The Lay of the Land

Thanksgiving

Violence, that imposter, foreshortens our expectancies, our logics, our next days, our afternoons, our sweet evenings, our whole story.

At 23,000 feet, the land lies north and east to the purple horizon. Terminal moraine, which in summer nurtures alfalfa fields, golf courses, sod farms, stands of yellow corn, is now masked and frozen white, fading into dusk. Wintry hills pass below, some with frail red Christmas lights aglitter on tiny porches, then a gleaming silver-blue river and the tower trail of our great midwestern power grid. It is all likable to me. Minnesota.

My fellow passengers on Northwest Flight 1724 (world’s most misunderstood airline), all thirty of us, are Mayo bound. O’Hare straight up to Rochester. The blond, heavy-boned, duck-tailed flight attendant — a big Swede — knows who her passengers are. She acts jokey-light-hearted if you’re just flying up for a colonoscopy—“the routine lube job”—but is chin-set, hard-mouth serious if your concerns are more of an “impactful,” exploratory nature. As usual, I fall into the mid-range of patient-passenger profiles — those who’re undergoing successful treatment and on our way to Rochester to hear encouraging news. At 23,000 feet, no one is the least bit reluctant to discuss personal medical problems with whoever fate has seated next to them. Above the engines’ hum, you hear earnest, droning heartland voices dilating on what an aneurysm actually is, what it feels like to undergo an endoscopy or a heart catheterization (“The initial incision in your leg’s the goddamn worst part”) or a vertebra fusion (“They go in through the front, but of course you don’t feel it, you’re asleep”). Others, less care-laden, discuss how “the Cities” have changed — for the better, for the worse — in the years they’ve been coming up here; where’s the best muskie fishing to be found (Lake Glorvigen); whether it was King Hussein or Saddam Hussein who was a Mayo patient once upon a time (AIDS and “the syph” are rumored); and what a good newspaper USA Today has turned out to be, “especially the sports.” Many tote thick manila envelopes containing crucial evidentiary X rays from elsewhere. BRAIN, SPINE, NECK, KNEE are stamped in red. I have only myself — and Sally Caldwell — plus a prostate full of played-out BBs destined to be with me forever. And I have my thoughts for a sunny prognosis and a good start to year two of the young Millennium, which includes a new direction in the Presidency — one it’s hard to see how we’ll survive — though the enfeebled new man’s little worse than his clownish former opponent, both being smirking cornpones unfit to govern a ladies’ flower show, much less our frail, unruly union.

Sally, beside me on the aisle of our regional Saab 340 turboprop, is reading a book encased in one of the crocheted book cozies women years ago employed to sneak Peyton Place or Bonjour Tristesse into the beauty parlor (my mother did it with Lady Chatterley’s Lover), books requiring privacy for full enjoyment. Sally’s reading a thick paperback called Tantrism and Your Prostate, by a Dr. White. She’s assured me there’re strategies woven into his recommendations that are part of our (my) natural maturing process and pretty much common sense anyway, and will clear out a lot of underbrush and open up some new paths we’ll both soon be breathless to enter. The sex part is still a source of concern — for me but not, apparently, for Sally — since we’ve yet to fully reconvene since she returned from Blighty and I cleared customs at Ocean County Hospital from my successful gunshot surgery, which left amazingly small scars and wasn’t nearly as bad as you’d imagine (pretty much the way it happens on Gunsmoke or Bonanza). I did wake up on the operating table, though the Pakistani surgeon, Dr. Iqbal, just started laughing at my shocked, popped-opened peepers and said, “Oh, well, my goodness, look who can’t stand to miss anything.” They put me out again in two seconds, and I have no memory of pain or fear, only of Dr. Iqbal laughing. The two.32 slugs are at home on my bedside table, where I have in the past two weeks studied them for signs of significance and found none. Sally believes there’s nothing to worry about on the sexual front and that she knows everything’ll kick into gear once I regain full strength and get some good news in Rochester.

Sally’s hand, her right hand, grazes mine when we encounter turbulence and go buffeting along over the oceany chop, while our fellow passengers — all regional flying veterans and all fatalists — start laughing and making woo-hoo-ing noises. Someone, a woman with a nasal Michigan voice, says, “Up-see-daisee. Ain’t this fun now?” None of us would mind that much if our ship went down or was hijacked to Cuba or just landed someplace other than our destination — some fresh territory where new and unexpected adventures could blossom, back-burnering our inevitables till later.

