The Lay of the Land

13

Brrrp-brrrrp! Brrrp-brrrrp! Brrrp-brrrrp! Brrrp-brrrrp!

My Swiss telephone, stylish, metal, minuscule (a present from Clarissa on my return to the land of the living), sings its distressing Swiss wake-up song: “Bad news, bad news for you (and it ain’t in Switzerland, either).”

I clutch for the receiver, so flat and sleek I can’t find it. My room’s full of morning light and cottony, humid, warmer air. What hour is it? I knock over my pile of books, detonating a loud and heavy clatter.

“Bascombe,” I say, breathless, into the tiny voice slit. This is never how I answer the phone. But my heart’s pounding with expectancy and a hint of dread. It’s Thanksgiving morning. Do I know where my daughter is?

“Okay, it’s Mike.” This is not how he talks, either. My answer-voice has startled him. He says nothing, as if someone’s holding a loaded gun on him.

“What time is it?” I say. I’m confused from too deep sleep, where I believe I was having a pleasant dream about eating.

“Eight forty-five. Did you hear my message last night?”

“No.” Half true. I didn’t listen past the Buddhist flounces and flourishes.

“Okay—” He’s about to tell me it’s been one heckuva hard decision, but the world’s a changing place and, even for Buddhists, is entirely created by our aspirations and actions, and suffering doesn’t happen without a cause and effort is the precondition of positive actions — the very reason I didn’t listen last night. I’m in bed, fully clothed, with my shoes still on, the counterpane wrapped around me like a tortilla. “Could you drive over to 118 Timbuktu at eleven and meet me?”

“What the hell for?”

“I sold it.” Mike’s accentless voice is fruity with exuberance. “Cash deal.”

“One eighteen Timbuktu’s already sold.” I’m about to be aggravated. Acceptance is right away posing a challenge. I’m relieved, of course, it’s not Clarissa telling me she and lizard Thom are married, that I somehow missed all the big clues yesterday. “It’s up on trucks,” I say. “I’m moving it over to 629 Whitman.” Our Little Manila section, which has begun gentrifying at an encouraging rate. He knows all this.

“My people want the house right now, as is.” It’s as though the whole idea tickles him silly and has elevated his voice half an octave. “They want to take over the moving and put it on a lot on Terpsichore that I’m ready to sell them.”

“Why can’t this wait till Monday?” I’m about to doze off, though I have to piss (the third time since 2 a.m.). Outside my open window, up in the scrubbed azure firmament, white terns tilt and noiselessly wheel. The air around my covers feels soft and cushiony-springlike, though it’s late November. Laughter filters up from the beach — laughter that’s familiar.

“You hold the deed on that, Frank.” Mike uses my name only at moments of all else failing. Usually, he calls me nothing at all, as if my name was an impersonal pronoun. “They have to buy it direct from you. And they’re ready right now. I thought you might just drive over.”

He, of course, is right. I sold 118 Timbuktu in September to a couple from Lebanon (Morris County), the Stevicks, who planned to demolish it first thing next spring and bring in a new manufactured dwelling from Indiana that had a lifetime guarantee and all the best built-ins. I stepped back in and offered to take the house in lieu of commission, since it’s a perfectly good building. They agreed and I’ve been arranging to move it to a lot I own on Whitman, where it’ll fit in and bring a good price because the inventory’s low over there. At 1,300 sq. ft., it’ll be bigger than most of its Whitman Street neighbors and be exactly the kind of small American ranch any Filipino who used to be a judge in Luzon, but who over here finds himself running a lawn-care business, would see as a dream come true. Arriba House Recyclers (Bolivians) from Keansburg have been doing the work on a time-permits basis, and throwing me a break. I’m looking at a good profit slice by the time the whole deal’s over. Except, if I sell it off the truck like a consignment of hot Sonys, get a good price (less Mike’s 2 percent), dispense with the rigamarole of moving a house up Route 35, getting a foundation dug and poured and utilities run, paying for all the permits and line-clearance fees, I’d need to have my head examined not to do Mike’s deal on the spot. It’s true that as deeded owner, only I can convey it if we’re conveying this morning. (We call deals like this WACs, for “write a check.”) Only I’m not certain I have the heart for real estate on Thanksgiving morning, even if all I have to do is say yes, sign a bill of sale and shake a stranger’s hand. The Next Level and universal acceptance may be closing the shutters on the realtor in me.

I haven’t spoken for several moments, and may have gone to sleep on the phone. I hear laughing again, laughing that’s definitely known to me but unplaceable. Then a voice talking loudly, then more laughter.

“Can we do it?” Mike’s voice is forceful, anxious, fervent — odd for a Tibetan who’d rather cut a fart in public than seem agitated. Possibly I’ve discouraged him. What about Tommy Benivalle?

“Will I come where?”

“To Timbuktu.” A pause. “One eighteen. Eleven o’clock.”

“Oh,” I say, pushing my head — still sore from Bob Butts’ wrenching it — deep into the yielding pillow, letting air exit my lungs slowly, then breathing in body odor in my winding-sheet, loving being where I am, but where I cannot stay much longer. “Sure,” I say. “Sure, sure.”

“Terrific!” Mike says. “That’s terrific.” He says “terrific” in his old Calcutta telemarketer style, as when a housewife in Pennsauken tumbled to a set of plastic-wicker outdoor chairs and a secret bond was forged because she thought he was white: “Terrific. That’s terrific. I know you’re going to enjoy that, ma’am. Expect delivery in six to ten weeks.”

The laughing voice, the laughing man I see when I stand to the window for the day’s first gaze at the beach, the sky, the waves is my son Paul, hard at work with a shovel, digging a hole the size of a small grave in the rain-caked sand between the beach and the ocean-facing foundation wall of my house, where some rhododendrons were planted by Sally but never thrived. The hole must be for his time capsule, which Clarissa told me about but which doesn’t seem present now. What would a time capsule look like? How deep would you need to bury one for it to “work”? What haywire impulse would make anyone think this is a proper idea for Thanksgiving? And why do I not know the answer to these questions?

Paul is not alone. He’s spiritedly shoveling while talking animatedly from three feet down in his hole to the tiny Sumitomo banker, Mr. Oshi, who’s surprisingly back from work and standing motionless beside Paul’s hole, dressed in a dark business suit as shovel-fulls of sand fly past onto a widening pile. Paul’s hair looks thinner than when I saw him last spring, and he’s heavier and is wearing what look like cargo shorts and a tee-shirt that shows his belly. He has the same goatee that connects to his mustache and surrounds his mouth like a golf hole. Though his haircut, I can see, is new — a style that I believe is called the “mullet,” and that many New Jersey young adults wear, and also professional hockey players, but that on Paul looks like a Prince Galahad. Mr. Oshi appears to be listening as Paul yaks away from his hole, haw-hawing and occasionally gesturing out toward the ocean with his shovel (from my utility room, no doubt), nodding theatrically, then going on digging. Mr. Oshi may also be trying to speak, but Paul has him trapped — which is his usual conversational strategy. Two dachshunds are rocketing around off the leash through the dune grass (where they’re forbidden) and out onto the beach, then back round the house and the hole and out of sight. These must be Mr. Oshi’s wiener dogs, since he’s holding in each hand what looks like a sandwich bag of dog crap that I’m sure he’d like to get rid of. Such is the private nature of neighborly life on Poincinet Road, that I’ve never seen these dogs before.

As the first thing one sees on Thanksgiving morning, it’s an unexpected sight — my son and Mr. Oshi in converse. Though I’m sure it’s what the higher-ups in Sumitomo hope for when they dispatch a Mr. Oshi to the Shore: chance encounters with the natives, cultural incumbency taking root, exchange of ground-level demographic and financial data, gradual acceptance of differences, leading quickly to social invisibility. Then bingo! The buggers own the beach, the ocean, your house, your memories, and your kids are on a boat to Kyoto for immersion language training.

Still, it’s saving that I’ve seen Paul before he sees me, since I’d begun — terrible to admit this — to dread our moment of meeting following last spring’s miscommunication. I’ve pictured myself standing in the middle of some indistinct room (my living room); I’m smiling, waiting — like a prisoner who hears the footfalls of the warden, the priest and the last-mile crew thudding the concrete floor — anticipating my son to come down a flight of stairs, open a closed door, emerge from a bathroom, fly unzipped, and me just being there, grinningly in loco parentis, unable to utter intelligible sounds, all possible good embargoed, nothing promising ahead. No wonder fathers and sons is the subject of enigmatic and ponderous literatures. What the hell’s it all about? Why even go near each other if we’re going to feel such aversion? Only the imagination has a prayer here, since all logic fails.

What I desire, of course, is that the freshening spirit of acceptance render today free of significant pretexts, contexts, subtexts — texts of any kind; be just a day when I’m not the theme, the constant, not expected to make things better, having now, with an optimistic outlook, put holiday events into motion. (I’m by nature a better guest than a host anyway.) But isn’t that how we all want Thanksgiving to be? Perfectly generic — the state of mind we enjoy best. In contrast to Xmas, New Year’s, Easter, Independence Day and even Halloween — the fraught, load-bearing holidays? We all project ourselves, just the way I do, as regular humans capable of experiencing a regular human holiday with selected others. And so we should. It was what I intended: Acceptance — a spirit to be thankful for.

Only easier said than done.

The beach beyond the grassy furze — where my son’s digging away and lecturing poor captive Mr. Oshi — is nonetheless a good beach for a holiday morning. After last night’s drought-ending rain, the air has softened and become salt-fragrant and lush, tropical depression Wayne having missed its chance with us. Light is moist and sun-shot. A tide is changing, so that fishermen, their bait pails left back on the sand, have edged out into the tame surf to cast their mackerel chunks almost to where a pair of wet-suited kayakers is plying a course up the coast. Tire tracks dent the beach where the Shore Police have passed. A few straggler tourists have returned with the good weather to stroll, throw Frisbees, shout gaily, let their kids collect seashells above the waves’ extent. Mr. Oshi’s dachshunds skirmish about like water sprites. Surely here in the late-autumnal tableau one can feel the holiday’s sweetness, the chance that normal things can happen to normal folk, that the sun will tour the sky and all find easy rest at day’s end, full of gratitude on gratitude’s holy day.

Though my son’s vocalizing and excavating make me know that for normal things to happen to normal folk, some selected normal folk in a frame of mind of acceptance, prudence and gratitude need to get kick-started and off the dime. Since the day is full, and it is here.

I’ve awakened to several new certainties, which make themselves known, as certainties often do, when I’m in the shower — the first pertaining to the day’s clothing commitments. As I’ve already said, I prefer mostly standard-issue “clothes.” Medium-weight chinos I buy from a New Hampshire mail-order firm where they keep my size, cuffing preferences, inseam — even which side I “dress” on — stored in a computer. I generally wear canvas or rawhide belts, tabbed to the season; white or pale oxford-cloth shirts, or knitted pullovers in a variety of shades — both long sleeve and short — along with deck shoes, penny loafers or bluchers all from the same catalog, where they showcase everything on unmemorably attractive human mannequins, pictured beside roaring fireplaces, out training their Labradors or on the banks of rilling trout streams. I hardly have to say that such clothing identifies me as the southern-raised frat boy I am (or was), since it’s a style ideal for warm spring days, perched on the balcony at Sigma Chi, cracking wise at passing Chi O’s, books to bosoms, headed to class. These preferences work very well in the house-selling business, where what I wear (like what I drive) is intended to make as little statement as possible, letting me portray myself to clients as the non-risk-taking everyman with a voice of reason, who only wants the best for all, same as they want for themselves. Which happens to be true.

However, for today I’ve decided to switch away from regular clothes, based on the first perceived certainty: that something different is needed. My new attire is not to dress up like a Pilgrim, ready to deliver an oration like the kids over in the Haddam Interpretive Center. I merely mean to wear blue relaxed-fit 501s — I had them already, just never thought to put them on — white Nikes from a brief try at tennis two years back, a yellow polo and a blue Michigan sweatshirt with a maize block-M, which the alumni association sent me for becoming a lifetime member (there was other stuff — a substandard-size football, a Wolverine bed toy, a leather-bound volume of robust imbibing songs — all of which I threw in the trash). I’m dressing this way strictly for Paul’s benefit, since it will conceivably present me as less obviously myself — less a “father,” with less a shared and problematic history, even less a real estate agent, which I know he thinks is an unfunny joke (a greeting-card writer being a giant step up). Dressing like an orthodontist from Bay City down for the Wisconsin game will also portray me as a willing figure of fun and slightly stupid in a self-mortifying way Paul generally appreciates, permitting us both (I hope) to make wry, get-the-ball-rolling jokes at my expense.

My father always wore the same significant blue gabardine suit, with a button-hole poppy in his wide lapel, for Thanksgiving dinner, while my mother always wore a pretty one-piece flowered rayon dress — pink azaleas or purple zinnias — with sling-back heels and blazing stockings I hated to touch. Their attire lives in my mind as the good touchstone for what Thanksgiving symbolized of material and spiritual life — steadiness. I had a blue Fauntleroy outfit given to me by Iowa grandparents, although I hated every minute I had it on and couldn’t wait to wad it in the back corner of my closet in our house in Biloxi. But my parents didn’t experience the same challenges with me that I face with Paul — resentment, zany oppositional behavior, too-abundant access to language, eccentric every-day appearance — jeopardy, in other words. Plus, at the Next Level, all things count more and can be ruined. So you could say that I’m building a firewall, allowing myself to become an accepting new citizen of the new century, walling myself off from being an asshole by dressing exactly like one in hopes everybody will get my well-intended message.

The second batch of certainties I’ve awakened clear-headed about and mean to put into motion even before heading to Timbuktu are: (1) call Ann to make sure she doesn’t show up today (there is acceptance here, but it’s of rejectionist character); (2) call the Haddam PD to be certain Detective Marinara understands I’m not a hospital bomber, but a citizen ready to help in any way I can; (3) send the thirty dollars plus a tip to the car repair, though I lack the address, so will have to deliver it in person; (4) call Clarissa’s cell phone to find out her arrival time to start hostessing Thanksgiving — and to make certain she’s not married; (5) call Wade in Bamber Lake; (6) put in an overseas call to Sally to inform her that after careful thought I officially accept the logic that it’s worse to let a person you love be alone forever when you don’t have to — and I’m that person.

Actually, I have done some homework on this last topic and now believe that “Sally-Wally”—I think of them in the same spirit as “priced to sell,” “just needs love,” “move in today”—makes about as much sense as wanting your dead son to come back to life, or wanting to marry your long-divorced former wife, and has the same success potential: Zero. And therefore something different and better has to goddamn happen now—and will — just like when Wally showed up at my doorstep as empty-headed as a rutabaga, and something had to happen then. And did.

I definitely, however, am not going to tell Sally I have, or did or still do have a touch of cancer, since that could be viewed as a cheap late-inning win strategy — and might even be — and therefore prove unsuccessful. One of the hidden downsides of being a cancer victim/survivor is that telling people you’ve got it rarely comes out how you want it to, and often makes you feel sorry for the people you tell — just because they have to hear it — and spoils a day both of you would like to stay a happy day. It’s why most people clam up about having it — not because it scares them shitless. That only happens the first instant the doctor tells you and doesn’t really last that long, or didn’t in my case. But mostly you don’t tell people you’ve got cancer because you don’t want the aggravation — the same reason you don’t do most things.

From my desk upstairs, where I go to make my calls, I detect unfamiliar noises downstairs. It’s too bad the prior owners never carried out their retrofitting plans for a maid’s quarters/back staircase, so I could see what’s what down there now. Paul, I believe, is still outside digging and lecturing Mr. Oshi, since his voice is still audible, laughing and yorking like a used-car salesman. This noise downstairs, then — morning TV noise, plates rattling, strangely heavy footfalls, a feminine cough — can only be Jill, the one-handed girl (which I’ll believe when I see).

Call one I decide to make to the Haddam PD. Detective Marinara won’t be there anyway and I can just leave my cooperative citizen’s message. Only he is there, picks up on the first half ring with the standard indifferent-aggressive TV cop greeting, full of dislike and spiritual exhaustion. “Mar-i-nara. Hate Crimes.”

“Hi, it’s Frank Bascombe over in Sea-Clift, Mr. Marinara. I’m sorry, I didn’t get your call till late.” I must be lying and am instantly nervous.

“Okay. Mr. Bascombe? Let me see.” Pages shuffling. Clickety-click, click-click. My name’s on a list, my number traced automatically. “Okay. Okay.” Clickety-click-clickety. I imagine the youthful bland face of a small-college dean of students. “Looks like—” A heavy sigh. Words come slowly. “We got a match. On your VIN at the crime scene yesterday. This is about the explosion here in Haddam, at Doctors Hospital. You might’ve read about it.”

“I was there!” I blurt this. Producing instant galactic silence on the line. Detective Marinara may be flagging to other cops at other desks, silently mouthing, “I got the guy. I’ll keep him on the line. Get the Sea-Clift police to pick him up. The fuck.”

“Okay,” he says. More silence. He is trained to be as emotionless as a museum guard. These people always call. They can’t stand not to be noticed. Actually, they want to be caught, can’t bear freedom; you just have to not get in their way. They’ll put the noose around their own necks. I’m sure he’s right.

More clickety-clicking.

“I mean, I was there because I came over to eat lunch at the hospital.” I’m fidgety, self-resentful, breathless. Paul’s voice is still audible through the bedroom window, in through my office door. Distant children’s voices are behind his. Out of the empty blue empyrean, I hear the calliope sounds of a Good Humor truck patrolling the beach, appealing to the hold-out holiday visitors, people not talking to the police on Thanksgiving Day about bloody murder.

“I see.” Click, click, click.

“I used to live in Haddam,” I say. Clickety-click. “I sold houses there for seven years. For Lauren-Schwindell. I actually knew Natherial. Mr. Lewis. I mean, I knew him fifteen years ago. I haven’t seen him in blows. I’m sorry he’s deceased.” Am I not supposed to know it was Natherial, and that he’s dead? I read it in the newspaper.

Silence. Then, “Okay.”

I hear more kitchen noises downstairs. Something made of glass or china has shattered on the floor, something a girl with only one hand might easily do. The TV volume jumps up, a man’s voice shouts, “Ter-rif-ic! And what part of Southern California do you hail from, Belinda?” Then it’s squelched to a mumble. “You say you knew Mr. Lewis?” Detective Marinara speaks in a monotone, very cop-like. He’s typing what I’m saying. My worries are his interests.

“I did. Fifteen years ago.”

“And, uh, under what circumstances were those?”

“I hired him to go find For Sale signs that had gotten stolen from properties we had listed. He was real good at it, too.”

“He was real good at it?” More typing.

“Yeah. But I haven’t seen him since.” Which is no reason to kill him is what I’d like to imply. My innocence seems bland and inevitable, a burden to us both. The HPD apparently hasn’t yet linked me to the August Inn dust-up with Bob Butts. I must seem exactly the harmless, civic-minded cancer victim I am. Of course this is the plodding police work — the investigative parameters, the mountain of papers, the maze of empty hunches, dismal dead ends and brain-suffocating phone conversations — that will relentlessly lead to the killer or killers, like the key to Pharaoh’s tomb. But for a moment, on Thanksgiving morning, it has led to Sea-Clift and to me.

“And you live where?” Detective Marinara says. Possibly he yawns.

“Number seven Poincinet Road. Sea-Clift. On the Shore.” I smile, with no one to see me.

“My sister lives up in Barnegat Acres,” he says. “It’s on the bay.”

“A stone’s throw. It’s nice over there.” Though it isn’t so nice. The water has a sulfurous bite and a cheesy smell. Quirky bay breezes hold acrid fog too close to shore. And it’s not far from the shut-down nuke facility in Silverton, which depresses house sales to flat-line.

“So.” More typing, a squeak of Detective M’s metal chair, then an amiable sniff of the constabulary nose. “Would you be willing, Mr. Bascombe, to drive over tomorrow and take part in an identification protocol?”

“What’s that? Mine or somebody else’s?”

“Just a lineup, Mr. Bascombe. It’s not very likely we’ll even do it. But we’re trying to enlist some community cooperation here, do some eliminating. We’ve got witnesses we need to double-check. It’d be a help to us if you’d agree. Mr. Lewis has a son in the department here.” (A cousin to young Lawrence, the hearse driver.)

“Okay. You bet.” If I don’t agree, my name goes into another pile, and the next person I’m interviewed by won’t be yakking about his sister Babs in Barnegat Acres but will be one of the neatnik, black-belt karate guys with Arctic blue eyes in an FBI windbreaker. It lances into my brain that I haven’t called Clare Suddruth back yet but am supposed to show him 61 Surf Road tomorrow. Then I remember I intend not to be available.

“Okay, then, that’s all set,” Detective Marinara says, more clicking. “Will. Participate. In. IDP. And…that’s great.”

“I’m happy to. Well. I’m—”

“Yep,” Marinara says. “Ya still in the realty business over there?”

“Sure am. Realty-Wise. You want to buy a house on the ocean? I’ll sell you one.”

“Oh yeah, I just gotta get these citizens over here to quit killing each other, then I’ll be over with you.”

“That’s a tall order but a noble quest, Detective.”

“It’s changed, Mr. Bascombe. It’s a big difference than when you lived over here.”

Just as I thought! He knows all about me. My life’s displayed on his green screen. My mother’s maiden name, my freshman GPA, my blood pressure, my tire pressure, my Visa balance and sexual preference. Probably he can see when I’m scheduled to die.

“People get rich, they get upset a lot easier. They keep me hoppin’, I’ll tell you that. Homicide rate’s inchin’ up in Delaware County. You don’t hear about it. But I hear about it.”

“Is your family together for Thanksgiving?”

“Oh, well. I’m workin’, ain’t I? Let’s don’t go down that road. You just have a good one.”

“It’s always complex.”

“Whew. You got that right. Thanks for your cooperation, Mr. Bascombe. We’ll be contacting you about tomorrow.” And click, Marinara’s gone, sucked into a computer dot just as I hear my son outside shout out, “He who smelt it, dealt it. That’s all I know.” It’s hard to know what he’s talking about, but my guess is the election.

I called last night,” Ann Dykstra-Bascombe-Dykstra-O’Dell-Dykstra says before I can say it’s me. I’ve called her cell. Where is she? In an underwear boutique at the Quaker Bridge Mall? On the 18th at HCC? In the can? You have no control over where your personal private voice is being heard, what audience it’s being piped into, who’s lying about who’s where. It’s an intrusion but isn’t quite. I was ordering two cubic yards of pea gravel at the Garden Emporium in Toms River last week, and the customer beside me at the register was blabbing away, “Listen, sweetheart, I’ve never been so in love with anybody in my whole fucking life. So just say yes, okay? Tell that imbecile to go fuck himself. We can be on Air Mexico to Puerto Vallarta at ten o’clock tonight—”

“We need to talk about some things, Frank,” Ann says in a disciplined voice. “Did you just elect to not call me last night?”

“This is calling you. I wasn’t home last night. I was busy.” Sleeping in my car. I’ve now showered and shaved and positioned myself, in my plaid terry-cloth robe and fleece mukluks, in as steadfast a sitting position as possible at my desk, coccyx flush to the chair back, feet flat to the floor, knees apart but nervous, breath regulated. It is the posture for hearing disappointing biopsy reports, offer turn-downs and “Someone’s been badly injured” calls. It’s also the posture for delivering bad news.

Yet I’m already on the defensive. My toes curl in my mukluks; my sphincter reefs in. And I’m the delivering party: Don’t come here today. Or ever. My heart thumps as if I’d sprinted up a fire escape to get here. Ann has perfected the skill of making me feel this way. It’s her golfer’s inner meritoriousness. I’m forever the hunch-shouldered, grinning census taker at the door; she, the one living the genuine life. I have my questionnaire and my stubby pencil but will never know what reality — the one behind her, within the complex rooms — is all about. Hers is the voice of reasoned experience, sturdy values, good instincts and correct outlook (no matter how conventional); I am outside the threshold, the regretted one in need of sobering lessons. It’s why she could turn away from me seventeen years ago and never (until now) look back. Because she was right, right, right. It’s amazing I don’t hate her guts.

“I think Gore should concede, don’t you?”

“No.”

“Well. He should. He’s a sap. The market’ll go crazy if he wins.” Sap. The all-around Michigan term of disparagement. Her father characterized me as a sap when Ann and I were dating. “Where’d you find that sap?” Its sound twists a tighter knot in my gut. No one ever gets called a sap without feeling he probably is one.

“He may be a sap, but the other guy’s unmentionably stupid.” I can’t actually mention the other guy’s name.

“What did John Stuart Mill say?”

“I don’t know. He didn’t say it was better to have a stupid President.”

“Better to have a happy, unmentionable pig than a something, something something.”

“That’s not what he said.” And it’s not what I want to talk about. Mill would’ve supported Gore and the whole ticket and feel betrayed just like I do.

“Have you talked to Paul?” She is progressing down a checklist.

“No. He’s out on the beach right now, digging a grave for his time capsule. I haven’t talked to Jill, either.”

“Well, she’s interesting. She’s different.” I hear Paul laugh again, then shout, “G’day, mate.” Possibly Mr. Oshi has freed himself.

“Listen,” I say. “About today. I mean this afternoon.”

Dense silence. Different from the galactic dead space Detective Marinara receded into. This silence of Ann’s is the silence known only to divorced people — the silence of making familiar but unwelcome adjustments to evidence of continued bad character, of second-tier betrayals, unreasonable requests, late excuses, heart stabbings that must be withstood but are better defeated in advance. It’s what communication becomes between the insufficiently loved. “I’m not coming,” Ann says, seemingly without emotion. It’s the same voice she’d use to cancel a hair appointment. “I think we are who we are, Frank.”

“Yeah. I sure am.”

“Since Charley died, I’ve had this feeling of something about to happen. I was waiting for something. Moving down from Connecticut seemed to be getting close to it. But I don’t think I thought it was you.” I am entombed in the silence she was just entombed in. Now comes revised testimony (including Charley’s) of my foul, corrupt and unacceptable nature. I wonder if she’s pacing her living room like an executive or sitting on a bench with her clubs, awaiting her tee time, while she dispenses with me again. “But then you got sick.”

“I wasn’t sick. Not sick sick. I had prostate cancer. Have. That’s not sick.” It’s just fatal. SBD. I’m still the census taker, weakened by illness but still in need of reproval and some lessons.

“I know,” Ann says officiously. I hear her footsteps on a hard floor surface. “Anyway, I didn’t really think it was you.”

“I get it.” A stack of mail’s on my desktop under my Realtor of the Year paperweight. It’s unopened since Tuesday — a measure of my distraction, since I’m usually eager to read the mail, even if it’s steak-knife catalogs or a pre-approved platinum-club membership. I don’t think I’m going to be allowed to say what I want to say, which is all right. “What do you think it was? Or who?” I’m staring at the cover of the AARP magazine — a full-color (staged) photograph showing a silver-haired gent lying on a city street looking dead, but being worked on by heavy-suited firemen in fireman hats, equipped with oxygen cylinders, defibrillator paddles, with intubation paraphernalia standing at the ready. A silver-haired old lady in an electric blue pantsuit looks on, horrified. The headline reads RISK. WILL THERE BE TIME?

“Gee, I don’t know,” Ann says. “It’s strange.”

“Maybe you missed Charley. Didn’t you meet him at Haddam CC? Maybe you thought you’d find him again.” No use mentioning her thoughts of the seminary.

“You didn’t like Charley. I understand that. But I did. You were jealous of him. But he was a fine man.”—In death, and when he thought my name was Mert. “He was the love of my life. You don’t like hearing that. You’re not a very good judge of people.” Whip. Crack. Pow! But I’m ready for it. The slow-rhythm meticulousness of Ann’s rhetorical style is always an indicator that I’m coming in for a direct hit. All bad roads lead to Frank. We have, of course, never talked about Sally — my wife — in the entire eight years I’ve been married to her. Now might be the optimum moment to set me straight about that misstep, since it’s led me where it’s led me: to this conversation. I’m not surprised to learn that I don’t win the “love of my life” gold medal. Except in rogue bands of lower primates, you don’t abandon the love of your life. Death has to intervene.

