The Lay of the Land

7

At 3:00 a.m., I’m suddenly awake, which is not unusual these days. A late-night call to the toilet, or else something from the day ahead or the day past, abruptly breaking through the tent of sleep to invade my brain and set my heart to beating fast. Sleep’s a gossamer thing for over-fifties, even women. Normally, I can breathe deep and slow, adjust my hearing to the hiss of the sea, project my mind into the oceany dark and am asleep without realizing I’m not awake. Though when that doesn’t avail — and sometimes it doesn’t — I seek repose by editing my list of prospective pallbearers, noting a crucial addition or deletion, depending on my mood, followed by a review of who I intend to leave what to when the day comes, then reviewing all the cars I’ve owned, restaurants I’ve eaten in and hotels I’ve slept in during my fifty-five years of ordinary life. And if none of these performs, I inventory all the acceptable ways of committing suicide (without scaring the shit out of myself — all cancer patients do this). And if nothing else works — sometimes that happens, too — I file through the names of every woman I ever made love to in my entire life (surprisingly more than I’d have thought), at which point sleep comes in half a minute, since I’m not really very interested, whereas with the others, I sort of am. Clarissa has told me that when sleep eludes her, she recites a South-Sea Fijian mantra, which goes: “The shark is not your demon, but the final resting place of your soul.” This I’d find disturbing, so that if it ever did put me to sleep, it would give me a bad dream, which would then wake me up and I’d be stuck till morning.

My room now is cold and nearly lightless but for the red numerals on the clock, the ocean sighing toward daylight, still hours on. I’ve been dreaming I rescued a stranger from the sea outside my house and have been declared a hero (a sure sign of needing rescue). I awoke to hear the sound of my own name whispered in the night air.

“Frank-ee,” I hear, “Frank-ee.” My heart’s racing like Daytona, my fingers and arms up to my shoulder webby and immobilized with slowed blood flow and dormancy. Normally, I maintain the recommended Dead Crusader position — flat on my back, feet together, wrists crossed on my chest as though a sword is in hand. But I’m surprisingly on my stomach and may possibly have been swimming in the sheets. My neck aches from my Bob Butts tussle. I’ve popped a sweat like an athlete on a jog. “Frank-ee.” Then I hear boisterous laughing. “Haw, haw, haw.” A door slamming. Splat.

When I arrived home last night from Haddam, a sports car, a shiny, pale blue, underslung Austin-Healey 1000, sat beside Sally’s LeBaron convertible in the driveway, its motor warm (I checked). Green-numeral LIVE FREE OR DIE license plates. A red Gore sticker was half torn off its back bumper. Later, I climbed the stairs to my bedroom and heard Clarissa’s radio, low and soft, tuned to the all-night jazz station in Philadelphia — Arthur Lyman playing “Jungle Flute” on a piano. A bottle lip clinked against a glass rim, a hushed man’s (not a very young man’s) voice was saying, humorously, “Not so bad. I wouldn’t say. Not so bad.” Silence opened as the two took in my footfalls and my door squeaking and a cough I felt required to cough, if only to say, Yes, things’re fine. Fine, fine. Things’re all fine. Then another tinkle-clink, Clarissa’s languorous laugh, the word father casually spoken in a low but not too low voice, and then silence.

But now the door splat outside the house. My name whispered, then “Haw, haw, haw.” Clearly, it’s my neighbors.

Next door on Poincinet Road, eighteen feet from my south wall, my immediate neighbors are the Feensters, Nick and Drilla. I sold them their house in ’97. Nick is a former Bridgeport firefighter who became a millionaire recycling old cathode-ray tubes, and then to his shock won the Connecticut lottery. Not the big one. But the big-enough one. He and Drilla had been weekenders in Sea-Clift, plus two set-aside weeks in August, consigning to me their pink, white-trimmed Florida-style bungalow on Bimini Street to rent for a fortune, May to October, which is our season. But when the big money rolled in, they sold the pink bungalow, Nick quit work, they pulled up stakes in Bridgeport and let me put them into #5 Poincinet Road — a modern, white-painted, many-faceted, architect’s dream/nightmare with metal-banistered miradors, copper roof, decks for every station of the sun, lofty, mirrored triple-panes open on the sea, imported blue Spanish tile flooring (heated), intercoms and TVs in the water closets, in-wall vacuums and sound system, solar panels, a burglar system that rings in Langley, built-in pecky cypress everythings, even a vintage belted Excalibur that the prior owners, a gay banking couple with an adopted child who couldn’t stand the damp, just threw in for the million eight, full-boat, as a housewarming present. (Nick sold it for a mint.)

The Feensters moved down, eager beavers, on New Year’s Day, ’98, ready to take up their fine new life. Only, their sojourn in Sea-Clift has turned out to be far from a happy one. I frankly believe if they’d stayed in Bridgeport, if Nick had stayed connected to the cathode-ray business, if Drilla had stayed working in the parts department at Housatonic Ford (where they loved her), if maybe they’d bought a transitional house in Noank and kept their rental here, practiced gradualism, not moved the whole gestalt in one swoop to Sea-Clift, where they didn’t know anyone, had nothing to do, weren’t adept at making new connections and, in fact, openly suspected everyone of hating them because of their ridiculous luck, then they might’ve been happier than a typical couple in the Witness Protection Program — which is how they seem.

Their Sea-Clift life seemed to go careening off the rails the instant they arrived. Our beach road, which contains only five houses, once contained twenty and stretched for a mile north along the beach, each large footprint facing the sea from behind a sandy, oat-grass hillock nature had placed in the ocean’s way. We Poincinet home owners — three other residents, plus me (excluding the Feensters) — all understand that we hold our ground on the continent’s fragile margin at nature’s sufferance. Indeed, the reason there are now only five of us is that the previous fifteen “cottages”—grandiloquent old gabled and turreted Queen Annes, rococo Stick Styles, rounded Romanesque Revivals — were blown to shit and smithereens by Poseidon’s wrath and are now gone without a trace. Hurricane Gloria, as recently as 1985, finished the last one. Beach erosion, shoreline scouring, tectonic shifts, global warming, ozone deterioration and normal w&t have rendered all us “survivors” nothing more than solemn, clear-headed custodians to the splendid, transitory essence of everything. The town fathers prudently codified this view by passing a no-exceptions-ever restriction against new construction down our road, grandfathering our newer, better-anchored residences, and requiring repairs and even normal upkeep be both non-expansive and subject to stern permit regulation. In other words, none of this, like none of us, is going to last here. We made our deal with the elements when we closed our deal with the bank.

Except the Feensters didn’t, and don’t, see things that way. They tried, their first summer, to change the road’s name to Bridgeport Road, have it age-restricted and gated from the south end, where we all drive in. When that failed — at a tense planning-board meeting with me and other residents opposing — they tried to close access to the beach farther up, where the old cottages once sat in a regal row. Public use, they argued, deprived them of full enjoyment and drove values down (hilarious, since Adolf Eichmann could own a beach house down here and prices would still soar). This was all hooted down by the surfer community, the surf-casting community, the bait-shop owners and the metal-detector people. (We all again opposed.) Nick Feenster grew infuriated, hired a lawyer from Trenton to test the town’s right to regulate, arguing on constitutional grounds. And when this failed, he stopped speaking to the neighbors and specifically to me and put up signs on his road frontage that said DON’T EVEN THINK OF TURNING AROUND IN THIS DRIVEWAY. KEEP OUT! WE TOW! BELIEVE IT! PRIVATE PROPERTY!!! BEACH CLOSED DUE TO DANGEROUS RIPTIDE. BEWARE OF PIT BULL! They also erected an expensive picket-topped wooden fence between their house and mine and installed motion-sensitive crime lights, both of which the town made them take down. Generally, the Feensters came to seem to us neighbors like the famous family that can’t be made happy by great good luck. Not your worst-nightmare neighbor (a techno-reggae band or an evangelical Baptist church would be worse), but a bad real estate outcome, given that signs were positive at first. And especially for me was it a bad outcome, because while not wanting recipe swapping, drill-bit borrowing or cross-property-line chin-music razz-ma-tazz, I would still enjoy the occasional shared cocktail at sundown, a frank but cordial six-sentence exchange of political views as the paper’s collected at dawn or a noncommittal deck-to-deck wave as the sun turns the sea to sequined fires, filling the heart with the assurance that we’re not experiencing life’s wonders entirely solo.

Instead, zilch.

My misdelivered mail (Mayo bills and DMV documents) all gets tossed in the trash. Only scowls are offered. No apologies are extended when their car alarm whangs off at 2:00 p.m. and ruins my post-procedure nap. There’s no heads-up when a roof tile blows loose and causes a behind-the-wall leak while I’m out in Rochester. Not even a “Howzitgoin?” on my return last August, when I wasn’t feeling so hot. Twice, Nick actually set up a skeet thrower on his deck and shot clay pigeons that flew (I thought) dangerously close to my bedroom window. (I called the cops.)

At one point a year ago, I asked one of my competitors, in strict confidence, to make a cold call to the Feensters, representing a nonexistent, high-roller, all-cash client, to find out if Nick might take the money and go the hell back to Bridgeport, where he belongs. The colleague — a nice, elderly ex-Carmelite nun who’s hard to shock — said Nick stormed at her, “Did that asshole Bascombe put you up to this? Why don’t you go fuck yourself,” then bammed the phone down.

A couple of us up the road have discussed the mystery of what we think of as the “Toxic Feensters,” standing out on sand-swept Poincinet on warm afternoons through the fall. My neighbors are a discredited presidential historian retired from Rutgers, who admitted fudging insignificant quotes in his book about Millard Fillmore and the Know-Nothing Party of 1856, but who sued and won enough to live out his years in style. (College lawyers are never any good.) There’s also a strapping, bulgy-armed, khaki-suited petroleum engineer of about my age, from Oklahoma, Terry Farlow, a bachelor who works in Kazakhstan in “oil exploration,” comes home every twenty-eight days, then returns to Aktumsyk, where he lives in an air-conditioned geodesic dome, eats three-star meals flown in from France and sees all the latest movies courtesy of our government. (I guarantee you’re never neighbors with people like this in Haddam.) Our third neighbor is Mr. Oshi, a middle-aged Japanese banker I’ve actually never talked to, who works at Sumitomo in Gotham, departs every morning at three in a black limousine and never otherwise leaves his house once he’s in it.

We’re an unlikely mix of genetic materials, life modalities and history. Though all of us understand we’ve tumbled down onto this slice of New Jersey’s pretty part like dice cast with eyes shut. Our sense of belonging and fitting in, of making a claim and settling down is at best ephemeral. Though being ephemeral gives us pleasure, relieves us of stodgy house-holder officialdom and renders us free to be our own most current selves. No one would be shocked, for instance, to see a big blue-and-white United Van Lines truck back down the road and for any or all of us to pack it in without explanation. We’d think briefly on life’s transience, but then we’d be glad. Someone new and possibly different and possibly even interesting could be heading our way.

None of us can say we understand the unhappy Feensters. And as we’ve stood evenings out on the sandy road, we’ve stared uncomprehending down Poincinet at their showy white house marred by warning signs about towing and pit bulls and dangerous but fallacious riptides, their twin aqua-and-white ’56 Corvettes in the driveway, where they can be admired by people the Feensters don’t want to let drive past. Everything that’s theirs is always locked up tight as a bank. Nick and Drilla go on beach power walks every day at three, rain, cold or whatever, yellow Walkmen clamped on their hard heads, contrasting Lycra outer garments catching the sun’s glow, fists churning like boot-camp trainees, eyes fixed straight up the beach. Never a word, kind or otherwise, to anyone.

Arthur Glück, the defamed, stoop-shouldered ex-Rutgers prof, believes it’s a Connecticut thing (he’s a Wesleyan grad). Everyone up there, he says, is accustomed to bad community behavior (he cites Greenwich), plus the Feensters aren’t educated. Terry Farlow, the big Irishman from Oklahoma, said his petroleum-industry experience taught him that conspicuous new wealth unaccompanied by any sense of personal accomplishment (salvaging cathode-ray tubes not qualifying as accomplishment) often unhinges even good people, wrecks their value system, leaves them miserable and turns them into assholes. The one thing it never seems to do, he said, is make them generous, compassionate and forgiving.

It seemed to me — and I feel implicated, since I sold them their house and made a fat 108K doing it — that the Feensters got rich, got restless and adventuresome (like anybody else), bought ocean-front but somehow got detached from their sense of useful longing, though they couldn’t have described it. They only know they paid enough to expect to feel right, but for some reason don’t feel right, and so get mad as hell when they can’t bring all into line. A Sponsor visit, or a freshman course on Kierkegaard at a decent community college, would help.

With the clairvoyance of hindsight, it might also have worked that if the Feensters were dead set on Sea-Clift, they would’ve been smarter to stay away from ocean-front and put their new fecklessly gotten gains into something that would keep longing alive. Longing can be a sign of vigor, as well as heart-stopping stress. They might’ve done better down here by diversifying, maybe moving into their own Bimini Street bungalow, adding a second storey or a greenhouse or an in-ground pool, then buying a bigger fixer-upper and fitting themselves into the Sea-Clift community by trading at the hardware store, subbing out their drywall needs to local tradesmen, applying for permits at the town clerk’s, eating at the Hello Deli and gradually matriculating (instead of bulling in), the way people have from time’s first knell. They could’ve invested their lottery winnings in boutique stocks or a miracle-cure IPO or a Broadway revival of Streetcar and felt they were in the thick of things. Later, they could’ve turned their cathode-ray-tube business into a non-profit to help young victims of something — whatever old cathode-ray tubes do that kills you — and made everyone love them instead of loathing them and wishing they’d go the hell away. In fact, if one or the other of them would get cancer, it would probably have a salubrious effect on their spirits. Though I don’t want to wish that on them yet.

The bottom line is: Living the dream can be a lot more complicated than it seems, even for lottery winners, who we all watch shrewdly, waiting to see how they’ll fuck it up, never give any loot away to AIDS hospices or battered children’s shelters or the Red Cross, the good causes they’d have sworn on their Aunt Tillie’s grave they’d bankroll the instant their number came up. This is, in fact, one reason I keep on selling houses — though I’ve had a snootful of it, don’t need the money and occasionally encounter bad-apple clients like the Feensters: because it gives me something to feel a productive longing about at day’s end, which is a way to register I’m still alive.

Frank-ee.” A heavy pause. “Frank-ee.” My name’s being called from the chilled oceany night, beyond the windows I’ve left open to invigorate my sleep. There are no sounds from Clarissa’s room, where she’s entertaining Mr. Lucky Duck, and where they may even be asleep now — she in bed, he on the floor like a Labrador (there’s so little you can do to make things come out right).

I climb stiffly out, blue-pajama-clad, and go to the window that gives down upon the sand and weedy strip of no-man’s-land between me and the Feensters, the ground where the fence used to be. No light shines from the three window squares on the three stacked levels of white wall facing my house. We’re bunched together too close in here despite the choker prices. Lots were platted by a local developer in cahoots with the planning board and who saw restrictions coming from years away and wanted to retire to Sicily.

Faint fog drifts from sea to land, but I can see a shadowy triangular portion of the Feensters’ front yard, where the gay bankers planted animal topiary the Feensters have let go to hell in favor of aggressive signage. A grown-out boxwood rhino and part of a boxwood monkey are ghostly shapes in the mist. Seaward I can see the pallet of shadowed beach, with a crust of white surf disappearing into the sand. In the night sky, there’s the icebox glow of Gotham and, in the middle distance, the white lights and rigging lines of a commercial fisher alone at its toils. In these times of lean catches, local captains occasionally dispose of private garbage on their overnight flounder trips. A fellow in Manasquan even advertises burials at sea (ashes only) beyond the three-mile limit, where permits aren’t required. Many things seem thinkable that once weren’t.

From between the houses, the Glücks’ big tomcat, William Graymont, strolls toward the beach to scavenge what the shorebirds have left, or perhaps snare a plover for his midnight meal. When I tap the glass, he stops, looks around but not at me, flicks his tail, then continues his leisurely trek.

No one’s said my name again, so I’m wondering if I dreamed it. But all at once a light snaps on in the Feensters’ third-floor bathroom, the Grecian marble ablution sanctum off the spacious master suite. Television volume blaring yesterday’s news headlines goes on, then instantly goes silent. Drilla Feenster’s head and naked torso pass the window, then pass again, her bottle-blond hair in a red plastic shower cap, heading for the gold-nozzled shower. Possibly it’s their usual bathing and TV hour. I wouldn’t know.

But then rounding the front outside corner of the house in pajamas, slippers, a black ski parka and a knit cap, Nick Feenster appears, talking animatedly into a cell phone. One hand holds the instrument to his ear like a conch shell, the other a retractable leash attached to Bimbo, their pug. A big man with a tiny dog could signal a complex and giving heart, if not straight-out homosexuality, but not in Nick’s case. (Bimbo is the “pit bull” referred to on the sign.) Nick’s gesturing with the hand holding Bimbo’s leash, so that each time he gestures, Bimbo’s yanked off his little front paws.

Nick’s voice is loud but muffled. “Frankly, I don’t get it,” he seems to be saying, with gestures accompanying and Bimbo bouncing and looking up at him as if each jerk was a signal. “Frankly, I think you’re making a biiiig mistake. A biiiig mistake. Frankly, this is getting way out of control.”

Frankly. Frankly. Frank-ee. Frank-ee. There’s so little that’s truly inexplicable in the world. Why should it be such a difficult place to live?

The lighted bathroom square goes unexpectedly black — a purpose possibly interrupted. Nick, who’s a husky, heavy-legged, former power lifter and has toted prostrated victims out of smoke-filled tenement stairwells, goes on talking in the cold, fog-misted yard (to whom, I don’t even wonder). A yellow second-floor light square pops on. This in the cypress kitchen-cum-vu room — Mexican tile fireplace, facing Sonoran-style, silver-inlaid, hand-carved one-of-a-kind couches, Sub-Zero, commercial Viking, built-in Cuisinart and a Swiss wine cellar at cabinet level. Almost too fast, the first-floor window brightens. A sound, a seismic disturbance up through the earth’s crust, permeating Nick’s bedroom slippers — an intimation only misbehaving husbands can hear — causes Nick abruptly to snap his cell phone closed, frown a suspicious frown upwards (at me! He can’t see me but senses surveillance). Then, in a strange, bumpy, big man’s slightly balletic movement, reflecting the fact he’s freezing his nuts off, Nick, with Bimbo struggling to keep up, beats it back around the house, past the topiary monkey and out of sight. Whatever he intends to say he’s been up to outside — to Drilla, who’s noted his absence and thought, What the fuck? — is just now larruping around in his brain like an electron.

I stare down into the sandy, weedy non-space Nick has vacated in guilty haste. Something’s intensely satisfying about his absence, as if I’ll never have to see him again. I think I hear, but probably don’t hear, voices far away, buffered by interior walls, a door slammed hard. A shout. A breakage. The odd socketed pleasure of someone else’s argument — not your night shot to hell, not your heart crashing in your chest, not your head exploding in anger and hot frustration, as when Sally left. Someone else’s riot and bad luck. It’s enough to send anyone off to bed happy and relieved, which is where, after a pit stop, I return.

Until…music awakens me. Dum-dee-dum-dee-dum, dum-dee-dum-dee-dum.

My bedroom’s lit through with steely wintry luminance. I’m shocked to have slept till now—7:45—with light banging in, the day underway and noise downstairs. Rich coffee and bacon-fat aromas mix with sea smells. I hear a voice particle. Clarissa. Hushed. “We have to be…He’s still…not usually so…” Mutter, mutter. A clink of cup and saucer. Knife to plate. A kitchen chair scrapes. A car murmurs past on Poincinet Road. The sounds now of the ball getting rolling. I’ve clenched my teeth all night. Small wonder.

The music’s from the Feensters’. Show tunes at high volume out the vu-room sliding door, past the owl decoy that keeps seagulls at bay. My Fair Lady. “…And oooohhh, the towering fee-ling, just to kn-o-o-o-w somehow you are ne-ah.” The Feensters often sit out on their deck in their hot tub during winter, drink Irish coffee and read the Post, wearing ski parkas, all as a way of smelling the roses. This morning, though, music’s needed to put some distance between now and last night, when Nick was “walking the dog” at 3:00 a.m.

I lie abed and stare bemused at the stack of books on my bedside table, most read to page thirty, then abandoned, except for The Road to the Open Heart, which I’ve read a good deal of. Much of it’s, of course, personally impractical, though you’d have to be a deranged serial killer not to agree with most of what it says. “On the one hand make concessions, on the other take the problem seriously.” It’s no wonder Mike does so well selling houses. Buddhism wrote the book on selling houses.

Recently I’ve also dipped into The Fireside Book of Great Speeches, a leftover from Paul’s HHS Oratory Club. I’ve sought good quotable passages in case a moment arises for valedictory words this Thursday. The speeches, however, are all as boring as Quaker sermons, except for Pericles’ funeral oration, and even he’s a little heavy-handed and patented: “Great will be your glory if you do not lower the nature that is within you.” When is that not ever true? Pericles and the Dalai Lama are naturals for each other. Convalescence is supposed to be a perfect time for reading, like a long stint in prison. But I assure you it isn’t, since you have too much on your mind to concentrate.

The sky I can see from bed is monochrome, high and lighted from a sun deep within cottony depths — not a disk, but a spirit. It is a cold, stingy sky that makes a seamless plain with the sea — decidedly not a “realty sky” to make ocean-front seem worth the money. I’m scheduled for a showing at 10:15; but the sky’s effect — I already know it — will not be to inspire and thrill, but to calm and console. For that reason I’m expecting little from my effort.

The exact status of my marriage to Sally Caldwell requires, I believe, some amplification. It is still a marriage that’s officially going on, yet by any accounting has become strange — in fact, the strangest I know, and within whose unusual circumstances I myself have acted very strangely.

Last April, I took a journey down memory lane to an old cadets’ reunion at the brown-stucco, pantile-roof campus of my old military school — Gulf Pines on the Mississippi coast. “Lonesome Pines,” we all called it. The campus and its shabby buildings, like apparently everything else in that world, had devolved over time to become an all-white Christian Identity school, which had itself, by defaulting on its debts, been sold to a corporate entity — the ancient palms, wooden goalposts, dusty parade grounds, dormitories and classroom installments soon to be cleared as a parking structure for a floating casino across Route 90.

During this visit, I happened to hear from Dudley Phelps, who’s retired out of the laminated-door business up in Little Rock, that Wally Caldwell, once our Lonesome Pines classmate, but more significantly once my wife’s husband, until he got himself shell-shocked in Vietnam and wandered off seemingly forever, causing Sally to have him declared dead (no easy trick without a body or other evidence of death’s likelihood)—this Wally Caldwell was reported by people in the know to have appeared again. Alive. Upon the earth and — I was sure when I heard it — eager to stir up emotional dust none of us had seen the likes of.

Nobody knew much. We all stood around the breezy, hot parade ground in short-sleeve pastel shirts and chinos, talking committedly, chins tucked into our necks, the pale, wispy grass smelling of shrimp, ammonia and diesel, trying to unearth good concrete memories — the deaf-school team we played in football that hilariously beat the shit out of us — anything we could feel positive about and that could make adolescence seem to have been worthwhile, though agreeing darkly we were all of us pretty hard cases when we’d arrived. (Actually, I was not a hard case at all. My father had died, my mother’d remarried a man I pretty much liked and moved to Illinois, only I simply couldn’t imagine going to high school with a bunch of Yankees — though, of course, I would someday become one of them and think it was great.)

The casino’s big building-razing, turf-ripping machinery was already standing ranked along the highway like a small mean army. Work was due to commence the next morning, following this last muster on the plain. We had a keg of beer somebody’d brought. The Gulf was just as the Atlantic is in summer: brownish, sluggish, a dingy aqueous apron stretching to nowhere — though warm as bathwater instead of dick-shrinkingly cold. We all solemnly stood and drank the warm beer, ate weenies in stale buns and did our best not to feel dispirited and on-in-years (this was before my medical surprises). We chatted disapprovingly about how the Coast had changed, how the South had traded its tarnished soul for an even more debased graven image of gambling loot, how the current election would probably be won by the wrong dope. Surprisingly, many of my old classmates had gone to Nam like Wally and come back Democrats.

And then around 2:00 p.m., when the sun sat straight over our sweating heads like a dentist’s lamp and we’d all begun to laugh about what a shithole this place had really been, how we didn’t mind seeing it disappear, how we’d all cried ourselves to sleep in our metal bunks on so many breathless, mosquito-tortured nights on account of cruel loneliness and youth and deep hatred for the other cadets, we all, by no signal given, just began to stray away back toward our rental cars, or across the highway to the casino for some stolen fun, or back to motels or SUVs or the airport in New Orleans or Mobile, or just back — as if we could go back far enough to where it would all be forgotten and gone forever, the way it already should’ve been. Why were we there? By the end, none of us could’ve said.

How, though, do you contemplate such news as this possible Wally sighting? I had no personal memories of Cadet W. Caldwell, only pictures Sally kept (and kept hidden): on the beach with their kids in Saugatuck; a color snapshot showing a shirtless, dog-tagged Wally squinting into the summer sun like JFK, holding a copy of Origin of Species with a look of mock puzzlement on his young face; a few tuxedoed wedding photos from 1969, where Wally looked lumpy and wise and scared to death of what lay before him; a yearbook portrait from Illinois State, showing Walter “The Wall,” class of ’67, plant biology, and where he was deemed (sadly, I felt) to be “Trustworthy, a friend to all.” “Solid where it counts” (which he wasn’t). “Call me Mr. Wall.”

These ancient, moistened relics did not, to me, a real husband make. Though once they had to Sally — a tall, blond, blue-eyed beauty with small breasts, thin fingers, smooth-legged, with her tiny limp from a tennis mishap — a college cheerleader who fell for the shy, heavy-legged, curiously gazing rich boy in her genetics class, and who smiled when she talked because so much made her happy, who didn’t have problems about physical things and so introduced the trusting “Wall” to bed and to cheap motels out Highway 9, so captivating him that by spring break, “they were pregnant.” And pregnant again and married by the time Wally got called to the Army and joined the Navy instead, in 1969, and went off to a war.

From which, in a sense, he never returned. Though he tried for a couple of weeks in 1971, but then one day just walked off from their little apartment in the Chicago suburb of Hoffman Estates, never to return with a sound or a glimpse. Kids, wife, parents, a few friends. A future. Boop. Over.

This was the extent of my knowledge of Wally the uxorious. He was already legally “dead” when I came on the scene in ’87 and tried to rent Sally some expandable office space in Manasquan. She’d identified me from a bogus reminiscence I wrote for the Gulf Pines “Pine Boughs” newsletter, though I had no actual memory of Wally and was merely on the Casualties Committee, responsible for “personal” anecdotes about classmates nobody remembered, but whose loved ones didn’t want them seeming like complete ciphers or lost souls, even if they were.

The thought that mystery-man Walter B. Caldwell might still be alive was, as you can imagine, unwieldy personal cargo to be carrying home, Mississippi to New Jersey. There could probably be stranger turns of events. But if so, I’d like you to name one. And while you’re at it, name one you’d find easy to keep as your little secret, something you’d rather not have spread around. No more details were available.

On arriving back to Sea-Clift (we’re only talking about last April here!), I decided that rogue rumors were always shooting around like paper airplanes in everybody’s life, and that this was likely just one more. Some old Lonesome Pines alum, deep in his cups and reeling through the red-light district of Amsterdam or Bangkok, suddenly spies a pathetic homeless man weaving on a street corner, a large, fleshy, unshaven “American-looking” clod, filthy in a tattered, greasy overcoat and duct-taped shoes, yet who has a particularly arresting, sweet smile animating tiny haunted eyes and who seems to stare back knowingly. After a pause, there’s a second cadged look, then a long unformed thought about it afterward, followed by a decision to leave well enough alone (where well enough’s always happiest). But then, in memory’s narrow eye comes a fixifying certainty, an absolute recognition — a sighting. And ker-plunk: Wally lives! (and will be in your house eating dinner by next Tuesday).

In eight years of what I thought were much more than satisfying-fulfilling marriage, not to mention almost thirty since Wally walked away and didn’t come back, Sally had made positive adjustments to what might’ve driven most people bat-shit crazy with anger and not-knowing, and with anxiety over the anger and not-knowing. Therefore, to drop this little hand grenade of uncertainty into her life, I concluded, would actually be unfriendly (I’d decided by then it wasn’t true, so it really wasn’t a hand grenade in my life). But what was either of us supposed to do with the news, short of a full-bore “Have You Seen This Man?” campaign (I didn’t want to see him), “aged” photos of Wally put up on Web sites, stapled to bulletin boards and splintery telephone poles beside aroma-therapy flyers and lost-cat posters, with appeals made to “Live at 5”?

After which he still wouldn’t show up. Because — of course — he’d long ago climbed over a bridge rail or slipped off a boat transom or rock face in the remotest Arizona canyon and said good-bye to this world of woes. Someday, I fantasized, I would sit with Sally on a warm, sun-smacked porch by a lake in Manitoba — this being once our days had dwindled down to a precious few. I’d be pensive for a time, staring out at the water’s onyx sheen, then quietly confide to her my long-ago gesture of devotion and love, which had been to shield her from faithlessly rumored sightings of Wally that I knew weren’t a bit true (everyone embroiders fantasies to please themselves), and that would only have kept her from what rewarding life she and I could cobble together, knowing what we knew and feeling what we felt. In this fantasy, Sally for a while becomes agitated by my deception and presumption. She stands and walks up and back along the long knotty-pine porch, arms tightly folded, her mouth official and cross, her fingers twitching as the sun burns the surface of Lake Winnipegosis, canoes set forth for sunset journeys, kids’ voices waft in from shadowy cottage porches deeper in the great woods. Finally, she sits back into her big green wicker rocker and says nothing for a long time, until the air’s gone cooler than we’d like, and as that old lost life still clicks past her inner gaze. Eventually, her heart gives a worrisome flutter, she swallows down hard, feels the back of her hand going even colder (in this fantasy, we have become Canadians). She sighs a deep sigh, reaches chair-arm to chair-arm, finds my hand, knows again its warmth, and then without comment or query suggests we go inside for cocktails, an early dinner and to bed.

Case closed. RIP, Mr. Wall. My dream, instead of my nightmare, come true.

To which fickle fate says: Dream on, dream on, dream on.

Because sometime in early May — it was the balmy, sun-kissed week between Mother’s Day and Buddha’s birthday (observed with dignified calm and no fanfare by Mike) and not long after my own fifty-fifth (observed with wonderment by me) — Sally caught the United Shuttle out to Chicago to visit the former in-laws in Lake Forest. I’m always officially invited to these events, but have never gone, for obvious reasons — although this might’ve been the time. The occasion was the aged Caldwells’ (Warner and Constance) sixtieth wedding anniversary. A party was planned at the formerly no-Jews-or-blacks-allowed Wik-O-Mek Country Club. Sally’s two grim, grown but disenchanted children, Shelby and Chloë, were supposedly coming from northern Idaho. They’d long ago fallen out with their mom over having their dad declared a croaker — prematurely, they felt. You can only imagine how they loathe me. Both kids are neck-high in charismatic Mormon doings (likewise, whites only) out in Spirit Lake, where for all I know they practice cannibalism. They never send a Christmas card, though they plan to be in the “Where’s mine?” line when the grandparents shuffle off. When I first met Sally, she was still making piteous efforts to include them in her new life in New Jersey — all of which they rebuffed like cruel suitors — until she was compelled to close the door on both of them, which thrilled me. Too much unredeemed loss can be fatal, which is one of the early glittering tenets of the Permanent Period, one I firmly believe in and was fast to tell her about. At some point — and its arrival may not be obvious, so you have to be on the lookout for it — you have to let life please you if it will, and consign the past to its midden (easier said than done, of course, as we all know).

When she drove her renter from O’Hare up to Lake Forest and up to the winding-drive, many-winged, moss-and-ivy — fronted fieldstone Caldwell manse that sits on a bluff of the lake, she entered the long, drafty, monarchical drawing room with her folding suitcase — she was considered a beloved family member and didn’t need to knock. And there seated on the rolled and pleated, overstuffed Victorian leather settee, looking for all the world like the Caldwells’ gardener asked in to review next season’s perennial-planning strategies (“Did we do the jonquils right? Is there reason to keep the wisteria, since it’s really not their climate?”), there was a man she’d never seen before but queerly felt she knew (it was the beady, piggy eyes). There was “The Wall.” Wally Caldwell. Her husband. Back from oblivion, at home in Lake Forest.

In time, Sally told me all the useless details, which, once the trap was sprung, took on a routinized predictability — though not to her. One detail that stays in my mind to this steely-sky morning all these months later is Sally standing, suitcase in hand, in the long, lofty drawing room of her in-laws’ castle, the must of age and plunder tangy in the motionless air, the leaded-window light shadowy but barred, the house silent behind her, the door just drifting closed by an unseen hand, the old fatigue of loss and heavy familiarity permeating her bones again, and then seeing this lumpy, bearded, balding gardener type, and beaming out a big welcome smile at him and saying, “Hi. I’m Sally.” To which he — this not-at-all, no-way-in-hell Wally, with a frown of inner accusing and insecurity, and in a vaguely Scottish accent — says, “I’m Wally. Remember me? I’m not entirely dead.”

It is proof that I love Sally that when I replay this moment in my brain, as I have many times, I always wince, so close do I feel to her — what? Shock? Shocked by her shock. Celestially reluctant to have happen next what happened next. The only thing worse would’ve been if I’d been there, although a murderous thrashing could’ve turned the tables in my favor, instead of how they did turn.

I don’t know what went on that weekend. Pensive, hands-behind-the-back walks along the palliative Lake Michigan beach. Angry recrimination sessions out of earshot of the old folks (her kids, blessedly, didn’t show). Moaning-crying jags, shouting, nights spent sweating, heart-battering, fists balled in fury, frustration, denial and crass inability to take all in, to believe, to stare truth in the beezer. (Think how you’d feel!) And no doubt then the rueful, poisoned thoughts of why? And why now? Why not just last on to the end on Mull? (The craggy, wind-swept isle off Scotland’s coast where Wally’d moled away for decades.) Mull life over till nothing’s left of it, soldier the remaining yards alone instead of fucking everything up for everybody — again. TV’s much better at these kinds of stories, since the imponderableness of it all conveniently is swept away when the commercials for drain openers, stool softeners and talking potato chips pop on, and all’s electronically “forgotten,” during which time the aggrieved principals can make adjustments to life’s weird wreckage, get ready to come back and sort things out for the better, so that after many tears are shed, fists clenched, hearts broken but declared mendable, everyone’s again declared “All set,” as they say in New Jersey. All set? Ha! I say. Ha-ha, ha! Ha, ha-ha-ha! All set, my ass.

Sally flew home on Monday, having said nothing of johnny-jump-up Wally during our weekend phone calls. I drove to Newark to get her, and on the ride back could tell she was plainly altered — by something — but said nothing. It is a well-learned lesson of second marriages never to insist on what you absolutely don’t have to insist on, since your feelings are probably about nothing but yourself and your own pitiable needs and are not appropriately sympathetic to the needs of the insistee in question. Second marriages, especially good ones like ours seemed, could fill three door-stop-size reference books with black-letter do’s and don’ts. And you’d have to be studious if you hoped to get past Volume One.

I, of course, assumed Sally’s strange state had to do with her kids, the little devil Christians out in Idaho — that one of them was in detox, or jail, or was a fugitive or self-medicating or in the nut house, or the other was planning a lawsuit to attach my assets now that therapy had unearthed some pretty horrendous buried episodes of abuse in which I was somehow involved and that explained everything about why his life had gone to shit-in-a-bucket, but not before some hefty blame could be spread around. My fear, of course, is every second husband’s fear: that somebody from out of the blue, somebody you won’t like and who has no sense of anything but his or her own entitlement to suffering — in other words, children — will move in and ruin your life. Sally and I had agreed this would not be our fate, that her two and my two needed to think about life being “based” elsewhere. Our life was ours and only ours. Their room was the guest room. Of course all that’s changed now.

When we reached #7 Poincinet Road, the sky was already resolving upon sunset. The western heavens were their brightest-possible faultless blue. Pre-Memorial Day beach enthusiasts were packing up books and blankets and transistors and sun reflectors, and heading off for a cocktail or a shrimp plate at the Surfcaster or a snuggle at the Conquistador Suites as the air cooled and softened ahead of night’s fall.

I put on my favorite Ben Webster, made a pair of Salty Dogs, thought about a drive later on up to Ortley for a grilled bluefish at Neptune’s Daily Catch Bistro and conceivably a snuggle of our own to the accompaniment of nature’s sift and sigh and the muttered voices of the striper fishermen who haunt our beach after the tide’s turn.

And then she simply told me, just as I was walking into the living room, ready for a full debriefing.

Something there is in humans that wants to make sure you’re doing something busying at the exact instant of hearing unwelcome news — as though, if your hands are full, you’ll just rumble right on through the whole thing, unfazed. “Wally? Alive? Really? Here, try a sip of this, see if I put in too much Donald Duck. Happy to add more Gilbey’s. Well, ole Wall — whadda ya know? How’d The Wall seem? Don’t you just love how Ben gets that breathy tremolo into ‘Georgia on My Mind.’ Hoagy’d love it. Give Wally my best. How was it to be dead?”

I should say straight out: Never tell anyone you know how she or he feels unless you happen to be, just at that second, stabbing yourself with the very same knife in the very same place in the very same heart she or he is stabbing. Because if you’re not, then you don’t know how anybody feels. I can barely tell you how I felt when Sally said, “Frank, when I got to Lake Forest, Wally was there.” (Use of my name, “Frank,” as always, a harbinger of things unpopular. I should change my name to Al.)

I know for a fact that I said nothing when I heard these words. I managed to put my Salty Dog down on the glass coffee-table top and lower myself onto the brown suede couch beside her, to put both my hands on top of my knees and gaze out at the darkening Atlantic, where the ghostly figures of the high-booted fishermen faced the surf and, far out to sea, the sky still showed a brilliant reflected sliver of azure. Sally sat as I did and may have felt as I did—surprised.

Sometimes simple words are the best, and better than violent images of the world cracking open; or about how much everything’s like a sitcom and what a pity William Bendix isn’t still around to play Wally — or me; or better than the ethical-culture response, that catastrophe’s “a good thing for everybody,” since it dramatizes life’s great mystery and reveals how much all is artifice — connected boxes, world-within-worlds — the trap Clarissa’s trying to break free of. How we express our response to things is just made-up stuff anyway — unless we tip over dead — and is meant to make the listener think he’s getting his money’s worth, while feeling relief that none of this shit is happening to him personally. Surprised is good enough. When I heard Wally Caldwell, age fifty-five, missing for thirty years, during which time many things had happened and substantial adjustments were made about the nature of existence on earth — when I heard Wally was alive in Lake Forest and had spent the weekend doing God knows what with my wife, I was surprised.

Sally knew I might be surprised (and again, I was surprised), and she wanted to make this news not cause the world to crack open, for me to go hysterical, etc. She’d had three days with Wally already. She had gotten over the shock of an older, bearded, avuncular and strange Wally hiding out in his parents’ house like some scary older brother with a terrible wound, whom you only see fleetingly behind shadowy chintz curtains in an upstairs dormer window, but who may be heard at night to moan. Her attitude was — and I liked it, since it was typical of her get-up-and-fix-things attitude — that while, yes, Wally’s reappearance had caused some tricky issues to pop up, needing to be resolved, and that while she understood how “this whole business” maybe put me in an awkward position (vis-à-vis, say, the past, the present and the future), this was still a “human situation,” that no one was a culprit (of course not), no one had bad will (except me) and we would all address this as a threesome, so that as little damage as possible would be done to as few a number of innocent souls and lives (I might’ve known who the left-unprotected innocent soul would turn out to be, but I didn’t).

Wally’s story, she told me, sitting on the suede couch that faced out to the darkened springtime Atlantic, as our Salty Dogs turned watery and dark descended, was “one of those stories” fashioned by war and trauma, sadness, fear and resentment, and by the chaotic urge to escape all the other causes, aided by (what else?) “some kind of schizoid detachment” that induced amnesia, so that for years Wally wouldn’t remember big portions of his prior life, although certain portions were crystal clear.