Since she’s been back from her own Wanderjahr, Sally has seemed unaccountably happy and hasn’t wanted to sit down for a full and frank debriefing, which is understandable and can wait forever if need be. I was in the hospital some of the time, anyway, and since then there’s been plenty to do — police visits and sit-down interviews with prosecutors, an actual lineup at the Ocean County Court House, where I identified the perpetrators, all this along with Clarissa’s difficulties in Absecon. (The pint-size accomplices were twins and Russians, boyfriends of the faithless Gretchen. It turns out there’s a story there. I, however, am not going to tell it.)

Paul and Jill, it should be said, proved to be much better than average ground support in all our difficulties, although they’ve now driven back to K.C. to celebrate the Yule season “as a couple.” Paul and I were never precisely able to get onto the precise same page because I was in the hospital, but we now seem at least imprecisely to be reading the same book, and since I was shot, he has seemed not as furious as he was before, which may be as good as these things get. I don’t know to this moment if he and Jill are married or even intend to be. When I asked him, he only smoothed his beard-stache and smiled a crafty, uxorious smile, so that my working belief has become that it doesn’t matter as long as they’re “happy.” And also, of course, I could be wrong. He did, as an afterthought, tell me Jill’s last name — which is Stockslager and not Bermeister — and I’ll admit the news made me relieved. But again, as to Sally’s and my true reconciliation (in both the historical and marital senses), it will come in time, or never will, if there’s a difference. In her letter, she said she didn’t know if there was a word that describes the natural human state for how we exist toward each other. And if that’s so, it’s fine with me. Ideal probably wouldn’t be the right word; sympathy and necessity might be important components. Though truthfully, love seems to cover the ground best of all.

When she arrived the day after Thanksgiving, Sally carried with her a wooden box containing Wally’s cremains. (I was zonked in the Ocean County ICU and she didn’t actually bring the box up there.) Wally, it seems, had just been a man who no matter how hard he tried could never find full satisfaction with life, but who actually came as close to happiness as he ever would by living alone, or as good as alone, as a bemused and trusted arborist on a remittance man’s estate (there are words for these people, but they don’t explain enough well enough). His nearly happy existence all went directly tits-up when Sally forcibly re-inserted herself into his life for reasons that were her own and were never intended to last forever — though poor Wally didn’t know that. After a few weeks together on Mull, Wally grew as grave as a monk, then gradually morose, apparently feared his paradise on earth would now not be sustainable, but could not (as he couldn’t from the start) explain to Sally that marriage was just a bad idea for a man of his solitary habits. She said she would’ve welcomed hearing that, had tried lovingly to make him discuss it and put some fresh words in place, but hadn’t succeeded and saw she was spoiling his life and was already planning to leave. But with no place else to run away to, and not realizing he could just stay in Mull, and thus in a fit of despair and incommunicable fearfulness and sorrow, Wally took a swim with a granite paving stone tied to his ankle and set his terrible fears and unsuitedness for earth adrift with the outward tide. She said when he was found he had a big smile on his round and innocent face.

Sally has admitted — seated at the same glass-topped breakfast table overlooking the ocean where she’d told me she was leaving and gave me her wedding ring only a short, eventful six months ago — that she simply never made Wally happy enough, though she loved him, and it was too bad they couldn’t have gotten a divorce like Ann and I did and freed each other from the past. In time, I will find words to explain to her that none of this is as simple as she thinks, and in doing so possibly help explain herself to herself, and let her and Wally off some hooks — one of which is grief — hooks they couldn’t get off on their own. It’s my solemn second-husbandly duty to do such things. In these small ways, there’s been appreciable progress made in life in just the twelve days since I got out of Ocean County. We both feel time is precious, for obvious reasons, and don’t want to waste any of it with too much brow beetling.

In any case, I rescheduled my Mayo post-procedure checkup, which will be tomorrow at nine with blunt-fingered Dr. Psimos. And since Chicago was, in a sense, on the way, Sally asked me to go with her to Lake Forest to present a solid-front fait accompli when she delivered Wally’s ashes to the aged parents. It is an unimpartably bad experience to have your son die once in a lifetime, as my son Ralph did. And even though I have officially accepted it, I will never truly get over it if I live to be a hundred — which I won’t. But it is unimpartably worse and in no small measure strange to have your son die twice. And even though I knew nothing to say to his parents and didn’t really want to go, I felt that to meet someone who knew Wally as an adult, as I did in a way, and who knew his odd circumstances and could vouch for them, and who was at the same time a total stranger they’d never see again, might prove consoling. Not so different from a Sponsor visit, when you settle it all out.