Out my front window, beyond the low hedgement of arborvitae, I spy Mr. Oshi moving in quickened, mechanized Japanese banker steps along Poincinet Road, hustling back to his own house to bolt the door. His business suit still looks neat, though he’s holding one Dachshund under his arm like a newspaper and he still has both plastic bags of dog shit. His other wiener’s prancing at his feet. Mr. Oshi takes a quick, haunted look toward my front door, as if something might rush out at him, then hastens his steps on to home.

I have not spoken into the receiver since Ann fingered me as a bad judge of human flesh, in preparation for apprising me that my marriage to Sally was a lot of foolishness that led to no good, whereas hers to architect Charley was the stuff myth and legend are made of.

“I have something I want to say to you,” Ann says, then sighs heavily through her nose. I believe she’s stopped pacing. “It’s about what I said when you were at De Tocqueville on Tuesday.”

“What part?”

“About wanting to live with you again. And then when I left a message that night.”

“Okay.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t think I really meant all that.”

“That’s okay.” An unexpected wrench in my heart, with no pain associated.

“I think I just wanted to come to a moment, after all these years, when I could say that to you.”

“Okay.” Three okays in a row. The gold standard of genuine acceptance.

“But I think I just wanted to say it for my own purposes. Not because I really needed to. Or need to.”

“I understand. I’m married anyway.”

“I know,” Ann says. Once again, it’s good there’re telephones for conversations like this. None of us could stand it face-to-face. Hats off to Alexander Graham Bell — great American — who foresaw how human we are and how much protection we need from others. “I’m sorry if this is confusing.”

“It’s not. I guessed if I wasn’t a good choice once, I’m probably not now, either.” For every different person, love means something different.

“Well, I don’t know,” she says disapprovingly but not sadly. A last disapproval of me as I genially disapprove of myself.

It’s tempting to wonder if a new goodly swain’s now in her picture, with a more attractive lunch invitation. That’s usually what these recitations mean but don’t get around to admitting. Teddy Fuchs, maybe. Or a friendly, widowed Mr. Patch Pockets, a gray-maned De Tocqueville Colonial history teacher, someone “youthful” (doesn’t need Viagra), coaches lacrosse and feels simpatico with her golfing interests. Amherst grad, Tufts M.A., a summer retreat in Watch Hill and whose grown kids are less enigmatic than our two. It would be a good end to things. They can be “life companions” and never marry except when one of them gets brain cancer, and then only as encouragement for life’s final lap. I approve.

“Is that all right?” Ann says, self-consciously sorrowful.

“It is all right.” I could let her know I’d already figured out that getting divorced after Ralph died just deprived the two of us of the chance to get properly divorced later on, and for simpler reasons: that we weren’t really made for each other, didn’t even love each other all that much, that the only lasting thing we did love about each other was that we each had a child who died (forgetting the two who didn’t die), which admittedly is a strange love and, in any case, wasn’t enough. Better, though, just to let her believe she’s the one who knows mystical truths, even if she doesn’t really know them, just feels them all these years later. Ann may be many good and admirable things, but a mystic is not one of them.

In the stack of unopened letter-mail, beneath the Mayo newsletter, a Thank You from the DNC, circulars for a 5-K race and the Pow-R-Brush Holiday promotion in Toms River, I spy a square blue onionskin envelope — not the self-contained kind I always open wrong because it can’t be opened right, and end up tearing and reading in three damaged pieces, but a fuller, sturdier one — on whose pale tissue-y surface is writing I recognize, the writer’s firm hand flowing with small peaked majuscules and even smaller perfectly formed, peaked and leaning minuscules: Frank Bascombe, 7 Poincinet Road, Sea-Clift, New Jersey 08753. USA.

“We just have to be who we are, Frank,” Ann is saying for the second time.

“You bet.” I separate the letter from its cohort and stare at it.

“You sound strange, sweetheart. Is this upsetting you? Are you crying?”

“No.” I almost miss the “sweetheart.” But how did I miss this letter — of all letters? “I’m not crying, I don’t think.”

“Well. I haven’t told you Irma’s ready to die. Poor old sweetie. She spent her life believing my father should’ve moved out with her from Detroit to Mission Viejo thirty years ago, which of course he never would’ve, because he was tired of her. She has Alzheimer’s. She thinks he’s arriving next week, which is nice for her. I wish she and the children could’ve been closer. They’re like you are about personal connections.”

“Really?” The salmon-colored stamp bears a stern-looking profile of the Queen of England in regnal alabaster, framed in fluted molding. It’s the most exciting stamp I’ve ever seen.

“They’re mostly okay without them, of course. At least not strong ones anyway.” Cookie never counted to her.

“I understand.”

“I’m sorry if all this is distressing you. I made a mistake and I regret it.”

“Well—” Fingering the letter’s heft upon my fingertips, I raise it to my nostrils and breathe in, hoping for a telltale scent of its far-off sender. Though it bears only a starchy stationery odor and the unsweet aroma of stamp glue. I hold it to the window light — there’s no return address — and turn it front to back, bring it instinctively to my nose again, touch my tongue tip to its sealed flap, put its smooth blue finish to my chin, then my cheek and hold it there while Ann continues blabbing at me.

“Paul said last night Clary has a new beau.”

“I—” Thom. The multicultural cipher.

“Has Paul told you yet that he wants to leave K.C. and come work in the realty office with you? He’s—”

Whip. Crack. Pow! Again. I am not ready. My swelling heart as much as founders. I don’t hear the next thing she says, though my mind offers up “You know a heart’s not judged by how much you love, but by how much you’re loved by others.” I don’t know why.

But. The mullet? My son? A promising second career after greeting cards? Chauffeuring clients around Sea-Clift? Holding court in the office? Farming listings? Catching cold calls? Wandering through other people’s precious houses, stressing the distance to the beach, the age of the roof, the lot-line dimensions, the diverse mix here in New Jersey’s Best Kept Secret? He could bring Otto out and sing a chorus of “Shine on, Harvest Moon,” like he used to do when he lived with me. “Realty-Wise. This is Paul. Our motto is, He Who Smelt It, Dealt It.”

“I haven’t heard about that,” I say. Whip-sawed.

“Well, you will. I assumed you’d asked him, since your surgery last summer and all of that. We talked a bit about that. I’m surprised you two hadn’t—”

“I didn’t have surgery. I had a procedure. They’re different.” I was going to tell him about my condition. And I didn’t ask him to “join the firm,” because I’m not crazy. I realize what an ideal job writing greeting cards is for my son.

“Women know about things like procedures, Frank.”

“Good for women. I’m not a woman yet.”

“I know you’re angry. I’m sorry again. I used to wonder if you ever got angry. You never seemed to. I always understood why you didn’t make it in the Marines.”

“I was sick in the Marines. I had pancreatitis. You didn’t even know me then. I almost died.”

“We don’t have to be angry at each other, do we? You may not realize it, but you don’t want to go any further with this, either.”

“I realize it.” Sally’s blue letter is pinched between my thumb and forefinger as though it might float upward and I need to cling to it for my life’s sake. “That’s what I called to say. You just beat me to it.”

“Oh,” Ann says. Ann my wife. Ann my not wife. Ann my never-to-be. The things you’ll never do don’t get decided at the end of life, but somewhere in the long gray middle, where you can’t see the dim light at either end. The Permanent Period tries to protect us from hazardous moments like this, makes pseudo-acceptance only a matter of a passing moment. A whim. Nothing that’ll last too long. Which is why the Permanent Period doesn’t work. Acceptance means that things, both good and sour, have to be accounted for. Relations, as the great man said, end nowhere.

“I encouraged Paul to come work with you. I think that would be good.”

I’m stunned silent by this preposterous prospect. Anger? If I spoke, I would possibly start cursing in an alien tongue. This is the stress Dr. Psimos advised me to avoid. The kind that burns out my soldier isotopes like they were Christmas lights and sends PSA numbers out of the ballpark. I’d like to say something apparently polite and platitudinous yet also shrewdly scathing. But for the moment, I can’t speak. It is entirely possible I do hate Ann’s guts. Odd to know that so late along. Life is a long transit when you measure how long it takes you to learn to hate your ex-wife.

“Maybe we just don’t need to say anything else, Frank.”

Mump-mump, mump. Mump. Silence.

I hear her chair squeak, her footsteps sounding against hardwood flooring. I picture Ann walking to the window of 116 Cleveland, a house where I once abided and before that where she abided, following our divorce, when our children were children. She is once again its proprietor, fee simple absolute. The big eighty-year-old tupelo out front is now spectral but lordly in its leaflessness, its rugged bark softened by the damp balmy air of false spring. I’ve stood at that window, my breathing shallowed, my feet heavy, my hands cold and hardened. I’ve calculated my fate on the slates of the neighbors’ roofs, their mirroring windowpanes, roof copings and short jaunty front walks. This can be both consoling (You’re here, you’re not dead), and unconsoling (You’re here, you’re not dead. Why not?). The past just may not be the best place to cast your glance when words fail.

Mump-mump.

My silence speaks volumes. I hear it. My voice is trapped within.

Mumpety-mump. Mump. Mump.

“Well,” I hear Ann say. More steps across the hardwood. Fatigue shadows her voice. “I don’t know,” I hear her say. Then ping-ping. I hear a truck in the street, outside her window — in Haddam (this I can picture) — backing up. Miles from where I stand. Ping! Ping! Ping! If you can’t see me, I can’t see you. I wait, breathe, say nothing. “Well,” Ann says again. Then I believe she puts the phone down, for the line goes empty and our call in that way ends.

My darling Frank,

I would like to write you something truly from my heart that would reveal me, good and bad, and make you feel better about things. But I’m not sure I am capable. I’m not sure I know my truest feelings, even though I have some. I don’t have any idea what you could be thinking. I guess I have Thanksgiving envy, since I’ve been thinking about you, and about that nice Lake Laconic we went to before. I bet you’re doing something really interesting and good for T’giving. I hope you’re not alone. I bet you’re not, you rascal. Maybe you’ve connected with some snappy realtor type and are headed somewhere out of town (I hope not to Moline). What I’m feeling now, true feelings or not, is that everything in my life is just all about me, and I can’t find a way to change the pronouns. I’m aware of myself, without being very self-aware. My kids would agree — if they spoke to me, which they don’t. But does that make any sense? (Possibly I won’t send this letter.) I think I should apologize for all that happened last June — and May. I am sorry for the difficulty it caused you. It’s probably hard to understand that someone can love you and feel great about everything, and then leave with her ex. I always thought people decided they were unhappy first, and then left. But maybe things in life are just fine and then you do some crazy thing, and decide later if you were. Unhappy, that is. What’s that the evidence of? But I can’t really be sorry for doing it, so why apologize only for half? This sounds like something you would say maybe about selling a house to somebody, some house you didn’t approve of, except you knew the people needed a home. If I’m right (about you), you’ll think this is funny and not very interesting — something a person from south-central Ohio would do. You are like that.

When I left with Wally last June, I just wasn’t feeling enough. I couldn’t take others in. You, for instance — hardly at all. It was so shocking to experience Wally. I made him come, by the way. He didn’t want to and was pretty embarrassed, you might’ve noticed. I think I just left on an idea — to go back and experience something I never got to experience before. (That word’s coming up a lot.) I’ve never even been stupid enough to think anyone can do that. You really ought to leave some things where they lay, whether you got to feel them or not. I think that now. I don’t think I’m sounding breezy here, do you? I don’t want to. I’m not breezy at all. Coming to the end of the millennium year, I wonder if I’ve been affected by it at all? Or if all this tumult and upset is the effect of it. Has it affected you yet? It hadn’t last spring, I don’t think. We’re both “only children.” Maybe I just fear death. Maybe I feared that you and I weren’t going anywhere and never realized it before. I am not very reflective. You know that. Or at least I wasn’t before. I ask questions but don’t always answer them or think about the answers.

I don’t want to go into too much detail here. I know I went away with Wally for my own reasons, probably selfish. And by August, I knew I wouldn’t stay much longer. He was a strange man. I loved him once, but I think I may have driven him crazy at least twice. Because the whole thing thirty years ago was that he was just very unhappy living with me, and couldn’t tell me. So he left. It’s so simple. I can’t say what we both knew back then. Probably very little. We did try to enlist the children’s sympathies this time. But they are both crazy as bats and treated us as though we were lunatics and wouldn’t talk to us and receded into their nutty beliefs, even though we said to them, “But we’re your parents.” “Who says?” they said. I guess I think they’re lost to me.

I would’ve left then (late August), but I got concerned about Wally. He began eating very little and lost a lot of weight. He would sit in the bathtub until the water was freezing (we lived in his cottage, which was okay, if small). I would see him standing out in his little row of apple trees he loved, just talking and talking, to no one — though I guess it was to me. I would catch him looking strangely at me. And then he began going for swims in the ocean. He was a very large white figure out there, even with his lost weight. I think, as I said, I drove him crazy. Poor man.

I don’t want to tell all the rest of it. Sooner or later you’ll find out. The best way out may not be through, though. Whoever said that?

But I am not in Mull anymore. (Isn’t that a funny name? Mull.) I am in a place called Maidenhead, which is funny, too, and is in J.O.E. (Jolly Old England). Talk about wanting to go back in time! I’ve come all the way back to Maidenhead. From Mull to Maidenhead. That’s a hoot. It is just a suburb here, not very nice or very different than any other one. I am doing temporary work in a sweet little arts centre (their spelling), where they need my skills for organizing older citizens’ happiness. It is like Sponsoring, although old English people are easier than our old people by a lot. England is not a bad place to be alone (I was here twice before). People are nice. Everyone gives solid evidence of feeling alone a lot, but seems to think that’s natural, so that they don’t get terribly, terribly invested in it. Unlike America where it’s just one mad fascination after another one, but no one’s any more invested — or so it seems to me. I did not vote, by the way, and now things are in this terrible twist with Bush. Can you believe it? Can that numbskull actually win? Or steal it? I guess he can. I’m sure you voted, of course, and I’m sure I know who you voted for.

How are your kids? Are you and Paul still feuding? Is Clarissa still being a big lesbian? (I bet not.) Who else do you see? Are you selling a lot of houses? I bet you are. (You can tell I’m fishing.) I am fifty-four this year, which of course you know. And I am not a grandparent, which is very odd, even though my children dislike me so much — for what, I don’t know exactly. I am thinking of going to a retreat in Wales — something Druidic — since I feel I’m heading someplace but don’t feel too confident about it. Though I am pretty comfortable in my skin. Being fifty-four (almost) is also odd. It kind of doesn’t have an era, and I know you believe in all human ages having a spiritual era. This one I don’t know. I think everybody needs a definition of spirituality, Frank (you have one, I believe). You wouldn’t want to go on a quiz show, would you, and be asked your definition of spirituality and not know one. (Apropos this retreat.) June doesn’t seem that far back to me. Does it to you? I can’t say that how things are now is how I thought they would end up. Though maybe I did.

But I do want to say something to you (a good sign, maybe). I want to tell you one reason why I’m sure I love you. There are people we can be around, and we take them for granted sometimes, and who make us feel generous and kind and even smarter and more clever than we probably are — and successful in our own terms and the world’s. They are the ideal people, sweetheart. And that’s who you are for me. I’m sure I’m not that way for you, which bothers me, because I think I’m kind of a roadblock for you now. No one else is like that for me, and I don’t know why you are that way, but you are. So just in case you were wondering.

(The reason I’m writing this is to see how it comes out. If it seems okay, then you’re reading it “now.”) Finally (thank God, huh?), I don’t know if I want to be married to you anymore. But I don’t know if I want a divorce, or if I can’t live without you. Is there a precise word for that human state? Maybe you can make something up. Maybe New Jersey is it. Though here in Maidenhead (what a name!), where for some reason tourists come, I hear Americans saying they’re from all over. Iowa and Oregon and Florida. And I think — that doesn’t matter anymore. Maybe it would be good to move away from New Jersey. Maybe all we need is a change. Like the hippies used to say when there were so many of them, and they were begging quarters back in the Loop in Chicago: “Change is good.” I thought that was a riot. At least we don’t have cancer, Frank. So maybe we have some choices to make together still. I also want you to know — and this is important — that you were not boring in bed, if you ever worried about that. I’ll call you on Thanksgiving, which is not a holiday in Maidenhead so I can probably use the trunk line at the arts centre. Love with a kiss. Sally (your lost wife).

I’m shocked. Humbled. Emptied. Amazed. Provoked. Delighted. Thrilled to be all. If man be a golden impossibility, his life’s line a hair’s breadth across, what is woman? A golden possibility? Her life’s line a lifeline thrown to save me from drowning.

I’m ready to wire greenbacks — except it’s Thanksgiving. Mr. Oshi could be of service, though he’s probably huddled in his house. I’ll send solicitors out to Maidenhead in a black saloon car to spirit Sally down to Heathrow, provide a change of clothes, get her into the VIP lounge at BA and right into a first-class seat — on the Concorde, except it crashed. I’ll be waiting at Newark Terminal 3 with a dinner-plate smile, all slates cleaned, agendas changed for the future, bygones trooping off to being bygones. Cancer’s a dot we’ll connect in due time. Since she doesn’t know I have/had it, it’s almost as if I don’t/didn’t — so powerful is her belief, so unreal is cancer to begin with.

Except there’s no call-back number here. № 44+ bippety, bippety, bippety, bip. When I come back from Timbuktu, I’ll coax the Maidenhead Arts Centre number out of inquiries, where they’re always helpful (our information won’t give you the time of day). Or else I’ll declare an emergency.

I go to the window again in my terry-cloth robe, my heart pumping, a zizzy bee-sting quiver down my arms and legs, my bare feet cold on the floor planks. “Is this really happening?” I say to the window and the beach beyond, in a voice someone could hear in the room with me. Is this happening? Is there a celestial balance to things? A yin/yang? Do people come back once they’ve gone away to Mull? Life is full of surprises, a wise man said, and would not be worth having if it were not. My choice then, since I have a choice, is to believe they do come back.

Out upon the dun Atlantic, a Coast Guard buoy tender sits bestilled on the water’s roll, its orange sash promoting bright, far-flung hope — the same it gives to all sailors adrift and imperiled. I train my powerful U-boat-quality binoculars, given to me by Sally, on its decks, its steepled conning bridge, its single gray gunnery box, its spinning radar dish, the heavy red nun already winched aboard. Fast-moving miniature sailors are in evidence. A davit’s employed, a dory’s lowering off the landward side. Sailors are there, too. No doubt this is a drill, a dry run to pass the time on Thanksgiving, when all would be elsewhere if only our shores were safe. I pan across the swells (how do they ever find anything?), but there is nothing visibly afloat. I put the lens bottles to the window glass and lean into the ferrules, as if finding a foreign object was essential to a need of mine. Only nothing’s foreign. A second red buoy, whose bell I sometimes hear in the fog or when the wind blows in, rocks in the slow swell, its red profile low, its clapping now inaudible. I, of course, can’t find what they’re after. And maybe it’s nothing, a coordinate on a chart, a signal down deep they must track to be accomplished sailors. Nothing more.

I sweep down the beach and find the surfcasters — close-up — in their neoprenes and watch caps, their backs to the shore, up to their nuts in frigid, languid ocean, their shoulders intent and hunched, their long poles working. A blue Frisbee floats through my circled view. A white retriever ascends to snare it. I find the Sea-Clift Shore Police’s white Isuzu trolling back along its own tracks, the uniformed driver, as I am, glassing the water’s surface. For a shark fin. A body (these things happen when you live by the sea). A periscope. Icarus just entering the sea, wings molten, eyes astonished, feet spraddling down.

And then I see my son Paul again, wading out of the surf in his soaked cargo shorts, his pasty belly slack for age twenty-seven. He is shoeless, shirtless, his skull — visible through his mullet — rounder than I remember, his beard-stached mouth distorted in a smile, hands dangling, palms turned back like a percy man, his feet splayed and awkward as when he was a kid. He does not look the way you’d like your son to look. Plus, he must be frozen.

I track down to the hole he’s dug beyond the hydrangeas, and it’s there, “finished,” coffin-shaped, not large, ready for its casket to be borne down. My shovel stands in the sandpile to the side.

When I find Paul again, he’s seen me glassing him like a sub-captain and has fixed his gaze back on me, his red-lipped smile distorted, his feet caked with sand, pale legs wide apart like a pirate’s. He flags his bare arm like one of those drowners out of reach — lips moving, words of some sentiment, something possibly that any father would like to hear but I can’t at this distance. Paul cocks his fists up in a Charlie Atlas muscle man’s pose, jumps sideways and bears down stupidly and shows his soft abs and lats. The young Frisbee spinners, the elderly walkers in bright sweats, the metal-detector cornballs, a late-arriving fisherman just wading into the sea — all these see my son and smile an indulgent smile. I wave back. It’s not bad to wave at this remove as our first contact. On an impulse, I put down my binocs and give my own Charlie Atlas double-bicep flexer, still in my tartan robe. And then Paul does his again. And we are fixed this way for a moment. Why couldn’t we just stop here, not go on to what’s next — be two tough boys who’ve fought a draw, stayed unvanquished, each to leave the field a victor? Fat Chance.

In front of my closet mirror, I get into my 501s, my Nikes and my block-M sweatshirt with the yellow polo underneath. I am Mr. Casual Back to Campus, booster dude and figure of wholesome ridicule. I have called Clarissa and left a message: “Come home.” I have called Wade and left a message: “Where are you?” Clearly, I’m fated to wait for Sally’s call, at least until I’m back from Timbuktu and can make calls of my own. I have another full-out yearning for a cell phone, which would render me available (at all times) to hear her voice, answer a summons and go directly to Maidenhead if necessary — though she would need to know my number. I’d gladly forget Thanksgiving (like any other American). Most of my guests have been decommissioned anyway. I’d take the organic turkey, the tofu stuffing, the spelt, the whatever else, straight down to Our Lady of Effectual Mercy, where the K of C ministers to Sea-Clift’s neediest and thankfulest. Or else I’d put it in Paul’s time capsule and bury it for later generations to puzzle over.

I am, however, exhilarated, and take a last scrutinizing look at myself. I look the way I want to — dopey but defended — the genial Tri-cities orthodontist. Though as usual, exhilaration doesn’t feel as good as I want it to — as it used to — since all sensation, good or bad, now passes through the damping circuitry of the cancer patient, victim or survivor. The tiramisu never tastes as sweet. The new paint job doesn’t shine as bright. Miss America’s glossy life-to-come wears a shadow of lurking despair, her smile a smile of struggling on in a dark forest. That’s what we survivors get as our good luck. Though think about the other poor bastards, the ones who get the real black spot — not just my gray one — and who’re flying home to Omaha this morning, urged to put their affairs in order.

I’ve, however, learned to let exhilaration be exhilaration, even if it only lasts a minute, and to fight the shadows like a boxer. Staring at the mirror, I give myself a slap, then the other side, then again, and once more, until my cheeks sting and are rosy, and a smile appears on my reflection’s face. I blink. I sniff. I throw two quick lefts at my block-M but hold back on the convincer right. I’m ready to step into the arena and meet the day. Once again, it’s Thanksgiving.

I’m taking this bad-boy outside to see how it fits,” Paul’s saying energetically. I’ve come down munching a piece of bacon, following voices to the daylight basement, chilly mausoleum of old Haddam furniture — my cracked hatch-cover table, my nubbly red hide-abed, my worn-through purple Persian rug, several non-working brass lamps bundled in the corner and a framed map of Block Island, where Ann and I once sailed when we were kids and thought we loved each other. I’ve thought of opening things up down here as a rumpus room.

I’m already smiling as I come to the bottom of the stairs, very conscious of my booster-club get-up, though Paul is just exiting the sliding glass door to the beach, toting his time capsule, which is a chrome bomb-shaped cylinder as long as two toasters. A tall young blond woman he’s been talking to is in the middle of the room and she looks at me. She’s beside the defunct old rabbit-eared DuMont that was my mother’s and that I’ve kept as a memento, and she unexpectedly smiles back widely to broadcast her surprise and enthusiasm — for me, for Paul, for the overall good direction things are taking down here. This is Jill, dressed — I don’t know why I’d expect any different — in bright red coveralls with a white long-john shirt underneath and some kind of green wooden clog footwear that makes her look six foot seven, when she may only be six three. Her long yellow hair hangs straight past her shoulders and is parted in the middle Rhine maiden — style, exposing a wide Teutonic forehead. Her generous mouth is unquestionably libidinous, though her sparkling dark eyes are welcoming — to me, in my own basement. A great relief. And as advertised, at the bottom of her left sleeve is the alarming hand absence, though there’s good evidence of a wrist. Here, I realize, is the girl who may become mother of my grandchildren, mourner when my obsequies are read out, will tell vivid rambling tales of my exploits once I’m gone. It’d be good to get off on the right foot with her. Though in a day’s time, I’ve met two of my children’s chosen ones. What’s gone wrong?

“Hi, I’m Frank,” I say. “You must be Jill.”

“Listen, Frank,” Paul’s saying, just leaving through the door. “You wanna come out and attend the trial internment?” He may mean interment, but possibly not — though he’s talking too loudly for indoors. He pauses, grinning from behind his smudged specs (we’re all grinning down here), his capsule clasped to his wet tee-shirt, which bears an Indian-warrior profile in full eagle-feather war bonnet — the Kansas City Chief. Paul’s still barefoot, still has his gold stud in his left ear. He looks like the guy who delivers the Asbury Press before dawn out of his backseat-less ’71 Cutlass and, I suspect, lives in his car.

“You bet I want to.” I make a step forward. “Let’s do it.” But he’s already out the sliding door, heading toward his site. My positive response hasn’t registered. I look to Jill and shake my head. “We don’t communicate perfectly all the time.”

“He’d really like you to approve of him,” Jill says in a slightly nasal midwestern voice. Though startlingly and with an even bigger, eager-er smile, she strides across the linoleum and with her right hand extended gives mine a painful squeeze, the kind lady shot-putters give each other outside the ring. Her smile makes me look straight at her nose, which is noble and makes her wide eyes want to draw in, in concentration, toward the middle. One central incisor has shouldered a half-millimeter over onto its partner, but not to a bad effect. In someone less imposing, this could be a signal to exercise caution (turbulent brooding over life’s helpless imperfections, etc.), but in Junoesque Jill, it is clearly trifling, possibly a giggle, in contrast to her injury and to how monstrously beautiful she otherwise is. I like her completely and wish I wasn’t wearing this preposterous get-up. She looks admiringly out the glass door at Paul, who’s already down inside his hole, bent over, apparently testing the dimensions of things. “He’s really a big fan of yours,” she says.

“I’m a big fan of his,” I say. Jill exudes a faint lilac sweetness, though the air’s gone musty as a ship’s hold down here. Jill lets her friendly dark eyes roam all around the low-ceilinged basement and sniffs. She smells it, too. I amiably swallow my last bit of bacon — left in plain sight (by who?) on a paper towel in the kitchen. I want to say something forward-thinking about my son, but being up close to his sweet-smelling, pulchritudinous squeeze is far from what I thought would be happening, and I’m not exactly sure what’s appropriate to say. Physical closeness to an abject (and smaller) stranger, however, doesn’t seem to faze her one bit. Clarissa’s the same — relaxed, defensible boundaries — something my age group didn’t understand. I could ask Jill how she likes New Jersey so far or how everything went with Ann last night (though I don’t want to mention Ann’s name), or what’s a bounteous beauty like her doing with an oddment like my son. But what I do say, for some reason, is, “What happened to your hand?”

