The Lay of the Land (38 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But come home!

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

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

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

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

“I know.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bullshit, in other words.

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

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

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

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

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

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

8

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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