The elderly Caldwells were rosy-cheeked, white-haired, small and trim Americans, who welcomed Sally and me into their great fieldstone manse that backs up on the lake and is probably worth eight million and will one day be turned into a research institute run by Northwestern to study (and interpret) whatever syndrome Wally suffered from that made everybody’s life a monkey house. I couldn’t help thinking it could also be turned into four luxury condos, since it had superb grounds, mature plantings and drop-dead views all the way to Saugatuck. A big conical blue spruce was already up and elaborately lighted in the long drawing room with the stone fireplace, where Sally (I guessed) first re-encountered Wally last May. The Caldwells were soon to be off to a do at the Wik-O-Mek that evening and wanted us to come along and stay over, since there would be dancing. I’d have died before doing anything like that and, in fact, managed to work into the conversation that unfortunately I’d recently been shot in the chest (which seemed not to surprise them all that much) and had trouble sleeping, which isn’t true, and Sally said we were really just stopping by on our way up to Mayo for my checkup and needed to get going — as if we were driving all the way. They both acted cheerful as could be, fixed us each an old-fashioned, talked dishearteningly about the election (Warner described all their neighbors as decent Chuck Percy Republicans) and how they felt the economy was headed for recession, witness the tech sector and capital-spending cuts. Constance took grateful but unceremonious possession of Wally’s ashes — a small box upholstered in black velvet. They both guardedly mentioned Sally’s two children in a way that made me sure they sent them regular whopper checks. Then they talked about what an exotic life Wally had chosen to live—“Strange and in some ways exciting,” Constance said. We all sat around the huge but cozy spruce-and-apple-wood-scented room and drank our cocktails and thought about Wally as if he was both with us and as if he had never lived, but definitely not as though he’d sharked my wife away from me — even if unwillingly. At some point all four of us started to get not-surprisingly antsy and probably fearful of our words beginning to take on meanings we might regret. Sally and Constance excused themselves, in a southern way, to go upstairs together with the cremains box. Warner took me out the French doors to the low-walled patio, which was snowy and already iced in. He wanted me to see the lake, frozen and blue, and also where he’d put up his fancy covered and heated one-man practice tee he could use all winter. He wondered if I played golf — as though he was sizing me up as a son-in-law. I said no, but that my former wife was a golf coach and played for the Lady Wolverines in the sixties. With a pixyish grin — he looked nothing like Wally, which leads to speculation — he said he’d played for the purple and white when he came back from the Marianas. We had nothing else to say after that, and he walked me around the outside of the big rambling house through the gleaming crust of snow to where the ladies were just then exiting the front door (it was their standard way to hustle you out). And in no more than three minutes, after we’d all uncomfortably hugged one another and said we’d definitely visit somewhere, someday on the planet, Sally and I headed out the drive, out of Lake Forest, back toward the Edens and toward O’Hare.

But since there was still plenty of light left and I had my old orienteering feel for streets and cardinal points — realtors all think we have this, but can be calamitously wrong — I said I wanted to drive past my mother’s last address in Skokie, where she’d lived while I was in college, with Jake Ornstein, her good husband, and where she’d died in 1965. We got off at Dempster Avenue and drove east to where I thought it would intersect, via a tricky set of small-street maneuverings, with Skokie Boulevard. Everything felt familiar to me, equipped as I was with the sense of near-belonging I’d had from thirty-five years ago, when I used to ride over from Ann Arbor on the old New York Central and be picked up at the LaSalle Street Station by my mother. But when I got to where I thought Skokie Boulevard should’ve been (possibly my old-fashioned was working on me), there was a big but past-its-prime shopping mall, with an Office Depot and a poorly patronized Sears as its anchors and a lot of vacant store spaces in between. I realized then that somewhere toward the back of the employee-parking section of the Sears was where my mother and Jake’s house had been — a blue-roofed, single-dormer, center-stoop, quasi-Colonial Cape where my mother had lived out her last days, and where I’d gone to see her before being officially rendered an orphan at age nineteen.

“Do you know where your mom’s buried?” Sally was driving our renter Impala and wasn’t in a hurry, since her duties toward Wally and herself were now forever discharged. She’d happily have driven around all day.

I said, “It’s one of those places where you just see miles of granite headstones and freeways go by on three sides. I could probably find it from the air. She’s buried beside Jake.”

“We can look for it,” she said, widening her eyes like a challenge. “I think it’d be nice if you went there once before you died. Not that you’re in jeopardy of dying. At least you better not be. I have plans for you.” That was our sexual code in prior days. “I’ve got plans for you, buster.” An eyebrow cocked. I’d certainly like those plans to see good results again soon.

“I hope you do,” I said. We were again headed back toward the Edens and the route to the airport. “It’s enough that I tried to find it. She’d think that was good. It’s one of the ways life’s like horseshoes.”