Which doesn’t faze her one bit more. She looks down at the vacant sleeve end, then raises it to eye level. She is still very close to me. A pink stump becomes visible, starting (or ending) where her carpal bone would be, the flesh finely stitched to make a smooth flap. Jill’s happy demeanor seems undiminished by a hand being conspicuously not there. “If everybody would just ask like that,” she says happily, “my life’d be easier.” We both look straight at the stump like surgeons. “I was in the Army, in Texas,” she says, “training for land mine work. And I guess I got the worst-possible grade. I shouldn’t have been doing it, as big as I am. It’s better if you’re small.” She moves the appendage around in a tight little orbit to exhibit its general worthiness and I suppose to permit me to touch it, which I don’t think I’ll do. I’ve never knowingly been this close to or conversant with an amputee. Doctors get used to these things. But no one much gets anything cut off in normal real estate goings-on. Without meaning to, I inch back and give her what I hope is an affirming nod. “So when I got to Hallmark,” she goes on chattily, “they thought, Well, here’s a natural for the sympathy-card department.” I knew it. “Which I was, but not because of my hand, but because I’m really sympathetic.” She rolls her eyes and shakes her head as though getting rid of that ole hand was the best-possible luck.

“So, is that where you two met, then?” I say. Out the corner of my eye, I uncomfortably spy Paul crawling back out of his hole, dusting off his knees, looking as if he’d just invented fluid mechanics. His silver capsule lies in the beach grass. He begins speaking toward the hole as if someone, a member of his crew, was still down there doing last-minute deepening and manicuring.

“We really met on the Internet,” Jill says, “though I’d already seen him at a film series and knew he’d be interesting. Which he is.” She stows her stump in her red coveralls pocket and warmly regards my son, who’s still outside talking away. I should go out there. Though my instinct is to stay where I am and chat up the big blondie, even if the big blondie belongs to my son and only has one hand. “We were really shocked when we finally met face-to-face at a bookstore”—conceivably the place where I got into hot water last spring—“and realized we were both writers at Hallmark.” In a bikini, Jill probably looks like young Anita Ekberg (minus a hand). It’s difficult to envision Paul, who’s a lumpy five ten, raree-ing around with her in his little Charlotte Street billet. Though no doubt he does. “Odd couple’s redundant is what we think,” Jill says. I’ve begun to think about what Paul, in his rage last spring, told me about his job — that it was the same as what Dostoyevsky or Hemingway or Proust or Edna St. Vincent Millay did: supplied useful words to ordinary people who don’t have enough of them. I, of course, thought he was nuts.

But suddenly, here is something crucial. I could spend the next six weeks locked in a room with these two, learn how Jill felt about boot camp, learn the mascot’s name of her girls’ basketball team, where she was the center, learn how she found her star-crossed way to K.C., how she came to write Ross Perot’s name in on her presidential ballot; and possibly at the same time get to know Paul’s closely guarded ideas about matrimony (coming as he does from a broken home), get his overview about parity in the NFL, hear his long-term thoughts for leaving Hallmark and joining Realty-Wise — things most fathers hear. But I still wouldn’t know much more that’s important about them as a couple than I do after these five perfectly good minutes. It’s electrifying to think Jill’s a lusty young Anita Ekberg, and interesting to know that Paul is interesting. But they are what they seem — which is enough to be. I don’t want to change them. I’m willing and ready to jump right to the climax, confer fatherly blessings on their union (if that’s what this is) before Paul makes it back inside. If they make each other happy for two seconds, then they can probably last decades — longer than I’ve lasted. I bless you — I say these words silently in anticipation of leaving. I bless you. I bless you. Sum quod eris, fui quod sis.

“Did you really go to Michigan?” Jill steps back and takes a look at my block-M, a studious cleft formed between her dark eyebrows. She leans forward and gives me the sensation of being loomed over. Obviously, she doesn’t see my outfit as comical.

“Did I what?”

“My dad went to U of M,” she says.

“Did he? Great.”

“I’m from Cheboygan.” She holds up her right hand to exhibit how much the state of Michigan — lower peninsula only — resembles a hand. With her stunted left arm, she taps the hand at about where the town of Cheboygan lies, near the top. “Right there on Lake Huron,” she says, making Huron sound like Hyurn. I knew a boy from Cheboygan back in the icy mists. Harold “Doodlebug” Bermeister, defenseman on our pledge hockey team, who longed to return to Cheboygan with his B.S. and buy a Chevy franchise. Doodlebug got blown to cinders in Vietnam the year he graduated and never saw Cheboygan again. No way this Jill is Doodlebug’s daughter. She’s twice as tall as he was. But if she is a wandering Bermeister and life’s a long journey leading to my son, it doesn’t need any explaining. I accept. Though you could work up a good greeting card out of the whole improbability, something on the order of “Happy Birthday, son of my third marriage to my foster sister of Native American descent.”

“I never really got up there,” I say in re Cheboygan.

“It’s where they have the snowmobile hall of fame,” she says earnestly.

Paul’s letting himself back in through the sliding glass door, his capsule wedged under his arm pigskin-style, wiping his bare feet on the rug and still talking away as if we’d all been outside doing things together. With his smudged glasses, mullet, his beard-stache and general unkempt belly-swell under his Chiefs shirt, Paul looks oddly elderly and therefore ageless — less like the Asbury Press guy and more like one of the beach loonies who occasionally walk into your house, sit down at your dinner table and start babbling about Jesus running for president, so you have to call the police to come haul them away. These people never harm anything, but it’s hard to see them (or Paul) as mainstream.

“So. You got it all set?” I say and give him one of our sly-shrewd chivvying looks, meant to draw attention to my Bay City orthodontist outfit. Such greeting is our oldest workable code: common phrasings invested with secret double, sometimes quadruple “meanings” that are by definition hilarious — but only to us. As a troubled boy of tender years, Paul was forever anticipating, keeping steps ahead, as if the left-behind brother of a dead boy had to be two boys, doubly, even triply aware of everything, could not just be a single yearning heart. Other priorities tended to get overlooked, and our code became our only way to converse, to keep love fitfully in sight and the world beneath us. In adulthood, of course, this fades, leaving just a vapor of lost never would-bes.

“Sherwood B. Nice,” Paul says — not really an answer — though he elevates his chin in a victorious way, possibly having to do with Jill. In the corner of his right eye, a small dent retains an apple redness from the terrible beaning at age fifteen, which he claims not to remember. I’ve never been sure how well he sees, though the doctors back then said he’d have vitreous swimmers, shortened depth perception, and in later life could face problems. Elevating his chin to see out the bottom of his eyes is compensatory. None of this, naturally, is ever discussed. “So. Aaaallll at once,” Paul immediately starts in, bringing his time capsule over to the hatch-cover table. It is his patented Tricky Dick voice. “Just out of nowhere, out of the clear blue.” He hoods his eyes and extends his schnoz like Nixon. “I realized. That what I really needed to do, you understand, was to help others. It was just that simple.” He gives his jowly face a solemn pseudo-Nixon head shake. “I hope you all can understand what I’m getting at here.” This may be his reaction to my get-up. I’m satisfied, though as always to me he is a borderless uncertainty. I don’t even feel like his father — more like his uncle or his former parole officer. It’s good if Jill, queen of Cheboygan, can try to admire, understand and please him, and he her. I bless you. I don’t know what we’re supposed to do now. “How’s your mom?”

“She’s not coming over today,” Paul says. He’s monkeying with his time capsule while I’m standing here. It has a little silver side door that slides open to permit installation of sacred artifacts. Where do you get one of these things? Is there a Web site? Why are we even down here where I never come? “She said you had cancer. How’s that going?” He frowns at me, then down again, as though this was another encoded joke of ours.

“Oh, it’s great,” I say. “I have a prostate full of radioactive BBs I didn’t have when I saw you last.”

“Cooo-ul. Do they hurt?”

“It—”

“My stepfather had that,” Jill says, the cleft reappearing between her wide-set eyes. A show of sympathy.

“How’d he do?”

“He died. But not from that.”

“I see. Well, this is all pretty new to me.” I say this as if we were talking about changing car-repair affiliations. I smile and look around my shadowy basement. In addition to the Block Island map, there’s a large hanging framed reproduction left by the prior owners, depicting the Lord Barnegat, famed two-masted whaling schooner that plied the ocean right outside in the 1870s and is currently in a museum in Navesink. I should toss out all this shit and turn the space into a screening room for resale to TV people. “I don’t see life as a perfect mold broken,” I say uncomfortably when neither of them says anything more about my having cancer. Possibly Jill and I share this point of view. What else has Ann blabbed to them?

The cancer topic has struck them both mute, the way it does most people, and I feel suddenly stupid standing here dressed like a nitwit, as if none of us has anything to say to the other on any subject but my “illness.” Aren’t they in the greeting-card business? Though probably we’re all three waiting for one of us to do something unforgivable so we can convulse into a throat-slashing argument and Paul can grab Jill and clear out back to K.C. I think again of him whonking away with this bounteous, one-handed Michigan armful and I admit I’m happy for him.

“The caterers’ll be here at one-forty-five,” I say to have something to say so I can leave. “Did your sister say when she might be back?”

Mention of Clarissa instantly inscribes a displeased/pleased smile on Paul’s beard-encircled lips. His sister is, of course, his eternal subject, though she has always treated him like a dangerous mutant, which he relishes. By taking possession of the most-unsettling-life-course trophy, she has further put him off his game. Jill could be his attempt to wrest back the trophy.

“So did you meet Gandhi’s grandson?” Paul smirks while he goes on fiddling with his time capsule, though he’s nervous, his eyes snapping at Jill, who regards him encouragingly. His mouth breaks into a derisive grin. “He’s into fucking equitation therapy. Whatever that is. He’s probably writing a semi-autobiographical novel, too.” Paul combs one hand back through his mullet and frowns with what I’m supposed to know is dismayed belief. “I like asked him, ‘What’s the most misunderstood airline?’ And he goes, ‘I don’t know. Royal Air Maroc?’ I go, ‘Fucking bullshit. It’s Northwest. It flies to the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul. No contest.’” Paul’s lip curls in its right corner. Something’s setting him off.

“Maybe he didn’t understand what you were getting at,” I say to be fatherly. “I’m guessing she’s not too serious about him anyway.”

“Oh, what a giant relief that is.” Paul’s odd round face assumes an expression of profoundest disdain.

“I thought he seemed pretty interesting,” Jill says — her first semi-familial utterance and the first uncoded words anybody’s spoken since Paul came back inside. Although, of course, she’s wrong.

“He’s a butthole. Case closed,” Paul snarls. “‘Are you all right? Are you all right?’ He’s like a fucking nurse. He’s one of those dipshits who’s always asking people if they’re all right. ‘Are you all right? How ’bout you? Are you all right, too? Do you want a fucking foot massage? How ’bout a back rub? Or a blow job? Maybe a high colonic?’” In this frame of mind, as a junior at Haddam High, Paul used to get so angry at his teachers, he’d beat his temples with his palms — the universal SOS for teen troubles ahead. It’s hard to imagine him selling residential real estate.

“I think you should let this go, okee, honey?” Jill says and smiles at him.

Paul glowers at Jill, then at me, as if he’s just exited a trance — blinking, then smiling. “Issat it?” he says. “You done? That be all? You want cheese on that?” It’s possible he might bark, which is also something he did as a teen.

Someplace, from some sound source I can’t locate, as if it came out of the drywall, I hear music. Orchestral. Ravel’s Bolero— the military snares and the twiny oboes, played at high volume. No doubt it’s the Feensters. What more perfect Thanksgiving air? Possibly they’re in the hot tub, staging a musicale for the beach visitors and, of course, to aggravate the shit out of me. At Easter, they played “The March of the Siamese Children” all day long. Last 4th of July, it was “Lisbon Antigua” by Pérez Prado, until the Sea-Clift Police (summoned by me) paid them a courtesy call, which started a row. It’s conceivable that in the cathode-ray tube business, Nick got too close to some bad-actor chemicals that are just now being registered in his behavior. To ask them to turn it down would invite a fistfight, which I don’t feel like. Though I’m happy to call the police again. Then, just as suddenly, Bolero stops and I hear voices raised next door and a door slam.

“Look here, you two.” I’m tempted to say lovebirds, but don’t. “I’ve got some bees wax of my own to take care of before the food gets here. I want you to treat the place like you own it.”

“Okay. That’s great.” Jill puts her arms behind her and nods enthusiastically.

“No, but wait!” Paul says, and suddenly abandoning his time capsule, he essentially rushes me across the basement. I manage to take one unwieldy backward-sideways step, since he seems maybe to want to go right by me and head up the stairs — to where, I haven’t the foggiest. But instead, he lurches straight into me, thudding me in the chest, expunging my breath and clamping his terrible grip on me. “I haven’t given you a hug yet, Dad,” he howls, his whiskery jaw broxed against my shaved face, his belly to my belly. He’s got me grappled around my shoulders, his bare knee, for some reason, wedging between mine the way a high school gorilla would body-press his high school honey. My shocked eyes have popped open wider, so that I see right down into his humid manly ear canal and across the red bumpy landscape of his awful mullet. “Oh, I’ve been so bad,” he wails in deepest, crassest sarcasm, clutching me, his head grinding my chest. I want to flee or yell or start punching. “Oh, Christ, I’ve just been so terrible.” He’s taken me prisoner — though I mean to get away. I’m backed into the narrow stairwell and manage to anchor one Nike against the bottom riser. Except with Paul grasping and rooting at me, I miss my balance and start listing backward, with him still attached, his glasses frame gouging my cheek. “Ooooh, ooooh,” he boo-hoos in mock contrition. We’re both going over now, except I catch a grip, hand-rasping and painful, on the banister pole, which stops us, saving me from knocking the crap out of myself — snapping a vertebra, breaking my leg, finishing the job Bob Butts started. What’s wrong with life?

“What the fuck, you idiot,” I say, clung to the sloping banister like a gunshot victim. “Are you losing your fucking mind?”

“Bonding.” Paul expels a not-wholesome breath into the front of my block-M sweatshirt. “We’re bonding.”

“Sweetie?” Jill’s beseeching voice. At the angle I’m suspended, and from behind the top of Paul’s head, Jill’s wide, disconcerted face comes into view, looking troubled, as she’s trying to gain a one-handed grip on Paul’s back to pry him off me before I lose my own hand-hold and brain myself on the riser edge. “Sweetie, let your dad up now. He’s gonna hurt himself.”

“It’s so important,” Paul murples.

“I know. But—” Jill begins raising him like a child.

“Get off me.” I’m struggling, trying to shout but breathless. “Jesus Christ.” What I’d like to do is wham a fist right in his ear, knock him into a stupor, only I can’t turn loose of the banister without falling. But I would if I could.

“Come on, Sweetie.” Jill has both her milky arms — hand and handless — about Paul’s sides. My nose is against her shoulder — the sweet smell of lilacs possibly associated with her Ekberg bosoms. Though it’s still an awful moment.

And then I’m loose and able to pull myself up. Paul is six inches in front of me, his bleared right orb glowing behind his spectacles, his mouth gaping, heaving for air, his gray pupils fixed on me.

“What’s wrong with you?” I let myself sit down onto the third stair leading up to the kitchen. I’m still breathless. Jill still has a wrestler’s grip around the middle of Paul’s red Chiefs shirt. He looks dazed, surprised but pleased. He may feel things couldn’t have turned out better.

“Are you one of those people who shies away from physical intimacy with loved ones?” He’s now speaking in a deep AM dee-jay voice, dead-eyed.

“Why are you such an asshole, is what I want to know.”

“It’s easier,” he snaps.

“Than what, for Christ’s sake? Than to act like a human being?”

Paul’s round face inches closer. Jill’s still got him. His body smells metallic — from his time capsule — his breathing stertorous as a smoker’s (which I hope he isn’t). “Than being like you.” He shouts this. He is furious. At me.

Except I haven’t done anything. Meant no harm or injury — other than to love him, which might be enough. This is all loss. “What’s so terrible about me? I’m just your old man. It’s Thanksgiving Day. I have cancer. I love you. Why is that so bad?”

“Because you hold everything fucking down,” Paul shouts, and he accidentally spits in my face, catching my eyelid. “You smother it.”

“Oh bullshit.” I’m shouting back now. “I don’t smother enough. How the hell would you know? What have you ever restrained?” I almost blurt out that someone ought to smother him, though that would send the wrong message. I begin hoisting my aching self off the stair, using the banister. “I’ve got things to do now. Okay?” My hand burns, my knees are quaky, my heart’s doing a little periwinkle in its cavity. Outside the sliding glass door, where the light’s diaphanous, the late-morning beach — what I can see of it — stretches pristine, sprigged up with airy yellow beach grass and dry stems. I wipe my son’s cool saliva off my eyelid and address Jill, who’s peering at me as if I might expire like her stepfather in Cheboygan. I wonder if I’d get used to her having only one hand. Yes.

I try to smile at her over my son’s shoulder, as if he wasn’t there anymore. “Maybe you two just oughta take a long walk down the beach.”

“Okee,” Jill says — good, staunch Michigan beauty who sees her job.

“You need to take the hostility quiz.” Paul’s eyes dance behind their specs. “It was on a napkin in a diner down in Valley Forge.”

“Maybe I’ll do that later.” I am defeated.

“‘How many times a week do you give the finger? Do you ever wake up with your fists clenched?’ Let’s see—” He’s forgotten how I smother things and make his difficult life unlivable. I’m sure he meant it when he said it. His mind is cavorting now, his way of letting the past go glimmering. “‘Do you think people are talking about you all the time? Do you think a lot about revenge?’ I forget the rest.” He stares expectantly, blinking, as if he needs re-acclimating — to me, to being here, to his niche in the world. There is nothing wrong with my son. It’s us. We’re not normal. No wonder life seems better in Kansas City.

I have nothing available to say to him. He has placed himself outside my language base, to the side of my smothering fatherly syntax and diction, complimentary closes, humorous restrictive clauses and subordinating conjunctions. We have our cocked-up coded lingo — winks, brow-archings, sly-boots double, triple, quadruple entendres that work for us — but that’s all. And now they’re gone, lost to silence and anger, into the hole that is our “relationship.” I bless you. I bless you. I bless you. In spite of all.

14

Hurriedly now, or I’ll have nothing to show for the day. It’s past 10:30. I head up Ocean Ave, my duct-taped window holding fast. I check the news-only station from Long Branch for something on the Haddam hospital explosion that might keep me out of the lineup tomorrow. But there’s only holiday traffic updates, a brewing controversy over the new 34-cent stamp, last night’s Flyers’ stats and Cheney doing swell in the Georgetown Hospital.

I’m certain I’ve missed Mike’s house prospects, though I may not now be in the best realty fettle — after my “conflict” with my son — and am just as likely to scare clients away. Plus, I’m missing my call from Sally and, at the very least, depriving myself of an easeful morning in bed following last night’s ordeal. I’d like to settle my blood pressure and stopper the seep of oily stress into my bloodstream before I show up in the phlebotomy line at Mayo on Wednesday. Even in stolid Lutheran Rochester, where sheikhs, pashas and South American genocidists go for tune-ups, and where they’ve seen everything, I still want to make as good a biomedical impression as possible, as if I was selling myself as a patient. If Paul’s right that I hold everything down, my wish would be that I could hold down more.

Sea-Clift, viewed out my Suburban window on late Thanksgiving morning, is as emptied, wide-streeted and spring-y as Easter Sunday — despite the Yuletide trimmings. No cars are parked along the boulevard shopfronts. Wreathed traffic lights are flashing yellow. The regular speed trap — a black-and-white Plymouth Fury “hidden” behind the fire station load lugger — is in position and manned (we locals know) by a rubber blow-up cop named “Officer Meadows” for a since-deceased chief fired for sleeping on the job. My Realty-Wise office at 1606 looks unpromising as I pass it. Only the crime-barred Hello Deli and Tackle Shop is lighted inside and doing business — three cars angled in, another Salvation Army red-kettle tender out front chatting with a pair of joggers in running gear. The Coastal Evacuation signs leading to the bay bridge and points inland appear to have been heeded, leaving the rest of us to fend for ourselves.

A beach town in off-season doldrum may seem to have blissfully reclaimed its truest self, breathing out the long-awaited sigh of winter. But in Sea-Clift, a nervous what-comes-next uneasiness prickles down the necks of our town fathers due to last summer’s business slowdown. Growth, smart or maybe even stupid, is the perceived problem here; how to grow an entrepreneurial culture where our hands-on family-based service commitment could survive till doomsday (because of the beach), but will never go all the way to gangbusters without a tech sector, a labor-luring signature industry, a process-driven mentality or a center of gravity to see to it we get rich as shit off beaucoup private dollars. In other words, we’re just a place, much like another.

I, of course, moved here for these very reasons: because I admired Sea-Clift’s face to the interested stranger — seasonal, insular, commuter-less, stable, aspirant within limits. There was no space to grow out to, so my business model pointed to in-fill and retrench, not so different from Haddam, but on a more human scale. My house-moving plan on Timbuktu is the perfect case in point. You could teach it over at Wharton. To me, commerce with no likelihood of significant growth or sky-rocketing appreciation seems like a precious bounty, and the opposite of my years in Haddam, when gasping increase was the sacred article of faith no one dared mention for fear of the truth breeding doubt like an odorless gas that suffocates everybody.

Mine, of course, is not the view of the Dollars For Doers Strike Council, who sit Monday mornings in the fire station bullpen and who’ve seen the figures and are charged to “transition” Sea-Clift into the “next phase,” from under-used asset to vitality pocket and full-service lifestyle provider using grassroots support. This, even though we all like it fine here. Permanence has once again been perceived as death.

This fall, after the summer down-tick — fewer visitors, fewer smoothies and tomato pies, fewer boogie-board and chalet rentals (I credit the election and the tech-stock slide) — new plans went on the table for revitalizations. The Council floated a town naming-rights initiative to infuse capital (“BFI, New Jersey” was seriously suggested, but met with a cold shoulder from citizens). A proposal came up to abandon the “seasonal concept” and make Sea-Clift officially “year-round,” only no one seemed to know how to do that, though all were for it until they figured out they’d have to work harder. There was support for dismantling a lighthouse in Maine and setting it on the beach, but regulations forbid new construction. The Sons of Italy offered to expand the Frank Sinatra contest to include a permanent “New Jersey Folk Traditions” exhibit to go on the Coastal Heritage Trail (no one’s taken this seriously). The most ambitious idea — which will take place, though not in my lifetime — is to reclaim acres of Barnegat Bay itself for revenue-friendly use: a human tissue — generator lab or possibly just a golf course. But no one’s identified partnering capital or imagined how to buy off wetlands interests. Though one day I’m sure a man will rollerblade from where the Yacht Club used to be across to the condom plant in Toms River without noticing that once a great bay was here. The only new idea that seems to be genuinely percolating is an Internet rental-booking software package (Weneedabreak.com) that’s worked in towns farther north, and that Mike’s all for. In all these visionings, however, my attitude’s the same: Quit fretting, keep the current inventory in good working order, rely on your fifties-style beach life and let population growth do its job the way it always has. What’s the hurry? We’ve already built it here, so we can be sure in time they’ll come. This is why I’m not on the Dollars For Doers anymore.

Just ahead, at the left turn onto Timbuktu Street, I see the scheduled Turkey Day 5-K Sea-Clift-to-Ortley-and-back road race nearing its start time in front of Our Lady of Effectual Mercy RC church. A crowd — a hundred or so singleted body types — mingles on the cold grassy median right where I have to turn. The runners — string-thin men and identical females in weightless shorts, expensive-as-hell running shoes, numbered Turkey Day racing bibs and plastic water bottles — are dedicatedly goading themselves into road race mentality, stretching and twisting, prancing and bending and ignoring one another, hands on hips, heads down, occasionally erupting into violent bursts of in-place jogging to fire their muscles into exertion mode. They are, I have to say, a handsome, healthy, sinewy, finelylimbed bunch of sociopathic greyhounds. Most are in middle years, all obviously scared silly of serenity and death, a fixation that makes them emaciate themselves, punish their bones and brains (many of the women quit menstruating or having the slightest interest in sex) and cut themselves off from friend, foe and family — everyone except their “running friends”—in order to pad out along the dark early-morning streets of America, demonstrating sentience. My time in the USMC, three decades back, and in spite of what Ann says about my suitability, made me promise myself that if I got out alive, I’d never hasten a step as long as I lived, unless real life or real death was chasing me. I pretty much haven’t.

On the margins of the crowd are the usual wheelchair athletes — chesty, vaguely insane-looking, leather-gloved men and women strapped into aerodynamic chairs with big cambered wheels and abbreviated bodies like their owners. There are also spry oldsters — stiff, bent-over and balding octogenarians of both genders, ready to run the race with extinction. And set apart from these are the true runners, a cadre of regal, tar-black, starved-looking, genuine Africans — women and men both, a few actually barefoot — chatting and smiling calmly (two talk on cell phones) in anticipation of tearing all the neurotic white racers brand new Turkey Day assholes. For all the runners, it’s hopeful, I know; but to me it’s a dispiriting spectacle to witness on a morning when so much less should be strived for under a wide, pale-clouded and slightly pinkish sky. I feel the same way when I go in a hardware store to have a new tenant’s key cut and smell the cardboard and corrugated-metal and feed-store aromas of all the dervish endeavors a human can be busily up to if he’s worth a shit: recaulking that shower groin with space-age epoxies, insulating the weather-side spigot that always freezes, re-hanging the bathroom door that opens the wrong way and clutters the nice view down the hall that reveals a slice of ocean when the trees aren’t in leaf. It gives me the grims to think of what we humans do that no one’s life depends on, and always drives me right out the door into the street with my jagged new key and my head spinning. It’s no different from Mike’s idea of putting up magnum-size “homes” on two-acre lots with expectations of luring hard-charging young radiologists and probate lawyers who’d really be just as happy to go on living where they live and who need six thousand square feet like they need a bone in their nose. Neither am I sure that the second-home market, where I ply my skills, is immune from the same complaint.

Sea-Clift police are of course a presence, a pair of thick-necks in helmets and jodhpurs on giant white-and-black Kawasakis, waiting to be escorts. A green EMS meat wagon sits beyond the crowd at the curb, its attendants sharing a smoke and a smirk. The priest from Our Lady of Effectual Mercy, Father Ray, wearing his dress-down everyday white surplice, has mounted a metal stepladder at the curb and is using a bullhorn and an aspergill to bless the race and runners: May you not fall down and bust your ass; may you not tear your Achilles or blow out an ACL; may you not have an aneurysm in your aorta with no one to give you last rites; may you have a living will that leaves all to the RC Church; now run for your lives in the name of the Father, the Son, etc., etc., etc.

I need to make my turn here, cross the median cut and the white markings the race organizers have painted on the pavement. All the milling soon-to-be-racers give me and my Suburban the cloudy eye, as if I might be about to plow into them, cut a bloody swath right through. What’s this Suburban all about, their hard looks say. Do you need a boat that big? There oughta be a special tax on those. What’s with the window and the fucking tape? Is this guy local?

I’m grinning involuntarily as I make the turn, my head ducking, nodding unqualified 5-K approval along with my guilty admission that I’m not one of them, not brave enough, will have to try harder. I mustn’t accidentally hit the horn, punch the accelerator, veer an inch off course, or risk setting them to yelling and contesting and reviewing their civil rights. But seeing them congregated and intent, so pre-preoccupied, so vulnerably clad and unprotected, so much one thing, makes me feel just how much I’m a realtor (in the bad sense); even more so now than in my last Haddam days, when I felt coldly extraneous and already irremediably what I was — a house flogger, cruising the periphery of all the real goings-on: the shoe-repair errands, the good-results doctor and dental visits, the 5-K races, the trips to the altar to kneel and accept the holy body and blood of keerist on a kee-rutch. I felt something akin to this somber sensation when I didn’t give Bud Sloat a ride in Haddam on Tuesday.