Wally, it seems, couldn’t put everything all together, though he admitted he hadn’t just gone out to pick up the Trib thirty years ago, bumped his head getting into his Beetle and suffered a curtain to close. It had to have been — this, he no doubt admitted on one of their cozy Lake Michigan beach tête-à-têtes — that “something unconscious was working on him,” some failure to face the world he confronted as a Viet vet with a (minor) head wound, and a family, and a future as a horticulturist looming, the whole undifferentiated world just flooding in on him like a dam bursting, with cows and trees and cars and church steeples swirling away in the gully-wash, and him in with it. (There are good strategies for coping with this, of course, but you have to want to.)

Cutting (blessedly) to the chase, Wally’s trauma, fear, resentment and elective amnesia had carried him as far away from the Chicago suburbs, from wife and two kids, as Glasgow, in Scotland, where for a time he became “caught up” in “the subculture” that lived communally, practiced good feeling for everything, experimented with cannabis and other mind-rousing drugs, fucked like bunny rabbits, made jewelry by hand and sold it on damp streets, practiced subsistence farming techniques, made their own clothes and set their communal sights on spiritual-but-not-mainstream-religious revelation. In other words, the Manson Family, led by Ozzie and Harriet.

Eventually, Wally said, the “petrol” had run out of the communal subculture, and with a satellite woman — a professor of English, naturally — he had migrated up to the wilds of Scotland, first to the Isle of Skye, then to Harris, then to Muck, and finally to Mull, where he found employment in the Scottish Blackface industry (sheep) and finally — more to his talents and likings — as a gardener on the laird’s estate and, as time went on, as head gardener and arborist (the laird was wild for planting spruce trees), and eventually as the estate manager for the entire shitaree. A complete existence was there, Wally said, a long way from Lake Forest “and that whole life” (again meaning wife and kids), from the Cubs, the Wrigley Building, the Sears Tower, the river dyed green—again, the whole deluging, undifferentiated crash-in of modern existence American-style, whose sudsy, brown tree-trunk-littered surface most of us somehow manage to keep our heads above so we can see our duty and do it. I’m not impartial in these matters. Why should I be?

In due time, the lady friend—“a completely good and decent woman”—got tired of life on Mull as a crofter’s companion and returned to her job and husband — likewise a professor, in Ohio. A couple of local lassies moved in and, in time, out again. Wally got used to living semi-officially in the manager’s stone cottage, scrubbing the loo, restocking the fridge with haggis, smoking fish, burning peat, reading The Herald, listening to Radio 4, snapping on the telly, sipping his cuppa, keeping his Wellies dry and his Barbour waxed during the long Mull winters. This was the wee life, the one he was suited for and entitled to and where he expected his days to end amongst the cold stones and rills and crags and moors and cairns and gorse and windblown cedars of his own dull nature — here in his half-chosen, half-fated, half-fucked-up-and-escaped-to destination resort from life gone kaflooey.

Enter then the Internet — in the form of the old laird’s young son, Morgil, who’d taken the reins of the property (having been to college at Florida State) and who’d begun to suspect that this lumpy American in the manager’s accommodation was probably other than he’d declared himself, was possibly an old draft dodger or a fugitive from some abysmal crime in his own country, from which he’d exiled himself, some guy who dressed up in clown suits and ate little boys for lunch. The standard idea of America, viewed from abroad.

What young Morgil found when he checked — and who’d be shocked? — was a “Wally Caldwell” Web site the old Lake Forest parents had erected as a long last hope, or whatever inspires Web sites (I don’t maintain one at Realty-Wise, though Mike does, www.RealtyTibet.com, which is how Tommy Benivalle found him). No outstanding warrants, Interpol alerts or Scotland Yard red flags were attached to the site, only several sequentially aged photos of Wally (one actually in a Barbour) that looked exactly like the Wally out planting spruce sprigs and pruning other ones like a character out of D. H. Lawrence. “Please contact the Caldwell Family if you know this man, or see him, or hear of him. Amnesia may be involved. He’s not dangerous. His family misses him greatly and we are now in our eighties. Not much time is left.”

Young Morgil didn’t feel it would be right to send a blind message out of the blue — that a cove of Wally Caldwell’s general description was working right on old Cullonden, on the Isle of Mull, under the name of Wally Caldwell. It’d be better, he gauged, to tell Wally, even at the risk of its being sensitive news that might wake him up from a long dream of life and dash him into a world he had no tolerance for, send him screaming and gibbering off onto the heath, his frail vessel cracked, so that all his ancient parents would have to show for their Web site was a pale, broken, silent man in green pajamas, who seemed sometimes to smile and recognize you but mostly just sat and stared at Lake Michigan.

Morgil tacked a note to Wally’s door the next morning — a color printout of the Caldwell home page — the computerized middle-aged face side-by-side with a yearbook photo from Illinois State (“Call me Mr. Wall”). No mention was made of Sally, Shelby and Chloë, or that he’d been declared expired. The only words it contained were his parents’ tender entreaties: “Come home, Wally, wherever you are, if you are. We’re not mad at you. We’re still here in Lake Forest, Mom and Dad. We can’t last forever.”

And so he did. Wally crossed the sea to home and the welcome arms of his mom and dad. A changed bloke, but nonetheless their moody, slow-thinking son, all things suddenly glittering and promise-laden, whereas before all had been a closed door, a blank wall, an empty night where no one calls your name. I know plenty about this.

Which was the strange tableau my unsuspecting wife walked in upon, carrying her suitcase and lost memories, expecting only a “drinks evening” with the in-laws, followed by some whitefish au gratin, then early to bed between cold, stiff sheets and the next day making nice with elderly strangers at the Wik-O-Mek, trying patiently, pleasantly to re-explain to them exactly who she was (a former daughter-in-law?). But instead, she found Wally, bearded, older, fattish, balded, gray-toothed, though still innocent and vague the way she’d once liked, only dressed like a Scottish gamekeeper with an idiotic accent.

She was surprised. We were both surprised.

When she’d told me this whole preposterous story, it’d long gone dark in the house. Chill had filtered indoors off the surface of the moonlit sea. She sat perfectly still, peering out at the high tide, the fishermen vanished to home, a red phosphorescence seeding the water’s swell. I left and came back with a sweater I’d bought years before in France, when I’d been in love in a haywire way (my then-beloved is now a thoracic surgeon at Brigham and Women’s), though my love story, then, had an all-round satisfactory end that left life open for new investigations and not obstructed by problematical, profoundly worrisome insolubles.

Sally put on the sweater Catherine Flaherty had settled into on cold French spring nights facing the Channel. She hugged her arms the way Catherine had, burying her cold chin into the crusted, musty-smelling nap, giving herself time to think a clear thought, since Wally was in Lake Forest and I was here. All the safety netting of our little life was still up to catch her, and she could — as it seemed to me she should — just forget the whole commotion, writing it all off as a dream that would go away if you let it. My heart went out to her, I’ll admit. But I also understood there could be no tweezing and tracing of slender filaments back through the knot to make loose ends become continuous and smooth. They weren’t loose ends. These were what I called my life. And even though they were short, blunt and more frayed than what I’d rather, they were still what I had. If I’d known what awaited me, I might’ve phoned up some boys in Bergen County who owed me a favor and had ’em fly out and perform a penitential errand on Wally’s noggin.

There are many different kinds of people on the planet — people who never let you forget a mistake, people who’re happy to. People who almost drown as children and never swim again, and people who jump right back in and paddle off like ducks. There are people who marry the same woman over and over, while others have no scheme in their amours (I’m this man. It’s not so bad). And there are definitely people who, when faced with misfeasance of a large and historical nature, even one that needn’t cloud the present and forbid the future, just can’t rest until the misfeasance is put right, redressed, battered to dust with study and attention so they can feel just fine about things and go forward with a clear heart — whatever that might be. (The opposite of this is what the Permanent Period teaches us: If you can’t truly forget something, you can at least ignore it and try to make your dinner plans on time.)

In Sally’s behalf, she was dazed. She’d gone to Illinois and seen a ghost. Everything in life suddenly felt like a cold higgle-piggle. It’s the kind of shock that makes you realize that life only happens to you and to you alone, and that any concept of togetherness, intimacy, union, abiding this and abiding that is a hoot and a holler into darkness. My idea, of course, would’ve been to wait a week or two, go about my business selling houses, book a Carnival Cruise vacation to St. Kitts, then in a while nose back in to see how the land lay and the citizenry had re-deployed. My guess was that with time to reflect, Wally would’ve disappeared quietly back to Mull, to his spruce and cairns and anonymity. We could exchange Christmas cards and get on with life to its foreshortened ending. After all, how likely are any of us ever to change — given that we’re all in control of most things?

Again, of course, I was wrong. Wrong, wrongety, wrong, wrong, wrong.

At the conclusion of Sally’s long recitation of the lost-Wally saga, a chronicle I wasn’t that riveted by, since I didn’t think it could foretell any good for me (I was right), she announced she needed to take a nap. Events had pretty well wrung her out. She knew I was not exactly a grinning cheerleader to these matters, that I was possibly as “mixedup” as she was (not true), and she needed just to lie in the dark alone for a while and let things — her word—“settle.” She smiled at me, went around the room turning on lamps, suffusing the dark space she was then abandoning me to with a bronze funeral-parlor light. She came around to me where I’d stood up in front of the couch, and kissed me on my cheek (oh Lord) in a pall-bearerish, buck-up-bud sort of way, then ceremoniously mounted the stairs, not to our room, not to the marriage bower, the conjugal refuge of sweet intimacies and blissful nod, but to the guest room! — where my daughter now sleeps and also “sleeps” with new Mr. Right Who Drives A Fucking Healey.

I might’ve gone crazy right then. I should’ve let her mount the stairs (I heard the guest room floorboards squeezing), waited for her to get her shoes shucked and herself plopped wearily onto the cold counterpane, then roared upstairs, proclaiming and defaming, vilifying and contumelating, snatching knobs off doors, kicking table legs to splinters, cracking mirrors with my voice — laying down the law as I saw it and as it should be and as it served and protected. Let everybody on Poincinet Road and up the seaboard and all the ships at sea know that I’d sniffed out what was being served and wasn’t having it and neither was anybody else inside my walls. One party left alone to his heartless devices, in his own heartless living room, while another heartless party skulks away to dreamland to revise fate and providence, ought to produce some ornate effects. No fucking way, José. This shit doesn’t wash. My way or the highway. Irish (or Scots) need not apply. Members only. Don’t even think of parking here.

But I didn’t. And why I didn’t was: I felt secure. Even though I could feel something approaching, like those elephants who feel the stealthy footfalls of those Pygmy spear toters far across savannas and flooded rivers. I felt at liberty to take an interest, to put on the white labcoat of objective investigator, be Sally’s partner with a magnifying glass, curious to find out what these old bones, relics and potsherds of lost love had to tell. These are the very moments, of course, when large decisions get decided. Great literature routinely skips them in favor of seismic shifts, hysterical laughter and worlds cracking open, and in that way does us all a grave disservice.

What I did while Sally slept in the guest room was make myself a fresh Salty Dog, open a can of cocktail peanuts and eat half of them, since bluefish at Neptune’s Daily Catch had become a dead letter. I switched off the lights, sat a while in the leather director’s chair, hunkered forward over my knees in the chilly living room and watched phosphorescent water lap the moonlit alabaster beach till way past high tide. Then I went upstairs to my home office and read the Asbury Press—stories about Elián González being pre-enrolled at Yale, a plan to make postmodern sculpture out of Y2K preventative gear and place it on the statehouse lawn in Trenton, a CIA warning about a planned attack on our shores by Iran, and a lawsuit over a Circuit City in Bradley Beach being turned down by the local planning board — with the headline reading HOW’S THE DOWNTICK AFFECTING HOLIDAY SHOPPING?

I rechecked my rental inventory (Memorial Day was three weeks away). I took note that the NJ Real Estate Cold Call reported four million of our citizens were working, while only 4.1 percent of our population was not — the longest economic boom in our history (now giving hissing sounds around the edges). Finally, I went back down, turned on the TV, watched the Nets lose to the Pistons and went to sleep on the couch in my clothes.

This isn’t to suggest that Wally’s re-emergence hadn’t caught my notice and didn’t burn my ass and cause me to think that discomforting, messy, troublesome readjustments wouldn’t need to take place, and soon. Readjustments requiring Wally being declared un-dead, requiring divorcing, estate re-planning and updated survivorship provisos, all while recriminations cut the air like steak knives, and all lasting a long time and raking everybody’s patience, politeness and complex sense of themselves over the hot coals like spare ribs. That was going to happen. I may also have felt vulnerable to the accusation of marital johnny-come-lately-ism. Though I’d have never met Sally Caldwell, never married her (I might still have romanced her), had it not been that Wally was gone — we all thought — for good.

What I, in fact, felt was: on my guard — but safe. The way you’d feel if crime statistics spiked in your neighborhood but you’d just rescued a two-hundred-pound Rottweiler from the shelter, who saw you as his only friend, whereas the wide world was his enemy.

Sally’s and my marriage seemed as contingency-proof as we could construct it, using the human materials we’re all equipped with. The other thing about second marriages — unlike first ones, which require only hot impulse and drag-strip hormones — is that they need good reasons to exist, reasons you’re smart to pore over and get straight well beforehand. Sally and I both conducted independent self-inquiries back when I was still in Haddam, and each made a clear decision that marriage — to each other — promised more than anything else we could think of that would probably make us both happy, and that neither of us harbored a single misgiving that wasn’t appropriate to life anyway (illnesses — we’d share; death — we’d expect; depression — we’d treat), and that any more time spent in deciding was time we could spend having the time of our lives. Which as far as I’m concerned — and in fact I know that Sally felt the same — we did.

Which is to say we practiced the sweet legerdemain of adulthood shared. We formally renounced our unmarried personalities. We generalized the past in behalf of a sleek second-act mentality that stressed the leading edge of life to be all life was. We acknowledged that strong feelings were superior to original happiness, and promised never to ask the other if she or he really, really, really loved him or her, in the faith that affinity was love, and we had affinity. We stressed nuance and advocated that however we seemed was how we were. We declared we were good in bed, and that lack of intimacy was usually self-imposed. We kept our kids at a wary but (at least in my case) positive distance. We de-emphasized becoming in behalf of being. We permanently renounced melancholy and nostalgia. We performed intentionally pointless acts like flying to Moline or Flint and back the same day because we were “archaeologists.” We ate Thanksgiving and Xmas dinners at named rest stops on the Turnpike. We considered buying a pet refuge in Nyack, a B&B in New Hampshire.

In other words, we put in practice what the great novelist said about marriage (though he never quite had the genome for it himself). “If I should ever marry,” he wrote, “I should pretend to think just a little better of life than I do.” In Sally’s case and mine, we thought a lot better of life than we ever imagined we could. In the simplest terms, we really, really loved each other and didn’t do a lot of looking right or left — which, of course, is the first principle of the Permanent Period.

Because today is November 22nd and not last May, and I have cancer and Sally is this morning far away on the Isle of Mull, I am able to telescope events to make our decade-long happy union seem all a matter of clammy reasons and practicalities, as though a life lived with another was just a matter of twin isolation booths in an old fifties quiz show; and also to make everything that happened seem inevitable and to have come about because Sally was unhappy with me and with us. But not one ounce of that would be true, as gloomy as events became, and as given as I am to self-pity and to doubting I was ever more than semi-adequate in bed, and that by selling houses I never lived up to my potential (I might’ve been a lawyer).

No, no, no, no and no again.

We were happy. There was enough complex warp and woof in life to make a sweater as big as the fucking ocean. We lived. Together.

“But she couldn’t have been so happy if she left, could she?” said the little pointy-nose, squirrel-tooth, bubble-coifed grief counselor I sadly visited up in Long Branch just because I happened to drive by and saw her shingle one early June afternoon. She was used to advising the tearful, bewildered, abandoned wives of Fort Dix combat noncoms who’d married Thai bar girls and never come home. She wanted to offer easy solutions that led to feelings of self-affirmation and quick divorces. Sugar. Dr. Sugar. She was divorced herself.

But that’s not true, I told her. People don’t always leave because they’re unhappy, like they do in shitty romance novels written by lonely New England housewives or in supermarket tabloids or on TV. You could say it’s my fatal flaw to believe this, and to believe that Wally’s return to life, and Sally leaving with him, wasn’t the craziest, worst goddamn thing in the fucking world and didn’t spell the end of love forever. Yet that’s what I believed and still do. Sally could decide later that she’d been unhappy. But since she left, the two polite postcards I’ve received have made no mention of divorce or of not loving me, and that’s what I’m choosing to understand.

When Sally came down later that night and found me asleep on the couch beside the can of Planters with the TV playing The Third Man (the scene where Joseph Cotten gets bitten by the parrot), she wasn’t unhappy with me — though she certainly wasn’t happy. I understood she’d just come unexpectedly face-to-face with big contingency—the thing we’d schemed against and almost beaten, and probably the only contingency that could’ve risen to eye level and stared us down: the re-enlivening of Wally. And she didn’t know what to do about it — though I did.

All marriages — all everythings — tote around contingencies whether we acknowledge them or don’t. In all things good and giddy, there’s always one measly eventuality no one’s thought about, or hasn’t thought about in so long it almost doesn’t exist. Only it does. Which is the one potentially fatal chink in the body armor of intimacy, to the unconditional this ’n that, to the sacred vows, the pledging of troths, to the forever anythings. And that is: There’s a back door somewhere to every deal, and there a draft can enter. All promises to be in love and “true to you forever” are premised on the iron contingency (unlikely or otherwise) that says, Unless, of course, I fall in love “forever” with someone else. This is true even if we don’t like it, which means it isn’t cynical to think, but also means that someone else — someone we love and who we’d rather have not know it — is as likely to know it as we are. Which acknowledgment may finally be as close to absolute intimacy as any of us can stand. Anything closer to the absolute than this is either death or as good as death. And death’s where I draw the line. Realtors, of course, know all this better than anyone, since there’s a silent Wally Caldwell in every deal, right down to the act of sale (which is like death) and sometimes even beyond it. In every agreement to buy or sell, there’s also the proviso, acknowledged or not, that says “unless, of course, I don’t want to anymore,” or “that is, unless I change my mind,” or “assuming my yoga instructor doesn’t advise against it.” Again, the hallowed concept of character was invented to seal off these contingencies. But in this wan Millennial election year, are we really going to say that this concept is worth a nickel or a nacho? Or, for that matter, ever was?

Sally stood at the darkened thermal glass window that gave upon the lightless Atlantic. She’d slept in her clothes, too, and was barefoot and had a green L.L. Bean blanket around her shoulders in addition to the French sweater. I’d opened the door to the deck, and inside was fifty degrees. She’d turned off The Third Man. I came awake studying her inky back without realizing it was her inky back, or that it was even her — wondering if I was hallucinating or was it an optical trick of waking in darkness, or had a stranger or a ghost (I actually thought of my son Ralph) entered my house for shelter and hadn’t noticed me snoozing. I realized it was Sally only when I thought of Wally and of the despondency his renewed life might promise me.

“Do you feel a little better?” I wanted to let her know I was here still among the living and we’d been having a conversation earlier that I considered to be still going on.

“No.” Hers was a mournful, husky, elderly-seeming voice. She pinched her Bean’s blanket around her shoulders and coughed. “I feel terrible. But I feel exhilarated, too. My stomach’s got butterflies and knots at the same time. Isn’t that peculiar?”

“No, I wouldn’t say that was necessarily so peculiar.” I was trying my white investigator’s labcoat on for size.

“A part of me wants to feel like my life’s a total ruin and a fuck-up, that there’s a right way to do things and I’ve made a disaster out of it. That’s how it feels.” She wasn’t facing me. I didn’t really feel like I was talking to her. But if not to her, then to who?

“That’s not true,” I said. I could understand, of course, why she might feel that way. “You didn’t do anything wrong. You just flew to Chicago.”

“There’s no sense to spool everything back to sources, but I might’ve been a better wife to Wally.”

“You’re a good wife. You’re a good wife to me.” And then I didn’t say this, but thought it: And fuck Wally. He’s an asshole. I’ll gladly have him big-K killed and his body Hoffa’d out for birdseed. “What do you feel exhilarated about?” I said instead. Mr. Empathy.

“I’m not sure.” She flashed a look around, her blond hair catching light from somewhere, her face appearing tired and marked with shadowy lines from too-sound sleep and the fatigue of travel.

“Well,” I said, “exhilaration doesn’t hurt anything. Maybe you were glad to see him. You always wondered where he went.” I put a single cocktail peanut into my dry mouth and crunched it down. She turned back to the cold window, which was probably making her cold. “What’s he going to do now,” I said, “have himself re-incarnated, or whatever you do?”

“It’s pretty simple.”

“I’ll keep that in mind. What about the being-married-to-you part? Does he get to do that again? Or do I get you as salvage?”

“You get me as salvage.” She turned and walked slowly toward me where I sat staring up at her, slightly dazzled, as if she was the ghost I’d mistook her for. Her little limp was pronounced because she was beat. She sat on the couch and leaned into me so I could smell the sweated, unwashed dankness of her hair. She put her hand limply on my knee and sighed as if she’d been holding her breath and didn’t realize it till now. Her coarse blanket prickled through my shirt. “He’d like to meet you,” she said. “Or maybe I want him to meet you.”

“Absolutely,” I said, and could identify a privileged sarcasm. “We’ll invite some people over. Maybe I’ll interest him in a summer rental.”

“That’s not really necessary, is it?”

“Yes. I’m in command of my necessaries. You be in command of yours.”

“Don’t be bad to me about this. It flabbergasts me as much as it does you.”

“That isn’t true. I’m not exhilarated. Why are you exhilarated? I answered that for you, but I don’t like my answer.”

“Mmmmmm. I think it’s just so strange, and so familiar. I’m not mad at him anymore. I was for years. I was when I first saw him. It was like meeting the President or some famous person. I know him so well and then there he is and of course I don’t know him. There was something exciting about that.” She looked at me, put her hands atop each other on my cold knee and smiled a sweet, tired, imploring, mercy-hoping smile. It would’ve been wonderful if we hadn’t been talking about her ex-dead husband and the disaster he was casting our way, but instead about how good something was, how welcome, how much we missed something we both loved and now here it was.

“I don’t feel that way,” I said. I was on solid ground not feeling what she felt. It occurred to me that how she felt toward Wally was a version of being married to him, which was a version of the truth I mentioned before and couldn’t argue with. But I didn’t have to like it.

“You’re right,” she said patiently.

And then we didn’t speak for a little while, just sat breathing in the cold air, each of us fancifully, forcefully seeking a context into which our separate views — of Wally, and disaster — could join forces and fashion an acceptable and unified response. I was further from the middle of events and had some perspective, so that the heavier burden fell on me. I’d already started suiting up in the raiments of patient understander. Oh woe. Oh why?

“Something has to happen,” Sally said with unwanted certainty. “Something had to happen when Wally left. Something has to happen now that he’s back. Nothing can’t happen. That’s my feeling.”

“Who says?”

“Me,” she said sadly. “I do.”

“What has to happen?”

“I have to spend some time with him.” Sally spoke reluctantly. “You’d want to do the same thing, Frank.” She wrinkled her chin and slightly puffed her compressed lips. She often took on this look when she was sitting at her desk composing a letter.

“No, I wouldn’t. I’d buy him a first-class ticket to anyplace he wanted to go in Micronesia and never think about him again. Where’re you planning to spend time with him? The Catskills? The Lower Atlas? Am I supposed to be there, too, so I can get closer to my needs? I’m close enough to them now. I’m sitting beside you. I’m married to you.”

“You are married to me.” She actually gasped then and sobbed, then gasped again and squeezed my hand harder than anybody’d ever squeezed it, and shook her head from side to side, so tears dashed onto my cheek. It was as if we were both crying. Though why I would’ve been crying, I don’t know, since I should’ve been howling again, shouting, waving my bloody fists in the air as the earth split open. Inasmuch as, with her certainty dawning like a new alien sun, split it did, where it stays split to this day.

I’ll make the rest short, though it’s not sweet.

I buttoned the buttons on my moral investigator’s labcoat and got busy with the program. Sally said she’d be willing to invite Wally down to Sea-Clift — either to a rental she would arrange for him (using who as agent?), or to our house, where he could put up in one of the two guest rooms for the short time he’d be here. The oddest things can be made to seem plausible by insisting they are. Remember Huxley on Einstein. Remember the Trojan Horse. Or else, Sally said, she and he could “go away somewhere” (the Rif, the Pampas, the Silk Road to Cathay). They wouldn’t be “together,” of course, more like brother and sister having a wander, during which crucial period they’d perform what few in their situation (how many are in that situation?) could hope to perform: a putting to rest, an airing, a re-examination of old love allowed to wither and die, saying the unsayable, feeling the unpermitted, reconciling paths not taken and those taken. Cleanse and heal, come back stronger. Come back to me. Yes, there might be some crying, some shouting, some laughter, some hugging, some crisp slappings across the face. But it would be “within a context,” and in “real time,” or some such nonsense, and all those decades would be drained of their sour water, rolled up and put away like a late-autumn garden hose, never to leave the garage again. In other words, it was a “good thing” (if not for everybody) — life’s mystery dramatized, all is artifice, connected boxes, etc., etc., etc.

Interesting. I thought it was all pretty interesting. A true experiment in knowing another person — me knowing her, not her knowing Wally, who I didn’t give a shit about. A revealing frame to put on Sally’s life and into which I could see, since this was between Sally and me — which I still think is true. Can you always tell a snake from a garden hose?

The Silk Road strategy didn’t appeal to me, for obvious reasons. I suggested (these things do happen) that we invite The Wall down for a week (or less). He could bivouac upstairs, set out all his toilet articles in the guest’s bath. We could meet the way I used to meet Ann’s previous, now dead, architect husband, Charley O’Dell — with stiffened civility, frozen-smile, hands-in-pockets mildness that only now and then sprang into psychotic dislike, with biting words that wounded and the threat of physical violence.

I could do better. I had nothing to fear from an ex-dead man. I’d tin his ears about the real estate business, let him experience Mike Mahoney, talk over the election, the Cubs, the polar ice cap, the Middle East. Though mostly I’d just stay the hell away from him, fish the Hendrickson hatch at the Red Man Club, spend a day with Clarissa and Cookie in Gotham, test-drive new Lexuses, sell a house or two — whatever it took, while the two of them did what they needed to do to get that moldy old hose put away on the garage nail of the past tense.

On the twenty-ninth of May, Wally “the Weasel,” as he was known in military school, my wife’s quasi-husband, father of her two maniac children, Viet vet, combat casualty, free-lance amnesiac, cut-and-run artist par excellence, heir to a sizable North Shore fortune, meek arborist, unmourned former dead man and big-time agent of misrule — my enemy—this Wally Caldwell entered my peaceful house on the Jersey Shore to work his particular dark magic on us all.

Clarissa and Cookie came down for the arrival to give moral support. Clarissa, who was still wearing a tiny diamond nostril stud (since jettisoned), felt it was an “interesting” experiment in the extended-family concept, but basically nonsensical, that something was “wrong” with Sally and that I needed to keep my “boundaries” clear and that they (being Harvard lesbians) knew all about boundaries — or something to that effect.

Sally became convulsively nervous, oversensitive and irritable as the hour of Wally’s arrival neared (I affected calm to show I didn’t care). She snapped at Clarissa, snapped at me, had to be talked to by Cookie. She smoked several cigarettes (the first time in twenty years), drank a double martini at ten o’clock in the morning, changed her clothes three times, then stood out on the deck, sporting stiff white sailcloth trousers, new French espadrilles, a blue-and-white middy blouse and extremely dark sunglasses. All was a calculated livery betokening casual, welcoming resolution and sunny invulnerability, depicting a life so happy, invested, entitled, entrenched, comprehended, spiritual and history-laden that Wally would take a quick peek at the whole polished array — house, beach, lesbian kids, damnable husband, unreachable lemony ex-wife, then hop back in his cab and start the long journey back to Mull.

I will concede that the real Wally, the portly, thin-lipped, timidly smiling, gray-toothed, small-eyed, suitcase-carrying, thick-fingered bullock who struggled out of the Newark Yellow Cab, didn’t seem a vast challenge to my or anyone’s sense of permanence. I had perfect no-recollection of him from forty years ago and felt strangely, warmly (wrongly) welcoming toward him, the way you’d feel about a big, softhearted PFC in a fifties war movie, who you know is going to be picked off by a Kraut sniper in the first thirty minutes. Wally had on his green worn-smooth corduroys — though it was already summery and he was sweltering — a faded, earthy-smelling purple cardy over a green-and-ginger rugger shirt, under which his hod-carrier belly tussled for freedom. He wore heavy gray woolen socks, no hat and the previously mentioned smelly but not mud-spackled Barbour from his days nerdling about the gorse and rank topsoil of his adopted island paradise.

He brought with him a bottle of twenty-year-old Glen Matoon and a box of Cohiba Robustos—for me. I still have the cigars at the office and occasionally consider smoking one as a joke, though it’d probably explode. He also brought — for Sally — a strange assortment of Scottish cooking herbs he’d obviously gotten for his parents at the Glasgow airport plus a tin of shortcakes for “the house.” He was at least six feet two, newly beardless and nearly bald, weighed a fair seventeen stone and spoke English in a halting, swallowing, slightly high-pitched semi-brogue with a vocabulary straight out of the seventies U.S. He said Chicago Land, as in “We left Chicago Land at the crack of dawn.” And he said “super,” as in “We had some super tickets to Wrigley.” And he said “z’s,” as in “I copped some righteous z’s on the plane.” And he said “GB,” as in “I banged down a GB” (a gut bomb) “before we left Chicago Land, and it tasted super.”

He was, this once-dead Wally, not the strangest concoction of Homo sapiens genetic material ever presented to me (Mike Mahoney has retired that jersey number), but he was certainly the most complexly pathetic and ill-starred — a strangely wide-eyed, positive-outlook type, ill at ease and conspicuous in his lumpy flesh, but also strangely serene and on occasion pompous and ribald, like the downstate SAE he was back when life was simpler. How he made it in Mull is a mystery.

Needless to say, I loathed him (warm feelings aside), couldn’t comprehend how anybody who could love me could ever have loved Wally, and wanted him out of the house the second he was in it. We shook hands limply, in the manner of a cold prisoner exchange on the Potsdam bridge. I stared. He averted his small eyes, so I couldn’t feel good about being insincerely nice to him and show Sally this was worthy of my patience — which I know she hoped.

I spoke tersely, idiotically. “Welcome to Sea-Clift, and to our home,” which I didn’t mean. He said something about “whole layout’s…super,” and that he was “chuffed” to be here. Clarissa instantly took me by the crook of my elbow and led me out to the road in front of the house, where we stood without speaking for a while in the thick spring breeze that stirred the vivid shoreline vegetation toward Asbury Park and points north. Dust from the town front-loader far up the beach, its yellow lights flashing, indicated civic efforts to relocate mounds of sand that had drifted over the promenade during the winter. We were making ready for Memorial Day.

Arthur Glück’s dog, Poot, part Beagle, part Spitz, that looks like a dog from ancient Egypt and scavenges everyone’s house (except the Feensters’), waited in the middle of Poincinet Road, staring at Clarissa and me as though it was clear even to him that something very wrong was underway, since events had driven all the humans out to the road in the morning, where it was his turf, his time, and where he knew how things worked.

Clarissa let go of my arm and just sat down in the middle of the sandy roadway — her gesture for separating us two from Sally and Wally, who’d already by fits and starts disappeared inside the house, though the door was left open. No one would’ve been driving down the road. Still, her gesture was a stagy, unplanned one I appreciated, even though it made me nervous and I wished she’d get up. Cookie, wise girl, had decided on a walk up the beach. I should have gone with her.

“You’re a way too tolerant dude,” Clarissa said casually, keeping her seat in the road, leaning back on one elbow and shielding her eyes from the noon-time sun. I felt even more awkward because of where she was and what she wasn’t feeling. “Which isn’t to say Mr. Wally isn’t pretty much a Wind in the Willows kind of character in need of a good ass-kicking. It’s pretty zen of you. In the girl community, this wouldn’t stand up.” Clarissa’s nose stud sparkled in the brassy light, and made me touch my nose, as though I had one in mine. She was wearing tissue-thin Italian sandals that exhibited her long tanned feet and ankles, and a pair of cream-colored Italian harem pants with a matching tank top that showed her shoulders. She was like a mirage, languorous but animated.

“I’m not zen at all.” Mike’s hooded-eye, scrunched face appeared in my mind like one of the Pep Boys. He knew nothing of this day’s events, but definitely would’ve approved of what I was doing.

“Don’t you feel strange? It’s pretty strange to have old Wally down here for a visit.” Clarissa wrinkled her nose and squinted up at me as if I was the rarest of vanishing species.

“I had a good picture in my mind of how this would all happen,” I said. “But now that he’s here, I can’t remember it.” I looked at the house, my house, felt stupid being out in my road. “I think that’s very human, though, to expect something and then have the expected event supplant the expectation. That’s interesting.”

“Yep,” Clarissa said.

What I didn’t say was even odder. That while I felt officially pissed off and deeply offended, I was not feeling that this fiasco was a real fiasco, or that my life was fucked up, or that any of the important things I hoped to do before I was sixty were going to be impossible to do. In other words, I felt tumult, but I also felt calm, and that I’d probably feel different again in another thirty minutes — which is why I don’t pay fullest attention to how I feel at any given moment. If I’d told this to Clarissa, she would’ve thought I was suffering from stress-induced aphasia, or maybe having a stroke. Maybe I was. But what I knew was that you’re stuck with yourself most of the time. Best make the most of it.

Clarissa struggled onto her feet like a kid at school after recess. She dusted off the seat of her pants and gave her hair a shake. It would’ve been a perfect day for a flight to Flint. Maybe by cocktail hour all would be settled, Wally packed off in another yellow taxi and happy to be, life resumable back at the Salty Dog stage, where I’d departed it a few days before.

“Is Sally a second child?” We were still standing in the middle of the road, as though expecting something. I was taking pleasure in the flashing yellow light of the town’s front-loader, a half mile up the beach.

“She had a brother who died.”

“I’m trying to be sympathetic to her. Second children have a hard time getting what they need. I’m a second child.”

“You’re a third child. You had a brother who died when you were little.” Clarissa has scant memory of her dead brother and no patience with trying to feel what she doesn’t really feel. Me, I feel like I’m Ralph’s earthly ombudsman and facilitator to the living. It is my secret self. I give (mostly) silent witness.

“That’s right.” She was briefly pensive then, in deference to “my loss,” which was her loss but different. “If Mom came back from the dead, would you invite her over for a visit?”

“Your mother’s not dead,” I said irritably. “She’s living in Haddam.”

“Divorce is kind of like death, though, isn’t it? Three moves equal a death. A divorce equals probably three-quarters of a death.”

“In some ways. It never ends.” And how would this day rate, I wondered. Six-sixteenths of a death? About the same for Sally. And who cared about The Wall? Morbid dimness had always complicated his life, landing him over and over in strange situations, and not knowing what to do about it.

“I’m just trying to distract you,” Clarissa said. “And humor you.” She rehooked her arm through mine and bumped me with her girlathlete’s shoulder. She smelled of shampoo and clean sweat. The way you’d want your daughter to smell. “Maybe you should keep a diary.”

“I’ll commit suicide before I keep a fucking diary. Diaries are for weaklings and old queer professors. Which I’m not.”

“Okay,” she said. She was never sensitive to insensitive language. We were starting to stroll up Poincinet Road, past the fronts of my neighbors’ houses — all similarly handsome board-and-batten edifices with green hydrangeas ready to sprout their showy blooms. Ahead, where our newer settlement stopped and where the old mansions had been blown away, there was open, sparsely populated beach and grass and sea. I could see a tiny ant in the hazy distance. It was Cookie. Poot, the Egyptian dog, had found her and was trotting along.

“I thought life isn’t supposed to be like this when you love someone and they love you,” I said to Clarissa, more speculative than I felt. “That intelligence won’t get you very far. That’s your father’s perspective.”

“I knew that.” She kicked road sand with her rubied toenail. Already things with her and Cookie were wearing through. I couldn’t have known, but she could. “What do you think’s gonna happen?”

“With Sally and Wally?” I gave myself a moment to wonder, letting sea breeze make my ears feel wiggly, my view of the beach grown purposefully wide and generous. Such views are supposedly good for the optic muscle, and the soul. Something seemed to be riding on what I said, as if I was the cause of whatever happened to us all. “I can guess,” I said breezily, “but I tend to guess bad outcomes. Most horses don’t win races. Most dogs finally bite you.” I smiled. I felt foolish in the situation I was in.

“Let’s hear it anyway,” Clarissa said. “It’s good to pre-vision things.”

“Well. I think Wally’ll stay around a few days. I’ll forget exactly why I don’t like him. We’ll talk a lot about real estate and spruce trees. We’ll be like conventioneers in town from Iowa. Men always do that. Sally’ll get sick of us. But then by accident, I’ll walk into a room where they are, and they’ll immediately shut up some highly personal conversation. Maybe I’ll catch them kissing and order Wally out of the house. After which, Sally’ll be miserable and tell me she has to go live with him.”

Cookie was waving to us from out on the beach, waving a stick that Poot expected her to throw. I waved back.

Clarissa shook her head, scratched into her thick hair and looked at me with annoyance, her pretty mouth-corners fattened in disapproval. “Do you really believe that?”

“It’s what anybody’d think. It’s what Ann Landers would tell you — if she isn’t dead.”

“You’re crazy-hazy,” she said and punched me too hard on the shoulder, as if a slug in the arm would cure me. “You don’t know women very well, which isn’t news, I guess.”

Cookie’s clear, happy voice was already talking over the distance, telling something she’d seen out in the ocean — a shark’s fin, a dolphin’s tail, a whale’s geyser — something the dog had gone after, trusting his Egyptian ancestry against impossible odds. “I don’t believe it,” Cookie said gaily. “You guys. You should’ve seen it. I wish you could’ve seen.”

I wouldn’t have been wrong about Sally, even not knowing women very well, and never having said I did. I’d always been happy to know and like them one at a time. But about some things, even men can’t be wrong.

Wally was in my house in Sea-Clift for five uncomfortable days. I tried to go about my diurnal duties, spending time early-to-late in the office where I had summer renters arriving, plumbers and carpenters and cleaning crews and yard-maintenance personnel to dispatch and lightly supervise. I sold a house on the bay side of Sea-Clift, took a bid on but failed to sell another. Mike sold two rental houses. He and I drove to Bay Head to inspect an old rococo movie house, the Rivoli Shore — where Houdini had made himself disappear in 1910. Maybe we wanted to buy it, find somebody to run it, go into limited partnership with a local Amvets group, using state preservation money and turn it into a World War II museum. We passed.

Normally, I’d have been home for lunch, but in grudging deference to what was going on in my house, I ate glutinous woodsman’s casserole one day, Welsh rarebit another, ham and green beans a third at the Commodore’s table at the Yacht Club, where I’m a non-boating member. Two times, I ate at Neptune’s Daily Catch, where I had the calzone, flirted with the waitress, then spent the afternoon at my desk, burping and thinking philosophically about acid reflux and how it eats potholes in your throat. I explained to Mike that Sally was having an “old relative” to visit, though another time I said an “old friend,” which he noticed, so he knew something was weird.

Each evening I went home, tired and ready for a renewing cocktail, supper and an early-to-bed. Wally was most times in the living room reading Newsweek, or on the deck with my binoculars, or in the kitchen loading up a dagwood or outside having a disapproving look at the arborvitae and hydrangeas or staring out at the shorebirds. Sally was almost never in sight when Wally was, leaving the impression that whatever they were carrying on between them during the day and my absence — hugging, face slapping, laughing that ended in tears — was all pretty trying, and I wouldn’t like seeing her face then, and in any case she needed to recover from it.

Toward Wally — who’d taken to wearing gray leisure-attire leather shorts that exposed his pasty bulldog calves above thick black ankle brogues and another rugby shirt, this time with Mackays printed on front — toward Wally, I dealt entirely in “So, okay, howzit goin’?” “Did you get to do some walking?” “Are they feeding you enough in here?” “Thought of going for a swim?” And to me, Wally — large, sour earth-smelling, full-cheeked, with a tired, timid smile I disliked — toward me, Wally dealt in “Yep.” “Super.” “Oh yeah, hiked up to the burger palace.” “Great spread here, looverly, looverly.”