“There’re more than you know, you know.” She smiled broadly at me, her eyes shiny in a way I hadn’t seen them shine in a while. This also clearly meant something amorous and made me happy, though also apprehensive that something close to amorous was all I was expected to manage. We got to the airport with two hours to spare.

I will say that in the days since Sally’s return, some of which time I was in the hospital in Toms River, before I walked out as a convalescing man, holey-chested as a minor-league saint, she has treated me — as I feared she might — with kid gloves, almost as if in some karmic way she believes she caused what happened to me. I probably have not objected enough, though Mike Mahoney says karma doesn’t work like that. Still, Sally often seems to be “attending” to me, and sometimes addresses me in an over-animated third-person manner — spirited attendant to fractious attendee: “So what does Frank have on his mind today?” “So is Frank going to clamber out of bed today?” I’ve heard this is what people do in therapy sessions when straight talk hits the wall. “Frank believes, or at least is willing to speculate, that Sally is overcompensating for prior behavior that requires no compensation, and Frank is wishing it would stop.” I actually said this to her. And for a day she turned silent and evasive, even a little testy. But by the second day, she was cheerful again, though still more solicitous than makes me happy.

I’m actually ready to believe that what any marriage might need is a good whacking abandonment or betrayal to test its tensile strength (most of them survive that and worse). In any case, I’m pretty well over being angry and feel an exhilarated sense of necessity just to be alive still and have her back. Marriage, in fact, does not even feel much like marriage anymore, even though Sally has asked for her wedding ring back (but has yet to put it on). Possibly it never really felt like marriage, and that in spite of two efforts I don’t know what marriage is. Maybe it’s not our natural human state, which is why Paul only smiled when I asked him about it.

But in these days since being shot in the chest, as this Millennial plague year ends and the confounding election’s finally resigned to, what I’ve begun to feel is a growing sense of enlightenment, even though I have plenty of pain from my bullet holes. Enlightenment often gets lost in intimate life with another person: the positive conviction, for instance, that the person you are now would make precisely the same choices you’re living with and that your life is actually the way you want it. That enlightened understanding can get lost. Life with Sally returned to Sea-Clift feels, in fact, less like a choice I made long ago, and more like the feeling of meeting someone you instantaneously like while on a walking trip along the Great Wall, and who seems sort of familiar and who by the end of the day you decide to share your pup tent with.

Not that I’m totally in the clear. If I intend to be healed and be a full participant more than an attendee, I believe I will have to become more interesting per se. Although being shot with a machine pistol by a fourteen-year-old assassin and living to tell about it gives me a good, unconventional story that most people probably won’t have. I may also need to become more intuitive, which I would’ve said I was anyway, until cancer got in the picture. And possibly I could stand an improved sense of spirituality — which Sally seems to have come home with, and Mike Mahoney sells like popsicles. “Faith is the evidence of things unseen” always seemed a reasonably reliable spiritual credo to have, and evoked me to myself in a secular sense — though you could also say it gave rise to problems. Or: “In an age of disbelief…it is for the poet to supply the satisfactions of belief in his measure and his style”—except of course I am not a poet, though I’ve read plenty of them and find their books easy to finish. But in the most purely personal-spiritual vein — since I took two slugs four inches above my own — the best motivational question in the spirituality catechism, and one seeking an answer worth remembering, may not be “Am I good?” (which is what my rich Sponsorees often want to know and base life on), but “Do I have a heart at all?” Do I see good as even a possibility? The Dalai Lama in The Road to the Open Heart argues I definitely do. And I can say I think I do, too. But anymore — as they say back down in New Jersey — anymore than that is more spiritual than I can get.

How any of this jibes with acceptance and the Next Level, I’m not sure. Self-improvement as a concept already smacks of the Permanent Period, of life you can live over again, which is a thought I’ve put behind me now but may be harder to outlive than it seems. Truly, at a certain point around the course, can you do much to change your chances? Isn’t it really more a matter of readying? Of life as prelude?

In a purely itemized way, then, these things are now of record at the end.

I’ve always liked the joke about the doctor coming into the examining room, holding a clipboard, wearing his stethoscope and mirrored visor, and saying, “I’ve got good news and bad news. The bad news is you have cancer and you’ll be dead in a week. The good news is I fucked my nurse last night.”

