’s not so different from thinking you know people when you don’t. Life is strange. What can we do about it? Which is why Sponsors are never concerned with underlying causes. My counsel was good counsel. Significant hurdles were cleared. One talked, one listened. Human character (or a lack thereof) was brought into play. A good future was projected. I’m actually now wondering if Marguerite could’ve been an older sister to Dusty and known nothing of me, only shared certain sibling nervous disorders. People, after all, have sisters. Whoever she was, she had legitimate issues I had a peculiarly good grasp on, and not just about reigniting the pilot light or reading the small print on the dehumidifier warranty. Something real (albeit invented) was bothering someone real (albeit invented). There are few enough chances to do the simple right thing anymore. A hundred years ago this week — in our grateful and unlitigious village past — this kind of good deed happened every day and all involved took it for granted. Looked at this way, Thanksgiving’s not really a mess but more than anything else, commemorates a time we’ll never see again.

4

I should say something about having cancer, since my health’s on my mind now like a man being followed by an assassin. I’d like not to make a big to-do over it, since my view is that rather than good things coming to those who wait, all things — good, bad, indifferent — come to all of us if we simply hang around long enough. The poet wasn’t wrong when he wrote, “Great nature has another thing to do to you and me…What falls away is always. And is near.”

The telescoped version of the whole cancer rigamarole is that exactly four weeks after my wife, Sally Caldwell, announced she and her posthumous husband, Wally (a recent, honored guest in our house), were reconvening life on new footings and blah, blah, blah, blah, in earnest hope of gaining blah, blah, blah, blah, and better blah, blah, blah, blah, I happened to notice some dried brown blood driblets at about pecker height on my bedsheets, and went straight off to Haddam Medical Arts out Harrison Road to find out what might be going on with what.

I was in robustest of health (so I thought) in spite of Sally’s unhappy departure — which I assumed wouldn’t last long. I did my sit-ups and stretches, took healthful treks down the Sea-Clift beach every other day. I didn’t drink much. I kept my weight at 178—where it’s been since my last year at Michigan. I didn’t smoke, didn’t take drugs, consumed fistfuls of daily vitamins, including saw palmetto and selenium, ate fish more than twice a week, conscientiously divided each calendar year into test results to test results. Nothing had come up amiss — colonoscopy, chest X ray, PSA, blood pressure, good cholesterol and bad, body mass, fat percentage, pulse rate, all moles declared harmless. Going for a checkup seemed purely a confirming experience: good-to-go another twelve, as though each visit was diagnostic, preventative and curative all at once. I’d never had a surgery. Illness was what others endured and newspapers wrote about.

“Probably nothing,” Bernie Blumberg said, giving me a wiseacre, pooch-mouthed Jewish butcher’s wink, stripping his pale work gloves into a HAZARD can. “Prostatitis. Your gland feels a little smooshy. Slightly enlarged. Not unusual for your age. Nothing some good gherkina jerkina wouldn’t clear up.” He snorted, smacked his lips and dilated his nostrils as he washed his hands for the eightieth time that day (these guys earn their keep). “Your PSA’s up because of the inflammation. I’ll put you on some atomic-mycin and in four weeks do another PSA, after which you’ll be free to resume front-line duties. How’s that wife of yours?” Sally and I both went to Bernie. It’s not unusual.

“She’s in Mull with her dead husband,” I said viciously. “We might be getting divorced.” Though I didn’t believe that.

“How ’bout that,” Bernie said, and in an instant was gone — vanished out the door, or through the wall, or up the A/C vent or into thin air, his labcoat tails fluttering in a nonexistent breeze. “Well, look here now, how’s that husband of yours?” I heard his voice sing out from somewhere, another examining room down a hall, while I cinched my belt, re-zipped, found my shoes and felt the odd queasiness up my butt. I heard his muffled laughter through cold walls. “Oh, he certainly should. Of course he should,” he said. I couldn’t hear the question.

Only in four weeks, my PSA showed another less-than-perfect 5.3, and Bernie said, “Well, let’s give the pills another chance to work their magic.” Bernie is a small, scrappy, squash-playing, wide-eyed, salt ’n pepper brush-cut Michigan Med grad from Wyandotte (which is why I go to him), an ex-Navy corpsman who practices a robust battlefield triage mentality that says only a sucking chest wound is worth getting jazzed up about. These guys aren’t good when it comes to bedside etiquette and dispensing balming info. He’s seen too much of life, and dreams of living in Bozeman and taking up decoy-carving. I, on the other hand, haven’t seen enough yet.

“What happens if that doesn’t work?” I said. Bernie was scanning the computerized pages of my blood work. We were in his little cubicle office. (Why don’t these guys have nice offices? They’re all rich.) His Michigan and Kenyon diplomas hung above his Navy discharge, next to a mahogany-framed display of his battle ribbons, including a Purple Heart. Outside on summer-steamy Harrison Road, jackhammers racketed away, making the office and the chair I occupied vibrate.

“Well”—not yet looking all the way over his glasses—“if that happens, I’ll send you around the corner to my good friend Dr. Peplum over at Urology Partners, and he’ll get you in for a sonogram and maybe a little biopsy.”

“Do they do little ones?” My lower parts gripped their side walls. Biopsy!

“Yep. Uh-huh,” Bernie said, nodding his head. “Nothin’ to it. They put you to sleep.”

“A biopsy. For cancer?” My heart was stilled. I was fully dressed, the office was freezing in spite of the warping New Jersey heat, and silent in spite of the outside bangety-bangety. Cobwebby green light sifted through the high windows, over which hung a green cotton curtain printed with faded Irish setter heads. Out in the hallway, I could hear happy female voices — nurses gossiping and giggling in hushed tones. One said, “Now that’s Tony. You don’t have to say any more.” Another, “What a rascal.” More giggling, their crepe soles gliding over scrubbed antiseptic tiles. This near-silent, for-all-the-world unremarkable moment, I knew, was the fabled moment. Things new and different and interesting possibly were afoot. Changes could ensue. Certain things taken for granted maybe couldn’t be anymore.

I wasn’t exactly afraid (nobody’d told me anything bad yet). I just wanted to take it in properly ahead of time so I’d know how to accommodate other possible surprises. If this shows a propensity to duck before I’m hit, to withhold commitment and not do every goddamn thing whole hog — then sue me. All boats, the saying goes, are looking for a place to sink. I was looking for a place to stay afloat. I must’ve known I had it. Women know “it’s taken” two seconds after the guilty emission. Maybe you always know.

“I wouldn’t get worked up over it yet.” Bernie looked up distractedly, glancing across his metal desk, where my records lay.

My face was as open as a spring window to any news. I might as well have been a patient waiting to have a seed wart frozen off. “Okay, I won’t,” I said. And with that good advice in hand, I got up and left.

I won’t blubber on: the freezing shock of real unwelcome news, the “interesting” sonogram, the sorry but somehow upbeat biopsy particulars, the perfidious prostate lingo — Gleason, Partin, oxidative damage, transrectal ultrasound, twelve-tissue sample (a lu-lu there), conscious sedation, watchful waiting, life-quality issues. There’re bookstores full of this nasty business: Prostate Cancer for Dummies, A Walking Tour Through Your Prostate (in which the prostate has a happy face), treatment options, color diagrams, interactive prostate CDROMs, alternative routes for the proactive — all intended for the endlessly prostate-curious. Which I’m not. As though knowing a lot would keep you from getting it. It wouldn’t — I already had it. Words can kill as well as save.

And yet. From the grim, unwanted and unexpected may arise the light-strewn and good. My daughter — tall, imperturbable, amused (by me) and nobody’s patsy — re-arrived to my life.

Clarissa is twenty-five, a pretty, stroppy-limbed, long-muscled, slightly sorrowful-seeming girl with hooded gray eyes who’d remind you of a woman’s basketball coach at a small college in the Middlewest. She has a square, inquisitive face (like her mother’s), is pleasant around men without being much interested in them. She is sometimes profane, will mutter sarcastically under her breath, likes to read but doesn’t finally say much (this, I’m sure, she got taught at Harvard). She wears strong contact lenses and frequently stares at you (me) chin down and for too long when you’re talking, as if what you’re saying doesn’t make much sense, then silently shakes her head and turns away. She maintains a great abstract sympathy for the world but, in my mind, seems in constant training to be older, like children of divorce often are, and to have abandoned her girlishness too soon. She’s said to have the ability to give memorable off-the-cuff wedding toasts and to remember old song lyrics, and can beat me at arm wrestling — especially now.

Though truth to tell, Clarissa was never a “great kid,” like the bumper stickers say all kids have to be now. She was secretive, verbally ahead of herself — which made her obnoxious — sexually adventurous (with boys) and too good at school. The fault, of course, is her mother’s and mine. She was loved silly by both of us, but our love was too finely diced and served, leaving her with a distrustful temper and pervasive uncertainties about her worth in the world. What can we do about these things after they’re over?

Clarissa’s and my relationship has been what anyone would expect, given divorce, given a brother she barely remembers but who died, given another brother she doesn’t much trust or like, given a pompous stepfather she detested until he grew sick (then unexpectedly loved), given parents who seemed earnest but not ardent and given strong intelligence nurtured by years away at Miss Trustworthy’s School in West Hartford. She and I together are fitful, loving, occasionally overcomplicating, occasionally heated and rivalrous and often lonely around each other. “We’re normal enough,” Clarissa says, “if you back away a few feet”—this being her young person’s faultless insight, wisdom not given to me.

I am, however, completely smitten by her. I do not believe she is permanently a lover of women, though I signed off on her orientation long ago and regret the dazzling Cookie’s no longer around, since Cookie and I hit it off better than I do with most women. Clarissa’s and my cohabitation during my convalescence has allowed her to think of me as a sympathetic, semi-complex-if-often-draining, not particularly paternal “older person” who happens to be her father, on whom she can hone her underused nurturing skills. And at the same time I’ve put into gear my underused fatherhood skills and tried to offer her what she needs — for now: shelter, a respite from love, a chance to exhale, have serious talks and set her shoulders straight before charging toward her future. It is her last chance to have a father experiencing his last chance to have the daughter he loves.

Three weeks ago, the day after Halloween, Clarissa and I were taking my prescribed therapy walk together up the beach at Sea-Clift, me in my Bean’s canvas nomad’s pants and faded blue anorak (it was cold), Clarissa in a pair of somebody else’s baggy khakis and an old pink Connemara sweater of mine. Dr. Psimos says these walks are tonic for the recovering prostate, good for soreness, good for swelling, and the sunlight’s a proven cancer fighter. Walking around every day with cancer lurking definitely commits one’s thoughts more to death. But the surprise, as I already said, is that you fear it less, not more. It’s a privilege, of an admittedly peculiar kind, to get to think about death in an almost peaceful frame of mind. After all, you share your condition — a kind of modern American condition — with 200,000 other Americans, which is comforting. And this stage of life — well past the middle — seems in fact to be the ideal time to have cancer, since among its other selling points, the Permanent Period helps to cancel out even the most recent past and focuses you onto what else there might be to feel positive about. Not having cancer, of course, would still be better.

On our beach walk, Clarissa began declaiming lengthily about the presidential election (which hadn’t happened yet). She detests Bush and adores our current shiftless President, wishes he could stay President forever and believes he exhibited “courage” in acting like a grinning, slavering hound, since, she said, his conduct “revealed his human-ness” (I was willing to take his human-ness on faith, along with mine, which we need not exhibit to people who don’t want us to). It’s clear she identifies him with me and would make unflattering high-horse excuses for me the way she makes them for him. These same-sex years of her life have left her not exactly a feminist, which she was in spades at Miss Trustworthy’s, but strangely tolerant toward men — which we all hoped would be the good bounty of feminism, though so far have little to show for it. Looked at another way, I’m satisfied to have a daughter who has sympathy to excess, since she’ll need it in a long life.

One of her current career thoughts for life after Sea-Clift and her life without Cookie, is to find employment with a liberal congressman, something Harvard graduates can apparently do the way the rest of us catch taxis. Only, she loathes Democrats for being prissy and isn’t truly sure what party she fits in with. My secret fear is that she’s pissed away her vote on sad-sack, know-it-all Nader, who’s responsible for this smirking Texas frat boy stealing a march into the power vacuum.

When her declaimings were over, we walked along the damp sand without saying much. We’ve taken many of these jaunts and I like them for their freedom to seem everyday-normal and not just the discipline of disaster. Clarissa was carrying her black cross-trainers, letting her long toes grip the caked sand where the ocean had recently withdrawn. Tire tracks from the police patrols had dented the beach surface in curvy parallels stretching out of sight toward Seaside Park, where a smattering of autumn beach habitués were sailing bright Frisbees for Border Collies, building sand skyscrapers, flying box kites and model planes or just leisurely walking the strand in twos and threes in the breeze and glittering light. It was two o’clock, normally a characterless hour in the days after the time change. Evening rushes toward you, although I’ve come to like these days, when the Shore’s masked with white disappearing winterish light yet nothing’s nailed down by winter’s sternness. I’m grateful to be alive to see it.

“What’s it like to be fifty-six?” Clarissa said breezily, sandy shoes adangle, her strides long and slew-footed.

“I’m fifty-five. Ask me next April.”

She adapted her steps to mine to stress a stricter precision for dates. I’m aware that she purposefully chooses subjects that are not just about her. She has always been a careful conversationalist and knows, in her Wodehousian manner, how to be a capital egg — though she’s much on her own mind lately. “I’m wrong a lot more,” I said. “That’s one thing. I walk slower, though I don’t much care. It probably makes you think I deal well with a challenging world. I don’t. I just walk slower.” She kept her stride with mine, which made me feel like an oldster. She’s as tall as I am. “I don’t worry very much about being wrong. Isn’t that good?”

“What else?” she said, concertedly upbeat.

“Fifty-five doesn’t really have all that much. It’s kind of open. I like it.” We have never discussed the Permanent Period. It would bore or embarrass her or force her to patronize me, which she doesn’t want to do.

Clarissa crossed her arms, clutched her shoes, toes askew in a dancer’s stride she used to practice when she was a teen. My own size tens, I noticed, were slightly pigeoned-in, in a way they never were when I was young. Was this another product of prostate cancer? Toes turn in….

“Who do you think’s turned out better, me or Paul?” she said.

I had no answer for this. Though as with so many things people say to other people, you just dream up an answer — like I told Marguerite. “I don’t really think about you and Paul turning out, per se,” I said. I’m sure she didn’t believe me. She’s mightily concerned with the final results of things these days, which is what her furlough with me at the beach is all about in a personal-thematic sense: how to make her outcome not be bad, in the presence of mine seeming not so positive. A part of her measures herself against me, which I’ve told her is not advisable and encourages her to be even older than she can be.

Between my two offspring, she is the “interesting,” gravely beautiful star with the gold-plated education, the rare gentle touch, the flash temper and plenty of wry self-ironies that make her irresistible, yet who seems strangely dislocated. Paul is the would-be-uxorious, unfriendly non-starter who pinballed through college but landed in the mainstream, sending nutty greeting-card messages into the world and feeling great about life. These things are never logical.

But when it comes to “turning out,” nothing’s clear. Clarissa’s become distant and sometimes resentful with her mother since declaring herself to “be with” Cookie her sophomore year in college, and now seems caught in a stall, is melancholy about love and loss, and exhibits little interest in earning a living, pursuing prospects or making a new start — something I want her to do but am afraid to mention. Yet at the same time she’s become an even more engaging, self-possessed, if occasionally impulsive, emerging adult, someone I couldn’t exactly have predicted when she was a conventional, girlish twelve, living with her mother and stepfather in Connecticut, but am now happy to know. (I’ve loaned her Sally’s beater LeBaron convertible as transportation, and since Halloween have put her to work with Mike making cold calls at Realty-Wise, which she halfway enjoys.)

Paul, on the other hand, has rigorously fitted himself in — at least in his own view. He’s purchased a substantial two-storey redbrick house (with his mother’s and my help) in the Hyde Park district of K.C., drives a Saab, has gotten fat, endured early hair loss, raised a silly mustache-goatee, and — his mother’s told me — asks every girl he meets to marry him (one may now have said yes).

But by striving hard to “turn out,” Paul has rejected much, and for that reason replicated in early adulthood precisely who he was when he was a sly-and-moody, unreachable teenager, rather than doing what his sister did. And by finding a “home” institution that cultivates harmlessly eccentric fuzzballs like himself and lets them “thrive and create” while offering a good wage and benefits package, Paul has witnessed independence, success-in-his-chosen-environment and conceivably flat-out happiness. All things I apparently failed to provide him when he was a boy.

Paul now lives snugly in the very town where he finally, by a circuitous routing, graduated college — UMKC — (a certain kind of American male fantasy is to live within walking distance of your old dorm). He now attends three university film series a week, has all of Kurosawa and Capra committed to memory, admits to no particular political affinities, enrolls in extension courses at the U, sits on a citizen watchdog committee for crimes against animals and wears bizarre clothes to work (plaid Bermudas, dark nylon socks, black brogues, occasionally a beret — the greeting-card company couldn’t care less). He has few friends (though three who’re Negroes); he takes vacations to the Chiefs’ training camp in Wisconsin, eats too much and listens to public radio all day long. He disdains wine tastings, book and dance clubs, opera, Chinese art, dating services and fly-tying groups, preferring ventriloquism workshops, jazz haunts downtown and hopeless snarfling after women, which he calls “moonlighting as a gynecologist.” All he shares with his sister is a temper and a wish somehow to be older. In Paul’s case, this means a life lived far from his parents — a fact that his mother finds to be a shame but to me seems bearable.

When I visited Paul in K.C. last spring — this was before my cancer happened and before Sally departed — we sat at a little bookshop/pastry/coffee place near his new house, which he wouldn’t let me visit due to phantom construction work going on. (I never got inside, only drove past.) While we were sitting and both having a chestnut éminence and I was feeling okay about the visit (I’d stopped by on a trip to my old military school reunion), I imprudently asked how long he intended to “hold out here in the Midwest.” Whereupon he viciously turned on me as if I’d suggested that dreaming up hilarious captions for drug-store card-rack cards wasn’t a life’s work with the same gravitas as discovering a vaccine for leukemia. Paul’s right eye orbit isn’t the exact shape as his left one, due to a baseball beaning injury years ago. His sclera is slightly but permanently blood-mottled, and the tender flesh encircling the damaged eye glows red when he gets angry. In this instant, his slate-gray right eye widened — significantly more than the left — as he glared, and his mustache-goatee, imperfect teeth and doofus get-up (madras Bermudas, thin brown socks, etc.) made him look ferocious.

“I’ve sure as fuck done what you haven’t done,” he snarled, catching me totally off guard. I thought I’d asked a newsy, innocent question. I tried to go on eating my éminence, but somehow it slid off its plate right down into my lap.

“What do you mean?” I grabbed a paper napkin out of the dispenser and clutched at the éminence, heavy in my lap.

“Accepted life, for one fucking thing.” He’d become suffused in anger. I had no idea why. “I reflect society,” he growled. “I understand myself as a comic figure. I’m fucking normal. You oughta try it.” He actually bared his teeth and lowered his chin in a stare that made him look like Teddy Roosevelt. I felt I’d been misunderstood.

“What do you think I do?” I was leveraging the sagging pastry back up onto its lacy paper plate, having deposited a big black stain on my trousers. Outside the bookshop, a place called the Book Hog, shiny Buicks and Oldses full of Kansas City Republicans cruised by, all the occupants giving us and the bookstore looks of hard-eyed disapproval. I wished I was leagues away from there, from my son, who had somehow become an asshole.

“You’re all about development.” He snorted lustily, as if development meant something like sex slavery or incest. I knew he didn’t mean real estate development. “You’re stupid. It’s a myth. You oughta get a life.”

“I do believe in development.” I said, and geezered around to see who was moving away from us in the shop, sure some would be. Some were.

“If the key fits, wear it.” Paul burned his merciless gap-toothed Teddy Roosevelt smile into me. His short, nail-gnawed fingers began twiddling. This conversation could never have happened between me and my father.

“What’s your favorite barrier?” he said, fingers twiddling, twiddling.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“The language barrier. What’s your favorite process?” He smirked.

“I give up,” I said, my crushed éminence pathetic and inedible back up on its greasy paper plate.

Paul’s eyes gleamed, especially the injured one. “I know you do. It’s the process of elimination. That’s how you do everything.”

I was back in my rental car, needless to say, and headed to the airport in less than an hour. I will be a great age before I try my luck with a visit there again.

Clarissa’s state of precarious maturation couldn’t be more different. Since college, she’s started a master’s at Columbia Teachers, intending to do work with severely disabled teens (her brother’s mental age), volunteered in a teen-moms shelter in Brooklyn, trained for the marathon, taken some acting lessons, campaigned for local liberals in Gotham and generally lived the rich, well-appointed girl-life with Cookie — who’s a foreign-currency trader for Rector-Speed in the World Trade Center and owns a power co-op on Riverside Drive, looking out at New Jersey. All seemed in place for a good long run.

Only, during this Gotham time — four years plus since college — Clarissa has told me, her life seemed to grow more and more undifferentiated, “both vertically and horizontally.” Everything, she noticed, began to seem a part of everything else, the world become very fluid and seamless and not too fast-paced, though all “really good.” Except, she wasn’t, she felt, “exactly facing all of life all the time,” but was instead living “in linked worlds inside a big world.” (People talk this way now.) There was school. There was her group of female friends. There was the shelter. There were the favorite little Provençal restaurants nobody else knew about. There was Cookie’s many-porched Craftsman-style house on Pretty Marsh in Maine (Cookie, whose actual name is Cooper, comes from the deepest of unhappy New England pockets). There was Cookie, whom she adored (I could see why). There was Wilbur, Cookie’s Weimaraner. There were the Manx cats. Plus some inevitable unattached men nobody took seriously. There were other “things,” lots of them — all fine as long as you stayed in the little “boxed, linked” world you found yourself in on any given day. Not fine, if you felt you needed to live more “out in the all-of-it, in the big swim.” Getting outside, moving around the boxes, or over them, or some goddamn thing like that, was, I guess, hard. Except being outside the boxes had begun to seem the only way it made sense to live, the only “life strategy” by which the results would ever be clear and mean anything. She had already begun thinking all this before I got sick.

My coming down with cancer amounted to nothing less than a great opportunity. She could take a break from her little boxed-linked Gotham world, claim some “shore leave,” dedicate herself to me — a good cause that didn’t require complete upheaval or even a big commitment, but which made her feel virtuous and me less bamboozled by death — while she lived at the beach and did some power thinking about where things were headed. “Pre-visioning,” she calls this brand of self-involved thinking, something apparently hard to do in a boxed-linked world where you’re having a helluva good time and anybody’d happily trade you out of it, since one interesting box connects so fluidly to another you hardly notice it’s happening because you’re so happy — except you’re not. It’s a means of training your sights on things (pre-visioning) that are really happening to you the instant they happen, and observing where they might lead, instead of missing all the connections. Possibly you had to go to Harvard to understand this. I went to Michigan.

Clarissa seems to think I live completely in the very complex, highly differentiated larger world she’s interested in, and that I “deal with things” very well all at once. She only believes this because I have cancer and my wife left me both in the same year and I apparently haven’t gone crazy yet — which amazes her. Her view is the view young people typically take of older citizens, assuming they don’t loathe us: That we’ve all seen a lot of stuff and need to be intensely (if briefly) studied. Though surviving difficulties isn’t the same as surviving them well. I don’t, in fact, think I’m doing that so successfully, though the Permanent Period is a help.

But there have been days during this rather pleasant, recuperative autumn when I’ve looked at my daughter — in the kitchen, on the beach, in the realty office on the phone — and realized she’s at that very moment pre-visioning me, wondering about my life, reifying me, forecasting my eventualities as presentiments of her own. Which I suppose is what parents are for. After a while it may be all we’re for. But there have also been gloomy days when rain sheeted the flat Atlantic off New Jersey, turning the ocean surface deep mottled green, and mist clogged the beach so you couldn’t see waves yet could view the horizon perfectly, and Clarissa and I were both in slack, sorry-sack spirits — when I’ve thought she might fancifully envy me being “ill,” for the way illness focuses life and clarifies it, brings all down to one good issue you can’t quibble with. You could call it the one big box, outside which there isn’t another box.