I certainly didn’t know what the hell any of us were doing — though who would? If you’d told me the two of them never so much as spoke, or went for polka lessons, or read the I Ching together, or shot heroin, I’d have had to believe it. Was it, I wondered, that everything was just too awkward, too revealing, too anxious-making, too upsetting, too embarrassing, too intimidating, too intrusive or just too private to exhibit in front of me — the husband, the patient householder, the rate-payer, the sandwich-bread buyer? And also now a stranger?

Sally made dinner for us all three on night two. A favorite — lamb chops, Cajun tomatoes and creamed pearl onions. This was not the worst dinner I ever attended, although conceivably it was the worst in my own house. Sally was nervous and too smiley, her limp worsening notably. She cooked the lamb chops too long, which made her mad at me. Wally said his was “astounding” and ate like a horse. I had three stout martinis and observed the dinner was “perfect, if not astounding.” And, as I’d predicted, I forgot more or less who Wally was, let myself act like he was one or the other of Sally’s cousins, talked at length about the history of Sea-Clift, how it had been founded in the twenties by upstart Philadelphia real estate profiteers as a summer resort for middle-middle citizens from the City of Brotherly Love, how its basic populace and value system — Italians with moderate Democratic leanings — hadn’t changed since the early days, except in the nineties, when well-heeled Gothamites with Republican preferences who couldn’t afford Bridgehampton or Spring Lake started buying up land from the first settler’s ancestors, who pretty quick wised up and started holding on to things. “Okay. Sure, sure,” Wally said, mouth full of whatever, though he also said “thas brillian” a few times when nothing was brilliant, which made me hate him worse and made Sally get up and go to bed without saying good night.

In bed each night with Sally returned — though asleep when her head hit the pillow — I lay awake and listened to Wally’s human noises across in “his” room. He played the radio — not loud — tuned to an all-news station that occasionally made him chuckle. He took long, forceful pisses into his toilet to let off the lager he drank at dinner. He produced a cannonade of burps, followed by a word of demure apology to no one: “Oh, goodness, who let that go?” He walked around heavily in his sock feet, yawned in a high-pitched keening sound that only a man used to living alone ever makes. He did some sort of brief grunting calisthenics, presumably on the floor, then plopped into bed and set up an amazing lion’s den of snarfling-snoring that forced me to flatten my head between pillows, so that I woke up in the morning with my eyes smarting, my neck sore and both hands numb as death.

During the five days of Wally’s visit, I twice asked Sally how things were going. The first time — this was two seconds before she fell into sleep, leaving me in bed listening to stertorous Wally — she said, “Fine. I’m glad I’m doing this. You’re magnificent to put up with it. I’m sorry I’m cranky….” Zzzzzzz. Magnificent. She had never before referred to me as magnificent, even in my best early days.

The other time I asked, we were seated across the circular glass-topped breakfast table. Wally was still upstairs sawing logs. I was heading off to the Realty-Wise office. It was day three. We hadn’t said much about anything in the daylight. To freshen the air, I said, “You’re not going to leave me for Wally, are you?” I gave her a big smirking grin and stood up, napkin in hand. To which she answered, looking up, plainly dismayed, “I don’t think so.” Then she stared out at the ocean, on which a white boat full of day-fishermen sat anchored a quarter mile offshore, their short poles bristling off one side, their boat tipped, all happy anglers, hearts set on a flounder or a shark. They were probably Japanese. Something she noticed when she saw them may have offered solace.

But “I don’t think so”? No grateful smile, no wink, no rum mouth pulled to signal no worries, no way, no dice. “I don’t think so” was not an answer Ann Landers would’ve considered insignificant. “Dear Franky in the Garden State, I’d lock up the silverware if I were you, boy-o. You’ve got a rough intruder in your midst. You need to do some night-time sentry duty on your marriage bed. Condition red, Fred.”

Wally gave no evidence of thinking himself a rough intruder or a devious conniver after my happiness. In spite of his strange splintered, half North-Shore-fatty, half earnest-blinking-Scots-gardener persona (a veteran stage actor playing Falstaff with an Alabama accent), Wally did his seeming best to spend his days in a manner that did least harm. He always smiled when he saw me. He occasionally wanted to talk about beach erosion. He advised me to put more aluminum sulfate on my hydrangeas to make the color last. Otherwise he stayed out of sight much of the time. And I now believe, though no one’s told me, that Sally had actually forced him to come: to suffer penance, to show him that abandonment had worked out well for her, to embarrass the shit out of him, to confuse him, to make him miss her miserably and make me seem his superior — plus darker reasons I assume are involved in everything most of us do and that there’s no use thinking about.

But what else was she supposed to do? How else to address past and loss? Was there an approved mechanism for redressing such an affront besides blunt instinct? What other kind of synergy reconciles a loss so great — and so weird? It’s true I might’ve approached it differently. But sometimes you just have to wing it.

Which explains my own odd conduct, my fatal empathy (I guess), and even Wally’s attempts to be stolidly, unpretentiously present, subjecting himself to whatever penitent paces Sally put him through in the daylight, essaying to be cordial, taking interest in the flora and fauna and in me at cocktail hour, eating and drinking his scuppers over, burping and snorting like a draft horse in his room at night, then making an effort to get his sleep in anticipation of the next day’s trials.

He and I never talked about “the absence” (which Sally said was his name for being gone for nearly thirty years) or anything related to their kids, his parents, his other life and lives (though of course he and Sally might’ve). We never talked about when he might be leaving or how he was experiencing life in my house. Never talked about the future — his or Sally’s or mine. We never talked about the presidential election, since that had a root system that could lead to sensitive subjects — morality, dubious ethics, uncertain outcomes and also plainly bad outcomes. I wanted to keep it clear that he was never for one instant welcome in my house, and that I pervasively did not like him. I don’t know what he thought or how he truly felt, only how he was in his conduct, which wasn’t that bad and, in fact, evidenced a small, unformed nobility, although heavy-bellied and gooberish. I did my best. And maybe he did his. I picked up some interesting tips about soil salinity and its effect on the flowering properties of seashore flora, learned some naturopathic strategies for combating the Asian Long-Horned Beetle. Wally heard my theories for combating sticker shock and enhancing curb appeal, got some insider dope about the second-home market and how it’s always wedded to Wall Street. There was a moment when I even thought I did remember him from eons ago. But that moment vanished when I thought of him together with Sally on the beach while I was alone eating tough, frozen woodsman’s casserole at the Yacht Club. In the truest sense, we didn’t get anywhere with each other because we didn’t want to. Men generally are better at this kind of edgy, pointless armistice than women. It’s genetic and relates to our hoary history of mortal combat, and to knowing that most of life doesn’t usually rise to that level of gravity but still is important. I’m not sure it’s to our credit.

Wally eventually departed on the morning of day five. Sally said he was going, and I made it my business to get the hell out of the house at daybreak and ended up snoozing at my desk until Mike arrived at eight and acted worried about me. I hung around the office the rest of the morning, catching cold calls, running credit checks on new rental clients and talking to Clarissa in Gotham. She’d called every day and tried to liven things up by referring to Wally as “Dildo” and “Wal-Fart” and “Mr. Wall Socket,” and saying he reminded her of her brother (which is both true and not true) and that maybe the two of them could be friends because they’re “both so fucking weird.”

Then I drove home, where Sally kissed me and hugged me when I walked in the door, as if I’d been away on a long journey. She looked pale and drained — not like somebody who’d been crying, but like somebody who might’ve been on a roadside when two speeding cars or two train engines or two jet airplanes collided in front of her. She said she was sorry about the whole week, knew it had taken a toll on all of us, but probably mostly me (which wasn’t true), that Wally would never again come into the house, even though he’d asked her to thank me for letting him “visit,” and even though having him here, as awful as it was, had served some “very positive purposes” that would never have gotten served any other way. She said she loved me and that she wanted to make love right then, in the living room on the suede couch, where this had all started. But because the meter reader knocked at the front door and Poot started barking at him out in the road, we moved — naked as two Bushmen — up to the bedroom.

Next day I assumed — believed — matters would begin shifting back toward normal. I wanted us to drive over to the Red Man Club for an outing of fishing, fiddlehead hunting and a trek along the Pequest to seek out Sampson’s Warbler pairs that nest in our woods and nowhere else in New Jersey. I intended to put in an order for a new Lexus at Sea Girt Imports — a surprise for Sally’s birthday in three weeks. I’d already made a trip up there to consult color charts and take a test drive.

Sally, though, seemed still pale and drained on Saturday, so that I canceled the Red Man Club and (thank goodness) didn’t get around to the Lexus.

She stayed in bed all day, as if she herself had been on a long and arduous journey. Though the journey that had left her depleted had left me exhilarated and abuzz, my head full of plans and vivid imaginings, the way somebody’d feel who’d gotten happy news from the lab, a shadow on an X ray that proved to be nothing, bone marrow that “took.” While she rested, I drove myself over to the movies at the Ocean County Mall and saw Charlie’s Angels, then bought lobsters on the way home and cooked them for dinner — though Sally barely rallied to work on hers, while I demolished mine.

She went to bed early again — after I asked if maybe she should call Blumberg on Monday and schedule a work-up. Maybe she was anemic. She said she would, then went to sleep at nine and slept twelve hours, emerging downstairs into the kitchen Sunday morning, weak-eyed, sallow and sunk-shouldered — where I was sitting, eating a pink grapefruit and reading about the Lakers in the Times—to tell me she was leaving me to live with Wally in Mull, and that she’d decided it was worse to let someone you love be alone forever than to be with someone (me!) who didn’t need her all that much, even though she knew I loved her and she loved me. This is when she said things about the “circumstances” and about importance. But to this day, I don’t understand the calculus, though it has a lot in common with other things people do.

She was wearing an old-fashioned lilac sateen peignoir set with pink ribbonry stitched around the jacket collar. She was thin-armed, bare-legged, her skin wan and blotchy from sleep, her eyes colorless in their glacial blue. She was barefoot, a sign of primal resolution. She blinked at me as if sending me a message in Morse code: Good-bye, good-bye, good-bye.

Oh, I protested. May it not be said I failed of ardor at that crucial moment (the past, critics have attested, seems settled and melancholy, but I was boisterous in that present). I was, by turns, disbelieving, shocked, angry, tricked-feeling, humiliated, gullible and stupid. I became analytical, accusatory, revisionist, self-justifying, self-abnegating and inventive of better scenarios than being abandoned. Patiently (I wasn’t truly patient; I wanted to slit Wally open like a lumpy feed sack) and lovingly (which I surely was), I testified that I needed her the way hydrogen needs oxygen — she should know that, had known it for years. If she needed time — with Wally, in Mull — I could understand. I lied that I found it all “interesting,” although I admitted it didn’t make me happy — which wasn’t a lie. She should go there and do that. Hang out. Plant little trees in little holes. Go native. Act married. Talk, slap, hug, giggle, groan, cry.

But come home!

I’d tear down conventional boundaries if we could just keep an understanding alive. Did I say beg? I begged. I already said I cried (something Clarissa chided me for). To which Sally said, shoulders slack, eyes lowered, slender hands clasped on the table top, her little finger lightly touching the covered Quimper butter dish she at one time had felt great affection for, and that I subsequently winged across the room and to death by smithereens, “I think I have to make this permanent, sweetheart. Even if I regret it and later come crying to you, and you’re with some other woman, and won’t talk to me, and my life is lost. I have to.”

Strange grasp on “permanent,” I thought, though my eyes burbled with tears. “It’s not like we’re dealing with hard kernels of truth here,” I said pitiably. “This is all pretty discretionary, if you ask me.”

“No,” she said, which is when she took her wedding ring off and laid it on the glass pane of the table top, causing a hard little tap I’ll never, ever, forget, even if she comes back.

“This is so terrible,” I said in full cry. I wanted to howl like a dog.

“I know.”

“Do you love Wally more than you love me?”

She shook her head in a way that made her face appear famished and exhausted, though she couldn’t look at me, just at the ring she’d a moment before relinquished. “I don’t know that I love him at all.”

“Then what the fuck!” I shouted. “Can you just do this?”

“I don’t think I can’t do it,” Sally — my wife — said. And essentially that was that. Double negative makes a positive.

She was gone by cocktail hour, which I observed alone.

Somewhere once I read that harsh words are all alike. You can make them up and be right. The same is true of explanations. I never caught them smooching. Probably they didn’t smooch. Neither did they stop mid-sentence in an intimate moment just when I strode through a door (I never strode through any without whistling a happy tune first). Sally and I never visited a counselor to hash out problems, or ever endured any serious arguments. There wasn’t time before she left. Apart from when I first knew Sally, Wally had never been a feature of our daily converse. Everybody has their casualties; we get used to them like old photographs we glance at but keep in a trunk. To understand it all in the way we understand other things, I would have to make an explanation up. The facts, as I knew them, didn’t say enough.

For the first week after Sally left, I cried (for myself) and brooded (about myself) as one would cry and brood upon realizing that marriage to oneself probably hadn’t been so great; that I maybe wasn’t so good in bed — or anywhere — or wasn’t good at intimacy or sharing or listening. My completelys, my I love yous, my my darlings, my forevers weighed less than standard issue, and I wasn’t such an interesting husband, in spite of believing I was a very good and interesting husband. Sally, possibly, was unhappy when I thought she was ecstatic. Any person — especially a realtor — would wonder about these post-no-sale issues just as a means of determining what new homework he was now required to do.

What I decided was that I may never have seemed to Sally to be “all in,” but that “all in” is what I goddamn was. Always. No matter how I felt or described my feelings. Anything more “all in” than me was just a fantasy of the perfidious sort manufactured by the American Psychiatrists Association, that Sisyphus of trade groups, to keep the customers coming back.

Bullshit, in other words.

I was intimate. I was as amorous and passionate as the traffic would bear. I was interesting. I was kind. I was generous. I was forbearing. I was funny (since that’s so goddamned important). I shared whatever could stand to be shared (and not everything can). Women both hate and love weakness in men, and I’d had positive feedback to think I was weak in the right ways and not in the wrong. Of course, I wasn’t perfect at any of these human skills, having never thought I had to be. In the fine print on the boilerplate second-marriage license, it should read: “Signatories consent neither has to be perfect.” I did fine as a husband. Fine.

Which didn’t mean Sally had to be big-H happy or do anything except what she wanted to do. We’re only talking about explanations here, and whether anything’s my fault. It was. And it wasn’t.

My personal view is that Sally got caught unawares in the great, deep and confusing eddy of contingency, which has other contingency streams running into it, some visible, some too deep-coursing below the surface to know about. One stream was: That just as I was enjoying the rich benefits of the Permanent Period — no fear of future, life not ruinable, the past generalized to a pleasant pinkish blur—she began, in spite of what she might’ve said, to fear permanence, to fear no longer becoming, to dread a life that couldn’t be trashed and squandered. Put simply, she wasn’t prepared to be like me — a natural state that marriage ought to accommodate and make survivable, as one partner lives the Permanent Period like a communicant lives in a state of grace, while the other does whatever the hell she wants.

Only along galumphs Wally, turf-stained, resolutely un-handsome, vaguely clueless from his years in the grave (i.e., Scotland). And suddenly one of the prime selling points of second marriage — minimalization of the past — becomes not such a selling point. First marriages have too much past clanking along behind; but second ones may have too little, and so lack ballast.

Heavy-footed, un-nuanced, burping, yerping Wally may have reminded Sally there was a past that couldn’t be generalized, and that she had unfinished business in the last century and couldn’t reason it away in the jolly manner that I’d reasoned myself into a late-in-life marriage and lived happily by its easy-does-it house rules. (Millennium angst, if it’s anything, is fear of the past, not the future.) In fact, with Wally both behind and also suddenly lumped in front, it’s good odds Sally never experienced the Permanent Period, and so had no choice but to hand me her wedding ring like I was a layaway clerk at Zales and push herself out of the eddy of our life and take the current wherever it flowed.

Though I’ll admit that even on this day, the eve of Turkey Day, I’m no longer so blue about Sally’s absence, as once I was. I don’t feature myself living alone forever, just as I wouldn’t concede to staying a realtor forever and mostly tend to think of life itself as a made-up thing composed of today, maybe tomorrow and probably not the next day, with as little of the past added in as possible. I feel, in fact, a goodly tincture of regret for Sally. Because, even though I believe her sojourn on Mull will not last so long, by re-choosing Wally she has embraced the impossible, inaccessible past, and by doing so has risked or even exhausted an extremely useful longing — possibly her most important one, the one she’s made good use of these years to fuel her present, where I have found a place. This is why the dead should stay dead and why in time the land lies smooth all around them.

8

This morning, I’ve scheduled the 10:15 showing at my listing at 61 Surf Road, and following that, at 12:30, a weeks-planned meet-up in Asbury Park with Wade Arsenault, my friend from years back, to attend a hotel implosion — the hotel in question being the elegant old Queen Regent Arms, remnant of the stately elephants from the twenties, surrendering at last to the forces of progress (a high-end condo development). Wade and I have been to two other implosions this fall, in Ventnor and Camden, and each of us finds them enjoyable, although for different reasons. Wade, I think, just likes big explosions and the controlled devastation that follows. In his young life, he was an engineer, and watching things blow up is his way of coping with being now in his eighties, and of fortifying his belief that the past crumbles and that staring loss in the face is the main requirement for living out our allotment (this is as spiritual as engineers get). On the other hand, I’m gratified by the idea of an orderly succession manifesting our universal need to remain adaptable through time, a lesson for which cancer is the teacher, though my reason may not finally be any different from Wade’s. In any case, going along with Wade injects an interesting and unusual centerpiece activity into the course of my day, one that gives it shape and content but won’t wear me out, since at the end I’ll have Paul to contend with. (Business itself, of course, is the very best at offering solid, life-structuring agendas, and business days are always better than wan weekends, and are hands-down better than gaping, ghostly holidays that Americans all claim to love — but I don’t, since these days can turn long, dread-prone and worse.)

This morning, however, has already turned at least semi-eventful. Up and dressed by 8:30, I spent a useful half hour in my home office going over listing sheets for the Surf Road property, followed by a browse through the Asbury Press, surveying the “By Owner” offerings, estate auctions, “New Arrivals” and “Deaths,” all of which can be fruitful, if sometimes disheartening. The Press reported on the Peter Pan tour-bus accident Mike and I saw yesterday — three lives “eclipsed,” all Chinese-American females on an Atlantic City gaming holiday from their restaurant jobs on Canal Street, Gotham. Others were injured but lived.

The Press also reported that the presumptive (and devious) Vice-President-in-waiting for the Republicans has suffered a mild heart trembler, and farther down the page that the device that exploded at Haddam Doctors took the life of a security guard named Natherial Lewis, forty-eight — which startled me. Natherial is/was the uncle of young Scooter Lewis, who chauffeured Ernie McAuliffe to his resting ground yesterday, and so must have known nothing of his own loss at the time, although today he’s thinking on death with new realities installed. I knew Natherial when he himself was a young man. Several times when I was at Lauren-Schwindell, I employed him to retrieve wayward FOR SALE signs after Halloween pranksters had swiped them from front yards and set them up in front of area churches or their divorced parents’ condos. Nate always thought it was funny. I’ll phone in flowers through Lloyd Mangum, who’ll be overseeing. New Jersey is a small place, finally.

When I looked up from my paper, though, and out the window — my home office gives onto the front, and down Poincinet Road toward the state park where Route 35 ends and a few old seasonal businesses are in sight (a chowder house, the Sinker Swim Doughnut) — I couldn’t stop remembering something Clarissa was talking about on our after-Halloween beach walk: That she felt strangely insulated from contemporary goings on. Which, as I’ve said before, is also true for me. I watch CNN every night, but never afterward think much about anything I see — even the election, as stupid as it is. I’ve come to loathe most sports, which I used to love — a loss I attribute to having seen the same things over and over again too many times. Only death-row stories and sumo wrestling (narrated in Japanese) can keep me at the TV longer than ten minutes. My bedside table, as I’ve said, has novels and biographies I’ve read thirty pages into but can’t tell you much about. A couple of weeks ago, I decided I’d write a letter to President Clinton — the opposite of Marguerite’s letter — detailing the sorry state of national affairs (much of it his fault), suggesting he’d be wise to nationalize the Guard and protect the future of the Republic with regard to the “rogue state of Florida.” But I didn’t finish it and put it in a drawer, since it seemed to me the work of a crank that would’ve earned me a visit from the FBI.

But what I wondered, at my desk with a copy of the Asbury Press, gazing out my window, was — it was a kind of minor revelation: Am I not just feeling what plenty of other humans feel all the time but don’t pay any attention to? People with no worrisome follow-up tests next Wednesday, civically alert citizens, members of PACs, schmoes who haven’t lost their spouses to a memory of love lost? And if so, do I even have any excuse to feel insulated? At the end of this reverie, I took out my half-written letter to the President and threw it in the trash and promised myself to write a better one, posing more constructive questions I can work on in the meantime — all in an effort to seem less like a nutter and a complainer, and to do whatever the hell we’re all supposed to do to display we’re responsible and doing our best to make life better.

I had several calls waiting before setting off for Surf Road. One from the Eat No Evil people in Mantoloking, wanting to know if gluten-free, no-salt bread in the organic turkey stuffing would be desired, or if the standard organic Saskatchewan spelt was okay. And could they come at 1:45 instead of 2:00? Another was from Wade, a nervous-nelly call to be sure we’re meeting at the Fuddruckers at Exit 102 on the Parkway at 12:30, and to say that he was bringing his own sandwich which he can eat while the Queen Regent comes down (this needed no answer). Another, which I also didn’t answer, was from Mike, apologizing for engaging in the “non-virtuous action of senseless speech” last night — which he certainly did — and accusing himself of covetousness, which I take as a sign that he’s maybe saying no to the Montmorency spaghetti and that I can keep him as a trusted employee and house-selling house-a-fire.

The fourth call, however, was from Ann, and strummed an ominous minor bass chord in my chest as it bespoke fresh assumptions I don’t share but may have seemed to share at the end of a long and wearisome day.

“It’s easier to leave this as a message than to say it to you, Frank.” My name again. Years ago, when we were married, Ann used to call me “Tootsie,” which embarrassed me in front of people, and then for a while she called me “Satch”—for private personal reasons — this being before “shit-heel” finally won the day. “I didn’t really think ahead much about what I said tonight. I just blurted it. But it still seems right to me. You acted completely stunned. I’m sure I scared you, which I’m sorry about. I certainly don’t have to come to Thanksgiving dinner. You were just sweet to ask. You were very good tonight, by the way, the best I can remember you — to me, anyway.” Cancer obviously agrees with me. “Charley knew what a good man you were, and said so, though probably not to you.” Definitely not. “He always thought I’d have been happier married to you than to him. But you can’t recalculate, I guess. We act on so many things we don’t know very much about, don’t you think? It’s no wonder we’re all a little fucked up — as they say in Grosse Pointe. Anyway, the idea of underlying causes to things has started to oppress me. I didn’t tell you, did I, that I considered attending the seminary after Charley died. It was probably why I came back here. Then I decided religion was just about underlying causes, things that are hidden and have to be treated like secrets all the time. And I—” Click. Time was up.

I sat at my desk, deciding if I wanted to hear the rest, which waited in message five. Humans generally get out the gist of what they need to say right at the beginning, then spend forever qualifying, contradicting, burnishing or taking important things back. You rarely miss anything by cutting most people off after two sentences. Ann’s spiel about how much we all don’t know about everything we do is linked thematically to Mike Mahoney’s fourth-grade perception on the Barnegat bridge last night that we all live in houses we didn’t choose and that choose us because they were built to somebody else’s specifications, which we’re happy to adopt, and that that says something about the price of baloney. Each has the specific gravity of a rice-paper airplane tossed from the top of the Empire State Building that soars prettily before it’s lost to oblivion. Another example of non-virtuous speech. Maybe Ann’s now dabbling in Eastern religions, since her old-line Reform Lutheranism stopped packing a wallop.

Except. Our ex-wives always harbor secrets about us that make them irresistible. Until, of course, we remember who we are and what we did and why we’re not married anymore.

Message five. “Okay, sweetie, I’ll get this over with. Sorry for the long message. I’ve had a glass of New Zealand sauvignon blanc.” Long messages ask for but don’t allow answers, which is why they’re inexcusable. “I just want to say that I can’t get over the long transit we all make in our lives. The strangest thing we’ll ever know is just life itself, isn’t it?” No. “Not science or technology or mysticism or religion. I’m not looking for underlying causes anymore. I want things to be evident now. When I saw you tonight, at first it was like being in a jet airplane and looking out the window and seeing another jet airplane. You see it, but you really can’t appreciate the distance it is from you, except it’s really far. But by the end, you’d gotten much closer. For the first time in a very long time you were good, like I said in my last message, or maybe I said it at school. Any-hoo, I just thought of one last thing, then I’m going to bed. Do you remember once when you took the little kids to see a baseball game? In Philadelphia, I guess. Charley and I were somewhere on his boat, and you had them down there. And some player, I guess, hit a ball that came right at you. Of course you remember all this, sweetheart. And Paul said you just reached up with one hand and caught it. He said everybody around you stood up and applauded you, and your hand swelled up huge. But he said you were so happy. You smiled and smiled, he said. And I thought when he told me: That’s the man I thought I married. Not because you could catch an old ball, but because that’s all I thought it took to make you happy. I realized that when I married you I thought I could make you happy just like that. I really did think that. Things made you happy then. I think you gave that ball to Paul. I have it somewhere. So okay. Life’s an odd transit. I already said that. It’ll be nice to see Paul tomorrow — at least I hope it will. Good night.” Click.

“It’s also true…” I said these words right into the receiver, with no one on the other end, my fingers touching my Realtor of the Year crystal paperweight from my early selling days in Haddam. It was holding down some unopened mail beside the phone. “…It’s also true”—and here I quit speaking to no one—“that we conjure up underlying causes and effects based on what we want the underlying causes to be. And that’s how we get things all fucked up.” But in any case, Ann would’ve done better marrying me precisely because I could catch a line drive with my bare hand, and then letting that handsome, manly, uncomplicated facility be the theme of life — one I might’ve lived up to — rather than thinking she could ever make me happy! The kind of happy I was that day at the Vet when “Hawk” Dawson actually doffed his red “C” cap to me, and everyone cheered and I practically convulsed into tears — you can’t patent that. It was one shining moment of glory that was instantly gone. Whereas life, real life, is different and can’t even be appraised as simply “happy,” but only in terms of “Yes, I’ll take it all, thanks,” or “No, I believe I won’t.” Happy, as my poor father used to say, is a lot of hooey. Happy is a circus clown, a sitcom, a greeting card. Life, though, life’s about something sterner. But also something better. A lot better. Believe me.

There was a sixth call. From my son Paul Bascombe, on the road, telling me he and “Jill” wouldn’t make it in tonight — last night, now — due to “hitting the edge of some lake-effect snow” that “has Buffalo paralyzed clear down into western PA.” They were “hoping to push on past Valley Forge.” Weighty pauses were left between phrases—“has Buffalo paralyzed,” “lake-effect snow,” “western PA”—to denote how hysterical these all are, requiring extra time for savoring. The two of them, he said, “almost picked up a flop in Hershey.” I’ve invited them to stay here, but Paul doesn’t like my house and I’m happy for them not to. I have a sense, of course, that Paul has surprises for us. Something’s in his flat, no-affect, Kanzcity-middlewestern, put-on phone voice that I don’t like, since he seems to strive too hard to become that strange overconfident, businessy mainstreamer with a mainstreamer’s sealed-off certainty riven right into the lingo. I haven’t given up on the notion of things generally “working out,” or with either of my children “fitting in,” but I’d also be pleased if they both thought these things had happened. I halfway expected Paul to say he’d “rest in the City of Brotherly Love,” but he couldn’t have suppressed a shout of hilarity, which would’ve ruined it.

Nine years ago, when he was an unusual and uninspired senior at Haddam HS — it was during the two years when Ann’s husband, Charley, had his first cruel brush with colon cancer and Ann simply couldn’t deal with Paul and Clarissa — Paul lived with me in the very house on Cleveland Street where he’d lived as a little boy, the house I bought from Ann when she moved away from Haddam and married Charley, and of course the very house she lives in this morning. It was the time when Ann — for some good reasons — thought Paul might have Asperger’s and was forcing me, at great expense, to drive him down to Hopkins to be neurologically evaluated. He was evaluated and didn’t have Asperger’s or anything else. The Hopkins doctor said Paul was “unsystematically oppositional” by nature and probably would be all his life, that there was nothing wrong with that, nor anything I could do or should want to, since plenty of interesting, self-directed, even famous people were also that. He named Winston Churchill, Bing Crosby, Gertrude Stein and Thomas Carlyle, which seemed a grouping that didn’t bode well. Though it was amusing to think of all four of them writing greeting cards out in K.C.

The day from that relatively halcyon time which I remember most feelingly was a sunny Saturday morning in spring. Forsythias and azaleas were out in Haddam. I had been outside bundling the wet leaves I’d missed the fall before. Paul had few friends and stayed home on weekends, working on ventriloquism and learning to make his dummy — Otto — talk, roll his bulging eyes, mug, agitate his acrylic eyebrows over something Paul, his straight man, said and needed to be made a fool of for. When I came in the living room from the yard, Paul was seated on the old hard-seated Windsor chair he practiced on. He looked dreadful, as he usually looked — baggy jeans, torn sweatshirt, long ratty hair dyed blue. Otto was perched on his knee, Paul’s left hand buried in his complicated innards. Otto’s unalterably startled, perpetually apple-cheeked oaken face was turned so that he and Paul were staring out the window at my neighbor Skip McPherson’s Dodge Alero, which McPherson was washing in front of his house across the street.

I was always trying to say things to Paul that were friendly and provoking and that made it seem I was an engaged father who knew things about his son that only the two of us could know — which maybe I was. These were sometimes dummy jokes: “Feeling a little wooden today?” “Not as chipper as usual?” “Time to branch out.” It was one reliable strategy I’d found that offered us at least a chance at rudimentary communication. There weren’t many others.

Otto’s idiot head swiveled around to peer at me when I came through the front door, though Paul maintained an intense, focused stare out at Skip McPherson. Otto’s get-up was a blue-and-white-plaid hacking jacket, a yellow foulard, floppy brown trousers, and a frizz of bright yellow “hair,” on top of which teetered a green derby hat. He looked like a drunk bet-placer at a second-rate dog track. Paul had bought him at a going-out-of-business magic shop in Gotham.

“I’ve decided what I want to be,” Paul said, staring away purposefully. Otto regarded Paul, batted his eyebrows up and down, then looked back at me. “The invisible man. You know? He unwinds his bandages and he’s gone. That’d be great.” Paul often said distressing things just to be, in fact, oppositional and usually didn’t really know or care what they meant or portended.

“Sounds pretty permanent.” I sat on the edge of the overstuffed chair I usually read my paper in at night. Otto stared at me, as if listening. “You’re only seventeen. Somebody might say you just got here.” Otto spun his head round full circle and blinked his bright-blue bulbous eyes, as if I’d said something outrageous.

“I can act through Otto,” Paul said. “It’ll be perfect. Ventriloquism makes the best sense if the ventriloquist’s invisible. You know?” He kept his stare fixed out at Skip, who was working over his hubcaps.

“Okay,” I said. Somebody might’ve interpreted this as a silent “cry for help,” an early warning sign of depression, some antisocial eruption in the offing. But I didn’t. Adolescent jabber designed to drive me crazy, is what I thought. Paul has put this instinct to work in the greeting-card industry. “Sounds great,” I said.

“It’s great and it’s also true.” He turned and frowned at me.

“True. Okay. True.”

“Greet ’n true,” Otto said in a scratchy falsetto that sounded like Paul, though I couldn’t see his whispering lips or his suppressed pleasure. “Greet ’n true, greet ’n true, greet ’n true.”

That’s all I remember about this — though I didn’t think about it at the time in 1991. But it’s probably not something a father could forget and might even experience guilt about, which I may have done for a while, but stopped. I also remember because it reminds me of Paul in the most vivid of ways, of what he was like as a boy, and makes me think, as only a parent would, of the progress that lurks unbeknownst in even our apparent failures. By his own controlling hand, Paul may now be said to have gotten what he wanted, willed invisibility, and may already be far down the road to happiness.

Clarissa’s beau, the New Hampshire Healey 1000 guy, I’m grievously forced to meet as I make my hurried trip through the kitchen, wanting to catch a bite and beat it. I intentionally stayed in my office, hoping the lovebirds would get bored waiting for Clarissa’s “Dad” and head out for a beach ramble or a cold Healey ride for a shiatsu massage up in Mantoloking. I could meet him later. But when I head through, my Surf Road listing papers in hand, aiming for a fast cup of coffee and a sinker, I find Clarissa. And Thom. (As in “Hi, Frank, this is my friend Thom”—I’m guessing the spelling—“who I woogled the bee-jesus out of all night long in your guest room, whether you approve or don’t.” This last part she doesn’t say.)

The two of them are arranged languidly, side-by-side, yet somehow theatrically intent at the glass-topped breakfast table, precisely where Sally gave me my bad news last May. Clarissa’s wearing a pair of man’s red-and-green-plaid boxer shorts and a frayed blue Brooks Brothers pajama shirt — mine. Her short hair’s mussed, her cheeks pale, her contacts are out, and she has her long-toed bare feet across the space of chairs in Thom’s lap and is studying an Orvis catalog. (All evidence of a “committed relationship” with another female gone. Poof. Things happen too fast for me — which, I guess, is a given.)

Thom’s frowning hard over an open copy of what looks like Foreign Affairs (thick, creamy, deckled pages, etc.) and looks up to smile weakly as my fatherly identity is expressed (in my own kitchen). I mean to proffer only the most carefully crafted, disinterested and hermetically banal sentiments and damn few of them, for fear I’ll say extremely wrong things, after which terrible words from my daughter’s razor tongue will lacerate my head and heart.

Only, Thom’s old—at least forty-six! And even bumbling through my kitchen like a renter and barely daring a look or to meet his dark eyes — my listing papers being my something to hold on to — I know this character’s rap sheet. And it has DANGER stamped on it in big red block letters. Clarissa has carefully mentioned nothing about him in the last days, only that he “teaches” equestrian therapy to Down’s syndrome kids at a “pretty famous holistic center” over in Manchester, where she volunteers a day a week when she isn’t working in my office. She’s intended him to attract absolutely no vetting commentary from me. Apparently the “whole thing”—the connected boxes versus the complex, well-differentiated big swim I was unarguably in — was still pretty precarious, and she didn’t need other people’s (mine, her mother’s) views making her difficult life harder to navigate. This is all re-conveyed to me now in my kitchen with one look of post-coital lassitude and menace.

Thom, however — Thom is no mystery. Thom is known to me and to all men — fathers, especially — and loathed.

Tall, rangy, long-muscled, large-eyed, smooth-olive-skinned Amherst or Wesleyan grad — read Sanskrit, history of science and genocide studies, swam or rowed till books got in the way; born “abroad” of mixed parentage (Jewish-Navajo, French, Berber — whatever gives you charcoal gray eyes, silky black hair on the back of your hands and forearms); deep honeyed voice that seems made of expensive felt; intensely “serious” yet surprisingly funny, also touchingly awkward at the most unexpected moments (not during intercourse); plays a medieval stringed instrument, of which there are only ten in existence; has mastered Go, was once married to a Chilean woman and has a teenage child in Montreal he’s deeply committed to but rarely sees. Worked in Ghana for the Friends Service, taught in experimental schools (not Montessori), built his own ketch and sailed it to Brittany, wears one-of-a-kind Persian sandals, a copper anklet, black silk singlets suggesting a full-body tan, sage-colored desert shorts revealing a shark bite on his inner thigh from who-knows-what ocean, and always smells like a fine wood-working shop. He’s only at the Equestrian Center now because of an “awakening” on the Going to the Sun Highway, which indicated he had yet to fully deliver on his “promise.” And since he’d grown up with horses in North Florida or Buenos Aires or Vienna, and since his little sister had Down’s, maybe there was still time to “make good” if he could just find the right place: Manchester, New Jersey.

And oh, yes, along the course, he also wanted to make good on some men’s daughters and wives. On Clarissa. My Clarissa. My prize. My lifesaver. My un-innocent innocent. She was number 1001.

If I had a pistol instead of a handful of house-for-sale sheets, I’d shoot Thom right in the chest in the midst of their cheery bagel ’n cream cheese, eggs ’n bacon ambience, let him slump onto his Foreign Affairs and drag him out to the beach for the gulls. (Since I’ve had cancer, I’ve compiled an impressive list of people to “take with me” when things get governmentally irreversible — as they soon will. If I survive the hail of bullets, I’ll happily spend my last days in a federal lockup with books to read, three squares, and limited TV in the senior block. You can imagine who I’ll be seeking out. Thom is my new entry.)

“…This is my dad, Frank Bascombe,” Clarissa mutters, head down over her Orvis catalog. She casually retracts her shoe-less foot out of Thom’s lap, gives her big toe a good scratching, then absently, lightly fingers the tiny red whelp where her diamond nose stud used to be. Breakfast dishes are disposed in front of them — bagel crescents, melted butter globs, a bowl of cereal bits afloat on a gray skim of milk product.

I proffer a hand insincerely across Clarissa. “Hi there,” I say. Big smile.

“Thom van Ronk, sir.” Thom looks up suddenly from Foreign Affairs, now smiling intensely. He shakes my hand without standing. Van Ronk. Not a Berber, but a treacherous Walloon. Clarissa could’ve been smarter than this.

“What’s shakin’ in Foreign Affairs, Thom?” I say. “Brits still won’t go for the Euro? Ruskies struggling with a market economy? The odd massacre needing interpreting?” I smile so he knows I hate him. Every person he’s ever known hates him — except my daughter, who doesn’t like my tone of voice and glares up from her page of Gore-Tex trekking mocs to burn a dead-eyed frown into me promising complex punishments later. They’d be worth it.

“Your son, aka my brother, paid us a visit already this morning,” Clarissa says, nestling her heel back comfy into Thom’s penile package, while he re-finds his place in his important reading material. They seem to have known each other for a year. Possibly they’re already on the brink of the kind of familiarity that leads to boredom — like a ball bearing seeking the ocean bottom. I hope so. Though neither of my wives ever stuck her heel into my package while fingering up breakfast crumbs. At Harvard, there’s probably a course for this in the mental-health extension program: Morning-After Etiquette: Do’s, Don’ts, Better Nots. “He seemed — surprise, surprise — extremely weird.” She casts a bored look out at the beach to where the Shore Police are grilling some local teens freed from school for the holiday. “He’s not as weird, though, as his girlfriend. Miss Jill.” She frowns at the boys, four in all, with shaved heads, butt-crack jeans, long Jets and Redskins jerseys. Two enormous, hulking, hatless policemen in shorts are making the boys form a line and turn their pockets out alongside the black-and-white Isuzu 4 × 4. All of them are laughing.

Clarissa, I understand to be musing over the fact that mere mention of her brother makes her revert to teen vocabulary ten years out-of-date, when Paul was “weird beyond pathetic, entirely out of it, deeply disgusting and queer,” etc. She’s sophisticated enough not to care, only to notice. She and her strange brother maintain an ingrown, not overtly unfriendly détente she doesn’t talk about. Paul admires and is deeply in love with her for being glamorous and a (former) lesbian and for stealing a march on transgressive behavior, which had always been his speciality. (I’m sure he was pleased to meet Thom.) Clarissa recognizes his right to be an insignificant little midwestern putzburger, card writer and Chiefs fan, someone she’d never have one thing to do with if he wasn’t her brother. It’s possible they’re in contact about their mother and me by e-mail, though I’m not sure when they last saw each other in the flesh, or if Clarissa could even be nice to him in person. Parents are supposed to know these things. I just don’t.

Though there’s also an old, murky shadow over their brother-sister bond. When Paul was seventeen and Clarissa fifteen, Paul in a fit of confusion apparently “suggested”—I’m not sure how — that he and Clarissa engage in a “see-what-it’s-like” roll in the hay, which pretty much KO’d further sibling rapport. It’s always possible he was joking. However, three years ago — he told his mother this — Paul was summoned to Maine by Clarissa and Cookie, given a ticket to Bangor, brought down to Pretty Marsh by bus, then forced to sleep in a cold cabin and endure an inquisition for misfeasances he wouldn’t go into detail about (reportedly “the usual brother-sister crap”), though clearly for trying to make Clarissa do woo-woo with him when she was underage and his sister. Paul said the two women were savage. They said he should be ashamed of himself, should seek counseling, was probably gay, wasn’t manly, had self-esteem issues, was likely an addicted onanist and premature ejaculator — the usual things sisters think about brothers. He told Ann he finally just gave in (without specifically admitting to what) when they said none of it was his fault, but was actually Ann’s and mine, and that they felt sorry for him. Then they each gave him a hug that he said made him feel crazy. They ended the afternoon with Paul showing them some of his sidesplitting “Smart Aleck” cards — the Hallmark line he writes for out in K.C. — and throwing his voice into the bedroom, and laughing themselves silly before sitting down to a big lobster dinner. He went home the next day.