My good news is I have cancer, but I sleep better than ever since being shot and nearly offed. The Ocean County Hospital doctors said this is not unusual. Death can take on a more contextualized importance relative to our nearness to it. And truthfully, I do not fear death even as much as I used to, which wasn’t much, although these things can get hidden. I did not, for example, get on the plane today and feel as I once felt — that I recognized the flight attendant from other flights (they never recognize me) and that therefore my odds of averting disaster were shortened. Neither today did I feel the urge I’ve felt for years — even on my happy, worry-erasing trips to Moline and Flint — to repeat my traveler’s mantra upon taking my seat: “An airplane is forty tons of aluminum culvert, pressure-packed with highly volatile and unstable accelerants, entering a sky chock-full of other similar contraptions, piloted by guys with C averages from Purdue and carrying God only knows what other carnage-producing incendiary materials, so it’s stupid not to think it will seek its rightful home on earth at the first opportunity. Therefore today must be a good day to die.” I used to take strength from those words, spoken silently as I watched my luggage ride the conveyor and the baggage handlers secretly stealing glances up at my face in the window and mouthing words I couldn’t lip-read but that seemed to be directed to me, smirking and laughing while they sent on board whatever fearsome cargo the other people were carrying (these baggage people rarely fly themselves).

For item number two, my strange syncopes have quit occurring since I was wounded. Why, I can’t say, but it may be that I meditate now without really realizing it.

On other fronts, the mystery of Natherial Lewis’s death was brought to a sad but sure solution — one that seems unrelated to a hate crime. A simpler matter than guessed was at its heart, as is often true in these cases. A man of the Muslim faith desired to “send a message” to a medical doctor of the same persuasion who, this first man believed, lived too much in the world of infidels and needed reminding. The medical doctor, of course, had already left to spend Thanksgiving in Vieques on the day the reminder was delivered — which must have proved to the bomb maker he was right. Only Natherial was there in the cafeteria, in the early a.m., listening to his transistor radio, looking out the window, watching dawn come up on the hospital grounds, waiting to go home and to bed — which he never did. No one was supposed to be hurt, the guilty man said. It was just a message.

Meanwhile our long drought is officially declared ended in New Jersey on the strength of tropical depression Wayne, which never became a hurricane but brought a change for all. Some people associate the dry season’s ending with the election being settled and a hoped-for upturn in the economy. But these people are Republicans who’ll do fine no matter who’s elected. They are the ones who sell you water in a desert.

On a less optimistic note, Wade Arsenault has, unhappily, died. Of a stroke. A general system failure. “Eighty-four,” as Paul Harvey would say, on the Sunday after Thanksgiving. No surprise to him and probably not disappointing, either, if he knew anything about it. I did not go to the funeral because I was in the hospital and didn’t hear until later. Though I wouldn’t have gone. Wade and I were not the kind of friends who need to attend each other’s funerals. In any case, his daughter, Ricki, and his thick-necked policeman son, Cade, were there to send him on to glory. Ricki called me in the hospital and sounded much the same as when I last saw her sixteen years ago, her voice a bit deepened and made less confident by time. I pictured her with a mall haircut, an extra thirty pounds strapped to her once-wonderful hips and a look of non-acceptance camouflaged behind a big Texas smile. “Deddy liked you s’much, Frank. Like me, I guess — hint, hint. It made a big difference to him havin’ you be his big buddy. Life’s peculiar, idn’t it?” “It is,” I said, staring apprehensively out my hospital window down onto Hooper Avenue choked with Christmas shoppers and misted with tiny snowflakes. I hoped she wasn’t calling from downstairs or out in her car, and wasn’t about to come check me out, being a nurse and all. But she didn’t. She was always a smarter cookie than I was a cookie. She told me that she’d discovered the Church of Scientology and was a better person for that, though at her age she doubted anybody would ever love her for what she was — which I said was dead wrong (I couldn’t remember what her exact age was). Our conversation did not range far after that. I think she would’ve liked to see me, and some parts of me would’ve liked to see her. But we were not moved enough to do that, and in a while we said good-bye and she was gone forever.