Once, while we were watching the World Series on TV, she suddenly asked if she might’ve had a twin sister who’d died at birth. I told her no but reminded her she’d had an older brother who died when she was little. And of course there was Paul. It was just a self-importanc-ing question she already knew the answer to. She was trying to make sure that what was true of herself was what she knew about, and wanted to hear it from me before it was too late. It’s similar to what Marguerite asked in our Sponsor visit. In a woman Clarissa’s age, you could say it was a respectable form of past-settlement, though again I’m not sure a settled past makes any difference, no matter how old you get to be.

And of course I know what Clarissa does not permit herself to be fearful of, and is by training hard-wired to confront: making the big mistake. Harvard teaches resilience and self-forgiveness and to regret as little as possible. Yet what she does fear and can’t say, and why she’s here with me and sometimes stares at me as if I were a rare, endangered and suffering creature, is unbearable pain. Something in Clarissa’s life has softened her to great pain, made her diffident and dodgy about it. She knows such fear’s a weakness, that pain’s unavoidable, wants to get beyond fearing it and out of those smooth boxes. But in some corner of her heart she’s still scared silly that pain will bring her down and leave nothing behind. Who could blame her?

Is it from me, you might reasonably ask, that she’s contracted this instinct for crucial avoidance? Probably, given my history.

Looking after me, though, may be a good means to pre-vision pain — mine, hers, hers about me — and make her ready, toughen her up for the inevitable, the one that comes ready or not, and that only your own death can save you from. It’s true I love her indefatigably and would help her with her “issues” if I could, but probably I can’t. Who am I to her? Only her father.

Clarissa and I reached our usual turn-around point on our beach walk — the paint-chipped, dented-roof Surfcaster Bar, built on stilts behind the beach berm and, due to the past summer’s tourist fall-off, still open after Halloween. Is it the Millennium Malaise, the election, the stock market or everything altogether that’s caused everybody in the country to want to wait and see? Knowing the answer to that would make you rich.

The shadowy, wide-windowed bar had its lights burning inside at a quarter to three. A few silhouetted Sea-Clift bibbers could be seen within. A forceful pepperoni and onion aroma drifted down to the beach, making me hungry.

Clarissa stood on one foot, putting her shoe on, a trick she performed with perfect balance, slipping it on behind her, mouth intent, lip bit, as if she was a splendid-spirited racehorse able to tend to herself.

We’d talked enough about how she and Paul had “turned out,” about me, about what I thought about marriage now that my second one seemed in limbo. We’d talked about how we both felt estranged from world events on the nightly news. It bothered her that a story was important one week, then forgotten the next, how that had to mean something about disengagement, loss of vital anchorage, the republic becoming ungovernable and irrelevant. There wasn’t much we disagreed on.

A colder midafternoon breeze plowed in off the ocean, elevating the kites and Frisbees to brighter heights. We were starting back. Clarissa put her arm on my shoulder and looked beyond me, up to the ghostly drinkers behind the Surfcaster’s picture window. “Einstein said a man doesn’t feel his own weight in free fall,” she said, and looked away toward the pretty, clouded coastal heavens, then gave her head a shake as if to jog loose a less pretentious thought. “Does that go for women, do you think?”

I said, “Einstein wasn’t that smart.” I just felt good about the beach, the breeze, the scruffy little bar above us behind the dune, where men I’d sold houses to were spying down on Clarissa with admiration and desire for the great beauty I’d somehow scored. “He sounds serious but isn’t. You’re not in free fall anyway.”

“I don’t like binary ways of thinking. I know you don’t.”

“And and but always seem the same to me. I like it.”

The long southerly coastline stretched toward my house and now seemed entirely new, observed from a changed direction. Where we were walking was almost on the spot where the team of German sappers came ashore in 1943 with hopes of blowing up something emblematic but were captured by a single off-duty Sea-Clift policeman out for a night-time stroll with his dog, Perky. The sappers claimed to be escaping the Nazis but went to Leavenworth anyway and were sent home when the war was over. Local citizens of German descent wanted a plaque to commemorate those who resisted Hitler, but Jewish groups opposed and the initiative failed, as did an initiative for the policeman’s statue. He was later murdered by shady elements who, it was said, got the right man.

From the south I breathed the pungent, sweet resinous scent from the National Shoreline Park, closed by then for the approaching winter. On the beach, discreetly back against the grassy berm, a family unit of Filipinos, one of our new subpopulations, was holding a picnic. These newcomers arrive in increasing numbers from elsewhere in the Garden State, take jobs as domestics, gardeners and driveway repairmen. One has opened a Chicago-style pizzeria beside my office. Another has a coin laundry. A third, a dirty-movie theater in Ortley Beach. Everyone likes them. Our VFW chapter officially “remembers” their brave support of our boys after the terrible march on Bataan. A Filipino flag flies on the 4th of July.

These beach lovers had established an illegal campfire and were laughing and toasting weenies, seated around on the cold sand, enjoying life. The men were small and compact and wore what looked like old golfer’s shirts and new jeans and sported wavy, lacquered coifs. The women were small and substantial and peered across the sands at Clarissa and me with lowered, guilty eyes. We’re entitled, their dark looks said, we live here. One man cheerfully waved his long fork at us, a blackened furter hanging from its prongs. A boom box played, though not loud, whatever Filipino music sounds like. We both gave a wave back and plodded toward home.

“As much as you think your life is just another life, it is, I guess,” Clarissa said, her long legs carrying her ahead of me. A flat, nasal New England curtness had long ago entered her inflection, as if words were chosen for how she could say them more than for what they meant. She’s young, and can still show it. She was now bored with me and was no doubt thinking about getting back to the house and on the phone to the new “friend” she’d tentatively invited for Thanksgiving but who didn’t have a name yet — and still doesn’t.

“Do you ever think that you were born in New Jersey and thanked your lucky stars, since you could’ve been born in south Mississippi like me and had to spend years getting it out of your system?” There was not much for us to talk about. I was vamping.

Something about the Filipinos had turned her disheartened. Possibly their small prospects had begun to seem like hers.

“I guess I don’t think about that enough.” She smiled at me, hands deep in her khaki pockets, her cross-trainers toeing through the tide-dry sand, eyes bent down. This was suddenly a female persona younger than she was and attractive to boys, who were now on the agenda. And then it vanished. “So, what’re the big persuasive questions, Frank?” Persuasive was another favorite word, along with vertical and horizontal. It was serious-sounding and made her seem like a smart no-bullshitter. Not a kid. You’re persuasive, you’re not persuasive. She was trying to pre-vision me again.

“The really big ones. Let’s see,” I said. “Can I remember my shoes are in the shoe shop before thirty days go by and they get donated to the Goodwill? What’s my PIN number? Which’re the big scallops? Which Everly Brother’s Don? Have I actually seen Touch of Evil or just dreamed I did? Like that.” I turned my attention to an acute and perfect V of geese winging low a quarter mile offshore, headed, it seemed, in the wrong direction for the season. The eyesight’s good, I thought, better than my daughter’s, who didn’t see them.

“Should I become like you, then?” Tall, handsome, unwieldy girl that she is, sharp-witted, loyal and as attentive to goodness as Diogenes, she almost seemed to want me to say, Yep. And let me keep you forever; let nothing change any more than it has. Be me and be mine. I won’t be me forever.

“Nope, one of me’s enough,” is what I did say, and with a thud in the heart, watching the geese fade up the flyway until they were gone into a bracket of sun far out in the autumn haze.

“I don’t think it’d be so bad to be you,” she said. Outlandishly, then, she took my right hand in her left one and held it like she did when she was a schoolgirl and was briefly in love with me. “I think being you would be all right. I could be you and be happy. I could learn some things.”

“It’s too late for that,” I said, but just barely.

“Too late for me, you mean.” My hand in hers.

“No. I don’t mean that,” I said. Then I didn’t say much more, and we walked home together.

What Clarissa actually did for me was take a firm grasp on the suddenly slack leash of my cancer-stunned life, which I’d begun to let slip almost the instant I got the unfavorable biopsy news.

You think you know what you’ll do in a dire moment: pound blood out of your temples with your fists; scream monkey noises; buy a yellow Porsche with your Visa card and take a one-way drive down the Pan-American Highway. Or just climb into bed, not crawl out for weeks, sit in the dark with bottles of Tanqueray, watching ESPN.

What I did was transcribe onto a United Jersey notepad a shorthand version of what the doctor read off: my new diagnosis. “Pros Ca! Gleas 3, low aggr, confined to gland, treatment ops to disc, cure rate + with radical prostetec, call Thurs.” This note I stuck on my electric pencil sharpener, then I drove up to Ortley Beach and showed a small sandy-floored, back-from-the-beach prefab to a couple who’d lost their son in Desert Storm and who’d lived under a cloud ever since, but one day snapped out of it and decided a house near the ocean was the best way to celebrate mourning’s closure. The Trilbys, these staunch citizens were. They felt good about life on that day, whereas they’d been miserable for a decade. I knew they didn’t want to go home empty-handed and had more to be happy about than I did to be morose. So, for a few hours I forgot all about my prostate, and before the hot August afternoon was concluded, I’d sold them the house for four twenty-five.

That night, I slept perfectly — though I did wake up twice with no thought that I had cancer, then remembered it. The next day, I called Clarissa in Gotham to leave a message for Cookie about some tech stocks she’d advised me to unload, and almost as an afterthought mentioned I might have to put up with “a little surgery” because the sawbones over at Urology Partners seemed to think I had minor…prostate cancer! My heart, exactly the way it did sitting out front of Marguerite’s house, lurched bangety-bang-bang like a cat trapped in a garbage pail. My hands went sweaty on the desktop in my at-home office. I got light-headed, tight-brained, seemed unable to keep the receiver pressed to my ear, though of course it was mushed so close it hurt for a week.

“What kind of surgery?” Clarissa spoke with her competent, efficient cadence, like a veteran court clerk.

“Well, probably they just take it out. I—”

“Take it out! Why? Is it that bad? Do you have a second opinion?” I knew her dark eyebrows were colliding and her gold-flecked gray irises snapping with new importance. Her voice was more serious than I hoped mine sounded, which made me want to cry. (I didn’t.)

I said, “I don’t know.” The receiver wobbled in my hand and pinched the helix of my ear.

“When’re you seeing this doctor again?” She was terrifyingly businesslike. “This doctor” indicated she thought I’d gone to a cut-rate, drive-thru cancer clinic in Hackensack.

“Friday. I guess maybe Friday.” It was Monday.

“I’ll come down tonight. You’ve got insurance, I hope.”

“It’s not that urgent. Prostate cancer’s not like bamboo. I’ll survive tonight.” I’d already looked at my Blue Cross papers, contemplated not surviving the night.

“Have you told Mom?”

I jabbingly imagined telling Ann — a “by the way” during one of our coffee rendezvous. She’d be not too interested, maybe change the subject: Yeah, well that’s too bad, ummm. Divorced spouses — long divorced, like Ann and me — don’t get over-interested in each other’s ailments.

“Have you told Sally?” I sensed Clarissa to be writing things down: Dad…cancer…serious. She favored canary yellow Post-its.

“I don’t have her number.” A lie. I had a 44 emergency-only number but had never used it.

“Let’s don’t tell Paul yet, okay? He’ll be strange.” We didn’t need to say he was already strange. “I can get a ride to Neptune with a girl in my theory class. You’ll have to pick me up.”

“I can drive to Neptune.”

“I’ll call when I leave.”

“That’s great.” Great was not what I meant to say. Oh-no-oh-no-oh-no is what I meant to say — but naturally wouldn’t. “What are we going to do?”

“Do some checking around.”

I heard paper tearing on her end, then the other line go click-click, click-click, click-click. Someone else was needing her attention. “What about school?”

She paused. Click-click. “Do you want me not to come?”

I hadn’t felt desperate, but all at once I felt as desperate as a condemned man. My way — the easy way — had seemed like the good way. Her way, the court clerk’s way, was full of woe, after which nothing would be better. What do twenty-five-year-old girls know about prostate cancer? Do they teach you about it at Harvard? Can you Google up a cure? “No. I’m happy for you to come.”

“Good.”

“Thanks.” My heart had gone back to, for my age, normal. “I’m actually relieved.” I was smiling, as though she was standing right in front of me.

“Just don’t forget to pick me up. Think Neptune.”

“I can remember Neptune. Jack Nicholson’s from Neptune. I’ve got cancer, but my brain still works.”

Clarissa moved herself in that night and in two days drove Sally’s LeBaron to Gotham and brought back ten blue milk crates of clothes, books, a pair of in-line skates, a box of CDs, a Bose and a few framed pictures — Cookie and Wilbur and her, me and Cookie in front of a Moroccan restaurant I didn’t remember, her brother Paul in younger days on her mother’s husband’s Hinckley in Deep River, a group of tall, laughing rowing-team girls from college. These she installed in the guest suite overlooking the beach. Cookie drove down on Thursday in her diamond-polished forest green Rover and stood around the living room smoking oval cigarettes, fidgeting and trying to act congenial. She knew something was happening to her, but wanted not to go to extremes.

When Cookie was leaving, I walked out to her car with her. She and Clarissa had stated their good-byes upstairs. Clarissa hadn’t come down. The story was that this was just until I got back on my feet. Though I was on my feet.

As I’ve said, Cookie is teeth-gnashingly beautiful — small and a tiny bit stout, but with a long, dense shock of black hair tinted auburn, black eyes, arms and legs the color of walnuts, silky-skinned, a round Levantine-looking face (in spite of her Down East Yankee DNA), with curvaceous plum-color lips, a major butt and thick eyebrows she didn’t fuss over. Not your standard lesbian, in my experience. Somewhere in the past, she’d incurred a tiny, featherish swimming-pool scar at the left corner of her lip that always attracted my attention like a beauty mark. She wore a pinpoint diamond stud in her right ear, and had a discreet tattoo of a heart with Clarissa inside on the back of her left hand. She spoke in a hard-jaw, trading-floor voice trained to utter non-negotiable words with ease. She’s Log Cabin Republican if she’s an inch tall.

Cookie took my arm as we stood on the pea-gravel drive with nothing to say. Terns cried in the August breeze, which had brought the sound of the sea and an oceany paleness of light around to the landward side of the house. A sweet minty aroma inhabited her blue silk shirt and white linen trousers. I felt the heft of her breast against my elbow. She was happy to give me a little jolt. I was surely happy to have a little jolt, under the circumstances. I was seeing the doctors again the next day.

“I feel pretty good, considering,” Cookie said in her hard-as-nails voice. “How do you feel, Mr. Bascombe?” She never called me Frank.

I didn’t want to ponder how I felt. “Fine,” I said.

“Well, that’s not bad, then. My girlfriend’s taking a furlough. You’ve got cancer. But we both feel okay.” This was, of course, the manner by which every man, woman, child and domestic animal in Cookie’s Maine family accounted for and assessed each significant life’s turning: dry, chrome-plated, chipper talk that accepted the world was a pile of shit and always would be, but hey.

I wondered if Clarissa was at an upstairs window, watching us having our brisk little talk.

“I’m hopeful,” I said, with no conviction.

“I think I’ll go have a swim at the River Club,” she said. “Then I think I’ll get drunk. What’re you going to do?” She squeezed my arm to her side like I was her old uncle. We were beside her Rover. Her name was worked into the driver’s door, probably with rubies. My faded red Suburban sat humped beside the house like a cartoon jalopy. I admired the deep, complex tread of her Michelins — my way to sustain a moment with an arm wedged to her not inconsiderable breast. If Cookie’d made the slightest gesture of invitation, I’d have piled in the car with her, headed to the River Club and possibly never been heard from again. Lesbian or no lesbian. Girlfriend’s father or no girlfriend’s father. The world’s full of stranger couples.

“I’ve got a good novel to read,” I said, though I couldn’t think of its author or its title or what it was about or why I’d said that, since it wasn’t true. I was just thinking she was a stand-up girl, touching and unforgettable. I couldn’t conceive why Clarissa would let her go. I’d have lived with her forever. At least I thought so that morning.

“Did you get rid of Pylon Semiconductor?”

“I’ll do it tomorrow,” I said, and nodded. Squeeze, squeeze, squeeze — my arm, arm, arm.

“Don’t forget. Their quarterlies’re out way below projected. There’ll be a change at CFO. Better get busy.”

“No. Yes.” Wilbur, the mournful yellow-eyed Weimaraner, stood in the backseat, looking at me. Windows were left open for his benefit.

“You know I love Clarissa, don’t you?” she said. I was learning to like her hacksaw delivery.

“I do.” She was pulling away. This was all I was getting.

“Nothing good comes easy or simple. Right?”

“That’s been my experience.” I smiled at her. Can you love someone for three minutes?

“She just needs some context now. It’s good for her to be here with you.”

Context was another of their frictionless Harvard words. Like persuasive. It meant something different to my demographic group. To my quartile, context was the first thing you lost when the battle began. I didn’t much like being a context—even if I was one.

“Where’s your father,” I asked. Her father was rich as a sheikh, I’d been told, had done things murky and effortless for the CIA sometime, somewhere. Cookie disapproved of him but was devoted. Another impossible parent in a long line.

Mention of the pater made her brain go spangly, and she smiled at me glamorously. “He’s in Maine. He’s a painter. He and my mom split.”

“Are you his context?”

“Peter raises Airedales, builds sailboats and has a young Jewish girlfriend.” (The venerable trifecta.) “So probably not.” She shook her fragrant hair, then pressed a button on her key chain, snapping the Rover’s locks to attention, taillights flashing hello. Wilbur wagged his nubby tail inside. “I hope you feel better,” she said, climbing in. I saw the ghost outline of her thong through her white pants, the heartbreaking bight of her saddle-hard butt. She smiled back at me from the leather driver’s capsule — I was gooning at her, of course — then let her gaze elevate to the house, as if a face was framed in a window, mouthing words she could take heart from: Come back, come back. She didn’t know Clarissa very well.

“I’m hopeful, remember,” I said, more to Wilbur than to her.

She fitted on her heavy black sunglasses, pulled her seat belt across and kicked off her sandals to grip the pedals of her rich-man’s sporting vehicle meant for the Serengeti, not the Parkway. “Why does this feel so goddamned strange?” she said, and looked sorrowful, even behind her mirroring shades. “Isn’t it strange? Does this feel strange to you?” Reflected in her Italian lenses I was a small faraway man, pale and frail and curved — insignificant in lurid-pink plaid Bermudas and a red tee-shirt that had Realty-Wise on it in white block letters. She switched on the ignition, shook out her hair.

“It’s a little strange,” I admitted.

“Thank you.” She smiled, her elbows on the steering wheel. Frowning and smiling were not far apart in her repertoire and went with the voice. “Why is that?” Wilbur nuzzled her ear from the backseat. A plaid blanket had been installed — also for his benefit. She closed the door, laid her arm on the window ledge so I could see the heart with my daughter’s name scored on her plump little dorsum.

“Uncharted territory.” I smiled.

A single limpid tear wobbled free from beneath her glasses’ frame. “Ahhh.” She might’ve noticed the tattoo.

“But it’s all right. Uncharted territory can be good. Take it from me.” I’d happily have adopted her if she wouldn’t let me sleep with her at the River Club.

“Too bad you weren’t my father.”

Too bad you’re not my wife, flashed in my mind. It would’ve been an inappropriate thing to say, even if true. She should’ve been with Clarissa, like I should’ve been with Sally. There were a hundred places I should’ve been in my life when I wasn’t.

She must’ve thought it was a good thing to have said, though, because when I was silent, standing staring at her, what she said was, “Yep.” She patted Wilbur’s head on her shoulder, clamped the big Rover into gear — its muffling system tuned like a Brahms organ toccata — and began easing out my driveway. “Don’t forget to sell your Pylon,” she said out the window, wiping her tear with her thumb as she rolled over the gravel and onto Poincinet Road and disappeared.

What Clarissa did — while I drove off to the Realty-Wise office on Tuesday, indomitably showed two houses, performed an appraisal, scrounged a listing, attended a closing and generally acted as if I didn’t have prostate cancer, just a touch of indigestion — was to attack “my situation” like a general whose sleeping forces have suffered a rear-guard sneak attack and who needs to reply with energetic force or face a long and uncertain campaign, whose outcome, due to attrition and insubordination and bad morale among the troops, is foregone to be failure.

Dressed in baggy gym shorts and a faded Beethoven tee-shirt, she brought her laptop to the breakfast room and set up on the glass-topped table that overlooks the ocean through floor-to-ceiling windows and simply ran down everything in creation that had to do with what I “had.” She spent all week, till Friday, researching, clicking on this, printing that, chatting with cancer victims in Hawaii and Oslo, talking to friends whose fathers had been in my spot, waiting on hold for hot lines in Atlanta, Houston, Baltimore, Boston, Rochester, even Paris. She wanted, she said, to get as much into her “frame” as she could in these crucial early days so that a clear, confident and anxiety-allaying battle plan could be drafted and put in place, and all I (we) had to do was make the first step and the rest would take care of itself just the way we’d all like everything to — marriage, buying a used car, parenting, career choices, funeral arrangements, lawn care. I’d show up from the realty office in rambling but wafer-thin good spirits at 12:45, armed with a container of crab bisque or a Caesar salad or a bulldog grinder from Luchesi’s on 98th Ave. We’d sit amidst her papers and beside her computer, drink bottled water, eat lunch and sort through what she’d learned since I’d escaped — on the run, you can believe it — five hours before.

I was far too young for “watchful waiting,” she’d determined, whereby the patient enters a Kafkaesque bargain with fate that maybe the disease will progress slowly (or not progress), that normal life will fantastically reconvene, many years march triumphantly by, until another whatever picks you off like a sniper (hit by a tour bus; a gangrenous big toe) before the first one can finish you. It’s great for seventy-five-year-olds in Boynton Beach, but not so hot for us fifty-fives, whose very vigor is the enemy within, and who disease tends to feast on like hyenas.

“You’ve got to do something,” Clarissa said over her picked-at sausage and pepper muffaletta. She looked to me — her father in a faltering spirit — like a glamorous movie star playing the part of a fractious, normally remote but frightened movie daughter, performing just this once her daughterly duty for a dad who’s not been around for decades but now finds himself in Dutch, and is played by a young Rudy Vallee in a rare serious role.

A second opinion was nondiscretionary — you just do it, she said, licking her fingertips. Though, she added (Beethoven glaring at me, leonine), that a nutritional history that’s included “lots of dairy” and plenty of these rollicking sausage torpedoes was definitely one of many “contributing toxic elements,” along with too little tofu, green tea, bulgur and flax. “The literature,” she said matter-of-factly, stated that getting cancer at my age was a “function” (another of the banned words) of the unwholesome Western lifestyle and was “a kind of compass needle” for modern life and the raging nineties tuned to the stock market, CNN, traffic congestion and too much testosterone in the national bloodstream. Blah, blah, blah, blah. Chinese, she said, never get prostate cancer until they come to the U.S., when they join the happy cavalcade. Mike, in fact, was now as much at risk as I was, having lived — and eaten — in New Jersey for more than a decade. He wouldn’t believe a word of this, I told her, and would burst out yipping at the thought.

I looked wistfully out at the sparkling summer ocean, where yet another container ship was plying the horizon, possibly loaded with testosterone, seeming not to move at all, just sit. Then I imagined it filled with all the ordained foods I’d never eaten: yogurt, flaxseed, wheat berries, milk thistle — but unable to get to shore because of the American embargo. Come to port, come to port, I silently called. I’ll be good now.

“Do you want to know how it all works?” Clarissa said like a brake mechanic.

“Not all that much.”

“It’s a chain reaction,” she said. “Poorly differentiated cells, cells without good boundaries, run together in a kind of sprawl.”

“Doesn’t sound unfamiliar.”

“I’m speaking metaphorically.” She lowered her chin in her signature way to bespeak seriousness, gray eyes on me accusingly. “Your prostate is actually the size of a Tootsie Roll segment, and where your bad cells are, the biopsy says — down in the middle — is good.” She sniffed. “Would you like to know exactly how an erection works? That’s pretty amazing. Physically, it seems sort of implausible. In the books it’s referred to as a ‘vascular event.’ Isn’t that amusing?”