“What’s wrong with Jill?” I say.

“Way-ell.” Clarissa casts an eyebrows-raised look of appraisal up at me. She can’t see well without her contacts.

Thom suddenly snaps to, grins, showing huge incisors, blinks his eyes and says, “What? Sorry. I wasn’t listening.”

“Did he tell you she only has one hand? I mean she’s perfectly okay. They probably love each other. But yeah. It’s fine, of course. It’s not a problem.”

“One hand?” I say.

“The left one.” Clarissa bites the corner of her mouth. “I mean she’s right-handed, so to speak.”

“Where’d it go?” I have both of mine. Everybody I know has both of theirs. I of course know people suffer such things — all the time. It shouldn’t be a shock that Paul romances a girl with only one arm. But it is. (Never wonder what else can happen next. Much can.)

“We didn’t get into it.” Clarissa shakes her head, her foot still tucked away in plain sight into Thom’s man department. “I guess they met on-line. But she actually works where he works, whatever that’s called. The card company.” (She knows what it’s called.)

I say, “Maybe she works in the sympathy-card department.”

Clarissa smiles an unfriendly smile and gives me one of her long looks that means everything I say is wrong. “A lot of people who write sympathy cards have disabilities themselves. She did tell us that — apropos of nothing. They didn’t stick around that long. I think he wants to surprise you.” She prisses her lips and goes back to her Orvis catalog.

Clarissa, who’s my only earthly ally, if provoked in front of Thom, will jump to Paul’s and one-arm Jill’s defense for anything inappropriate in my body language, facial expression, much less my word-of-mouth. Never mind that she thinks it’s all the strangest of strange. Paul may have hired an actor to bring home just to drive us all crazy. It’s in his realm. Otto in a skirt.

“They said they were going to ‘pick up a motel room.’” Clarissa’s very businessy-sarcastic now because she wants to be — but I can’t be. “They’re going to Ann’s for dinner.” (First names only here.) I don’t want to tell her I’ve invited Ann for Thanksgiving and hear from her what an insanely bad idea it is. “Surprises all around. She’ll flip.” Clarissa executes a perfectly glorious smile that says, I wish I could be there.

Words, I find, are not in full abundance. “Okay,” I say.

“We’re going to Atlantic City, by the way.” She extends a hand over onto velvety Thom’s singleted shoulder and rolls her eyes upward (in mockery). Thom seems confused — that so much could go on in one family in so short a period of time without any of it being about him. “We’ll be back in the morning.” More woogling, this time at Trump’s. “I’m going to try my luck at roulette.” She pats Thom’s tawny, muscular thigh right where the shark took its nip or where he rappelled down the face of Mount whatever. Maybe they’ll see the Calderons at the free high-roller buffet.

“Then I think I’ll just go off and try to sell a house.” I grin insincerely.

“Okay now, is that what you do?” Thom blinks at me. The widely separated corners of his mouth flicker with a smile that may be amused or may be amazed but is not interested.

“Pretty much.”

“Great. Do you do commercial or just houses?” His smile’s tending toward being amused. I’m sure his father did commercial in Rio and printed his own currency.

“Mostly residential,” I say. “I can always use a mid-career salesman, if you’re interested. I have a Tibetan monk working for me right now who’s maybe going to leave. You’d have to take the state test, and I get half of everything. I’d put you on salary for six months. You’d probably do great.”

Amazement. His teeth are truly enormous and white and unafflicted by worry. He likes flashing them as proof of invulnerability.

“I’ve got my hands pretty full at the Down’s center,” he says, smiling self-beknightedly.

“Do those little devils really stay on a horse without being wired on?”

“You bet they do,” Thom says.

“Does riding horses cure Down’s syndrome?”

“There isn’t any cure.” Clarissa smacks shut her Orvis catalog and retracts her heels from Thom’s scrotal zone. It’s time to go. This is her house, too, she wants me to understand — though it isn’t. It’s mine. “You know it doesn’t cure Down’s syndrome, you cluck.” She starts gathering dishes and ferrying them noisily to the sink. “You should come over and volunteer, Frank. They’ll let you ride a pony if you want to. No wires.” Her back is to me. Thom’s gazing at me wondrously, as if to say, Yep, you’re getting a good scolding now, I’m sorry it has to happen, but it does.

“Great,” I say jovially, and give Thom a chummy grin that says we men are always in the line of female fire. I pop the spindled listing sheets in my palm — three times for emphasis. “You kids have yourselves some fun pissing Thom’s money away.”

“Yeah, we will,” Clarissa says from the sink. “We’ll think of you. Paul has a time capsule with him. I almost forgot. He wants us to put something in it and bury it someplace.” She’s smirking as she rinses cups and doesn’t turn around. Though this occasions a troubled look from Thom, as if Paul’s a sad soul who’s made all our lives one endless hell on earth.

“That’ll be great,” I say.

Clarissa says, “What’re you going to put in it?”

“I’ll have to think. Maybe I’ll put in my Michigan diploma, with a listing sheet. ‘Once there was a time when people lived in things called houses — or in their parents’ houses.’ You can put your old—”

“I’ll think about me,” Clarissa says. She knows what I was about to suggest. Her nose stud.

I consider confessing that I’ve invited her mother for Thanksgiving — just to discourage Thom from coming. But I’m late and don’t have time for an argument. “Don’t forget you’re the acting lady of the house tomorrow. I’m depending on you to be a gracious hostess.”

“Who’s the husband?”

“I hope you sell a house,” Thom says. “Is that what you want to do? My dad was in real estate. He sold big office buildings. He—” I’m on my way to the front door and miss the rest.

9

Up again, old heart. Everything good is on the highway. In this instance, New Jersey Route 35, the wide mercantile pike up Barnegat Neck, whose distinct little beach municipalities — Sea-Clift, Seaside Park, Seaside Heights, Ortley Beach — pass my window, indistinguishable. For practical-legal reasons, each boro has its separate tax collector, deeds registry, zoning board, police, fire, etc., and local patriots defend the separate characters as if Bay Head was Norway and Lavallette was France. Though I, a relative newcomer (eight years), experience these beach townlettes as one long, good place-by-an-ocean and sell houses gainfully in each. And particularly on this cold, clearing morning when it’s reassuring as a fifties memory all up the Shore, I thank my lucky stars for landing me where they did.

Christmas decorations are going up in the morning sunshine. The streets crew is stringing red-and-green plastic bunting to the intersection wires, and swagging the firemen’s memorial at Boro Hall. Candy-cane soldiers have appeared on the median strip, and a crèche with bearded, more authentic burnoose-clad Semites is now up on the lawn of Our Lady of Effectual Mercy. No revolving lights are in place. A banner announcing a Cadillac raffle and a Las Vegas Night stands on the lawn by the announcements case offering CONFESSIONS ANYTIME.

In Frederick Schruer’s History of Garden State Development: A Portrait in Contrasts, Conflicts and Chaos (Rutgers, 1984), Sea-Clift is favorably referred to as the “Classic New Jersey Shore Townlette.” Which means that owing to the beach and the crowds, we’re not a true suburb, though there’re plenty of pastel split-levels on streets named Poseidon, Oceania and Pelagic. Neither are we exactly a fishing village, though flounder fishermen and day charters leave from the bay-side wharf. We’re also not exactly a resort town, since most of the year tourists are gone and the steel Fun Pier’s ancient and the rides closed for being life-threatening. There’s not even that much to do in summer except float along in the crowds, hang out in the motel or on the beach, eat, drink, rent a boogie board or stare off.

There is a mix, which has encouraged a positivist small-businessman spirit that’s good for real estate. The 2,263 year-rounders (many are south Italians with enormous families) run things, own most of the businesses, staff the traffic court, police and fire — which makes Sea-Clift more like Secaucus than the ritzier enclaves north of us. Our town fathers long ago understood that xenophobia, while natural to the species, will get you broke quick in a beach town, and so have fostered a not so much “Mia casa é tua casa” spirit as a more level-headed “Your vacation is my financial viability” expedience, which draws eight jillion tourists to our summer streets, plus a stream of new semi-affluent buy-ins from Perth Amboy and Metuchen, all of it spiced with Filipinos, Somalians and hard-working Hondurans (who come for the schools) to brew up a tranquil towny heterogeneity that looks modern on paper without feeling much different from the way things have always felt.

For me, transacting the business of getting people situated under roofs and into bearable mortgages and out again, Sea-Clift couldn’t be a better place — real estate being one of our few year-round business incubators. People are happy to see my face, know that I’m thriving and will be there when the time comes, but still don’t have to have me to dinner. In that way, I’m a lot like a funeral home.

Very little’s abuzz and about today in spite of Thanksgiving being tomorrow. A few home owners down the residential streets are employed in pre-holiday cleanup, getting on ladders, opening the crawl space for termite checks, putting up storms, spooling hoses, closing off spigots, winterizing the furnace. In a town where everybody comes in the summer, now’s when many year-rounders take their three-day trips — to Niagara and the Vietnam Memorial — since the town’s theirs and empty and can be abandoned without a worry. Which doesn’t make now a bad selling season, since niche buyers come down when the throngs are gone, armed with intent and real money to spend.

Of course, now’s when any prudent newcomer — a software kingpin with new development dollars — would notice all that we don’t offer: any buildings of historical significance (there are no large buildings at all); no birthplaces of famous inventors, astronauts or crooners. No Olmsted parks. No fall foliage season, no sister city in Italy or even Germany. No bookstores except one dirty one. Mark Twain, Helen Keller or Edmund Wilson never said or did anything memorable here. There’s no Martin Luther King Boulevard, no stations on the Underground Railroad (or any railroad) and no golden era anyone can recollect. This must be true for plenty of towns.

There is, however, little teen life, so car thefts and break-ins are rare. You can smoke in our restaurants (when they’re open). The Gulf Stream moderates our climate. Our drinking water’s vaguely salty, but you get used to it. We were never a temperance town, so you can always find a cocktail. College Board scores match the state average. Two Miss Teenage New Jerseys (’41 and ’75) hail from here. We stage an interesting Frank Sinatra impersonator contest in the spring. Our town boundary abuts a state park. Cable’s good. And for better or worse, the hermit crab is our official town crustacean — though there’s disagreement over how large the proposed statue should be. You could also say that for a town founded by enterprising Main Line land speculators on the bedrock principles of buy low/sell high, we’ve exceeded our municipal mission with relatively few downsides. Since we’re bounded by ocean and bay, there’re few places where planning problems could ever arise. Water is our de facto open space plus a good population stabilizer. For a time, I sat on the Dollars For Doers Strike Council, but we never did much besides lower parking fines, pass a good-neighbor ordinance so tourists could reach the beach via private property, and give the Fun Pier a rehabilitation abatement the owners never used. Our development committee extended feelers to a culinary arts academy seeking growing room — though we didn’t have any. There was a citizen’s initiative for a new all-cement promenade, but it failed, and for establishing a dinosaur park, though we hadn’t had any dinosaurs and couldn’t legally claim one. Still, as old-timey, low-ceiling and down-market as Sea-Clift is, most people who live here like it that way, like it that we’re not a destination resort but are faithful to our original charter as a place an ordinary wage earner comes for three days, then beats it home again — a town with just a life, not a lifestyle.

I make a stop by my office to pick up the Surf Road keys. Inside, it’s shadowy and dank, my and Mike’s desktops empty of important documents. Mike’s computer (I don’t own one) beams out his smiling picture of himself and the Dalai Lama, which coldly illuminates his Gipper portrait and his prayer flags on the wall. The office has a stinging balsam scent (mingled with a pizza odor through the wall) from the one time Mike burned incense in the john — which I put a stop to. The house keys, with white tags, are on the key rack. I have a quick piss in our bare-bones bathroom. Though when I come out, I see through the window that a car’s stopped out front by my Suburban, a tan Lincoln Town Car with garish gold trim and New York plates. Since it’s too early for a Chicago-style pizza, these are doubtless showcase shoppers eye-balling the house snapshots in the window. They’ll be scared off when they see me, sensing I might drag them in and bore them to death. But not today. I frown out at the car — I can’t see who’s inside, but no one climbs out — then I go back in the bathroom, close the door, stand and wait thirty seconds. And when I come out, as if by magic the space is empty, the Lincoln gone, the morning, or what’s left of it, returned to my uses.

The client for my Surf Road showing is a welding contractor down from Parsippany, Mr. Clare Suddruth, with whom I’ve already done critical real estate spadework the past three weeks, which means I’ve driven him around Sea-Clift, Ortley Beach, Seaside Heights, etc., on what I think of as a lay-of-the-land tour, during which the client gets to see everything for sale in his price range, endures no pressure from me, begins to think of me as his friend, since I’m spending all this time with nothing promised, comes after a while to gab about his life — his failures, treacheries, joys — lets me stand him some lunches, senses we’re cut out of the same rough fustian and share many core values (the economy, Vietnam, the need to buy American though the Japs build a better product, the Millennium non-event and how much we’d hate to be young now). We probably don’t agree about the current election hijacking, but probably do see eye-to-eye about what constitutes a good house and how most buyers are better off setting aside their original price targets in favor of stretching their pocketbooks, getting beyond the next dollar threshold — where the houses you really want are as plentiful as hoe handles — and doing a little temporary belt-tightening while the economy’s ebb and flow keeps your boat on course and steaming ahead.

If this seems like bait-and-switch hucksterism, or just old-fashioned grinning, bamboozling faithlessness, let me assure you it’s not. All any client ever has to say is, “All right, Bascombe, how you see this really isn’t how I see it. I want to stay inside, not outside, my price window, exactly like I said when I sat down at your desk.” If that’s your story, I’m ready to sell you what you want — if I have it. All the rest — the considered, heartfelt exchange of views, the finding of common ground, the beginning of true (if ephemeral) comradeship based on time spent inside a stuffy automobile — all that I’d do with the Terminix guy. A person has only to know his mind about things, which isn’t as usual as it seems. I view my role as residential agent as having a lay therapist’s fiduciary responsibility (not so different from being a Sponsor). And that responsibility is to leave the client better than I found him — or her. Many citizens set out to buy a house because of an indistinct yearning, for which an actual house was never the right solution to begin with and may only be a quick (and expensive) fix that briefly anchors and stabilizes them, never touches their deeper need, but puts them in the poorhouse anyway. Most client contacts never even eventuate in a sale and, like most human exposures, end in one encounter. Which isn’t to say that the road toward a house sale is a road without benefit or issue. A couple of the best friends I’ve made in the real estate business are people I never sold a house to and who, by the end of our time together, I didn’t want to sell a house to (though I still would’ve). It is another, if unheralded, version of the perfect real estate experience: Everyone does his part, but no house changes hands. If there weren’t, now and then, such positive outside-the-envelope transactions, I’d be the first to say the business wouldn’t be worth the time of day.

I swing off Ocean Avenue at the closed-for-the-season Custom Condom Shoppe (“We build ’em to your specs”) and motor down toward the beach along the narrow gravel lane of facing, identical white and pastel summer “chalets,” of which there must be twenty in this row, with ten identical parallel lanes stacked neighborhood-like to the north and south, each named for a New Jersey shorebird — Sandpiper, Common Tern, Plover (I’m driving down Cormorant Court). Here is where most of our weekly renters — Memorial Day to Columbus Day — spend their happy family vacations, cheek-to-cheek with hundreds of other souls opting for the same little vernal joys. At several of these (all empty now), more pre-winter fix-up is humming along — hip roofs being patched, swollen screen doors planed, brick foundation piers regrouted after years of salt air. Three of these chalet developments lie in the Boro of Sea-Clift, where I own ten units and, with Mike’s help, manage thirty more. These summer chalets and their more primitive ancestors have been an attractive, affordable feature of beach life on south Barnegat Neck since the thirties. Five-hundred-square-foot interiors, two tiny bedrooms, a simple bath, beaverboard walls, a Pullman kitchen, no yard, grass, shrubbery, no AC or TV, electric wall heaters and stove, yard-sale decor, no parking except in front, no privacy from the next chalet ten feet away, crude plumbing, tinted, iron-rich water, occasional gas and sulfur fumes from an unspecified source — and you can’t drive vacationers away. A certain precinct in the American soul will put up with anything — other people’s screaming kids, exotic smells, unsavory neighbors, unsocialized pets, high rents (I get $750 a week), car traffic, foot traffic, unsound construction, yard seepage — just to be and be able to brag to the in-laws back in Parma that they were “a three-minute walk to the beach.” Which every unit is.

Of course, another civic point of view — the Dollars For Doers Strike Council — would love to see every chalet bulldozed and the three ten-acre parcels turned into an outlet mall or a parking structure. But complicated, restrictive covenants unique to Sea-Clift require every chalet owner to agree before the whole acreage can be transferred. And many owners are among our oldest Sea-Clift pioneers, who came as children and never forgot the fun they had and couldn’t wait to own a chalet, or six, themselves and start making their retirement nut off the renters — the people they had once been. Most of the people I manage for are absentees, the sons and daughters of those pioneers, and now live in Connecticut and Michigan and would pawn their MBA’s before they’d sign away “Dad’s cottage.” (None of them, of course, would spend two minutes inside any of these sad little shanties themselves, which is when I get in the picture, and am happy to be.)

These days, I do my best to upgrade the ten chalets I own, plus all the ones I can talk my owners into sprucing up. Occasionally I let a struggling writer in need of quiet space to finish his Moby-Dick, or some poor frail in retirement from love, stay through the winter in return for indoor repairs (these guests never stay long due to the very seclusion they think they want). Looked at differently, these chalets would be a perfect place for a homicide.

Three Honduran fix-up crews (all legal, all my employees) are at work as I drive down Cormorant Court. From the roof of #11, one of these men (José, Pepe, Esteban — I’m not sure which), suited up in knee pads and roped to a standpipe, replacing shingles, rises to his feet on the steep green asphalt roof-pitch and into the clean, cold November sky, leans crazily against his restraint line and performs a sweeping hats-off Walter Raleigh-type bow right out into space, a big amigo grin on his wispy-mustachioed face. I give back an embarrassed wave, since I’m not comfortable being Don Francisco to my employees. The other workers break into laughing and jeering calls that he (or I) is a puta and beneath contempt.

Clare Suddruth is already out front of the fancy beach house he thinks he might like to buy. Surf Road is a sandy lane starting at the ocean end of Cormorant Court and running south a quarter-mile. If it were extended, which it never will be due to the same shoreline ordinances that infuriate the Feensters, it would run into and become Poincinet Road a mile farther on.

Clare stands hands-in-pockets in the brisk autumn breeze. He’s dressed in a short zippered khaki work jacket and khaki trousers that announce his station as a working stiff who’s made good in a rough-and-tumble world. The house Clare’s interested in is — in design and residential spirit — not so different from my own and was built during the blue-sky development era of the late seventies, before laws got serious and curtailed construction, driving prices into deep space. In my personal view, 61 Surf Road is not the house a man like Clare should think of, so of course he is thinking of it — a lesson we realtors ignore at our peril. Number 61 is a mostly-vertical, isosceles-angled, many-windowed, many sky-lighted, grayed redwood post-and-beam, with older solar panels and inside an open plan of not two, not three, but six separate “living levels,” representing the architect’s concern for interior diversity and cheap spatial mystery. More than it’s right for Clare, it’s perfect for a young sitcom writer with discretionary scratch and who wants to work from home. Asking’s a million nine.

How the house “shows,” and what the client sees from the curb — if there was a curb — are only two mute, segmented, retractable brown garage doors facing the road, two skimpy windows on the “back,” and an unlocatable front door, through which you go right up to a “great room” where the good life commences. I don’t much like the place since it broadcasts bland domiciliary arrogance, typical of the period. The house either has no front because no one’s welcome; or else because everything important faces the sea and it’s not your house anyway, why should you be interested?

Clare’s a tall, bony, loose-kneed sixty-five-year-old, a bristle-haired Gyrine Viet vet with a thin, tanned jawline, creased Clint Eastwood features and the seductive voice of a late-night jazz DJ. In my view, he’d be more at home in a built-out Greek revival or a rambling California split-level. “Thornton Wilders,” we call these in our trade, and we don’t have any down here. Spring Lake and Brielle are your tickets for that dream.

But Clare’s recent life’s saga — I’ve heard all about it — has led him down new paths in search of new objectives. In that way, he is much like me.

Clare’s standing beside my Realty-Wise sign — red block letters on a white field plus the phone number, no www, no virtual tours, no talking houses, just reliable people leading other people toward a feeling of finality and ultimate rightness. Clare turns and faces the house as I drive up, as if to allow that he’s been waiting but time doesn’t mean much to him. He’s driven down in one of his company’s silver panel trucks, which sits in the driveway, ONLY CONNECT WELDING painted in flowing blue script. His schoolteacher wife dreamed it up, Clare told me. “Something out of a book.” Though Clare’s no mutton-fisted underachiever who married up. He won a Silver Star with a gallantry garnish in Nam, came out a major and did the EE route at Stevens Tech. He and Estelle bought a house and had two quick kids in the seventies, while Clare was on the upward track with Raytheon. But then out of the blue, he decided the laddered life was a rat-race and took over his dad’s welding business in Troy Hills and changed its name to something he and Estelle liked. Clare’s what we call a “senior boomer,” someone who’s done the course creditably, set aside substantial savings, gotten his kids set up at a safe distance, experienced appreciation in the dollar value of his family home (mortgage retired), and now wants a nicer life before he gets too decrepit to take out the garbage. What these clients generally decide to buy varies from a freestanding condo (we have few in Sea-Clift), to a weekend home near the water (these we have aplenty), to a “houseboat on the Seine”—aka something you park at a marina. Or else they choose a real honest-to-God house like this one Clare’s staring up at: Turn the key, dial up the Jacuzzi. The owners, the Doolittles — currently in Boca Grande — detected the tech-market slowdown in September, were ready to shift assets into municipals and conceivably gold and are just waiting to back their money out. So far, no takers.

The other characteristic on Clare’s buyer’s profile is that three years ago — by his own candid recounting (as usual) — he fell in love with somebody who wasn’t exactly his wife, but was, in fact, a fresh hire at the welding company — someone named Bitsy or Betsy or Bootsy. Not surprisingly, big domestic disruptions followed. The kids chose sides. Several loyal employees quit in disgust when “things” came out in the open. Welding damn near ceased. Clare and Estelle acted civilly (“She was the easy part”). A sad divorce ensued. A marriage to the younger Bitsy, Betsy, Bootsy hastily followed — a new life that never felt right from the instant they got to St. Lucia. A semi-turbulent year passed. A young wife grew restive—“Just like the goddamn Eagles song,” Clare said. Betsy/Bitsy cut off all her hair, threw her nice new clothes away, decided to go back to school, figured out she wanted to become an archaeologist and study Meso-American something or other. Somehow she’d discovered she was brilliant, got herself admitted to the University of Chicago and left New Jersey with the intention of morphing her and Clare’s spring-fall union into something rare, adaptable, unusual and modern — that he could pay for.

Only, at the end of year one, Estelle learned she had multiple sclerosis (she’d moved to Port Jervis to her sister’s), news that galvanized Clare into seeing the fog lift, regaining his senses, divorcing his young student wife. (“A big check gets written, but who cares?”) He moved Estelle back down to Parsippany and began devoting every resource and minute to her and her happiness, stunned that he’d never fully realized how lucky he was just to know someone like her. And with time now precious, there was none of it he cared to dick around with. (As heartening and sui generis as Clare’s story sounds, in the real estate profession it’s not that unusual.)

Which is when Sea-Clift came into play, since Estelle had vacationed here as a child and always adored it and hoped…. Nothing now was too good for her. Plus, in Clare’s estimation our little townlette was probably a place the two of them would die in before the world fucked it up. (He may be wrong.) I’ve driven him past thirty houses in three weeks. Many seemed “interesting and possible.” Most didn’t. Number 61 was the only one that halfway caught his fancy, since the inside was already fitted with a nursing home’s worth of shiny disabled apparatus, including — despite all the levels — a mahogany side-stair elevator for the coming dark days of disambulation. Clare told me that if he likes it when he sees it, he’ll buy it as is and give it to Estelle — who’s currently holding her own, with intermittent symptoms — as a one-year re-wedding/Thanksgiving present. It makes a pretty story.

“Dry as my Uncle Chester’s bones out here, Frank,” Clare says in his parched but sonorous voice, extending me a leathery hand. Clare has the odd habit of giving me his left hand to shake. Something about severed tendons from a “helo” crash causing acute pain, etc., etc. I always feel awkward about which hand to extend, but it’s over fast. Though he has a vise grip even with his “off” hand, which fires up my own Bob Butts injuries from last night.

Clare produces his steady, eyes-creased smile that projects impersonal pleasure, then crosses his arms and turns to look again at 61 Surf Road. I’m about to say — but don’t — that the worst droughts are the ones where we occasionally get a little rain, like yesterday, so that nobody really takes the whole drought idea seriously, then you end up ignoring the aquifer until disaster looms. But Clare’s thinking about this house, which is a good sign. The color listing brochure I’m holding is ready to be proffered before we go in.

Down Surf Road (like my road, there are only five houses), a bearded young man in yellow rubber coveralls is scrubbing the sides of a white fiberglass fishing boat that’s up on a trailer, using an extended aluminum hose brush — a blue BUSH-CHENEY sign stuck up in his weedy little yard. From back up Cormorant Court I hear the sharp shree-scree of a saber saw whanging through board filaments, followed by the satisfying bops of hammers hitting nails in rapid succession. My unexpected jefe presence has set my Hondurans into motion. Though it’s only a game. Soon they’ll be climbing down for their pre-lunch marijuana break, after which the day will go quickly.

The cold seaside air out here has a fishy and piney sniff to it, which feels hopeful in spite of the unpredictable November sky. My Thanksgiving worries have now scattered like seabirds. A squad of pigeons wheels above, as far beyond a jet contrail — high, high, high — heads out to sea toward Europe. I am rightly placed here, doing the thing I apparently do best — grounded, my duties conferring a pleasant, self-actualizing invisibility — the self as perfect instrument.

“Frank, tell me what this house’ll bring in a summer?” Clare’s mind is clicking merits-demerits.

I assume he’s talking about rent and not a quick flip. “Three thousand a week. Maybe more.”

He furrows his brow, puts a hand to his chin and rests it there — the standard gesture of contemplation, familiar to General MacArthur and Jack Benny. It is both grave and comical. Clearly it is Clare’s practiced look of public seriousness. My instant guess is we’ll never see inside #61. When clients are motivated, they don’t stand out in the road talking about the house as if it’d be a good idea to tear it down. When clients are motivated, they can’t wait to get in the door and start liking everything. I’m, of course, often wrong.

“Boy, oh boy.” Clare shakes his head over modernity. “Three G’s.”

“Pays your taxes and then some,” I say, breeze waffling my listing brochure and stiffening my digits.

“So who all’s moving down to Sea-Clift now, Frank?” More standing, more staring. This is not a new question.

“Pretty much it’s a mix, Clare,” I say. “People driven out of the Hamptons. And there’s some straight-out investment beginning. Our floor hasn’t risen as fast as the rest of the Shore. No big springboard sales yet. Topping wars haven’t gotten this far down. It’s still a one-dimensional market. That’ll change, even with rates starting to creep. A really good eight-hundred-thousand-dollar house is already hard to find.” I take a glance at my sheet, as if all this crucial data’s printed there and he should read it. I’m guessing coded chalk talk will appeal to Clare-the-small-businessman, make him think I’m not trying very hard to sell him the Doolittles’ house, but am just his reliable resource for relevant factual info to make the world seem less a sinking miasma. Which isn’t wrong.

“I guess they’re not making any more ocean-front, are they?”

“If they could, they would.” In fact, I know people who’d love to try: interests who’d like to “reclaim” Barnegat Bay and turn it into a Miracle Mile or a racino. “Fifty percent of us already live within fifty miles of the ocean, Clare. Ocean County’s the St. Petersburg of the East.”

“How’s your business, Frank?” We’re side-by-side — me a half step behind — staring at silent multi-this, multi-that #61.

“Good, Clare. It’s good. Real estate’s always good by the ocean. Inventory’s my problem. If I had a house like this every day, I’d be richer than I am.”

Clare at this instant lets go a small, barely audible (but audible) fart, the sound of a strangled birdcall from offstage. It startles me, and I can’t help staring at its apparent point of departure, the seat of Clare’s khakis, as if blue smoke might appear. It’s the ex-Marine in Clare that makes such nonchalant emissions unremarkable (to him), while letting others know how intransigent a man he is and would be — in a love affair, in a business deal, in a divorce or a war. Possibly my reference to being rich forced an involuntary disparaging gesture from his insides.

“Tell me this now, Frank.” Clare’s stuffed both hands in his khaki side pockets. He’s wearing brown-and-beige tu-tone suede leisure sneakers of the sort you buy at shoe outlets or off the sale rack at big-box stores and that look comfortable as all get out, though I’d never buy a pair, because they’re what doozies wear (our old term from Lonesome Pines), or else men who don’t care if they look like doozies. The Clint Eastwood look has a bit of doozie in it. Old Clint might wear a pair himself, so uncaring would he be of the world’s opinion. “What kind of climate have we got, I mean for buying a house?”

I hear my workers up Cormorant Court begin laughing and their hammering come to a halt. “¡Hom-bre!” I hear a falsetto voice shout. “Qué flaco y feo.” One needn’t wonder. Something involving somebody’s “chilé.”

“I’d say that’s a mixed picture, too, Clare.” He already knows everything I know, because I’ve told him, but he wants me to think he takes what we’re doing seriously — which means to me this is a waste of my time, which I in fact do take seriously. Clare came into the picture saying he was ready to buy a house sight unseen, maximize the quality-of-life remaining for his dear-stricken-betrayed-but-timeless love Estelle. Only, like most humans, when it gets down to the cold nut cutting, it’s do-re-mi his heart breaks over.

“Money’s cheap down here, Clare,” I say, “and the mortgage people have got some interesting product enhancements to shift weight toward the back end — for a price, of course. Like I said, our inventory’s down, which tends to firm up values. Most sales go for asking. You read the technology sector’s ready to cycle down. Rates’ll probably squirt up after Christmas. You’d hate to buy at the top with no short-term resale potential, but you can’t take your cue from the wind, I guess. We saw a forty percent price increase in two years. I don’t tell clients to go with their hearts, Clare. I don’t know much about hearts.”

Clare gazes at me, brown eyes squinted near-to-closing. I’ve probably said too much and strayed over into sensitive territory by referring to the heart. This sleepy-eyed look is a recognition and a warning. Though I’ve found that in business, a quick veer into the soft tissue of the personal can confuse things in a good way. Clare, after all, has given me a giant earful — probably he does everyone. He’s just suddenly gotten leery about forging an unwanted connection with me. But ditto. I like Clare, but I want him to spend his money and feel good about giving part of it to me.

“Can I show you something, Frank?” Clare peers down at his doozie tu-tones as if they were doing his thinking for him.

“Absolutely.”

“It won’t take a minute.” He’s already moving — in a bit of a slinking, pelvis-forward gait — along the driveway toward the back of the Doolittles’, between it and the next-door neighbor’s, a dull two-storey A-frame that’s boarded for the winter and has a dead look: basement windows blocked with pink Styrofoam, plants covered with miniature wooden A-frames of their own, the basement door masked with ply-board screwed into the foundation. Winter gales are expected.

“I took a walk around here while I was waiting,” Clare’s saying as he walks, but in a more intimate voice, as if he doesn’t want the wrong people hearing this. I’m following, my listing materials stuffed in my windbreaker pocket. The Doolittles’ house, I can see, is in need of upkeep. The side basement door is weathered and grayed, the veneer shredded at the bottom. A scimitar of glass has dropped out of a basement window and shattered on the concrete footing. Something metal is whapping in the wind above the soffits — a loose TV cable or a gutter strap — though I can’t see anything. I wonder if the solar panels even work. The house could do with a new owner and some knowledgeable attention. The Doolittles, who’re plastic surgeons in joint practice, have been spending their discretionary income elsewhere. Though they may soon have less of it.

Clare leads around to the “front” of the house, between the windowed concrete basement wall and the ten-foot sand dune that’s covered with dry, sparse-sprouted sea rocket from the summer. The dune — which is natural and therefore inviolable — is what keeps the house from having a full ocean view from the living room, and probably what’s retarded its sale since September. I’ve put into the brochure that “imagination” (money) could be dedicated to the living room level (moving it to the third floor) and “open up spectacular vistas.”

“Okay, look at this down here.” Clare, almost whispering, bends over, hands on his knees to designate what he means me to see. “See that?” His voice has grown grave.

I move in beside him, kneel by his knee on the gravelly foundation border and stare right where he’s pointing at an outward-curving section of pale gray concrete that’s visible beneath the sill and the footing. It is one of the deep-driven piers to which the well-named Doolittles’ house is anchored and made fast so that at times of climatological stress the whole schmeer isn’t washed or blown or seismically destabilized and propelled straight out to sea like an ark.

“See that?” Clare says, breathing out a captured breath. He gets down on both knees beside me like a scientist and brings his face right to the concrete pillar as if he means to smell it, then puts his index finger to the curved surface.

“What is it?” I say. I see nothing, though I’m assuming there is something and it can’t be good.

“These piers are poured far away from here, Frank,” Clare says as if in confidence. “Sometimes Canada. Sometimes upstate. The Binghamton area.” He employs his finger to scratch at the transparent lacquer painted on the pier’s exterior. “If you pour your forms too early in the spring, or if you pour them when the humidity’s extremely high…well, you know what happens.” Clare’s creased face turns to me — we’re very close here — and smiles a closed-mouth gotcha smile.

“What?”

“They crack. They crack right away,” Clare says darkly. He has a pale sliver of pinkish scar right along the border of his Brillo-pad hairline. A vicious war wound, possibly, or else something discretionary from his second marriage. “If your manufacturer isn’t too scrupulous he doesn’t notice,” Clare says. “And if he’s unscrupulous he notices but then has this silicone sealer painted on and sells it to you anyway. And if your home builder or your GC isn’t paying attention, or if he’s been paid not to pay attention or if his foreman happens to be of a certain nationality, then these piers get installed without anybody saying anything. And when the work gets inspected, this kind of defect — and it is a serious defect and oughta show up — it might be possible for it not to get noticed, if you get my drift. Then your house gets built, and it stands up real well for about fifteen years. But because it’s on the ocean, salt and moisture go to work on it. And suddenly — though it isn’t sudden, of course — Hurricane Frank blows up, a high tide comes in, the force of the water turns savage and Bob’s your uncle.” Clare turns his gaze back to the pier, where we’re crouched like cavemen behind the musty quicklime — smelling Doolittle house, which is built, I see, on much worse than shifting sand. It’s built on shitty pilings. “These piers, Frank. I mean”—Clare pinches his nose with distaste and home-owner pity, pressing his lips together—“I can see cracks here, and this is just the four to five inches showing. These people have real problems, unless you know a sucker who’ll buy it sight unseen or get an inspector who needs a seeing-eye dog.”

Clare’s breath in these close quarters is milky stale-coffee breath and makes me realize I’m freezing and wishing I was two hundred miles from here.

“It’s a problem. Okay.” I stare at the innocent-looking little curve of gray pier surface, seeing nothing amiss. The thought that Clare’s full of shit and that this is a softening-up ploy for a low-ball offer naturally occurs to me, as does the idea that since I can’t see the crack, I don’t have to bear the guilty knowledge that adheres to it. A thin file of stalwart ants is scuttering around the dusty foundation, taking in the air before the long subterranean winter.

“A problem. Definitely,” Clare says solemnly. “I was raised in a tract home, Frank. I’ve seen bad workmanship all my life.” He and I are straggling to our feet. I hear youthful boy-and-girl voices from the beach, beyond the dune bunker.

“What can you do about a problem like that, Clare?” I dust off my knees, stuffing the listing sheet farther down in my pocket, since it won’t be needed. I experienced a brief stab of panic when Clare revealed the cracked pier, as if this house is mine and I’m who’s in deep shit. Only now, a little airy-headed from bending down, then standing up too fast, I feel pure exhilaration and a thrumming sense of well-being that this is not my house, that my builder was a board-certified UVa architect, not some shade-tree spec builder (like Tommy Benivalle, Mike’s best friend) with a clipboard and some plan-book blueprints, and who’s in cahoots with the cement trade, the Teamsters, the building inspectors and city hall. Your typical developer, Jersey to Oregon. “I’m fine.” These murmured words for some reason escape my lips. “I’m just fine.”

“Okay, there’s things you can do,” Clare’s saying. “They’re not cheap.” He’s looking closely at me, into my eyes, his fingers pinching up a welt of nylon on my windbreaker sleeve. “You all right, old boy?”

I hear this. I also hear again the sound of youthful boy-girl voices beyond the dune. They emerge from a single source, which is the cold wind. “You look a little green, my friend,” Clare’s friendly voice says. I’m experiencing another episode. Conceivably it’s only a deferred result of my floor struggle with Bob Butts last night. Yet for a man who hates to hope, my state of health is not as reliable as I’d hoped.

“Stood up too fast,” I say, my cheeks cold and rubbery, scalp crawly, my fingers tingling.

“Chemicals,” Clare says. “No telling what the hell they spray back here. The same thing’s in sarin gas is in d-Con, I hear.”

“I guess.” I’m fuzzy, just keeping myself upright.

“Let’s grab some O₂,” Clare says, and with his bony left fist begins hauling me roughly up the dune, my shoes sinking in sand, my balance a bit pitched forward, my neck breaking a sweat. “Maybe you got vertigo,” Clare says as he guys me up toward the top, his long legs doing the work for my two. “Men our age get that. It goes away.”

“How old are you?” I say, being dragged.

“Sixty-seven.”

“I’m fifty-five.” I feel ninety-five.

“Good grief.”

“What’s the matter?” Sand’s in my shoes and feels cool. His doozie loafers must be loaded, too.

“I must look a lot younger than I am.”

“I was thinking you did,” I say.

“Who knows how old anybody is, Frank?” We’re now at the top. Lavender flat-surfaced ocean stretches beyond the wide high-tide beach. A smudge of gray-brown crud hangs at the horizon. Breeze seems to stream straight through my ears and gives me a shiver. For late November, I’m again dressed way too lightly. (I believed I’d be inside.) “I look at twenty-five-year-olds and somebody tells me they’re fifteen,” Clare natters on. “I look at thirty-five-year-olds who look fifty. I give up.”

“Me, too.” I’m already feeling a bit replenished, my heart quivering from our quick ascent.

Thirty yards out onto the beach and taking no notice of our appearance — legionnaires topping a rise — a group of teens, eight or nine of them, is occupied by a spirited volleyball game, the white orb rising slowly into the sky, one side shouting, “Mine!” “Set, seeeet-it!” “Bridget-Bridget! Yours!” The boys are tall, swimmer-lanky and blond; the girls semi-beautiful, tanned, rugged, strong-thighed. All are in shorts, sweaters, sweatshirts and are barefoot. These are the local kids, gone away to Choate and Milton, who’ve left home behind as lowly townie-ville but are back now, dazzlingly, with their old friends — the privileged few, enjoying the holidays as Yale and Dartmouth early-admissions dates grow near. Too bad my kids aren’t that age instead of “grown.” Possibly I could do my part better now. Though possibly not.

“You back in working order?” Clare pretends to be observing the volleyballers, who go on paying us no attention. We are the invisibles — like their parents.

“Thanks,” I say. “Sorry.”

“Vertigo,” Clare says again, and gives his long over-large ear a stiff grinding with the heel of his hand. Clare clearly likes the prospect from up here. It’s the view one would get from a “reimagined” floor three of the big-but-compromised Doolittle house behind us. Maybe his mind will change. Maybe cracked piers aren’t so troublesome. Things change with perspective.

“You’re from California, you don’t count,” a girl volleyballer says breezily into the breeze.

“I count,” a boy answers. “I absolutely count. Ro-tate, ro-tate.”