On the nearer-to-home front, Clarissa Bascombe’s scrape with local law in Absecon was indeed serious, but ended not nearly as badly as it might’ve. Her mother did bring down a lawyer from Haddam, a big, blond, handsome Nordic-looking palooka with eyes on both sides of his head — who I’d seen a hundred times and never paid any attention to, and who, I believe, is Ann’s new goodly swain — not the patch-pockets history teacher I previously imagined. She told me this lawyer, Otis — I don’t know if that’s his last name or his first — had “good connections,” which meant either the mob or the statehouse, whatever the difference might be. But by six p.m. Thanksgiving Day, this Otis had Clarissa sprung from the Absecon lockup and had made allegations that the police applied reckless and undue force by running her off the road and into the blinking lane-change arrow and on into the NJDOT employee, whose foot was only sprained and may have been sprained a week before. Otis also claimed Clarissa had possibly been the victim of date rape, or at the very least of a pretty scary dating experience that amounted to assault, leaving her traumatized — as good as innocent. She was actually fleeing for her safety, he said, when she made contact with the Absecon police. Thom may pay the freight for this or he may not, since he naturally turns out to have a past no one knew about but, also naturally, has mouthpieces of his own. It’s enough that Clarissa was unharmed and will eventually look less like a fool than she felt at the time. When she arrived at the hospital late on Thanksgiving night, when I’d been in surgery and was just waking up, feeling surprisingly not so bad but out of my head, she stood close by my bed, gave me her serious stare, put her two hands on my wrist below where they had me strung up to fluids and infusions and heartbeat monitors, then smiled gamely and said in what I remember as an extremely softened, chastened, worn-out, had-it-with-life voice, “I guess I’ve become number one in number two.” This was our joke of possibly longest standing and refers to a sign we once saw on a septic-service truck on the back roads of Connecticut, when she was just a girly girl and I was an insufficient father trying to find sufficiency. There were, or seemed to be, others in the room with her — Ann, possibly Paul, possibly Jill, possibly Detective Marinara. I may have dreamed this. Along the top of the green wall, where it corniced with the white ceiling, was a frieze bearing important phrases that the hospital authorities wanted us patients to see as soon as we opened our eyes (if we did). What I read said, “When patients feel better about their comfort level they heal faster and their length of stay is shortened.”

I looked at my sweet daughter, into her fatigue-lined, handsome face, at her thick honeyed hair, strong jaw, her mouth turned down at the corners when her smile was gone. I could see then, and for the first time, what she would look like when she was much older — the opposite of what a father usually sees. Fathers usually think they see the child in the adult’s face. But Clarissa would look, I thought, just like her mother. Not like me, which was acceptable along with the rest. I thought as I lay there, how few jokes we’d shared and how rarely I had seen her laugh since she’d become a grown-up. And while you could say the fault for that belonged to her mother and me, that fault in truth was mostly mine.

I said something then, in my daze. I believe I said, “I should’ve spent more time with you when you were young.”

She said, “That’s not true, Frank. I didn’t want to spend more time with you then. Now’s better.” That’s all I remember from those early hours in the hospital and from my daughter, who’s now back “camping out” with Cookie in Gotham, which pleases me, since she may have decided that “the big swim,” the “out in the all of it” were just mirages to keep her from accepting who she is, and that the smooth, gliding life of linked boxes may not be the avoidance of pain but just a way of accepting what you can’t really change. It’s possible she’s come to feel fortunate.

The passengers across the aisle from Sally have turned out to be Kansas Citians, a jolly, rotund couple named the Palfreymans. Burt Palfreyman is hairless as a cue ball, from chemo, and as blind as Milton from retinal cancer, but full of vim and vigor about a whole new round at “the clinic.” He’s had many others and tells Sally his hair’s getting tired of growing in and has just decided to stay gone. They don’t say what’s ailing Burt this time, though Natalie mentions something about “the whole lymph system,” which can’t be good. Sally remarks that my son lives in Kansas City, too, and works for Hallmark, news that turns them reverent, provoking approving nods, though Burt’s nod is more toward the seat-back in front of him. “First-class outfit,” Burt says soberly, and Natalie, who’s pleasingly rounded, with frizzed salmon-colored hair and puffy cheeks gone venous with worry and long life, stares over at me, around Sally, as if I might not know what a first-class outfit Hallmark really is and that that’s a serious lapse of info, needing correction. I smile back as if I cannot speak but can nod. “It’s all family-owned,” she says. “And they do absolutely everything for Kanzcity.” Burt grins at nothing. He’s wearing a blue velour lounging outfit with purple piping down the legs and looks as comfortable as a blind man can look in an airplane. “They’re right up there with UPS,” Burt says (which he calls “ups”), “or any of those big outfits when it comes to employee benefits, compassionate leave, that kind of thing. Oh yeah. You bet.” He might’ve worked for them in the Braille card department.

Sally touches my left hand as if to say, Don’t let these nice souls give you the blues. We’ll be landing soon.