But I’m sorry to be here feeling it now. Though it is but another in the young day’s cavalcade of good-for-my-soul, Next Level acceptances for which I’ll be thankful: I am this thing, seller of used and cast-off houses, and I am not other. It’s shocking to note how close we play to unwelcome realizations, and yet how our ongoing ignorance makes so much of life possible. However, gone in a gulp are all the roles I might still inhabit but won’t, all the new learning curves I’d be good at, all the women who might adore me, the phone calls bearing welcome news and foretelling unimagined happiness, my chance to be an FBI agent, ambassador to France, a case worker in Mozambique — the one they all look up to. The Permanent Period permitted all that, and the price was small enough — self-extinguishment, becoming an instrument, blah, blah, blah. And now it’s different. The Next Level means me to say yes to myself just when it feels weirdest. Is this what it means to be mainstreamed like my son?

“I’m one of you,” I want to say to these joggers out my window like a crowd in a jogger republic undergoing a coup. “The race is ahead of me, too. I’m not just this. I’m that. And that. And that. There’s more to me than meets your gimlet eye.” But it isn’t so.

A bare coffee-colored arm flags out of the milling crowd, with a squat body attached and a face I know above the three blue stars ’n bars of the Honduran flag worn as a singlet. This is Esteban, from the Cormorant Court roofing crew, waving happily to me, el jefe, his gold restorations flashing in the hidden sun’s glint. He’s socked into the runner crowd, way more a part of things than I feel. My thumb juts to tap the horn, but I catch myself in time and wave instead. Though it’s then I have to press across the opposing lane of Ocean Ave and onto Timbuktu. The electric carillon in Our Lady commences its pre-race clamor, startling the shit out of me. The runner crowd shifts as one toward the starting line and up goes the gun (Father Ray is the shooter). I carry through with my turn, extra careful, since the motorcycle cops are eyeing me. But in an instant, I’m across and anonymous again as the gun goes off and the beast crowd swells with a sigh, and then all of it’s behind me.

Mike Mahoney — bony, businesslike, crisply turned-out realty go-getter — is the first human I see down Timbuktu. He’s out in the street beside his Infiniti with its REALTORS ARE PEOPLE TOO sticker and Barnegat Lighthouse license tag, waving, a happy grin on his round flat face, as though I’d gotten lost and just happened down the right street by dumb luck. He’s wearing his amber aviators and clutching a bouquet of white listing sheets. Twenty yards beyond him is a beige Lincoln Town Car, the exact model Newark Airport limo drivers drive. Outside the Lincoln waits a small, ovoid mustachioed personage in what looks like, through my windshield, a belted linen-looking suit that matches the Town Car’s paint job, into which the man almost perfectly blends. This is the client Mike has somehow convinced to hang around. I’m a half hour late — for reasons of my difficult son — but frankly don’t much care.

Timbuktu Street is a three-block residential, connecting Ocean Avenue to Barnegat Bay out ahead. The closed-for-the-season Yacht Club is at the end to the left, and across the gray water the low populous sprawl of Toms River is two-plus miles away. The bay bridge itself is visible, though at 11:30 on Thanksgiving morning, it is not much in use.

Houses on Timbuktu (Marrakesh Street is one street south, Bimini one street north) are all in the moderate bracket. The bay side is naturally cheaper than the ocean side, but prices go up close to the water, no matter what water it is. Most of these are frank plain-fronted ranches, some with camelbacks added, some with new wood-grained metal siding, all hip-roofed, three-window, door-in-the-middle, pastel frame constructions on small lots. Most were put up en masse, ten streets at a time, after Hurricane Cindy flattened all the aging cypress and fir bungalows the first Sea-Clift settlers built from Sears kits in the twenties. A few of those ’59-vintage owners are still around, though most houses have changed hands ten times and are owned by year-rounders who’re retired or commute to the mainland, or who keep their houses as rentals or a summer bolt-hole for the extended family. Several are owned and kept in mint condition by Gotham and Philadelphia policemen and firefighters who store their big trailered Lunds and refurbished Lymans, shrink-wrapped in blue plastic, on their pink-and-green crushed-marble “lawns.” These small streets, with their clean-facade, well-barbered, moderately-priced dwellings (250–300 bills) are, in fact, the social backbone of Sea-Clift, and even though most newcomers are Republicans, it’s they who oppose the Dollars For Doers schemes to grow out the economy like a mushroom.

It’s also these same home owners who’re made rueful by the sight of a neighbor house being torn off its foundation and trucked away, leaving behind scarred ground that once was a compatible vista, to be replaced by some frightening new construction. The worst is always assumed. And even though the identical houses along these identical, all but tree-less streets are simplicity and modesty’s essence, and finally no great shakes, that’s exactly how the owners want it, and know for certain a new house of unforeseeable design will rob their street of its known character and kick the crap out of values they’re looking to cash in on. I’ve already received concerned calls from the Timbuktu Neighbors Coalition, advancing the idea that I “donate”(!) the emptied lot at 118 for a passive park. Though even if I wanted to (which I don’t), no one in the Coalition would keep it up or pay the liability premiums, since many Coalition-owners are absentees and quite a few are elderly, on fixed whatevers. Eventually, the “park” would turn into a weedy eyesore everyone’d blame me for. Prices would then fall, and everyone would’ve forgotten that an attractive new house could’ve been there and made everything rosy. Better — as I told the Coalition lady — to sell the lot to some citizen who can afford it, then let the community do what communities do best: suppress diversity, discourage individuality, punish exuberance and find suitable language to make it seem good for everyone and what America’s all about. Placards (like election placards) still stand in some yards, shouting SAVE TIMBUKTU FROM EVIL DEVELOPERS!!! Though the house at 118 is already up on steel girders and in a week will be history.

Mike’s heading toward my driver’s window as I pull to the curb. He’s smiling and glancing back, nodding assurances to his client and generally brimming with house-selling certainty.

“I got tied up,” I say out the window, and look annoyed.

“It’s better, it’s better,” Mike says in a whisper, then has another glance at the Town Car clients. He looks like a dashboard doll, since he’s wearing a strange knee-length black knitted sweater with a mink-looking collar, a Black Watch plaid sports-car cap, green cords and green suede loafers with argyle socks. It would seem to be his Scottish ensemble. “It’s good to make them wait.” He has drawn close to my face, so that I’m almost nose-into the fur trim on his sweater. The breeze on the bay side of Barnegat Neck is stouter than I expected. Inland weather is bringing change. We’ll have a proper blustery Thanksgiving cold snap before the day’s done. I bend forward against my steering wheel and give a look through the windshield up at pleasant, leaf-green #118, hiked up on dull red girders that have several impressive-looking hydraulic jacks under them, so the entire house, sill and all, has been elevated five feet off its brick foundation, exposing light and air and affording a view to the back yard. Two sets of heavy-duty tires and axles await use in what was once the front yard, in preparation for actually moving the house — which, like its neighbors, is unornamented, aluminum-sided, with brighter, newer green roof shingles mixed with old. The Arriba house movers have put their enigmatic sign up in the yard: EL GATO DUERME MIENTRAS QUE TRABAJAMOS.

This is the first time I’ve seen 118 up on its sleds, and I frankly can’t blame the neighbors for feeling “violated,” which is what the Coalition lady said before she started to cry and told me I was a gangster. It’s not a very good thing to do to a street’s sense of integrity — prices or no prices — to start switching houses like Monopoly pieces. I’m actually sorry I’ve done it now. It would’ve been better if the new owners had torn 118 down as planned and put their new house up in its dust. Orderly residential succession would have been satisfied, although possibly nobody would’ve been any happier. All the more reason to let Mike sell it to his clients right off the sleds and shift the focus to them — who at least plan to live in it, albeit someplace else.

“I’ve been telling them inventory’s down a third and demand’s kicking up.” Mike’s whispered breath is warm and once again has tobacco on it. He practices all kinds of breath-purifying techniques, as if that’s the thing buyers look for first. His Infiniti has a Dalai Lama-approved incense air-freshener strung to the rearview, and his car seats are always strewn with Clorets and Dentyne papers. But today’s efforts are so far unavailing.

I stare curiously out at Mike’s shiny round face — a face of high, faraway mountain crags, clouded pinnacles and thinnest airs, all forsaken for the chance to sell houses in the Garden State. And just for that instant, I cannot for the life of me think of his name — even though I just thought it. I’d like to say his name, frame a question in a confidential manner that lets him know I’m behind his deal 110 percent, and why doesn’t he just take my thumbs-up from right here in the car. I’ll wave a cheery welcome aboard to the fat little Hindu (or Mohammedan or Buddhist or Jainist or whatever he is), then motor off to be home when Sally calls and Clarissa returns with tales. Possibly Jill will have given Paul a sedative and we can all watch the Patriots pregame on Fox before the food’s festive arrival.

Only, my mind has problematically swallowed up this bright-eyed little brown man’s name, even though I can tell you everything else there is to know about him. Gone from me like a leaf in the wind.

“Uhmmm,” I say. Of course I don’t need to know his name to carry on a conversation with him. Though not knowing it has had the added defect of sweeping clean the conversational path from in front of me, like the police sweeping pedestrians from in front of the 5-K to Ortley and back. I remember all that perfectly! What the hell’s going on? Am I having a stroke? Or just bored to nullity by one more house going on the sale block? This may be how you know you’ve reached the finish line in real estate. I even remember that.

I smile out at this strangely dressed, burbling little man, hoping to neutralize alarm from my face. Though why should there be any? Whatever we’re about to do — I assume sell a house — doesn’t seem to require me. I peer out toward the small pear-shaped man in his wrong-season suit, beside his Lincoln, which wears what looks like blue-and-white Empire State plates and also, I see now, a blue BUSH sticker on its left bumper. He has his short fat-man’s arms folded and is staring thoughtfully at 118 up on its girders, as if this is a marvelous project he’s now in charge of but needs to study for a while. The Town Car appears packed with shadowy human cargo — three distinct heads in back, plus a dog staring through the back window, its tongue out in a happy-dog laugh.

I look back at this diminutive unnamed man at my window. It’s possible I don’t look normal. “So,” I say, “are we all set, then?” I smile exuberantly, suddenly invigorated with what I’m here for and ready to do it — press the flesh, seal the deal, say howdy and make the outsider feel wanted — things I’m good at. “I’m ready to meet the pigeon,” I say for some reason, which seems to distress and sink the grin on——’s round mug. Bill, Bert, Baxter, Boris, Bently…I’ll come to it.

“Mr. Bagosh, Frank,”——says, sotto voce through my window. Frank. Me.

——smiles in at me faintly. His thumb is, I can see, twisting his pinkie ring. Thank goodness he doesn’t know I can’t say his fucking name. He’d think I’m demented. Which I’m not. This kind of thing happens. Possibly vertigo again.

“How is it again?” I say.

“Bagosh,” Carl, Carey, Chris, Court, Curt, Coop says, pushing his listing papers into his silly sweater’s side pocket, then pulling down on his sports-car cap to look more official. He doesn’t want me involved in this now. Something doesn’t feel right. He sees his deal evaporating. But I’m doing it, if only because I don’t know how to leave. He casts a guarded look at my block-M sweatshirt. Then behind his aviators, his eyes drift down to my jeans, as if I might not be wearing pants at all.

“Bagosh it is.” I start out of the car, surprisingly feeling damn good about selling a house on Thanksgiving. Cash deal to sweeten the pot — if I remember right. I actually love this kind of shirt-sleeve, write-a-check, hand-it-over deal. Real estate used to have plenty of them. Nowadays, parties are walled off from exposure, require exit strategies, escape hatches in case a sparrow flies against a screen on the third Tuesday and this is thought to be a bad omen. America is a country lost in its own escrow.

I don’t know why I can’t say Ed, Ewell, Ernie, Egbert, Escalante, Emerson, Everett’s name, but I can’t. He’s Tibetan. He’s my associate. I’ve known him for a year and a half. He and his wife are estranged, with genius-level kids. He’s a Libertarian but a social moderate. A Buddhist. A tiger in our trade, a clotheshorse, a happy little business warrior. I just can’t come up with his handle, even out on chilly Timbuktu, with a mind-clearing whistle-breeze gusting off the bay. Maybe I should ask to borrow his business card to make a note.

Mr. Bagosh is heading toward us with a big pleased grin on his plump lips. He has a toddling-sideways motoring gait you sometimes see experienced waiters use. What I couldn’t see from the car is that he’s wearing walking shorts with his belted Raj jacket, plus rattan loafers and socks of the thinnest white silk up to his knees. We are in Rangoon (when it was still Burma). I’m just out of the cockpit of my Flying Fortress, ready for a gin-rickey, a good soak, a new linen suit of my own and some social introductions. This man — Bagosh — coming across the lobby is just the fellow to make it all happen (in addition to being a spy for our side).

“Bagosh,” this good man says into the Barnegat breezes, far from Rangoon, here now on Timbuktu. He must’ve thought it’d be warm here.

“Bascombe,” I say in the same robust spirit.

“Yes. Wonderful.” We clasp hands. He gives me his two-hander, which is okay this time. “Mr. Mahoney has told me superior things about you.”

Bingo! But Mahoney? I wouldn’t have guessed it. I extend to Mr. Mahoney an affirming business associate’s smile. Mike. All is normal again. We at least know who we are.

“I love your house!” Mr. Bagosh nearly shouts with pleasure. In his toddling way, he half-turns and regards 118 up on its severe machinery, as if it was a piece of rare sculpture he was connoisseur to. “I want to buy it right now. Just as we see it here. Up on its big boats. Whatever they are.” He leans back and beams, as if saying “its big boats” afforded him inexpressible pleasure.

“Well, that’s what we’re here for.” I nod at Mr. Mahoney at my side. He’s re-examining his listing sheets and looking more confident. I have the rich, ineradicable fetor of English Leather burning in my nostrils and also, I believe, on my hand. It’s no doubt Mr. Bagosh’s signature scent since his school days in Rajpur or some such outpost.

“We’re down from the Buffalo area, Mr. Bascombe,” Mr. Bagosh says pridefully. “I own an awards and trophies business, and my business has been good this year.” He has twinkling black eyes, and his fine white hair has been choreographed into a swirling comb-down from the far reaches that complements a little goatee, which is not so different from my son Paul’s beard-stache, only presentable. On anyone but an Indian — if that’s what he is — this configuration would make him look like a masseur. The three of us, me in my block-M and Nikes, Mike in his Scotch get-up, Bagosh in his tropical lounging-wear, are probably the strangest things anyone on Timbuktu — a street of cops, firemen, Kinko’s managers and plumbers — has yet witnessed, and might make them all less sorry to see the house head down the road.

“I’m not sure what that is,” meaning the “awards business,” though I have an idea.

“Oh, well,” Mr. Bagosh says expansively in a plummy accent. “If you become a salesman of the year in New Jersey. And you receive a wonderful awahd for this honor. We supply this awahd — in the Buffalo area. In Erie, as well. We’re a chain of six. So.” His mouse-brown face virtually glows. Possibly he’s five eight and sixty, and obviously happy to see the complex world in terms of bestowing awards on inhabitants and to make a ton of money doing it. “We say ours is a rewarding business. But it has been very profitable.” This is his standard joke and makes him lower his eyes to stifle a look of pleasure.

“That’s great.” I pass an eye over his Town Car, which has all gold accessories — gold door handles, gold side mirrors, gold and silver hubcaps and gold window frames. Even the famed Lincoln hood ornament is gold-encrusted. It is the car I saw at the office yesterday. In the passenger’s seat, a swarthy Madonna-faced woman with dense black hair and a pastel scarf covering part of her head is talking non-stop into a cell phone and paying no attention to what we’re doing. In the back I count possibly three sub-teen faces (there could be more). A large-eyed girl peers at me through the tinted window. The others — two slender boys with vulpine expressions — are fidgeting with handheld video gizmos as though they don’t know they’re in a car in New Jersey. The dog is not to be seen.

But ecce homo—Bagosh. Family number two is my guess. The cell-phone Madonna looks not much older than Clarissa and is probably a mail-order delivery from the old country, where she may have been unmarriageable in ways Buffalo residents couldn’t care less about. A young widow.

“I guess a lot more people are getting awards now,” I say.

“Oh my, yes. It’s very good today. Very positive. When my father started in the business in 1961, everyone said, ‘Oh, Sura, my God. This doesn’t make sense. There’s no possible way for you. You’re mad as a hatter.’ But he was smart, you know? When I finished at Eastman and came into the firm, he had two stores. And now I have six. Two more next year, maybe.” Mr. Bagosh links his manicured fingers across the belted front of his Raj cabana jacket and rests them on his prosperous little belly — one pinkie wears a raucous diamond Mike is probably envious of. He’s a better candidate for one of the mansionettes Mike’s planning in Montmorency County than for 118. Though he may already have one of those in Buffalo, and maybe in Cozumel. In any case, the first commandment of residential sales is never to question the buyer’s motives. Leave that for the lawyers and the bankruptcy referees, who get paid to do it.

“Is there anything I can tell you about the house?” I have to say something to merit being here. I look down at my Nike toes and actually give the asphalt a tiny Gary Cooperish nudge.

“Oh no, my goodness,” Mr. Bagosh exults. His teeth are straight and white and uniform — top of the line, in dental terms. “Your Mike here has done his job splendidly. I could use twenty of him.”

Stood off to the side so the two of us can talk, Mike, I see, is unsmiling. Being commodified in front of me is distasteful to him and will make skinning money off this gentleman less than a hardship. I’m certain he’s reciting his Ahimsa, since he’s begun gazing up into the sky as if a passing pelican was his soul dispersing to bliss. When reason ends, anger begins. Mike’s little flat face, I think, looks weary.

“Have you even been in the house?” I say for no particular reason.

“No, no. But I really don’t—”

“Let’s just have a look,” I say. “You don’t want any surprises once it’s yours.”

“Well—” Bagosh shoots a dubious look at Mike and then over to the Lincoln, where his girlfriend, wife, daughter, granddaughter is still yakking on the phone. A hurry-the-hell-up frown wrinkles her features, as if she’s wanting lunch and to be rid of the kids. I see the dog now, a black Standard Poodle seated beside her in the driver’s seat, staring out toward Barnegat Bay, a block and a half away, where a late-staying pair of Tundra swans browses on the weedy shore. In his doggy mind, they are his future. “It’s conceivably not safe, I think,” Bagosh says, his smile gone measly. In fact, both the house and the red girdering have PELIGRO! NO ENTRADA! painted on in big, crude, no-nonsense letters. Except I know the Bolivians crawl these houses like lemurs and the whole rigamarole’s solid as a bank.

“I’m gonna have a look,” I say. “I think you should, too. It’s just good business.” I’m only doing this to put chain-store, second-family Bagosh through some hands-on experience he won’t enjoy — this, because he gloated over Mike’s subaltern status (and voted for Bush). Though it’s Mike’s fault for thinking he can sell a house to an Indian and not feel cheated. Last year, he sold a condo to a Chinese family and accepted an invitation to dinner once they moved in. I asked him how it had gone, and he answered that the little man-god no longer opposes Chinese sovereignty and that Buddhists bear exile well.

Mike projects a beetled expression and definitely does not support a trip inside the house or hauling his customer up with me. He’s worried what the place looks like — huge cracks in the ceilings, floor joists compromised by wet rot — the cold vastness of all that’s unknown but not good and therefore peligro. Only a nitwit would expose a client to the unexpected when cash is smiling at you. Despite being a Buddhist — full of human compassion for all that lives, and who views real estate as a means of helping others — when it comes to clinching deals, Mike sees clients as rolls of cash that happen to be able to talk. He is no more bothered by Bagosh’s undervaluing his essence than if Bagosh fell down and barked like a dog. To Mike — eyes blinking, hands thrust into his absurd sweater pockets — Bagosh is “Mr. Equity Takeover.” “Mr. Increased Disposable Income.” It wouldn’t matter if he was a Navajo. I’ve never felt exactly that way in fifteen years of selling houses. But I’m not an immigrant, either.

Bagosh, against his will and judgment, but shamed, has begun clambering up onto the girder behind me, bumping the back of my Nikes with his noggin and making me breathe in big burning whiffs of his English Leather. He’s taking deep grunting breaths as he ascends, and because he’s a shrimp, has to struggle up on his bare knees to reach the red girder surface.

Once onto the flat I-beam, however, it’s easy to step along past the front window, holding to the siding panels, and to walk straight to the front door opening that gives entry to the house. Bagosh keeps crowding me on the girder, breathing unevenly, a couple of times saying, “Yes, yes, all right, this is fine now,” and smiling wretchedly when I look back at him. We’re only eight feet off the ground here and wouldn’t do any damage if we did a belly flop.

But there’s a nice new view to take in from here, one I’m happy to have and that makes the whole climb-up worthwhile, no matter what we discover inside. Getting a new view — even of Timbuktu Street — is never a waste of time. From here the community is briefly revisioned: Mike Mahoney down in the street, looking skeptically up at us; our three cars; Bagosh’s little closeted brood, all now watching us — the wife at the window, smiling a smile of disapproval. The view stresses the good uniformity of the houses, with their little crushed-marble front yards of differing hues (grassy green, a pink, two or more oceany blues). Few have real trees, only miniature Scotch pines and skimpy oak saplings. None have political placards (meaning the Republicans have won), though several still have their SAVE TIMBUKTU FROM EVIL DEVELOPERS!!! protests. Some yards have boats stored and others feature white statuary of Ole Neptune leaning on his trident — purchasable off the back of trucks on Route 35. No house has nothing, though the effect is to re-enforce sameness: three windows (some with decorative crime bars), center door, no garage, fifty-by-a-hundred-foot lots the original way the (not yet evil) developer designed it. A housing concept which permits no one ever to feel he was meant to be here, and so is happy to be, and happier yet to pack up and go when the spirit moves him or her — unlike Haddam, which operates on the Forever Concept but is really no different.

Up the street toward Ocean Avenue, where the 5-K racers have disappeared and the carillon tower at the RC chapel is just visible, some owners are out busying. A man and his son are erecting an Xmas tree in a front yard, where the MIA flag flies on its pole below the Italian tricolor. A man and wife team is painting their front door red and green for Yuletide. Across at 117, in the skimpy back yard, a wrestling ring’s been put up and two shirtless teens are throwing each other around, springing off the ropes, taking goofy falls, throwing mock punches, knee lifts and flying mares, laughing and growling and moaning in fun. Number 117, I see, is for sale with my competitor Domus Isle Realty and looks fixed up and spruced for purchase. To the west, the bay stretches out toward the scrim of Toms River far beyond the white Yacht Club mooring markers set in rows. A few late-season sailors are out on the water, seizing the holiday and the land breeze for a last go.

“Ahhhh, yes, now. This is very fine now, isn’t it?” Bagosh is close to my shoulder, taking the view, and has actually fastened ahold of my arm. This may be as far above ground as he’s been without walls around him. His English Leather is happily beginning to dissipate in the breeze. His womanish knees have smudges from clambering onto the girder. We’re outside the vacant front doorway, at a level where the sill comes to my waist. Mike, at street level, is frowning at the bay. He is envisioning better events than these.

“We have to go inside still,” I say. “You have to inspect your house.” This is purely punitive. I’ve, of course, already been in the house when it was attached to the ground and I was selling it to the Morris County Stevicks following the departure of the previous owners, the Hausmanns. Though climbing up and in constitutes a pint-size good adventure I didn’t expect and is much more rewarding than fighting with my son.

“I’ll certainly inspect it when these moving chaps finish,” Bagosh says, and widens his onyx eyes in a gesture of objection that seems to agree.

“You’ll own it by then,” I say, and start pulling myself over the metal sill strip that’s half-worked out of its screw holes and a good place to get a nasty cut.

“Yes. Well—” Bagosh casts a fevered frown down at his luxury barge, clearly wishing to be driving it away. He coughs, then laughs a little squealy laugh as I reach down from the doorway and haul him up into the house that will soon be his.

But if it’s good to see the familiar world from a sudden new elevation, it may not be to see inside a house on girders, detached from the sacred ground that makes it what it is — a place of safety and assurance. This is what Mike was trying to make me understand by saying nothing.

Down on the street, temps must be low forties, but inside here it’s ten degrees colder, and still and dank as a coal scuttle and echoey and eerily lit. It’s different from what I thought — without being sure what I thought. The soggy-floored living room-dining room combo (you enter directly — no foyer, no nothing) is tiny but cavernous. The stained pink walls, old green shag and picture-frame ghosts make it feel not like a room but a shell waiting for a tornado to sweep it into the past. Leaking gas and backed-up toilets stiffen the cold internal air. If I was Bagosh, I’d get in my Town Car and not stop till I saw the lights of snowy Buffalo. Good sense is its own reward. I may be losing my touch.

“O-kay! Well. Yes, yes yes. This is fine,” Bagosh says jauntily. We’re both too big for the cramped, emptied living room, our footfalls loud as thunder.

I walk through the kitchen door to a tiny room of brown-and-gold curling synthetic tiles, where there’s no stove, no refrigerator, no dishwasher. All have been ripped out, leaving only their unpainted footprints, the rusted green sink and all the metal cabinets standing open and uncleaned inside. There’s a strong cold scent in here of Pine-Sol, but nothing looks like it’s been scrubbed in two hundred years. Police enter rooms like this every day and find cadavers liquefying into the linoleum. It didn’t look like this when I showed it to the Stevicks.

Bagosh is heading down the murky hall that separates the two small bedrooms and ends in the bath — the classic American starter-home design. “Okay, this is fine,” I hear him say. I’m sure he’s frozen in his shorts. The Hausmanns lived in these rooms twenty years, raised two kids; Chet Hausmann worked for Ocean County Parks and Lou-Lou was an LPN in Forked River. Life worked fine. They were normal-size people, with normal-size longings. They bought, they saved, they accrued, they envied, they thrived and enjoyed life right through the Clinton administration. The kids left for other lives (though Chet “the Jet” Jr.’s currently in rehab #2). They grew restless for Dade County, where Lou-Lou’s parents live. Things seemed to be changing here — though they weren’t. So they left. Nothing out of the ordinary, except it’s hard to see how it could’ve happened inside these four walls, or, if it did, how things could look like this four months later. Empty houses go downhill fast. I should have been more vigilant.

I have a look out the kitchen window into the ditched-up and vacant back yard, and the square, fenced back yards of Bimini Street. Several houses there are closed and boarded for the season, though some have dogs chained up and clothes on the line. Up on Ocean Avenue, the noon carillon at Our Lady has begun chiming “O come, all ye faithful, joyful and triumphant—” Then the wail of a farther-off siren signals the hour. Sirens are rare in Sea-Clift in the off-season, though routine in summer.

“O-kay!” I hear Bagosh say conclusively. It’s time to leave. I’ve said not a word since forcing us to come in here.

And then there’s a loud, violent, scrabbling, struggling commotion down the hall, where Bagosh is carrying out his unwilling presale inspection. “Oh my Gawd,” I hear him shout in a horrified voice. Then bangety, bangety, bang-bang. The sound of a man falling. I’m moving, without bidding myself to move, across the mud-caked floor of the back family room, with its water-clouded picture window overlooking the wrecked back yard. It’s less than twenty feet to the hallway entrance and another twelve down the passage. It’s possible Bagosh has come upon the overdosed Chet, Jr., is all I can think. Then “Ahhhhh,” I hear poor Bagosh shout again. “My Gawd, oh my Gawd.” I still can’t see him, though unexpectedly I’m faced with me, reflected in the mirror on the dark bathroom medicine chest at the end of the hallway. I look terrified.

“What’s wrong? Are you all right?” I call out. Though why would he be all right and be howling?