“Could you entertain a quasi-philosophical question, Frank?” Clare’s now squatted atop the dune and has scooped up a handful of sand, as though assaying it, sampling its texture.

“Well—”

“Pertains to real estate. Don’t worry. It’s not about my sex life. Or yours. That’s not philosophical, is it? That’s Greek tragedy.”

“Not always.” I am on the alert for some heart-to-heart I lack the stomach for.

Clare half closes his creased submariner’s eye at the brown horizon murk then spits down into the sand he’s just released. “Do you imagine, Frank, that anything could happen in this country to make normal just not be possible?” He continues facing away, facing east, as if addressing an analyst seated behind him. “I actually tend to think nothing of that nature can really happen. Too many checks and balances. We’ve all of us manufactured reality so well, we’re so solid in our views, that nothing can really change. You know? Drop a bomb, we bounce back. What hurts us makes us stronger. D’you believe that?” Clare lowers his strong chin, then cranks his skeptical gaze up at me, wanting an answer in kind. His kind. His kind of stagy seriousness. Semper Fi, Hué ’n Tet, the never-say-die Khe Sanh firebase of ’67 seriousness. All the things I missed in my rather easy youth.

“I don’t, Clare.”

“No. Course not. Me, either,” he says. “But I want to believe it. And that’s what scares the shit right out of me. And don’t think they’re not sitting over there in those other countries that hate us licking their chops at what they see us doing over here, fucking around trying to decide which of these dopes to make President. You think these people here”—a toss of the Clare Suddruth head toward crumbling 61 Surf Road—“have foundation problems? We’ve got foundation problems. It’s not that we can’t see the woods for the trees, we can’t see the woods or the fuckin’ trees.” Clare expels through his schnoz a breath heavy and poignant, something a Clydesdale might do.

“What does it have to do with real estate?”

“It’s where I enter the picture, Frank,” Clare says. “The circuit my mind runs on. I want to make Estelle’s last years happy. I think a house on the ocean’s the right thing. Then I start thinking about New Jersey being a prime target for some nut with a dirty bomb or whatever. And, of course, I know death’s a pretty simple business. I’ve seen it. I don’t fear it. And I know Estelle’s gonna probably see it before I do. So I go on looking at these houses as if a catastrophe — or death—can’t really happen, right up until, like now, I recognize it can. And it shocks me. Really. Makes me feel paralyzed.”

“What is it that shocks you, Clare? You know everything there is to be afraid of. You seem way ahead of the game to me.”

Clare shakes his head in self-wonder. “I’m sitting up in bed, Frank — honest to God — up in Parsippany. Estelle’s asleep beside me. And what I go cold thinking about is: If something happens — you know, a bomb — can I ever sell my fucking house? And if I buy a new one, then what? Will property values even mean anything anymore? Where the hell are we then? Are we supposed to escape to some other place? Death’s a snap compared to that.”

“I never thought about that, Clare.” As a philosophical question, of course, it’s a lot like “Why the solar system?” And it’s just about as practical-minded. You couldn’t put a contingency clause in a buy-sell agreement that says “Sale contingent on there being no disaster rendering all real estate worthless as tits on a rain barrel.”

“I guess you wouldn’t think about it. Why would you?” Clare says.

“You said it was pretty philosophical.”

“I know perfectly well it all has to do with ’Stelle being sick and my other relationship ending. Plus my age. I’m just afraid of the circumstances of life going to hell. Boom-boom-boom.” Clare’s staring out to sea, above the heads of the lithe, untroubled young volley-ballers — a grizzled old Magellan who doesn’t like what he’s discovered. Boom-boom-boom.

Clare’s problem isn’t really a philosophical problem. It just makes him feel better to think so. His problem with circumstances is itself circumstantial. He’s suffered normal human setbacks, committed perfidies, taken some shots. He just doesn’t want to fuck up in those ways again and is afraid he can’t recognize them when they’re staring him in the face. It’s standard — a form of buyer’s remorse experienced prior to the sale. If Clare would just take the plunge (always the realtor’s warmest wish for mankind), banish fear, think that instead of having suffered error and loss, he’s survived them (but won’t survive them indefinitely), that today could be the first day of his new life, then he’d be fine. In other words, accept the Permanent Period as your personal savior and act not as though you’re going to die tomorrow but — much scarier — as though you might live.

How, though, to explain this without arousing suspicion that I’m just a smarmy, eel-slippery, promise-’em-anything sharpster, hyperventilating to unload a dump that’s already crumbling from the ground upward?

You can’t. I can’t. As muddled as I feel out here, I know the Doolittles’ house has serious probs, may be heading toward tear-down in a year or two, and I would never sell this house to Clare and will, in fact, now have to be the bearer of somber financial news to the Doolittles in Boca. All’s I can do is just show Clare more houses, till he either buys one or wanders off into the landscape. (I wonder if Clare’s a blue state or a red state. Just as in Sponsoring, politics is a threshold you don’t cross in my business, though most people who look at beach houses seem to be Republicans.)

Somewhere, out of the spheres, I hear what sounds like the Marine Corps Hymn played on a xylophone. Dum-dee-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dee-dum, dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum. It’s surprisingly loud, even on the dune top in the breeze. The volleyball kids stop rotating, their heads turn toward us as if they’ve registered something weird, something from home or further back in the racial fog.

Clare goes fumbling under his jacket for a little black hand-tooled holster looped to his belt like a snub-nose. It’s his cell phone, raising a sudden call to arms and valor — unmistakable as his ring and only his, in any airport, supermarket deli section or DMV line.

“Sud-druth.” Clare speaks in an unexpected command voice — urgent message from the higher-ups to the troops in the thick of it down here. His snapped answer is aimed into an impossibly tiny (and idiotic) red Nokia exactly like every one of the prep school girls has in her Hilfiger beach bag. “Right,” Clare snaps, jabbing a thumb in his other ear like a thirties crooner and lowering his chin in strict, regimental attention. He steps away a few yards along the dune, where we are trespassers. Every single particle of his bearing announces: All right. This is important. “Yep, yep, yep,” he says.

For me, though, it’s a welcome, freeing moment, unlike most cell-phone interruptions, when the bystander feels like a condemned man, trussed and harnessed, eyes clenched, waiting for the trap to drop. The worst thing about others blabbing on their cell phones — and the chief reason I don’t own one — is the despairing recognition that everybody’s doing, thinking, saying pretty much the same things you are, and none of it’s too interesting.

This freed moment, however, strands me out of context and releases me to the good sensations we all wish were awaiting us “behind” every moment: That — despite my moment of syncope, my failed house-showing, my crumbling Thanksgiving plans, my condition, my underlying condition, my overarching condition — there is still a broad fertile plain where we can see across to a white farmhouse with willows and a pond the sky traffics over, where the sun is in its soft morning quadrant and there is peace upon the land. I suddenly can feel this. Even the prep school kids seem excellent, promising, doing what they should. I wish Clare could feel it. Since with just a glimpse — permitted by a kindly, impersonal life force — many things sit right down into their proper, proportionate places. “It’s enough,” I hear myself breathing to myself. “It’s really enough.”

“Yep, yep, yep.” Clare’s internalizing whatever’s to be internalized. Get those fresh troopers up where they can see the back side of that hill and start raining hellfire down on the sorry bastards. And don’t be back to me till that whole area’s secured and you can give me a full report, complete with casualties. Theirs and ours. Got that? Yep, yep. “I’ll get home around one, sweetheart. We’ll have some lunch.” It is a homelier communiqué than imagined.

Clare punches off his Nokia and returns it to its holster without turning around. He’s facing north, up the shore toward Asbury Park, miles off, and where I’ll soon be going. His posture of standing away gives him the aura of a man composing himself.

“Everything copacetic?” I smile, in case he should turn around and unexpectedly face me. A friendly visage is always welcome.

“Yes, sure.” Clare does turn, does see my welcoming mug — a mug that says, We aren’t looking at a house anymore; we’re just men out here together, taking the air. The volleyballers have formed a caucus beside their net and are laughing. I hear one of their cell phones ringing — a gleeful little rilling that exults, Yes, yes, yes! “My wife, Estelle — well, you know her name.” Clare glances toward the calm sea and its white filigree of sudsy surf, over which gulls are skimming for tiny fleeing mackerel. “When I’m gone for very long, it’s like she thinks I’m not coming back.” He dusts his big hands, cleaning off some residue of his call. “Of course, I did go away and didn’t come back. You can’t blame her.”

“Sounds like it’s all different now.”

“Oh yeah.” Clare runs his two clean hands back through his salt ’n pepper hair. He is a handsome man — even if part doozie, part fearful shrinker from the world’s woe and clatter. We have things in common, though I’m not as handsome. “What were we gassing about?” His call has erased all. A positive sign. “I was bending your ear about some goddamn thing.” He smiles, abashed but happy not to remember. A glimpse of my wide plain with the house, sun, pond and willows may, in fact, have been briefly his.

“We were talking about foundations, Clare.”

“I thought we were talking about fears and commitments.” He casts a wistful eye back at #61’s troubled exterior — its weathered soffits, its gutter straps (defects I hadn’t noticed). I say nothing. “Well,” Clare says, “same difference.”

“Okay.”

“Somebody else’ll want this place.” He offers a relieved grin. Another bullet dodged.

“Somebody definitely will,” I say. “You can bet on it. Not many things you can bet on, but on that, you can.”

“Good deal,” Clare says.

We find other things to talk about — he is a Giants fan, has season tickets — as I walk him back down and out to his Only Connect truck. He’s happy to be heading home empty-handed, happy to be going where someone loves him and not where somebody’s studying archaeology. I’m satisfied with him and with my part in it all. He is a good man. The Doolittles, I’m sure, after a day of raging, then brooding, then grudging resolution, could easily decide to come down on their asking. Houses like theirs change hands every four to six years and are built for turnover. Not many people feel they were born to live in a house forever. I’ll sell it by Christmas, or Mike will. Possibly to Clare. They truly aren’t making any more of it here at the beach. And in fact, if the Republicans steal the show, they’ll soon be trucking it away.

On my way back out Cormorant Court, Clare blinks his lights, and I pull over in front of a chalet where my red-and-white REALTY-WISE sign stands out front. The Hondurans lounge on the little front steps, eating their lunches brought from home.

Clare idles alongside, his window already down so we can confer vehicle-to-vehicle in the cold air. Possibly he wants to set matters straight about my BUSH? WHY? bumper sticker, which I’m sure he doesn’t approve of. I should probably peel it off now.

“What’s the story with these?” he half shouts through his window (his passenger seat’s been removed for insurance reasons). He’s now wearing a pair of Foster Grants that make him look more like General MacArthur. He’s talking about the chalet being spiffed up.

“Same old,” I say. “I sell. You buy.”

Clare’s tough Marine Corps mouth, used to doing the talking, all the ordering, assumes a wrinkled, compromised expression of deliberate tolerance. He knows the opportunity to be taken seriously even by me is almost over. He gets most things — it’s one of his virtues. But I’m as happy to sell him one of these as I am the Doolittles’. I’ve shown many a client a house they didn’t want, then sold them a chalet as a consolation prize. Although blending business (potential rental income) with sentimental impulses (buying a house for the dying wife) can be troublesome for buyers. Internal messages can become seriously mixed, and bad results in the form of lost revenues ensue.

“What’s the damage?” Clare says from the financial safety of his work truck.

“A buck seventy-five.” Add twenty-five for wasting my time this morning, and since he’s obviously got the scratch. “Walking distance to the beach.”

“Rent ’em year-round?” Clare’s smiling. He knows what a schmendrick he is.

“Make your nut in the summer. Seven-fifty a week last year. I take fifteen percent, get my crew in for upkeep. Capital improvement’s yours. You probably clear seven per summer, before taxes and insurance. You really need to own three or four to make it happy.” And you have to keep your heart out of your pocketbook. And this last summer wasn’t that great. And Estelle won’t like it. Clare’s probably not ready for all this.

“That’s assuming some miserable asshole doesn’t sue you,” he says out of the echo chamber of his truck. He may have heard me say something I didn’t say. But he’s refound his authority and begun frowning not at me but out his windshield toward NJ 35 at the end of Cormorant Court.

“There’s always that.” I smile a zany smile of who cares.

“Fuckin’ ambulance chasers.” Clare’s two divorces could conceivably have left a bad taste in his mouth for the legal profession. He shakes his head at some unavenged bad memory. We’ve all been there. It’s nothing to share the day before Thanksgiving. I try to think of a good lawyer joke, but there aren’t any. “I see you voted for Gore. The patsy.” He’s acknowledging my BUSH? WHY? sticker.

“I did.”

He stares stonily ahead at nothing. “I couldn’t vote for Bush. I voted for his old man. Now we’re in the soup. Wouldn’t you say?”

“I think we are.”

“God help us,” Clare says, and looks puzzled for the first time.

“I doubt if he will, Clare,” I say. “Are you staging a big Thanksgiving?” I’m ready to part company. But I want to celebrate Clare-the-redeemed-Republican with a warm holiday wish.

“Yeah. Kids. Estelle’s sister. My mom. The clan.”

It’s nice to know Clare has a mom who comes for holidays. “That’s great.”

“You?” Clare shifts into gear, his truck bumping forward.

“Yep. The whole clan. We try to connect.” I smile.

“Okay.” Clare nods. He hasn’t heard me right. He idles away up toward 35 and the long road back to Parsippany.

10

Since there’s no direct-est route to Parkway Exit 102N, where Wade’s already fuming at Fuddruckers, I take the scenic drive up 35, across the Metedeconk and the Manasquan to Point Pleasant, switch to NJ 34 through more interlocking towns, townships, townlettes — one rich, one not, one getting there, one hardly making its millage. I love this post-showing interlude in the car, especially after my syncope on the dune. It’s the moment d’or which the Shore facilitates perfectly, offering exposure to the commercial-ethnic-residential zeitgeist of a complex republic, yet shelter from most of the ways the republic gives me the willies. “Culture comfort,” I call this brand of specialized well-being. And along with its sister solace, “cultural literacy”—knowing by inner gyroscope where the next McDonald’s or Borders, or the next old-fashioned Italian shoe repair or tuxedo rental or lobster dock is going to show up on the horizon — these together I consider a cornerstone of the small life lived acceptably. I count it a good day when I can keep all things that give me the willies out of my thinking, and in their places substitute vistas I can appreciate, even unwittingly. Which is why I take the scenic route now, and why when I get restless I fly out to Moline or Flint or Fort Wayne for just a few hours’ visit — since there I can experience the new and the complex, coupled with the entirely benign and knowable.

Cancer, naturally, exerts extra stresses on life (if you don’t instantly die). We all cringe with cancer scares: the mole that doesn’t look right; the lump below our glutes where we can’t monitor it, the positive chest X ray (why does positive always mean fatal?) resulting in CAT scans, blood profiles, records reviews from twenty years back, all of which scare the shit out of us, make us silent but wretched as we await the results, entertaining thoughts of apricot treatments in Guadalajara and inquiries about euthanasia for nonresidents in Holland (I did all these). And then it’s nothing — a harmless fatty accumulation, a histoplasmosis scar from childhood — innocent abnormalities (there are such things). And you’re off the hook — though you’re not unfazed. You’ve been on a journey and it’s not been a happy one. Even without a genuine humming tumor deep in your prostate, just this much is enough to kill you. The coroner’s certificate could specify for any of us: “Death came to Mr. X or Ms. Y due to acute heebie-jeebies.”

But then when the sorry news does come, you’re perfectly calm. You’ve used up all your panic back when it didn’t count. So what good is calm? “Well, I’m thinking we’d better do a little biopsy and see what we’re dealing with….” “Well, Mr. Bascombe, have a seat here. I’ve got some things I need to talk to you about….” Be calm now? Calm’s just another face of wretched.

And then what follows that is the whole dull clouding over of all good feeling, all that normally elevates days, moods, reveries, pretty vistas, all the minor uplifts known to be comforting…. Crash-bang! Meaningless! Not real reality anymore, since something bad had always been there, right? The days before my bad news, when I had cancer but didn’t know I had it and felt pretty damn good — all of those days are not worth sneezing at. Good was a lie, inasmuch as my whole grasp on life required that nothing terrible happen to me, ever—which is nuts. It did.

So the on-going challenge becomes: How, post-op, to maintain a supportable existence that resembles actual life, instead of walking the windy, trash-strewn streets in a smudged sandwich board that shouts IMPAIRED! FEEL SORRY FOR ME! BUT DON’T BOTHER TAKING ME SERIOUSLY AS A WHOLE PERSON, BECAUSE (UNLIKE YOU) I WON’T BE AROUND FOREVER!

I wish I could tell you I had a formula for changing the character of big into small. Mike has suggested meditation and a trip to Tibet. (It may come to that.) Clarissa’s been a help — though I’m ready for her life to re-commence. Selling houses is clearly useful for making me feel invisible (even better than “connected”). And Sally’s absence has not been a total tragedy, since misery doesn’t really want company, only cessation. Suffice it to say that I mostly do fine. I overlook more than I used to, and many things have just quit bothering me on their own. Which leads me to think that my “state” must not be such a thoroughly bad or altered one.

And I’ll also admit that in the highly discretionary lives most of us lead, there is sweet satisfaction to this being it, and to not having it be always out there to dread: the whacker coronary; both feet amputated after paraskiing down K2 on your birthday; total macular degeneration, so you need a dog to help you find the can. This longing for satisfaction, I believe, is in the hearts of those strange Korea vets who admit to wartime atrocities they never committed and never would’ve; and may be the same for poor friendless Marguerite, back in Haddam, wondering what she has to confess. There is a desire to face some music, even if it’s a tune played only in your head — a desire for the real, the permanent, for a break in the clouds that tells you, This is how you are and will always be. Great nature has another thing to do to you and me, so take the lively air, the poet said. And I do. I take the lively air whenever I can, as now. Though it’s that other thing great nature promises that I rely on, the thing that quickens the step and the breath and so must not be thought of as the enemy.

11

I hatch a thought as I cross the Manasquan bridge and near the 34 cut-off: to stop at the Manasquan Bar for a beer and a piss in its nautical, red-lit cozy confines. Years ago, with a cohort of fellow divorcés, I would drive over from Haddam once a month, just to get out of town, seeking night-time companionship and large infusions of gin and scotch that always sent us back into the dark to Hightstown, Mercerville and home with a better grasp on our griefs and sorrows. A quick re-savoring of those old days — the rosy perpetual indoor bar light and beery bouquets — would, I’m sure, extend the good feeling I’ve concocted. But a piss is what I really need and a beer is not, since a beer would just require another piss sooner than I now consider normal (hourly). Plus, any venture into the swampy vapors of time lost — no matter how good I’d feel — could prove precarious, and make me late for Wade.

Instead then, I take 34 straight inland, north through suburban Wall Township, which is not truly municipal or even towny, but dense and un-centered, a linear boilerplate of old strip development, skeins of traffic lights and jug-handles with signage indicating Russians, Farsi speakers, Ethiopians and Koreans live nearby and do business. A cellular tower camouflaged to look like a Douglas fir looms up at an uncertain distance above roofs and fourth-growth woodlots. The Manasquan River winds past somewhere off to the left. But little is discernible or of interest. It is actually hard to tell what the natural landscape looks like here.

I pull in for my long piss at a Hess station across the avenue from Wall Township Engine Company No. 69, where a Thanksgiving CPR clinic’s in progress on the station-house apron. Burly firefighters in black-and-yellow regalia are demonstrating modern resuscitative techniques on plastic mannequins and on citizens craving resuscitating firsthand. Cheerleaders from the Upper Squankum Middle School are running a five-dollar car wash at the curb. Inside the station house, so the sign-on-wheels says, selected items from the Hoboken Museum’s traveling Frank Sinatra collection are on display, along with a DNR exhibit entitled “What to Do When Wild Animals Come to Call.” A handful of citizens mills around on the asphalt — tall and skinny Ethiopians, with a few smaller Arabs in non-Arab sweaters — all having a perusal of the pumper rig and the hook ’n ladder, stealing nervous glances at the female dummy the firemen are working on and taking leaning peeks in at the Old Blue Eyes display. It is all a good civic pull-together, even if Thanksgiving’s a quaint mystery to most of them and business is poor hereabouts. Rich soil is here for municipal virtues, though the philosopher would never have planted them in Wall Township.

At Garden State Exit 102N, it’s half past noon, a cold November sun shining high. The Queen Regent implosion is scheduled for one, and since I haven’t answered Wade’s calls, he’s likely to be fidgety and cross. In my view, oldsters with virtually zilch to do should squander their hours like sailors on shore leave, but instead end up hawking the clock and making everybody miserable, while us working clods would like to throw our watches in the ocean (I don’t own one).

When I pull up, Wade is seated on the curb under the yellow awning of the Fuddruckers, which appears to be out of business, along with the empty sixties-era mall just behind it, whose long, vacant parking lot awaits reassignment. Wade starts theatrically tapping the face of his big silver and turquoise wristwatch and scowling when I wheel in beside his ancient tan Olds. I should’ve been here yesterday, or at least two hours ago, and now I’ve jeopardized his day.

“Did you get lost in Metedeconk?” he says, struggling up onto his tiny feet, getting his balance on the blue disabled sign. Metedeconk represents an insider joke I know nothing about.

“I did,” I say through my window. “They all asked about you.” I stay put behind the wheel. The warmer inland air carries a seam of dry cold as traffic swishes noisily on the Parkway.

“I know who asked about me, all right.” He’s shuffling — bowlegged, stiff-hipped, arms slightly held out like an outrigger. Wade says he’s seventy-four, but is actually over eighty. And though he’s dressed in youthful sporting attire — baggy pink jackass pants with a semaphore pattern, sockless white patent-leather slips-ons and a bright yellow V neck — he looks decrepit and shabby, as if he’d slept in this outfit for a week. “We’re going in my vehicle,” he growls, eyes fixed on the pavement in front of him as if its surface was tricking around.

“Not today,” I say, cheerfully.

Wade is a menacing driver. He regularly runs stop signs, drives thirty-five on the Turnpike, barges through intersections, leans on his horn, has his turn signal constantly on, shouts religious and gender epithets at other drivers, and, because he’s considerably shrunken, can barely see over his dashboard. He shouldn’t be allowed near the driver’s seat. Though when I’ve counseled him, during our monthly lunch at Bump’s, that it’s time to hang up his duster and ride, his blue eyes snap, his teeth clack, his foot and knee tremor starts whapping the table leg. “So are you volunteering to drive me? Good. I’ll let you drive me — and wait for me everyplace I go until I’m ready to go home. Sounds perfect. Do you think I like to drive?” He has his point. Though I often think that death will come to me not naturally, but by being backed over by some stiff-necked old lunatic like Wade in front of the Marshalls in Toms River.

I sit my seat, shaking my head, which is certain to piss him off.

Wade pauses between our two vehicles and glowers at me. “Mine’s all rigged up.” Meaning his car seat’s shoved up, his hemorrhoid donut’s strapped to the extra cushion, the radio’s tuned to a hillbilly station he likes in Long Branch, and the beaded back supporter that helps his arthritis is bungeed to the driver’s side. For years, Wade worked as a toll taker at Exit 9 on the Turnpike and believes repetitive stress plus exhaust fumes degraded his skeleton and compromised his immune system, resulting in shrunkenness and unexplained night pains. I’ve explained to him he’s just old.

“I’ve got a wife and children to think about, Wade.” I’m waiting for him to get in.

“Hah! The missing wife. That’s a good one.” Wade knows all about my marital hiatus, as well as my prostate issues and most of the rest of my story, which he takes no interest in unless he can make a joke out of it (his own prostate is a memory). Due, I believe, to an occasional mini-stroke, Wade also sometimes confuses me with his son, Cade, a New Jersey State Trooper in Pohatcong, Troop W. And at other times, for reasons I don’t understand, he calls me “Ned.” This kind of impairment could pass for useful disinterest, I’ve thought. So that if Wade wasn’t occasionally ga-ga and didn’t yak your ear off, I’d get him certified to Sponsor fellow seniors out at the Grove, the staged senior community where he lives in Bamber Lake, where they hold weekly wine tastings, senior art openings and jigsaw puzzle contests, and boast gold-standard tertiary care, in-house cardiac catheterization, their own level-one trauma center, with six class-A hospitals a twenty-minute ambulance ride away, but where Wade says the oldsters are always looking for something extra.

Wade has given in to riding in my car and has crawled into his Olds to retrieve his brown-bag lunch and his video cam so he can eat while the Queen Regent falls in on herself and also get the whole thing on tape for public exhibit. At the Grove, he says, he’s an A-list dinner guest and much sought after by the ladies as a raconteur.

“We’re all better off to get over our pain,” Wade says in a muffled voice inside his passenger’s door. He’s referring to my absent wife. He’s on his hands and knees, fishing for something on the floorboard and making Frankenstein noises, his pink-pants ass in the air. I would help, but it’s part of our compact that he never needs help. I stare glumly in at his inflatable hemorrhoid donut.

“I think you’re a walking advertisement for a long life,” I say, though he can’t hear me. I could just as easily say, I’d like to string you up by your ankles and put a stopwatch on how long it takes your head to explode, and it would mean the same. Wade’s not a proficient listener, which he credits to having had a full life and a reduced need to take anything in anymore.

“On the other hand.” He’s grunting, backing out, hauling his sack lunch and his Panasonic. “I’d kill myself if I wasn’t afraid of the fucking pain.” He stands up on the Fuddruckers’ asphalt, facing inside his car as if I was there instead of behind him. He’s become an odd-looking creature, after being pretty normal-looking when I first knew him. While his hands and arms and neck are dry and leathery as an alligator, his small head is round and pinkish-orange, as if he’d been boiled. He’s fashioned his white hair into a Caesarian back-to-front comb-down that makes a bang, which — depending on barbershop visits — can be a simple-sad oldster fringe or else a Beatle-length mop that makes him appear seventy, which is how he more or less looks now. Add to this that when he takes off his glasses, his blue left eye wanders off cockeyed, that he wears a big globby hearing device in each ear, is an inexpert face shaver, plus always gets too close to you when he talks (spritzing you with Listerine spit), and you have a not always attractive human package.

When I first knew Wade, sixteen years ago, he lived in the suburb of Barnegat Pines, with his now-deceased second wife, Lynette, and son, Cade. I was then lost in hapless but powerful love for his daughter, Vicki — an oncology nurse and major handful of daunting physical attainments. It was three years after my son died, and one after my divorce from Ann, a time when my existence seemed in jeopardy of fading into a pointless background of the onward rush of life. Wade was then a level-eyed, crew-cut engineer and truth seeker. He’d seen confusion in life, had looked the future in the eye and gotten down to being a solid citizen/provider who understood his limits, maintained codes and was glad to welcome me as a unique, slightly “older” son-in-law candidate. My present take on Wade comes mostly from those long-ago days. I didn’t see him at all for sixteen years and only refound him four months back when Cade presented me with a speeding ticket on my way back late from the Red Man Club and I noticed the ARSENAULT on his brass name plate. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah…I ended up calling Wade because as he wrote out the summons, Cade — thick-browed, fat-eared, wearing a black flak jacket and a flat-top — said that “Dad” had become “like a pretty sad case” and “maybe wouldn’t last a lot longer” and that they (Cade and Mrs. Cade) had “pretty much our own lives up in Pohatcong, kids and whatever,” and didn’t make it down to visit the old man as often as they should. “Things like that are too bad in a way,” he observed. And, oh, by the way, that’ll be ninety clams, plus costs, plus two points, have a nice day and keep ’er under fifty-five.

I ended up rendezvous-ing with Wade at Bump’s and reaffiliating. And in a short while, I managed to reconcile Wade years back—frontier Nebraskan with a trim physique and a Texas Aggie engineering degree, with Wade today—orange-skinned, obstreperous bang-wearer and sour-smelling, weirdly dressed crank; and, by the force of my will, to make a whole person out of the evidence. Aging requires reconciliations, and nobody said getting old would be pretty or the alternative better.

What Wade and I actually do for each other in the present tense, and that makes putting up with each other worth the aggravation, is a fair question. But when he’s in his right head — which is most of the time — Wade’s as sharp as a Mensa member, still sees the world purely as it is and for this reason is not a bad older friend for me, just as I’m not a bad younger companion to keep him on his toes. We share, after all, a piece of each other’s past, even if it’s not a past we visit. We also like each other, as only truly consenting adults can.

Asbury Park, which we pass through and where I’ve done some bank work, has unhappily devolved over the years into a poverty pocket amidst the pricey, linked Shore communities, Deal to Allenhurst, Avon to Bay Head. Those monied towns all needed reliable servant reserves a bus ride away, and Asbury was ceded to the task. Hopeful Negroes from Bergen County and Crown Heights, Somalis and Sudanese fresh off the plane, plus a shop-keeper class of Iranis for whom Harlem was too tough, now populate the streets we drive down. Occasionally, a shady Linden Lane or a well-tended Walnut Court survives, with its elderly owner-occupant tending his patch while values sink to nothing and the element pinches in. But most of the streets are showing it — windows out, mansions boarded, grass gone weedy, sidewalks crumbling, informal automotive work conducted curbside, while black men wait on corners, kids ply the pavements on Big Wheels, and large African-looking ladies in bright scarves lean on porch rails, watching the world slide by. Asbury Park could be Memphis or Birmingham, and nothing or no one would seem out of place.

“One in five non-English speakers, right?” Wade’s watching out his window, fingering his diabetic’s Medi-Ident bracelet and looking abstracted. He’s infected the interior of my car with his sour, citrusy elder-smell — mostly from his yellow sweater — that mingles with Mike’s stale Marlboro residue from last night, making me have to crack open my window. He shoots me a fiery glance when I don’t answer his non-English-speaker non-question, pink tongue working his dentures (his “falsies”) as if he’s warming up for verbal combat. Wade is of a generally conservative belief-base but wouldn’t vote for dumb-ass Bush if the world was ablaze and Bush had the bucket. He grew up poor, lucked into A&M, worked two decades in the oil patch in Odessa and views Republicans as trustees for keeping government on the sidelines, out of his boudoir, the classroom and the Lord’s house (where he’s not a frequenter). Isolation’s the way to go, keep the debt below zero, inflation nonexistent, blubbety-blubbety. Any kind of sanctimony’s for scoundrels — hence the hatred of Bush. Smiling Rocky was Wade’s hero, though he’s voted Democrat since Watergate. “Housing’s leveled off. D’you read that?” he says, just to make noise.

“Not where I live,” I say.

“Oh, well of course,” Wade says. “Being what you are, you’d know that. That’s the kind of stuff you’re the expert in. The rest of us have to read about it in the papers.”

At straight-up one o’clock, the day’s turned warmer than in Sea-Clift. A pavement of gray clouds has streaked open up here to reveal febrile blue out over the ocean we’re approaching. The day no longer feels like the day before Thanksgiving, but a late-arriving Indian summer afternoon or a morning in late March when spring’s come in like a lamb. A perfect day for an implosion.

The Queen Regent sits opposite the boardwalk and the crumbling Art Deco convention hall — home to luckless club fights and poorly attended lite-rock record hops. Noisy gulls soar above and around the Queen’s battlements, where she stands alone on a plain against the sky, as if the old buff-colored hospital-looking pile of bricks was occupying space no longer hers. Though even from a distance she’s hardly an edifice to rate a big send-off: Nine stories, all plain (and gutted), with two U-shaped empty-windowed wings and a pint-size crenellated tower like a supermarket cake. A previously-canopied but now trashy glassed-in veranda faces the boardwalk and the Atlantic, and a wooden water tower with a giant TV antenna attached bumps above the roofline. Once it was a place where felt-hatted drummers could take their girlfriends on the cheap. Families with too many kids could go and pretend it was nice. Young honeymooners came. Young suicides. Oldster couples lived out their days within sound of the sea and took their meals in the dim coffered dining room. Standing alone, the Queen Regent looks like one of those condemned men from a hundred revolutions who the camera catches standing in an empty field beside an open grave, looking placid, resigned, distracted — awaiting fate like a bus — when suddenly volleys from off-stage soundlessly pelt and spatter them, so they’re changed in an instant from present to past.

All around the Queen Regent is a dry, treeless urban-renewal savanna stretching back to the leafless tree line of Asbury. Where we’re currently driving were once sweller, taller hotels with glitzier names, stylish seafood joints with hot jazz clubs in the basement, and farther down the now-missing blocks, tourist courts and shingled flophouses for the barkers and rum-dums who ran the Tilt-A-Whirl on the pier or waltzed trays in the convention hall, which itself looks like it could fall in with a rising tide and a breeze. Today it is all a PROGRESS ZONE! a sign says, with LUXURY CONDO COMMUNITY COMING!

Wade has his silver Panasonic up and trained tight on the Queen Regent through the wide windshield glass. His is the awkward kind you peer down into like a reverse periscope, and operating it through his bifocals makes him crank his mouth open moronically and his old lips go slack. He seems to believe the Queen is about to go down any instant.

“Drive us around to the front, Franky. What’re we doin’ over here?” He flashes me a savage gaping grimace. The V of Wade’s yellow velour sweater, under which is only bare skin, shows his chicken chest with sparse white pinfeathers sprouting. I’ve seen Wade naked once, in his “flat” in Bamber Lake, when I arrived early for dinner. I haven’t gone back.

A tall cyclone fence, however, has been stretched around the Queen Regent, razor wire on top to discourage souvenir seekers and preservationist saboteurs who’re always around looking to monkey-wrench a decent implosion. We the public can’t go where Wade wants us to, or, in fact, get within three football fields of the site, since Asbury Park police and a cadre of blue-tunicked State Troopers have rigged a traffic diversion using cones and Jersey barriers and are forcing us off onto (another) Ocean Avenue and away from the hotel entirely. We can both see where a crowd of implosion spectators has been marshaled into a temporary grandstand the imploding company, the Martello Brothers — FIREWORKS, DETONATING, RAZING FOR PASSAIC AND CENTRAL JERSEY — has put up behind another cyclone fence at the remote south end of the Progress Zone, across from another big sign that says THIS STREET ADOPTED BY ASBURY PK CUB PACK 31. Some land — I’m thinking, as we follow Ocean Avenue toward the Temporary Parking — is better off with a few good condos.

“You can’t see a fucking thing from over here.” Wade’s twisted in his seat, straining to see back to the Queen Regent, his throat constricted, his voice raised a quarter octave while he forces his Panasonic up to his bifocals in case the whole shebang goes down while I’m parking. “It might as well be the White Sands Proving Ground out here. What’re they afraid of, the goddamn peckerwoods?” Wade never cursed when I first knew him and was wooing his daughter like Romeo.

“I’m sure insurance stipulates—”

“Don’t get me going on those shitheads,” he says. “When Lynette died, I didn’t get a cryin’ nickel.” Lynette was Wade’s wife number two, a tiny Texas termagant and Catholic crackpot who left him to enter a Maryknoll residence in Bucks County, where she became a Christian analyst auditing the troubled life stories of others like herself, until she had an embolism, assigned her benefits to the nuns and croaked. I’ve heard quite a bit about all that since the summer, and I consider it one of the fringe benefits of not marrying Wade’s daughter, Vicki, that I missed having Lynette as my mother-in-law. Wade doesn’t always perfectly remember I was ever in love with Vicki, or why he and I know each other. Vicki, however — he told me — has now changed her name to Ricki and lives a widow’s life in Reno, where she works as an ER nurse and never ventures back to New Jersey. God works in sundry ways.

I’ve driven us around to the temporary parking remuda behind the Martello Brothers’ bleachers. Back here are two trucked-in Throne Room portable toilets — always good to find — and several land yachts and fifth-wheel camper rigs, indicating that other implosion enthusiasts have spent the night to get the best seats. I’ve barely stopped and Wade is already quick out and stumping around toward the side of the bleachers, Panasonic in one hand, greasy sandwich bag in the other, not wanting to miss anything, since we’re five minutes late.

The whole setup’s like an athletic event, a Friday pigskin tilt between Belvedere and Hackettstown in the brittle late-autumn sunshine — only this tilt’s between man’s hold on permanence and the Reaper (most contests come down to that). The crowd around the front of the bleachers is exerting a continuous anticipatory hum as I approach. A raucous male voice shouts, “Not yet, not yet. Please, not yet!” An African-looking woman in a flowered daishiki has set up a makeshift table-stand, selling I Went Down with the Queen and The Queen Regent Had My Child tee-shirts. A large black man has secured the “Chicago Jew Dog” concession and is cooking franks on a black fifty-gallon drum. I’m famished and buy one of these in a paper napkin. Bush and Gore placards are leaned against the fence in case anyone wants to recant his vote. The Salvation Army has a tripod and kettle off to the side, with a tall blue-suited matron clanging a big bell and smiling. There are lots of Asbury Park cops. Everything is here but someone singing karaoke.

When I get near the edge of the grandstand (Wade has disappeared), I can see that the crowd’s being addressed by a small stout man in a yellow jumpsuit and gold hard hat, who’s talking through a yellow electric bullhorn. He’s in the middle of declaring that thousands of man-hours, four million sticks of dynamite, nine zillion feet of wire, brain-scrambling computer circuitry, the services of two Rutgers Ph.D.’s, plus the generous cooperation of the Monmouth County Board of Supervisors and the Asbury Park city council, plus the cops, have made here be the safest place to be in New Jersey, which makes the crowd snicker. This man I recognize as “Big Frank” Martello of the fabled brothers. Big Frank is a homegrown Jersey product who, after mastering percussive skills blowing up VC caves in the sixties, came home to Passaic, turned away from the family’s business of loan-sharking and knee-restructuring, took a marketing degree at Drew and went into the legit business of blowing things to smithereens for profit (the fireworks came along later). Being the oldest, Frank sent his six siblings to college (one is a dentist in Middlebush), and little by little absorbed the ones who were inclined into the business, which was in fact, booming. There they thrived and became a famed family phenomenon the world over — a sort of black-powder Wallendas — capable of astounding destructive dexterities, pinpoint precision and smokeless, dustless, barely noticeable obliterations in which buildings safely vanished, sites were cleaned and the craters filled so that the concrete trucks could be all lined up for work the following day.

I’m acquainted with Big Frank “the legend” because his brother Nunzio, the dentist, made inquiries about a snug-away for one of his girlfriends in Seaside Heights. While we cruised the streets, one thing led to another and the family saga got unspooled. Nunzio finally bought a lanai apartment for his honey down in Ship Bottom, and I’m sure is happy there.

Big Frank’s riling up the crowd — about two hundred of us — to a modest pitch, cracking dumb New Jersey Turnpike and Turkey Day jokes, taking off his yellow hard hat and dipping his dome to show us how few hairs his dangerous job has left him, then strutting around arms-crossed in front of the bleachers, like Mussolini. The crowd includes plenty of young parents with their kids in crash helmets, off for school holidays, plus a good number of older couples representing the land yachts and fifth-wheelers, who conceivably honeymooned in the Queen Regent, skating nights on the hardwood floors of the convention hall way back when. There’s also, of course, the inevitable collection of singleton strangees like Wade and me, who just like a good explosion and don’t need to talk about it. All are seated in rows, knees together, sunglasses and headgear in place, staring more or less raptly at a red plunger box Big Frank has stationed on a red milk crate in front of the temporary fence on which is attached a sign inscribed with his well-known motto, WE TAKE IT DOWN.

From where I’m standing to the side of the bleachers, eating my Jew Dog, I can see the red plunger is ominously up. Though no wires are connected. The whole plunger business, I suspect, is a fake, the critical signal likely to be beamed in from Martello Command Central in Passaic, using computer modeling, high-tolerance telemetry, fiber optics, GPS, etc. Nobody there will hear or see a thing but what’s on a screen.

I cast up into the bleachers, half-wolfed hot dog in hand, seeking Wade’s orange face, and find it instantly, sunk in the crowd at the top row. He’s glowering down at me for not being up where he is, with a good view across the Progress Zone to the far away Queen Regent. Wade makes an awkward, spasmic hand gesture for me to get my ass up there. It’s a movement a person having a heart attack would make, and people on either side of him give him a fishy eye and inch away. (“Some smelly old nut sat beside us at the implosion. You can’t go anywhere—”)

But I’m in no mood for climbing over strangers to achieve closer bodily contact with Wade — plus, I have my dog, and am as happy here as I’m likely to get today. The sun at the crowd’s edge feels good, the air rinsed clean like a state fair on the first afternoon before the rides are up. No matter that we’re in a no-man’s-land in a dispirited seaside town, waiting to watch an abandoned building get turned to rubble — the second explosion I’ve been close to in two days.