I stared across the table and did not know how to say “no more,” other than to scream it, which wouldn’t have sounded as grateful as I wanted to seem.

“It’s interesting,” she said, looking down at her papers as if she wanted to dig one out and show me. “You probably never had problems, did you, with your vascular events?”

“Not that often.” I don’t know why I picked that to say, except it was true. What we were talking about now was all strangely true.

“Did you know you can have an orgasm without an erection?”

“I don’t want one of those.”

“Women do it, sort of,” she said, “not that you’d be interested. Men are all about hardness, and women are all about how things feel.” All about: yet another item on the outlawed list. “Not too difficult to choose, really.”

“This isn’t funny to me,” I said, utterly daunted.

“No, none of it is. It’s just my homework. It’s my lab report in my filial-responsibility class.” Clarissa smiled at me indulgently, after which I went back to the office in a daze.

Next day, we met again over lunch and Clarissa, now dressed in a faded River Club polo and khaki trousers that made her look jaunty and businesslike, told me she basically had it all figured now. We could put a plan in force so that when I went back to Urology Partners in Haddam on Friday to review my treatment options, I’d be “holding all the cards.”

Hopkins and Sloan Kettering were first-rate, but the real brain-trust treasure trove was Mayo in Rochester. This came from computer rankings, from a book she’d read overnight and from a Harvard friend whose father was at Hopkins but liked Mayo and could probably get us in in a jiffy.

The options, she felt, were pretty much straightforward. My Gleason score was relatively low, general health good, my tumor positioned such that radioactive iodine-seed implants, with a titanium BB delivery system, could be the “way to go” if the Mayo doctors agreed. Having “the whole thing yanked,” she said (here her eyes fell to the toasted eggplant napoleon I’d bitten the bullet and brought back), was better in the philosophical sense that having no transmission is better than keeping an old beat-up one that might explode. But the side effects of “a radical” involved “lifestyle adjustments and a chance of impairment” (adult diapers, possibly a flat-line on my vascular events). The procedure itself was tolerable, though drastic, and in the end you might not live any longer, while “quality-of-life issues” could be “problematic.”

“It’s a trade-off,” she said, and bit her lower lip. She looked across at me and seemed not to like this conversation. It was no longer a lab report, but words that shed shadowy light on another’s future in, as it’s said, real time. “Why not take the easier route if you can?” she said. “I would.” As always, the best way out is not through.

“They put seeds in?” I said, baffled and contrary.

“They put seeds in,” Clarissa said. She was reading from a sheet of paper she’d printed out. “Which are the size of sesame seeds, and you get anywhere up to ninety, under general anesthetic, using stainless-steel needles. Minimal trauma. You’re asleep less than an hour and can go home or wherever you want to go the same day. They basically bombard the shit out of the tumor cells and leave the other tissue alone. The seeds stay in forever and become inert in about three months. Once they’re in, there’s some minor side effects. You might pee more for a while, and it might hurt some. You can’t let babies sit in your lap, at first, and you have to try not to cough or sneeze real hard, because you can launch one of these seeds out through your penis — which I guess isn’t cool. But you won’t set off airport security, and the risk to pets is low. You won’t infect anybody you have sex”—on the restricted list—“with. And you probably won’t be incontinent or impotent. Most important”—she squinted at the paper as if her eyes were blurring, and scratched a finger into the thick hair above her forehead—“you won’t be letting this take over the core of your manhood, and the chances are in ten years you’ll be cancer-free.” She looked up and turned her lips inward to form a line, as if this hadn’t necessarily been so pleasant, but now she’d done it. “If you want me to,” she said, picking up a scrap of eggplant and bringing it purposefully toward her mouth, “I’ll go out to Mayo with you. We can have a father-daughter thing, with you having your radioactive seeds sown into your prostate.”

“I don’t think that’s the job for the daughter,” I said. I’d already decided to do whatever she said. Talking to your father about his dysfunctions and impairments wasn’t a job for the daughter, either. But there we were. Who else would I want to help me? And who would?

“Okay,” Clarissa said amiably. “I don’t mind, though. I don’t know what the daughter’s job really is.” She chewed her eggplant while staring at me, leaning on her knobby elbows. She looked like a teen eating a limp French fry. She quietly burped and looked surprised. “It’d be nice if the wife was around. That’s a different screenplay, I guess. Marriage is a strange way to express love, isn’t it? Maybe I won’t try it.”

I, at that instant, thought of “the wife,” just like people do in movies but almost never in actual life. We usually think about absolutely nothing in these becalmed moments, or else about having our tires rotated or buying a new roll of stamps. Writers, though, like to juice these moments to get at you while you’re vulnerable. What I actually did think of, however, was Sally — sitting down to this very glass-topped breakfast table last June, with the hot sun on the water and bathers standing in the surf, contemplating immersion. A tiny biplane had buzzed down the beachfront, pulling a fluttering sign that said NUDE REVIEW — NJ 35 METEDECONK. I had the New York Times flattened out to the sports page and was skimming a story about a Lakers win, before heading to the obits. It was the morning Sally told me she was leaving for Scotland with her long-presumed-dead former husband, Wally, who’d strangely visited us the week before. She loved me, she said, always would, but it seemed to her “important” (there are so many of these slippery words now) to finish “a thing” she’d started — her ossified marriage, which I’d thought was kaflooey. It seemed, she said, that I didn’t “all that much need” her, and that “under the circumstances” (always treacherous) it was worse to be with someone who didn’t need you than to let someone who maybe did be alone — i.e., Wally, a boy I’d actually gone to military school with but never knew before he showed up in my house. In other words (I supplied this part), she loved Wally more than me.

I sat there while Sally said some other things, wondering how in hell she could conclude I didn’t need her, and what in hell “need” meant when another person’s “need” was in question.

Then I cried. But she left anyway.

And that was that — right at the table where Clarissa said she’d go to Mayo with me to have my prostate radiated and (as the world says) “hopefully” my life saved.

“I understand the drive south of Red Wing along the Mississippi is gorgeous in the summer.” Clarissa was standing, stacking my lunch plate onto hers.

“What’s that?” My interior head, for many plausible reasons, felt restless — my grip on the moment, her offer, Sally’s departure, the setting overlooking the Sea-Clift beach, the idea of Red Wing, my newly defined physical condition and survival possibilities all scrabbling for attention.

“I was thinking about what I could do while you were in the hospital. I looked Minnesota up on the Web.” She smiled the beautiful smile I knew would sink a thousand ships, but was now saving mine. “Minnesota’s okay. In the summer anyway.”

“I’m sorry, sweetheart. I wasn’t paying attention.” I smiled up at her.

“I don’t blame you,” Clarissa said, moving her long bones and having a stretch in the sunlight that fell in on us out of the August sky. Oddly enough, and for an instant, I felt glad about everything. “If I’d heard what you heard,” she said, “I wouldn’t pay much attention, either.” And that was finally the way the whole matter was decided.

5

The drive out to De Tocqueville minds the woodsy curves of King George Road away from Haddam centre ville, along the walled grounds of the Fresh Light Seminary, now (in the view of local alarmists) under the control of South Korean army factions. The tall, gaunt, flat-roofed old buildings the Presbyterians built loom beyond the darkening, oak-clustered Great Lawn like a New England insane asylum, though within, all souls are saved instead of lost. Single yellowed windows glow high up the building fronts. Fall classes are ended. Foreign students far from Singapore and Gabon, with no chance of travel home, are locked in their dorm rooms front-loading Scripture into their teeming brains, fine-tuning their homiletic techniques in front of the closet mirror, experiencing, no doubt, the first intimation that most believers aren’t real believers and don’t care what you say if you just take their minds off their woes. Some motivated seminarians, I see, have stretched a brash white-red-and-blue banner between two sentinel oaks, proclaiming BUSH IS GOD’S PRESIDENT AND CHARLTON HESTON IS MY HERO.

Traffic out King George has slackened to a trickle, as though a get-out-of-town-now whistle had sounded, whereas normally it’s bumper-to-bumper down to Trenton, three to seven. But the nearing holiday and worsening weather have returned Haddam to its later-after-hours, nothing-happening somnolence, which all would love to legislate, with day workers, secretaries and substitute teachers broomed out back to their studio apartments and double-wides in Ewingville and Wilburtha.

Possibly it’s a side effect of the Millennium (which doesn’t seem to have other effects), or else it’s my recent indisposed passage in life, but often these days I’m thunderstruck by the simplest, most commonplace events — or nonevents — as if the regular known world had suddenly illuminated itself with a likable freshness, rendering me pleased. Geniuses must experience this every day, with great inventions and discoveries the happy results. (“Isn’t it neat how birds fly. Too bad we can’t….” “If you just rounded off the sides of this granite block, you could maybe move it a mite easier….” etc., etc.) My recent fresh realizations were on the order of being amazed that someone thought to put a yellow light in between the green and the red ones, or that everybody takes the road from Haddam to Trenton for granted but nobody thinks what a stroke of brilliance it was to build the first road. None of these has made me feel I could invent anything myself, and I don’t share my perceptions with others, for fear of arousing suspicions that I’ve gone crazy due to my treatment. And of course I don’t have anybody to share perceptions with anyway. (Clarissa would be bored to concrete.) And to be truthful, my feeling of low-wattage wonder is usually tinged with willowy sadness, since these alertings and sudden re-recognitions carry with them the sensation of seeing all things for the final time — which of course could be true, though I hope not.

Not long ago, I was in my Realty-Wise office, at my desk with my sock feet up, reading the National Realty Roundtable Agents’ Bulletin — a tedious article from their research department about locked, float-down mortgage rates being the wave of the future — when my eye slipped down to a squib at the end that said, “When asked what practical value there is in knowing if neutrinos possess mass, Dr. Dieter von Reichstag of the Mains Institute, Heidelberg, admitted he didn’t have the foggiest idea, but what really amazed him was that on a minor planet that circles an average-size star (earth), a species has developed that can even ask that question.”

I’m sure this had some interesting connections to locked, float-downs and to what amazing product enhancements they are in the residential mortgage market (I didn’t read to the end). But the amazement Dr. von Reichstag admitted to is more or less what I feel with frequency these days, albeit about less weighty matters. Dr. von Reichstag may also feel the same sensation of last-go-round somberness that I feel, since all new sensations carry in their DNA intimations of their ending. Viewing the new in this way almost certainly relates to having cancer, and with being an older fast-fading star myself.

But driving out King George, on the road to meet my ex-wife — a meeting I have trepidations about — I experience in this late-day gloom another of my illuminations, one that interests me, even though it strikes me as tiresome. Simply stated: What an odd thing it is to have an ex-wife you have to have a meeting with! Millions, needless to say, do it day in and day out for legions of good reasons. Chinamen do it. Swahilis do it. Inuits do it. Anytime you see a man and woman sitting having coffee in a food court at the mall, or having a drink together in the Johnny Appleseed Bar, or walking side-by-side out of the Foremost Farms into a glaring summer sun holding Slurpees, and you instinctively force onto them your own understanding of what they could be up to (adulterers, lawyer-client, old high school chums), it’s much more likely you’re seeing an ex-wife and ex-husband engaged in contact that all the acrimony in the world, all the hostility, all the late payments, the betrayals, the loneliness and sleepless nights spent concocting cruel and crueler punishments still can’t prevent or not make inevitable.

What is it about marriage that it won’t just end? I’ve now had two go on the fritz, and I still don’t get it. Sally Caldwell may be asking this question wherever she is with the shape-shifting Wally. I hope it’s true.

But is this how life is supposed to be — loving someone, but knowing with certainty you’ll never, never, never (because neither of you remotely wants it) have that person except in this sorry ersatz way that requires a “meeting” to discuss who the hell knows what? Clarissa doesn’t agree and believes all things can be adjusted and made better, and that Ann and I can finally blubbety, blub, blub. But we can’t. And, in fact, if we could, doing so would represent the very linked boxes Clarissa herself claims to hate. Only they’d be mine and Ann’s boxes. A lot of life is just plain wrong. And the older I get, the more clearly and often wrong it seems. And all you can do about it — which is what Clarissa is trying to pre-vision — is just start getting used to it, start selecting amazement over bewilderment. This whole subject, you might say, is just another version of fear of dying. But my bet is 80 percent of divorced people feel this way — bewildered yet possibly also amazed by life — and go on feeling it until the heavy draperies close. The Permanent Period is, of course, the antidote.

The turn-off to De Tocqueville Academy is like the entrance to a storied baronial game preserve — a lichenous, arched stone gate carved with standing stags holding plaques with Latin mottoes on them. The gate alone would cause any parent driving little Seth or little Sabrina, in the backseat of the Lexus reading Li Po and Sartre three levels above their age group, to feel justly served and satisfied by life. “Seth’s at De Tocqueville. It’s rilly competitive, but worth every sou. His fifth-grade teacher’s got a Ph.D. in philosophy from Uppsala and did his post-doc at the Sorbonne—”

Inside the gate, the road, murky in early-dark and drizzle, narrows and passes into first-growth hardwood, dense and primordial. Yellow speed moguls proliferate. Roadside signs let the uninitiated know what sort of place he or she’s entering: We’re Liberal! GORE FOR PRESIDENT placards just like out on Route 206 clutter the grassy verge as my headlights pass, while others demand that someone GET US OUT! that PEACE IS WORTH VIOLENCE, that we all should STOP THE CARNAGE! I’m not sure which carnage they have in mind. There’s one lonely Bush sign, which I’m sure has been put up to preserve the endowment, since no one here would vote for Bush any more than they’d vote for a chimp.

A pair of whitetails suddenly appears in my headlights, and I have to idle up close and beep-beep before they snort, flag their tails and saunter onto the road edge and begin nibbling grass, unfazed. De Tocqueville, back in the twenties, was in fact a vaunted hunting woods for rich Gotham investment bigwigs (part of the carnage) and was then called Muirgris, which is embossed on the gate in Latin. Packard-loads of happy fat men in tweeds rumbled down on weekends, disported like pashas, drank like Frenchmen, consorted with ladies imported from Philly and occasionally stepped outside to blow the local fauna to smithereens, before packing up on Sundays and happily motoring home.

Muirgris is now De Tocqueville — and a bane of the old roisterers — a “sanctuary” overrun with deer, turkeys, skunks, possum, squirrels, raccoons, porcupines, some say a catamount and a bear or two, all of which enjoy refuge. Disgruntled Haddam home owners living outside the Muirgris boundaries have voiced complaints about predation issues (deer and bunnies eating their winged euonymus) and made dark threats about hiring professional hunter-trappers to “thin the herd” using controversial net-and-bolt devices, all of which has the gentle De Tocqueville staffers up in arms. There have been property-line confrontations, township-council shouting scenes, police called at late hours. Lawsuits have been filed as the animals have crowded inside, seeking protection, and new worries about Lyme disease, bird flu and rabies are now rumored. A relative of one of the original old sports, an interior design consultant from Gotham, gave a speech at commencement, saying his forebear would want Muirgris to stay up with the new century’s values and be as “green” today as he was “bloody-minded” in his own time. So far, the issue is far from decided.

I wind a cautious way down to campus — speed bump to speed bump. The school’s buildings are all sited around the old rogues’ hunting lodge, a regal log and sandstone Adirondack-style dacha now converted into an “Admin Mansion,” with earth-friendly faculty and classroom modules built down into the woods, as if prep school was a dreamy summer camp on Lake Memphremagog, instead of a hot petri dish where the future of the fortunate gets on track, while the less lucky schlump off to Colgate and Minnesota-Duluth. My son Paul didn’t rate a sniff here ten years ago.

Ann’s styleless brown Honda Accord sits alone in the shadowy, sodium-lit faculty lot, the rest of the De Tocqueville staff long gone for Turkey Day festivities. It’s possible Ann wants to discuss the children today: Clarissa’s revised gender agenda and lack of life direction; Paul’s arrival tomorrow with a companion; how to apportion visiting hours, etc. She may, in fact, be afraid of Paul, as I slightly am, though he claims she’s his “favorite parent.” Having children can sometimes feel like a long, not very intense depression, since after a while neither party has much left to give the other (except love, which isn’t always simple). You’re each, after all, taken up with your own business — staying alive, in my case. And for reasons they have no control over, the children are always aware they’re waiting for you to croak. Paul has expressed this very view as a “generic fact” of parent-child relations, point-blank to his mother, which is probably why she fears him. Clarissa’s current gift-of-life to me is the rarest exception, though one partly entered on by her — and why not — because it allows her to think of herself as equally rare and exceptional.

In any case, conversations with one’s ex-wife always exist in a breed-unto-themselves/zero-gravity atmosphere that’s attractive for its old familiarities, but finally less interesting than communication with an alien. Whenever I’m around Ann, no matter how civil or chatty or congenial we manage it, no matter what the advertised subject matter (it was worse when the kids were younger), her silent thoughts always turn to the old go-nowhere ifs and what-ifs, all the ways “certain people” (who else?) should be, but mysteriously are not. Try, try, try to be better. Award good-citizenship medals, wait patiently at bedsides, shell out my last dime for kids’ therapy — still Ann can’t ignore the one fatally blown circuit from long ago, the one that doused the lights and put karmic unity forever out of reach. The Permanent Period again stands me in good stead here by allowing me to take for granted exactly who I am — good, or awful — not who I should be, and along the way blurs the past to haze. But Ann is finally a life-long essentialist and thinks there’s a way all things should be, no matter how the land lies around her feet. Whereas I am a lifelong practitioner of choices and always see things as possibly different from how they look.

But even with these asymmetries being in continuous effect, I constantly carry around a sometimes heart-wrenching, hand-sweating fear that Ann will manage to die before I do (the odds there have clearly shifted to my favor). Each time I’m about to see her — the few times since she moved back to Haddam last year — I’ve sunk myself into a deep fret that she’s about to release a truckload of bad news. A mysterious lesion, a “shadow,” a changed mole, blood where you don’t want blood, all requiring ominous tests, the clock ticking — all things I know about now. Following which, I won’t know what the hell to do! If loving somebody you’ll never really know again and only rarely see can be difficult — though I don’t really mind it — think about having to grieve for that person long after any shared life is over, life that could’ve made grieving worthwhile. You think grief like that, grief once removed, can’t be experienced? It can kill you dead as a mackerel. I, in fact, wouldn’t last a minute and would head straight to the Raritan bridge at Perth Amboy and leave my car a derelict on the Parkway. Think about that the next time you see such a vehicle and wonder where the driver went.

De Tocqueville Academy is a day school only. Even the Arab and Sri Lankan kids have well-heeled host families and good places to go — the Vineyard, the Eastern Shore — for holidays. A couple of dim fluorescent lights are left burning in the Admin Mansion, just like at the seminary, and down toward the classroom modules, past the postmodern ecumenical chapel, toward the glass-exterior athletic installation, a scattering of yellow lights prickles through the oaks and copper beeches as the day is ending. I’m confident I’m being observed on a bank of TV screens from some warm security bunker close by, the watchful crew standing around with coffee mugs, studying me, a “person of interest, doing what, we don’t know,” my name already jittering through the FBI computer at Quantico. Am I wanted? Was I wanted? Should I be? I’m surprised Ann can stand it here, that the practical-bone, non-joiner Michigan girl in her can put up with all this supervised, pseudo-communal, faux-humanistic, all-pull-together atmosphere that infests these private school faculties like mustard gas — everyone burnishing his eccentricities smooth so as to offend no one, yet remaining coiled like rattlers, ready to “become difficult” and “have problems” with colleagues whose eccentricities aren’t burnished the same way. You think it’s the psychotic parents and the hostile, under-medicated kids who drive you crazy. But no. It’s always your colleagues — I know this from a year’s teaching at a small New England college back in the day. It’s the Marcis and the Jasons, the exotic Ber-nards and the brawny Ludmillas, over for the Fulbright year from Latvia, who send you screaming off into the trees to join the endangered species hiding there. In-depth communication with smaller and smaller like-minded groups is the disease of the suburbs. And De Tocqueville’s where it thrives.

Ann has given me directions to the indoor driving range where we’re to meet. Footlights lead around the old plutocrats’ hunting lodge, down a paved, winding trail under dripping trees, past brown-shingled, clerestoried class buildings, each with a low rustic sign out front: SCIENCE. MATH. SOCIAL STUDIES. FILM. LITERATURE. GENDER. Ahead, at a point farther into the woods — I see my breath in the cedar-scented air — I can make out a high lighted window. Below is a glass double door kept open just for me with a fat swatch of weather carpet. This I head for, my jaw tightening like a spring, my neck sweating, my hands fidgety. I don’t feel at all vigorous, and vigorous is how I always want to feel when I present myself to Ann. I also don’t feel at ease in my clothes. I’ve always been a dedicated solid-South, chinos, cotton shirt, cotton socks ’n loafers wearer — the same suiting I packed in my steamer trunk when I came up from Mississippi to Ann Arbor in ’63, and that’s done the job well enough through all life’s permutations. It’s not, in fact, unusual attire for Haddam, which again has its claque of similarly suited crypto-southerners — old remittance men who trace back to rich Virginia second sons of the nineteenth century and who arrived to seminary study bringing along their colored servants (which is why there was once a stable Negro population in the Wallace Hill section — now gentrified to smithereens). To this day, a seersucker suit, a zesty bow tie, white bucks and pastel hosiery are considered acceptable dress-up (post — Memorial Day) at all Haddam lawn parties.

Nowadays, though, and for no reason I understand, what I find myself wearing seems to matter less than it used to. Since August, I no longer look in mirrors or glance into storefront windows, for fear, I guess, I’ll glimpse a worrisome shoulder slump that wasn’t there before, or an unexplained limp, or my chin hung at a haggard angle on my neck stem. We’re best on our guard against becoming the strange people we used to contrast ourselves favorably to: those who’ve lost the life force, lost the essential core vigor to keep up appearances, suffered the slippage you don’t know has slipped until it’s all over. I definitely don’t want to find myself turning up at a closing wearing copper-colored Sansabelts, a purple-and-green-striped Ban-Lon, huaraches with black socks and sporting a yawing, slack-jaw look of “whatever.” Lost, in other words, and not remembering why or when.

In the present moment, it’s my tan barracuda jacket I’m uneasy about. I bought it at a summer’s-end sale from the New Hampshire catalog outfit I usually buy from, thinking it’d be nice to own something I’d never owned before — a wrong-headed impulse, since I now feel like some rube showing up to take flying lessons. Plus, there’re the green-and-blue argyles and fake suede, Hush Puppy-like crepe-soled tie-ups I bought in Flint, Michigan, on a one-day trip in October. They were on sale in a shoe-store clearance where odd shoes in odd sizes were lined up on the sidewalk, and I felt like a fool not to find something, even if I never wore it. Which I now have. I don’t know what Ann will think, having gotten used to seeing me the old way during years of divorced life. If I could, I’d ditch the jacket out here in the yew shrubs, except I’d freeze and catch cold — the BBs having done a job on my immune department. So, uneasiness or not, I’m consigned to present myself to Ann just as I am.

At the end of the winding asphalt path (it’s only 4:00 p.m. but as good as dark), the Athletic Module is a state-of-the-art facility with lots of gigantic windows facing the woods, floating stairways and miles of corridors with exposed brightly-painted pipes and ductwork to give the impression the place had once been a power plant or a steel mill. It was designed by a Japanese architect from Australia, and according to the Packet, the Tocquies all refer to it as “Down Under,” though the actual name is the Chip and Twinkle Halloran Athletic and Holistic Health Conference Center, since Chip and Twinkle paid for it.