Then out from the right bedroom, where I take it Bagosh is and has hit the floor, a good-size bushy-tailed red fox comes shooting into the hallway. “Ahhh,” Bagosh is wailing, “my-Gawd, my-Gawd.” The fox stops, paws splayed, and fixes its eyes on me, hugely blocking the path of escape. Its eyes are dark bullets aimed at my forehead. Though it doesn’t pause long, but turns and re-enters the room where Bagosh is, provoking another death wail (possibly he’s being ripped into now and will have to undergo painful rabies shots). Immediately, the fox comes rocketing back out the bedroom door, claws scrabbling powerfully to gain purchase. For an instant, its spectral, riotous eyes consider the other tiny bedroom — the kids’ room. But without another moment’s indecision, the fox fires off straight toward me, so that I stagger back and to the left and pitch through the arched doorway into the living room and right off my feet onto the filthy green shag, where I land just as the fox explodes after me through the door, claws out and scrabbling right across my block-M chest, so that I catch a gulp of its feral rank asshole as it springs off, straight across to the metal threshold and out into the clean cold air of Timbuktu, where, for all I know, Mike may believe the fox is me, translated by this house of spirits into my next incarnation on earth. Frank Fox.

15

When the Bagoshes’ taillamps have made the turn up onto Ocean Avenue and disappeared ceremoniously into the post noon-time, holiday-emptied streets, Mike and I have ourselves a side-by-side amble down to the bay shore, malodorous and sudsed from last night’s storm.

Sally will have called by now. Paul will have answered and could possibly have blurted things I don’t want her to know (my illness, for one). Though Clarissa will be home, and the two of them can have a sister-brother parsing talk about my “condition,” my upcoming Mayo trip, etc., etc. Possibly Clarissa could also talk to Sally, fill in some gaps, welcome her back on my behalf, no recriminations required. As is often the case, one view is that life is as fucked up as ground chuck and not worth fooling with. But there’s another view available to most of us even without becoming a Buddhist: that with an adjustment or two (Sally moving home to me, for instance), life could perhaps be fine again. No need for a miracle cancer cure. No need for Ann Dykstra to vaporize off the earth. No need for Clarissa to marry a former-NFL-great-become-pediatric-oncologist. No need for Paul to dedicate himself to scaling corporate Hallmark (new wardrobe concepts, a computerized prosthesis for his sugar pie). I can’t say if this view is the soul of acceptance. But in all important ways, it is the Next Level for me and I am in it and still taking breath regularly.

Mike and I trek stonily down toward the bay’s ragged edge. He, it seems, has a proposition for me. The not-good outcome of the Bagosh deal, he believes, only underscores the wisdom and importance of his plan, as well as the “time being right” for me. There’s a bravura opportunity for “everybody,” should I take him seriously, which I do. I’m always more at home with chance and transition than with the steady course, since the steady course leads quickly, I’ve found, to the rim of the earth.

The Bagoshes, not surprisingly, couldn’t get away from us fast enough. Bagosh emerged uninjured from his ordeal — a small tear in his linens, a scuffed wrist (no chance of a bite), his hair disfigured. But the sight of the fleeing fox incited the big poodle, Crackers, to a primordial in-car carnivore rage, so that the kids got deep scratches, broke their computer games and eventually had to pile out on the street, letting Crackers give pursuit out of sight. (He came back on his own.) Mrs. Bagosh, if that’s who the Madonna-faced woman was, didn’t leave the front seat, never lowered her window, did nothing more than say nothing to anyone, including her husband, a silence lasting up to Ocean Avenue, I suspected, but no longer.

Bagosh himself couldn’t have been nicer to me or to Mike. Mike couldn’t have been nicer. And neither could I, since I was responsible for everything. Bagosh said he would “definitely” buy the house on Monday. He and his family, however, had Thanksgiving reservations in Cape May that night, planned to travel up to Bivalve to see the snow geese wintering ground, then on to Greenwich, Hancocks Bridge and around to the Walt Whitman house in Camden before driving home weary but happy on Sunday, back to Buffalo, where there’s now ten feet of snow. He’d be calling. The story made him happy to tell. And even though Mike knew Bagosh had at that moment a choker wad of greenbacks in his shorts pocket and could’ve counted out big bills while I executed a quit-claim deed on my Suburban hood, he seemed jolly about money he would never see. He actually took off his sports-car cap, revealed his bristly dome, rubbed his scalp and joked with Bagosh about what a dog’s breakfast the Bills were making of the regular season, but that with luck a new O.J. would come along in the draft — a possibility that made them both laugh like Polacks. They are both Americans and acted like nothing else.

When the Bagoshes were all loaded in and maneuvering the big Lincoln around on Timbuktu, Mike stood beside me, hands thrust in his sweater pockets. “Wrong views result in a lack of protection, with no place to take refuge,” he announced solemnly. I took this to mean I’d fucked up, but it didn’t matter, because he had more significant things in mind.

“I loused this up,” I said. “I apologize.”

“It’s good to almost sell a house,” he said, already upbeat. The Bagosh children were waving at us from inside their warm, plush car (unquestionably at the command of their father). The little girl — wispy, sloe-eyed, with a decorative red dot on her forehead — held up Crackers’ paw so he could wave, too. Mike and I both waved and smiled our good-byes to dog, money and all as the Lincoln, its left taillight blinking at the intersection, rumbled out of sight forever.

“I’d rather have their money than their friendship,” I said. I noticed that I’d ripped my 501s somewhere in the house. My second fall of the day, third in two days. A general slippage. “Did he say what he thought he wanted the house for?”

“He didn’t know,” Mike said. “The idea just appealed to him. It’s why I didn’t want him to go inside.” He looked at me to say I should’ve known that, then smiled a thin, indicting smile meant not to be condescending.

“I’m an essentialist in things,” I said. “I believe humans buy houses to live in them, or so other people will.”

Mike didn’t attempt a reply, just looked up at the frosted clouds quickly forming. I cast a speculative eye up at the unsold green house, raised and allowing the glimpse of fenced back yards on Bimini Street. Possibly Thanksgiving wasn’t really a great day to sell a house. On a day to summon one’s blessings and try to believe in them, it might be common sense not to risk what you’re sure you have.

Last night’s storm has widened the bay’s perimeter and shoved water up onto Bay Drive, where it exudes swampy-sweet odors of challenged septics. Yellow fluff rides in the weeds where the black-billed swans have foraged. This part of the bay shore has remained undeveloped due to seventies-era open-space ordinances mandating jungle gyms, slides and merry-go-rounds for younger, child-bearing families in the neighborhood. These apparatuses are here but now disused and grown dilapidated on the skimpy beach. A billboard announcing WE CAN DO IT IF WE TRY has been erected on the bay’s sandy-muddy shore. I’m not sure what this message means. Possibly save the bay. Or possibly that condos, apartments and shops will soon be here where there’s now a pleasant vista across the water, and that the families with kids will have to do their own math or else take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut.

The two swans have moved off among the Yacht Club buoys. Bits of white Styrofoam, yellow burger wrappers and a faded red beach ball have washed in among the weeds with last night’s blow. A gentleman is working alone on his black-hulled thirty-footer, readying it for winter storage. His white-helmeted kid plays with a cat on the dock plankings. Thanksgiving now and here feels evasive, the day at pains to seem festive. It’s cold and damp. The usual band of bad air along the far, cluttered Toms River horizon has been washed away in the night. I have noted in our walk down that I am not keen to walk as fast as Mike, whose little green loafers step out lively as he talks in his businessy voice. I’m hoping not to forget his name in mid-announcement of his developer plans. I want to be upbeat and comradely — even if I don’t feel that way. We can, after all, always set aside our real feelings — which usually don’t amount to a hill of beans anyway, and may not even be genuine — and let ourselves be spontaneous and bounteous with fast-flowing vigor, just as when we’re at our certifiable best. This is the part of acceptance I welcome, since it has down-the-line consolations.

On our walk down, Mike has said matter-of-factly that the last two nights have been a “great sufferance” to him, that he dislikes dilemmas (the middle way should preclude them), hates causing me “uncertainty,” is uncomfortable with ambition (though he’s been practicing it for a coon’s age), but has had to concede these “pressures” are a part of modern life (here in America, apparently not in Tibet) and there’s no escaping them (unless of course you can get stinking rich, after which you have no real problems). I was curious if he was fingering a pack of Marlboros in his sweater pocket and would’ve preferred to be puffing away Dick Widmark-style as he spieled all this out to me.

I’ve begun to enjoy the lake-like bay, the clanking halyards of the remaining Yacht Club boats, the rain-cleared vista across to the populous mainland, even the distant sight of the newer homes down the shore, from the go-go nineties. There’s nothing wrong with development if the right people do the developing. At the gritty water’s edge, with the wind huskier, I can see that the WE CAN DO IT billboard has a tiny Domus Isle Realty logo at its bottom corner, an artist’s conception of a distant desert atoll with a lone red palm silhouetted. Unfortunately, though maybe only in my view, the desert-island motif calls to mind Eniwetok, not some South Sea snug-away where you’d like to buy or build your dream house, but in any case has nothing at all to do with Sea-Clift, New Jersey. I’ve met the owners, two former sports-TV execs from Gotham, a husband and wife team, and by most accounts, they’re perfectly nice and probably honest.

Farther down Bay Drive, where it approaches the first of the newer nineties homes, a two-person survey crew has set up — a man with a tall zebra stake and a girl bent over a svelte-looking digital transit on a tripod. Something’s already afoot, out ahead of public approval and opinion. These two are working where a sign designates CABLE CROSSING. I can make out the tiny red digitalized numerals in the transit box, glowing at me each time the young surveyor girl stands up to take a sight line.

There’s absolutely no reason to drag out Mike’s epic new-vistas announcement and spend all day out here where it’s cold and gusty. I’m ready to get on board, whatever it is. I regret our last collaboration hasn’t been a money-maker. Averages of showings-to-sales run 12 percent, and we came close on an unpromising day. I want to get home in case Sally hasn’t called. But because Mike’s a Buddhist, he can only proceed the way he wants to proceed and not the way anybody else does, which means he often has to be humored.

In my rising spirit, I take a cold seat on the low barn-red kids’ merry-go-round and give it a rounding push with my toe, so that Mike has to come where I am to speak his piece.

“So’re we gonna jump into the McMansion business with our new pecorino cumpari?” I say, and give another spin around. The wrecked old contraption squalls with a metal-on-metal skweeeee-er that unfortunately nullifies my spirited opening. I’m succeeding in feeling munificent, but can’t be sure how long it’ll last.

“Tom’s a real good guy,” Mike says gravely.

I can’t hear that well as the merry-go-round takes my gaze past the surveyors, across the bay, past the nineties housing, then back to Mike, who’s stationed himself legs apart, arms folded like an umpire. His brow’s furrowed and he looks frustrated that I won’t be still.

“Yep, yep, yep,” I say. “He seemed pretty solid — for a bozo developer.” Benivalle, however, also once knew my precious son Ralph — whose death I have now accepted — and thus occupies a special place in my heart’s history book. But I don’t want to piss Mike off after I’ve queered the Bagosh deal like an amateur, so I stop the merry-go-round in front of him and offer up a general smile of business forgiveness for quitting on me when I’m not feeling my best.

“I think now’s the right time to make a change,” Mike says, seeming to widen his eyes to indicate resolution, his pupils large behind his glasses. “I think it’s time to get serious about real estate, Frank. Bush is going to win Florida, I’m sure. We’ll see a turn-around by fiscal ’01.” I don’t know why Mike has to sear his little self-important gaze into my brain just to tell me what he’s going to do.

“You could be right.” I try to look serious back. I’d like to take another spin on the old go-round, but my ass is frozen on the boards and what I need to do is stand up. Only then I’d tower over Mike and ruin his little valedictory. I just want him to get on with it. I’ve got places to go, telephone calls to answer, children to be driven crazy by.

“People need to stay the course, Frank,” he says. “If it isn’t broken, don’t break it, you know. Stick with old-fashioned competence. Thanksgiving’s a good time for this.” Mike uncorks a giant happy-Asian smile, as if I’d just said something I haven’t said. He’s, of course, kidnapping Thanksgiving for his own selfish commercial lusts, the same as Filene’s. “I’ve got a new person in my life,” Mike says.

“A new what?” I suspected it.

“A new lady friend.” He rises fractionally on the soles of his shoes. “You’ll like her.”

“What about your wife?” And your two kids at their laptops? Don’t they get to make the transition, too? What about the soulful, clear-sighted immigrant life that delivered you to me? And old-fashioned competence not breaking what isn’t broken? “I thought you two were reconciling.”

“No.” Mike tries to look tragic, but not too. He doesn’t want to go where what he’s said gets all blurred up with what he means. A true Republican.

But it’s okay with me. I don’t want to go there either.

“Love-based attachments,” Mike says indistinctly enough that I don’t hear the next thing he says — lost in the breeze — something about Sheela and the kids in the Amboys, the discarded part of his history the business biographers will gloss over in the cover stories once he and Benivalle break through to developer’s paradise: “Little Big Man: Tiny Tibetan Talks Turkey to Tantalize Trenders, Trenton to Tenafly.” But who could a new squeeze be — suitable for a forty-something Himalayan in the lower echelons of the realty trade? And in New Jersey? An arranged union, like Bagosh, with a Filipina daughter grown too long in the tooth for her own kind? A monied Paraguayan military widow seeking a young “protégé”? A Tibetan teen flown in like a pizza, on a pledge he’ll care for her always? I wonder what the Dalai Lama says in The Road to the Open Heart about monogamy. Probably not much, given his own curriculum vitae.

“So, is that all the news that’s fit to tell?” From my cold merry-go-round, I can address Mike at eye-level. His plaid cap has drifted down an inch and off to the side, so he looks once again like a pint-size mobster.

“No. I want to buy you out.” His now invisible eyes go grim as death. Then again his mouth cracks a big smile, as if what he’s just said was absolutely hilarious. Which it isn’t.

My own mouth opens to speak, but no words are ready.

“I’ve tamed myself,” Mike says, jubilant. A lone passing duck quacks one quack high in the misty sky, as if all the creatures agree, yes, he’s tamed himself.

“From what?” I manage. “I didn’t know you needed taming. I thought you were rounding up your courage.”

“They’re the same.” He, as usual, gets instantly giddy at talk like this — word riddles. “There’s some unhappiness never to be as rich as J. Paul Getty.” Another of Mike’s earthly deities. “Filthy rich,” he adds buoyantly. “But I can make money, too. Helping people this way can make money.”

He means helping them out of their cash. There’s a reason these people don’t get cancer in their countries. And there’s a reason we do. We make things too complicated.

“I believe you want to think about this proposal,” he says. His tough little hands are clasped priest-like. He likes being the presenter of a proposal. Believe, want, think—these are words used in new ways.

“I don’t want to sell you my business,” I say. “I like my business. You go develop McMansions for proctologists.”

“Yes,” he says, meaning no. “But if I make a good business proposal and pay you a lot of money, you can transfer ownership, and everything will stay the same.”

“Everything’s already the same. It ain’t broke. Due to old-fashioned competence. Mine.”

“I knew you’d say this,” Mike says happily. For the first time since I’ve known him, he’s talking like the departed Mr. Bagosh, with whom he shares, after all, a stronger regional bond than he shares with me. “I think we should agree, though. I’ve thought about this a great deal. It’ll give you time to travel.”

Travel is code for my compromised health status, which Mike is officially sensitive to, and means in Mike’s enlightened view — Buddhist crappolio — that I “need” to ready myself for the final conjugation by taking a voyage on the Queen Mary or the Love Boat. He’s “helping” me, in other words, by helping me out of business. “I’ve got time to travel,” I say. “Why don’t we not talk about this anymore. Okay?” I attempt a faint smile that feels unwelcome to my cold cheeks. Munificence is gone. I don’t like being strong-armed or felt sorry for.

“Yes! Okay!” Mike exults. “This is just what I thought. I’m satisfied.” It’s all about him, his confidence level, his satisfaction. I’m as good as out of work, a cat in need of herding.

“Me, too. Good. But I’m not going to sell you Realty-Wise.” I give my sore knees a try at prizing me up off the butt-froze planks. I hold onto the curved hang-on bar that wants to glide away and spill me over. Mike semi-casually secures a light grip on my sweatshirt sleeve. But I’m up and feel fine. The bay breeze cools my neck. My eyes feel like they’ve both just freshly opened all the way. Down Bay Drive, the boy-girl surveyors are walking side-by-side toward a yellow pickup parked farther along the curve, where houses are. One holds the collapsed tripod, the other the striped pole.

“So, you’re not going into business with what’s his name?” I say gruffly.

Mike dusts his little hands together as if dirt was on them. He’s pretending we didn’t have the conversation we just had, and that he feels good about something else. It’s possible he’ll never bring this subject up again. Intention is the same as action to these guys. “No,” he says, pseudo-sadly.

“That’s probably smart. I didn’t want to say that before.”

“I think so.” He gives his little Black Watch cap a straightening as we begin walking back to the cars.

Mike is pleased by my rebuff of his unfriendly takeover try. He knows I know it’s nothing more than what I did with old man Barber Featherstone and how the world always works. Plus, he’s smart. He knows he’s succumbed to the little leap into the normal limbo of life. That he’s facing down the big fear of “Is this it?” by agreeing “Yes, this is.” He also knows I might sell him Realty-Wise after all, possibly even very soon, and that he can then start video-taping virtual tours, building Web-based rental connections, adding a new Arabic-speaking female associate, change the company name to Own It…TODAY!.com, subscribe to recondite business studies from Michigan State and concentrate more on lifestyle purchasing than essentialist residential clientele. In two to twelve years, when he’ll be my age now, he’ll be farting through silk. One hardly knows how or when or by what subtle mechanics the old values give way to new. It just happens.

Tommy Benivalle taught me some invaluable—” Mike’s maundering on as we trudge at my slower pace back up Timbuktu. Ahead, his new-values silver Infiniti and my broke-window, old-values, essentialist Suburban sit end to end in front of 118, perched sturdily up on its girders. “Only a fool—” Mike rattles on. I’m not interested. I was his mentor and am now his adversary — which probably mean the same thing, too. I admire him but don’t particularly like him today, or the fresh legions he commands. How much life do I have to accept? Does it all come in one day?

“So, are you putting on a big holiday feed bag with your new squeeze?” I say this just to be rude. We stand mid-street, looking exactly like what we are — a pair of realtors. Mike’s eyes move toward my Suburban. The duct-taped back window may be a worrisome sign that he needs to hurry up with his business proposal, get the deal nailed down before the mental-health boys show up. There was the puzzling scene at the August on Tuesday. I could be discovered tomorrow sitting silently in the office, “just thinking.” He could be forced to negotiate with Paul.

“She’s got her big place up in Spring Lake. The kids come. They’re Jewish. It’s a big scene.” Mike nods a sage “not my kind of thing” nod. He’s gone back to talking like a Jerseyite.

But I knew it! A dowager, a late-model divorcée like Marguerite. She’s adopted “little Mike-a-la,” who’s giving her “investment counsel” over and above his unspecified services of a consensual nature. The kids, Jake, a Columbia professor, Ben, a fabric artist on Vinal-haven, and one daughter, Rachel, who lives alone in Montecito and can’t seem to get started. They all keep the zany parent on a frugal budget so she can’t ruin their retirements with her funny enthusiasms. Mike’s “interesting,” a minority, resembles the Dalai Lama — plus, who cares, if he makes “Gram” happy and keeps her away from ballroom dancing. At least he’s not a Mexican.

“Do they let you carve the turkey and serve?” I don’t try to suppress a smirk, which he hates but won’t show. He knows what he’s up to and doesn’t care if I know. It’s business, not a love-based attachment.

“I’ll just drop by late,” he says, and frowns, not at me, but at how he’ll pass the night. He is, as we all are, taking his solaces as they come. “I have the business proposal already written up.” He produces a white Realty-Wise business envelope from his sweater pocket, rolled up with the listing sheets for 118. This he proffers like a summons, bowing slightly. I’m not sure Tibetans even bow. It may be something he picked up. Though I, the defendant, accept it and bow back (which I can’t seem to prevent myself from doing) before folding it and stuffing it in my Levi’s back pocket like junk mail.

“I’ll read this someday. Not today.”

“That’s splendid.” He is elated again. It pleases him to conduct business in the street, in the elements, far from the ancestral cradle. To Mike, this is a sign of progress: the old lessons from the life left behind still viable here in New Jersey.

“Am I going to see you again?” My hand’s on my cold door handle. “I don’t know what you’re doing. I thought you were moving your base of operations over to Mullica Road. You’re a mystery wrapped in a small enigma.”

“Oh, no.” His smile — all intersecting angles — radiates behind his specs. He’s risen onto his little toes again, Horatio Alger-style. “I work for you. Until you work for me. Everything’s the same. I love you. I keep you in my prayers.”

I’m fearful he may hug, kiss, high-five or double-hander me. Two male hugs in one morning is a lot. Men don’t have to do that all the time, even though it doesn’t mean we’re not sensitive. I open the car door and stiffly get myself inside before the inescapable happens. I shut the door and lock it. Mike’s left standing out on Timbuktu in his black sweater with its fake-fur collar and his little Black Watch cap. He’s speaking something. I can hear the buzz of his voice, but not the sense, through the window. I don’t care what he’s saying. It’s not about me. I get the motor started and begin to mouth words he’ll “understand” through the window glass. “Abba-dabba, dabba-dabba, dabba-dabba-dabba, dabba-dabba,” I say, then smile, wave, bow in my car seat. He says something back and looks triumphant. He gives me the thumbs-up sign and nods his head proudly. “Abba dabba, dabba, dabba-dabba,” I say back and smile. He nods his head again, then steps back, effects a small wave, laughs heartily. And that is it. I’m off.

16

A dual sensation — pleasure and enthusiasm — unexpectedly skirls through my middle by the time I reach Ocean Avenue; and alloyed with it is another bracing sensation, from my arms down to my fists, of complete readiness to “take hold.” I actually envision these words—take hold—in watery letters like an old eight-ball fortune. And there’s also, simultaneously, a seemingly opposite feeling of release—from something. Sometimes we know complex pressures are building and roiling, and can finger exactly what they’re about — a gloomy doctor visit, a big court case before a mean-spirited judge, an IRS audit we wish to God wasn’t happening. And other times, we have to plumb the depths, like seeking a warm seam in a cold pond. Only, this time it’s easy. Full, pleasurable release and bold, invigorating authority both exude from the sudden, simple prospect of handing over the Realty-Wise reins to Mike Mahoney.

At first blush, of course, it’s a heresy. Except, life on the Next Level is only what you invent. And as Mike pointed out two days ago (and I scoffed at), residential real estate’s all about what somebody invented. I could sign the papers right now and be on top of the world. Even if it’s the worst idea in the world and leaves me rudderless, with yawning angst-filled days during which I never get out of my pj’s, it still feels like the right invention now. And now is where I am. (This feels, of course, like a Permanent Period resurrection. But if it is, I don’t care.)

There’s no sign of returning 5-K runners here at the corner, or much mid-day traffic, not even post-race street litter — only the starting line, whitewashed across the north-bound side of the avenue. A black man — the docent at Our Lady — is just now carting Father Ray’s aluminum blessing ladder across the lawn to an arched side doorway. He leans the ladder against the stucco exterior, steps in the door, closes it behind him and does not come out again.

My instinct now is to turn right and get myself home — a better second act with my son, the hoped-for return of my daughter, the crucial call from Sally. The resumption of the day’s best, if unlikely, hopes for itself.

Only another powerful urging directs me not to turn right, but to cross the median and go left, and north, up the peninsula toward Ortley Beach. I know what I’m up to here. I’m empowered by the dual sense of release and take hold, which don’t come often and almost never together, and so must be heeded as if ordained by God.

There are — I admit this at risk to myself, though all men know it’s true and all women know men think it — there are ideal women in the world. Sally said it about me in her letter — which means the same is true for how women calculate men. In my view, there’s at least one ideal person for all of us, and probably several. For men, these are the women who make you feel especially smart, that you’re uniquely handsome in a way you yourself always believed you were, who bring out the best in you and, by some generosity or need in themselves, cause you to feel generous, clever, intuitive as hell about all sorts of things and successful in the world exactly the way you’d like to be. Pity the man who marries such a woman, since she’ll eventually drive him crazy with undeserved approval and excessive, unwanted validations. Not that I’d know, having married two “challenger” types, who may have loved me but never looked upon me with less than a seasoned eye, and whose basic watchwords to friend and foe alike were, “Well, let’s just see about that. I’m not so sure.” In any case, they both left me flat as a flounder — though Sally may be coming back at this moment.

These ideal women can actually make you be smarter than you are, but are finally only suitable for fleeting escapades, for profound and long-running flirtations never acted on, for unexpected driving trips to Boston or after-hours cocktails at shadowy red-booth steak houses like the one Wade Arsenault tried to lure me to yesterday with his Texas-bred, ball-crusher, definitely not ideal daughter, Vicki/Ricki, who anybody’d be smart to steer wide of, but who I once unaccountably wanted to marry. These women are also meant for sweetly intended, affectionate one-nighters (two at the max), after which you both manage to stay friends, conduct yourselves even better than before, possibly even “enjoy” each other a time or two every six months or six years, but never consider getting serious about, since everybody knows that serious ruins everything. Marguerite might’ve qualified, but wasn’t truly ideal.

Perfect for affairs is what these women are. They almost always know it (even if they’re married). They realize that given the kind of man they find attractive — usually ruminant loners with minimal but quite specific needs — to strive for anything more lasting would mean they’d soon be miserable and hoping to get things over with fast, and so are happy for the escapade and the cocktails and the rib-eye and the one-nighter where everything works out friendly, and then pretty quick to get back in their own beds again, which is where they (and many others) are happiest.

“Enlightened” thought by headshrinkers with their own rich broth of problems has twisted these normal human pleasures and delights into shabby, shameful perversions and boundary violations needing to be drummed out of the species because someone’s always seen as the loser-victim and someone’s definition of wholesome and nurturing doesn’t always get validated. But we all know that’s wrong, whether we have the spirit to admit it or don’t. Women are usually full participants in everything they do (including heading off to Mull), and I’m ready to say that when it comes to wholesome, nurturing and long-lasting, a frank, good-hearted roll in the alfalfa, or something close to it, with an enthusiastic and willing female is about as nurturing and wholesome as I can imagine. And if it doesn’t last a lifetime, what (pray tell me) does, except marriages where both parties are screaming inside to let light in but can’t figure out how to.

The old release-and-take-hold has worked its quickening magic on me and routed me north toward Neptune’s Daily Catch Bistro and (I hope) to Bernice Podmanicsky, who may be my savior for the day just when a savior’s needed. Sally’s call offers some things, but pointedly not others. And she herself authorized a female companion for the day. I’d be a fool to pass on the opportunity, should there be one.

Bernice Podmanicsky, who’s one of the wait-staff at Neptune’s, is my candidate for the aforementioned ideal woman. A lanky, full-lipped, wide-smiling brunette with big feet, a hint of dark facial hair, but oddly delicate hands with shiny pink nails, a proportionate bosom, solid posterior and runway-model ankles (always my weakness once the butt’s accounted for), Bernice would be considered pretty by some standards, though not by all: mouth too big (fine with me); hair taking root a sixteenth of an inch too far down the forehead (ditto); augmented eyebrows (neutral); libidinous chin dimple when she smiles, which is often; fortyish age bracket (I prefer women with adult experience). Altogether, hard not to like. I’ve known Bernice three years, ever since her long-standing love relationship in Burlington, Vermont, blew a tire and she came down to live in Normandy Beach with her sister Myrna, who’s a Mary Kay franchisee. Waitressing was what she’d always done since college at Stevens Point, where she took art (waitressing leaves time for drawing). She is a reader of serious novels and even abstruse philosophical texts, owing to her father, who was a high school guidance counselor in Fond du Lac, and her mother, who’s in her seventies and a serious painter in the style of Georgia O’Keeffe.