Natalie goes on to say that Burt has just retired after thirty-five years working for a company that makes laundry starch — another solid family-owned outfit in K.C. — which made a place for him in the accounting department once his eyes got to be a problem. They have kids “out west,” which Sally admits she does, too, allowing Natalie to know we’re second-timers. Natalie says the two of them are thinking of going ahead and moving up to Rochester after selling their family home in Olathe. “At least get a condo,” she says, since they’re up and back so much now. They like Burt’s cancer doctor, who’s had them to dinner once, and feel they could fit well into the Rochester community, which is not so different from K.C. “A good deal less crime.” They’ll just need to get used to the winter, which seems a fun idea to her. They’ve made some “relator” appointments to see some places in between Burt’s tests. “Health’s the last frontier, isn’t it?” Natalie hoods her eyes and looks straight to me, as if this is a fact men need to be aware of. I smile back a smile of false approval, though my mind runs to the idea of a barium enema self-administered on a cold bathroom floor, which is what I always think of when I envision my “health”—either something not good or else something that was good but will soon be no more. A permanent past tense. A lost frontier, not just the last one. Health’s a word I never use.

Getting on to the end, then.

Paul, as I said, along with Jill, has returned to K.C. and to the sweet feasible life of greeting cards and giving words to feelings others lack their own words for. On the day I left the hospital, we buried Paul’s time capsule behind the house in a quiet ceremony that was very much like burying a dog or a goldfish. Paul put in some of his riotous rejects, Jill put in a lock of her yellow hair for purposes of DNA, later on. Detective Marinara (whose name turns out to be Lou) put in a broken pair of handcuffs Paul had wangled out of him, in addition to his police business card. Sally put in a smooth granite pebble off the beach at Mull and another off our beach in Sea-Clift. Clarissa, with Cookie present, put in the mahogany gearshift knob off Thom’s Healey. Mike put in his signed Gipper photo and a green prayer flag. Ann did not attend, although she was invited and may now have made some positive strides with her daughter. I, as a joke, put in one of the spent titanium BBs (packaged in a plastic baggie), which I apparently “passed” on the operating table in Toms River, no doubt when I woke up in mid-surgery and everyone had a good laugh at my expense. Paul was pleased, made a couple of corny wisecracks about the Millennium, and then we covered the little missile up with sand. (I’m sure in the next big blow it’ll be unearthed and washed away and turn up in Africa or Scotland, which will work out just as well.) For whatever Paul may have said to Ann or Ann to him about wanting to break into the real estate industry, this never came up between us — a relief, since his style of everyday mainstream life would never adapt well to the need to coax and coddle and be confessor, therapist, business adviser and risk assessor to the variety of citizen pilgrims who cross my threshold most days. He would like them, do his level best for them, but ultimately think everything they said was a riot and wouldn’t understand the heart from which their words drew strength — much as he doesn’t understand mine. He is a different kind of good man from most. And though I love him and expect him to live long and thrive, I don’t truly understand him much, cannot do much for him except be happy he’s where he is and with his love, and that he will know increase in his days. Perhaps over time, if I have time, I will even come to know them better than I do.

As to Mike and the sale of Realty-Wise, I have elected to take a Tibetan partner. In the time that I was laid up, he not only sold the Timbuktu house-on-wheels to a wholly different Indian client — they apparently come in droves when they come — but also sold 61 Shore Road, cracked piers and all, plus four chalets, to Clare Suddruth, who showed up Friday morning after Thanksgiving with Estelle, having called the emergency number when I didn’t answer, and was so eager to get his money out of his pocket and into somebody else’s that Mike feared he might be “losing an inner struggle” (experiencing a psychotic detachment) and possibly wasn’t responsible for his acts. A call to the bank settled that. Mike also turned down a listing on the Feensters’ beach house when he was approached by poor dead Drilla’s sister, and discreetly passed the business along to Sea-Vu Associates. Nick, it turns out, had many more enemies than the two Russian kids, and had not been as fastidious in his personal affairs as would’ve been needed to keep him above ground.

At first, Mike didn’t see how partnership would suit his ambitions or his arrangements with his Spring Lake dowager. But I convinced him that in the long run, which might not be such a long run, all will be his to buy out. I said I was not ready for éminence grise status or to retire to an island, and that in the coming housing climate with a big shiny bubble around it, he’d be smarter to be half-in instead of all the way, to retain some liquidity, keep a diverse portfolio and his options open for the deal you can’t see coming until it’s suddenly there. He has his children to think about, I reminded him, and a soon-to-be former wife he may someday feel differently about. We’re not having a new shingle made or opening a bigger office, though we’ve subscribed to the Michigan State Newsletter and to “Weneedabreak.com.” On his business card it will soon say “Mike Mahoney, Co-Broker,” and he is thinking of enrolling in an executive boot camp in the Poconos, which I approve of. On the scale of human events and on the great ladder that’s ever upward-tending, this has left him satisfied. At least for now.