Dim ceiling lights reflect off the long, echoing, buffed corridor floor when I step in where it’s warm. Dank swimming pool water, sour towels, new athletic gear and sweat make the hot air stifling. I hear the consoling sound of a lone basketball being casually dribbled on a gym floor that’s out of sight. No one’s in the dark glassed-in events office. The turnstile is disengaged to let anyone pass. The indoor driving range is supposedly down the corridor, then right, then right again. I can’t, though, resist a peek at the “Announcements” case by the events window. I regularly check all such notice boards in Sea-Clift — by the shopping carts at Angelico’s, above the bait tank at Ocean-Gold Marina — standing arms folded, studying the cards for kittens lost, dinette sets to sell, collections of Ezio Pinza ’78s, boats with trailers, boats without, descriptions of oldsters wandered off, the regular appeal for the young motorcycle victim in the ICU. Even Purple Hearts are for sale. You can eavesdrop on the spirit of a place from these messages, sense its inner shifts and seismic fidgets — important in my line of work, and more accurate than what the Chamber of Commerce will tell you. Real life writ small is here, etched with our wishes, losses and dismays. I occasionally pluck off a “For Sale by Owner” note and leave it on Mike’s desk for follow-up — which usually comes to nothing. Though it might. I once saw the name of an old Sigma Chi brother on a notice board on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, where I’d gone to a realtors’ meeting. Seems my onetime bro Rod Cabrero had been last seen there, and family members in Bad Axe were worried and wanted him to know he was loved — no residual bad feelings about the missing checks and stock options. Another time up in Rumson, right here in the Garden State, I saw a notice for a “large Airedale” found wandering the beach, wearing a tag that said “Angus,” and instantly recognized it as the lost, lamented family treasure of the Bensfields on Merlot Court in Sea-Clift — a house I’d sold them less than a year before. I was able to effect the rescue and will get the listing again when they’re ready to sell. Just like the home-for-sale snapshots we put in our office window, these message boards all say “there’s a chance, there’s hope,” even if that chance and that hope are a thousand-to-one against.

Here, the “Noticias del Escuela” board is none too upbeat. “Have you been raped, fondled, harassed, or believe yourself to be, by a De Tocqueville faculty member, staff or security person? THERE’S HELP. Call [a phone number’s supplied].” Another insists, “You don’t have to be a minority to suffer a hate crime.” (Another number offered.) A third simply says, “You can grieve.” (No number is given, but a name, Megan, is in quotes.) There’s also a schedule for blood testing (hepatitis C, AIDS, thyroid deficiency). A typed note is posted here from Ann about the Lady Linkster tryouts and team meeting. Another one says, “Fuck Bush,” with the inflaming verb x-ed over. And one, in red, simply says, “Don’t keep it to yourself, whatever it is. Culturally, we are all orphans.” De Tocqueville seems not only funless but careworn and fatigued, where any time you’re not studying, you’d better be worrying or dodging unwanted experiences. I’m glad Paul didn’t get in, which isn’t to say I’m thrilled with how things have gone.

Ann Dykstra is visible, alone and practicing, when I peer through the tiny door window into the blazing-lit inner sanctum of the indoor driving range (formerly a squash court). She doesn’t know I’m here watching but is aware I might be, and so is going extra scrupulously through her ball placement, club-face address, feet alignment, shoulder set, weight distribution and outbound stare toward a nonexistent green. A white catch-net with golf balls scattered around has been established at the squash court’s front wall, and behind it an enlarged color photograph of a distant links course on some coast of Scotland. All this is in preparation for her perfectly grooved, utterly fluid, head-down, knees-bent, murderous swing, the lethal metal-headed driver striking the nubbly ball so violently as to crush it into space dust. “This is how the fucker’s done and always will be. No matter what asshole’s watching or isn’t”—is what I read this daunting display to say in so many words.

She doesn’t glance toward the door, which I’m safe behind in the corridor darkness, but begins placing a second ball onto a pink rubber tee fixed into a carpet of artificial grass, and re-commences the fateful protocol of striking.

I don’t want to go in. To enter will only ruin something that is and is perfect, by intruding a clamorous, troublesome, infuriating, chaotic something else. I’d forgotten, watching Ann through the peephole like a witness viewing a suspect, how much a perfect golf swing is an airtight defense against all bothersome “others.” Once I knew that, long ago when I wrote sports: That for all athletes — and Ann’s a good one — a perfect stroke protects against things getting over-complicated. I would actually slink away now if I could.

But just as I take an opportunistic look down the corridor with a thought to escape, Ann, I find, is staring at me — my partial, reluctant face obviously visible through the double-thick window. Her lips inside move in speech I can’t hear. I again have an urge to run, become an optical illusion, down the hall, around a corner, be no more. But it’s too late. Way too late for escape.

I push in the heavy, air-sucking door and Ann’s words come into my ears. “…thought you were the security guy, Ramon,” she says, and smiles cheerlessly at my presence. She has her driver in hand like a walking stick and goes back to addressing the new ball as if I were Ramon. “I don’t like to be watched when I’m in here. And he watches me.”

“You looked pretty solid.” I’m guessing this is the appropriate compliment.

“How are you?” Ann calmly lays her club face to the ball’s surface without touching it. I’m holding the heavy door open, barely inside. The brightly lit room smells like heated wood products.

“I’m great.” I mean to act vigorous even if I’m not. Ann and I haven’t seen each other in months. A chummy, hygienic phone chat would’ve been as good or better than this. The dense air is already thickening with ifs and what-ifs. “Nice place in here,” I say, and look up and around. A black video camera’s on a tripod to the left, a wooden team bench sits against the white squash court wall. The Scottish links course has been holographed right onto the plaster behind the catch-net. It could just as well be a chamber for a lethal injection.

“It’s okay. They rigged this place up for me.” Ann lightly taps her white ball off its tee, bends to retrieve it. She is turned out just as I’ve seen her all our life, married and apart — golf shorts (pink), white shoes (Reeboks with pink ankleless socks), a white polo with some kind of gold crest (De Tocqueville no doubt), white golf glove, and a pair of red sunglasses stuck in her hair like a country-club divorcée. She now exudes — unlike thirty years ago, when I couldn’t get enough of her — a more muscular, broader-backed, stronger-armed, fuller-breasted, wider-hipped aura of athleticized sexlessness, which is still bluntly carnal but isn’t helped by her blonded hair being cut in a tail-less ducktail a prison matron might wear, and her pale Dutch-heritage skin looking sweat-shiny and paper-thin. The fly of her shorts has inched down from the top button due to ungoverned belly force. I’m sorry to say there’s nothing very appealing about her except that she’s herself and I’m unexpectedly glad to see her. (Clenching has now made my third molar, left side, lower, begin to ache in a way that makes my jaw tighten. I should put in my night guard, which is in my pocket.)

Ann walks in a long, slightly up-on-toes gait over to the pine bench and leans her driver into a rack where other clubs stand. She sits on the pine and begins untying her golf shoes. I’m stationed in the doorway, feeling both reluctance and enthusiasm, longing and uxorious remorse. I don’t know why I’m here. I wish I knew a hilarious golf joke but can only think of one that involves a priapic priest, a genie in a bottle and a punch line she wouldn’t like.

“Somebody blew out the lunch room windows at the hospital,” I say. Not a great conversation starter. Though why did no one at the funeral home mention it? News in Haddam must travel more slowly than ever. Everyone in his own space. Even Lloyd Mangum.

“Why?” Ann looks up from her shoelaces, bent over her thick, shiny knees. Pushing through her polo-shirt back is the wide, no-nonsense imprint of a brawny sports bra.

“I don’t know. The election. People get pissed off. Doctors are all Republicans.”

“How’s real estate?”

“Always a good investment. They aren’t making any more of it.” I smile and round my eyes as a gesture of geniality.

Ann sets her Reeboks, toes out, under the bench atop the miserable green turf. She disapproves of my selling houses (Sally loved it, loved it that I think of real estate as related to Keatsian negative capability, with the outcome being not poetry but generalized social good with a profit motive). Ann fell in love with me when I was an aspiring (and failing) novelist, but since then has lived in Connecticut, grown rich and may have no use for negative capability. She may consider selling real estate to be like selling hubcaps on Route 1. She could be a Republican herself, though when I married her, she was a Soapy Williams Democrat.

I step all the way inside the warmed, dazzling, wood-scented room and let the door suck closed behind me. I don’t know where to go or what to do. I need a golf club to hold. Though it’s not so bad in here — unexpectedly satisfying, strangely intimate. We’re at least alone for once.

“I have something I want to say to you, Frank.” Ann leans back against the white wall, which has been recently repainted. She looks straight at me, her pale cheeks tightened and the downward tug at the corners of her mouth signifying importance of an ominous kind. Using my name always means “serious.” I feel my hands and lips spontaneously (I hope invisibly) tremble. I do not need bad news now.

Ann wiggles her sock feet on the phony turf and looks down.

“Great”—my smile my only defense. Maybe it is great news. Maybe Ann’s marrying Teddy Fuchs, the gentle-giant math teacher who everybody thought was a queer but was just shy and had to wait (till age sixty) for his camps-survivor mother to pass on. Or maybe Ann’s decided to cash in Charley’s annuity and live on the Costa del Sol. Or maybe she’s figured out a meaningful new way to explain to me what an asshole I am. I’m all ears for any of that. Just nothing medical. I’ve had it with medical.

“Can I tell you a story?” She’s still looking down at her pink sock-lets as if she drew assurance from them.

“Sure,” I say. “I like stories. You know me.” Her gray eyes dart up, warning against familiarity.

“I went into Van Tuyll’s Cleaners the other day to check on a damage claim about a pair of pants they’d stained and hadn’t paid me for. I was mad, and you can’t really sue your dry cleaners over a pair of pants, but I thought of going in the shop and doing something disruptive to punish them. They really aren’t very nice people.”

Bring in some deer urine or maybe set a skunk loose behind the counter. I’ve thought of doing that. Just not a “device.” I haven’t moved an inch from where I’ve been under the too-warm lights.

“Anyway,” Ann says. “When I got to the shop, down that little Grimes Street alley”—fine address for a dry cleaners—“a typed card was taped inside the door that said, ‘We’re closed due to the tragic death of our daughter Jenny Van Tuyll, who lost her life last Saturday in a traffic accident in Belle Fleur. She was eighteen. Our life will never be the same. The Van Tuyll family.’ I actually had to sit down on the edge of the shop window to keep myself from fainting. It just overtook me. That poor Jenny Van Tuyll. I’d talked to her fifty times. She was as sweet as she could be. And that poor family. And there I was, mad about my goddamned Armani pants. It seemed so stupid.” Ann squints at her feet, then raises her eyes to me.

Sad news. But not as bad as “I’ve got a fast-growing encephaloblasty and probably only about a month to keep breathing.” “It’s bad,” I say gravely. Though I think: But you really can’t feel worse about it just because of your Armani pants. They are a dry-cleaners. You wouldn’t even know about this if you weren’t already mad at them.

Ann lowers her ocean-gray eyes, then lifts them to me significantly, and all the remembered shock and grief and impatience with me are absent from her gaze. An indoor driving range is an odd place to have this conversation. We have had a child to die, of course — in the very hospital where someone exploded a bomb today. Surely there’s no need to talk about that now. For a while after Ralph’s death, Ann and I met at the grave on his birthday. This being after our divorce. But eventually we just quit.

“Do you wonder, Frank, if when you feel something really forcefully — so forcefully you know it’s true — do you ever wonder if how you feel is just how you feel that particular day and tomorrow it won’t matter as much?”

“No doubt about it,” I say. “It’s a good thing. We need to question our strong feelings, though we still need to be available to feel them. It’s like buyer’s remorse. One day you think if you don’t have a particular house, your whole life’s ruined. Then the next day you can’t imagine why the hell you ever considered it. Though plenty of times people see a house, fall in love with it, buy it, move in and never leave till they get taken out in a box.” For some reason, I’m grinning. I wonder if the video camera that’s pointed at me is operating, since something’s making me uneasy, so that I’m racketing on like Norman Vincent Peale.

Ann has taken her red sunglasses out of her matron-athlete’s hair and carefully folded them while I’m blabbering, as if whatever I’m saying must be endured.

“It’s just hard to know,” I say, and inch back against the door through which I spied Ann a while ago teaching a stern lesson to an innocent Titleist.

“I know I’ve told you this, Frank,” she says, carefully laying her Ray-Bans on the pine seat beside her as a means of shutting me up about buyer’s remorse. “But when Charley was so bad off, and you drove up those times to sit with him in Yale-New Haven, when his real friends got preoccupied elsewhere, that was a very, very excellent thing to have done. For him. And for me.”

It only lasted six weeks; then off he went to heaven. Through his haze, Charlie thought I was someone named Mert he’d known at St. Paul’s. A few times he talked to me about his first wife and about important twelve-meter races he’d attended, and once or twice about his current wife’s former husband, whom he said was “rather sweet at times” but “ineffectual.” “A Big-Ten graduate,” he said, smirking, though he was nutty as a coon. “You couldn’t imagine her ever marrying that guy,” he said dreamily. I told Charley the fellow probably had some good qualities, to which Charley, from his hospital bed, handsome face drained of animation and interest, said, “Oh, sure, sure. You’re right. I’m too tough. Always have been.” Then he said the whole thing over again, and in a few days he died.

Why would I do such a thing? Sit with my ex-wife’s dying husband? Because it didn’t bother me. That’s why. I could imagine someone having to do it to me — a total stranger — and how nice it would be to have someone there you didn’t have to “relate” to. I don’t want to visit the subject again, however, and fold my arms across my chest and look down like a priest who’s just heard an insensitive joke.

“It made me see something about you, Frank.”

“Oh.” Noncommittal. No question mark. I don’t intend asking what it might be, because I don’t care.

“It’s something I think you would’ve said was always true about you.”

“Maybe.”

“I don’t think I’ve always thought so. I might’ve when we were kids. But I quit about 1982.” She picks up her white golf glove and folds it into a small package.

“Oh.”

“You’re a kind man,” Ann says from the team bench.

I blink at her. “I am a kind man. I was a kind man in 1982.”

“I didn’t think so,” she says stoically, “but maybe I was wrong.”

I, of course, resent being declared something I’ve always been and should’ve been known to be by someone who supposedly loved me, but who wasn’t smart or patient or interested enough to know it when it mattered and so divorced me, but now finds herself alone and it’s Thanksgiving and I conveniently have cancer. If this is leading to some sort of apology, I’ll accept, though not with gratitude. It could also still be a clear-the-decks declaration before announcing her engagement to oversized Fuchs. Our bond is nothing if not a strange one.

“You can’t live life over again,” Ann says penitently. She smiles up and across at me, as if telling me that I’m kind has gotten something oppressive off her chest. All dark clouds now are parting. For her anyway.

“Yeah. I know.” A pearl of sweat has slid out of my hairline. It’s hot as hell in here. What I’d like to do is leave.

“I didn’t know if you really did know that.” Ann nods, still smiling, her eyes sparkling.

“I understand conventional wisdom,” I say. “I’m a salesman. Placebos work on me.”

Ann’s smile broadens, so that she looks absolutely merry. “Okay,” she says.

“Okay,” I say. “Okay what?” I glance at the tri-podded Sony, useful for showing Lady Linksters hitches in their backswings. “Is that goddamn thing turned on?”

Ann looks up at the black box and actually grins. Many years have elapsed since I’ve seen her so happy. “No. Would you like me to turn it on?”

“What’s going on?” I’m feeling dazed in this fucking oven. It must be what a hot flash feels like. First you get hot; then you get mad.

“I have something to say.” She is solemn again.

“You told me. I’m kind. What else? I accept your apology.” Ungiven.

“I wanted to tell you that I love you.” Both her hands are flat down beside her on the bench, as if she or the bench were exerting an upward force. Her gray eyes have trapped me with a look so intent I may never have seen it before. “You don’t have to do anything about it.” Two small tears wobble out of her eyes, although she’s smiling like June Allyson. Sweat, tears, what next? Ann sniffles and wipes her nose with the side of her hand. “I don’t know if it’s again, or still. Or if it’s something new. I don’t guess it matters.” She turns her head to the side and dabs at her eyes with the heel of her hand. She breathes in big, breathes out big. “I realized,” she says mournfully, “it’s why I came back to Haddam last year. I didn’t really know it, but then I did. And I was actually prepared to do nothing about it. Ever. Maybe just be your friend in proximity. But then Sally left. And then you got sick.”

“Why are you telling me this now?” My mouth’s been ajar. These are not the words I want to say. But the words I want to say aren’t available.

“Because I went to Van Tuyll’s cleaners, and their pretty daughter was dead. And that seemed so unchangeable — dying just blotting things out. And I thought I’d invented ways to be toward you that let me pretend that being mad at you wasn’t changeable, either — or whatever it is. But those ways can be blotted out, too. I guess there are degrees of unchangeableness. Love’s a terrible word. I’m sorry. You seem upset. I decided I’d just tell you. I’m sorry if you’re upset.” Ann hiccups, but catches her hiccup in her throat as a little burp, just like Clarissa. “Sorry,” she says.

“Are you just telling me this because you’re afraid I’m going to die, and you’ll feel terrible?”

“I don’t know. You don’t have to do anything about it.” She picks up her sunglasses and puts them back up in her hair. She reaches beneath the bench, produces a pair of brown penny loafers she puts on over her pink socks. She looks around where she’s sitting for something she might be leaving, then stands in the blaring lights, facing me. “My coat’s behind you.” She’s fast receding into the old protocols that she, for one moment, had gotten beyond and out into the open air, where she caught a good whiff and held it in her lungs. The poet promised, “What is perfect love? Not knowing it is not love, some kind of interchange with wanting, there when all else is wanting, something by which we make do.” I’m not making do well at all. Not achieving interchange. I am the thing that is wanting. After so long of wanting.

I turn clumsily, and there is Ann’s jacket on a coat-rack I hadn’t seen, a thin brown rayon-looking short topcoat with a shiny black lining — catastrophically expensive but made to look cheap. I take it off the old-fashioned coat tree and hand it over. Heavy keys swag inside a pocket. Its smell is the sweet powdery scent of womanly use.

“I’ll let you walk me out to my car.” She smiles, putting her brown coat on over her golfing uniform. She moves by, but I am not ready with a touch. She pulls open the air-sucking squash-court door. A breath of cool floods in from the corridor, where it’d seemed warm before. She turns, assesses the room, then reaches beyond me and snaps off the light, throwing us into complete, studdering darkness, closer together than we have been in donkey’s years. My fingers begin to twitch. She moves past me into the shadowy hall. I almost touch the blousy back of her coat. I hear a boy’s voice down the long hall. “You asshole,” the voice says, then laughs—“hee, hee, hee, hee.” A basketball again bounces echoingly on hardwood. Splat, splat, splat. A ker-chunk of a gym door opening, then closing. A girl’s voice — lighter, sweeter, happier — says, “You give love a bad name.” And then our moment is, alas, lost.

It’s only 5:30, but already dead-end nighttime in New Jersey. Nothing good’s left of the day. Heading across the cold, peach-lit parking lot, Ann at first walks slowly, but then picks it up, going briskly along toward her Accord. The sulfur globes atop the curved aluminum stanchions light the damp asphalt but do not warm. All here seems deserted except for our two vehicles side-by-side, though of course we’re still being watched. Nothing goes unobserved on this portion of the planet.

We have said nothing more, though we understand that saying nothing’s the wrong choice. It is for me to declare something remarkable and remarkably important. To add to the sum of our available reality, be the ax for the frozen sea within us, yik, yik, yik, yik. Though I’m for the moment unable to fit my thoughts together plausibly or to know the message I need to get out. Ann and I are on a new and different footing, but I don’t know what that footing might be. The Permanent Period and its indemnifying sureties are in scattered retreat out here in the post-rain De Tocqueville lot. They have sustained too many direct hits for one day and have lost some potency.

“I’ve lived here almost a whole year now.” Ann walks resolutely beside me. “I can’t say I love Haddam. Not anymore. It’s odd.”

“No,” I say. “Me, either. Or, me, too.”

“But…”

“But what?” We’re back to our old intractable, defensible selves. Asking “What?” means nothing.

“But nothing.” She fishes the clump of jingly keys out of her topcoat pocket and fingers through them beside her car. It was this way when we visited Ralph’s grave on his birthday in the spring: a negotiated peace of little substance or duration, pleasing no one, not even a little. Then she says, “I suppose I should say one more thing.” It’s cold. Clouds are working against the moon’s disk. I’m tempted to put a hand on her shoulder, ostensibly for warmth’s sake. She is wearing golfing clothes, after all, in falling temps.

“Okay.” I do not put a hand on her shoulder.

“All those things I said in there.” She quietly, self-consciously clears her throat. I smell her hair, which still hints of the warm wood inside and something slightly acidic. “I meant all that. And what’s more, I’d live with you again — where you live, if you wanted me to. Or not.” She sighs a businesslike little sigh. No more tears. “You know, parents who’ve lost a child are more likely to die early. And people who live alone are, too. It’s a toxic combination. For both of us, maybe.”

“I already knew that.” Everybody reads the same studies, takes the same newspapers, exhibits the same fears, conceives the same obsessive, impractical solutions. Our intelligence doesn’t account for much that’s new anymore. Only, I don’t find that discouraging. It’s like reading cancer statistics once you’ve been diagnosed — they become a source of misplaced encouragement, like reading last night’s box scores. Misery may not love company. But discouragement definitely does. “Would-you-like-to-come-over-on-Thursday-and-have-Thanksgiving-with-me? I-mean-with-us-with-the-children?” With blinding swiftness these ill-conceived words leave my mouth, taking their rightful place among all the other ill-conceived things I’ve said in life and taking the place of something better I should’ve said but couldn’t say because I was paralyzed by the thought of living with Ann and that she’s now concluded I’m alone.

She clicks her car unlocked and swings the door out. Clean, new-car bouquet floods our cold atmosphere. The dimly lit cockpit begins pinging.

Ann turns her back to me as if to put something inside the car — though she’s carrying nothing — then turns back, chin down, eyes trained on my chest, not my (shocked) face. “That’s nice of you.” She’s smiling weakly, June Allyson-style again. Ping, ping, ping. It’s other than the invitation she wanted and a poor substitute — but still. “I think I’d like that,” she says, her smile become proprietary. A smile I haven’t seen trained on me in a hundred years. Ping, ping, ping.

And just then, as when we are children sick at home with a fever in bed late at night, suddenly everything moves a great distance away from me and grows small. Softened voices speak from a padded tube. Ann, only two feet away, appears leagues away, her pinging Accord all but invisible behind her. The pinging, ping, ping comes as if from fresh uncovered stars high in the cold sky.

“That’s great,” her distant voice says.

Ann looks at my face and smiles. We are now not merely on different footings but on different planets, communicating like robots. “You’ll have to give me directions, I guess.”

“I will,” I say robotically, cheeks and lips smiling a robot smile. “But not now. I’m cold.”

“It is cold,” she says, ignition key in hand. “When’s Paul arriving?”

“Paul who?”

“Paul, our son.” Ping, ping.

“Oh.” Everything’s smashing back into close quarters, the night hitting me on the nose. Real sound. Real invitation. Real disaster looming. “Tomorrow, I guess. He’s en route.” For some reason I say route to rhyme with gout, a way I never say it.

“Is that a new jacket,” she asks. “I like it.”

“Yeah. It is.” I’m stumped.

She looks at me hard. “Do you feel all right, Frank?”

“I do,” I say. “I’m just cold.”

“There are a lot of things we haven’t talked about.”

“Yeah.”

“But maybe we will.” And instead of crossing the gulf of years to give my cold cheek a buss with cold lips, Ann gives me three pats on my barracuda jacket shoulder — pat, pat, pat — like a girl in a riding habit patting the shoulder of an old saddle nag she’s just had a pleasant but not especially eventful ride on. “Paul’s coming to my house for dinner tomorrow. I asked Clary, but she declined, of course.” Same proprietary equitational smile and voice. Time for your rubdown and a nose bag. Ping, ping, ping. “I guess I’ll see you for dinner Thursday.”

“Okay.”

“Call me. Tell me how to get there.”

“Yes. I will. I’ll call you.” Ping, ping.

She looks at me as if to say, I know you might die right here and now, but we’re going to pretend you won’t and everything’ll be fine, old fella. And it is in this manner we manage our good-bye.

As if someone, someone else, someone in a panic, someone like me but not me, was piloting my dark capsule, I am down the drizzly midnight De Tocqueville entrance lane like a NASCAR driver, my tires barely registering the speed moguls, skidding on each curve, sending deer, possum and catamount leaping into the sheltering woods, until I’m out past the signage, out the gate and out, back onto 27, headed into town. I of course have to piss.