I actually like Bernice immensely, though there hasn’t been any but the most casual contact between us over the course of the three years. When Sally was my regular dinner companion, Bernice was gregarious and jokey and impudently friendly to both of us. “Oh, you two again. Somebody’s gonna get the wrong idea about you…. And I guess you’ll have the bluefish rare.” But when Sally left, and I was often alone at a window table with a gin drink, Bernice was more candid and curious and personal and (on occasion) clearly flirtatious — which I was happy about. But mostly she was interested and corroborative and even spontaneously complimentary. “I think it’s odd but completely understandable that a man with your background — writing short stories and writing sports and a good education — would be happy selling houses in New Jersey. That just makes sense to me.” Or “I like it, Frank, that you always order bluefish and pretty much dress the same way every time you come in here. It means you’re sure about the little things, so you can leave yourself open for the big ones.” She smiled so as to show her provocative dimple.

I told her about my Sponsoring activities and she said I seemed, to her experience, unusually kind and sensitive to others’ needs. Once she even said, “I bet you’ve got a big lineup at your door, handsome, now that you’re single again.” (I’ve heard her call other men “handsome” and could care less.) I decided not to tell her about the titanium BBs situation, for fear she’d feel sorry for me — I couldn’t see a use for pathos — but also because talking about the BBs can convince me I’ve lost the wherewithal even if I still have the wherefore.

Several times, I’ve stayed late at the Bistro, feeling better about myself and also about Bernice. Sometimes her shift would end and she’d come out from the kitchen in a pea jacket over her pink waitress dress and walk over and say, “So, Franklin”—not my name—“happy trails to you.” But then she’d sit and we’d talk, during which occasions I’d become the funniest, cleverest, the wisest, the most instructive, the most complex, enigmatic and strangely attractive of all men, but also the best, most attentive listener-back that anybody on earth had ever heard of. I’d quote Emerson and Rochefoucauld and Eliot and Einstein, remember incisive, insightful but obscure historical facts that perfectly fitted into our discussions but that I never remembered talking about to anyone else, all the while dredging up show-tune lyrics and Bud & Lou gags and statistics about everything from housing starts in Bergen County to how many salmon pass through the fish ladder up at Bellows Falls in a typical twenty-four-hour period during the spring run. I became, in other words, an ideal man, a man I myself was crazy about and in love with and anybody else would be, too. All because — though I never specifically said so to her — Bernice was herself an ideal woman. Not ideal per se, but ideal per diem, the only place ideal really makes much difference. I realize as I say all this that my “Bernice experience” and my current willingness to rekindle it represents another small skirmish into the Permanent Period and away from the strict confines of the Next Level. Sometimes, though, you have to seek help where you know you can find it.

On late after-shift evenings, I sometimes would walk outside the Bistro with Bernice onto the warm beach-town sidewalk, when the air was cooling and things were buzzing last summer and, later on, after my procedure, and when most visitors had gone home in September. We’d stand at the curb or walk, not holding hands or anything like that, down to the beach and talk about global warming or Americans’ inexplicable prejudice against the French or President Clinton’s sadly missed opportunities and the losses that won’t ever be recovered. I always had, when I was with Bernice, unusual takes on things, historical perspectives I didn’t even know I possessed, bits of memorized speeches and testimony I’d heard on Public Radio that somehow came back to me in detail and that made me seem as savvy as a diplomat and wise as an oracle, with total recall and flawless sense of context, all of it with a winning ability to make fun of myself, not be stuffy or world-weary, but then at a moment’s notice to be completely ready to change the subject to something she was interested in, or something else I knew more about than anybody in the world.

In all of this rather ordinary time together, Bernice had persistently positive things to say about me: that I was young for my age (without knowing my age, which I guessed she guessed was forty-five), that I led an interesting life now and had a damn good one in front of me, that I was “strangely intense” and intuitive and probably was a handful, but not really a type-A personality, which she knew she didn’t like.

I said about her all the good things that I thought: that she was “a major looker,” that her independent “Fighting Bob” La Follette instincts were precisely what this country needed, that I’d love to see her “work” and had a hunch it would wow me and I’d be drawn to it, implying but not actually saying that she wowed me and I was drawn to her (which was sort of true).

Once, Bernice asked me if I’d like to take a drive and smoke some reefer (I declined). And once she said she’d finished a “big nude” just that day and would be interested to know what a guy with my heightened sensibilities and intuition would think about it, since it was “pretty abstract” (I assumed it was a self-portrait and burned to see it). But I declined that, too. I understood that how we felt, standing out on the curb or at the edge of the beach, where the street came to an end and the twinkling shank of the warm evening opened out like a pathway of stars to where the old ferris wheel turned like a bracelet of jewels down at the Sea-Clift Fun Pier — I understood that how we felt was good and might conceivably get better if we had a Sambuca or two and a couple of bong hits at her place and took a look at her big nude. But then pretty quickly who we really were would assert itself, and it wouldn’t feel good for long and we’d end up looking back at our moment on the curb, before anything happened, with slightly painful nostalgia — the way emigrants are said to feel when they leave home, thrilled to set sail for the new land, where life promises riches but where hardships await, and in the end old concerns are only transported to a new venue, where they (we) go back to worrying the same as before. When you’re young, like my daughter, Clarissa, and maybe even my son, you don’t think like that. You think that all it takes is to get free of one box and into a bigger one out in the mainstream. Change the water in your bowl and you become a different fish. But that’s not so. No siree, Bob, not a bit. It’s also true that because of the fiery BBs in my prostate, and despite early-morning and even occasionally late-night erectile events giving positive testimony, I wasn’t sure of my performance ratings under new pressures and definitely didn’t want to face another failure when so few things seemed to be going my way.

Now, though, I believe is the time — if ever one was ordained — for Bernice and me to lash our tiny boats together, at least for the day, and set sail a ways toward sunset. Nothing permanent, nothing that even needs to last past dark, nothing specifically venereal or proto-conjugal (unless that just happens), but still an occasion, an eleventh-hour turn toward the unexpected — the very thing that can happen in life to let us know we’re human, and that could even prove I’m the handful Bernice always knew I’d be and perhaps still am. All this, of course, if it seems like a good idea to her.

Neptune’s Daily Catch Bistro, I already know from our local Shore weekly, is serving its twenty-dollar turkey ’n trimmings buffet to all Ortley Beach seniors, eleven to two. Bernice — because she casually told me — is without companionship today and only working to give herself something to do, then heading home with a jug of Chablis to “watch the Vikes and Dallas at 4:05,” before turning in early. My guess is if I cruise in right at one, almost now, and tell her I’m taking her away for a holiday feast, she’ll beg off with the boss, leave her apron on the doorknob, see the whole idea as a complete blast that I’ve had planned for weeks, feel secretly flattered and relieved and sure she’s had me pegged right and that I’m fuller of surprises than she imagined and that all her appreciation of me these years wasn’t wrong or wasted. In other words, she’ll recognize that I recognize her as the ideal woman, and that even if she’s home in time for the nightly news, she’ll have gotten more than she bargained for — which is all that usually counts with humans.

And as an added inducement, bringing Bernice Podmanicsky for Thanksgiving dinner will drive my kids crazy. Worse than if I’d brought home a Finnish midget from the circus, a six-foot-eight fag comb-out assistant from Kurl Up ’n Dye in Lavallette, or a truckload of talking parrots that sing Christmas carols a cappella. It’ll drive them — Paul especially — into paralyzed, abashed and scalding, renunciating silence, which is what I may now require of my Thanksgiving festivity. Loathing will run at warp speed. Sinister “What’s happened to him?” grimaces will radar between siblings who already don’t like each other. Your kids may be the hapless victims of divorce and spend their lives “working out” their “issues” on everybody in sight, but they damn straight don’t want you to have any issues, or for their boats to get rocked while they’re doing their sanctified “work.” They want instead for you to provide them a stable environment for their miseries (they might as well be adopted). Except my view is that if kids are happy to present us aging parents with their own improbabilities, why not return the favor? A diverse table of Paul, Jill, Clarissa, Thom, Bernice and myself seems more or less perfect. As is often the case, given time, “things” come into better focus.

And yet. Best case? It could bring out the unforeseeable best in everybody and cause Thanksgiving to blossom into the extended-family, come-one-come-all good fellowship the Pilgrims might (for a millisecond) have thought they were ringing in by inviting the baffled, mostly starved Indians to their table. Paul’s time capsule could turn out to be the rallying projectile he may — or may not — want it to be. Clarissa could send Thom away two-thirds through the bulgur course, and we could all laugh like chimps at what a sorry sack he was. Bernice could do her full repertoire of America’s Dairyland imitations. We might even ask the Feensters in and watch them combust. I could be made happy by any or all or none of these, and the day could end no worse than it began. Though I’d still like Bernice Podmanicsky with me, just as my personal friend against the difficulties that are likely waiting. She would think it was all — whatever it was — a riot or a trip or awesome, and be agreeable when we excused ourselves from the table to take a sunset stroll on the beach, where we could both make ourselves feel ideal all over again, after which I could take her home for the second half of the Vikes’ game — which I might stay for. I’d tell Sally all about it later and be certain she wouldn’t care.

Central Boulevard enters Ortley Beach from Seaside Heights without fanfare — both being Route 35—the same no-skyline weather-beaten townscape of closed sub shops, blue Slurpee stands, tropical fish outlets and metal-detector rentals, where I’m thinking the 5-K runners must have now come and gone, since I see none of them. In the election three weeks ago — the life-threatening part of which is still unsettled in the Florida court — Ortley Beach gave its own voters their chance to ratify a non-binding “opinion” by the Boro attorney that the town could secede from New Jersey and join a new entity called “South Jersey.” But like our naming-rights initiative, this was hooted down by Republicans as being fiscal suicide, not to mention civically odd and bad for business. Sea-Clift — nearer the end of Barnegat Neck, and farther south — would’ve ended up marooned in “Old Jersey,” tolls could’ve been exacted just for the privilege of leaving town, while Ortley would have had a different governor and a state bird. Municipal conflict would’ve erupted, had cooler heads not prevailed. Though even now I see a few inflaming SECESSION OR DIE stickers still plastered on stop signs and a few juice-shop windows. It’s always been a strange place here, though you can’t tell by looking.

What I see as I approach the Neptune’s Daily Catch doesn’t make my heart hopeful. No cars are parked in front. The blue neon FISH sign is turned off. As I pull to the curb, inside appears empty. Grainy daylight falls in through the big windows, turning the interior dishwater gray. Chairs are upside down on tabletops. Next door, the Women of Substance second-hand shop is closed. The Parallel Universe video arcade is open three doors down, but only a thin bald man’s standing in the door alone, reading a magazine. Four men in khaki clothing and heavy corduroy jackets wait at the corner under the Garden State Parkway sign, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee from the Wawa across Central. Mexicans, these are. Illegals — unlike my Hondurans — hoping to be picked up for a job across the bridge, unaware today’s a holiday. They eye me and laugh as if I’m the cops and they’re invisible.

The thought, however, that I may be wrong and Bernice is inside at a back table having an Irish coffee alone, awaiting opening time, makes me get out and peer through the plate-glass window. Arnie Sikma, the owner, is an old Reed College SDSer who’s evolved into a community-activist, small-business booster, and has stuck various groups’ advertising stickers on his front window beside the door. ORTLEY, AN UNUSUAL NAME FOR THE USUAL PLACE. WE ROOT FOR THE PHILLIES. SUPPORT OUR TROOPS (from Gulf War days). PROTECT RAPTORS, NOT RAPISTS. THIS, TOO, SHALL PASS — JERSEY SHORE NEPHROLOGY CLINIC. PEOPLE HAVE TO DIE…SOMEWHERE (a hospice in Point Pleasant).

But no Bernice when I peer in between my cupped hands. Or anyone. Arnie’s left the Christmas Muzak on outside—“Good King Wenceslas” sung by a choir. “Yon-der pea-sant, who is he, where and what his dwel-ling—” No one out in the cold hears it but me and the Mexicans.

Though a hand-written note scotch-taped to the door announces that, “We will be closed Thanksgiving Day due to a loss in our family. God Bless You All. The Mgt.”—naturally a sign that alarms me. Since does it mean family family (Arnie’s of Dutch extraction in Hudson, New York, up-river — a distant relation of the original patroons)? Or does it mean extended family? The Neptune’s Daily Catch Bistro “family” of trusted employees. Does it mean Bernice, heretofore scheduled to work the buffet? Though wouldn’t it mention her name — like the Van Tuyll daughter Ann told me about two nights ago? “Our trusted and beloved Miss B—”

A hot sizzling sensation spreads up my cold neck, then spreads down again. How can I find out? I once called information to learn if Bernice was listed, in case I someday decided to call her and needed to be made to feel like my best self in return for a movie ticket to the Toms River Multiplex and a late dinner at Bump’s. I found out she possessed a phone but didn’t choose to list its number. Waitresses rarely do. I couldn’t very well tell the operator, “Yeah, but she thinks I’m great. It’s fine. I won’t give the number to anybody or do anything weird.” Those innocent days are behind us now.

Gusty ocean air with a strong grease smell in it pushes a white Styrofoam container along the sidewalk — the kind of container you’d carry your unfinished fried calamari home in. One of the khaki-suited Mexicans gives the container a soccer kick out into the boulevard, which inspires another, smaller Mexican to address the box with a complex series of side kicks and heel kicks that finally send it flying in the air. His associates all laugh and sing out “Ronaldito,” which amuses the kicker, who sashays back up onto the curb and makes them all howl.

A skinny, elderly bald man in red running shorts and a blue singlet with a 5-K card on his chest—#174—glides past us up Central on bulky in-lines, arm swings propelling him like a speed skater, one hand tucked behind, his old eagle’s face as serene as the breeze. He is heading home. The Mexicans all eye him with amusement.

I gaze up to the woolen sky and think of good-soul Bernice, her sweet breath, full smiling lips, dainty ankles, dense virile hair not everyone would go for and that possibly I didn’t go for or else I’d know her phone number. Where is she today? Safe? Sound? Not so good? How would I find out? Call Arnie Sikma at home the minute I arrive. Ask for her number as a special favor. High up and to the north, a pale blue and optimistic fissure has opened in the undercloud. Two jet contrails, one southerly, one headed east and out to sea, have crossed there, leaving a giant and, for an instant, perfect X at 39,000 feet above where I am, in Ortley, outside a good fish place, contemplating the life of a friend. X marks my spot (and every place else that can see it). “Begin here. This is where I left it. This is where the gold is. This is—” what?

Only the most dry-mouthed Cartesian wouldn’t see this as a patent signal, a communiqué from the spheres, an important box on an important form with my name on top — X’d in or X’d out, counted present or absent. You’d just need to know what the fucker means, wouldn’t you? There may have been others. Two swans on the bay shore. A quick red fox in the bedroom. A letter. A call. Three boats. All can be signage. I’d thought Ralph’s finality, my acceptance and succession to the Next Level and general fittedness to meet my Maker were my story, what the audience would know once my curtain closed — my, so-to-speak, character. “He made peace with things, finally, old Frank.” “He was kind of a shit-bird, but he got it sorted out pretty good just before—” “He actually seemed clear-sighted, damn near saint-like toward the end there—” This happens when you have cancer, though it’s not a fun happening.

Except now there’s more? Just when you think you’ve been admitted to the boy-king’s burial chamber and can breathe the rich, ancient captured air with somber satisfaction, you find out it’s just another anteroom? That there’s more that bears watching, more signs requiring interpretation, that what you thought was all, isn’t? That this isn’t it? That there’s no it, only is. Hard to know if this is heartening or disheartening news to a man who, as my son says, believes in development.

The cloud fissure has now closed primly, and what was a sign — like a rainbow — is no more. Somehow I know that Bernice Podmanicsky is not the family member lost. She’d laugh to know I even worried about her. “Oh, handsome”—she’d beam at me—“I didn’t know you cared. You’re just such an unusual man, aren’t ya? A real handful. Some lucky girl—” It’s odd how our fears, the ones we didn’t know we had, alter our sight line and make us see things that never were.

The Mexicans are all looking at me as if I’ve been carrying on a boisterous conversation with myself. Possibly it’s my block-M. I should take it off and give it to them. Their faces are serious, their small grabby hands jammed in their tattered jacket pockets. Their expectancy of work is being clouded over by my suspicious starings into the Bistro and the firmament. They are religious men and on the lookout for signs of their own, one of which I may have become. Possibly I’m “touched” and am about to be drawn up into heaven by a lustrous beam of light and they (in the good version) will find true vocations at last: to tell the thing they saw and of its wonders. Is that not the final wish of all of us on earth? To testify of our witness to wonders?

But as an assurance, since I cannot ascend to heaven in front of them today, I’d still like to speak something typically First World and welcoming, put them off their guard. We are together, after all. Simple me. Simple them.

Only when I turn their way, a welcome grin gladdening my cheeks, my eyes crinkling up happy, my mind concocting a formulation in their mother tongue—“Hola. ¿Cómo están? ¿Pasando un buen día?”—they stiffen, set their narrow shoulders and lock their knees inside their khakis, their faces organized to say they want nada of me, seek no assurance, offer none. So that all I can do is freeze my grin like a crazy man caught in his craziness. They look away at the empty boulevard to search for the truck that isn’t coming. For all five of us, together and apart, the moment for signs goes past.

Headed home now, fully contextualized, vacant of useful longing. Bernice could’ve conferred a sporty insularity, made me feel my own weight less. Even un-ideal women can do this. But help’s not available, which is a legitimate mode of acceptance. It just doesn’t feel good.

Traffic lights are working again, candy-cane ornaments weakly lit. Commerce is flickering to life as I drive out of Seaside Park and reenter Sea-Clift. LIQUOR has illuminated its big yellow letters at noon, and cars are flocking. The drive-thru ATM at South Shore Savings is doing a smart business, as is the adult books, Guppies to Puppies and the bottle redemption center — the former Ford dealership. The Wiggle Room has opened up, and a hefty blue New Jersey Waste snail-back is swaying into its back alley. There are even tourists outside the mini-golf/batting cage, their nonchalant gestures betraying seasonal uncertainty, their gazes skyward. The green EMS wagon rests back in its Fire Department bay, the same crew as earlier out front under the waving American flag, sharing a smoke and a joke with the two jodhpured motorcycle cops who guarded the race. The Tru-Value is holding its “Last Chance Y-2K Special” on plastic containers and gas masks. THE FUTURE WAS A BOMB, their hand-lettered sign says.

Many of the 5-K runners are here straggling home along the sidewalks and down the residential side streets, their race run, their faces relaxed, limbs loosened by honest non-cutthroat competition, their water bottles empty, their gazes turned toward what’s next in the way of healthy, wholesome Thanksgiving partaking. (There’s no sign of the Africans.) I still wouldn’t want to be any of them. Though one scrawny red-shoed runner waves at my car as I pass — I have no idea who — someone I sold a house to or busted my ass trying, but left a good impression of the kinda guy I am. I give a honk but head on.

When I cruise past my Realty-Wise office, Mike’s Infiniti sits by itself in front. The pizza place is lighted and going, though no one seems to want a pizza for Thanksgiving. Doubtless, Mike’s at his desk tweaking his business plan, re-conferring with his new friend, the money bags. He may be trying the Bagosh family on his cell before they hit the Parkway after lunch. I lack the usual gusto to go have a look-see at what he’s up to — which makes business itself seem far away and its hand-over a sounder idea. How, though, will I feel to “have sold” real estate and sell it no more? The romance of it could fade once the past tense takes over. Different from, “Well, yeah, I usta fly 16’s up in that Bacca Valley. Pretty hairy up there.” Or, “Our whole lab shared credit on the malaria cure.” The only way to keep the glamour lights on in the real-estate commitment is to keep doing it. Do it till you drop dead, so you never have to look back and see the shadows. Most of the old-timers know that, which is why so many go feet first. This won’t please Mike, but fuck Mike. It’s my business, not his.

Ahead, beyond the old shuttered Dad ’n Lad, where the Boro of Sea-Clift originally ended because the topsoil ran out and the primeval white sand beach took up, the old Ocean Vista Cemetery, where Sea-Clift’s citizens were buried back in the twenties, lies shabbily ignored and gone to weeds. The Boro officially maintains it, keeps up its New Orleans-style wrought iron fence and little arched filigree gate that opens pleasantly down a slender allée three-quarters of a city block toward the sea, where the ocean vista’s long been blocked by grandfathered frame residences that have gone to seed themselves but can’t be replaced. No one is currently at rest in Ocean Vista, not even gravestones remain. The ground — alongside the Dad ’n Lad — looks like nothing but a small-size shard of excess urban landscape awaiting assignment by developers who’ll tear down the whole block of elderly structures and put up a Red Roof Inn or a UPS store — the same as happened on a grand scale in Atlantic City.

The particular reason our only town cemetery no longer has residents is that the great-great-grandchildren of Sea-Clift’s first Negro pioneer, a freed slave known only as “Jonah,” somehow discovered him interred plumb in the middle of the otherwise-white cemetery, and began agitating at the state level for a monument solemnizing his life and toilsome times as a “black trailblazer” back when being a trailblazer wasn’t cool. Jonah’s progeny turned out to be noisy, well-heeled Philadelphia and D.C. plutocrat lawyers and M.D.’s, who wanted to have their ancestor memorialized as another stop on the Coastal Heritage Trail, with an interactive display about his life and the lives of folk like him who valiantly diversified the Shore — a story that was possibly not going to be all that flattering to his white contemporaries.

Whereupon all hell broke loose. The town elders, who’d always known about Jonah’s resting place and felt fine about him sharing it with their ancestors, did not, however, want him “stealing” the cemetery and posthumously militating for importance he apparently hadn’t claimed in life. Jonah had his rightful place, it was felt, among other Sea-Clifters, and that was enough. The grandchildren, however, sniffing prejudice, commenced court proceedings and EEOC actions to have the Boro Council sued in federal court. Everything got instantly blown out of proportion, at which point an opportunistic burial-vault company with European Alliance affiliations in Brick Township offered free of charge to dig up and re-inter anybody whose family wanted its loved one to enjoy better facilities in a new and treeless memory park they had land for out Highway 88. Everyone — there were only fifteen families — said sure. The town issued permits. All the graves — except Jonah’s — were lovingly opened, their sacred contents hearsed away, until in a month’s time poor old Jonah had the cemetery all to his lonesome. Whereupon, the litigious Philadelphians decided Jonah and his significance had been municipally disrespected and so applied for a permit themselves and moved him to Cherry Hill, where people apparently know better how to treat a hero.

The town is still proprietor of the cemetery and awaits the happy day when the Red Roof site-evaluation crew shows up seeking a variance and a deconsecration order. For a time — two winters ago — I proposed buying the ground myself and turning it into a vernal park as a gesture of civic giving, while retaining development rights should the moment ever come. I even considered not deconsecrating it and having myself buried there — a kingdom of one. This was, of course, before my prostate issues. I’d always pondered — without a smidge of trepidation — where I’d “end up,” since once you wander far from your own soil, you never know where your final resting place might be. Which is why many people don’t stray off their porch or far from familiar sights and sounds. Because if you’re from Hog Dooky, Alabama, you don’t want to wind up dead and anonymously buried in Metuchen, New Jersey. In my case, I thought it would’ve saved my children the trouble of knowing what in the hell to do with “me,” and just deciding to entrust my remains to some broken-down old Cap’n Mouzakis who’d “return” me to the sea from whence as a frog I came. You could say it’s a general problem, however — uncertainty over where and how you want to be eternally stowed. Either it represents your last clinging to life, or else it’s the final muddled equivocation about the life you’ve actually lived.

Not surprisingly, insider development interests on the Dollars For Doers Council saw disguised dreams of empire behind my petition and declined my cash offer for the cemetery. The “civic giving” part put them on their guard. Which was and is fine with me. Money not spent is money saved, in my economy. Though it has left as an open subject the awkward issue of my ending-up formalities. I have a will which leaves the house and Realty-Wise to Sally and all remaining assets to the kids — not much, though they’ll get plenty from their mom, including a membership in the Huron Mountain Club. But that picture’s different since Sally left for Mull, and could shift again, since she could come back and Mike now wants the business. I’d even thought the three of us nuclear-family components might sit around a congenial breakfast table during the coming days and talk these sensitive matters into commonsense resolution. But that was prior to reexposure to Paul (and Jill), and hearing of his secret dreams to be my business partner. And before Clarissa hied off to Atlantic City, leaving me with the uneasy sensation she’ll return changed. In other words, events have left life and my grasp on the future in as fucked-up a shape as I can imagine them. Life alters when you get sick, no matter what I told Ann. Don’t let any of these Sunny Jims tell you different.

What I don’t expect to find in my driveway is activity. But activity is what I find. Next door at the Feensters’, as well. Thanksgiving, in my playbook, is an indoor event acted out between kitchen and table, table and TV, TV and couch (and later bed). Outdoor activity, particularly driveway activity, foreshadows problems and events unwanted: genies exiting bottles, dikes bursting, de-stability at the top — anti-Thanksgiving gremlins sending celebrants scattering for their cars. The outcome I didn’t want.

The Feensters appear unimplicated. Nick has set up shop in his driveway and is giving his twin ’56 vintage Vettes the careful hand-waxing they deserve and frequently get (cold-weather bonding issues, what the hell). Drilla, in a skirt and sweater, is seated on the front step, hugging her knees and petting Bimbo in her lap as if now was July. Nick is, as usual, luridly turned out in one of his metallic Lycra bodysuits — electric blue, showing off his muscles and plenty of bulgy dick — the same outfit the neighborhood is used to seeing during his and Drilla’s stern-miened beach constitutionals, when they each listen to separate Walkmen. Though because it’s wintry, Nick has added some kind of space-age silver-aluminum anorak you’d buy in catalogs only lottery winners from Bridgeport get sent for free. Seen through his derelict topiary, he is a strange metallic sight on Thanksgiving. Though if Nick wasn’t such an asshole, there’d be something touching about the two of them, since clearly they don’t know what to do with themselves today, and could easily end up gloomy and alone at the Ruby Tuesday’s in Belmar. Likewise, if Nick weren’t such an asshole, I’d walk over and ask them to come join our family sociality, since there’s too much food anyway. Possibly next year. I give him a noncommittal wave as I pass and turn in my own drive. Nick repays it with a black stare of what looks like disgust, though Drilla, clutching the dog, waves back smally and smiles in the invisible sunshine — her smile indicating that if a man like Nick is your husband, nothing’s easy in life.

However, it’s my own driveway that’s cause for concern. If I’d noticed in time, I might’ve driven back to the office, listened to Mike’s business proposal, sold the whole shitaree, then come home a half hour later in a changed frame of mind.

Paul and his lofty Jill are out on the pea-gravel drive in holiday attire and absorbed in an arms-folded, head-nodding confab with a man I don’t know but whose chocolate brown Crown Vic sits on the road by the arborvitae and Paul’s ramshackle gray Saab. Possibly this is a client prospect who’s tracked me down, holiday or no, in hopes I’ll have the key to the beach house he’s noticed in the Buyer’s Guide and can’t wait to see. Paul may be dry-running his new agent’s persona, gassing about time capsules, greeting-card pros and cons, the Chiefs’ chances for the Super Bowl and how special it is being a New Jersey native.

Only this guy’s no realty walk-up, nor is his car a usual car. His body language lacks the tense but casual hands-in-pockets, feet-apart posture of protective customer indecision. This man is dapper and small, with both hands free at his sides like a cop, with thick blunt-cut Neapolitan hair, a long brown leather jacket over a brown wool polo and heavy black brogues with telltale crepe soles. He looks like a cop because he is a cop. Plenty of ordinary Americans living ordinary citizen lives dress exactly this way, but nobody looks this way dressed this way but cops. It’s no wonder crime’s on the uptick. They’ve given away the element of surprise to the element — to the window bashers, hospital bombers and sign stealers of the world.

But why is a cop in my driveway? Why is his brown cop car with MUNICIPAL license plates conspicuously parked in front of my house on Thanksgiving, dragging my family outside when law-abiding citizens should be inside stuffing their faces and arguing?