I wave enigmatically up to Wade, raise my hot dog bun, point to my wrist as if it had a watch on it that said zero hour. Wade mouths back grudging words no one can hear. Then I turn my attention back to Big Frank, who’s standing beside his red plunger box while a skinny white kid with technical know-how, wearing a plain white jumpsuit, screws wires to terminals on top, looking questioningly up at Big Frank as if he doesn’t think any of this is going quite right. In the distance, through the fence and across the three football fields, I can make out small human figures moving hastily inside the Queen Regent’s secure perimeter toward what must be the exit gates. Many more blue-and-white Asbury PD cruisers are now apparent, all with their blue flashers going. Yellow traffic lights I also hadn’t noticed are blinking along the emptied streets. A police helicopter, an orange-striped Coast Guard chopper and a “News at Noon” trafficopter are hovering just off the boardwalk in anticipation of a big bang soon to come. The Salvation Army bell is clanging, and for the first time I hear hearty, sing-song human voices chanting from somewhere “Save the cream, save the cream,” which, of course, is “Save the Queen, save the Queen.” The chanters are nicely dressed (but unavailing) landmark loonies who’ve been forced into a spot outside some white police sawhorses, where they can make their voices heard but be ignored.

Big Frank, through his electric megaphone, which makes his strong New Jersey basso seem to come out of a cardboard box, is spieling about how the “seismic effects” of what we’re about to witness will be detectable in China, yet the charges have been so ingeniously calculated by his family that the Queen Regent will fall straight down in exactly eighteen seconds, every loving brick coming to rest in arithmetically predetermined spots. “Nat-ur-al-ly” there’ll be some dust (none of it asbestos), but not even as much, he’s saying, as a stolen garbage truck would kick up in Newark — this is also due to climatological gauging, humidity indexing, plus fiber optics, lasers, etc. The sound will be surprisingly modest, “so you might want to hire us to renovate your mother-in-law’s house in Trenton, hawr, hawr, hawr.” A Coast Guard cutter is stationed just off the boardwalk (“In case one of my brothers gets blown out there”). Scuba divers are in the water. Fish and geese migration patterns won’t be disrupted, nor will air quality or land values in Asbury Park — a murmur of general amusement. Likewise hospital services. “All efforts, in other words,” he concludes, “have been expended to make the demolition nuttin’ more than a fart in a paint bucket.”

Big Frank stumps heavily off his central master of ceremonies spot to confer, head-down, with the skinny technician kid, plus two other swart-haired parties in red jumpsuits, who look like they might be filling station employees, though for all I know are the Rutgers Ph.D.’s. One of these red-suits hands Big Frank a set of old-fashioned calipered earphones with a mouthpiece attached. Big Frank, hard hat in hand, holds one phone to his ear, seems to listen intently to something — a voice? — coming through, then begins barking orders back, his meathead’s big mouth cut into a downward swoop of anger, his head nodding.

Conceivably something’s amiss, something that might postpone the big mushroom cloud and send us all cruising back down the streets of Asbury Park seeking substitute excitements. A hush of waiting has fallen over the hurly-burly, and a low hum of individual voices and single laughters and beer-can pops arises. A rich fishy smell drifts in off the sea — contributor, no doubt, to the Queen Regent’s run of bad luck, since it comes from discharge practices long banned, though the pollutants are still in the soil and the atmosphere. From some undetermined place, there’s a high-pitched mechanized whee-wheeing in the air, like the ghost of an empty ferris wheel at the boardwalk Fun Zone, where millions idled and thrilled and smooched away summer evenings without a care for what came before or next. To me, there’s good to be found in these random sensations. I’ve made it my business at this odd time of life, when the future seems interesting but not necessarily “fun,” to permit no time to be a dead time, since you wouldn’t want to forget at a later, direr moment what that earlier, possibly better, day or hour or era was “like”; how the afternoon felt when the implosion got canceled, what specific life got lived as you awaited the Queen Regent’s decline to rubble. You definitely would want to know that, to have that on your mind’s record instead of say, like poor Ernie, hearing the thanatologist droning, “Frankee, Frankee? Can you hear me? Can you hear any-ting? Is you all de vay dead?”

Then…boom, boom, boom, boom. Boomety-boom. Boom, boom. Boomety-boomety! The Queen Regent is going. Right now. I’m happy I didn’t duck out to the Throne Room.

Innocent puffs of gray-white smoke, small but specific and unquestionably consequential, go poof-poof-poof all up and down the Queen’s nine-storey height, as if someone, some authority inside, was letting air out of old pillows, sweeping her clean, putting her in top form for the big reopening. Birds — the gulls I’d seen before, diving, swooping and wheeling — are suddenly flying away. No one warned them.

Our entire crowd — many are standing — exhales or gasps or sighs a spoon-moon-Juning “ahhhh” as if this is the thing now, finally, what we’ve come for, what nothing else can ever get better than.

Big Frank’s staring, startled, right along with us, his big baldy head still calipered, his mouth gapped open, though he quickly closes it hard as an anvil, nostrils flaring. The two swarthy red-suited assistants have backed away as if he might start wind-milling punches. The skinny kid who’d wired the plunger box is blabbing into Big Frank’s sizable ear, though Big Frank’s staring out at the building being consumed in smoke, the plunger still stagily up at his feet.

Boom. Boom. Boomety-boom. Again, puffs of now grayer smoke squirt out all around the Queen Regent’s foundation skirting, and another big one at the top, from the crenellated crown. And now commences a set of larger sounds. These things never go off with one bang, but more like a percussive chess game — the pawns first, then the bishops, then the knights. Whatever’s left stands and fights but can’t do either. At least that’s how it happened down in Ventnor.

Now another series of boom-booms, bigger towering ones erupt from the Queen Regent’s core. The old dowager has yet to shudder, lean or sway. Possibly she won’t go down at all and the crowd will be the winner. Some yokel up in the stands laughs and yaps, “She ain’t fallin’. They fucked this all up.” Spectators have begun smiling, looking side to side. Wade, I can see, is getting all on tape. The Grove ladies will love him even more if the Queen survives. Big Frank’s now glaring. I can read his lips, and they say, Fuck you. It’ll fuckin’ fall, you pieces of shit.

Just then, as the Queen Regent is holding firm and the copters are darting in closer from over the water, and some of the Asbury cops with flashers are moving along Ocean Avenue in front of the convention hall, and our crowd has started clapping, whooping and even stomping on the risers (Big Frank looks disgusted in his caliper headgear, and no doubt’s begun calculating who’s gonna catch shit) — just then, as the demolition turns to undemolition — a scrawny, dark-skinned black kid of approximately twelve, wearing a hooded black sweatshirt, baggy dungarees down over big silver basketball sneaks and carrying a plastic Grand Union bag containing a visible half gallon of milk, a kid who’s been standing beside me, letting his milk carton bap against my leg for five minutes as if I wasn’t there, this kid suddenly makes a springing, headlong dash from beside me, out across the front of the crowd, and with one insolent stomp of his silver foot whams down the red plunger of the phony detonator box, then goes whirling back past me around the end of the grandstand, darting and dodging through the standees toward the parking lot, where he disappears around a big Pace Arrow and is gone. “Motherfuckin’ booolshit” is all I’m certain he says in departure, though he may have said something more.

And now the Queen Regent is headed down. Maybe the plunger did it. Black smoke gushes from what must be the hotel’s deepest subterranean underpinnings, her staunchest supports (this will be what the Chinese seismographers detect). Her longitude lines, rows of square windows in previously perfect vertical alignment, all go wrinkled, as if the whole idea of the building had sustained, then sought to shrug off a profound insult, a killer wind off the ocean. And then rather simply, all the way down she comes, more like a brick curtain being lowered than like a proud old building being killed. Eighteen seconds is about it.

A clean vista briefly comes open behind the former Queen — toward Allenhurst and Deal — leafless trees, a few flecks of white house sidings, a glint of a car bumper. Then that is gone and a great fluff of cluttered gray smoke and dust whooshes upward and outward. We spectators are treated to a long, many-sectioned, more muffled than sharp progression of rumblings and crumblings and earth-delving noises that for a long moment strike us all silent (it must be the same at a public hanging or a head lopping).

Someone, another male, with a Maryland Tidewater accent, shouts, “Awww-raaiight. Yoooooo-hoo.” (Who are the people who do this?) Then someone else shouts, “Aww-right,” and people begin clapping in the tentative way people clap in movies. Big Frank, who’s stood glaring across the empty Progress Zone, turns to the crowd with a smirk that combines disdain with derision. Someone yells, “Go get ’em, Frank!” And for an instant, I think he’s shouting encouragement to me. But it’s to the other Frank, who just waves a sausage hand dismissively — know-nothings, jerkimos, putzes — and with his two red-suited lieutenants, stalks away around the far side of the bleachers and out of sight. One could hope, forever.

Wade’s gone pensive as we walk back across the grass lot to my Suburban, a mood that’s infected other spectators retreating to their campers and SUVs and vintage Volvos. Most conduct intimate hushed-voice exchanges. A few laugh quietly. Some brand of impersonal closure has been sought and gained at no one’s expense. It’s been a good outing. All seem to respect it.

Wade, however, is struggling some with his motor skills. How he climbed the bleachers, I don’t know, though he seems a man at peace. He’s told me that after Lynette retreated to the Bucks County nunnery and he’d retired from the Turnpike, he decided to put his Aggie engineering degree to use for the public’s benefit. This involved trying out some invention ideas he’d logged in a secret file cabinet down in his Barnegat Pines basement (plenty of time to dream things up in the tollbooth). These were good ideas he’d never had time for while raising a family, moving up to New Jersey from the Dallas area and working a regular shift at Exit 9 for fifteen-plus years. His ideas were the usual Gyro Gearloose brainstorms: a lobster trap that floated to the surface when a lobster was inside; a device to desalinate seawater one glassful at a time — an obvious hit, he felt, with lifeboat manufacturers; a universal license plate that would save millions and make crime detection a cinch. If he could dream it up, it could work, was his reasoning. And there were plenty of millionaires to prove him right. You just had to choose one good idea, then concentrate resources and energies there. Wade chose as his idea the manufacture of mobile homes no tornado could sweep away in a path of destruction. It would revolutionize lower-middle-class life, Florida to Kansas, he felt certain. He took half his lump-payment Turnpike pension and sank it in a prototype and some expensive wind-tunnel testings at a private lab in Michigan. Naturally, none of it worked. The coefficients to wind resistance proved 100 percent relatable to mass, he said. To make a mobile home not blow away — and he knew this outcome was a possibility — you had to make it really heavy, which made it not a mobile home but just a house you wouldn’t think to put up on wheels and move to Weeki Wachee. And apart from not working, his prototype was also far too expensive for the average mobile-home resident who works at the NAPA store.

Wade lost his money. His patent application was turned down. He damn near lost his house. And it was at that point, twelve or so years ago (he told me this), that he began taking an interest in demolitions and in the terminus-tending aspects of things found in everyday life. It’s hard to argue with him, and I don’t. Though selling real estate, I don’t need to say, is dedicated to the very opposite proposition.

A small plane pulls a banner across the blue-streaked November sky above us, heading north into the no-fly zone now abandoned by the Coast Guard and the “News at Noon” copters. BLACK FRIDAY AT FOSDICKS? the trailing sign says. No one in the departing crowd pays it any attention. Up ahead, a black man is helping the Salvation Army woman lift her red kettle into a white panel truck. Several landmark protestors are trailing their signs behind them as they seek their vehicles, satisfied they’ve again done their best. No one’s much talking about the Queen Regent, now a rock pile awaiting bulldozers and fresh plans. Many seem to be chatting about tomorrow’s turkey and the advent of guests.

“What do you hope for, Franky?” Wade has taken a grip of my left bicep and given me his Panasonic, which is surprisingly light. He’s eaten his sandwiches and left the sack behind. My Suburban’s at the far end of the parked cars. Wade intends, I know, to leap-frog on to weightier matters. The reminder of his own end, concurrent with the Queen Regent’s demise, fastens him down even more firmly to the here and now.

“I’m not a great hoper, Wade, I guess.” We’re not walking fast. Others pass us. “I just go in for generic hopes. That good comes to me, that I do little harm and die in my sleep.”

“That’s a lot to hope for.” His grip is pinching the shit out of me right through my windbreaker. Then he unaccountably loosens up. Vehicles are starting around us, back-up lights and taillights snapping on. “I’m not alive from the waist down anymore. How ’bout you?” Wade isn’t looking at me, but staring toward what’s ahead — my Suburban, which has an altered look about it.

“I’m shipshape, Wade. Fire in the hole.” I’m reliant on Dr. Psimos’s assessment, and on how things seem most mornings. You could say I have high hopes for life below the waist.

“I’ve plateaued,” Wade says irritably. “Left it all in the last century.” He’s frowning, as if he, too, has spied something wrong up ahead of us. The Millennium clearly has different resonances for different age brackets.

“Maybe enough’s enough, Wade. You know?”

“So other people tell me.”

What Wade and I have seen altered about my car is that the driver’s-side backseat window’s been smashed and glass particles scattered on the sparse grass. Below the door, on top of the glittering glass, is a flesh-colored Grand Union plastic bag with the milk carton inside. Though when I pick it up, it’s as heavy as a brick, and on closer notice I discover that the Sealtest carton inside — a pink-toned photograph of a missing teen on the label — actually contains a brick. The carton’s mission hasn’t been what it seemed when I felt it bumping my leg, its little brigand owner awaiting his chance at mischief. Did he sense I was a Suburban owner? Was I under surveillance from the beginning? This is why I never hope: Hoping is not a practical mechanism for events that actually happen.

“Little pissmires nailed you,” Wade snarls, taking in the damage, completely clear-brained, bifocals flashing at the chance to be permissibly pissed off, instantly intuiting the whole criminal scenario. “Too bad Cade’s not here,” he says, “though they probably didn’t leave any prints.” He hasn’t seen the actual culprit, only the virtual one (the real one’s spitting image). “Shouldn’t of stuck that stupid sticker on your bumper.” He scowls, walking around behind my car, assessing things like a cop, his little bandy-legged self full-up with race bile, which makes me angrier than the busted window — and fingers me as a typical liberal. “They probably hate fat-ass Gore worse than they hate shit-for-brains,” he says. (His only name for Bush.) Wade’s mouth wrinkles into a twisted, unhumorous smile of seen-it-all pleasure. “What’d they get? Did you leave your billfold in there?”

“No.” I touch my lumpy back pocket, then peer inside the mostly glassless window hole, trying not to touch a sharp edge. Glass kernels carpet the backseat and floor. Sunlight on the roof has turned it hot and boggy inside. The deed can’t be more than five minutes old. I stand up and look longingly around, as if I could rerun things, set a guiding, weighted hand onto little Shaquille’s or little Jamal’s sun-warmed head, walk with him over to the boardwalk for a funnel cake and some unangrified, nonjudgmental, free-form man-to-man about where one goes wrong in these matters. Possibly he’s a member of Cub Pack 31 and is at work on his larceny merit badge.

Nothing’s present in the backseat but a torn-out Asbury Park Press real estate page, a couple of red-and-white bent-legged Realty-Wise signs and the pink Post-it with Mike’s directions to Mullica Road. That seems long ago. Though yesterday wasn’t better than today. If anything, it was worse. I haven’t been in a fistfight today or had my neck twisted (yet). I haven’t been vilified, haven’t gotten in deep with my ex-wife, haven’t gone to a funeral. It may not be the right moment to count my blessings, but I do.

An enormous Invector RV as big as a team bus, with Indian arrow markings on its side, comes rumbling past us, its owner-operator a tiny balding figure with sunglasses inside the slide-back captain’s window. He frowns down at me with empathy and stops. He’s a “Good Sam” and has the smiling, stupid mouthy-guy-with-the-halo decal on one of his back windows. These birds are always Nazis. The captain’s sweet-faced wife’s behind him in the copilot’s space, craning past to see down to me and my lower-case woes. I know she feels empathy for me, too. But being peered down at, shattered glass around my feet, my car busted and an orange-skinned old loony as my teammate, makes me feel a wind-whistling loss far beyond empathy’s reach.

“Vehicle crime’s up twenty percent due to the Internet,” the Invector captain says from behind his sunglasses, surveying the scene from above. He’s weasly, with a puny little mustache that he may have just started. His wife’s saying something I can’t hear. Another man and woman, their lifelong friends, plus the square head of a Great Dane, appear in the back living-quarters window. All stare at me gravely, the dog included.

“What’d he say?” Wade says from behind my car.

I can’t repeat it. A saving force in the universe forbids me. Something tells me these travelers are from central Florida, possibly the Lakeland area, which makes me hate them. I shrug and look back at my window hole. I’m still holding Wade’s Panasonic, as if I was taping everything.

“No use callin’ the cops,” the land-yacht driver says, down from his little window. His wife nods. Their passengers have pulled the café curtains farther apart and are rubber-necking me and Wade and my broken vehicle. Both are holding tall-boys of Schlitz. I am another feature of the interesting New Jersey landscape, a textbook case of worsening crime statistics. Eighty percent of murders are committed by people who know their victims, which means many murders are probably not as senseless as they seem.

“I guess,” I say, and fake a grateful smile upward.

“Oh yeah!” From somewhere, a hidey-hole the police wouldn’t find — in a safe box, a glove compartment, under the sun visor — the land-yacht guy produces a nickel-plated revolver as big as Wade’s video cam, from whose barrel end he coolly blows invisible smoke like an old-west gunfighter who is also a good samaritan. “They don’t fuck with me,” he smirks. His wife gives him a halfhearted whap on the shoulder for language reasons. Their friends in the back laugh soundlessly. I’m sure they’re all Church of Christers.

“That oughta do it,” I say.

“That already has done it,” he says. “I’m ex-peace officer.” He lowers his big Ruger, S&W, Colt, whatever, smiles a goofy sinister smile, then revs his Invector into new life, issuing an order over his shoulder to his passengers, who disappear from the window. He sets some kind of blue ball-cap with U.S. Navy braiding onto his skint head. “Buckle up. We’re casting off,” a man’s voice says inside. The captain’s wife mouths something to me as her window of opportunity closes, but I can’t hear for the motor noise. “Okay,” I say. “Thanks.” But it’s the wrong thing to say as they sway away over the dry grass toward new marvels awaiting them.

Cold pre-Thanksgiving winds whistle through my broken back window, stiffening my neck and making me feel like I’m catching something, even though I had a flu shot and am probably not. The advance weather of tropical depression Wayne is moving up the seaboard, and the once-nice sky has quilted into dense cotton batting, the cold sun that warmed us in the bleachers now retired. It’s November. Nothing more nor less.

The Queen Regent’s big finish has contributed little to Wade and me, only a bleak and barren humility, suggesting closure’s easier to wish for than locate. Driving back out Lake Avenue toward the Fuddruckers — through a precinct of crumbling mansions, a Dominican “hair station,” the Cobra motorcycle club and the Nubian Nudee Revue, all bordering a pretty green lake with low Parisian bridges crossing to a more prosperous town to the south (Ocean Grove) — I spy my little culprit window smasher, tootling along down the crumbling sidewalk in his big silver shoes and hooded sweatshirt, under the heavy hand of the Chicago Jew-Dog purveyor, a giant coffee-black Negro with woolly hair and big inner-tube biceps. Wade’s mooning out the window, sees these citizens and makes a satisfied grunt of approval, as if to say, See, now. More of this kind of parental oversight will get you less of that other stuff…pass on the vital gnosis of the civilization…a sense of what’s right…intact units, yadda, yadda, yadda. Better than a perp walk into social services in plastic bracelets, I’ll concede, and drive us on.

Wade is exhausted. His rucked hands, in the skinny lap of his jackass pants, have begun just noticeably to tremble, and his old white-fringed head won’t exactly be still and is ducked, anticipating sleep — which he complains he does little of. He smells possibly more sour, and one of his scuffed patent-leather slip-ons taps the floor mat softly. Old people, no matter what anyone says, do not make the best company when spirits flag. They tend to sink toward private thoughts or embarrassed, uncomprehending silence, from whose depths they don’t give much of a shit about anybody else’s private thoughts — all the “great experience” they carry become essentially useless. Not that I blame him. Seeing an implosion has given him the peek into oblivion he wanted. It simply hasn’t changed anything.

I remember, years ago, after my father died and my mother and I were living in a sandy, ant-infested asbestos-sided house near Keesler, my mother one morning backed our big green Mercury right over my little black-and-white kitten, Mittens. Apparently nothing caught her notice, because she continued out onto the street and drove away to her job. It was not the best time in her life. But Mittens made a terrible squawling scream I heard inside the house. And when I raced out in a panic of knowledge and cold helplessness, there was the sad, mangled little cat, not long for the planet, flopping and wriggling, making awful strangling noises out of his crushed little gullet and turning me crazed, since my mother was gone and no one was there to help.

Next door, on our neighbor’s front porch, was the neighbor lady’s — Mrs. Mockbee’s — antique old daddy, a dapper turkey-necked fossil who told my mother he’d fought in the Civil War but of course hadn’t. Still, he called himself Major Mockbee and sat long days on his daughter’s concrete porch in a straw boater, red bow tie, suspenders, spats and seersucker suit, chewing, spitting and talking to himself while Keesler Saber jets flew over.

He alone was there when Mittens got flattened by my mother’s Merc. The only adult. And it was to him I fled, my mind a fevered chaos, across the driveway in the sweltering Mississippi morning, across the damp St. Augustine and up the three steps onto the porch. The poor little cat had already grown quiet, breathing his troubled last. But I pushed his smushed limp body straight into Major Mockbee’s field of vision — he knew me, we’d spoken before. And I said, tears squirting, my heart pounding, my limbs aching with fear (I shouted, really), “My mother ran over my cat. I don’t know what to do!”

To which Major Mockbee, after spitting a glob over the porch rail into the camellias, clearing his acrid old throat and putting on a pair of wire spectacles to have a better look, said, “I believe you’ve got yourself a Persian. It looks like a Persian. I’d say something’s wrong with it, though. It looks sick.”

Unfair, I know. But truth is truth. I sometimes think of old people as being like pets. You love them, amuse yourself with them, tease and humor them, feed them and make them happy, then take solace that you’re probably going to live longer than they will.

Back in the Barnegat Pines days of ’84—when Wade took life more as it tumbled, projected a seamless, amiable surface, kept his garage neat, his tools stowed, his oil changed, tires rotated, went to church most Sundays, watched the Giants not the Jets, prayed for both the Democrats and the Republicans, favored a humane, Vatican II approach to the world’s woes, inasmuch as we live amid surfaces, etc. — back then I just assumed he, like the rest of us (prospective son-in-laws think such things), would wake up one morning at four, feel queasy, a little light-headed, achy from that leaf raking he’d done the evening before and decide not to get up quite yet. Then he’d put his head back to the pillow for an extra snooze and somewhere around six and without a whimper, he’d soundlessly buy the farm. “He usually didn’t sleep that late, but I thought, well, he’s been under a strain at work, so I just let him—” Gone. Cold as a pike.

Only, age plays by strange rules. Wade’s now survived happiness to discover decrepitude. To be alive at eighty-four, he’s had to become someone entirely other than the smooth-jawed ex-Nebraska engineer who was cheered to see the sun rise, cheered to see it set. He’s had to adapt (Paul would say “develop”) — to shrink around his bones like a Chinaman, grow stringy, volatile, as self-interested as a pawnbroker, unable to see his fellowmen except as blunt instruments of his demon designs. Apart from merely liking him, and liking to match Wade-remembered to Wade-present tense, I’m also interested for personal reasons in observing if any demonstrable good’s to be had from getting as old as Methuselah, other than that the organism keeps functioning like a refrigerator. We assume persistence to be a net gain, but it still needs to be proved.

“Why don’t you come down to my place for dinner?” Wade says gruffly out of the blue, more energetic than I expected.

“Thanks, but I’ve got some duties.” Not true. We’re re-crossing 35, the route I’ll take home. Some commercial establishment — I don’t know where, but cultural literacy tells me it’s there — will be eager to fix my back window, if only in a temporary way until after the holiday. Busted Back Windows R-Us.

“What the hell duties have you got?” Wade cuts his jagged eyes at me, working his tongue tip along his lower lip. He gives one bulky beige hearing device a jab with his thumb. “You don’t have a new girlfriend, do you?”

“I have a wife. I have two wives. At least I—”

“Hah!” Wade makes a strangled noise that could be a cough or a last gasp of life. “You know the penalty for bigamy? Two wives! I had two. I’m single now. Never had so much fun.” Wade’s forgotten we’re acquainted. He’ll be calling me Ned next. Ned might be better than Frank now, since Frank’s not feeling so enthusiastic.

Evenings down at the Grove are not for everybody. Dinner’s at 6:00 and over by 6:25. Then the inmates (the ones that can) scuttle out to the common room for rapt-silence CNN viewing and alarming postprandial personal odors. Meals are color-coded — something brown, something red, something that once was green, with tapioca or syrupy no-sugar fruit to follow. If I went with Wade, we’d arrive early, have to wait in his two-room “en suite,” full of his bric-a-brac, his bathroom full of medicines, his framed Turnpike battle insignias and vestigial home furnishings from Barnegat Pines. We’d watch a Jeopardy rerun, then get in an argument, like we did the one time I was a guest and unexpectedly saw him naked. It’s no wonder Cade and family stay up in Pohatcong and don’t much look in. What can you do? Things are what they are. If we hang on too long, we reach the back side of the Permanent Period, where life doesn’t grow different, there’s just more of it until the lights go dim.

“I’ve got a surprise for you.” Wade’s white slip-on’s still tapping the floor mat, but his hand-trembling and neck-ducking have ceased. I’ve turned up the heater due to the back window draft. Suburbans have world-beating comfort systems, which is a reason to own one.

Wade claims he indulges in unbridled semi-sexual liaisons with several of the grannies at the Grove — in spite of being dead below the belt line. He charms them with his implosion videos and spicy narratives about things he’s seen in the backseats of stretch limos passing through his tollbooth. During my one visit, he had a tiny powdery-cheeked, pink-haired lawyer’s widow in her seventies as his squeeze. They smirked and winked, and Wade made lewd innuendos about night-time feats he was still capable of after two vodka gimlets and a Viagra chaser.

“I’d love to, but I’ve got a house-full back home,” I say, easing into the Fuddruckers’ lot across from the streaming Parkway. Wade’s Olds sits nosed under the faded yellow awning. A blue-and-white Asbury Park PD cruiser with a Bush sticker is parked across the lot, its hatless occupant observing traffic through the intersection. Technically, I have no one waiting at home. Paul and the unusual Jill have checked into the Beachcomber and are dining at Ann’s. Clarissa’s off on her heterosex escapade with honey-voiced Thom. My house is ringingly empty on Thanksgiving eve. How does that happen?

“But how ’bout I mention there’s somebody back at my place who’d love to lay eyes on you?” Wade’s damp mouth wallops shut, suppressing a smile. He’s up to mischief, stroking his Caesarish comb-down like an old Arab. One of his wrinkle-cheeked old squeezes no doubt has a freshly widowed sister from the Wildwoods who’s a “young sixty-eight” and on the hunt.

“I need to get this window fixed, Wade.”

“It’s what?” Wade looks affronted. His tongue darts in and out like a viper’s.

“My window.” I motion backward with my thumb. “It’s trying to rain.”

“You’re cracked! You need a new connection, mister. There’s something hollow under you, you know that?” Wade’s suddenly talking way too loud and vehement for our close quarters. He’s been sneaking up on this with his questions about hoping and my sexual problems and barbs about my absent wife.

We’re stopped alongside his Olds. I check in the rearview to see if the cop’s surveilling us, which of course he is. Possibly the empty Fuddruckers’ lot is a rendezvous point in the white-slave market.

Wade’s eyes fix on me accusingly, making me feel accused. “I don’t think that’s true, Wade.”

“You’re a goddamn house peddler. You hang around with strangers all the time. You’re gonna be poopin’ in a bag one of these days — if you live long enough. Which you may not.” His old mouth does something between a terrible grin and a furious frown. It’s close to the look my son Paul turned on me last spring in K.C. Only Wade’s upper falsie set sinks a millimeter, so he has to clack it back up with his lowers. I’m happy Wade’s still in touch with who I am.

“Well.” I glance again at the Asbury cop.

“Well what?” Wade dips his head like a goose, snorts, then suddenly stares down at his big watchband as if he was on a tight schedule.

Cold air is still drawing in on my neck. “It may not seem like it, Wade,” I say softly, “but I’m connected enough. Real estate’s a good connecter.”

“Bullshit. It’s putting stitches in a dead man’s arm.” He blinks, ducks, saws his wrist — the one with his Medi-Ident — across his red nose, then grabs his Panasonic off the seat. “You’re an asshole.”

“I just told you how I feel about things, Wade. I wasn’t trying to piss you off. My belief is we all have an empty spot underneath us. It doesn’t hurt anything.” I tap my foot on the brake. This needs to end now.

“You’re in a dangerous spot, Franky.” Wade pops open his big door. “However old you are. Fifty-what?”

“Two.” Which feels better than fifty-five. I gently bite down on a welt of my left cheek — a bad sign. I’m not going to the Grove with Wade and make woo-woo with some retired reference librarian from Brigantine. I’d end up driving home to Sea-Clift with black vanquishment filling my car like cyanide.

“Fifty-two doesn’t mean anything!” Wade croaks. “You’re between everything good when you’re fifty-two. You need to get hooked up or you’re screwed. I married Lynette when I was fifty-two. Saved my ass.”

Wade of course has told me never to get married again, and Lynette, after all, left him for the Lord. Plus, I believe I’m still married. “You were lucky.”

“I was smart. I wasn’t lucky.” Wade levers one trembling sockless white-shoed foot out and down onto the pavement, then the other, then cautiously scoots his scrawny ass off the seat, holding the door handle for support, emitting a tiny effortful grunt.

“I guess we might as well think our life’s the way it is ’cause that’s how we want it, Wade.”

“Haw!” He’s studying down at his feet as if to be sure they know their assignments. “That’s in your brain.”

“That’s where a lot of stuff goes on.”

“Think, think, thinky, think. In your life it does. Not mine.” Wade gives my car door a fearsome, dismissive bang shut.

I power down the passenger window so he’s not shut out. “Don’t think I don’t appreciate your thinking about me.” Think, think, thinky, think.

“I’ll tell my daughter you gotta think about gettin’ your window fixed instead of seein’ her.” Wade’s mouth wrinkles up bitterly as he starts his staggering departure.

Daughter?

“Which daughter?” I say through the window.

“Which daughter?” Wade’s red-rimmed eyes glare in at me, as if I knew we’d been talking about his daughter this whole time, and why was I being such a stupe? Stupe, stupe, stupey, stupe. “I only have one, you nunce. Your girlfriend. You farted around with her till you ran her off right in my front yard. You’re a nunce, you know that? You like being a nunce. You get to do a lot of good thinking that way.” Wade starts struggling toward the front of my car, heading toward his Olds, his Panasonic bumping my fender panels he’s holding onto for balance. I can only see the upper half of him, but he’s not looking at me, as if I’d stopped existing in here.

But. Daughter!

For these weeks, traveling to the odd implosion here, another there, a cup of chowder or a piece of icebox pie in a Greek diner, I’ve all but expunged from my thoughts the truth that Wade is father to Vicki (now Ricki), my long-gone dream of a lifetime from when I, as a divorced man, wrote for a glossy New York sports magazine, horsed around with women, suffered dreaminess both night and day and had yet to list my first house. I rashly, wrongly loved nurse Arsenault with my whole heart and libido, was ready to tie the knot, move to Lake Havasu and live in an Airstream off savings (I had none). Only she lacked the necessary whatever (love for me) and sent me packing. So Wade’s wrong about who heave-ho’d who. Vicki shortly afterward married a handsome, clean-cut Braniff pilot, moved to Reno, became a trauma nurse at St. Crimonies, eventually was widowed when Darryl Lee crashed his spotter plane in Kuwait under the command of Bush #1.

I haven’t seen, spoken to or thought much about Vicki/Ricki, who I guarantee was a yeasty package, since ’84, and wouldn’t recognize her if she shot out of Fuddruckers on a pair of roller skates. Although daughter sets loose deep space-clearing stirrings. Not that I want to see her any more than I want to see the reference librarian from Brigantine. But the thought of Vicki/Ricki — once a bounteous, boisterous, fine-thighed and raven-haired dreamboat — sets my ribs atremble, I’m not ashamed to say it. On the other hand, driving to the Grove on the night before Thanksgiving for a surprise face-to-face, followed by an unwieldy intime in some ennui-drenched south Jersey “steak place,” at the conclusion of which she and I disappear in opposite directions into the teeming night, is far from anything I want to happen to me. Even though I have nothing else to do: early to bed amid sea breezes after maybe getting my window fixed.

“Maybe Ricki and I can have lunch once the holiday’s over,” I say insincerely out the window to where Wade has navigated around the front of my car. I don’t want him to feel condescended to on the topic of his marriageable daughter. I have some experience there.

“What?” he snaps. He’s putting his video cam down on the passenger’s side seat as if it was his honored guest.

“Tell Ricki I said howdy.”

“Yeah, I’ll do that.”

“When am I likely to see you again? When’s our next blow-up?” Wade has forgotten I’ve invited him for Thanksgiving, an offer I now silently retract in self-defense.

“I dunno.” He’s begun crawling into his car from the wrong side.

“Wade, are you okay in there?” My smile dwindles to a half smile of concern.

“How do I look?” His baggy ass and the scuffed soles of his slip-ons face me out of his open car door.

I could get the Asbury cop to come confiscate Wade’s car keys if I thought he’d lost his marbles and presented a threat to the public. Except I’d have to drive him home. “You got your keys?” I sing out hopefully.

“Kiss my ass.” He’s struggling down onto his donut, his feet to the floor, back to his cushion. I hear him breathe sternly. “Goddamn piece of shit.”

“What’s happening in there, Wade? You need some help?”

Wade burns a scowl back at me, then looks at his instruments. “Goddamn door’s busted. Some idiot woman backed into me at CVS. Now get your silly ass out and close my door. You nunce.” He’s got his little biscuit hands fastened to the wheel at ten and two, like Mike Mahoney. His keys dangle from the ignition, where they’ve been the whole time. He gets her cranked as I get out into the cold. It’s sizing up to rain more. Yesterday’s weather is hanging over the seaboard like a bad memory. Plus there’s tropical disturbance Wayne.

“I wanted you to get to see Vicki,” Wade says. “She wants to see you.” He can’t remember her new name and won’t look at me, only out at the Fuddruckers’ chained and locked front door. He’s resigned more than mad and, like all good fathers, ineptly keeping vigil for his offspring’s improvement. “We’ll have lunch” is not what he wants to hear. Wade wants me in the steak place with his honey bunch, ordering our third martini, with love — belated, grateful, willing, candid, budding and, above all, permanent — saturating the dark, rich airs like gardenias. It’s his last try to set things right before his hour’s called.

Though based on history, there’s nothing I can do. The last thing Vicki Arsenault ever said to me sixteen years ago, from her bachelorette apartment in Pheasant Run on the Hightstown Pike, by phone to my former, since-demolished family home in Haddam, was, “Woo, boy-hidee, you like to of fooled me.” She talked in a wide, east Dallas, barrel-racer lingo, just right for barrooms, bronco-buster sex and no bullshit but hers. I loved it.

“How did I fool you, sweetheart? I love you so much,” I said. It was spring. The copper beech was in abundance. The wisteria and lilacs in bloom. The dreamy time of love’s labors lost.

“‘Sweetheart’?” she pooh-poohed. “Love me? Opposites cain’t love. Opposites just attract. And we’re done through with that. Least I am. But I almost took a tumble. I’ll give you that.” I remember her wonderful tongue-cluck, like a jockey signaling giddy-up.

“I still want you to marry me,” I said. And I dearly did — would’ve in a minute and been happy. Although it would’ve been the lamp business more than the realty business, the unexamined life more than the life steeped in reflection and contingency. Win-win.

“Yeah, but first we’d get married”—I knew she was beaming her big Miss Cotton Bowl smile—“and then we’d have to get divorced. And I need somebody who’ll get me all the way to death. And that id’n you.”

Death. Even then!

“I’ll give a call in the next couple days, Wade.” I’m leaning into his open door, radiating bad faith. “Maybe Ricki’ll have time to grab lunch. It’d be good to catch up.” The prospect makes my brain swell.

Wade carefully uncouples his spectacles from his crusted ears and gives his old eyes a good knuckle-kneading that’s probably painful. He turns toward me, sockets hollowed, pale and knobby, his left pupil orbited out to left field. Age is not gentle or amusing.

“I can’t talk you into it?” he says, insulted.

“I guess not, Wade.” I smile the way you would into the upside-down mirror of an iron-lung patient. “I’ll call. We’ll stage a lunch.”

“You’re not vital anymore. You know that?” He sniffs as if my words carried a bad odor, then looks disgusted and shakes his head. His Olds is idling. The Asbury cop, his gray exhaust visible in falling temps, eases out into traffic and slowly motors away. The wind has a bite that stings my butt. Across the access road, the Parkway groans with the hum-bum-bum sounds of pre-Thanksgiving hurry-up.

“I’m working on vital,” I say. “It’s on my short list.” I try a smile.

“Hunh,” Wade grumps. He doesn’t know what I’m talking about. “You’re a nunce. I already said that.”

“Could be true.” I’m holding his car door open.

“Remember the three boats, Franky?” The three boats parable is Wade’s favorite. He’s told me the three boats story six times in support of six different points of reference — most recently the presidential race and the American people’s blindness to the obvious.

“I do, Wade. I only get three boats.”

“What?” He can’t hear me. “You only get three, and you already had two.” He gives me a mean threat-look across the seat, where his silver Panasonic lies full of new implosion footage. “This is your last one.” My first pair of boats, I take it, symbolizes my two marriages, though they could also reference my prostate condition.

“Okay, I’ll give it some serious thought. Maybe it’ll make me more vital. I hope so.”

“How long has it been for you?” Wade drops the Olds into gear, causing a sinister metal-on-metal ker-klunk.

“How long’s what been? There’s been a lot of ‘it’s’ this year. Hard to keep ’em straight.”

“Since you were with anybody?” His scraggly old brows dart up lewdly.

“Since I was with anybody?” Wade’s lips tremble with a hint of below-the-belt seaminess. “What do you mean?” I’m still holding open the passenger door, but I must be squeezing it, because my thumb’s gotten numb. What’s the matter with the world all of a sudden?

“Ah, forget it. The hell with you.” He’s scowling up into his rearview. Conversation over. He’s ready to make a move.

“I don’t want to think about the implications of what you’re saying, Wade.” Why does this sound so pompous and stupid?

“Yeah, yeah,” Wade growls. “Think, think, thinky, think. Where do you think you’re gonna end up?”

“Go fuck yourself. Okay?” I stand back and give his car door a powerful slam closed. I can just hear him say, “Yeah, maybe I will.”

Wade’s begun backing up, using his mirror in the tried-and-true manner of the old and joint-frozen. I have to step lively since he hauls on the wheel like a stevedore, swerves and nearly swipes my foot. I can see his mouth working, in furious converse with the face in the rearview.

“Be careful, Wade,” I call out. He’s glued to his mirror and can’t see the fat red postpole holding aloft the gold sunburst Fuddruckers’ WORLD’S GREATEST HAMBURGERS sign, plus a smaller white one that says EAT HEALTHY! TRY AN OSTRICH BURGER!

The old Eighty Eight crunches straight into the postpole with a hollow metallic bung noise, the whole vehicle caroming back and jangling to a stop, giving Wade a jolt inside. He glowers up at the mirror, half-cocks his head around as three black letters off the Ostrich Burger sign spiral down — the O, the N and the H—and clatter onto his rusted-through vinyl roof.

Wade’s twisted around, facing back, able now to see the pipe he’s smacked. Without looking, he sends the Olds lurching forward in “D,” burns rubber, then stabs the brakes and stops again, the motor racing to indicate he’s somehow gotten into “N.”

“Wade!” I shout. “Hold it. Hold it.” I’m coming to give assistance, in spite of Wade being the shameless procurer for his own daughter. I’ll have to take charge of him now, transport him home in my vehicle, meet Vicki/Ricki, go to dinner, etc., etc., none of which I want to do. Too bad the Asbury cop’s left already. He could arrest Wade, call the EMS and Ricki could claim him in the Monmouth County ER, where she’d know all the procedures.