And, no surprise, I am locked in a fury of regret, self-reproach and bafflement. Why, why, why, why, why did I have to ask? Why can’t I be trusted not to ask? What hysteria chip in my personal hard drive impels me to self-evident disaster? Does anything teach us anything? Do seventeen years of perfectly acceptable divorced life, following clear-cut evidence of incompatibility, not dictate steering wide of Ann Dykstra, no matter how much I love her? Does cancer make you stupid as well as sick? If there was a Sponsor, a palmist, a shrink open late, dispensing mercy and wisdom to drop-ins, I’d beg, write a big check, dedicate quality hours. As stated, our intelligence doesn’t account for much.

I wish, for the very first time, for a cell phone. I’d call Ann from the car and leave a cringing message: “Oh, I’m a terrible, terrible man. Mistake after mistake after mistake. You were always right about me. Just please don’t come for Thanksgiving. We’d have an appalling time. I’ve booked you an A-list banquette at the Four Seasons, selected the right Dom Pérignon, arranged for Paul Newman and Kate Hepburn to be on your either side (where they’ll definitely want to talk to you), ordered the baked Alaska in advance. Keep the limo, take a friend…. Just keep away on Thanksgiving. Even though you love me. Even if I’m dying. Even if you’re lonely. Take my word for it.”

If we’d only had our just-finished conversation on the phone — from home, without the tears, the sock feet, the lonely, converted, over-heated squash court — none of this would be happening. When I was at Mayo I met a hog farmer from Nebraska up on the urology floor, same as me, but who’d had a stroke and could barely speak to anyone. His happy, fat, grinning, scrubbed-face farm wife did the talking while he worked his eyebrows and nodded and smiled at me furiously but in total silence. Except on the phone, the wife told me, old Elmer’d yak and laugh and philosophize hours on end and never miss a beat or a connection, could even tell dirty jokes. Something’s to be said for disembodied communication. Too much credit’s given to the desultory intime. It’s why the governor’s never at the prison when the deed’s being done.

I stop on the darkened roadside in front of a big, well-treed, hedge-banked, wide-lawned Norman Tudor that was actually moved to its present site twenty years ago from the Seminary grounds. There are few cars on this stretch of 27, so I can shuffle unnoticed up against the dark, dripping cedar hedge, in the damp leaf duff, and piss out the two cups I’ve accumulated since I can’t remember when but which have suddenly begun to make me panicky. A diaper would be a fail-safe, but I’m holding the line there.

Then I’m back in the car and headed into Haddam, relieved, vaguely exhilarated, as only a blessed leak can bestow, though with my jaw screwed down even tighter, a faint flicker-rill in my lower abdomen more or less where I calculate my aggrieved prostate to be, my blood pressure for sure spiked, my life shortened by another thirty seconds — all this because I have now traitorously returned myself to the everyday, detail-shot, worry-misery-gnawing mind-set that I hate: how to un-invite the unwisely invited dinner guest who’ll torpedo the otherwise-nice-enough family meal. This is what Clarissa experiences as linked boxes, the slippy-sliding world within worlds of everyone’s feelings being on the line all the time, of perfect evenings with perfect overachiever dinner partners, the world of keeping calendars straight, of not forgetting to call back, always sending a note, the world of ducks-in-a-row, i’s dotted, t’s crossed and recrossed, of making sure the wrong person is never invited, or else everything’s fucked up horrible and you’re to blame and no one gets one ounce of closure. It’s the world she’s fled, the social Pleistocene tar pit that the Permanent Period is dedicated to saving you from by canceling unwanted self-consciousness, dimming fear-of-the-future in favor of the permanent, cutting edge of the present. By this measure, I shouldn’t care if Ann comes to Thanksgiving dressed as Consuelo the Clown, squirts everybody with seltzer, honks her horn and sings arias till we’re ready to strangle her. Because, in a little while it’ll be over, no one will be any different and the day will end as it would’ve anyway: me half-asleep in front of the TV, watching the second game on Fox. It’d be a thousand times better — for my prostate, for my diastole and systole, for my life span, mandibular jaw muscles, embattled molars — for me just to rear back, har off a big guffaw, throw open the doors, push out the food, crack open my own big bottle of DP and turn ringmaster to the whole joyless tent-full.

Except that’s not how I fucking well feel about it.

And how I do feel is not good. My Easter-egg-with-the-downsized-family-inside’s been cracked. The usual Permanent Period protocols aren’t restoring order. My brain’s buzzing with unwanted concerns it wasn’t buzzing with an hour ago.

When I first got my bad prostate news in August, and in the hours before Clarissa became my partisan-advocate, I stood out on the deck, stared at the crowded beach and silvered Atlantic and thought how just one day before this day I didn’t know what I then knew. I tried to drift back to the bliss that didn’t know enough to count itself bliss, have a moment of reprieve, stuff the genie back in. Several times I even said out loud to the warm wind and the aroma of sunblock and salt and seaweed, as transistors buzzed the top-40 countdown and no one noticed me watching from above — I’d say, “Well. At least nobody’s told me I have cancer.” But of course before fresh well-being could swell in my chest and return me inside with a precious moment captured, I was reduced to gulping, squeezing, straining tears and feeling worse than if I’d never kidded myself. Don’t try this.

And what’s zooming around my brain now is the certainty that Ann Dykstra knows next to nothing about me anymore — except what the kids tell her privately — nothing about Sally or about the particulars of my condition, and hasn’t bothered to ask. That may be what she meant by “more to talk about,” which puts it mildly. But for starters, I’m married and holding out hope I can stay that way. My medical condition is “subtly nuanced,” though that may not mean much to her, since she buried one husband only two years ago. Women have things wrong with them just like men, and, as far as I can tell, don’t act as bothered by it. Ann probably assumes I’m adrift and ought to be grateful for any life raft heaved my way. I’m not.

Plus, why would she be attracted to me? And now? I must be much paler from my ordeal. I’m definitely thinner. Am I stooped, too? (I said I never look.) Are my cheekbones knobby? My clothes grown roomy? I’m sure this is how old age and bad health dawn on you — gradually and unannounced. Just all at once people are trying to persuade against things you want to do and always have done: Don’t climb that ladder. Don’t drive after dark. Don’t postpone buying that term life. The Permanent Period, again, is set against this type of graduated obsolescence. But its strengths again seem in retreat.

Ann, of course, has also crudely played the “Ralph card” by referring to parents who lost children and the connecting path to early death — which is close to a cheap shot and offers no reason for us to get back together. I mean, if having my son die condemns me to an early exit, can that mean there are interesting new choices open that weren’t before? Becoming a synchronized sky diver? Sailing alone around the world in a handmade boat? Learning Bantu and ministering to lepers? No. It’s information that releases me to do nothing different and, in fact, almost challenges me to do nothing at all. It’s like dull heredity, whereby you learn you have the gene that causes liver cancer, only you’re too old for the transplant. Better not to know.

Though the truest, deep-background reason Ann is courting me (I know her as only an ex-husband can) is for a private whiff of the unknown, to provide the extra beat in her own life by associating it with a greater exigence than the Lady Linksters can offer: me, in other words, my life, my decline, my death and memory. Her daughter’s on a similar search. If you think this kind of mischief is unthinkable, then think again. As I used to preach to my poor lost students at Berkshire College back in ’83, when I wanted them to write something that wasn’t about their roommate’s acne or how it felt to be alone in the dorm after lights were out and the owls were hooting: If you can say it, it can happen.

6

I motor past the brick-and-glass-facaded village hall, lit up inside like a suburban Baptist church. Thick-chested policemen stand inside, talking casually while a poor soul — a thin, shirtless Negro — waits beside them in handcuffs. Does this bear on the Haddam Doctors Hospital “event” today? A known troublemaker, one of the usual suspects in for a round of grilling? Since there are no TV cameras or uplink trucks out front, no flak jackets, no FBI windbreakers, no leg irons, my guess is not. Just someone who’s had too much pre-holiday fun and now must pay the price.

Seminary Street, when I cruise in just past six, appears reduced to its village self. The streets crews have strung up red and green twinkly Christmas lights and plastic pine-needle bunting over the three intersections. (The “no neon” ordinance is a good thing.) A modest team of rain-geared believers is setting up a lighted crèche on the lawn at the First Prez, where in days gone by I occasionally snuck in for a restorative, chest-swelling sing. Two women and two men are kneeling in the wet grass, training and retraining misty floods and revolving colored lights into the manger’s little interior, while others cart in ceramic wise men and ceramic animals and real hay bales to set the scene. All is to be up and going for the first holiday returnees.

Across the street — below the United Jersey Bank sign, its bleary news crawl streaming out-of-town events — a gaggle of local kids, all boys, stands slouched in the pissy weather, wearing baggy jeans cut off at the calves, long white athletic jerseys and combat boots. This is the Haddam gang element, children of single moms back-in-the-dating-scene, and dads working late, who arrive home too tired to wonder where young Thad or Chad or Eli might be, and head straight for the blue Sapphire in the freezer. These kids merely long for attention, possibly even a little tough-love discipline, and so are willing to provide it for each other, their mode of communication being bad posture, bad complexion, piercings, self-mortifications, smirky graffiti from Sartre, Kierkegaard and martyred Russian poets. In his day, Paul Bascombe was one of them. He once spray-painted “Next time you can’t pretend there’ll be anything else” on the wall of the high school gym, for which he was suspended, though he said he didn’t know what it meant.

These idle kids — six of them, under the bright galloping news banner — are taunting the Presbyterian crèche assemblers, who occasionally look across Seminary and shake their heads sadly. Gamely, one ball-capped man comes out to the curb, where I stop at the light, and shouts something about lending a hand. The kids all smile. One shouts back, “Eat me,” and the man — probably he’s the preacher — fakes a laugh and goes back.

And yet, as it always could, the town works its meliorating blessing on me and my mood. There’s nothing like a night-time suburban town at holiday season to anesthetize woe out of the feelable existence. I cruise down past the Square, where the Pilgrim Village Interpretive Center is now closed and padlocked against pranksters, the Pilgrims all hied off to their motel rooms, period animals stabled and safe in host back yards, the re-enactors disappeared into their Winnebagos, their uniforms drying, tomorrow’s skirmishes vivid in their minds. At the I Scream Ice Cream, customers are crowded in under the lights, while others wait outside against the damp building, having a smoke. A thin queue has formed at the shadowy Garden Theater — a Lina Wertmüller offering I saw a hundred years ago, reprised for the holiday, the ship’s-prow marquee proclaiming Love and Anarchy. It’s the holiday. Not much is shaking.

My rendevous with Mike at the August is not until 6:45. I have time to slide by my dentist’s, on the chance he’ll be in late doing a pre-holiday bridge repair and can make a quick adjustment to my night guard before I head out to Mayo next Tuesday. I turn around in the Lauren-Schwindell lot — my old realty firm. All’s dark within, Real-Trons sleeping, desks clean, alarms armed, not open until Tuesday no matter who wants what. A big cheery orange banner in the window proclaims GOBBLE, GOBBLE, GOBBLE, which I understand means “Thanks.”

I drive back up to Witherspoon, which goes direct to 206 and Calderon’s office. The gang-posse hangs out under the bank sign, eyeing me pseudo-menacingly, though this time my notice is captured by the crawl, a miniature, bulb-lit Times Square above them, to which they’re oblivious. Quarterlysdown29.3…ATTdown62 %…Dowclose10.462…HappyThanksgiving2000…LLBeanChinamadeslippersrecalledduetodrawstringdefectabletochoketoddlerusers…PierreSalingertestifiesreLockerbiecrashsez“ Iknowwhodidit”…Airlineblanketsandheadrestssaidnotsanitized…Buffalostymiedunder15"lakeeffectsnow…HorrorstorieswithFlaballots:“WhatinthenameofGodisgoingonhere?”workersez…NJenclavesuffersmysteriousbombdetonlinktoelectionsuspec’d…TropicaldepresWaynenotlikelytomakeland…BigpileupontheGardenState…HappyThanksgiving…

These things are never easy to read.

I turn and pass down Witherspoon, the old part of Haddam, from when it was a real town — the old hardware, the old stale-but-good Greek place, the pole-less barbershop, the old Manusco photography gallery where everyone got his and her graduation portraits done until Manusco went to prison for lewdness. A new realtor’s moved in here — Gold Standard Homes — beside the Banzai Sushi Den, where few customers are visible through the window. The tanning salon’s in full swing for those heading to the islands. Bombdeton…linktoelectionsuspec’d—I “speak” these quasi-words in a mental voice that sounds portentous, though I don’t think it could be true. Such a thought doesn’t want to stay in mind and drifts away on the rainy evening’s odd movie-street limbo, overtaken quickly by a thought that I can get my night guard fixed before heading home. I wonder, driving again along untrafficked Pleasant Valley Road past the cemetery fence, if I mentioned to Ann about the bomb, or if I told Marguerite during my Sponsor visit, or did she mention it to me, and did I go past Haddam Doctors before or after my funeral home stop? I can spend hours of a perfectly sleepable night wondering if I’ve kept such things straight, getting it all settled, then starting the process over, then wondering if I’ve contracted chemically induced Alzheimer’s and pretty soon won’t know much of anything.

Here again is the hospital, its upper storeys lit up like a Radisson, its middle ones blacked out, its broken ground floor exterior turned incandescent by spotlights on metal scaffolds, shining alarmingly onto the distressed earth, turning the air pale metallic through the rain and dark. Humans — I see the FBI and ATF in blue rain jackets and white hard hats, and plenty of yellow-coated HPD — are in motion around the scene, so many hours after, their movement stylized and ominous. Yellow police tape cordons most of the grounds, and plenty of official vehicles, including an ambulance, a fire truck, more cruisers and two black panel trucks are parked helter-skelter inside the perimeter, as if something else is anticipated. No faces appear at the high hospital windows. The upper floors, the burn unit, the oncology ward, the ICU and maternity wings — the alpha and omega services — are in full swing, nobody with time for a crime scene outside. Officers, the same as earlier, their blue-flashing police cars parked up on the curb, wave me and the few other drivers on through. Red fusees sputter on the pavement.

Naturally, I’d love to shake loose some info, a name, a theory, a motive, a clue, but no one would spill any beans. “You’ll know as soon as we know.” “Everybody’s doing their best out here.” I stare up at the babyish rain-slick face of the young traffic cop, cold under his cop hat. He’s rosy-cheeked, accustomed to smiling, but for the moment is as stern as a prosecutor. He peers inside my car with another practiced gaze. Anything suspicious here? Any tingle that says, “Maybe?” Any sign this could be Mr. Nutcase? A BUSH? WHY? sticker. A REALTOR sticker. Faded red Suburban with an Ocean County transfer station windshield sticker. Haven’t I seen you pass by here already today? Maybe you’d better pull over…. I glide through, glancing in the rearview. He watches me as the red of my taillights fades into the dark, reads my license numbers, registers nothing, turns to the next car.

I turn onto Laurel Road, and immediately ahead is Calderon’s office, on the back side of an older blond-brick sixties dental plaza that fronts on 206 and where I’ve always used this rear entrance. As I cruise up Laurel, toward the little three-storey cube down a flight of steps below a grassy embankment, I see two sets of lights are, in fact, glowing within. One suite, I know, is the endo guy, finishing off an after-hours root canal on some friend’s impecunious sister. Another is the dental psychologist who works, evenings-only, on secretaries and dress-shop clerks who don’t have the moolah for implants but still want to feel better about their smiles.

But no lights issue from Suite 308—Calderon’s office. All’s dark and buttoned up. Although up ahead, out at the curb as if awaiting a bus, is someone who actually looks like Calderon — topcoat, beret, a big-featured face distinguishable by black horn-rims and a black mustache I’m used to seeing sprouted behind his dental mask while he scrutinizes my bicuspids through a plastic AIDS shield. Here is my dentist — an odd vision to encounter after dark. Calderon’s probably my age, the doted-on only son of Argentine renaissance scholar-diplomats who couldn’t go home. He attended Dartmouth in the sixties and settled in New Jersey after dental school. He’s a tall, handsome, wry-mouthed, dyed-hair pussy hound, married to the fourth Mrs. Calderon, a young, tragically widowed, crimson-haired Haddam tax lawyer who makes poor Calderon dye his mustache, too, and work out like a decathalete at Abs-R-Us Spa in Kendall Park to keep him looking younger than she is. In his dental practice, Calderon affects bright tangerine clinical smocks, shows Gilbert Roland oldies on the patients’ TV instead of tapes about what’s wrong with your teeth and only hires blond knockout assistants who make the trip over worthwhile. He was briefly a member of our Divorced Men’s Club in the eighties and still is known to specialize in married female patients who require their cavities be filled at home. I’m always cheered up by my visits, since not only do I leave with shiny teeth, soft tissue checked, fillings tucked in tight and a feeling of well-being, but I’m also happy to pass an hour with another consenting adult who understands the lure of the Permanent Period but who hasn’t had to dream it up the way I did. I, in fact, sometimes go right to sleep in the chair, with my mouth propped open and the drill whirring.

It makes me feel good now just to see Calderon waiting for who-knows-what out on the curb, though it’s a long shot he’ll take me back inside and knock off an adjustment.

I shoot down my driver’s side window and angle over, satisfied if we only share a word. Calderon immediately smiles conspiratorially — with no idea who I am. Rain drizzle whooshes past on 206, thirty yards away.

“Hola, Erno. ¿Dónde está el baño?” I say this out my window — our usual palaver.

“El Cid es famoso, ¿verdad?” Ernesto beams a big scoundrel’s smile, still not recognizing me, but putting his big veneers on display. His are white as pearls and made for him by a dental colleague at his wife’s insistence. In his beret, he looks more like an old-timey film star than a philandering gum plumber. “Monet didn’t have a dentist, I guess.” This bears upon some lusty joke he told me the last time and has treated all his patients to for months. I don’t remember it exactly, since I haven’t been in since April. He doesn’t know I’ve had/have cancer — which is a relief, since it makes me forget it. “What’re you do-ing out here, a-mi-go, looking for houses to sell?”

Ernesto pretends to be more Latin than he is after thirty years. I’ve heard him on the phone with his denture lab in Bayonne. He could be from Bayonne. He does know who I am, though. Another small benison.

“I was hoping for a little after-hours dental attention.” He’ll think I’m kidding, but I’m not. Though having a night guard in my pocket feels ridiculous.

“No! Hombre! Don’t tell me. Look at myself.” He gaps back his topcoat to display a tuxedo with flaming red piping. His shoes are the shiny patent-leather species, and he’s wearing a red bow tie and a red-and-green-striped cummerbund that does everything but blink and play music. Calderon’s headed somewhere fancy, while I’m adrift on the back streets with a sore mandible. Who could expect a dentist to be late for a dinner party just because a patient’s in need?

“So where’s your big shindig?” I’m happy to get into the party spirit if I can’t get my night guard fixed.

“Bet-sy went to see her old daddy in Chevy Chase. So…I am left alone once again con my thoughts. ¿Entiendes? I’m going to New Jork to my club.” Ernesto’s donkey eyes brim with the promise of extramarital holiday high jinks. He’s regaled me in the dentist’s chair with winking accounts of his upper-Seventies “gentleman’s club,” where it’s understood he’d be happy to take me and where I’d have the time of my life. Everything top-drawer. The best clientele — former Mets players, local news anchors, younger-set mafiosi. Black tie required, high-quality champagne on ice, the “ladies,” naturally, all Barnard students with great personalities, making money for med-school tuition. I’ve pictured the “gentlemen” rumpus-ing round the plush-carpeted, damask-wallpapered rooms with their tuxedo pants off, in just their patent-leather pumps, dark socks and dinner jackets, comparing each other’s equipment, of which it’s my guess Ernesto probably has a prize specimen.

“Sounds like a blast,” I say.

“Yeees. We have loads of fun. They send me down the leemo. Sometimes you should come with me.” Ernesto nods to certify I wouldn’t be sorry.

I have, just then, the recurrent aching memory of the long walk Clarissa and I took last August through the sun-warmed, healthy-elm-shaded streets of Rochester, a town noted for its prideful thereness and for looking like a small Lutheran college town instead of medical ground zero. It was the Friday before my procedure on Monday, and we’d decided to walk ourselves to sweaty exhaustion, eat an early dinner at Applebee’s and watch the Twins play the Tigers on TV at the Travelodge. We hiked out State Highway 14 to the eastern edge of town — on our feet where others were driving — beyond the winding streets of white-painted, well-tended, green-roof neighborhoods, past the Arab-donated Little League stadium and the federal medical facility and the Olmsted County truck-marshaling yard, beyond the newer rail-fenced ranch homes with snow machines, bass boats and fifth-wheelers For Sale on their lawns, past where a sand and gravel operation had cracked open the marly earth, and farther on to where dense-smelling alfalfa fields took up and a small, treed river bottom appeared, and the glaciated earth began to devolve and roll and slide greenly toward the Mississippi, fifty miles away. NO HUNTING signs were on all the fence posts. The summer landscape was as dry as a razor strop, the corn as high as an elephant’s gazoo, the far, hot sky as one-color gray as a cataract. There was, of course, a lake.

On a little asphalt hillcrest beside where the highway ribboned off to the east, Clarissa and I stopped to take the view back to town — the great, many-buildinged Mayo colossus dominating the pleasant, forested townscape like a kremlin. Impressive. These buildings, I thought, could take good care of anybody.

Sweat had beaded on Clarissa’s forehead, her tee-shirt sweated through. She passed a hand across her flushed cheek. A green truck with slatted sides rumbled past, kicking up hot breeze and sand grit, leaving behind a loud, sweetish aroma of pigs-to-market. “This is where America’s decided to receive its bad news, I guess, isn’t it?” She suddenly didn’t like being out here. Everything was far too specific.

“It’s not so terrible. I like it.” I did. And do. “Given the alternatives.”

“You would.”

“Wait’ll you’re my age. You’ll be happy there’re places like this to receive you. Things look different.”

“Maybe you should just move out here. Buy one of those nice, horrible houses with the green roofs and the green shutters and mullioned windows. Buy a Ski-Doo.”

I’d already given that some thought. “I think I’d do fine out here,” I said. We were both pretending I’d be dead on Monday, just to see how it felt.

“Great,” she said, then turned dramatically on her heel to gaze down the highway eastward. We were traveling no farther that day. “You think you’d do fine anywhere.”

“What’s the matter with that? Is it a mark of something to be unhappy?”

“No,” she said sourly. “You’re very admirable. Sorry. I shouldn’t pick on you. I don’t know why I bother.”

I started to say, Because I’m your father, I’m all that’s left — but I didn’t. I said, “I understand perfectly. You have my best interests at heart. It’s fine.” We started back walking to town and to the things town had in store for me.

Ernesto stares down at me off the curb the way he would if he was waiting for my mouth to numb up. It dawns on me he has no real idea who I am. I am real estate-related but possess no name, only a set of full-mouth X rays clamped to a cold white screen. Or maybe I’m the carpet-cleaning guy from Skillman. Or I own the Chico’s on Route 1, a place I know he skulks off to with his Lebanese hygienist, Magda.

Up in my darkened rearview, I see what may be Ernesto’s leemo, its pumpkin-tinted headlights rounding onto Laurel and commencing slowly toward us.

“What’s up for Thanksgiving in su casa, Ernesto?” I have somehow become pointlessly cheery. Ernesto eyes the white stretch, then glances back at me warily, as if I might just be the wrong person to witness this. He flicks a secret hand signal to the driver, and in so doing makes himself look effeminate instead of mal hombre machismo. Maybe one of the nice-personality Barnard girls with her gold-plated health report is waiting in the backseat, already popping the Veuve Clicquot.

“What’s going on what?” he says, his horn-rims and beret getting misted, his smile not quite earnest.

“Thanksgiving,” I say. “¿Qué pasa a su casa?” I’m deviling him, but I don’t care, since he won’t fix my night guard.

“Oh, we go to Atlantic City. Always. My wife likes to gamble at Caesars.” He’s departing now, inching crabwise toward the limo, which has halted a discreet distance down Laurel. In my side mirror I see the driver’s door swing open. A tall chorus-girl-looking female in silver satin shorty-shorts, high heels and a white Pilgrim collar with a tall red Pilgrim hat just like on the Pennsylvania highway signs gets out and pulls open the rear door. “I have to go now.” Ernesto looks back at me a little frantically, as if he might get left. “Hasta la vista,” he adds idiotically.