Clarissa. A heart flutter, a new burning up my back. He is an emissary of doleful news. Like in The Fighting Sullivans, when the grief squad marches up the steps. Her re-entry to conventionality has already come to ruin. Not thinkable.

All three turn as I climb out, leaving Mike’s business plan on the seat, my gait hitched again and slowed. I’m smiling — but only out of habit. The Feensters — I couldn’t hear it from my car — have their boom box at its usual high decibels, apparently to aid in waxing. “Lisbon Antigua” again — their way of getting their Thanksgiving message out: Fuck you.

“Hi,” I say. “What’s the trouble here, Officer?” I intend this to be funny, but it isn’t. There can’t be bad news.

“This is Detective Marinara, Frank,” Paul says in the most normal of imaginable voices, tuned to the exquisite pleasure of saying “Detective Marinara.” I can smell cops. Though this, thanks to the signs above, will not be about Clarissa, but me.

Paul and Jill — she’s looking at me sorrowfully, as though I’m Paul’s crippled parent — have transubstantiated themselves since our basement get-together. Jill has severely pulled much of her long, dense yellow hair “back,” but left skimpy fringe bangs, plus a thick, concupiscent braid that swags down behind her like a rope. From her travel wardrobe, she’s chosen a green flare-bottomed pantsuit with some sort of shiny golden underhue and a pair of clunky black shoes that show off the length of her feet and that, as an ensemble, renders her basically gender-neutral. She’s also attached a flesh-tinted holiday hand prosthesis, barely detectable as not the real thing, though not flexible like a hand you’d want. Paul, from somewhere, has found a strange suit — a too-large summer-weight blue-gray-and-pink plaid with landing-strip lapels, gutter-deep cuffs and English vents — a style popular ten years before he was born and that everyone joked about even then. With his mullet, his uncouth beard-stache and ear stud, his suit makes him look like a burlesque comedian. He looks as if he could break out a ukelele and start crooning in an Al Jolson voice. Just seeing him makes me long for sweet and affirming Bernice. She could set things right in a heartbeat, though I don’t really know her.

“I’m impressed with your place here, Mr. Bascombe.” Detective Marinara scans around and grins at the way some people can live, but not him: ocean-front contemporary, lots of glass and light, high ceilings — the works. He’s a small, handsome, feline-looking man with long, spidery fingers, dark worried eyes and a small shapely nose. He could’ve been a sixth-man guard in Division III, maybe for Muhlenberg, who only heeded the call to police work because of his “soshe” degree and a desire to stay close to his folks in Dutch Neck. These guys make detective in a hurry and aren’t adept at cracking skulls.

“I’d be happy to sell it to you,” I say, and try to look happy. “I’ll move out today.” I’m not comfortable standing in front of my house with a cop, as if I’m soon to be leaving in handcuffs. Though it could happen to any of us.

“I was down at my sister’s,” Detective Marinara says. “I told you she lives in Barnegat Acres.” His interested eyes survey around professionally. They pass my busted duct-taped window, Sally’s LeBaron, pass the Feensters, my son, Jill. “They do the whole Italian spread,” he says. “You need to take a breather though. So I wandered down here. Your son happened to be outside.”

“We asked Detective Marinara to have Thanksgiving with us,” Paul says with barely suppressible glee at the discomfort this will cause me (it does). His fingers, I can see, are working. When he was a boy, he “counted” with his fingers — cars on the highway, birds on wires, individual seconds during our lengthy disciplinary discussions, breaths during his therapy sessions at Yale and Hopkins. He eventually quit. But now he’s counting again in his weird suit, his warty fingers jittering, jittering. Something’s wound him up again — a cop, of course. Jill is aware and smiles at him supportively. They are an even stranger pair all dressed up.

“That’d be great,” I say. “We’ve got plenty of free-range organic turkey.”

“Oh, no. I’m all set there. Thanks.” Marinara continues panning around. This is not a social visit. He pauses to give a lengthy disapproving stare at Nick Feenster, buffing his Vettes in his Lycra space suit, Pérez Prado banging up into the atmosphere, where a whoosh of blackbirds goes over in an undulant cloud. “That’s a plate-full over there, I guess.”

“It is,” I admit. Though the old sympathy again filters up for the poor all-wrong Feensters, who, I’m sure, suffer great needless misery and loneliness here in New Jersey with their Bridgeport social skills. My heart goes out to them, which is better than hoping they’ll die.

Nick has seen Detective Marinara and me observing him across the property line. He stands up from buffing, his Lycra further stressing his smushed genitals, and gives us back a malignant “Yeah? What?” stare, framed by topiary. He doesn’t know Marinara’s the heat. His lips move, but “Lisbon Antigua” blots out his voice. He jerks his head around to fire words off to Drilla — to crank up the volume, probably. She says something back, possibly “don’t be such an asshole,” and he waves his buffing pad at us in disgust and resumes rubbing. Drilla looks wistfully out toward where Poincinet curves to meet 35. She’d be a better neighbor married to someone else.

“I could flash my gold on that clown, tune him down a notch.” Marinara shoots his sweater cuffs out of his jacket sleeves. An encounter would feel good to him about now. Conflict, I’m sure, calms him. He’s a divorcé, under forty. He’s full of fires.

“He’ll quit,” I say. “He has to listen to it, too.”

Marinara shakes his head at how the world acts. “Whatever.” It is the policeman’s weltanschauung.

Exactly then, as if on cue, the music stops and airy silence opens. Drilla — Bimbo under one arm — stands and walks inside, carrying the boom box. Nick, his voice softened to indecipherability, speaks something appeasing to her. But she goes inside and closes the front door, leaving him alone with his buffing implements. It’s the way I knew it would happen.

I am thinking for this instant, and longingly, about Sally, whose call I’ve now missed. And about Clarissa. It’s 1:30 already. She should be home. The Eat No Evil people will be here soon. All this brings with itself a sinking sensation. I don’t feel thankful for anything. What I’d like to do is get in bed with my book of Great Speeches, read the Gettysburg Address out loud to no one and invite Jill and Paul to go find dinner at a Holiday Inn.

The mixed rich fragrance of salt breeze, Detective Marinara’s professional-grade leather coat and no doubt his well-oiled weapon tucked on his hip, all now enter my nostrils and make me realize once again that this is not a social call. Nothing can make a day go flat like a police presence.

Paul and Jill stand silent, side-by-side in their holiday get-ups. They say nothing, intend nothing. They are as I am — in the thrall of the day and the law’s arrival.

“This is not a social call, I don’t think.”

“Not entirely.” Detective Marinara adjusts his cop’s brogues in the driveway gravel. His precise, intent features have rendered him an appealing though slightly sorrowing customer — like a young Bobby Kennedy, without the big teeth. I have the keenest feeling, against all reason, that he could arrest me. He’s sensed “something” in my carriage, in my house’s too rich affect (the redwood, the copper weather vane), my car, my strange children, my white Nikes, something that makes him wonder if I’m not at least complicitous somewhere. Surely not in setting a bomb at Haddam Doctors and heedlessly taking the life of Natherial Lewis, but in something that still requires looking at. And maybe he’s exactly right. Who can say with certainty that he/she did or didn’t do anything? Why should I be exempted? Lord knows, I’m guilty (of something). I should go quietly. I don’t say these words, but I think them. This may be what Marguerite Purcell experienced, though I’ll never know.

What I do say apprehensively is, “What gives, then?” The corners of Paul’s mouth and also his bad eye twitch toward me. “What gives, then?” is gangster talk he naturally relishes.

“Just standard cop work, Mr. Bascombe.” Marinara produces a square packet of QUIT SMOKING, NOW gum from his jacket pocket, unsheathes a piece, sticks it in his mouth and thoughtlessly pockets the wrapper. Possibly he wears a nicotine “patch” below his BORN TO RUN tattoo. “We’re pretty sure we got this thing tied up. We know who did it. But we just like to throw all our answers out the window and open it up and look one last time. You were on our list. You were there, you knew the victim. Not that we suspect you.” He is chewing mildly. “You know?”

“I tell people the same thing when they buy a house.” I do not feel less guilty.

“I’m sure.” Detective Marinara, chewing, looks appraisingly up at my house again, taking in its modern vertical lines, its flashings, copings, soffit vents, its board-and-batten plausibility, its road-facing modesty and affinity for the sea. My house may be an attractive mystery he feels excluded from, which silences him and makes him feel out of place now that he’s decided murderers don’t live here. Belonging is no more his metier than mine.

“Must be okay to wake up here every day,” he says. Paul and Jill have no clue what we’re talking about — my car window, an outstanding warrant, an ax murder. Children always hear things when they don’t expect it.

“It’s just nice to wake up at all,” I say, to be self-deprecating about living well.

“You got that right,” Marinara says. “I wake up dreading all the things I have to do, and every one of them’s completely do-able. What’s that about? I oughta be grateful, maybe.” He gazes up Poincinet Road, along the line of my neighbors’ large house fronts to where only empty beach stretches far out of sight. A few seaside walkers animate the vista but don’t really change its mood of exclusivity. The air is grainy and neutral-toned with moisture. You can see a long way. On the horizon, where the land meets the sea, small shore-side bumps identify the Ferris wheel Bernice and I admired on our evenings together months ago. I wonder again where and how my daughter is, whether I’ve missed Sally’s call. Important events seem to be escaping me.

“Detective Marinara was considerate enough to give me his business card to put in the time capsule.” Paul speaks these words abruptly and, as always, too loud, like someone introducing quiz-show contestants. Jill inches in closer, as if he might lift off like a bottle rocket. She touches her prosthesis to his hand for reassurance. “I gave him one of my Smart Aleck cards.” Paul, my son, mulleted, goateed, softish and strange-suited, again could be any age at this moment — eleven, sixteen, twenty-six, thirty-five, sixty-one.

“Okay, yeah. Okay.” Marinara jabs a hand (his wristwatch is on a gold chain bracelet) into his leather jacket pocket, where his QUIT SMOKING packet went, and fishes out a square card, which he looks at without smiling, then hands to me. I have, of course, seen Paul’s work before. My impolitic response to it was the flash point in last spring’s fulminant visit. I have to be cautious now. The card Marinara hands me seems to be a photograph, a black and white, showing a great sea of Asians — Koreans, Chinese, I don’t know which — women and men all dressed in white Western wedding garb, fluffy dresses and regulation tuxes, all beaming together up into an elevated camera’s eye. There must be no fewer than twenty thousand of them, since they fill the picture so you can’t see the edge or make out where the photograph’s taken — the Gobi Desert, a soccer stadium, Tiananmen Square. But it’s definitely the happiest day of their lives, since they seem about to be married or to have just gotten that way in one big bunch. Paul’s sidesplitting caption below, in red block letters, says “GUESS WHAT????” And when opened, the card, in bigger red Chinese-looking English letters, shouts “WE’RE PREGNANT!!!”

Paul is staring machine-gun holes into me. I can feel it. The card I stupidly didn’t respond to properly last spring featured a chrome-breasted, horse-faced blonde in a fifties one-piece bathing suit and stiletto heels, grinning lasciviously while lining up a bunch of white mice dressed in tiny racing silks along a tiny starting stripe. It was clearly a still from an old porn movie devoted to all the interesting things one can do with rodents. The tall blonde had dollar bills sprouting out her cleavage and her grin contained a look of knowing lewdness that unquestionably implicated the mice. Paul’s caption (sad and heart-wrenching for his father) was “Put Your Money Where Your Mouse Is.” I didn’t think it was very funny but should’ve faked it, given the fury I unleashed.

But this time, I’m ready — though the cold driveway setting isn’t ideal. I’ve slowly creased my lips to form two thick mouth-corners of insider irony. I narrow my eyes, turn and regard Paul with a special Chill Wills satchel-faced mawp he’ll identify as my instant triple-entendre tumbling to all tie-ins, hilarious special nuances and resonances only the truly demented and ingeniously witty could appreciate and that no one should even be able to think of, much less write, without having gone to Harvard and edited the Lampoon. Except he has and can, even though he’s in love with a big disabled person, is twenty pounds too pudgy and has mainstreamed himself damn near to flat-line out in K.C. You can hang too much importance on a smile of fatherly approval. But I’m not risking it.

“Okay, okay, okay,” I say in dismissal that means approval. Standard words of approval would be much riskier. I do my creased-mouth Chill Wills mawp again for purposes of Paul’s re-assessment and so we can travel on a while longer functioning as father and son. Parenthood, once commenced, finds its opportunities where it can. “Okay. That’s funny,” I say.

“I’m willing to admit”—Paul is officiously brimming with pleasure, while smoothing his beard-stache around his mouth like a seamy librarian—“that they rejected that one as too sensitive, ethnically. It was one of my favorites, though.”

I’m tempted to comment that it pushes the envelope, but don’t want to encourage him. His plaid joker’s jacket is probably stuffed with other riotous rejects. “Grape Vines Think Alike.” “The Elephant of Surprise.” “The Margarine of Error.” “Preston de Service”—all our old yuks and sweet guyings from his lost childhood now destined for the time capsule, since Hallmark can’t use them. Too sensitive.

And then for the second time in ten minutes we are struck dumb out here, all four of us — me, Marinara, Paul and Jill — aware of something of small consequence that doesn’t have a name, as though a new sound was in the air and each thinks the others can’t hear it.

Loogah-loogah-loogah, blat-blat-blat-a-blat—a sound from down Poincinet Road. Terry Farlow, my neighbor, the Kazakhstan engineer, has fired up his big Fat Boy Harley in the echo chamber of his garage. We all four turn, as if in fear, as the big CIA Oklahoman rolls magisterially out onto his driveway launching pad, black-suited, black-helmeted as an evil knight, an identically dressed Harley babe on the bitch seat, regal and helmeted as a black queen. Loogah, loogah, loogah. He pauses, turns, activates the automatic garage-door closer, gives his babe a pat to the knee, settles back, gears down, tweaks the engine—blat-a-blat-BLAT-blat-blat-blat—then eases off, boots up, out and down Poincinet, idling past the neighbors’ houses and mine with nary a nod (though we’re all four watching with gaunt admiration). He slowly rounds the corner past the Feensters’—Nick ignores him — accelerates throatily out onto 35, and begins throttling up, catches a more commanding gear, then rumbles on up the highway toward his Thanksgiving plans, whatever they might offer.

To my shock, I can’t suppress the aching suspicion that the helmeted, steel-thighed honey, high on the passenger perch, gloved hands clutching Terry’s lats, knees pincering his buns, inner-thigh hot place pressed thrillingly to his coccyx, was Bernice Podmanicsky, my almost-savior from the day’s woolly woes, and who I was just thinking might still be reachable. Wouldn’t she know I’d sooner or later be calling? The Harley, already a memory up Route 35, stays audible a good long time, passing through its gears until it attains its last.

I’ve handed back Detective Marinara’s “We’re Pregnant” card. He studies it a moment, as though he’d never really looked before, then effects a mirthless, comprehending smile at all the grinning brides and beaming grooms. This is not what Paul had in mind: vague amusement. I’m close enough to smell Marinara’s QUIT SMOKING gum, his breath, cigarette-warm and medicine-sweet. He dyes his hair its shiny shade of too-black black, and down in his bristly chest hair, tufted out of his brown polo, he wears a gold chain — finer than his watchband — with a gold heart and tiny gold cross strung together. My original guess was Dutch Neck, but now I think Marinara hails from the once all-Italian President streets of Haddam — Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Cleveland, etc. — a neighborhood where I once resided, where Ann resides today and where once Paul and Clarissa were sweet children.

“Maybe you want to come in and try that organic turkey,” I say. “And some organic dressing and mock pumpkin pie with plain yogurt for whipped cream.” Paul and Jill grin warm encouragement for this idea, as if Detective Marinara was a homeless man we’d discovered to have been a first violinist with the London Symphony and can nurse back to health by adopting him into our lives and paying for his rehab.

“Yeah. No,” Marinara says — proper Jersey syntax for refusal. He cranes his fine-featured head all around and winces, as if his neck’s stiff. “I gotta get back to my sister’s to get in on the fighting. This is just, you know—” He smiles a professional, closed-mouth smile and plunges both hands in his brown jacket pockets, giving Paul’s “We’re Pregnant” card a good crunching. “You’ll still come over and do our show-and-tell for us, will you?” He now reminds me of a young Bob Cousy in his Celtic heyday, all purpose and scrap, maximizing his God-givens but strangely sad behind his regular-Joe features.

“Absolutely. Just tell me when. I’m always happy to come to Haddam.” (Not at all true.)

“Like I said. We think we got him. But you never know.”

“No, you don’t.” I’m not asking who’s the culprit, in case I sold him a house or he was once a fellow member in the Divorced Men’s Club.

“You go to Michigan?” Marinara side-eyes my maize-and-blue block-M as if it was worthy of esteem.

“I did.”

He sniffs and looks around as Nick Feenster’s entering his house, carrying his buffing supplies clutched to his electric blue chest. At the door, he turns and gives us all a look of warning, as if we were gossiping about him, then regards his twin Corvettes the same way. It’s cold as steel out here. I’m ready to get inside.

“I wanted to go there,” Marinara says, wagging his shoulders an inch back and forth with the thought of Michigan.

“What stopped you?”

“I was a Freehold kid, you know?” Wrong again. “I got all intoxicated with the band and the neat football helmets and the fight song. Saturday afternoons, leaves turning. All that. I thought, Man, I could go to Michigan, I’d be, you know. All set forever.”

“But you didn’t go?”

“Naaaa.” Marinara’s bottom lip laps over the top one and presses in. It is a face of resignation, which no doubt strengthens his aptitude for police work. “I was the wrong color. Scuse my French.”

“I see,” I say. I’m of course the wrong color, too.

“I did my course over at Rutgers-Camden. Prolly was better, given, you know. Everything. It isn’t so bad.”

“Seems great to me.” I shiver through my thighs and knees from the accumulating cold. It’s just as well, I think, that Detective Marinara has his family to go back to. Police, by definition, make incongruous guests and he could turn unwieldy with a glass of merlot, once he got talking. Though he doesn’t seem to want to leave, and I don’t want to abandon him out here.

“Okay. So. Good to meet you. I’ll be in touch tomorrow.” He smiles, proffers a hand to me, a hand as soft as calfskin and delicate — not large enough to palm a basketball. I have yet to hear his first name. Possibly it’s Vincent. He extends his smile to Paul and Jill, but not a hand. “Thanks for the card,” he says, and seems pleased. Detective Marinara is, in fact, a regular Joe, could’ve been my little brother in Sigma Chi, done well in management or marketing, settled in Owosso, become a Michiganian. He might never have given the first thought to carrying a shield or a gun. It’s often the case that I don’t know whether I like fate or hate it.

“Great to meet you,” I say. “Have a happy Thanksgiving.”

“Yeah. That’d be different.” He shrugs, his smile become sun-less but mirthful. Then he’s on his way, back to his cruiser, his radio (hidden somewhere on his person) crackling unexpectedly with cop voices. He doesn’t look back at us.

17

Inside, behind the coffered front door of the steam bath that’s become my residence, in the candle-lit dining room that’s too small and boxy and windowless (a design flaw fatal to resale), arrayed on the Danish table accoutred with bone china, English cutlery, Belgian crystal, Irish napkins as wide as Rhode Island, two opened bottles of Old Vine Healdsburg merlot, all courtesy of Eat No Evil, who’ve arrived early and paved every available table inch with pricey ethical food, including an actual, enormous, glistening turkey, is: Thanksgiving, broadcasting its message through the house with a lacquered richness that instantly makes my throat constrict, my cheeks thicken, my saliva go ropy and my belly turn bilgy. It’s exactly the way I ordered it. But just for the moment, I can’t go in the room where it is. No doubt my condition’s asserting itself through the belly and up the gorge.

“Isn’t it great?” Jill’s ahead, beaming, peeking in at the flickering festive room, not wanting to enter before I do, eyes wide back to Paul and me like a daughter-in-law, her prosthesis tucked behind her.

“Yeah,” I say, though the whole spread looks like a wax feast in a furniture store showroom. If you put a knife to the turkey or a spoon to the yellow squash or a fork to the blamelessly white spuds, it would all be as hard as a transistor radio. And at the last second before entering, I swerve right, and into the kitchen, where there are windows, big ones, and a door out, giving air, which is what I need before I chuck up. “Yeah, it is,” I say as I push open the sliding door and struggle onto the deck for the ocean’s chill that’ll save a big mess (I’m also dying to grab a leak). You can say yours is a “nontraditional” Thanksgiving when you have cancer and the sight of food makes you sick and you nearly piss your pants and the police check in and your wife’s split to England — which isn’t counting your kids. From out here, Drilla Feenster’s in view, deck to deck, alone in her hot tub — naked, it would seem — listening to “The March of the Siamese Children” (clearly her favorite) on the boom box, drinking some kind of milky white drink from a tall glass and staring out past the owl decoy to the sea. Bimbo sits on the hot tub ledge beside her, staring in the same direction. I must be invisible to her.

“Who turned the fucking heat up to bake?” I say back through the open doorway into the kiln of a kitchen, where Jill and Paul have stopped, looking concerned by the fact that I am (I can feel it) pale as a sheet. “Where’s Clarissa?”

The beach and ocean are oily-smelling, the sand stained lifeless brown and packed by the tide. Long yellow seaweed garlands are strewn from the turbulence at sea (these are what stink). Two hundred yards out, a black-suited surfer sits his board, prow-up, on the barely rising sheen of ocean. Nothing’s happening. Paul’s time-capsule hole and pile of sand are the only things of note close by.

“There’s a kind of story involved in that,” Paul says from the kitchen, through the door out to the deck. A small bird-like female is visible behind the stove island in the kitchen, holding a dish towel, insubstantial through the mirroring glass. She’s got up in a floppy white chef’s toque and a square-front tunic that engulfs her.

“Who’s that?” I say. The sight of this tiny woman makes me unexpectedly agitated — and also enervated. I’m sure this is the way the dying man feels as his final breaths hurry away and word goes through the house: “It’s time, it’s time, he’s going, better come now.” The room fills with faces he can’t recognize, all the fucking air he’d hoped to salvage is quickly sucked up. It’s the feeling of responsibility colluding with pointlessness, and it isn’t good.

“That’s Gretchen,” Paul says. I feel like I’ve entered a house not my own and encountered circus performers — the one-handed mountain woman, the midget chef, the wise-cracking pitchman in the horse-blanket suit. Everything’s gone queer. It wasn’t supposed to.

“What’s she here for?” I’m now burning to piss. Were it not daylight and Drilla not in her hot tub in full view, I’d lariat out right here, the way I do all the time behind Kmart.

“She’s part of the food,” Paul says, and looks uncomfortably at Jill, who’s beside him. “She’s nice. She’s from Cassville. She and Jill both do yoga.”

“Where’s your sister?” I snap. “Did Sally call me?”

“She did,” Paul says. “I told her that you were doing fine, that your prostate stuff was a lot better and probably in remission, and that you and I had—”

“Did you say that to her?” My lips stiffen to a grimace. This was my news. My story to spin, to bill me as more than a penile has-been. Guilt, shame, regret will now cloud all Sally’s intentions toward me. Love will never have its second chance. She’ll be on a plane to Bhutan by sundown. I’ll become a pitiful thing in her horoscope (“Better watch your p’s and q’s on this one, hon”). I could strangle my son and never think of him again.

“I just thought she prolly knew about it.” Paul elevates his chin semi-defiantly, thumbs over his belt cow-puncher-style. This is his new take-charge posture — somewhat compromised by his suit. Tiny Gretchen stares out at me apprehensively, as if I was being talked off a high ledge. She doesn’t know who I am. Introductions were neglected. “She said she’d be here tomorrow. She seemed a little distressed, I guess.”

I, of course, was too busy not selling a cracker box on wheels to awards-store Bagosh and hunting for — and not finding — Bernice Podmanicsky. At the Next Level, the old standards vanish. You don’t know where your interests lie or how to contact them. “Where’s your sister. Did she call?”

“Okay.” Paul casts a fugitive look around the kitchen. Jill is nowhere in sight now. Probably she’s snuffing the dining room candles so the smoke alarm doesn’t go off.

“Okay? Okay what?” Paul stands his ground, separated by the open sliding doorway, his brow heavy, his damaged eye twitching but focused. What’s wrong here? What’s the story? Is she hurt, after all? Maimed? Dead? And everyone’s too embarrassed to tell me? Me, me, me, me. Why does so much have to be about me? That’s the part of life that makes you want to end it.

“She, like, called right after you left and talked to Jill and said she’d be late because there were some issues with dumb-fuck whatever. Thom.”

“Tell me what issues.” Atlantic City’s eighty miles south. I can be there in a twinkling (and be glad to go).

“She didn’t say. Then half an hour later she called back and asked to talk to you, and you were gone, I guess.”

“Yeah. So? What’d she say? What’s this about?”

“I didn’t know then. She asked for Mom’s cell and I gave it to her.” Paul isn’t used to being the bearer of important news that doesn’t seek its source from his everlasting strangeness. For that reason, he’s reverted to talking like a halting seventeen-year-old.

“Is that it?” It. It. It. And why am I hearing about it on the deck and not twenty minutes ago instead of “We’re Pregnant”? My fists ball up hard as cue balls. I’ve gratefully lost the urge to piss, though I might’ve pissed and not noticed. That’s happened. Little Gretchen’s still staring at me, dish towel in hand, as if I’m an intruder wandered in off the beach. “Is that it? Is there anything else to the fucking story? About your sister?”

“Okay.” Paul blinks hard, as if he’s recognized I might do something he might not like. I may look frightening. But what I am is scared — that my son is about to calmly mention, “Well, like, um, I guess Clarissa got decapitated. It was pretty weird.” Or “Um…some guys wearing hoods sort of kidnapped her. One guy, I guess, saw her get shot. We aren’t too sure—” Or “She was, I guess, trying to fly off the thirty-first floor. But she didn’t really get too far. Except like down.” This is how real news is imparted now. Like reading ingredients off the fucking oatmeal box.

“Would that ‘okay’ be the same ‘okay’ as the first ‘okay’ that meant not okay?” I say. I’m staring a hole in him. “What the fuck’s the matter with you, Paul? What’s happened to your sister?”

“She’s in Absecon.” His gray eyes behind his lenses roll almost out of sight in their sockets, as if under slightly different circumstances this information could be hilarious. Paul sways back on his heels and drops his hands to his sides.

“Why?” My heart’s going thumpa-thumpa.

“She and Thom got into some kind of fight. I don’t know. Clary took his keys and went and got his car”—the Healey—“and started driving back up here. But then shit-for-brains called the police and said it was stolen. And the police in Absecon, I guess, tried to pull her over. And she panicked and drove into one of those lighted merge-lane arrows on a trailer at Exit Forty, and knocked it into a highway guy and broke his leg.” Paul runs his left hand back through his mullet, and for an instant closes his eyes, then opens them as if I might be gone, suddenly, blessedly.

“How do you know this?” My chest is twittering.

“Mom told me.” His hands slip nervously down into his baggy plaid suit-pants pockets.

“Is she in Absecon, too?” Where the fuck is Absecon?

“I guess. Yeah.”

“Is your sister hurt?” Thumpa-thumpa-thump, thump.

“No, but she’s in jail.”

“She’s in jail?”

“Well. Yeah. She hit that guy.” Paul’s gray eyes fix on me as though to render me immobile. They blink. He coughs a tiny unwarranted cough and begins to say something else, his hands in his pockets.

But I’m already moving. “Well, Jesus Christ—”

I shoulder past him into the kitchen, past Gretchen and go for the stairs, skinning off my block-M, already contemplating how I will portray myself as a good, solid, not-insane-but-still-distressed father to all of ranked Absecon officialdom justifiably angry about one of their own being mowed down by my daughter. Ann, I absolutely know, will bring a lawyer. It’s in her DNA. My job will be simply to get there — down there, over there, wherever.