Winds buffet us. Our flying culvert makes a sudden shimmying eee-nyaw-eee noise, and a tiny red seat belt emblem illuminates above me. The big brassy stewardess, whose name tag says Birgit, stands up like a friendly stalag matron and begins talking into a telephone receiver turned upside down, working her dark mannish eyebrows at the comedy of knowing none of us can understand anything she says. Though we’re all veterans of this life. We know where we’re descending to. No one’s surprised or applauding. “Here goes nuttin’,” someone says behind me and guffaws. Sally Caldwell, sweet wife of my middle season, squeezes my hand, smiles a falsely gay smile, rolls her eyes dreamily and leans to give me a “be brave” kiss on my oddly cold cheek.

Below us I see the whited landscape stamped out in squares despite the early snow and failing light. It is nearly four. We pass, lowering, lowering over farms and farmettes and farm-equipment corrals, single stores with gas pumps along the ribbon of Route 14, where Clarissa and I walked and talked and sweated last August. Settlement’s thickening and widening to include vacant baseball diamonds, a Guard armory with starred tanks and trucks out back (in case the fuckers make it this far inland, and they might), the Applebee’s, the red blinking tower of an old AM transmitter morphed now into all new radiography — cell phone, cable, radar, NORAD, government surveillance. I don’t yet see the great Mayo citadel with its own antennas and helipads, ICBM launchers and surface-to-air missiles to shoot down marauding microbes, but it’s there. It’s what we’ve come for. I press my cheek to the cold window, try to see the airport out ahead, establish the world on a more human scale. But I see only another jet, tiny and at an incalculable distance, its own red beacons winking, vectored for some different landing.

It is, of course, only on the human scale, with the great world laid flat about you, that the Next Level of life offers its rewards and good considerations. And then only if you let it. A working sense of spirituality can certainly help. But a practical acceptance of what’s what, in real time and down-to-earth, is as good as spiritual if you can finagle it. I thought for a time that practical acceptance, the final, certifying “event” and extra beat for me had been my breathless “yes, yes,” to my son Ralph Bascombe’s death, and that I would never again have to wonder if how I feel now would be how I’d feel later on. I felt sure it would be. Here was necessity.

But get shot in the heart and live, and you’ll learn some things about necessity — and quick. Lying in my ultramodern hospital bed in Toms River, looped to this machine and that fluid, with winter’s woolen days coming on, I determined to be buried in powdered form somewhere at sea off Point Pleasant (it seemed simplest), and set about the solemn details that only a cold hospital room in New Jersey can make seem congenial: compiled my list of pallbearers, jotted down some basic obituary thoughts, concluded how I wanted my assignables assigned, to whom and with what provisos; who to take the business (Mike. Who else?). Happily, there wasn’t so much. For a day or two afterward, I lay there and it all made me glad, and I thought I’d feel glad that way forever. Only by day three, I’d started to feel differently about everything — saw that what I’d decided was a mistake, probably a vanity — I’m not sure why. But right then and there, in that motorized bed with a hospital priest shanghaied from his everyday death duties and not at all sure if what he was doing was right, I fired all my pallbearers, forgot about a sea-burial, tore my organ-donor card in half and executed a document provided in the “welcome kit” by the hospital ethicist, consigning all my mortal leavings to science — the option I and Ann had failed for lack of courage to choose for our first son years ago. The medical kids, I felt, would treat me with all the dignity and compassion I’m due and no doubt with a measure of irreverence and amusement, which seemed right and a better way to turn a small event — my death and life — into a slightly less small one, while keeping things simple and still making a contribution. Not a contribution you can see from a satellite, like Mount St. Helens or the Great Wall, but one that puts its money where its mouth is.

On the day I got home from the hospital, the weather turned ice-cream nice, and the low noon sun made the Atlantic purple and flat, then suddenly glow as the tide withdrew. And once again I was lured out, my pants legs rolled and in an old green sweatshirt, barefoot, to where the soaked and glistening sand seized my soft feet bottoms and the frothing water raced to close around my ankles like a grasp. And I thought to myself, standing there: Here is necessity. Here is the extra beat — to live, to live, to live it out.

We are going down fast now. Sally clutches my fingers hard, smiles an encouragement. The big engines hum. Our craft dips, shudders hard, and I feel myself afloat as the white earth rises to meet us — square buildings, moving cars, bundled figures of the other humans coming into clear focus as we descend. Some are watching, gaping up. Some are waving. Some turn their backs to us. Some do not notice us as we touch the ground. A bump, a roar, a heavy thrust forward into life again, and we resume our human scale upon the land.