Wade’s mouth’s still working vigorously. He fires a look of betrayal out at me, seeing I’m coming to help him. I’m to blame for all of this. If I’d gone down to the Grove and made everybody happy, none of this horseshit would be happening. I don’t know what made me think I could befriend the father of a former love interest who spurned me. These conjunctions aren’t meant to happen except among the primitive Yanomami. Not in New Jersey.

Wade’s staring down at his dashboard. Rust and road crap have dislodged from the Olds’ chassis, though nothing seems broken or hanging. One of the Ostrich Burger letters has slid off his roof and lodged under the passenger-side wiper blade. It is an H. The sign now reads EAT EALTHY.

I step out in front of Wade’s car and raise my hand like an Indian. I see he’s furious. He could easily run me over. You read about these deaths in the paper every day. Wade grimaces at me through the windshield. His engine suddenly kicks up a mighty whaaaa, and I start backpedaling, my hand still up in the original peace sign, and almost stumble back on my ass as he socks it into “D” again and the Olds springs ahead with a screech, headed toward the EXIT and the traffic-clogged business street leading to the Parkway. I’m all out of the way but can feel the Olds’ side panel whip past me. It’s as if I’m not here, not even a holiday statistic. Wade’s fighting the wheel to get himself into the EXIT side of the curb-cut. His shoulder dips left, his hands still at ten and two. Brack, brack, brack. The old Eighty Eight judders, bucks, then judders again — probably the parking brake’s on — heading across the empty lot into the ENTRANCE side, not the EXIT. “Wade!” I shout again, and start walking toward his car, its brake lights glowing, exhaust shooting out. I’ll help him. I’ll drive him. The Olds dips stopped, then noses out toward the traffic that’s backed up at the red light. Though the red immediately goes to green, and the cars commence smoothly forward. Wade’s head is oscillating back and forth, hawking a place in the line, his mouth still going. I’m moving toward him. I haven’t helped him. I’m very aware of that, but I will — for all the difference it’ll make. A young woman in a blue Horizon full of kids smiles at Wade, waves a hand, motions his beater out into the flow. And in just that number of precious seconds and before I can get there to give help, Wade smoothly becomes traffic, his taillights blending into the flux of the street and on under the Parkway overpass. And gone.

12

Eyes peeled, I cruise busy 35 South — Bradley Beach, Neptune, Belmar. I’m expecting a storefront to be open at 3:30 on Thanksgiving eve, with GLASS on the menu. These places thrive on every street corner in America, though they vanish when you want one. Cultural literacy’s never perfect.

Wintry effluvium has turned my vehicle into an icebox, and I’ve cranked the heat up on my feet, my belly already sensing a mixed signal from my hot dog. The three boats parable is, in fact, a useful moral directive, and though Wade would sneer at me, in my own view I’ve heeded it by giving a wide berth to the Grove and Vicki/Ricki, or whatever her name is. Of course, my more natural habit would be to consider most all things as mutable, and to resist obstinance in human affairs, an attitude which has helped me to think more positively about Sally’s return and not to be flattened like roadkill by her abandoning me (I think of myself as a variablist). The realty profession itself thrives on the perpetual expectation of changes for the better, and is permanently resistant to the concept of either the rock or the hard place. Ann, however, once pointed out to me that a variablist can be a frog who sits in a pan of water, looking all around and feeling pretty good about things, while the heat’s gradually turned up, until cozy, happy pond life becomes frog soup.

In the three boats story, a man is floating alone in an ocean without a life jacket when a boat passes by. “Get in. I’ll save you,” the boatman says. “Oh, no, it’s fine,” the floating man answers, “I’m putting my faith in the Lord.” In time, two more boats come along, and to each rescuer the man — usually me, in Wade’s telling — says, “No, no, I’m putting my faith in the Lord.” Eventually, and it isn’t very long in coming, the man drowns. Yet when he stands up to meet his Maker at the fated spot where some rejoice but many more cower, his Maker looks sternly down and says, “You’re a fool. You’re assigned to hell forever. Go there now.” To which the drowned man says, “But your honor, I put my faith in you. You promised to save me.” “Save you!?” fearsome God shouts from misty marmoreal heights (and this is the moment the old liver-lipped procurer of his own daughter likes most, when his scaly eyelids blink down hard and his tongue darts like a grinning Beelzebub). “Save you? Save you?” God thunders. “I sent you three boats!” And off goes Frank forever.

The last time Wade told this story — in reference to who the American people should’ve chosen but probably didn’t in this doomed election now awaiting God’s wrath — God supposedly said, “Three fucking boats! I already sent you three fucking boats, you morons. Now go to hell.” God, Wade believes, sees most things as they are and has no trouble telling it.

But the point’s plain. Drowning men save themselves, no matter how it looks from the shore and even though it’s not always easy to assess your own situation. Vicki/Ricki’s my last boat, Wade believes. Though in my view (and what could she look like after sixteen years), she’s only a ghost ship out of the mists. To drive to the Grove and reconnect with that old life would be treacherous even for a variablist — as asinine as Sally heading off to Mull or Ann wanting to forge a new union with me. In the modern idiom, that boat won’t float. And I’m resolved to stay here even in the deep water, waiting for the next one, even if it’s the boat to you-know-where.

The first glass place I see — Glass, Glass, & More Glass — is closed, closed, & more closed. The second, Want a Pane in the Glass? in the 35 U-Need-It Strip Mall, has its metal grate chained to the sidewalk and everything dark within. The third, in Manasquan — forth-rightly called Glass? — appears open, though when I walk inside the dingy, echoing, oily-lit front showroom with its big sheets of plate glass leaned against the walls, there’s not a soul in evidence. I step through a door to a long, cold, shadowy room with empty wide-topped tables where glass could be cut. But no one’s around — no sounds of skilled labor in progress, or the after-work noises of back-room pre-holiday whiskey cheer. Which suddenly turns me spooky, as if a storage bin of cooling corpses awaits beyond the next door, a pre-holiday revenge-hit by elements from north of here.

“Hello,” I timidly call out — but only once — then, quick as a flash, beat it back to my freezing car.

It has somehow become four o’clock. Daylight’s sunk out of the invisible east. Sunset’s at a daunting 4:36. Brash wind and slashing rain sheets have begun whacking my windshield and beading moisture on the backseat. Headlights are now in use. It’s drive-time, the race home, the time no one but the doomed want to be on our nation’s roadways — including me, with nobody waiting at the doorway, no plans to make the hours resemble the true joy of living.

A drink’s what I require. I usually hold the line till six, a discipline well known to weary corporate accountants, single-handed sailors and hard-luck novelists in need of cheering. But six is a state of mind, and my state of mind says it’s six, which even out front of the spooky Glass? confers a jollying self-confirming certainty that positive elections can still be mine — not just refusals to drive Wade to the Grove or to romance the unspecified Ricki. I can have a drink. Some good things, warm sensations, await me.

I’m once again only a stone’s short throw from the old Manasquan Bar, below the river bridge, where I took the 34 cut-off earlier. There I can certainly have a drink (and a piss) in familiar, congenial surroundings. Save an Hour, Save an Evening — the late-occurring motto for the day.

The Manasquan, which I head straight toward, would ordinarily — as I said before — be off-limits to me due to its anchorage in the past and prone-ness to fumy nostalgias. In the middle eighties, it had its scheduled and amiable purpose. After a night’s chartered fishing excursion on the Mantoloking Belle, the Manasquan was the Divorced Men’s special venue for demonstrating residual rudimentary social, communicative and empathy skills (we actually weren’t very good at any of these things and not good at fishing, either), and we all fled to it the instant we stepped off our boat — our legs rubbery, arms weak from manning our rods, thirsts worked up. The charter captain’s mustachioed brother-in-law owned the place — an extended family of crafty Greeks. And it sat where it sat — hard by the dock — to make sure the Mouzakis family got all our money before sending us home happier but wiser. Which, as if by magic, is what happened — until it didn’t, at which point and by no agreed-upon signal, we all quit going and consigned it to the past and oblivion, where we wished our old marriages would go.

Though I sense I have nothing to fear now from the Manasquan, for reason of its prosaic, standard-dockside, snug-away character — the red BAR sign on its shingled roof, muted rose-blue accent lights, tar-ry nautical smells, plenty of cork buoys and shellacked swordfish husks on the walls alongside decades of dusty fishermen photos. It will be as it was years back: detoxified and inoculated by inauthenticity, with no negative juju powers to give me the creeps about not throwing my life over to become a second mate on a halibut hauler off the Grand Banks, and instead being a realtor — or a State Farm agent in Hightstown, or a garden supply owner-operator in Haddam, or a podiatrist in Rocky Hill — all those things we were back in ’83. Of course, I anticipated the same at the Johnny Appleseed last night, with sorry results.

I take the Manasquan jug-handle and loop down around to the small embarcadero fronting the River Marina, where banners are still up from the annual striper derby in September, an antique fair and last summer’s Big Sea Day on the beach. All is familiar — the Mouzakis Paramount Show Boat Dock and the lowly Manasquan itself, red BAR warmly glowing through the early-evening rain.

Although names have changed. The Paramount Dock is now Uncle Ben’s Excursions. The old Belle, with a fresh pink paint job, is dimly visible at the dock’s end, bearing the name Pink Lady. The shingled, barn-roofed Manasquan, once in neon above the portholed entry, has become Old Squatters, with a plain black-letter sign hung to the door itself.

And by a good stroke, across the puddled lot from the dock and bar, there’s now, outside the old Quonset shed where nautical gear was once stored for the charter business, a shingle that says BOAT, CARS, TRAILER REPAIRS. NO JOB TOO ABSURD. Lights are on in the garage and the tiny office. I swing around, stop in front and walk up to ask about a back-window repair.

Inside, a small black-haired man in need of a shave is seated behind the counter, close to a gas space heater, listening to a Greek radio station playing twiny bouzouki music while he eats an enormous sandwich. A long-legged, peroxided, pimpled kid with tattoos on his arms, possibly the son, sits in a tipped-back dinette chair across the tiny overheated office, bent over a foxed copy of The Great G atsby—the old green-gray-and-white Scribner Library edition I read in “American Existentialism and Beyond” in Ann Arbor in 1964. For decades, I reread it every year, exactly the way we’re all supposed to, then got sick of its lapidary certainties disguised as spoiled innocence — something I don’t believe in — and gave my last copy to the Toms River Shriners’ Xmas Benefit. Garage mechanics, of course, play a pivotal role in Fitzgerald’s denouement, transacted scarcely a hundred miles from here as the gull flies. It is this boy, I’m certain, who’s authored the sign outside, and he I address about my window.

His eyes raise above his book top and he smiles a perfectly receptive smile, though the older attendant never looks at me. He may only wait on other Greeks.

“Okay,” the boy says before I can explain the whole situation and how little I’ll be satisfied with. “I’ll do it. Duct tape okay?” He looks back with interest to his page. He’s near the end, where Meyer Wolfsheim says, “When a man gets killed I never like to get mixed up in it in any way. I keep out.” Sound advice.

“Great,” I say. “I’ll head over to the Manasquan and try the cocktails.” I offer a nod of trust that promises a big tip.

“Leave me them keys.” He’s wearing a blue mechanic’s shirt with a white patch that says Chris in red cursives. Likely he’s a Monmouth College student on Thanksgiving break, the first of his immigrant family to blub, blub, blub. I’m tempted to poll his views about Jay Gatz. Victim? Ill-starred innocent? Gray-tinged antihero? Or all three at once, vividly registering Fitzgerald’s glum assessment of our century’s plight — now blessedly at an end. The “boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past” imagery is at odds with the three boats imagery of the old Nick Carraway doppelganger, Wade. It’s possible of course that as a modern student, Chris doesn’t subscribe to the author concept per se. I, however, still do.

Keys handed off, I head across the drizzly gravel lot to the Old Squatters né Manasquan, heartened that the time-honored shade-tree way of doing business “While-U-Wait” is still a tradition in this part of our state — among immigrants anyway — and hasn’t caved in to the franchise volume-purchasing-power mentality that only knows “that’s on back order” or “the manufacturer stopped making those”—the millennial free-enterprise canon in which the customer’s a bit-part player to the larger drama of gross accumulation (what the Republicans want for us, though the liars say they don’t).

Dense, good bar smell meets me when I step inside, surprising for being the exact aroma I remember — stale beer, cigarette smoke, boat tar, urinal soap, popcorn, wax for the leather banquettes, and floor-sweep granules — a positive, good-prospects smell, though probably best appreciated by men my age.

The dark-cornered, barny old room looks the same as when Ernie McAuliffe pounded his fists on the table and racketed on about Ruskies — the long-raftered ceiling, the long bar down the right side, back-lit with fuzzed red and blue low-lights and ranked rows of every kind of cheap hooch you’d dream of, all reflected in a smoky mirror on which the management has taped a smiling cartoon turkey with a cartoon Pilgrim pointing a musket at it. Two patrons sit at a table at the booth-lined rear wall. There’s a tiny square linoleum dance floor, where no one ever danced in my day, and hung above it a mirror-faceted disco ball useful when things are jumping, which I don’t remember ever being the case. Once the Manasquan served a decent broasted-chicken basket and a popcorn-shrimp platter. But no one’s eating, and no food smell’s in the atmosphere. The swinging chrome doors to the kitchen are barred and padlocked.

I am, though, happy to arrive, and to take a stool at the near end of the bar, with a view toward the other patrons — two women drinking and talking to the bartender.

As I left Asbury Park, with Wade careering off toward what destiny I don’t know, and an empty nest awaiting me and the weather swarming into my car, I tried — just as I did the day I returned from Mayo last August, radiating anti-cancer contamination like Morse code — to imagine what a really good day might be. And in each instance I thought of the same thing (this strategy, as childlike as it seems, ought not be scoffed at).

Two years ago, Sally and I set off on one of our cut-rate one-day flying adventures — this time to Moline — with the intention of taking an historic boat trip down the Mississippi, visiting some interesting Algonquian earthworks, seeing a Civil War ironclad that had been hauled out of the muck and given its own museum, and maybe stopping off at the Golden Nugget casino, which the same Algonquians had built to recoup their dignity. We planned to finish the day with an early dinner in the rotating tenth-floor River Room of the Holiday Inn-Moline, then get back on the plane in time to be home by 3 a.m.

But when we got to the departure dock of the romantic old paddle-wheeler, the S.S. Chief Illini, a storm began dumping every manner of precip on us — snow, rain, sleet, hail, arriving by turns with a coarse wind at their backs. We’d bought our tickets off the Internet ahead of time, but neither Sally nor I wanted any part of a river cruise, wanted only to head back up the old cobbled streets of the historic district in search of a nice place to have lunch and to hatch a new plan for the hours that remained — possibly a leisurely trip through the John Deere Museum, since we had time to kill. I went aboard and told the boat captain, who was also the concessionaire and proprietor of the cruise business and owner of the Chief Illini, that we were sacrificing our tickets due to weather skittishness but wanted him to know (since he seemed personable and accommodating) that we’d be back another time and buy more tickets. To which the captain, a big happy-faced galoot dressed in his river pilot’s blue serge uniform with gold epaulettes and a captain’s cap, said, “Look here, you folks, we don’t want anybody not to have a good time in Moline. I know this weather’s the pits and all. I’ll just return your money, and don’t you sweat it. We’re not in the business here in River City to take anybody’s dough without rendering a first-class service. In fact, since you’ve come all this way”—he didn’t know we’d flown from Newark but recognized we probably weren’t locals—“maybe you’ll be my guest at the Miss Moline diner my sister runs, where she makes authentic Belgian waffles with farm-fresh eggs and homemade sticky buns. How ’bout I just give her a call and say you’re on your way up there? And here’re some tickets to the John Deere Museum, the best one you’ll find from here to South Dakota.”

We didn’t end up eating at the Miss Moline. But we did take in the museum, which was well-curated, with interesting displays about glaciation, wind erosion and soil content that explained why in that part of America you could grow anything you wanted pretty much anytime — forget about the growing season.

When I think about it now, here in the Manasquan — or the Old Squatters — with my window being fixed while I take my ease in these familiar detoxified surrounds, I can almost believe I made it up, so perfect a day did it produce for Sally and me, and so enduring has it been as illustration of how things can work out better than you thought — like now — even when all points of the spiritual weather vane forecast dark skies.

Okay, I could aks you again, but it ain’t good to wake up de dead.” A small mouse-faced woman with a silver flat-top and two good-sized ears full of tiny regimented gold loops stacked lobe to helix, faces me across the empty bar surface. A look of wry, not hostile, amusement sits on her lips, though her lips also have a permanent wrinkle to their contours, as if harsh words had once passed through but things had gotten better now.

I don’t know what she’s been saying, but assume it’s to do with my drink preference. I’ve decided on the time-honored highball, the all-around drinker’s drink, to commemorate the old divorced men, many of whom have now died. It’s perfect for me in my state. “I’d like a tall bourbon and soda on ice, please.”

“Dat ain’t what I sed. But whatever.”

I smile pointlessly. “Sorry.”

“I aksed wuz you sure you wuz meetin’ your friends in de right place here.” The bartender casts a look around down the bar toward her customers, two large older women elbowed in over birdbath-size cocktails, covertly eyeing me but clearly amused.

“I think so.” Her accent is pure swamp-water coon-ass, straight from St. Boudreau Parish, far beyond the Atchafalaya. She’s trying to be nice, making me know as gently as possible that the atmospheric old Manasquan has become a watering hole for late-middle-passage dykes and possibly I might be happier elsewhere, but I don’t have to leave if I don’t want to.

Except I couldn’t be happier than to be here amidst these fellow refugees. The nautical motif’s intact. The framed greasy-glass heroic fish photos still cover the walls with coded significance. The light’s murky, the smells are congenial, the world’s held at bay, as in the storied Manasquan days. Probably the drinks are just as good. I couldn’t care less whose orientation’s bending its big elbow beside mine. In fact, I feel a strong Darwinian rightness about what was once a hard-nuts old men’s hidey-hole transitioning into a safe house for tolerant, wry, full-figured, thick-armed goddesses in deep mufti (one’s wearing a Yankees cap, another a pair of bulgy housepainter’s dungarees over a Vassar sweatshirt). My own daughter used to be one of their number, I could tell them — but possibly won’t.

“I used to come in here when Evangelis owned it,” I say gratefully, referring to old Ben Mouzakis’s sister’s husband.

“Fo’ my time, dahlin’,” the bartender croons, organizing my highball. I see she has a vivid green tattoo on her skinny neck, inches below her ear. Gothic letters spell out TERMITE, which I guess could be her name, though I’m not about to call her that.

“How’s ole Ben doing?”

“He’s okay. He in the whale-watch bidnus anymore.” My drink set down in front of me, Termite (I’m only calling her that privately) begins giving a sink full of dirty glasses the three-tub, suds-rinse-rinse treatment, her little hands nimble as a card sharp’s. “Dat ole charter boat bidnus played out. He got into burials-at-sea for a while. Den dat crapped. Annend dis whale thing jumped up.”

“Sounds great.” I take a first restorative sip. Termite has poured me a double dose of Old Woodweevil, meaning it’s happy hour. Soon the bar will be filling up with big women fresh from jobs as stevedores, hod carriers and diesel mechanics — happy warriors happy to have a place of their own. I wonder if Clarissa has a tattoo someplace I don’t know about, and if so, what does it say? Not Dad, we’re sure of that.

The two shadowy women from the rear booth, one in a floral print muumuu her belly doesn’t fit into too well, the other in a bulky red turtleneck, stand up and walk arms around each other to the antique jukebox. One puts in a quarter and cues up Ole Perry singing “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” then they begin slowly to dance to the sweet-sad melody underneath the unmoving disco globe.

“She’d fuck a bullet wound, that skanky bitch,” I hear one of the two full-figured gals at the bar — the one in the Yankees cap — saying to Termite, who’s back down where they are, conniving about one of their friends.

“Well, guess what?” Termite is brazenly smirking, rising up onto her toes on the duckboards better to get into the faces of the two women patrons. “Ah ain’t no fuckin’ bullet wound. I heeerd dat. You know what ahm sayin’?” She shoots a sudden feral look my way, then lowers her voice to a big stage whisper. “Ahmo be dat bitch’s worst nightmare.” Termite, I see, wears an enormous Jim Bowie sheath knife on her oversized silver-studded black bruiser-belt that’s drawn up so tight she must have trouble breathing. She herself is entirely in black — jeans, boots, tee-shirt, eyeshadow — everything but her silver flat-top, ear decor and TERMITE tattoo. I imagine she’s already been a lot of people’s nightmare, though she’s been completely welcoming to me and could bring me another highball and I wouldn’t mind it. My car window’s not fixed yet, and the roof’s drumming with sheets of merciless rain I’m happy to be out of.

Termite sees me angling for her eye and leaves the disputers and saunters down to me, still carrying most of her fuck-you attitude with her. She’s skinny-bowlegged in her jeans, with excessive space between her taut little spavined thighs, so that she swaggers like the long-departed Charlie Starkweather, no small-change nightmare himself.

“How you doin’? You still thirsty?” She rests her little hands on the bar rail and tap-taps an oversized silver thumb ring against the wood. “You suck dat one down like you needed it.”

“It was good,” I say. “I’ll have another one just like it.” I have to take my piss now. My eye wanders to where the gents used to be.

“Oh yeah, dey good.” Termite’s filling my glass where it sits, using the old ice, lots of whiskey and a quick squirt from the soda gun. “It’s over in dat corner,” she says, seeing where I’m looking without looking there. “Light’s burnt out. It don’t get the use it used to.”

“Great.” I slide off my stool and test my walking stability, which is solid.

Termite flashes a nasty smile down at her two friends as I go, and in the same stagy voice says, “It might be a ole alligator in dere, so you better be careful.”

“Or worse,” one of the girls cracks back, and snorts.

“Okay,” I say. “Will do.”

Inside the GENTLEMEN door, nothing’s forbidding. The ceiling bulb actually works, though the grimy porcelain fixtures are decrepit fiftiesera Kohler, the hand-dryer fan’s hanging on a screw, and the woolly old window vent whose outside cover bangs in the wind lets cold mist in onto the layer of brown that gunks up everything. Still, the pissing facility’s perfectly usable. No alligators.

Plenty of messages have been left on the wall for future users to ponder, all illustrated with neatly-penciled, magic-markered or rudely carved depictions of the engorged male equipment, plus a variety of women with miraculous breasts, several demonstrating uncanny coupling postures. Appeals are made for the “Able-bodied Semen,” the “Lonely Hards Club” and “Fearless Fast-Dick Dick-tective Agency.” One, to the side of the urinal, has the nostalgic old 609 area code, with a request for “Discreet Callers Only.” Several messages propose reckless sexual chicanery with members of the Mouzakis family, including Grandma Mouzak and the Mouzakis pet sheep, Mouzy, who’s shown scaling a fence. The only items of unusual note as I complete a long, knee-weakening piss — other than the BUSH-GORE BOTH SUCK, lipsticked onto the scaly old mirror — is a chartreuse cell phone, a little Nokia that’s been tossed in the urinal as a gesture, I suppose, of dissatisfaction with its service. And beside it on the rubber grate is a half-eaten lunch-meat sandwich on white bread. It feels odd to piss on a sandwich and simultaneously into the ear hole of the miniature green telephone. But I’m past having a choice. My time in unlikely men’s rooms has tripled since my Mayo insertions, and I tend not to be as finicky as I once was.

When I re-take my place at the bar, feeling immensely better, my fresh highball’s waiting along with a new twin. Ms. Termite has stayed at my end and wants to be friendly, which makes me even happier to be here.

“So whadda you do? You some kinda salesman?” She hauls a soft pack of Camels out of her jeans, retrieves one with pinched lips and lights it with a silver Zippo as big as a Frigidaire. Click-crack-tink-snap. She exhales a gray smoke trickle out the corner of her mouth, skewing her lips like a convict. “Mind if I smoke? Ain’t spose to, but fuck it.”

“You bet,” I say, grateful for the forbidden aroma in my nostrils. When Mike fired up last night, I realized you don’t smell it as much as you used to. I’m tempted to bum one, though I haven’t smoked since military school and would probably suffocate. “I am a salesman,” I answer. “I sell houses.”

“Where at? Florida? One-a dem?”

“Right down in Sea-Clift. A ways south of here. Not far, really.”

“Oh yeah? Well ain’t dat sump’n.” Eyes squinted, her smoke in the corner of her mouth, Termite goes searching under the bar and produces a copy of the Shore Home Buyer’s Guide. The East Jersey Real Estate Board publishes this guide, and if Mike Mahoney’s done his homework, there’s a boxed Realty-Wise ad in the south Barnegat section showing 61 Surf Road, which the storm outside — vanguard of tropical depression Wayne — may now be washing out to sea.

“I been lookin’,” Termite says.

“What kind of place you lookin’ for?” I drop my g’s as a gesture of camaraderie. Termite would be a challenging client, though possibly I could let Mike do the honors. He’d think it was great — and it would be.

“Oh. You know.” She plucks a fleck of tobacco off her tongue tip and in doing so gives me a glimpse of a silver stud punched through her tongue skin like a piece of horse tack. I want it to be still so I can get a better look, but in an instant it’s flickered and gone. “Just sump’n grand, overlookin’ de ocean and dat don’t cost nothin’. Maybe sump’n somebody died in, like what used to be about the Corvette dat girl died in in Laplace and dey couldn’t get the smell out, so they had to junk it. I could live with it. You got sump’n like dat? Where was it you live?”

“Sea-Clift.”

“Okay.” She sucks a molar and rolls her punctured tongue around her cheek at the concept of a town by that name. “Course, I got my momma. She in the wheelchair since I don’t know when.”

“That’s nice,” I say. “I mean it’s nice she can live with you. It’s not nice she’s in a wheelchair. That’s not nice.”

“Yeah. Diabetes amputated her leg off.” Termite frowns as if this was, for her, personally painful.

“I see.”

The two big ladies down the bar are re-animating their conversation at higher decibels. “Every time I get on a fuckin’ plane, I think, This sumbitch is gonna blow up. Makes me sleep better if I just accept it.” The couple from the back booth are still dancing, though Perry has long ago finished his Christmas song.

“Look. Lemme aks you somethin’.” Termite hikes her booted foot onto the lip of the rinse sink and holds her smoke like a pencil between her thumb and index finger. In spite of her tough-as-rivets, knife-wielding personal demeanor — little biceps veined and sculpted, brown eyes slightly, skeptically bulged, ringed fingers raw and probably callused from pumping iron — she is not the least bit masculine. In fact, she’s as feminine as Ava Gardner — just not in the same way as Ava Gardner. Her waist, with her big silver and black belt pulled tight, is as tiny as a dragonfly’s. And her breasts, possibly encased in something metal under her black muscle shirt, are sizable breasts no man would sniff at. I’d like to know what her mother calls her at home. Susan or Sandra or Amanda-Jean. Though she’d pop you in the kisser if you breathed it. “Where you come from originally?”

“I’m pure cracker,” I say. “Mississippi.”

“I heeerd dat,” Termite sneers. A lineage check means we’re aiming toward subject matter her customers down the bar wouldn’t tolerate, something, in her experience, only another southerner could possibly comprehend: exactly why your colored races are constitutionally unsuited to work a forty-hour week; the consequences of their possessing statistically proven smaller brains; why they can’t swim or leave white women alone. It’s too bad there can’t be something good to come from being a southerner. However, I’m getting happily drunk on my second highball and these are subjects easily skirted.

“Okay. See. I read this.” Termite inches in close to the bar, drops her voice. “Your brain don’t have no manager, see. Not really. It’s just like a plant. It go dis way, den it go dat way. Dey ain’t no self ever runnin’ it. It just like adapts. We all just like accidents dat we got minds at all.” Her little rodent’s face grows solemn with the dark implications of this news. I know something about this matter from my bathroom study of the Mayo newsletter, where such matters are regularly reported on. The mind is a metaphor. Consciousness is cellular adaptation, intelligence is as fortuitous as pick-up sticks. All true. I only hope Termite’s not vectoring us toward adumbrations about The Lord and His Overall Design. If she is, I’ll run right out into the storm. “You know what ahm sayin’?” She’s whispering in a secret-keeping voice the other bar patrons aren’t supposed to hear. “You know what ahm sayin’?” she says again.

“I do.”

“Millennium! What fuckin’ Millennium?” The big boisterous girls are getting drunker, too, and have decided they’ve got the place to themselves, which they nearly do. No one’s come in since I did. “I musta been in the crapper when that happened!”

Termite gives them a disgusted look and begins spindling the Shore Home Buyer’s Guide into a tight tube, scrolling it smaller and smaller into itself until it looks solid. “So, see,” she says, still confidentially. “Like I’m fifty-one”—I’d have said forty—“and I try to like test ma mind sometimes. Okay?” I smile as if I know, and simultaneously try to know. “I try to think of a specific thing. I try to remember somethin’. To see if I can. Like — and it’s usually a name — de name of dem flowers with red berries on ’em we useta always have at Christmas. Or maybe something’ll come up when ahm talking, and I wanta say, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s like…’ Den I can’t think of it. You know? They’s just a hole there where what I want to say ought to be. It ain’t never nuttin important, like what’s Jack Daniel’s or how you make a whiskey sour. It’s like ahm sayin’, ‘…and den we all drove over to Freehold.’ But den I can’t say Freehold. Dat ain’t the best example. ’Cause I can say Freehold, whatever. But if I give you a good example, den I won’t think of it. I can’t even think of a good example. You know what I’m talkin’ about with dis thing?”

Termite takes a long consternated drag on her Camel, then douses it in the rinse sink and tosses the butt into a black plastic garbage can behind the bar, blowing smoke straight down without lowering her head.

“I’ve had that happen to me plenty of times,” I say. Who hasn’t? This is the kind of pseudo-problem that would easily succumb to a Sponsor call. And as always, my solution would be: Forget the hell about it. Think about something better — a new apartment with a wheelchair ramp and maybe a Jenn-Air and lots of phone jacks. Your mind’s not the fucking Yellow Pages. You’ve got no business asking it to perform tasks it’s not interested in just so you can show off. To me, it’s a worse signal that anybody would ever worry about these things than that he/she can’t remember every little bit of nibshit minutiae you can dream up but that maybe doesn’t even exist.

“Pyracantha?”

“Say what?” Termite blinks at me.

“That Christmas flower with the red berries.”

“Dere it is, okay. But dat ain’t all. ’Cause the real baddest thing is that when I can’t get what you just said into my mind, den I worry about dat, and den dat like opens the floodgates for stuff you wouldn’t believe.”

“What stuff?”

“Stuff I don’t wanna talk about.” Termite guardedly eyes the two large-bodies down the bar again, as if they might be snickering at her. They are, in fact, pulled in close together, whispering, but holding hands like married bears.

“But I mean, true stuff?” I’m wondering but not wondering very hard.

“Yeah, true stuff. Stuff I don’t like to think about. Okay?”

“You bet.” I take a subject-changing sip of my — now — third happy-hour highball. I may have had enough. I don’t have the stamina I used to. I’m also on the brink of a discussion that threatens to tumble into seriousness — the last thing I want. I’d rather talk about beach erosion or golf or the Eagles’ season or the election, since I’m sure these girls have to be Democrats.

“You think ahm losing my mind?” Termite asks accusingly.

“Absolutely not. I don’t think that. Like I said. I’ve had that happen to me. Your mind’s just got a lot in it.” Tattoo and piercing decisions, who’s a good knife sharpener, her invalid mom.

“’Cause Mamma thinks mebbe I’m losing it. Ya know what ahm sayin’? And sometimes I think I am, too. When I want de name of some got-damn red flower, or whatever dat woman’s name is who’s the Astronaut — whatever — then I can’t think of it.” Her lips curl in a smile of disgust with herself — a look she’s used to.

And then, in by-the-book bartender protocol, she turns and walks away, resuming something with the lovebirds who’ve been smooch-dancing to Perry. I hear her say, “…they just treat Thanksgiving like it really meant somethin’. What I want to know is, what is it?”

“Me, too,” one of the slow dancers speaks, with an echo that registers sadly in the bar.

Termite’s left me the spindled Home Buyer’s Guide. I intend to show her my ad and leave my card. Sometimes a new vista, a new house number, a new place of employ, a new set of streets to navigate and master are all you need to simplify life and take a new lease out on it. Real estate might seem to be all about moving and picking up stakes and disruption and three-moves-equals-a-death, but it’s really about arriving and destinations, and all the prospects that await you or might await you in some place you never thought about. I had a drunk old prof at Michigan who taught us that all of America’s literature, Cotton Mather to Steinbeck — this was the same class where I read The Great Gatsby—was forged by one positivist principle: to leave, and then to arrive in a better state.

I take this opportunity to climb off my stool and walk to the porthole door and have a check across the lot to find out if my car window’s ready. It isn’t. Chris, the Fitzgerald scholar, has pulled it into the fluorescent-lit garage bay and is moving around the murky shop interior, seeming to be in search of the right materials for the job. The other man, small and raffish and unshaven, stands at the office door, looking up at the rain-torn skies as if into a cloud of sorry thoughts. Edward Hopper in New Jersey.

I reclaim my bar stool and remind myself to grab another piss or be faced with again relieving myself in the rain, behind some darkened Pathmark, where I’ve already been caught more than once by security patrols, resulting in a lot of unwieldy explanation. In each instance, however, the officers were moonlighting middle-age cops and completely sympathized.

Termite’s staying down with the girls at the end of the bar. No one else has shown up for happy hour (weather and the holiday are always negatives). I leaf through the Buyer’s Guide, perusing the broker-associate faces in their winning, confidence-pledging smiley cameos. The glam Debs, Lindas and Margies with their golden silky hair, big earrings, plenty of lens gauze to disguise what they really look like, and the men all blow-dried Woodys and mustachioed Maxes in hunky poses — blue jeans, open-collar plaids, tasteful silver accessories and gold throat jewelry. Most of what’s for sale are “houses,” our term of art for cookie-cutter ranches and undersized split-levels — nothing different from our basic inventory in Sea-Clift. Every few pages, there’s a grandiose one-of-a-kind “palatial beach estate” that doesn’t list the price but everyone knows is seizure-inducing.

My 61 Surf Road listing is back on page ninety-six, a boilerplate box with the Doolittles’ house in washed-out color, a shot captured by Mike using our old Polaroid. It strikes me again, even knowing what I now know, that it’s as good as there is at this location, at this time, at this price. There are nicer listings in Brielle, but at twice the ticket. Monday morning, I’ll call Boca and discuss options regarding foundation issues and amending the disclosure statement. “Foundation needs attention” is naturally a death knell in a saturated market unless the buyer sees the whole thing as a tear-down. My bet is the Doolittles jerk the listing and hand it to a competitor who knows nothing about the foundation. I’m not sure I’d blame them.

“Hey! You!” the big Yanks-cap mama bear down the bar (she’s shit-faced) is addressing me. I smile as if I’m eager to be spoken to. “You wouldn’t happen to be named Armand, would you? And you wouldn’t happen to be from Neptune, I guess?”

“Or Ur-a-nus.” Her can’t-bust-’em friend bursts out a guffaw.

“Nope. Afraid not.” Smiling back winningly. “Sea-Clift.”

“Told ya,” the overall woman gloats.

“Big deal. Well then, do you wanna dance? I promise I’m a woman.”

“He doesn’t give a shit,” her companion stage-whispers, leaning in front of her to grin down at me. “Look at him.” More laughing.

“That’s really nice. But no thanks,” I say. “I’m taking off pretty soon.”

“Who isn’t?” she growls. “Tough luck for you. I’m a good dancer.”

“On her feet and yours, too,” her friend mocks.

“You two should dance,” I say.

“There you go,” the second woman agrees.

“Where I go?” the first woman grumbles, and they immediately forget about me.

It is a fine and fortunate feeling to be beached here — stranger and welcomed onlooker. I could’ve easily gotten mired into nowhere-no-time, with only the night’s dark cave in front of me. But I’m not. I’m found, though I’m not sure anyone but me would see it like that.

Still, my day has accomplished much of what I wanted when I set forth — which is full immersion in events. Three occurrences have been of a positive nature: a good if unproductive house showing, a successful implosion and a salubrious interlude here. Versus only two and a half of a low-quality: a not-good kitchen encounter with my daughter and her beau; my car busted into; Wade blowing a gasket and ending up — where? (Home, I hope.)

Any of the latter events would be enough to set a man driving to North Dakota, ending up at a stranger’s farmhouse east of Minot, pleading amnesia and letting himself be sheltered for the day — Turkey Day — before regaining his senses and heading home. Suffice it to say, then, that when you see a man bending an elbow, head down, shoulders hunched before a dark brown drink, chatting elliptically, sotto voce with the barkeep, looking tired-eyed, boozy, but apparently happy, you should think that what’s being transacted is the self giving the self a much-needed reprieve. The brain may not have a true manager, but it’s got a boss. And it’s you.

Several pairs of fresh patrons have rumbled in out of the rain, which turns the bar more festive. All the ladies — a couple being 200-plus-pounders — are in some species of loose-fitting work clothes with durable footwear, as if they were members of the pipe fitters’ union. Some have donned amusing headgear (a pink beret, a zebra-striped hard hat, a backwards Caterpillar cap), and they’re all in cracking good spirits, know everyone else’s name and are joking and ribbing one another just like a bunch of men — though these women are younger than men would be, and more amiable and tolerant, and would undoubtedly make better friends.

They each give me a surreptitious appraising eye upon entering and share a quick naughty remark, as if I was actually a woman. One or two of them smile at me in a haughty way that means, we’re happy you’re here, we’re on our best behavior, so you better be on yours (which I intend to be). Termite, they all treat like a beloved little sister, but a scandalous little sister with a vicious mouth any parent would have trouble with. She stalks the duckboards with their drink orders, calling everyone “gents” and “goyls” and “douchebags,” occasionally wisecracking something down to me that I’m not supposed to answer. She drifts my way, eyes snapping, offers me something known as an “Irish Napalm” that the “goyls” all like, and that’s served on fire. “They’ll all be wanting ’em in a minute,” she says in a tough, loud voice over the enlarged noise, “after which all shit’ll break loose in here. Anyway, an-y-way.” She’s forgotten about having talked to me twenty minutes ago about being afraid she’s going crazy.

“De thing I want to know,” she says, leaning in again, tiny eyes slitted, as if this is definitely not for general consumption, her right hand resting on her bowie knife handle, “is — when did everything get to be about bidnus? You know what ahm sayin’? Bidnus this, bidnus that.”

One thing I hadn’t noticed, now that Termite’s moved in close to me again, is that she’s wearing silvery orthodontic appliances on her lower incisors, in addition to her silver tongue rivet — which makes her look even stranger.

“The business of business is business,” I say with a frank expression to suggest I know what that means.

“Okay.” She nods, then glances over her shoulder at her bar full of business, as if the new raucousness in here gives us some privacy we hadn’t had. “You a good listener. Did ma old husband, Reynard, hear one thing I ever said, ah mighta been stayed married to dat knucklehead. You know what ahm sayin’? But no way. Uh-uh. Wudn’ no listenin’ involved. Just him talkin’ and me jump’n round like a old hop-frog.”

“That’s too bad. Some men aren’t good listeners, I guess.”

“Oh yeah.” She sucks a tooth and looks down. “You a good-lookin’ man, too. You got you a good young hotsy down-ere where you livin’ at Sea-what’s-it-called?” Termite suddenly smiles at me both directly and sweetly, a smile that features her lower line of silver braces, and tentatively advances a thought that a better, stronger bond might form between us, with other things possibly permissible.

“I do,” I cheerfully lie. I’m picturing my daughter with polyethnic Thom, who I hope never to see again.

Termite’s sweet smile turns instantly professional-impersonal. “Yeah. Well. Das good. Yep,” she says crisply. “Happy hour almost over wid. You need anything?”

“I’m already happy,” I say, wanting to sound affirming about all her life’s prospects but one.

“Dere you go,” she says, and turns straight away again and saunters down the duckboards, proclaiming, “Now ya’ll fatsos try to control ya’ll selves.”

“Fuck you and that goat you rode in on, you skinny little bitch,” one of the women shouts in merry mirth, and they all convulse full-throated.