“Hugo de Naranja to you, too.”

“Okay. Yes. Thanks.” In the mirror I see him hustle down the street, giving the chorus-girl driver a quick peck and scampering in the limo door. The Pilgrim chauffeur looks my way, smiles at me scoping her out, then climbs back in the driver’s seat and slowly pulls around me and up Laurel Road.

It wouldn’t be bad to be in there with ole Ernesto is what I think. Not so bad to have his agenda, his particular species of ducks lined up. Though my guess is, none of it would work out for me. Not now. Not in the state I’m currently in.

The Johnny Appleseed Bar, downstairs at the August Inn, where I’m meeting Mike Mahoney, is a fair replica of a Revolutionary War roadhouse tavern. Wide, worn pine floors, low ceilings, a burnished mahogany bar, plenty of antique copper lanterns and period “tack”—battle flags with snakes and mottoes, encrusted sabers, drumheads, homespun uniforms encased in glass, framed musket-balls, framed tricorn headgear — with (the pièce de résistance) a wall-sized spotlit mural in alarmingly vivid colors of a loony-looking J. Appleseed seated backward astride a gray mule, saucepan on head, a Klem Kadiddlehopper grin on his lascivious lips, mindlessly distributing apple seeds off the mule’s bony south end. Which apparently was how the West was won. For years, Haddam bar-stool historians debated whether Norman Rockwell or Thomas Hart Benton had “executed” the Appleseed mural. Old-timers swore to have watched both of them do it at several different times, though this was disproved when Rockwell stayed at the inn in the sixties and said not even Benton could paint anything that bad.

I’m always happy in here any time of day or night, its clubby, bogus, small-town imperviousness making me sense a safe haven. And tonight especially, following today, with only a smattering of holiday tipplers nursing quiet cocktails along the bar, plus an anonymous him ’n her tucked into a dark red leather banquette in the corner, conceivably doing the deed right there — not that anyone would care. A wall TV’s on without sound, a miniature plastic Yule tree’s set up on the bottle shelf, a strand of silver (flammable) bunting’s swagged across the mirrored backbar. The old sack-a-bones bartender’s watching the hockey game. It’s the perfect place to end up on a going-nowhere Tuesday before Thanksgiving, when much of your personal news hasn’t been so festive. It’s one thing to marvel at what a bodacious planet we occupy, the way Dr. von Reichstag did, where humans ruminate about neutrinos. But it’s beyond marveling that those humans can invent a concept as balming to the ailing spirit as the “cozy local watering hole,” where you’re always expected, no questions asked, where you can choose from a full list of life-restoring cocktails, stare silently at a silent TV, speak non sequiturs to a nonjudgmental bartender, listen (or not) to what’s said around you — in other words, savor the “in but not all in,” “out but not all out” zeitgeist mankind would package and sell like hoola-hoops if it could and thus bring peace to a troubled planet.

After my sad divorce seventeen years ago, and before I was summoned to the bar of residential realty, I found myself on a stool here many a night, enjoying a croque monsieur from the upstairs kitchen, plus seventy or eighty highballs, sometimes with a “date” I could smooch up in the shadows, then later slithering (alone or à deux) up the steps out onto Hulfish Street and into a warm Jersey eventide with not a single clue about where my car might be. I frequently ended up lurching home to Hoving Road (avoiding busier streets, and cops), and diving straight into bed and towering sleep. I may have experienced my fullest sensation of belonging in Haddam on those nights, circa 1983. By which I mean, if you saw a fortyish gentleman stepping unsteadily out of a bar into a dark suburban evening, staring around mystified, looking hopefully to the heavens for guidance, then careening off down a silent, tree-bonneted street of nice houses where lights are lit and life athrum, one of which houses he enters, tramps upstairs and falls into bed with all his clothes on — wouldn’t you think, Here’s a man who belongs, a man with native roots and memory, his plow deep in the local earth? You would. What’s belonging all about, what’s its quiddity, if not that drunk men “belong” where you find them?

It’s 6:25 and Mike is not yet in evidence. Hard to imagine what a diminutive Tibetan and a macaroni land developer could do together for an entire afternoon of rotten weather. How many plat maps, zoning ordinances, traffic projections, air-quality regulations, floodplain variances and EEOC regs can you pore over without needing sedation, and on the first day you ever laid eyes on each other?

From the elderly bartender, I order a Boodles, eighty proof, straight up, take a tentative lick off the martini-glass rim and feel exactly the way I want to feel: better — able to face the world as though it was my friend, to strike up conversations with total strangers, to see others’ points of view, to think most everything will turn out all right. Even my jaw relaxes. My eyes attain good focus. The bothersome belly sensation that I probably erroneously associate with my prostate has ceased its flickering. For the first time since I woke at six in Sea-Clift and knew I could sleep another hour, I breathe a sigh of relief. A day has passed intact. It’s nothing I take for granted.

My fellow patrons are all Haddam citizens I’ve seen before, may even have done business with, but who, because of my decade’s absence, pretend never to have laid eyes on me. Ditto the bean-pole, white-shirted, green-plastic-bow-tied bartender, Lester, who’s stood the bar here thirty years. He’s a Haddam townie, a slope-shouldered, high-waisted Ichabod in his late sixties, a balding bachelor with acrid breath no woman would get near. He’s given me the standard, noncommittal “Whatchouhavin,” even though years ago I listed his mother’s brick duplex on Cleveland Street, next door to my own former house, where Ann now lives, presented him two full-price offers in a week, only to have him back out (which he had every right to do) and turn the place into a rental — a major financial misreading in 1989, which I pointed out to him, so that he never forgave me. Often it’s the case that no matter how successful or pain-free a transaction turns out — and in Haddam there was never a bad one — once it’s over, clients often begin to treat the residential agent like a person who’s only half-real, someone they’ve maybe only dreamed about. When they pass you in a restaurant or mailing Christmas cards at the PO, they’ll instantly turn furtive and evade your eyes, as if they’d seen you on a sexual-predators list, give a hasty, mumbled, noncommittal “Howzitgoin?” and are gone. And I might’ve made them a quick two mil or ended a bad run of vein-clogging hassles or saved them from pissing away all in a divorce or a Chapter 11. At some level — and in Haddam this level is routinely reached — people are embarrassed not to have sold their own houses themselves and resentful about paying the commission, since all it seems to involve is putting up a sign and waiting till the dump truck full of money stops out front. Which sometimes happens and sometimes doesn’t. Looked at from this angle, we realtors are just the support group for the chronically risk-averse.

Lester’s begun using the remote to click channels away from the hockey game, staring up turkey-necked, gob open at the Sanyo bracketed above the flavored schnapps. He’s carrying on separate dialogues with the different regulars, desultory give-and-takes that go on night to night, year to year, never missing a beat, just picked up again using the all-purpose Jersey conjunction, So. “So, if you put in an invisible fence, doesn’t the fuckin’ dog get some kinda complex?” “So, if you ask me, you miss all the fuckin’ nuance using sign language.” “So, to me, see, flight attendants are just part of the plane’s fuckin’ equipment — like oxygen masks or armrests. Not that I wouldn’t schtup one of them. Right?” Lester nibbles his lip as he flips past sumo wrestling, cliff divers in Acapulco, two people who’ve won a game-show contest and are hugging, then on past several channels with different people dressed in suits and nice dresses, sitting behind desks, talking earnestly into the camera, then past a black man in an ice-cream suit healing a fat black woman in a red choir robe by making her fall over backward on a big stage — more things than I can focus on in my relaxed, not-all-in, not-all-out state of mind.

Then all at once, the President, my president — big, white-haired, smiling, puffy-faced and guileless—his face and figure fill the color screen. President Clinton strolls casually, long-strided, across a green lawn, suppressing an embarrassed smile. He’s in blue cords, a plain white shirt, a leather bomber jacket and Hush Puppies like mine. He’s doing his best to look shy and undeserving, guilty of something, but nothing very important — stealing watermelons, driving without a learner’s permit, taking a peek through a hole in the wall of the girls’ locker room. He’s got his Labrador, Buddy, on a leash and is talking and flirting with people off-camera. Behind him sits a big Navy copter with a white-hatted Marine at attention by the gangway. The President has just saluted him — incorrectly.

“Where’s the fuckin’ Mafia when you need them bastards?” Lester’s growling up at the tube. He makes a pistol out of his thumb and index finger and assassinates the man I voted for with a soft pop of his lizard lips. “Ain’t he havin’ the time of his fuckin’ life with this election bullshit. He loves it.” Lester swivels around to his patrons, his mouth sour and mean. “Country on its fuckin’ knees.”

“Easier to give blow jobs,” one of the regulars says, and thumbs his glass for a fill-up.

“And you’d know about that,” Lester says, and grins evilly.

The couple in the back booth, who’ve been doing whatever away from everybody’s notice, unexpectedly stands up, moving their banquette table noisily out of the way, as if they thought a fight was about to erupt or their sexual shenanigans required more leg room. All five of us, plus an older woman at the bar, have a gander at these two getting their coats on and shuffling out through the tables. Happily, I don’t know them. The woman’s young and thin and watery-blond and pretty in a sharp-featured way. He’s a short-armed, gangsterish meatpie with dark curly hair, stuffed into a three-piece suit. His trousers are unzipped and part of his shirttail’s poked guiltily through the fly.

“What’s your hurry there, folks?” Lester yaps, and leers as the couple heads for the red EXIT lozenge and up to the street.

The noisy drinker down the bar leans forward and smirks at me. “So whadda you think?” He is Bob Butts, owner (once) of Butts Floral on Spring Street, since replaced by the Virtual Profusion and going great guns. Bob is red-skinned, fattish and embittered. His mother, Lana, ran the shop after Bob’s dad died in Korea. This was prehistoric Haddam, when it was a sleepy-eyed, undiscovered jewel. When Lana moved to Coral Gables and remarried, Bob took over the shop and ran it in the ground, gambling his brains out in Tropworld, which was new in Atlantic City. Bob’s a first-rate dickhead.

The two men beyond him, I don’t know, but are shady, small-time Haddam cheezers I’ve seen six hundred times — in Cox’s News or in the now-departed Pietroinferno’s. I have an idea they’re involved with delivering the Trenton Times and possibly less obvious merchandise. The hatchet-faced, thin-haired woman, wearing a blowsy black dress suitable for a funeral, I’ve never seen, though she’s apparently Bob’s companion. It would be easy to say these four are members of a Haddam demimonde, but in fact they’re only regular citizens holding out in defiance, rather than making the move to Bordentown or East Windsor.

“What do I think about what?” I lean forward and look straight at Bob Butts, raising my warming martini to my lips. President Clinton has disappeared off the screen. Though I wonder what he’s doing in real time — having a stiff belt himself, possibly. His last two years haven’t been much to brag about. Like Clarissa, I wish he was running again. He’d do better than these current two monkeys.

“All this election bullshit.” Bob Butts cranes forward, then back, to get a better look at me. Lester’s pouring him another 7&7. Bob’s haggard lady friend gives me an unfocused, boozy stare, as if she knows all about me. The two Trenton Times guys muse at their shot glasses (root beer schnapps, my bet). “Some guy got blown up over at the hospital today. Bunch of pink confetti. This shit’s gone too far. The Democrats are stealin’ it.” Bob’s wet, bloodshot eyes clamp onto me, signaling he knows who I am now — a nigger-lovin’, tax-and-spend, pro-health-care, abortion-rights, gay-rights, consumer-rights, tree-hugging liberal (all true). Plus, I sold my house and left the door open to a bunch of shit Koreans, and probably even had something to do with him losing the flower shop (also true).

Bob Butts is wearing a disreputably dirty brown shawl-collar car coat made of a polymer-based material worn by Michigan frosh in the early sixties but not since, and looks like hell warmed over. He has on chinos like mine and white Keds with no socks. He’s been in need of a shave for several days. His thin, lank hair is long and dirty and he could do with a bath. Obviously, Bob’s experiencing a downward loop, having once been handsome, clever, gaunt to the point of febrile Laurence Harvey effeminance. Like Calderon, he cut a wide swath through the female population, who he used to woogle in his back room, right on the stem-strewn metal arranging table. That’s maybe all you can hope for if you’re a florist.

“I don’t really see what the Democrats have to do with whoever got blown up at the hospital,” I say. I half-turn and take a casual, calculated look back at the Appleseed mural, brightly lit by a row of tiny silver spotlights attached to the low ceiling. By looking at goofball Johnny, I’m essentially addressing nut-case Bob. This is the message I want subliminally delivered. I also don’t want Bob to think I give half a shit about anything he says, since I don’t. I’m ready right now for Mike to show up. But then I can’t resist adding, “And I don’t see where the Democrats are stealing anything, unless getting more votes could be said to be a form of theft. Maybe you do. Maybe it’s why you’re not in the flower business anymore.”

“Could be said.” Bob Butts grins idiotically. “Could be said you’re an asshole. That could be said.”

“It’s already been said,” I say. I don’t want to fan this disagreement beyond the boundary of impolite bar argument. I’m not sure what would wait out past that frontier at my age and state of health and with a big drink already under my belt. And yet the same irresistible urge makes me unable not to add, still facing the Appleseed mural, “It’s actually been said by even bigger shit-heels than you are, Bob. So don’t worry too much about surprising me.” I shift around on my bar stool and entertain the rich thought of a second chilled Boodles. Only, I hear scuffling and wood being scraped. The hatchet-faced woman says, “Oh, Jesus Christ, Bob!” Then a bar stool like the one I’m sitting on hits the floor. And suddenly there’s a fishy odor in my nostrils and mouth, and Bob Butts’ small, rough hands go right around my neck, his whiskery chin jamming into my ear, his throat making a gurgling noise both mechanical, like a car with a bad starter, and also simian—grrrrr—into my ear canal—“Grrrrr, grrrrr, grrrrr”—so that I tip over off my bar stool, which tumbles sideways, and Bob and I go sprawling toward the pine floor. I’m trying to grab a fistful of his reeking car coat and haul it in the direction I’m falling so he’ll hit the floor first and me on top — which bluntly happens. Though the bar stool next to mine — heavy as an anvil — topples down onto me with a clunk in my rear rib cage that doesn’t knock the breath out of me but hurts like shit and makes me expel a not-voluntary “oooof.”

“Cocksucker, you cocksucker.” Bob Butts is gurgling in my ear and stinking. “Grrrr, errrr, grrrr.” These are noises (I for some reason find myself thinking) Bob probably learned as a child, and that were funny once, but now come into play in a serious effort to murder me. Bob’s grip isn’t exactly around my windpipe, only my neck, but he’s squeezing the crap out of me and digging his grimed fingernails into my skin. My flesh is stinging, but I don’t feel shocked or in any jeopardy, except possibly from the fall.

No one else in the bar does anything to help. Not Lester, not the two Trenton Times palookas, not the witchy, balding woman in widow’s weeds who’s invoked Jesus Christ. They simply ignore Bob and me wrestling on the floor, as if a new bar customer, in for a Fuzzy Navel, might think it was great to see two middle-aged guys muggling around on the damp boards, trying to accomplish nobody’s too sure what-in-the-fuck.

All of this begins to seem like an annoyance more than a fight, like having someone’s pet monkey hanging on your neck, though we’re down on the floor and the stool’s on top of me and Bob’s going “Grrrr, errrr, grrrr” and squeezing my neck, his breath and hair reeking like week-old haddock. Suddenly, I lose all my wind and have to buck the bar stool off my back to breathe, and in doing so I get my knee in between Bob’s own squirming, jimmering knees and my right elbow into his sternum, just below where I could interrupt his windpipe. I lean on Bob’s hard breast bone, stare down into his bulging, blood-splurged eyes, which register that this event may be almost over. “Bob,” I half-shout at him. His eyes widen, he bares his long yellow teeth, refastens a fisted grip on my neck tendons and croaks, “Cocksucker.” And with no further prelude, I go ahead and jackhammer my kneecap straight up into Bob’s nuttal pouch pretty much as hard as I can — given my weakened state, given my lack of inclination and the fact that I’ve had a martini and had hoped the evening would turn out to be pleasant, since so much of the day hadn’t.

Bob Butts erupts instantly in a bulbous-eyed, Gildersleevian “Oooomph,” his cheek and lips exploding. His eyes squeeze melodramatically shut. He lets go of my neck and goes as flaccid as a lifesaving dummy. Instead of more “Grrrr, errr, grrr,” he groans a deep, agonizing and, I’ll admit, satisfying “Eeeeeuh-uh-oh.”

“You fuckin’ scrogged ’im, you cheap-ass son of a bitch,” the hatchet-faced woman shouts from up on her bar stool above us, frowning down at Bob and me as if we were insects she’d been interested in. “Fight fair, fucker.” She decides to toss her drink at me and does. The glass, which has gin in it, hits my shoulder, but most of its contents hit Bob, who’s grimacing, with my elbow point — excruciatingly, I hope — nailed into his sternum.

“All right, all right, all right,” Lester says behind the bar, as if he couldn’t really give a shit what the hell’s going on but is bored by it, his spoiled, impassive shoe-salesman’s mug and his green plastic bow tie — relic of some desolate Saint Paddy’s day — just visible to me beyond the bar rail.

“All right what?” I’m holding Bob at elbow point. “Are you going to keep this shit bucket from strangling me, or am I going to have to rough him up?” Bob makes another gratifying “Eeeeeuh-uh-oh,” whose exhalation is foul enough that I have to get away from him, my heart finally beginning to whump.

“Let ’im get up,” Lester says, as though Bob was his problem now.

Bob’s blond accomplice hauls a big shiny-black purse off the floor beside her. “I’ll get ’im home, the dipshit,” she says. The two other bar-stool occupants look at me and Bob as if we were a show on TV. On the real TV, Bush’s grinning, smirking, depthless face is visible, talking soundlessly, arms held away from his sides as if he was hiding tennis balls in his armpits. Other humans are visible around him, well-dressed, smooth-coifed, shiny-faced young men holding paper plates and eating barbecue, laughing and being amused to death by whatever their candidate’s saying.

Using the bar stool, I raise myself from where I’ve straddled Bob Butts, and feel instantly light-headed, weak-armed, heavy-legged, in peril of falling back over on top of Bob and expiring. I gawk at Lester, who’s taking away my martini glass and scowling at me while Bob’s lady friend pulls him, wallowing, off the floor. She squats beside me, her scrawny knees bowed out, her skirt opened, so that I unmercifully see her thighs encased in black panty hose, and the bright white crotch patch of her undies. I avert my eyes to the floor, and see that my night guard has fallen out of my pocket in the tussle and been crunched in three pieces under the bar rail. It makes me feel helpless, then I scrape the pieces away with my heel. Gone.

Bob is up but bent at the waist, clutching his injured testicles. He’s missing one of his Keds, and his ugly yellow toenails are gripping the floor. His hair’s mussed, his fatty face blotched red and white, his eyes hollowed and mean and full of defeated despisal. He glares at me, though he’s had enough. I’m sure he’d love to spit out one more vicious “Cocksucker,” except he knows I’d kick his cogs again and enjoy doing it. In fact, I’d be glad to. We stand a moment loathing each other, all my parts — hands, thighs, shoulders, scratched neck, ankles, everything but my own nuts — aching as if I’d fallen out a window. Nothing occurs to me as worth saying. Bob Butts was better as a lowlife, floral failure and former back-room lady-killer than as a vanquished enemy, since enemy-hood confers on him a teaspoon of undeserved dignity. It was also better when this was a homey town and a bar I used to dream sweet dreams in. Both also gone. Kaput. On some human plain that doesn’t exist anymore, now would be a perfect moment and place from which to start an unusual friendship of opposites. But all prospects for that are missing.

I turn to Lester, who I hate for no other reason than that I can, and because he takes responsibility for no part of life’s tragedy. “What do I owe you?”

“Five,” he snaps.

I have the bat-hide already in hand, my fingers scuffed and sticky from my busted knuckles. My knees are shimmying, though fortunately no one can see. I give a thought to collecting up my shattered night guard pieces, then forget it.

“Did you used to live here?” Lester says distastefully.

This, atop all else, does shock me. More than that, it disgusts me. Possibly I don’t look exactly as I looked when I busted my ass to flog Lester’s old mama’s duplex in a can’t-miss ’89 seller’s market — a sale that could’ve sprung Lester all the way to Sun City, and into a cute pastel cinder-block, red-awninged match box with a mountain view, plus plenty left over for an Airstream and a decent wardrobe in which to pitch sleazy woo to heat-baked widows. A better life. But I am the same, and fuck-face Lester needs to be reminded.

“Yeah, I lived here,” I growl. “I sold your mother’s house. Except you were too much of a mamma’s-boy asshole to part with it. Guess you couldn’t bear leaving your leprechaun tie.”

Lester looks at me in an interested way, as if he’d muted me but my lips are still moving. He rests his cadaver hands on the glass rail, where there’s a moist red rubber drying mat. Lester doesn’t actually look much different from Johnny Appleseed, which may be why the August Inn people (a hospitality consortium based in Cleveland) keep him on. He still wears, I see, his big gold knuckle-buster Haddam HS ring. (My son refused his.) “Whatever,” Lester says, then turns down the pasty corners of his mouth in disdain.

I’d like to utter something toxic enough to get through even Lester’s soul-deep nullity. The least spark of anger might earn me the pleasure of kicking his ass, too. Only I don’t know what to say. The two Trenton Times delivery goons are frowning at me with small, curious menace. Possibly I have morphed into something not so good in their view, someone different from who they thought I was. No longer the invisible, ignorable, pathetic drip, but a rude intruder threatening to take too much attention away from their interests and crap on their evening. They might have to “deal” with me just for convenience sake.

Bob Butts and his harridan lady friend are exiting the bar by way of the stairs up to Hulfish Street. “Naaaa, leave off, you asshole,” I hear the old blondie growl.

“This fuckin’ stinks,” Bob growls back.

“You stink is what,” she says, continuing with difficulty, one leaning on the other, up toward the cold outdoors, the heavy door going click shut behind them.

I stare a moment, transfixed by the bright apple-tinted Disneyish mural of clodhopper Johnny, straddling his plug bass-ackwards, saucepan on top, dribbling his seed across Ohio. These bars are probably a chain, the mural computer-generated. Another one just like this one may exist in Dayton.

I unexpectedly feel a gravity-less melancholy in the bar, in spite of victory over Bob Butts. In the ponderous quiet, with the Sanyo showing leather-fleshed Floridians at long tables, examining punch-card ballots as if they were chest X rays, Lester looks like a pallid old ex-contract killer considering a comeback. His two customers may be associates — silent down-staters handy with chain saws, butcher’s utensils and Sakrete. It’s still New Jersey here. These people call it home. It might be time to wait for Mike outside.

“Ain’t you Bascombe somethin’?” One of the toughs frowns down the bar at me. It’s the farther away one, seated next to the shot-glass rack, a round, barrel-chested, ham-armed smudge pot with a smaller than standard hat size. His face has a close-clipped beard, but his cranium is shaved shiny. He looks Russian and is therefore almost certainly Italian. He produces a short unfiltered cigarette (which Boro regulations profoundly forbid the smoking of), lights it with a little yellow Bic and exhales smoke in the direction of Lester, who’s rummaging through the cash drawer. I would willingly forswear all knowledge of any Bascombe; be instead Parker B. Farnsworth, retired out of the Bureau — Organized Crime Division — but still on call for undercover duties where an operative needs to look like a real estate agent. However, I’ve blown my cover over Lester’s mother’s house. I feel endangered, but see no way free except to fake going insane and run up the stairs screaming.

So what I reluctantly say is, “Yeah.” I expect the smudge pot to snort a cruel laugh and say something low and accusing — a widowed relative or orphan nephew I gave the mid-winter heave-ho to so I could peddle their house to some noisy Jews from Bedminster. I’ve never done that, but it doesn’t stop people from thinking I have. Someone in my old realty firm for sure did it, which makes me a party.

“My kid went to school with your kid.” The bald guy taps his smoke with his finger, inserts it in the left corner of his small mouth and blows more smoke out the front in little squirts. He lets his eyes wander away from me.

“My son Paul?” I am unexpectedly smiling.

“I don’t know. Maybe. Yeah.”

“And what was your son’s name? I mean, what’s his name?”