Standing shirtless in my closet, I immediately understand that regulation realtor clothing’s what’s called for — attire that causes the wearer to look positive-but-not-over-confident, plausible, capable but mostly bland on first notice; suitable for meeting a client from Clifton, or the FBI. In the real estate business, an agent’s first impression is as an attitude, not a living being. And for that, I’m well provided. Chinos (again), pale blue oxford button-down, brown loafers, nondescript gray socks, brown belt, navy cotton V neck. My uniform.

From inside my closet, I can hear the high-pitched nazzing, ratcheting, gunning, insect-engine noise of a dirt bike out on the beach. Local ball-cap hooligans, younger siblings of the prep school kids from yesterday, freed up — due to relaxed holiday police staffing — to go rip shit over our fragile shore fauna and pristine house-protecting dunes. If I weren’t on a dire mission, I’d call the cops or go put a stop to things myself. Possibly they’ll drive into Paul’s time-capsule bunker.

As I tie my shoes, I meditate darkly (and again) upon the very model of young manhood I once had in mind for my daughter — not to marry necessarily, or run away with, but to seek out as a good starter boyfriend. There was just such a staunch fellow when she was at Miss Trustworthy’s. A small, wiry, bespectacled, slate blue — eyed, blinking Edgar-of-Choate, who went on to read diplomatic history at Williams and Oxford but chose the family maritime law practice on Cape Ann, who coxed the heavyweight eight, could do thousands of knuckle push-ups, had an intense, scratchy, yearning voice, dressed more or less like me, and who I liked and encouraged (and who Clarissa humored and also liked), even though we all knew she was destined for a sage older man (who also remarkably resembled me), a fact that young Edgar didn’t seem to mind the hopelessness of, since a chassis like Clarissa Bascombe was way beyond the planet Pluto in terms of his life’s hopes. All seemed safe and ideal. Clarissa would begin adult life believing men were strange, harmless beings who couldn’t always be taken completely for granted, needed to be addressed seriously (now and then), but ultimately were hers for the taking — low-hanging fruit for a girl who’d seen some things. Edgar is now a hang ’em high prosecutor out in Essex County in Mass. — and a Republican, natch. I hardly have to say that a perilously bogus over-oiled character like van Ronk-the-equestrian is not the safe finish line for which good, solid Edgar was ever the starting gate. Beware when you have children that your heart not be broken.

Outside, the bracking, whining dirt-bike racket hasn’t stopped, has, in fact, seemed to migrate down through the space between my and the Feensters’ houses (where I observed Nick having his secret phone rendezvous two nights ago). The ruckus carries out to the front, where the vandals, I’m sure, are whipping out toward 35 before the police can trap them. “The March of the Siamese Children” is still blaring off the Feensters’ deck. As I finally take my long, jawclenching piss, I’m able to think that Absecon and whatever yet transpires there may offer the only relief and achievement the holiday will deliver to me. Although, did I not hear my son say that Sally would arrive? Tomorrow? A good sign.

Jill, large and green-suited, Paul, fidgety and zoot-suited, loiter in the front foyer, waiting on me like scolded servants. Jill’s hands are clasped behind her, schoolmarm-style — a habit. Both are grave but seem confident there’s nothing they can do. Our decommissioned and paralytically expensive Thanksgiving feast lies cooling, inedible and uncelebrated on the dining room table. The Men’s Ministry at Our Lady can come for it in a panel truck — and throw it in the ocean if they want to. Minuscule white-suited Gretchen is nowhere in sight. She may have been smart enough to leave.

My furniture, when I stop to put on my barracuda jacket, all seems bland and too familiar, but also strange and unpossessed — the couches, tables, chairs, bookcases, rugs, pictures, lamps — not mine. More like the decor of a Hampton Inn in Paducah. How does this happen? Does this mean my time here is nearing its end?

“I’m heading to Absecon, okay?” I have seen an Absecon exit on the Garden State but never gotten off.

“I’m going with you,” Paul announces commandingly.

“No way. You almost fucked this all up.” It’s still a furnace in here. Sweat sprouts in my hairline. My jacket — slightly grimed from my Bob Butts one-rounder — is the finishing touch of persuasive but distressed fatherdom.

“That’s really not fair.” Paul blinks behind his glasses. I didn’t notice before, but Otto, Paul’s dummy — his stupid blue eyes popped open, lurid orange hair, hacking jacket, fingerless wooden mitts, black patent-leather pumps with white socks, plus his green derby all making him appear perfectly at home in my house — is seated at the table-full of food like a stunned guest. Thanksgiving is all his now.

“I can’t explain it to you right now, Paul. But I will. I love you.” I’m moving out the front door. Outside, the dirt-bike noise is intense, as if whoever it is, is running a gymkhana around my or the Feensters’ front yard. Nick will be out if he isn’t already, primed to deal cruelly, etc., etc. It could be a chance for us to act in concert, only I have to leave. My daughter’s in jail.

“I think you need me with you. I think—” Paul’s saying.

“We’ll talk about it later.”

Then abruptly all is silenced outside—no-noise as palpable as noise.

And I feel just as suddenly a sensation of beforeness, which I’ve of course felt on many, many days since my cancer was unearthed, the sensation of when there was no cancer, and oh, how good that was—before—what a rare gift, only I was careless and didn’t notice and have kicked myself ever since for missing it.

But I feel that same beforeness now. Though nothing’s happened that a before should be expected. Unless I’ve missed something — more than usual. The Next Level wouldn’t seem to be in the business of letting us miss important moments. Still, why does now—this moment, standing in my own house — feel like before?

“What’s going on out there?” Paul says in a superior-sounding voice. His gray eyes bat at me. These words come from some old movie he’s seen and I have, too. Only he means them now, looks stern and suspicious, moves toward the doorknob, intent on turning it — to get to the bottom of, shed some light on, put paid to….

“No! Don’t do that, Paul,” I say. We all three look to one another — wondrous looks, different looks, because we are all different, yet are joined in our beforeness. It’s quiet outside now — we all say this with our silence. But it’s just the usual. The holiday calm. The peace of the harvest. The good soft exhale along this stretch of nice beach, the last sigh and surrender the season is famous for.

“Let me look,” I say, and go forward. “I’m leaving anyway.”

Paul’s brow furrows. Even in his horse-blanket suit, he is imploring. He heard what I said. “I’m going with you,” he says.

It’s hard to say no. But I manage. “No.”

I grasp the warm knob, give it a turn and pull open my front door.

And, just as it’s supposed to, everything changes. Before is everlastingly gone. There is only everlastingly after.

At first, I see nothing strange from my doorway, into which a cold gasp floods by my damp hairline. Only my hemispheric driveway. The high seaboard sky. My Suburban, its window duct-taped. Paul’s junker Saab behind the arborvitae. Sally’s LeBaron. Sandy Poincinet Road, empty and mistily serene toward the beach. And to the left, the Feensters’ yard with its sad topiary (the monkey, the giraffe, the hippo all neglected). Nick’s aqua Corvettes, enviably buffed, the upbraiding signs — DON’T EVEN THINK OF TURNING AROUND. BEWARE OF PIT BULL. DANGEROUS RIPTIDES. Nothing out of the ordinary. William Graymont, who’s caught something — possibly a bird — stands under the monkey, calmly staring down at his kill.

I begin walking toward my vehicle. Paul and Jill stand in the doorway behind me.

Where’s the clamorous, peace-destroying dirt bike, I wonder. Can it have simply vanished? I open the driver’s door, thoughts of Absecon re-encroaching with unhappy imagery — Clarissa in a room wearing beltless jailhouse garb; a two-way mirror with smirking men in suits behind it; an Oriental detective — a female — with small clean hands and a chignon; loathsome Thom at a desk, filling out forms. Then Clarissa remote from everything and everyone, forever. I test the gray duct tape across my broken window with an estimating poke — it gives but holds. Then Sally re-enters — on a Virgin flight from Maidenhead. How am I to re-establish myself as a vigorous, hearty, restless, randy Sea Biscuit, who’s also ready to forgive, forget, bygones staying bygones? I give Paul and Jill a fraught frown back where they stand in the doorway, followed by a bogus Teddy Roosevelt thumbs-up like Mike’s. A flight of geese, audible but invisible, passes over — honk-honk-honk-honk-honk in the misted air. I raise my eyes to them. “What the hell happened to your window?” Paul in his silly suit says, starting heavily out the door.

“Nothing,” I say. “It’s fine. It’ll be fine.”

“I should go with you.” He’s crossing the driveway, for some reason putting his hands on his hips like a majorette.

And that is when all hell breaks loose at the Feensters’.

From inside their big white modernistic residential edifice — the teak front door, I can see, is left open — comes the blaring, grinding, reckless start-up whang of a dirt bike. Possibly it’s sound effects, something Nick’s ordered from an 800 number on late-night TV, delivered in time for the holidays. The Sounds of Super-X. Give those neighbors something to be thankful for — when it’s turned off.

Paul and I stare in wonder — me across my Suburban hood, he mid-driveway. Inside the Feensters’, the dirt-bike racket winds up scaldingly, very authentic if it’s a recording—raaa-raaa-raaa-raaaraaaaaaaaaaa-er-raaaaaaa. I hear, but am not sure I hear, Drilla Feenster in a shrill operatic voice say, “No, no, no, no, no. You will not—” Her voice gets husky, insisting “no” to be the only acceptable thing about something. And then, through the Feensters’ open front door, wheeled up and rared back on its thick, black, cleated, high-fendered rear tire, a monstrous, gaudy, electric-purple Yamaha Z-71 “Turf Torturer” screams straight out onto the front drive, where the Corvettes are and the cat was. Astride the bike, captaining it, is a small-featured miniature white kid wearing green-and-black blotch camo, paratrooper boots, a black battle beret and a webbed belt full of what look to me like big copper-jacketed live rounds. (There is no way to make this seem normal.) The instant the bike touches front wheel down in the Feensters’ driveway, the kid snaps the handlebars into a gravel-gashing, throttle-up one-eighty that spins him around to face the house, at the same time giving the Yamaha more raaaa-raaaa-raaaarer-raaaas—popping the clutch out, in, out, spewing gravel against the Corvettes and looking neither left (at Paul and me, astonished across the yards) nor right, but back into the house, his face concentrated, luminous.

It’s not possible to know what’s happening here, only that it is happening and its consequences may not be good. I look at Paul, who looks at me. He seems perplexed. He is a visitor here. Jill steps out into the driveway to view things better. Gretchen has come to the door still in her chef’s hat and carrying a large metal kitchen spoon.

“Go back inside.” I say this loudly to Jill over the bike whine. The kid rider now takes note of me, fastens his eyes on me (he could be fourteen), then looks intently back through the Feensters’ open door, where someone he’s communicating with must be. He’s wearing an earpiece in the ear I can see, and his lips are moving. The kid rider points over to me and wags his gloved finger for emphasis. “You go back inside, too,” I say to Paul and turn to go in myself — just for the moment, lock the door, wait this one out. These sorts of things usually pass if you let ’em.

Then I hear Drilla inside saying over again, “No-no-no-no-no-no.” And then very sharply, possibly from the Great Room — where there are Jerusalem marble countertops, copper fixtures, mortised bamboo floors, no expense spared top to bottom — there come two short metallic brrrrp-brrrrp! noises. And Drilla stops saying “No-no-no-no.”

“Oh, man,” Paul says mid-driveway.

Almost in the same instant as the brrrrp-brrrrp sounds, Nick Feenster appears, marching out the door, bulky and muscular in his electric-blue Lycra get-up — no anorak. He is barefoot, being led like a prisoner by another undersized white kid, the match of the first one, camo’d, booted, beret’d and web-belted, but who is holding pressed to Nick’s jawbone an oddly shaped, black boxy contraption with a stubby barrel that looks like a kid’s gun and is — unless someone else is still in the Feensters’ house — what I just heard go brrrrp-brrrrp. Nick’s eyes cut over to me across the yards through his topiary as he’s being shoved ahead. His walking style is bumpy, a bulky man’s gait. His jowly face is stony, full of hatred, as if he’d like to get his hands on the parties responsible, just have five minutes alone with one or all of them.

I have no idea what this is that’s happening in the yard. I look at Paul, who’s motionless, hands riding his hips in his plaid suit, staring across the yard as I’ve been. He is transfixed. Jill is a few steps behind and motionless, her generous mouth opened but silent, hands (real and inauthentic) clasped at her waist. Little Gretchen has disappeared from the doorway.

“Go inside. Call somebody,” I say — to Paul, to Jill, to both of them. “Call 911. This is something. This isn’t good.”

And as if her switch has been thrown, Jill turns and walks directly back inside the front door without a word.

“You go inside, I said,” I say to Paul. I have to have them inside, so I can know what to do. But Paul doesn’t budge.

Nick Feenster, when I look again, is exactly where he was in his driveway. But the kid from the fiery purple Yamaha is just getting in the driver’s seat of one of the Corvettes — becoming instantly invisible behind the wheel. The big bike has been allowed to fall on its side in the gravel but is running. The other boy’s still holding the black machine pistol under Nick’s chin. They’re stealing his cars. That’s all this is. This is about stealing cars. They get the keys and then they shoot him. He knows this.

The Corvette rumbles to life. Its headlights flick on, then off, its fiberglass body trembling. Then the kid is quick out of it, hurries around, jumps in the other Corvette. He has both sets of keys. The second aqua-and-white Corvette cranks and shimmies and vibrates. Smoke puffs out of its dual pipes. The kid revs and revs the big mill, just like he did the Yamaha, but then drops it in reverse, sends it springing backward, spewing gravel underneath, then (I can see him looking down at the gear shifter) he yanks it down into first, rips a buffeting, wheel-tearing power left in the gravel and, in a clamor of smoke and engine racket and muffler blare, gurgle and clatter, spins out of the Feensters’ driveway, bouncing out onto Poincinet Road and straight away toward Route 35.

“They’re going to shoot Nick,” I say — I suppose — to Paul, who hasn’t gone inside the way I told him to. The boy with the machine pistol is talking to Nick, and Nick, at the point of the stubby barrel, is talking to the boy, his lips moving stiffly, as if they were discussing something difficult. I hear a siren not so far away. A silent alarm has gone off. The police will have stopped the first boy already, and none of this will go much further. I begin walking toward Nick and the boy, who’re still talking. I lack a plan. I’m merely impelled to walk across the driveway and the tiny bit of scratchy lawn separating our two houses to do something productive. You’re not supposed to think thoughts in these moments, only to see things distinctly for the telling later: the remaining vibrating aqua-and-white Corvette; the topiary monkey and the hippo; the cottony sky; Nick’s house; the kid with the machine pistol; Nick, muscular and stern-jawed in his blue Lycras and big bare feet. Though I do think of the boy, this lethal boy with his gun, threatening Nick. But as if he was a mouse. A tiny mouse. A creature I can corner and trap and hold in my two hands and feel the insubstantial weight of and keep captured until he’s calm. They’re still talking, this boy and Nick. Behind me, I hear Paul say, “Frank.” Then I say, “Could I just…. Could I just…get a little involved here in this?” And then the boy shoots Nick, shoots him straight up under the jaw. One brrrrp! I am beside the measly topiary giraffe and say, “Oh, gee.” And almost as an afterthought, more a choice of activities he didn’t know he’d have to make, the boy shoots me. In the chest. And that, of course, is the truest beginning to the next level of life.

18

I wonder at what Ms. McCurdy saw as she fell. What were her last recorded visual inputs before she closed her amazed eyes upon this toilsome, maybe not entirely bad life forever? Did she get to see the crack-brained Clevinger squeeze the final round into his melon? Did she see her astonished nursing students get the education of their lives? Did she see, for one last eye flutter, the sands of Paloma Playa or glimpse an oil derrick out at sea? A bather? A man standing in a tepid surf, looking back at her curiously, waving good-bye? I have the hope of a man who never hopes.

You’re told about the long, shimmering corridor with the spooky light at the end and the New Age music piped in (from where?). Or of the chapter-by-chapter performance review of your muddled life, scrolling past like microfiche while you pause at death’s stony door for some needed extra suffering. Or of the foggy, gilded, curving steps leading to the busy bearded old man at the white marmoreal desk with the book, who scolds you about the boats he’s already sent, then sends you below.

Maybe for some it happens.

But what I tried very, very hard to do, there on Nick Feenster’s lawn, was keep my eyes open, stay alert, maintain visual contact with as much as possible, keep the dots connected. Shooting three living humans apparently does not make a big impression on a fourteen-year-old, because even before I let myself kneel on the lawn and take notice of the two holes in my barracuda jacket high up in my left pectoral region, then look up at the boy with an odd sensation of gratitude, he’d already climbed into Nick’s Corvette and put it into clunking gear, after which he wheeled around in the driveway and roared off, narrowly missing Nick and geysering gravel in my whitening face, turning onto Route 35, where possibly the Sea-Clift police were already waiting to catch him as he headed onto the Toms River bridge.

My son Paul appeared at once to aid me where I lay on the lawn, as did Jill. Oddly enough, Paul kept asking me — I was awake for all of this — if I felt I was going to be all right, was I going to be all right, was I going to be all right. I said I didn’t know, that being shot in the chest was often pretty serious. And then Detective Marinara arrived — I may have dreamed this — having decided to celebrate Thanksgiving with us after all. He said — I may have dreamed this, too — that he knew quite a lot about bullet wounds to the chest, and mine might be all right. He called an ambulance from the radio in his jacket pocket.

And it came. I was lying on the cold ground, breathing shallow but religiously regular breaths, staring up glass-eyes into the misty sky, where I again could hear the geese winging through the smoky air, even see their spectral bodies, wings set, barely agitating. A stocky red-haired man with a red beard and a purple birthmark on his lower lip arrived and looked down at me. He had a hypodermic syringe in his mouth and a pink-tubed stethoscope around his rucked neck. “So, how’s it going there, Frank?” he said. “You gonna die?” He had one of the clotted Shore accents and grinned at me as if my dying was the furthest thing from his mind. “You ain’t gonna gork off on us, are you? Right here on your own lawn, in front of God and everybody. And on Thanksgiving? Are you, huh? That wouldn’t be too cool, big ole boy. Ruin everybody’s day. Specially mine.” He was giving it to me in the arm. The ground was very cold and hard. I wondered if the bullets (I didn’t know how many, then) had entered my chest and gone out the other side. I wanted to ask that and to explain that it wasn’t my lawn. But I must’ve lost consciousness, because I don’t even remember the needle being taken out, only that I hadn’t been called “big ole boy” in a long time. Not since my father called me that on our golfing days on the sun-baked Keesler course, when he would smack the living shit out of the ball, then look down at me, with my little junior clubs, and say, “Can you hit it that far, big ole boy? Let’s see if you can, big ole boy. Give her a mighty ride.” It’s worth saying that it doesn’t hurt that much to be shot in the chest. It was something I always wondered about as far back as my Marine Corps days, when people talked a lot about it. There’s the hit and then it’s hot and hurts some, then it’s numb. You definitely hear it. Brrrrp! You instantly feel strange, surprised (I was already cold, but I felt much colder) and then you — I, anyway — just kneel down to try to get some rest, and there’s the feeling then that everything’s going on without you. Which it pretty much is.

Of course — anyone would expect the rest to happen — I wake up in the Sea-Clift EMS truck, strapped to a yellow Stryker stretcher, shirtless and jacketless, covered with a thin pink blanket, my feet toward the back door. It is just like all the movies portray it — a fish-eye view, a jouncing, swerving ride under an elevated railroad in the Bronx, siren whoop-whooping, diesel motor growling, lights flashing. The fluorescent light inside is lime green, barely sufficient for decent patient care. The turns and roaring motorized dips make me roll against my nylon belt restraints. There’s the smell of rubbing alcohol and other disinfectants and aluminum. And I believe I’ve died and this is what death is — not the “distinguished thing,” but a swervy, bumpy ride with a lot of blinking lights all around you that never ends, a constant state of being in between departure and arrival, though that might be just for some. I’m bandaged and strung up to a collapsing clear plastic drip bag, and wearing a mask to aid my breathing. I can see the scruffy, heavy-set, red-bearded guy in a white shirt with his stethoscope, sitting beside me, talking to someone else in the compartment who I can’t see, talking in the calmest of voices, as if they’re on break from the produce department at Kroger’s and taking their time about clocking back in. They talk about the 5-K race and some guy they thought had “stroked out” but, it turns out, hadn’t. And some woman with a prosthetic leg whom they admired but couldn’t see having decent sex with. And about how no one would catch them out running in the street on Thanksgiving when they could be home watching the Sixers, and then something about the police saying the boys who’d shot me and Nick (and possibly Drilla) being Russians: “Go figure.” I am gripping. My hand can touch something cold and tubular, and I would like very much to sit up and see out the little louvered side windows to find out where we are. The clock on the wall here says it’s 2:33. But when I stir toward rising, the red-bearded EMS guy with the purple birthmark says, “Well, our friend’s come alive, looks like,” and puts a big freckled hand heavily on my good shoulder so that I can see he’s wearing a milky blue plastic glove. I’m aware that I say from under my mask, “It’s all right, I don’t have AIDS.” And that he says, “Sure, we know. Nobody does. These gloves are just my fashion statement.” And I may say, “I do have cancer, though.” And he may say, “In-te-rest-ing. Four inches lower and this would be a more leisurely trip.” Then I relax and stare at the dim, rocking, metallic-gray ceiling as the boxy crate roars on.

The ceiling has a color snapshot of a thinner version of the red-haired paramedic in an Army desert uniform, kneeling, smiling down at me from a far-away land, and above his head a thought-balloon says “Oxygen In Use. Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha.” I may dream then that we’re passing onto the long bridge to Toms River, across Barnegat Bay, and that these two men are talking and talking and talking about the election and what a joke it is: “suspended agitation,” “diddling while home burns,” how no one has loyalty to our sacred institutions anymore, which is a national disgrace, since institutions and professions have always carried us along. In their view, it is a nature-nurture issue, and they agree that nurture is, while not everything, still very important (which I don’t feel so sure about). And then I think someone, I’m not sure who, is flossing his teeth and smiling at me at the same time.

And at this point it becomes clear to me (how does one know such things?) that I’m not going to die from merely being shot in the chest by some little miscreant mouse who needs to spend some concentrated time alone thinking about things, particularly about his effect on others. Now, today, may be an end — time will tell what of — but it is not the end the way Ernie McAuliffe’s and Natheriel Lewis’s ends were unarguably the end for those good and passionate souls. And Nick, too, who can’t have survived his wounds. To know such a thing so clearly is a true mystery, but one does, which puts an interesting spin on the rest of life and how people pretend to live it, as well as on medical care and on religion and on business and the pharmaceutical industry, real estate — most everything, when you get right down to it.

I could, of course, die in the hospital. Thousands do, victims of lawless pathogens that make their home there, felled by an otherwise-non-fatal wound; or I could suffer my titanium BBs to turn traitor to my tissues and become my worst enemy. These things are statistically possible and happen. Listen to Live at Five or read the Asbury Press. Nature doesn’t like to be observed, but can be.

Whoop-whoop, whoop-whoop! Blaaaant, blaaaant! Vroom, vroom. “That’s right, that’s it. Just sit there. You motherfucker! I gotta dead guy in he-ah, or soon will. Ya silly son of a bitch.”

It’s good to know they actually care — that it’s not like driving a beer truck or delivering uniforms to Mr. Goodwrench. What is their average time in traffic, one wonders.

BANG! BANG! Bangety-ruuuump-crack. We’ve hit something now. “That’s right, asshole. That’s why I got this cowcatcher on this baby, for assholes like you!” Vroom, vroom, vroom-vroom. We’re off again. It can’t be far now.

When I’m turned loose from this current challenge, I am going to sit down and write another letter to the President, which will be a response to his yearly Thanksgiving proclamation — generally full of platitudes and horseshit, and no better than poems written for ceremonial occasions by the Poet Laureate. This will be the first such letter I’ve actually sent, and though I know he will not have long to read it and gets letters from lots of people who feel they need to get their views aired, still, by some chance, he might read it and pass along its basic points to his successor, whoever that is (though of course I know — we all do). It will not be a letter about the need for more gun control or the need for supporting the family unit so fourteen-year-olds don’t steal cars, own machine pistols and shoot people, or about ending pregnancies, or the need to shore up our borders and tighten immigration laws, or the institution of English as a national language (which I support), but will simply say that I am a citizen of New Jersey, in middle age, with wives and children to my credit, a non-drug user, a non-jogger, without cell-phone service or caller ID, a vertically integrated non-Christian who has sponsored the hopes and contexts and dreams of others with no wish for credit or personal gain or transcendence, a citizen with a niche, who has his own context, who does not fear permanence and is not in despair, who is in fact a realtor and a pilgrim as much as any. (I will not mention cancer survivor, in case I’m finally not one.) I’ll write that these demographics confer on me not one shred of wisdom but still a strong personal sense of having both less to lose and curiously more at stake. I will say to the President that it’s one thing for me, Frank Bascombe, to give up the Forever Concept and take on myself the responsibilities of the Next Level — that life can’t be escaped and must be faced entire. But it’s quite another thing for him to, or his successor. For them, in fact, it is very unwise and even dangerous. Indeed, it seems to me that these very positions, positions of public trust they’ve worked hard to get, require that insofar as they have our interests at heart, they must graduate to the Next Level but never give up the Forever Concept. I have lately, in fact, been seeing some troubling signs, so that I will say there is an important difference worth considering between the life span of an individual and the life span of a whole republic, and that….

“Absecon,” I hear someone say. “That’s Ab-see-con.” That’s not how I’ve been pronouncing it, but I will forever. Surely we’re not going to a hospital there. “When I was a kid, in Ab-see-con—” It’s the big red-headed Army medic, blabbing on in his south Jersey brogue. “My old man useta go to Atlantic City. They still had real bums over there then. Not these current fucks. This was the seventies, before all this new horseshit. He’d go get one a these bums and bring him home for Thanksgiving. You know? Clean him up. Give him some clothes. Useta look for bums about his own size. My mom useta hate it. I’ll tell ya. We’d—”

We are slowing up. The siren’s gone silent. The two men inside with me are moving, legs partly bent, stooping. A two-way radio crackles and sputters from someone’s belt beside my face. The clock says it’s 3:04. “Could be you’ll want some backup,” a woman’s metallic voice says from a place where it sounds like the wind’s blowing. “Oh boy. Ooooohh boy. Oh man,” the woman’s faraway voice says. “This is somethin’. I promised you fireworks.” Sputter and fuzz. And we are, because I can feel it, backing up and turning at once. I strain against my webbed restraints to see something. My hands are cold. I feel my upper chest to be cold, too, and numb. A randy taste has dislodged from somewhere in my mouth. My chest actually hurts now, I have to admit. I’m not breathing all that well even with oxygen in use, though I’m glad to have it. “Delivery for occupant,” I hear a man’s voice say. “He had a big heart, my old man.” The medic is speaking again, “For all the good it did ’im.” The red-bearded face is peering down into mine out of the minty fluorescence. “How ya doin’, big ole boy? You holdin’ up?” the red mouth with the birthmark says. His blue eyes fix on me suspiciously. I wonder what my own eyes say back. “How’d you like your ambulance ride? Just like TV, wasn’t it?”

“Life’s interesting,” I say from under my mask.

“Oh yeah.”

Suddenly, there’s lots of outside light and a burst of cold air. The door, which I can see, has opened, and my stretcher is moving. The face of a bright-eyed, smiling young nurse, a black woman in a long white labcoat, and corn-rows with gold beads intertwined and tortoiseshell glasses, is staring into my face. She’s saying, “Mr. Bascombe? Mr. Bascombe? Can you tell me how you feel?”

I say, “Yes. I don’t feel like a big ole boy, that’s one thing.”

“Well then, why don’t you tell me how you are,” she says. “I’d like to know.”

“Okay,” I say. And as we move along, that is what I begin to do — with all my best concentration, I begin to try to tell her how I am.