I browse back through the curled pages of the Buyer’s Guide, wanting to give mechanic Chris another ten minutes. These publications can actually be the most helpful and news-packed that any citizen could hope for when entering a community or region where he knows no one and might grow dispirited and feel tempted just to head home to Waukegan. In the interest of plain and simple commerce, but for the price of nothing, the Guide provides a well-researched list of “essential services,” crisis numbers, “Best Bet” Italian, Filipino and Thai cuisines, walk-in wellness clinics, an e-mail address for a mortgage-consultant clearing house, emergency dental care and pet health hot-line numbers, oxygen tank delivery, bump shops and bail bondsmen. And, of course, bi-weekly training classes in the real estate profession. There’s even a list of local numbers for Monmouth and Ocean County Sponsors Anonymous. Plus, many small-business opportunities are advertised, situations where you can walk in and take over like I did. I always find one or two new summer rental properties every year by leafing through these pages on slow Saturday afternoons in January — often chalets I could buy myself if they’re in presentable shape, or manage for a good fee if they’re not. I also read through these crowded pages just to acquire (by osmosis) some sense of how we’re all basically doing, what we need to be wary of, look forward to or look back on with pride or relief. These spiritual sign-pointers are revealed to me in old fire stations, rectories or Chrysler agencies that are for sale, or once-thriving businesses in turnaround, or the number of old homes versus new ones on the sale block, or the addresses and plat maps of new constructions, the ethnicity (gauged by the names) of who’s selling what, who’s doing the cooking or who’s going out of business. And finally, of course, what costs what, versus what used to cost what. There’s in fact a listing in the middle Green Pages of every property sold in Monmouth and Ocean counties and how much was paid and by whom — sure signs of the time. Little of this will be anything I make a note about or mention to Mike in our Monday strategy breakfasts at the Earl of Sandwich. It’s just the soft susurrus, the hick and tick of the engine that warms us when it’s cold, soothes us when it’s beastly, and that we all hear and feel on our arms, necks and faces like atmosphere, whether we know it or whether we never do.

On page sixty-four, however, amidst all that’s familiar, a new Guide feature attracts my eye, part of a double-truck layout for the Mengelt Agency in Vanhiseville. Mengelt offerings are generally small, characterless scrub lots in old interior suburbs on their way to extinction, exactly like the ones Mike and I rode past on our trip to Haddam. The Mengelt motto, in hopeful serifs, is, “We find your home. You find the happiness.” There’s the usual row of tiny page-bottom snapshots showing the mostly unsmiling, mostly female Mengelt agents — a new batch of Carols, Jennifers and a Blanche — contributing to the impression that the institution of marriage may be losing some traction in Vanhiseville.

But in a larger framed box, under the title “Profiles in Real Estate Courage,” is a sharp color photo of “Associate of the Month” Fred Frantal, smiling and cherub-cheeked, a sausage of a fellow with a round weak chin, crinkly hair, a fuzzy mustache and two happy, saucerish eyes. Fred’s wearing a red-and-green lumberjack shirt that hints of a decent-size personal sculpture below the frame. And under his picture there’s printed a lengthy story apparently pertaining to Fred, which the Mengelt associates want the world to know about. I’d probably be smart to plaster Mike’s squinting, beaming mug onto our ad, with a boiled-down account of his improbable but inspirational life’s journey from Tibet to the Jersey Shore. It would attract the curious, which is often where commerce begins.

“‘Frog’ Frantal,” the Mengelt story goes, “is not just our Associate of the Month but our Associate of the Millennium. A two-year Vanhiseville resident and graduate associate from Middlesex Community College, Fred got gold-plated lucky when he married Carla Boykin back in ’82 and moved to Holmeson to be an EMS technician for the H’son Rescue Unit, where he saved many lives and made a big impression on many others. Fred and Carla raised two great kids, Chick and Bev, and have always trained Rottweilers. The Frantals moved to Vanhiseville in 1998, when Fred retired from the FD, having earned his real estate license at night. He joined the Mengelt family last year and made an instant impact here, too, on our residential sales, due to his EMS contacts and generally positive outlook (he loves cold calls). Fred’s a Navy vet, a brown belt in tae kwon do, an avid surfcaster and snowmobiler, a Regular Baptist Church member and these days is in demand as a motivational speaker on youth and grieving issues. Sadly, last winter tragedy struck the Frantals, when their son Chick, 20, was killed by a drunken snowmobiler in eastern PA. We all mourned Fred and Carla’s loss. But with support of friends, loved ones and the Mengelt crew, Fred’s back and ready to list your house and sell you another one. Frog has topped our leaders board eight of the last ten months, and deserves the distinction of Associate of the Millennium. He believes that whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, and that you meet triumph and disaster and make friends with both. If either of these describes your current real estate situation, give Fred a call at (732) 555-2202, or e-mail him at frog@mengelt.com. Happy Thanksgiving from all of us!”

Voices in the bar. Laughter. The tinkle-clinkle of glasses. Shuffle of booted feet, squeezing bar-stool leather, heavy coats rustling, exhale of heavy breaths. Outside, there’s the hiss of wind, the spatter splat of rain on the metal roof. A sigh of a door closing. These sounds of mutuality and arrival recede down a hallway, yet grow more distinct, as though I viewed the livening bar on a screen, with the sound track elsewhere.

Down the bar, little silver-haired Termite frowns toward me, narrows her eyes suspiciously, then turns back to the bar full of women, all laughing at something. Someone says, pretty loud, “So it turns out, see, that China’s really fucking BIG.” “Whoa,” someone else says.

I am, I now perceive, immobilized on my stool, though in no danger of toppling off. I don’t feel drunk, though I could be. My head isn’t swimming. My extremities aren’t dulled or immobilized. I’d recognize all the money denominations in my pocket if I had to, could pay my tab and walk right out into the stormy parking lot and take command of my vehicle (which must be fixed by now). Yet I’m heavy-armed and moored to the bar rail, my heels stuck to the brass footrest. My empty highball glass seems small and distant — once again, as when I was a feverish kid and the contents of my room got pleasantly distant, and the sound of my mother’s footsteps in another room were all I experienced of ambient sound.

I’ve said it before. I do not credit the epiphanic, the seeing-through that reveals all, triggered by a mastering detail. These are lies of the liberal arts to distract us from the more precious here and now. Life’s moments truly come at us heedless, not at the bidding of a gilded fragrance. The Permanent Period is specifically commissioned to combat these indulgences into the pseudo-significant. We’re all separate agents, each underlain by an infinite remoteness; and to the extent we’re not and require to be significant, we’re not so interesting.

And yet. In this strange, changed state I for this moment find myself, and for reasons both trivial and circumstantial (the bar, the booze, the day, even Fred Frantal), my son Ralph Bascombe, age twenty-nine (or for accuracy’s sake, age nine), comes seeking audience in my brain.

And I am then truly immobilized. And with what? Fear? Love? Regret? Shame? Lethargy? Bewilderment? Heartsickness? Whimsy? Wonder? You never know for sure, no matter what the great novels tell you.

It may go without saying, but when you have a child die — as I did nineteen years ago — you carry him with you forever and ever after. Of course you should. And not that I “talk” to him (though some might) or obsess endlessly (as his brother, Paul, did for years until it made him loony), or that I expect Ralph to turn up at my door, like Wally, with a wondrous story of return or of long, shadowy passageways with luminous light awaiting, from which he bolted at the last second (I’ve fantasized that could happen, though it was just a way to stay interested as years went by). For me, left back, there’s been no dead-zone sensation of life suspended, hollowed, wind-raddled, no sense of not leading my real life but only some consolation-prize life nobody would want — I’m sure that can happen, too.

Though what has developed is that my life’s become alloyed with loss. Ralph, and then Ralph being dead, long ago became embedded in all my doings and behaviors. And not like a disease you carry that never gets better, but more the way being left-handed is ever your companion, or that you don’t like parsnips and never eat them, or that once there was a girl you loved for the very first time and you can’t help thinking of her — nonspecifically — every single day. And while this may seem profane or untrue to say, the life it’s made has been and goes on being a much more than merely livable life. It’s made a good life, this loss, one I don’t at all regret. (The Frantals couldn’t be expected to believe this, but maybe can in time.)

Of course, Ralph’s death was why Ann and I couldn’t stay married another day seventeen years back. We were always thinking the same things, occupying and dividing up the same tiny piece of salted turf, couldn’t surprise and please each other the way marrieds need to. Death became all we had in common, a common jail. And who wanted that till our own deaths did us part? There would be a forever, we knew, and we had to live on into it, divided and joined by death. And not that it was harder on us than it was on Ralph, who died, after all, and not willingly. But it was hard enough.

Out of the rosy bar-light distance, as though emerging from a long passageway, so long she’ll never reach me in my state — I’m drunk, okay — is Termite, thumbs provocatively in her black denim pockets, inquisitive grin on her mousy mouth, eyes shining, fixed on me. We are like lovers who’ve become friends late in life: She knows my hilarious eccentricities and failures and only takes me half seriously. I love her to bits but no longer feel the old giddy-up. We could spend hours now just talking.

“You know all what I was yakkin’ about back den? I’m probably gon’ forget about it tomorrow. It ain’t permanent — goin’ crazy. You know whut ahm sayin’?” She sweeps away my empty highball glass, drops it plunk into the sudsy sink. “Do you say drought or drouth?” She stares across at me, though her face has turned suspicious in a hurry, as though I’d offered her a counterfeit tenner. She takes a step back, cocks her flat-topped head, her mouth curls cruelly the way I knew it could. “Whut’s wrong witch you?”

Unexpectedly, my eyes flood with tears, my hot cheeks taking the runoff. I’ve known about them for the better part of a minute but have been stuck here, unable to blink or wipe my nose with my sleeve or to think about a trip to the gents or about seeking a breath of rescue in the out-of-doors. I don’t know what to say about drought or drouth. Dry comes into my mind, as does I’m in a terrible state. Though like a lot of terrible states, it doesn’t feel so bad.

“I–I—” My old stammer, not heard from in years but always lurking were I to laugh inconsiderately at another stammerer — which I never do — now revisits my glottus. “I–I-I don’t know.” I want to smile but don’t quite make it.

Termite’s hard little ferret’s eyes fix on me. She performs one of her flash glances back down the bar, as if my predicament needs to be kept under wraps. “Wadn’t nuthin I said,” she announces, but not loud.

“N-n-n-o.” My hands clutch the Buyer’s Guide and give it another fierce re-spindling. N is a hard one for stutterers. My chest empties as if somebody has just stamped on it. Then it heaves a big sigh-sounding noise, which I manage not to let out as a groan, though stifling it hurts like hell. I have to get out of here now. I could die here.

“You piss drunk is all,” Termite snarls. This is not old-lovers-become-friends. This is, “I’ve seen the likes of you all my life, been married to it, fucked it, wallowed in it, but I’m well out of it as you see me now.” That’s what this is.

“Ahhh, yeah.” This time an actual groan issues forth. Then more tears. Then a shudder. What’s going on? What’s going on? What’s going on?

“Jew drive here?”

“Yeah.” I reach my nose with my jacket sleeve and saw back and forth.

“You drive off and git in a wreck and kill some kid, you ain’t sayin’ you been in here. You got dat? I’m spose to take dem keys”—She regards me with revulsion, right hand on her silver bowie knife hilt. How can things change so fast? I haven’t done anything—“but I don’t wanna touch you.” She snorts back a stiff breath, as if I smell bad.

I am climbing off my bar stool, feeling light-headed but terribly heavy, like a sandbag puppet.

“Y’hearin’ what ahm sayin’?” Her eyes narrow to a threat. Termite might be her real name.

“Okay. Sure.” From my pocket I produce a piece of U.S. paper currency along with my Realty-Wise card. It could be a million-dollar bill. These I place on the bar. “Thanks,” I say, my mouth chromy. My hands are cold, my feet thick.

Termite doesn’t regard my pay-up. I’ve become her problem now, something else to lose sleep over. Will there be repercussions? Her job in jeopardy? Jail time? One more thing not to be thankful for.

But I’m already away, heading for the door, my gait surprisingly steady, as if the way out was downhill. I am, in fact, not drunk. Though what I am is a different matter.

Rain needles sting my cheeks, nose, brow, chin, neck when I make it out into the dark parking lot — painful but alerting. It was burning up in there, though I was frozen. Again, I may be catching something.

Cars with cadaverous colored headlights pass over the Route 35 bridge, motoring home to relatives, a quiet night before the holiday tangle, a long weekend of parades, floating balloon animals, football and extra plate-fulls. I have no idea what time it is. Since Spring Ahead gave way to Fall Back, I’ve been uncertain. It could be six or nine or two a.m. Though I’m clear-headed. My heart’s beating at a good pace. I even give a sudden optimistic thought to Ann and Paul (and Jill) in Haddam, enjoying each other’s company, reacclimating, forging new bonds. I don’t feel panicky (though that could be a sure sign of panic). It is merely odd to be here now — the opposite of where the evening seemed to be heading, though, again, I had no plans.

But bad luck, bad luck heaped on bad luck! The Quonset across the lot looms dark and silent, from all appearances closed up forever, the big metal door rolled down, the office — I can see from here — wearing a fat bulletproof padlock that catches a glint off the sulfur lights from the boatyard next door. Cut-out turkeys and Pilgrims in happy holiday symbiosis are taped to the window there, too. NO JOB TOO ABSURD.

I am incensed — and breathless. If I could just get out of here, I’d gladly hunt down the faithless Chris asleep somewhere, and strangle him in front of his father, uncle, whatever, then smoke a cigarette before attacking the old man with a pair of needle-nose pliers. Except I spy a rear bumper’s shine, a BUSH? WHY? sticker and a pale-blue-and-cream AWK 486, Garden State plate — mine. My Suburban’s parked in the oily shadows between the Quonset and a pile of tire discards. Left out, where I’m supposed to find it. I’ll send young Chris a whopper check that’ll pay his way through Monmouth and pave the path to dental school. If he’d hung around, I’d have bought him a shore dinner and told him about the things in life he needs to beware of — starting with lesbian bars and the false bonhomie of treacherous little coon-ass bartenders.

I hustle through the remnant mist, avoiding the lakes and flooded tire tracks. Most of the women in Squatters seem to have arrived in pickups with chrome toolboxes or else junker Roadmasters with rusted rocker panels. Despite the shadows, Chris, I can see, has performed a creditable repair, including sweeping out the broken glass. My window’s masked by multiple layers of gray duct tape backed by a slat of jigsawed plywood fitted to the hole. I could drive it this way for weeks and be fine.

The driver door’s unlocked and the interior I crawl into stiff and cold and dank. My eyes are still flooding with unavailing tears. But I am eager to get going.

Only where are the keys? The ones with the fake Indian arrowhead and miniature beaded warrior-shield fob made by the retarded son of Louis the Dry Cleaner and for sale on a card for three dollars (and you’d better buy one or your shirts come back with their buttons crunched). I handed them to Chris just before the “boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly” part. He had them, or the car wouldn’t be here and fixed. I saw it half-in the lighted garage bay when I checked — how long ago? Twenty minutes. How can a place of business go dark and its employees vamoose like ghosts all in twenty minutes? Why wouldn’t he just skip across and give me the high sign, a hand signal, a raised eyebrow, two monosyllables—“Yer done.” Cultural literacy should make this kind of masculine transaction a no-brainer — even in Greece. But not in Manasquan.

I go rifling through all the places keys can hide. The visor. The side map pocket. The glove box — full of extra chalet keys. The ashtray. Under the rubber floor mat. In the fucking cup holder. Tears are flowing, my fingers clammy, stinging when I scrape them on every sharp or rough surface. I’ve given my extra set to Clarissa in case I fall over dead and there’re complications with the authorities about getting my valuables sacked up and returned in a timely fashion. These things happen. How mindless would it have been to have Assif Chevrolet-GMC requisition twenty extras to distribute in every corner of my existence. I swear that on Monday, when I take my window hole for proper fixing (assuming I make it to then), I’ll issue the order no matter the cost, even though computer chips aren’t cheap. I consider getting out in the cold and crawling underneath, probing my bunged fingers under the gritty bumpers, into the wheel wells, inside the grille face. Though I’d only soak myself and compromise my flu-shot immunity. In any case, I know the sons of bitches aren’t there. They’re hanging “safely” on a fucking nail in the office, attached to a paper tag that says “Older dude. Red Sub keys. Payment due,” meaning the little Greek cocksuckers didn’t trust me to pay the twenty-five bucks the moment the sun comes up tomorrow; were happier to let me do whatever in hell a human being does in asshole Manasquan outside a dyke bar, the night before Thanksgiving, when you’re too crocked to call the police. While-U-Wait, my ass.

I pound my fists on the steering wheel until they ache and it’s ready to crack. “Why, why, why?” These actual words come with an all-new freshet of frustrated tears. Why did I do what’s so ill-advised? Why did I risk the Manasquan, knowing what might lurk here? Why did I, a nunce, trust a Greek? One who reads Fitzgerald? Faithless Chris, himself a callow young Nick. Why, oh why did I rashly count my blessings and leave myself at risk? Thanksgiving? Thanksgiving’s bullshit.

I should’ve driven down to the Grove with Wade, hied off with a mid-forties-body-style Ricki, downed the martinis, eaten the hanger steak, skived away in the night, right to the blind golfers Quality Court to test the lead left in the ole pencil. What higher ground am I occupying? For what greater purpose am I preserved? Do I have anything to accomplish before I’m sixty that makes an unserious boinking a bad idea when it never was before? Am I preserving clarity? Am I too good, too intent, too loyal, too cautious, too free to grab a little woogle when it’s offered and otherwise in short supply?

Tears and more tears come fairly flooding. Rage, frustration, sorrow, remorse, fatigue, self-reproach — a whole new list. Name it, I’ve suddenly got it. I gawk around through the fogged windows at the Squatters’ lot. A low-rider Chevette idles through and noses into the handicapped space. Two women in big coats climb out, one on crutches, and move slowly through the doors, which when open cast a blue-red blur into the night, where I’m trapped, wanting, needing someone to help me. No one inside would even remember me, though probably plenty possess automotive skills.

It’s another moment for cell-phone service. A chance to use the Triple-A I never bought. The ideal dilemma for an in-car computerized hot-line-to-Detroit for dispatched emergency assistance — though my Suburban’s a ’96. Too old. Of course, there aren’t pay phones anymore.

And for God’s sake and beyond all: What else is happening to me out here? I’m not about to die (I don’t think). “Bascombe was discovered deceased in his car outside a Manasquan bump shop, across from an alternative night spot on Thanksgiving morning. No further details are available.” No, no, no. Except this feeling I’m having reminds me of death and presents itself as pain right where my heart ought to be; only nothing’s spazzing down my arm, no light-headed, gasping or blue-faced constriction. It’s as if I’d done death already. Though I’d give anything, promise any promise, admit anything just to not feel this way, to see instead a hopeful, trusting Sponsoree materialize out of the misty night, seeking good counsel for his or her issues and shifting the focus away from mine. Since mine seem to be not that I’m dying, but that I just have to be here in some fearsome way — and me the last person on earth to truckle with stagy ideas of be-ness. Be-ness means business to me. (What is it about being trapped in your cold vehicle with no help coming and the promise of the night spent curled up like a snake in the luggage compartment that gives rise to the somberest of thoughts: the finality of one’s self, in defeat of all distractions put in the way? Possibly it’s cloying Thanksgiving itself — the recapitulative, Puritan and thus most treacherous of holidays — that clears away the ordinary pluses and leaves only the big minuses to be totaled.)

Of course, anyone could tell, even me, that it’s the Frantals’ sad family mini-saga that’s whop-sided me into painful, tearful grieving (if you’ve lost a child, other people’s child-loss stories magnetize around you like iron filings). And what else would you call my symptoms but grieving? Inasmuch as tucked away in the Home Buyer’s Guide, where I’d least expect it, is the juggernaut of acceptance—grief’s running mate. Their acceptance — of life’s bounty and its loss — which the world can honor, in the Frantals’ case, by plunking down some earnest money on a cunning Cape on Crab Apple Court.

But what the hell more do I need to accept that I haven’t already, and confessed as the core of my be-ness? That I have cancer and my days are numbered in smaller denominations than most everyone else’s? (Check.) That my wife’s left me and probably won’t come back? (Check.) That my fathering and husbanding skills have been unexemplary and at best only serviceable? (Check.) That I’ve chosen a life smaller than my “talents” because a smaller life made me happier? (Check, check, double check.)

More tears are falling. I could laugh through them if I didn’t have a potentially self-erasing pain in my chest. What is it I’m supposed to accept? That I’m an asshole? (I confess.) That I have no heart? (I don’t confess.) But what would be the hardest thing to say and mean it? What would be the hardest for others? The Frantals? For Sally? For Mike Mahoney? For Ann? For anybody I know? All good souls to God?

And of course the answer’s plain, unless we’re actors or bad-check artists or spies, when it’s still probably plain but more tolerable: that your life is founded on a lie, and you know what the lie is and won’t admit it, maybe can’t. Yes, yes, yes, yes.

Deep in my heart space a breaking is. And as in our private moments of sexual longing, when the touch we want is far away, a groan comes out of me. “Oh-uhhh.” The sour tidal whoosh the dead man exhales. “Oh-uhhh. Oh-uhhh.” So long have I not accepted, by practicing the quaintness of acceptance by…. “Oh-uhhh. Oh-uhhh.” Breath-loss clenches my belly into a rope knot, clenching, clenching in. “Oh, oh, ohhhhhpp.” Yes, yes and yes. No more no’s. No more no’s. No more no’s.

A single rain spatter strikes the hood of my cold vehicle. I’m roused and gaunt, mouth open. Ears stinging. Fists balled. My feet ache. My neck’s stiff. My interior parts feel wounded, as if I’d been sealed in a barrel, tupped off a cliff, then rolled and rolled and rolled, bracing myself inside until stopped, upon a dark terrain I can’t see but only dream of.

“What now?” These are spoken words I manage. In the rearview, through the fogged back glass, there’s still the red smear of BAR across the lot. Two cars are left — the low-rider and a big Ram club cab. It feels late. Traffic on the 35 bridge has thinned to a trickle. “What now?” I offer again to the fates. I breathe a testing breath (no heart pain), then a deeper, colder one I fill my chest with and hold for my inner parts to register back. My temples go bump-bump-bump-bump behind my eyes, which feel tight. It’s better to close them, hands in my lap, cold knees together, elbows in, cranium on the headrest, chest expanded with held-in air. Dampness sits in the cockpit. I breathe out my deep inhale. And though it’s said (by ninnies) that we can never experience the exact moment of sleep’s arrival, still — and in a speed that amazes me — I do. “So it turns out, see, that China’s really fucking BIG” are the words I’m thinking, and they are like velvet with their comfort.

Tap, tap, tap. Tap, tap, tap. A pale moon’s face, young, mostly nose and chin and eyebrows, hangs outside my window glass — apprehensive, puzzled, a slight uncertain smile of wonder.

Is he dead? Is it too late?

At first it doesn’t scare me. And then, when I realize how deep in sleep I’ve been, I’m startled. My eyes blink and blink again. My heart goes from imperceptible to perceptible. Robbed, bludgeoned, dragged, heels in the muck, to the cold Manasquan and schlumped onto the tide like a rolled-up rug. I shrink from the glass to escape. I utter a small frightened sound. “Aaaaaaaaaa.”

The moon’s mouth is moving. Its muffled voice says, “I went to a club over in…” Static, static, static…“I seen your vehicle from the bridge…like…” Static, static.

I gawk through the glass, unable to fix on the face. My cheeks are cobwebby, my mouth bitter and dry. I’m frozen in my jacket and thin pants, but I’m willing to go back to sleep and be murdered that way.

“…So, are you, like, okay?” the pimpled young moon mouth says.

“Yep,” I say, not knowing who to.

But criminals don’t wonder if you’re okay. Or they shouldn’t.

The muffled voice outside says, “Did you find your keys?” An agreeable grin says, You’re a poor dope, aren’t you? You don’t know a goddamn thing. You’ll always have to be helped.

I push at the window button. Nothing happens. I struggle at the ignition, where there’s no key inserted. Things fall into place.

Chris speaks something else, something I can’t make out. I push open the heavy-weight door right into his chest and forehead as I hear him say “…under the mat.”

I stare up. He is no longer in his blue mechanic’s shirt that shows off his tattoos, but in a Jersey long-coat of inexpensive green vinyl manufacture, which makes him look like a seedy punk and is meant to. He’s cold, too, his hands stuffed in his shallow pockets. He’s rocking foot to foot. His nose is running, his forehead reddened, his hair a yellow tangle. But he is in positive spirits, possibly a little wine-drunk or stoned.

Cold air smacks my cheeks. “What time is it?”

Chris breathes out a congested nasal snurf. “Prolly. I don’t know. Midnight.” He looks over to Squatters. The BAR sign’s dark, but visible. No cars sit outside. Route 35’s a ghost highway, the bridge empty and palely lit. A garbage truck with a cop car leading it, blue flasher turning, moves slowly south toward Point Pleasant. “I seen your rig still here. I go, ‘Uh-oh, what the fuck is this?’” Chris shudders, tucks his chin into his lapel and breathes inside for warmth.

“I looked under the goddamn mat,” I say. I’m feeling extremely rough, as if I’d been manhandled for the second night in a row. I’m grinding my molars and must look deranged.

“That mat out front of the office,” Chris says, fidgety, chin down, pointing around toward the front door at a mat that’s invisible from my car. “We leave ’em there. That way, the car looks like it’s just sitting.”

“How the hell am I supposed to know that?”

“I don’t know,” says Chris. “It’s how everybody does it. How’d you get in?”

“It was unlocked.” I am slightly dazed.

“Oh. Man. I messed that up. I shoulda locked it. Lemme get them keys.”

Chris doesn’t act like a struggling American Existentialist scholarship boy at Monmouth, but a sweet, knuckleheaded grease monkey weighing a stint in trade school or the Navy. He is who he ought to be. It is a lesson I could apply to my son Paul if I chose to, and should.

Chris hustles back with my arrowhead fob, but grinning. “Didn’t you get cold in ’ere?” He swabs his nose, sucks back, hocks one on the gravel. He is someone’s son, capable of a good deed performed without undue gravity. He has saved me tonight, after nearly killing me. I now see he has SATAN inked into the flesh of his left metacarpals and JESUS worked into the right ones. Both inexpertly done. Chris is on a quest, his soul in the balance.

“Yeah, but it was fine,” I say. “I went to sleep. How much for the window?” I straighten my left leg, where I’m sitting half out the door, so I can reach my billfold. I’m tempted to ask who’s winning his soul. Old number 666 rarely has a chance anymore except in politics.

“Thirty,” he says. “But you can mail it to him. It’s all shut up. I gotta get home. Tomorrow’s a holiday. My wife’ll kill me.”

Wife! Chris has one of those already? Possibly he’s older than he looks. Possibly he’s not even Greek. Possibly he’s a father himself. Why do we think we know anything?

“Me, too.” A marital lie to make me feel better. “Thanks.” I effect a sore-necked look back at the duct-taped window, seemingly as impregnable as a bank.

“No problem,” Chris says. His skin-pink Camaro with a bright green replacement passenger door sits idling behind us, headlights shining, interior light on, its door standing open. “You’d be surprised how many of them babies I fix a month.” He grins again, a boyish grin, his teeth straight, strong and white. He’s leaving, rescue complete, heading home to his Maria or his Silvie, who won’t be mad, and will thrill to his return (after modest resistance).

“How old are you?” It seems the essential question to ask of the young.

“Thirty-one.” A surprise. “How ’bout you?”

“Fifty-five.”

“That ain’t so old.” His breath is thin smoke. His vinyl coat affords little warmth. “My dad’s, like, fifty-six. He does these tough-guy competitions for his age group, up at the convention hall in Asbury. He’s on his fourth wife. Nobody fucks with him.”

“I bet not.”

“Bet they don’t fuck with you,” Chris says to be generous.

“Not anymore they don’t.”

“There you go.” He breathes down into his lapel again. “That’s all you gotta worry about.”

“Happy Thanksgiving,” I say. “Early.” We are beating on, Chris and me, against the current.

“Oh yeah.” He looks embarrassed. “Happy Thanksgiving to you, too.”

Conceivably it’s two. I’ve avoided clocks on my drive home, likewise during the passage through my empty house. Knowledge of the hour, especially if it’s later than I think, will guarantee me no sleep, promising that tomorrow’s celebration of munificence and bounty will degrade into demoralized fatigue before the food arrives.

Clarissa’s bedroom window’s been left open, and I crank it closed, intentionally noticing nothing. I listen to none of my day’s messages. I’ve shown one house to one serious client on the day before Thanksgiving, a day when most toilers in my business are headed off to convivial tables elsewhere. For that reason I’m ahead of the game — which is generally my tack: With few obligations, turn freedom into enterprise. Thoreau said a writer was a man with nothing to do who finds something to do. He would’ve made the realty Platinum Circle. His heirs would own Maine.

But passing by my darkened home office a second time, I’m unable to resist my messages. After all, Clarissa herself might’ve called with a plea that I shoot down and collect her at the elephant gate at the Taj Mahal. In my unwieldy state of acceptance, I concede that something once unpromising could show improvement.

Clare Suddruth has, not surprisingly, called at six — a crucial interval, and at the vulnerable cocktail hour. He says he definitely wants to “re-view” the Doolittle house on Friday, if possible. “At least let’s get through the damn front door this time.” He’s bringing “the boss.” “At my age, Frank, there’s no use worrying about the long run in anything.” He says this as if I hadn’t spoon-fed him those very words. Estelle, the MS survivor, has been counseling with Clare about matters eschatological. I’m just relieved not to have to call the Drs. Doolittle with unhappy news that would cost me the listing. Though Clare’s the type to come in with a low-ball offer, consume weeks with back-and-forth and then get pissed off and walk away. My best strategy is to say I’m tied up until next week (when I’ll be at Mayo) and hope he gets desperate.

Call #2 is from Ann Dykstra, more cut-and-dried-businessy than last night’s sauvignon blanc ramble about what a good man I am, what a long transit life is, me snagging the Hawk’s liner at the Vet in ’87. “Frank, I think we need to talk about tomorrow. I’m thinking maybe I shouldn’t come. Paul and Jill just left, which was very strange. Did you know she only has one hand? Some awful accident. Maybe I’m just saving myself.” What’s wrong with that? “Anyway, maybe I’m getting ahead of myself on several fronts. I sort of sense you may feel the same. Call me before you go to bed. I’ll be up.”

Too late.

Call #3 listens to my Realty-Wise recording, waits, breathes, then says “Shit” in a man’s voice I don’t recognize and hangs up. This is normal.

Call #4 is from the Haddam Boro Police — putting me on the alert. A Detective Marinara. The room where he’s speaking is crowded with voices and phones ringing and paper rattling. “Mr. Bascombe, I wonder if I could talk to you. We’re investigating an incident at Haddam Doctors on eleven twenty-one. Your name came up in a couple of different contexts.” A tired sigh. “Nothing to be alarmed about, Mr. Bascombe. We’re just establishing some investigative parameters here. My number’s (908) 555-1352. That’s Detective Mar-i-nar-a, like the sauce. I’ll be working late. Thanks for your help.” Click.

What investigatory parameters? Though I know. The boys at Boro Hall are hard at it, connecting dots, leveling the playing field. My license number was mentally logged by Officer Bohmer. Dot one. My years-old connection with the grievously unlucky Natherial (who couldn’t have been the target) has been cross-referenced from his list of life acquaintances. Dot two. Possibly my passing association with Tommy Benivalle (who’s conceivably under indictment somewhere) has hit pay dirt via the FBI computer. Dot three. My fistfight with Bob Butts at the August has disclosed an unstable, potentially dangerous personality. Dot four. Who of us could stand inspection and not come out looking like we did it — or at least feeling that way? I am again a person of interest and my best bet is to call and admit everything.

Call #5 is, also predictably, from Mike, at ten, and sounds as if he may have been into the sauce (he’s a Grand Marnier man). Mike hopes that I’ve enjoyed an excellent day with my family around me (I haven’t); he also notes that Buddha permits individuals to make decisions without giving offense because “the nature of existence is permanent, which can include temporarily taking up a quest to free oneself from the cycle of time.” There’s more, but I don’t intend to hear it at what is probably two-something. He’ll be naming streets in Lotus Estates by Monday. His arc is shorter than most.

I’m relieved there’s no call-out-of-the-weirdness from Paul, and half-relieved/half not that there’s nothing from Wade. Nothing’s from Clarissa. And I’ll be honest and admit, in the new spirit of millennial necessity, that not a night begins and ends without a thought that Sally Caldwell might call me. I’ve played such a call through my brain cells a hundred times and taken pleasure in each and every one. I don’t know where she is. Mull or not Mull. She could be in Dar es Salaam, and I’d welcome a call gratefully. A lot of things seem one way but are another. And how a thing seems is often just the game we play to save ourselves from great, panicking pain. The true truth is, I wish Sally would come home to me, that we could be we again, and Wally could wear a tartan, hybridize many trees and be satisfied with his hermit’s lot — which he chose and, for all I know, may long for, given the kind of lumpy-mumpy bloke he was in this house. Possibly I will call her on Thanksgiving, use the emergency-only number. Nothing has qualified as an emergency — but may.

The sea and air outside my window are of a single petroleum density, with no hint of the tide stage. One socketed nautical light drifts southward at an incalculable distance. I’ve always attributed such lights to commercial craft, dragging for flounder, or a captaincy like the Mantoloking Belle, commandeered by divorced men or suicide survivors or blind golfers out on the waves for a respite before resuming brow-furrowing daylight roles. Though I know now, and am struck, that these can be missions of another character — grieving families scattering loved ones’ ashes, tossing wreaths upon the ocean’s mantle, popping a cork in remembrance. Giving rather than taking.

When our sweet young son Ralph breathed his last troubled breath in the now-bomb-shattered Haddam Doctors, in time-dimmed ’81 (Reagan was President, the Dodgers won the Pennant), Ann and I, in one of our last free-wheeling marital strategizings — we were deranged — sought to plot an “adventurous but appropriate” surrender of our witty, excitable, tenderhearted boy to time’s embrace. A journey to Nepal, a visit to the Lake District, a bush-pilot adventure to the Talkeetnas — destinations he’d never seen but would’ve relished (not without irony) as his last residence. But I was squeamish and still am about cremation. Something’s more terrifying than death itself about the awful, greedy flames, the sheer canceling. Whereas death seems a regular thing, a familiar, in no need of fiery dramatizing, orderly to the point of stateliness, just as Mike says. I couldn’t cremate my son! Only to have him come back in powdered form, in a handy box, with a terrifying new name I’d never forget in four hundred years: Cremains! I’ve scattered the ashes of two Red Man Clubmen, and these residues turn out not to be powdered nearly enough, but are ridden through with bits of bone — odorless gray grit — like the cinders we Sigma Chi pledges used to shovel onto the front walk of the chapter house in Ann Arbor.

Ann felt exactly the same. We had two other children to think about; Paul was seven, Clarissa five. Plus, there was no way to transport a whole embalmed body on an around-the-world victory lap. It would’ve cost a fortune.

For a few brief hours, we actually thought about, and twice talked of donating Ralph’s physical leavings to science, or of possibly going the organ donor route. Though we pretty quickly realized we could never bear the particulars or face the documents or stand to have strangers thank us for our “gift,” and would never forgive ourselves once the deeds were done.

So finally, with Lloyd Mangum’s help, we simply and solemnly buried Ralph in a secular ceremony in the “new part” of the cemetery directly behind our house on Hoving Road, where he rests now near the founder of Tulane University, east of the world’s greatest expert on Dutch elm disease, a stone’s throw away from the inventor of the two-level driving range and, as of yesterday, in sight of Watcha McAuliffe. Interment at sea — a shrouded bundle sluiced off the aft end of a sportfishing craft with a fighting seat and a flying deck, performed under cover of darkness and far enough out so the Coast Guard wouldn’t come snooping — wasn’t an option we knew about. But it’s on my list for when my own time arrives and final thoughts are in the ballpark.

But. Acceptance, again. What have I now accepted that visits me in my stale bedroom, where I’m warm and dank beneath the covers, my stack of unread books beside me, and at an unknown but indecent hour? What is it that rocked me like an ague, turned me loose like a flimsy ribbon on a zephyr? All these years and modes of accommodation, of coping, of living with, of negotiating the world in order to fit into it — my post-divorce dreaminess, the long period of existence in the early middle passage, the states of acceptable longing, of being a variablist, even the Permanent Period itself — these now seem not to be forms of acceptance the way I thought, but forms of fearful nonacceptance, the laughing/grimacing masks of denial turned to the fact that, like the luckless snowmobiler Chick Frantal, my son, too, would never be again in this life we all come to know too well.

It’s this late-arriving acknowledgment that’s unearthed me like a boulder tumbled down a mountain. That was my lie, my big fear, the great pain I couldn’t fathom even the thought of surviving, and so didn’t fathom it; fathomed instead life as a series of lives, variations on a theme that sheltered me. The lie being: It’s not Ralph’s death that’s woven into everything like a secret key, it’s his not death, the not permanence — the extra beat awaited, the mutability of every fact, the grinning, eyebrows-raised chance that something’s waiting even if it’s not. These were my sly ruses and slick tricks, my surface intrigues and wire-pulls, all played against permanence, not to it.

Hard to think, though, that the Frantals alone could’ve sprung me this far loose with their sad acceptance qua sales pitch. Chances are, with the year I’ve had, I was headed there anyway, preparing to meet my Maker. When I asked what it was I had to do before I was sixty, maybe it’s just to accept my whole life and my whole self in it — to have that chance before it’s too late: to try again to achieve what athletes achieve when their minds are clear, their parts in concert, when they’re “feeling it,” when the ball’s as big as the moon and they hit it a mile because that’s all they can do. When nothing else is left. The Next Level.

A cooling tear exits my eye crease where I’m turned on the pillow to face the inky sea. The single-lighted ship is nearly past the window’s frame. Possibly they do more than one cremains box per night if no mourners are along. This could be what the funeral business means when it says “We’re trustworthy.” No tricks. No shameless practices. No doubling up. No tossing Grandma Beulah in the dumpster behind Eckerd’s. We do what we say we’ll do whether you’re along or not. A rarity.

Somewhere below the ocean’s hiss I hear Bimbo’s doggy voice, musical within the Feensters’ walls, yap-yap-yap, yap-yap-yap. Then a muffled man’s voice — Nick — not decipherable, then silence. I detect the murmur of the Sumitomo banker’s limo as it motors down Poincinet Road past my house for his early morning pickup, hear two car doors close, then the murmured passage back. No Thanksgiving for the Nikkei.

My last tear, after this many, and many more not shed, is a tear of relief. Acceptable life frees you to embrace the next thing. Though who’s to say it all wouldn’t have worked fine anyway — those familiar old rejections and denials performing their venerable tasks. Years ago, I knew that mourning could be long. But this long? Easy to argue some things might be better left alone, since permanence, real permanence, not the soft blandishments of the period I invented, can be scary as shit, since it rids you of your old, safe context. With whom, for instance, am I supposed to “share” that I’ve accepted Ralph’s death? What’s it supposed to mean? How will it register and signify? Will it be hard to survive? Can I still sell a house? Will I want to? And how would it have been different if I’d accepted everything right from the first, like the CEO of GE or General Schwarzkopf would’ve? Would I be living in Tokyo now? Would I have died of acceptance? Or be in Haddam still? God only knows. Maybe all would’ve been about the same; maybe acceptance is over-rated — though the shrinks all tell you different, which just means they don’t know. After all, we each carry around with us plenty of “things” that’re unsatisfactory, “things” we’re wanting to undo or ignore so other “things” can be happier, so the heart can open wider. Ask Marguerite Purcell. As I said, acceptance is goddamned scary. I feel its very fearsomeness here in my bed, in my empty house with the storm past and Thanksgiving waiting with the dawn in the east. Be careful what you accept, is my warning — to me. I will if I can.

Out in the dark, I hear a motorcycle, nazzing, gunning, high-pitched, somewhere out on Ocean Avenue, though it fades. Then I think I hear another car, a smaller foreign one with narrow-gauge tires and a cheap muffler, slowing at my driveway. For a moment, I think it’s Clarissa, home now, with Thom in the Healey, or alone in a rented Daewoo — safe. I’ll hear the front door softly open and softly click closed. But that’s not it. It’s only the Asbury Press. I hear music from the carrier’s AM as his window lowers and the folded paper whaps the gravel. Then the window closes and the song fades—“Gotta take that sentimental journey, sen-ti-men-tal jour-ur-ney home.” I hear it down the street and down into my sleep. And then I hear nothing more.