“Teddy.” He is wearing a tight black nylon windbreaker open onto what looks like an aqua tee-shirt that exhibits his hard basketball-size belly. His clothes are skimpy for this weather, but it’s part of his look.

“And where’s he now?” Likely the Marines or a good trade school, or plying Lake Superior as an able seaman gaining grainy life experience on an ore boat before coming home to settle into life as a plumber. Possibilities are plentiful and good. He’s probably not authoring wiseacre greeting cards and throwing shit fits because he feels underappreciated.

“He ain’t.” The big guy elevates his rounded chin to let cigarette smoke go past his eyes. His drinking buddy, a bony, curly-headed weight-lifter type with a giant flared nose and dusky skin — also wearing a nylon windbreaker — produces a Vicks inhaler, gives it a stiff snort and points his nose at the ceiling as if the experience was transporting.

I get a noseful clear over here. It makes the room suddenly wintry and momentarily happy again. “You mean he stayed home?”

“No, no, no,” Teddy’s father says, facing the backbar.

“So, where is he?” This is, of course, 100 percent none of my business, and I already detect the answer won’t be good. Prison. Disappeared. Disavowed. The standard things that happen to your children.

“He ain’t on the earth,” the big guy says. “Now, I mean.” He removes his cigarette and appraises its red tip.

No way I’m heading down this bad old road. Not after having had my own dead son flashed like a muleta by my wife I’m no longer married to. Since Ralph Bascombe’s been absent from the planet, I haven’t gone around yakking about it in bars with strangers.

I stand up straight in my now-soiled barracuda — sore kneed, neck burning, knuckles aching — and look expressionlessly at this short, cylindrical fireplug of a man who’s suffered (I know exactly, or close enough) and has had to get used to it. Alone.

The big guy swivels to peer past his friend’s face at me. His dark, flat eyes don’t glow or burn or teem, but are imploring and not the eyes of an assassin, but of a pilgrim seeking small progress. “Where’s your kid?” he says, cigarette backward in his fingers, French-style.

“He’s in Kansas City.”

“What’s he do? He a lawyer? Accountant?”

“No,” I say. “He’s a kind of writer, I guess. I’m not really sure.”

“Okay.”

“What happened to your son?”

Why? Why can’t I just do what I say I will? Is it so hard? Is it age? Illness? Bad character? Fear I’ll miss something? What this man’s about to say fairly fills the bar with dread, bounces off the period trappings, taps the drumheads, jingles the harnesses, swirls around Johnny Appleseed like a Halloween ghost.

“He took his own life,” the palooka says without a blink.

“Do you know why?” I ask, full-in-now, with nothing to offer back, nothing to make a man feel better in this season when all seek it.

“Look at those fucks,” Lester snarls. Candidate Gore and his undernourished running mate have commandeered the TV screen in their shirt sleeves, walled in behind stalks of microphones in front of an enormous oak tree, looking grave and silly at once. Gore, the stiff, is spieling on soundlessly, as if he’s admonishing a seventh grader, his body doughy, perplexing, crying out to put on more weight and be old. “Haw!” Lester brays at them. “Whadda country. Jeez-o fuck.” If I had a pistol I’d gladly shoot Lester with it.

“No. I don’t.” The big Trentonian bolts his drink and has a last drag on his smoke. He doesn’t like this now, is sorry he started it. Just an idle question that led the old familiar wrong way. “What I owe you?” he says to Lester, who’s still gawking at Gore and Lieberman gabbling like geese.

“A blow job,” Lester says without looking around. “It’s happy hour. Make me happy.”

The skint-headed guy stubs his smoke in his shot glass, lays two bills on the bar but doesn’t rise to the bait. I get another hot whiff of Vicks as the two men shift around to depart. Off the stool, the big guy’s actually small and compact, and moves with a nice, comfortable, swivel-shouldered Fiorello La Guardia rolling gait, like a credible middleweight.

“Good talking to ya,” he says. His taller, more threatening friend looks straight at me as he steps past, but then seems embarrassed and diverts his eyes.

“Remember what we talked about,” Lester shouts as they head toward the stairs.

“You’re already on the list,” the bald guy’s stairwell voice says as the metal door clanks open and their footfalls and muttering voices grow soft, leaving me alone with Lester.

Mike hasn’t arrived. I stare at Lester’s satchel-ass behind the bar as if it foretold a mystery. He glances around at me (I’m still queasy after my Bob Butts set-to). He has put on tortoiseshell-framed glasses and his practically chinless face is hostile, as if he’s just before invoking his right to refuse to serve anyone. I could use the pisser. Once it was by the exit, but the old smoothed brass MEN plaque is gone and the wall’s been bricked up. The gents must be upstairs in the inn.

“Who’dju waste your vote on?” Lester says. I transfer my stare from trousers seat to the plastic Christmas tree on the backbar. I’m unwilling to leave till Mike gets here.

“I voted for Gore.” The sound of these four words makes me almost want to burst out laughing. Except I feel so shitty.

Lester bellies up to the bar in front of me. His frayed gray-white shirt bears tiny dark specks of tomato juice on its front. His black bartender trousers could use fumigating. He lays his big left hand, the one with the Haddam HS ring on it, palm-down on the eurathaned compass of the bar. The ring’s H crest is bracketed by two tiny rearing stallions on either side, with the numeral 19 below one stallion, and 48 the other. I peer at Lester’s fingers, which promise prophesy. He uses his other index finger to point toward his long left thumb. “Let me show you something,” he says, sinister, matter-of-fact, staring down at his own fingers. “This is your Russian. This next one’s your spic. This one’s your African. This last one’s your Arab or your sand nigger — whichever. You got your choice.” Lester raises his eyes to me coldly, smiling as if he was passing a terrible sentence.

“My choice for what?”

“For what language you want to learn when you vote for fuckin’ Gore. He’s givin’ the country away, like the other guy, except his dick got in his zipper.” Lester, as he did earlier, nibbles his lip — but as though he might punch me. “You probably respect my opinion, don’t you? That’s what you guys do. You respect everybody’s fuckin’ opinion. Except you can’t respect everybody’s opinion.” Lester has made a brawler’s fist out of his prophetic hand and leans on it to draw closer to me over the bar. Vile, minty fixative smell — something he’s been told to use when he meets the public — has been adulterated by an acrid steam of hate. It would make me nauseated if I didn’t think Lester was about to assault me.

“No,” I say. “I don’t respect your opinion.” My voice, even to me, lacks determination. I stand back a step. “I don’t respect your opinion at all.”

“Oh. Okay.” Lester smiles more broadly but keeps on staring hate at me. “I thought you thought everybody was just like everybody else, everybody equal. All of us peas in a fuckin’ pod.”

It is what I think, but I won’t be able to explain that now. Precisely at this flash point — and surprisingly — Mike walks out of the stairwell and through the door of the Johnny Appleseed, looking like a happy little middle-manager, in his mustard blazer and Italian tassel-loafers, though he has the spontaneous good sense to halt under the red EXIT as if something was about to combust. It may.

“It is what I think,” I say, and feel stupid. Lester’s eye shifts contemptuously to Mike, who looks disheartened but is, of course, smiling. “And I think you’re full of shit!” I say this too harshly and somehow begin to lose my balance on the tumbled-over bar stool I haven’t had a chance to put back upright. I am falling yet again.

“Is the midget a friend of yours now?” Lester sneers, but his eyes stay nastily on Mike, object of all he holds loathsome, treacherous and wrong. The element. The thing to be extirpated.

I feel hands on my shoulder and lumbar region. I am now not falling (thank God). Mike has moved quickly forward and kept me mostly upright. “He is my friend,” I say, and accidentally kick the bar stool against the brass foot rail with a loud clanging.

Lester just grimly watches the two of us teetering around the floor like marionettes. “Get out,” he snarls, “and take your coolie with you.” Lester is an old man, possibly seventy. But meanness and bile have made him feel good, able to take an honest pleasure in the world. Old Huxley was right: stranger than we can know.

“I will.” I’m pushing against Mike with my left arm, urging him toward the exit. He has yet to make a noise. What a surprise all this must be. “And I’ll never come in this shithole again,” I say. “I used to like this place. You’d have been a lot better off if you’d sold your mother’s house and moved to Arizona.” Why I say these things — other than that they’re true — I can’t tell you. You rarely get the exit line you deserve.

“Blow it out your ass, you fag,” Lester says. “I hope you get AIDS.” He scowls, as if these weren’t exactly the words he wanted to say, either. Though he’s said them now and ruined his good mood. He turns sideways and looks back up at the TV as we meet the cold air awaiting us in the stairwell. A hockey game is on again, men skating in circles on white ice. The sound comes on, an organ playing a lively carnival air. Lester glances our way to make sure we’re beating it, then turns the volume up louder for a little peace.

Up on the damp sidewalk bordering the Square, white HPD sawhorses have been established along the Pilgrim Interpretive Center’s wattle fence so that during Pilgrim business hours pedestrians can stand and observe what Pilgrim life was once all about and hear Pilgrims deliver soliloquies. A youngish boy-girl couple in identical clear plastic jackets and rain pants stands peering over into the impoundment, shining a jumbo flashlight across the ghostly farm yard. The young husband’s pointing things out to the young wife in a plummy English voice that knows everything about everything. They’ve let their white Shihtzu, in its little red sweater, go spiriting around inside the mucked-up yard, rooting the ground and pissing on things. “Ser-gei?” the husband says, using his most obliging voice. “Look at him, darling, he thinks this is all brilliant.” “Isn’t he funny? He’s so funny,” his young wife says. “Those hungry buggers would probably eat him,” the young man observes. “Probab-lee,” the wife says. “Come along, Ser-gei, it’s 2000, old man, time to go home, time to go home.”

Mike and I cross the shadowed Square to my car, parked in front of Rizutto’s. Mike still has said nothing, acknowledging that I don’t want to talk either. A Buddhist can nose out disharmony like a beagle scenting a bunny. I assume he’s micromanaging his private force fields, better to interface with mine on the ride home.

All the Square’s pricey shops are closed at seven o’clock except for the liquor store, where a welcoming yellow warmth shines out, and the Hindu proprietor, Mr. Adile, stands at his white-mullioned front window, hands to the glass, staring across at the August, where few guest rooms are lit. In steel indifference to the holiday retail frenzy elsewhere, nothing stays open late in Haddam except the liquor store. “Let ’em go to the mall if they need hemorrhoidal cream so bad.” Shopkeepers trundle home to cocktails and shepherd’s pie once the sun goes past the tree line (4:15 since October), leaving the streets with a bad-for-business five o’clock shadow.

Up on Seminary, where I cruised barely an hour ago, the news crawl at United Jersey flows crisply along. The stoplight has switched to blinking yellow. The Haddam gang element has skittered home to their science projects and math homework, greasing the ways for Dartmouth and Penn. The crèche is up and operating on the First Prez lawn — rotating three-color lights, red to green to yellow, brightening the ceramic wise men, who, I see, are dressed as up-to-date white men, wearing casual clothes you’d wear to the library, and not as Arabs in burnooses and beards. Work, I suspect, continues apace at the hospital — where someone got blottoed today. Ann Dykstra’s home, musing on things. Marguerite’s feeling better about what’s not worth confessing. And Ernie McAuliffe’s in the ground. Altogether, it’s been an eventful though not fulfilling day to kick off a hopeful season. The Permanent Period needs to resurge, take charge, put today behind me, where it belongs.

In a moment that alarms me, I realize I haven’t pissed and that I have to — so bad, my eyes water and my front teeth hurt. I should’ve gone upstairs in the Appleseed, though it would’ve meant beseeching Lester and letting him savor the spectacle of human suffering. “Hold it!” I say. Mike halts and looks startled, his little monk’s face absorbing the streetlamp light. Good news? Bad news? More unvirtuous thoughts.

My car would make for good cover and has many times since the summer — on dark side streets and alleys, in garbage-y roadside turn-outs, behind 7-Elevens, Wawas, Food Giants and Holiday Inn, Jrs. But the Square’s too exposed, and I have to step hurriedly into the darkened Colonial entryway of the Antiquarian Book Nook — ghostly shelving within, out-of-print, never-read Daphne du Mauriers and John O’Haras in vellum. Here I press in close to the molded white door flutings, unzip and unfurl, casting a pained look back up the side street toward the Pilgrim farm, hoping no one will notice. Mike is plainly shocked, and has turned away, pretending to scrutinize books in the Book Nook window. He knows I do this but has never witnessed it.

I let go (at the last survivable moment) with as much containment as I can manage, straight onto the bookshop door and down to its corners onto the pavement — vast, warm tidal relief engulfing me, all fear I might drain into my pants exchanged in an instant for full, florid confidence that all problems can really be addressed and solved, tomorrow’s another day, I’m alive and vibrant, it’s clear sailing from here on out. All purchased at the small cost of peeing in a doorway like a bum, in the town I used to call home and with the cringing knowledge that I could get arrested for doing it.

Mike coughs a loud stage cough, clears his throat in a way he never does. “Car coming, car coming,” he says, soft-but-agitated. I hear girdering tires, a throaty V-8 murmur, the two-way crackle in the night, the familiar female voice directing, “Twenty-six. See the man at 248 Monroe. Possible 103-19. Two adults.”

“Coming,” Mike says in a stifled voice.

There’s never very much and I’ve almost done it, though my unit’s out and not easily crammed back in tight quarters. I crouch, knees-in to the door frame, piss circling my shoes. I cup my two hands, nose to the door glass the way Mr. Adile peered out from the liquor store window, and stare fiercely in with all my might — dick out, unattended and drafty. I’m hoping my posture and the unlikelihood that I’m actually doing what I’m doing will suppress all prowl-car attention, and that I won’t be forced by someone shining a hot seal beam to turn around full-flag and set in motion all I’d set in motion, which would be more than I could put up with. Warm urine aroma wafts upward. My poor flesh has recoiled, my heart slowed by the cold pane against my forehead and hands. The Book Nook interior is silent, dark. My breathing shallows. I wait. Count seconds…5, 8, 11, 13, 16, 20. I hear, but don’t see, the cruiser surge and speed up, feel the motor-thrill and the radio-crackle pulse into my hams. And then it’s past. Mike, my Tibetan lookout, says, “They’re gone. Okay. No worries.” I tuck away, zip up quick, take a step back, feel cold on my sweated, battered neck, cheek and ears. I might be okay now. Might be okay. No worries. Clear sailing. All set.

Mike sits in motionless, ecclesiastical silence while I drive us home — Route 1 to 295 to NJ 33, skirt the Trenton mall tie-ups, then around to bee-line 195, to the Garden State toward Toms River. Cold rain has started again, then stopped, then started. The temperature’s at 31, the road surface possibly coated with invisible ice. My suede shoes, I regret, smell hotly of urine.

Mike would’ve understood little of events at the Appleseed, only the last part, which seemed (mysteriously) concerned with him. And like any good Buddhist, he’s decided the less made of negativity, the better. For all I know, he could be meditating. Anger is just attachment to the cycle of birth and death, while we live in thick darkness that teaches that all phenomena (such as myself) have inherent existence, and we must therefore distinguish between a rope and a snake or else be a dirty vase turned upside down and unable to gain knowledge. This was all in the book Mike left on my desk after my Mayo procedure. The Road to the Open Heart. Giving it to me represents his belief that I basically appreciate such malarkey, and that one of the reasons we get along so well and that he’s become a fireball real estate agent is, again, that — due to my being “pretty spiritual” in a secular, pedestrian, all-American sort of way — we see many things the same. Namely, that few outcomes are completely satisfactory, it’s better to make people happy — even if you have to lie — rather than to harm them and make them sad, and we should all be trying to make a contribution.

The Road to the Open Heart is a big, showy coffee-table slab chocked full of idealized, consciousness-expanding color photographs of Tibet and snowy mountains and temples and shiny-headed teenage monks in yellow-and-red outfits, plus plenty of informal snapshots of the Dalai Lama grinning like a happy politician while meeting world leaders and generally having the time of his life. Supposedly, the little man-god wrote the whole book himself, though Mike’s admitted he probably didn’t have time to “write” write it — one of the lies that make you feel better. Though it doesn’t matter since the book is full of his most important teachings boiled down to bite-size paragraphs with easy-to-digest chapter headings even somebody with cancer could memorize, which was what the monks were doing: “The Path to Wisdom.” “The Question We Should All Ask Ourselves.” “The Sweet Taste of Bodhicitta.” “The Middle Way.” Mike left a bookmark at page 157, where the diminutive holiness talks ominously about “death and clear light,” followed by some more upbeat formulations about the “earth constituent, the water constituent, the fire constituent, and the wind constituent,” followed by another photograph of the very view you’ve just been promised — if you’re spiritual enough: an immaculate dawn sky in autumn. At this moment, the book’s in a stack on my bedside table, and on one of these last balmy autumn days I intend to take it down to the ocean and send it off, since in my view the Lama’s teachings all have the ring of the un-new, over-parsed and vaguely corporate about them — which, of course, is thought to be good, and a famous tenet of the Middle Way. What I needed, though, post-Mayo, was the New and Completely Unfamiliar Way. To me, the DL’s wisdom also seemed only truly practicable if your intention was to become a monk and live in Tibet, where these things apparently come easy, whereas I just wanted to go on being a real estate agent on the Jersey Shore and figure out how to get around a case of prostate cancer.

Mike and I did talk about The Road to the Open Heart in the office one day while combing through some damage-deposit receipt forms to identify skippers — although our talk mainly concerned my son Ralph and was to the point that there are many mysteries and phenomena that can’t be apprehended through sense or reason, and that Ralph might have a current existence as a mystery. It was then that he told me about young people who die young becoming masters who teach us about impermanence — which, as I said, I can buy, the Permanent Period not entirely withstanding.

Still, you can take the Middle Way only so far. Asserting yourself may indeed lead to angry disappointment — the DL’s view — and anger only harms the angry and karma produces bad vibes in this life and worse ones in the next, where you could end up as a chicken or a professor in a small New England college. But the Middle Way can just as easily be the coward’s way out. And based on what Mike probably heard back in the Johnny Appleseed, I’d feel better about him if he’d get in a lather about being called a coolie, insist we turn around, drive back to Haddam and kick some Lester ass, then head home laughing about it — instead of just sitting there in the reflected green dashboard glow composed as a little monkey under a Bodhi tree. East meets West.

I’m still feeling a little drunk, in addition to being roughed up, and may not be driving my best. My hands are cold and achy. My knees stiff. I’m gripping the wheel like a ship’s helm in a gale. Twice I’ve caught myself broxing the be-jesus out of my unprotected molars. And twice when I took my eyes off the red taillight smear and the shoe-polish black highway, I found I was going ninety-five — which explains Mike’s leaden silence. He’s been scared shitless since Imlaystown, and is in a frozen fugue state, from which he’s picturing the radiant black near-attainment as I send us skidding off into a cedar bog. I dial it back to seventy.

Today has gone not at all how I intended, although I’ve done nothing much more than what I planned — with the obvious exceptions of the hospital being detonated, having Ann ask me to marry her and getting into a moronic fight with Bob Butts. It’s loony, of course, to think that by lowering expectations and keeping ambitions to a minimum we can ever avert the surprising and unwanted. Though the worst part, as I said, is that I’ve cluttered my immediate future with new-blooming dilemmas exactly like young people do when they’re feckless and thirty-three and too inexperienced to know better. I wouldn’t have admitted it, but I may still possess a remnant of the old feeling I had when I was thirty-three: that a tiny director with a megaphone, a beret and jodhpurs is suddenly going to announce “Cut!” and I’ll get to play it all again — from right about where I crossed the bridge at Toms River this morning. This is the most pernicious of anti-Permanent Period denial and life sentimentalizing, which only lead you down the road to more florid self-deceptions, then dump you out harder than ever when the accounts come due, which they always do. It also suggests that I may not be up for controversy the way I used to be, and may have lapsed into personal default mode.

We’re nearing the 195 junction with the Garden State, where millions (or at least hundreds of thousands) are now streaming south toward Atlantic City — not a bad choice for Turkey Day. It’s the stretch of highway we detoured around this morning due to police activity. I shoot through the interchange as new lighted town signage slips past: Belmar, South Belmar, pie-in-the-sky Spring Lake, all sprawling inland from the ocean into the pine scrub and lowlands west of the Parkway. HUNGRY FOR CAPITAL. REGULAR BAPTIST CHURCH — MEET TRIUMPH AND DISASTER HEAD-ON. HOCKEY ALL NIGHT LONG. NJ IS HOSPITAL COUNTRY. Any right-thinking suburbanite would like to feel confident about these things.

I’m aware Mike’s been cutting his eyes at me and frowning. He can possibly smell my soaked shoes. Mike occasionally broadcasts condescending, hanging-back watchfulness, which I take to mean I’m acting too American and not enough the velvet-handed secular-humanist-spiritualist I’m supposed to be. (This always pisses me off.) And perched on his seat in his fawn trousers, pink sweater, his ersatz Rolex and little Italian shoes with gold lounge-lizard socks, he’s pissing me off again. I’m like chesty old Wallace Beery ready to rip up furniture in the barroom and toss some drunks around like scarecrows.

“What the fuck?” I say, as menacing as I can manage. All around us are mostly tour buses, Windstars and church-group vans headed down to see Engelbert Humperdinck at Bellagio. Mike ignores me and peers ahead into the taillit traffic, little hands gripping the armrests like he’s in a hurtling missile. “Are you going into the land-developing business and start throwing up trophy mansions for Pakistani proctologists and make yourself rich, or what? Aren’t I supposed to hear the pitch and give you the benefit of my years of non-experience?” The aroma I’ve been sniffing since we left Haddam is not just urine but also, I think, garlic — not usual from Mike. Benivalle has given him the full gizmo — some gloomy il forno out on 514, where ziti, lasagne and cannoli hang off the trees like Christmas candy.

Mike turns a serious and judicious look my way, then returns to the taillight stream, as if he has to pay attention in case I don’t.

“So? What?” I say, less Wallace Beery-ish, more mentorish Henry Fonda-like. The car in front of us is a wide red Mercedes 650 with louvered back windows and some kind of delta-wing radar antenna on the trunk. A big caduceus is bolted to the license plate holder and below it a bumper sticker says ALL LIFE IS POST-OP. GET BUSY LIVING IT. Back-lit human heads are visible inside, wagging and nodding and, I guess, living it.

“Not sure.” Mike is barely audible, as if speaking only to himself.

“About what? Is Benivalle a cutie pie?” Cutie pie is our office lingo for shit-heel walk-ins who waste your time looking at twenty listings, then go behind your back and try to buy from the seller. Cutie pie sounds to us like mobster talk. We always say we’re “putting out a contract” on some “cutie pie,” then laugh about it. Most cutie pies come from far east Bergen County and never buy anything.

“No, he’s not,” Mike says morosely. “He’s a good guy. He took me to his home. I met his wife and kids — in Sergeantsville. She fixed a big lunch for us.” The ziti. “We drove out to his Christmas tree farm in Rosemont. I guess he owns three or four. That’s just one business.” Mike’s laced his fingers, pinkie ring and all, and begun rotating his thumbs like a granny.

“What else does he do?” I’m only performing my agreed-to duty here.

“A mobile-home park that’s got a driving range attached, and he owns four laundromats with Internet access with his brother Bobby over in Milford.” Mike compresses his lips to a stern little line, all the while thumbs gyrating. These are rare signs of stress, the inner journey turning bumpy. Entrepreneurship clearly unsettles him.

“Why the hell does he need you to go into business with him? He’s got a plate-full. Has he ever developed anything except Christmas trees and laundromats?”

“Not so far.” Mike is brooding.

In Benivalle’s behalf, he is, of course, the model of the go-it-alone, self-starter that’s made New Jersey the world-class American small-potatoes profit leader it is. Before he’s forty, he’ll own a chain of Churchill’s Chickens, a flush advertising business, hold an insurance license and be ready to go back to school and study for the ministry. Up from the roadside vegetable stand, he’s exactly what this country’s all about: works like a dray horse, tithes at St. Melchior’s, has never personally killed anyone, stays in shape for the fire department, loves his wife and can’t wait for the sun to come up so he can get crackin’.

Which doesn’t mean Mike should risk his hairless little Tibetan ass in the housing business with the guy, back-loaded as that business is with cost over-runs, venal subcontractors slipping kickbacks to vendors, subpar re-bar work, off-the-books payouts to inspectors, insurers, surveyors, bankers, girlfriends, the EPA and shady guys from upstate — anybody who can get a dipper in your well and sink you into Chapter 11. Guys like Benivalle almost never know when to stay small, when a laundromat in the hand is worth two McMansions in the cornfield. This deal smells of ruin, and neither one of them needs a new ruin when 30-years are at 7.8, the Dow’s at 10.4, and crude’s iffy at 35.16.

“He’s also got an eighteen-year-old who’s mentally challenged,” Mike says, and aims a reproving glower to indicate I’m, again, more American than he’s comfortable with — though he’s just as American as I am, only from farther east.

“So what? He’s raking it in.” A mind’s picture of my son Paul Bascombe’s angry face — not a bit challenged — predictably enters my thinking with predictable misgiving.

“His wife’s not really well, either,” he says. “She can’t work because she has to drive little Carlo everywhere. They’ll have to put him in a care facility next year. That’s expensive.” Mike, of course, has a seventeen and a thirteen-year-old with his wife, now in the Amboys — little Tucker and little Andrea Mahoney. Plus, because he’s a Buddhist, he’s crippled by seeing the other guy’s point of view about everything — a fatal weakness in business. I’m crippled by it, too, just not when it comes to giving advice.

“Yeah,” I say, “but it’s not your kid.”

“No.” Mike stops gyrating his digits and settles himself on the passenger’s seat. He’s thinking what I’m thinking. Who wouldn’t?

We’re suddenly five hundred yards from Exit 82 and Route 37. Our turn-off. I have no memory of the last 15.6 miles — earth traversed, traffic negotiated, crashes avoided. We’re simply here, ready to get off. The red Mercedes with the caduceus dematerializes into the traffic speeding south — a Victorian manse on the beach at Cape May in its future, a high-roller suite at Bally’s.

I slide us off to the right. And then instantly, even in the dark, the crumpled remains of a tour bus come into view. Undoubtedly it’s the bigpileupontheGardenState that made the news crawl and stoppered the Parkway this morning when we tried to get on. The big Vista Cruiser’s down over the corrugated metal barriers into the pine and hardwoods, flipped on its side like a wounded green-and-yellow pachyderm, left-side tires and undercarriage exposed to the night air, a gash opened in the graded berm, as if lightning had ripped through.

All passengers would be long gone now — medi-vac’d to local ERs or just limped away, dazed, into the timber. There’s no sign of fire, though the big tinted vista windows have been popped out and the bus skin ripped open through the lettering that says PETER PAN TOURS (no doubt the Jaws of Life were used). Men in white jumpsuits are at this moment maneuvering a giant wrecker down the embankment from the Route 37 side, preparing to winch the bus upright and tow it away. No one who isn’t getting off at Toms River would see anything, though an Ocean County deputy’s at the ramp bottom, directing traffic with a red flare.

Neither Mike nor I speak as we slow and get directed by the deputy toward the left, in the direction of the bay bridge. Something about the accident requires a reining in on our conversation about Benivalle’s family sorrows. Tragedies, like apples and oranges, don’t compare.

Route 37 back through Toms River is changed from the Route 37 we traveled this morning. Road construction’s shut down and the sky’s low, mustard-colored and muffled, the long skein of traffic signals popping green, yellow, red through a salty seaside haze. Only it’s not a bit less crowded — due to the Ocean County mall staying open 24/7, and all other stores, chains, carpet outlets, shoe boutiques, language schools, fancy frame shops, Saturn dealerships and computer stores the same. Traffic actually moves more slowly, as if everyone we passed this morning is still out here, wandering parking lot to parking lot, ready to buy if they just knew what, yet are finally wearing down, but have no impulse to go home. The old curving neon marquee at the Quality Court has had its WELCOME amended. No longer SUICIDE SURVIVORS, but JERSEY CLOGGERS and the BLIND GOLFERS’ ASSOC are welcomed. The blind golfers have earned a CONGRATS, though they’re unlikely to know about it.

My neck, arms, jaw and knuckles have gone on throbbing and burning where miscreant Bob Butts throttled me. Bob should be thinking life over in the Haddam lockup, awaiting my decision to bring charges. I’ve been able to let the unhappy prospect of Ann coming to Thanksgiving sink out of mind. But the slow-motion consumer daze on the Miracle Mile has revived it. It’s the time of day in the time of year when things go wrong if they’re going to.

In Ann’s case, she simply didn’t have any attractive Thanksgiving plans (not my fault), wished she did and exerted her will (strong-woman-getting-to-the-bottom-of-things) on me, in a depleted state. She’s ignored Sally like temporary house help, played the sensitive dead-son card, the kind-man card, plus the L word, then stood back to watch how it all filters out. For years, I dreamed, shivered and thrilled at the idea of remarrying Ann. I pictured the whole event in Technicolor — though I could never (I wouldn’t admit it) work the whole thing through to its fantastical end. There was always a difficulty—a door I couldn’t find, words I got wrong — like in the dream in which you sing the national anthem at the World Series, except a lump of tar’s for some reason stuck to your molars and your mouth won’t open.

But this visit and all attached to it seem like the wrongest of wrong ideas even if I’m wrong as to motivation (I’ve had it with tonight). I don’t even know Ann’s politics anymore (Charley’s I knew: Yale). I could also be impotent — though no trial runs have been attempted. She and the children have grinding life issues I don’t want to share. And I have to piss too much to be perpetually amusing at dinner parties. Given Ann’s power-point certainty about everything, I’d end up a will-less sheep at De Tocqueville faculty do’s, a partial man who sees life from a couch in the corner. Plus, I have this sleeping-panther cancer that could roar back on me.

We all need to take charge of who we spend our last years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, seconds, final fidgeting eye-blinks with, who we see last and who sees us. Like the wise man said, What you think’s going to happen to you after you die is what’s going to happen. So you need to be thinking the right things in the run-up.

“They bundle up those Christmas trees so they look like torpedoes,” Mike says out of the blue, taking his glasses off and rubbing them on his blazer cuff, blinking eyes attentively. We’re passing the bonsai nursery, transformed now into a bulb-strung Christmas tree lot. “There’s a big machine that does it. Then they’re trucked out to vendors in Kansas. All Tommy’s customers’re in Kansas.” He’s thinking about commerce in general — if it’s a good idea or if it could possibly be his punishment for cheating someone out of his wattle ten centuries back. Belief, in Mike’s view, is not a luxury, but still needs to keep pace with known facts and established authority — in his case, the economy. It’s the theory-versus-practice rub that all religions fail to smooth over.

We’ve passed beyond the mall-traffic chaos and are headed toward the bay bridge, along the strip of elderly clam shacks, red-lit gravel-lot taverns, Swedish massage parlors, boat-propeller repairs and boss & secretary tourist cabins from the fifties, when it was a hoot to come to the Shore and didn’t cost a year’s pay. Out ahead spreads Barnegat Bay and across it the low sparse necklace lights of Sea-Clift, visible like a winter town on a benighted prairie seen from a jetliner. It’s as beckoning as heaven. New Jersey’s best-kept secret, where I’ll soon be diving into bed.

Mike goes reaching under his pink sweater as if reaching for a package of smokes, his gaze cast over the dark frigid waters toward the bull-semen lab. And from his inside blazer pocket he produces, in fact, a pack of smokes! Marlboro menthols, in the distinctive green-and-white crushproof box — my parents’ favorites and my own fag of choice during my military school days of experimentation eons ago. I could never hack it, though I perfected the French inhale, learned to finger a fleck off my tongue tip à la Richard Widmark and to hold one clenched between my teeth without smoke getting in my eyes.

But Mike? Mike doesn’t smoke cigarooties! Buddhists don’t smoke. Virtuous thinking can’t possibly permit that. Does he know about his already-increased cancer susceptibility that comes with the oath of citizenship? To see him expertly strip open the pack like a fugitive is shocking. And revelatory — as if he’d started whistling “Stardust” out his butt.

I look over to be sure I’m not hallucinating, and for an instant veer into the other bridge lane and nearly wham us into a septic-service truck on its holiday way home. The truck’s horn blares into the background, leaving me strangely excited.

“You mind if I smoke?” Mike looks preoccupied and vaguely ridiculous in his little dandy’s threads. He even has his own matches.

“Not a bit.” My surprise is really just the surprise of waking up to the moment in life I’m currently in: I’m in my car, driving over the Barnegat bridge with a forty-three-year-old Tibetan real estate salesman who’s my employee and looking to me for advice about his business future and who’s now smoking a cigarette! An act I’ve never known him to perform in eighteen months. We’re a long way from Tibet out here. “I didn’t know you were a Marlboro man.”

He’s already fired up, cracked the window and blown a good lungfull into the slipstream. “I smoked when I worked in Calcutta.” He’s referring to his telemarketer days of selling Iowa beef and electronic gadgets to New Jersey matrons from bullpens in the subcontinent. What a life is his. “I quit. Then I started again when I got separated.” He takes another hungry suck. He already has it half-burned down, rich, stinging gray smoke hissing through the window crack. With one simple, indelible act he’s no longer strictly a Tibetan, but has become the classic American little-guy, struggling under a wagonload of tough choices and plagued by uncertainties he has no experience with — in his case, about whether to become a sleazy land developer. It’s our profoundest national conundrum: Are things getting better, or much worse? Poor devil. Welcome to the Republic.

“I was thinking when we were driving through Toms River.” Mike actually plucks a fleck of tobacco off his tongue tip Dick Widmark-style. “All that mess back there, those people driving around aimlessly.”

“They weren’t aimless,” I say. “They were looking for bargains.” I’m still thinking about the septic truck that almost flattened us. Some guy heading home to Seaside Park, kids at the front windows, hearing the truck rumble in, happy wife, supper steaming on the table, brewsky already cracked, TV tuned to the Sixers.

“So much of life’s made up of choosing things created by other people, people even less qualified than ourselves. Do you ever think about that, Frank?” He is graver than grave now, fag in mouth, its red tip a beacon as we reach the Sea-Clift end of the bridge. The illuminated NEW JERSEY’S BEST KEPT SECRET sign flashes past Mike’s face and glasses. Once again, his snappy apparel and anchorman voice don’t go together, as if someone else was talking for him. I’m about to be treated to some Buddhist ex cathedra homiletics in which I’m a hollow, echoing vessel needing filling with someone else’s better intelligence — all because I’m patient and forbearing.

“We don’t originate very much,” Mike adds. “We just take what’s already there.”

“Yeah, I’ve thought about that.” This very morning. Possibly he and I even talked about it and he’s appropriated it and made it the Buddha’s. I’m tempted to call him Lobsang. Or Dhargey — whichever one comes first — just to piss him off. “I’m fifty-five years old, Mike. I’m in the real estate business. I make a good living selling people houses they didn’t originate and I didn’t, either. So I’ve thought about a lot of these things over the years. Are you just a numbnuts?”

Lighted houses, wimmering up on the bay side as we circle off the bridge, are mostly ranches with remodeled camelbacks, and a few larger, modern, all-angles board-and-battens that solidify the tax base. I’ve sold a bunch of them and expect to sell more.

Mike further narrows his old-looking little eyes. This isn’t what he expected to hear. Or what I expected to say.

“I mean, what about mindfulness being a glass of yak milk sitting on your head?” This is straight out of the Dalai Lama book, which I’ve read part of — mostly on the crapper. “I mean, you aren’t acting very fucking mindful.” I’m speeding again, off the bridge and onto Route 35, Ocean Avenue, the Sea-Clift main drag, also the main drag for Seaside Heights, Ortley Beach (with a different boulevard name), Lavallette, Normandy Beach, Mantoloking — concatenated seaside proliferance all the way to Asbury Park. Mike’s Infiniti is parked at the office. I’ve so far given him little good advice about becoming a housing mogul. Possibly I have very little good advice to give. In any case, I’ll be glad to have him out of the car.

Northbound Ocean Avenue is a wide, empty one-way separated from southbound Ocean Avenue by two city blocks of motels, surfer shops, bait shops, sea-glass jewelers, tattoo parlors, taffy stores (all closed for the season), plus a few genuine lighted-and-lived-in houses. In summer, our beach towns up 35 swell to twenty times their winter habitation. But at nine at night on November 21st, the mostly empty strip makes for an eerie, foggy fifties-noir incognito I like. No holiday decorations are up. Few cars sit at curbs. The ocean, in frothy winter tumult, is glimpsable down the side streets and the air smells briny. Parking meters have been removed for the convenience of year-rounders. Two traditional tomato-pie stands are open but doing little biz. The Mexicatessen is going and has customers. Farther on, the yellow LIQUOR sign and the ruby glow of the Wiggle Room (a summer titty bar that becomes just a bar in the winter) are signaling they’re open for customers. A lone Sea-Clift town cop in his black-and-white Plymouth waits in the shadows beside the fire department in case some wild-ass boogies from East Orange show up to give us timid white people something to think about. A yellow Toms River Region school bus moves slowly ahead of us. We have now traveled as far east as the continent lasts. There’s much to be said for reaching a genuine end mark in a world of indeterminacy and doubt. The feeling of arrival is hopeful, and I feel it even on a night when nothing much is going good.

Mike’s clammed up since I scolded him about being mindful. We have yet to develop a fully operational language for conflict in the months he’s been with me. And by being scolded, he’s possibly been tossed back onto painful life lessons — the telemarketers’ bullpen with its cynical Bengali middle-management bullies; ancient, happy-little-brown-man stereotypes; muscular-McCain-war-hero imagery and plucky Horatio Algerish immigrant models — all roles he’s contemplated in his odyssey to here but that don’t really cohere to make a rational world.

Though I don’t mind if Mike’s being pushed out of his comfort zone. He’s like every other Republican: nervous about commitment; fearful of future regret; never saw a risk he wouldn’t like somebody else to take. Benivalle may have done his dreams brusque disservice by putting his own little domestic Easter egg on display. Since what he’s done is make Mike stop, think and worry — bad strategy if your customer’s a Buddhist. Mike’s now being forced to consider his own Big Fear — the blockade that has to be broken through sometime in life or you go no further. (I used to think mine was death. Then cancer taught me it wasn’t.)

Mike now has to figure out if his big fear is the terror of going on ahead (into the mansioning business) or the terror of not; if he’s ready to buy into the proposition most Americans buy into and that says “You do this shit until either you’re rich or you’re dead”; or if he’s more devoted to his old conviction that dying a millionaire is dying like a wild animal, attachment leads to disappointment and pain, etc. In other words, is he really a Republican, or is this dilemma the greening of Mike? Flattening pretty cornfields for seven-figure mega-mansions isn’t, after all, really helping people in the way that assisting them to find a modest home they want — and that’s already there — helps them. Benivalle’s idea, of course, is more the standard “we build it, they come,” which Mike uncomfortably sniffed back in Toms River: If we build Saturns, they will want to drive them; if we build mini-crepe grills, they will want to eat mini-crepes; if we invent Thanksgiving, they will try to be thankful (or die in the process).

My Realty-Wise office sits tucked between a Chicago-Style Pizza that previously occupied my space, and the Sea-Clift Own-Make Candies, that’s only open summers and whose owners live in Marathon. The pizza place is lighted inside. The tricolor flag still leans out from its window peg over the sidewalk (Italy is the official kingdom-in-exile on the Shore). Bennie, the Filipino owner, is alone inside, putting white dough mounds back in the cold box and closing down the oven until Saturday, when everybody will crave a slice of “Kitchen Sink.” Some days, when the humidity’s high, my office smells like rich puttanesca sauce. I can’t tell if this inclines clients more, or less, to buy beach property, though when they aren’t serious enough to get in the car and go have a look at something up their alley, I often later see them next door, staring out Bennie’s front window, a slice on a piece of wax paper, happy as clams for having exercised self-control.

Mike’s silver Infiniti, with a REALTORS ARE PEOPLE TOO sticker on the back bumper and a Barnegat Lighthouse license plate, sits in front of my white, summery-looking, cubed building, which announces REALTY-WISE in frank gold-block lettering on its front window like an old-time shirtsleeve lawyer’s office. Home-for-sale snapshots are pinned to a corkboard that’s visible inside the door. In general, my whole two-desk set-up is decidedly no-frills when compared to the Lauren-Schwindell architect’s showplace on Seminary, which shouted Money! Money! Money! Nothing along this stretch of the Shore compares to Haddam, which is good, in my estimation. Here at this southern end of Barnegat Neck, life is experienced less pridefully, more like an undiscovered seacoast town in Maine, and no less pleasantly — except in summer, when crowds rumble and surge. When I came over with my broker’s license in ’92, seeking a place to set up shop, all my competitors gave me to understand that everyone was collegial down here, there was plenty of business (and money) to go around for someone who wanted not to work too hard but keep on his toes (handle summer rentals, own a few apartments, do the odd appraisal, share listings, back up a competitor if things got tight). I purchased old man Barber Featherstone’s business when Barber opted for managed care near his daughter’s in Teaneck, and everybody came by and said they were glad I was here — happy to have a realty veteran instead of a young cut-throat land shark. I took over Barber’s basic colors — red and white (no motto or phony Ivy League crest) — substituted Realty-Wise for Featherstone’s Beach Exclusives, and got to work. Anything fancier wouldn’t have helped and eventually would’ve made everyone hate my guts and be happy to cut me off at the knees whenever they had the chance — and there are always chances. As a result, in eight years I’ve made a bundle, missed the stock market boom — and the correction — and hardly worked a lick.

The WE’RE OPEN sign’s been left hanging inside the glass door since yesterday, and in the shadowy interior, where Mike and I sit at two secondhand metal desks I got at St. Vincent de Paul to make us not look like sharpsters but doers, the red pin light’s blinking on the ceiling smoke alarm. Of course I have to piss again, though not frantically. Later in the day the urge is worse. Mornings and early afternoons, I often don’t even notice. I can use the office facilities rather than wait for home (which could get tricky).

Mike is still aswarm with thoughts. He’s stuffed another cigarette out the window and breathed a deep sigh of anti-Buddhist dismalness. His Marlboro and garlic, and my pissed-on shoes, have left my car smelling terrible.

There’s no good reason to resume our conversation about mindfulness, glasses of yak milk, what we originate and what we don’t. I have no investment in it and was only performing my role as devil’s advocate. In my view, Mike is made for real estate the way some people are made to be veterinarians and others tree surgeons. He may have found his niche in life but hates to admit it for reasons I’ve already expressed. I would hate to lose him as my associate — no matter how unusual an associate he is. I might arrange to have a Sponsor visit him, some stranger who could tell him what I’d tell him.

Still, old Emerson says, power resides in shooting the gulf, in darting to an aim. The soul becomes. My soul, though, has become tired of this day.

“You’re not under any big time constraint in all this, are you?” I say this to the steering wheel without looking at him. The interior instruments glow green. The heat’s on, the car’s at idle. “I’d be suspicious if there was some kind of rush. You know?”

“House prices went up forty percent last year. Money’s cheap. That won’t last very long.” He is morose. “When Bush gets in, the minority program’ll dry up. Clinton would keep it. So would Gore.” He sighs again deeply. He dislikes Clinton for uncoupling China trade from human rights, but of course would fare better with the Democrats — like the rest of us.

“Does Benivalle like Bush?”

“He likes Nader. His father was a lefty.” Mike absently pulls on his undersized earlobe. A gesture of resignation.

“Benivalle’s green? I thought they were all cops. Or crooks.”

“You can’t generalize.”

Though generalization’s my stock-and-trade. And I like Benivalle less for getting in bed with the back-stabbing Nadir. “Isn’t it odd that you like Bush, and he’s killing off your minority whozzits. And you’re thinking of going into business with a liberal.”

“I don’t like Bush. I voted for him.” Mike impatiently unsnaps his seat belt. He has ventured valiantly forth as a brave citizen and come back an immigrant vanquished by uncertainty. Too bad. “I feel regret,” he says solemnly.

“You haven’t done anything bad,” I say, and attempt a smile denoting confidence.

“It doesn’t attach to doing.” And he’s suddenly smiling, himself, though I’m sure he’s not happy.

“You just got out beyond your stated ideological limits,” I say. “You can always come back. Devil’s advocate’s just a figure of speech. My belief system hasn’t defeated your belief system.”

“No. I’m sure it hasn’t.” Mike frames his words as a verdict.

“There you go.” Ours is a rare conversation for two men as different as we are to have in a car, though I wish it could be over so I could grab a piss.

“I understand you think this is not a good thing to do,” he says.

“I don’t want to keep you from anything but harm,” I say. “You’ll just have to understand what you understand.”

Bennie, the pizzeria owner, has taken his Italian flag inside and is letting himself out his front door, locking up using a ring of keys as big as a bell clapper. He has his white apron draped over his arm for at-home laundering. He’s a small, crinkly-haired, mustachioed man and looks more Greek than Filipino. He’s wearing flip-flops, a red shirt and black Bermudas that reveal white ham-hock thighs. He glances at Mike and me, shadowy male presences in an idling Suburban, gives us a momentary stare, possibly puts us down for queers — though he should recognize me — then finishes his lock-up and walks away toward his white delivery van farther down the block.

Mike says he feels regret, but what he feels is lonely — though it’s logical to confuse the two. He’ll probably never feel true regret, which is outside his belief system. When he gets back to his empty house in Lavallette, he’ll turn up the heat, call his pining wife in the Amboys, speak lovingly of reconciling, talk sweetly to his kids, meditate for an hour, connect some significant dots and pretty soon start to feel better about things. As an immigrant, he knows loneliness can be dealt with symptomatically. I could ask him over for Thanksgiving. But I’ve made a big-enough mess with Ann, and don’t trust my instincts. Anything can be made worse.

In our silence, my mind strays to Paul again, already on his soldiering way over from the Midwest, his new “other” manning the map under the dim interior lights so there’s no need to stop. (Why do so many things happen in cars? Are they the only interior life left?) I wonder where exactly they are at this moment. Possibly just passing Three Mile Island in his old, shimmying Saab? I already sense his commotional presence via consubstantive telemetry across the dwindling miles.

Mike’s small, lined, smiling face waits outside my car door. Cold ocean fog swirls behind him, giving me a shudder. I’ve briefly zoned again. Oh my, oh me.

“Suffering, I think, doesn’t happen without a cause.” He nods consolingly in at me, as if I was the one in the pickle.

“I don’t necessarily look at things that way,” I say. “I think a lot of shit just happens to you. If I were you, I wouldn’t think so much about causes. I’d think more about results. You know? It’s my advice.”

His smile vanishes. “They’re always the same,” he says.

“Whatever. You’re a good real estate agent. I’d be sorry to lose you. This is the fastest-growing county in the East. Household income’s up twenty-three percent. There’s money to be made. Selling houses is pretty easy.” I could also tell him there’d be virtually zero Buddhists in Haddam to be buddies with — just Republicans by the limo-full, who wouldn’t associate with him, not even the Hindus, once they found out he’s a developer. He’d end up feeling sad about life and moving away. Whereas here, he wouldn’t. I don’t say that, though, because I’m out of advice. “I’ll be in in the morning,” I say, all business. “Why don’t you take the day and think about things. I’ll steer the ship.”

“Sure. Good. Okay.” He goes reaching in his trousers for his keys. “Have a happy Thanksgiving.” He puts the accent on the giving, not on the thanks as we longer-term Americans do.

“Okay.” I sound and feel vapid.

“Do you explode fireworks?” His car lights flash on by themselves.

“Different holiday,” I say. “This is just eating and football.”

“I can’t always keep things straight.” He looks at me inside my cold cockpit and seems delighted. A minor holiday miscue lets him feel momentarily less American (in spite of his lapel-pin flag) and makes his other errors, failures and uncertainties feel more forgivable, just parts of those things that can’t be helped. It’s not a wrong way to feel — less responsible for everything. Mike closes the door, taps the glass with his pinkie ring and gives me a silly, grinning half bow with a thumbs-up, to which I involuntarily (and ridiculously) give him a half bow back, which delights him even more and into another thumbs-up but no bow. I am the hollow, echoing vessel between the two of us now. I have my patience and forbearance for my ride home, but as this long day of events comes to its close, I have little more to show.