Let Me Be Frank With You (19 page)

“Not this pig,” I said. My old Michigan joke. “I'm the happiest man in the world. Don't I oink it?”

“You do. You oink it,” she said. “Just checking. Sorry.” And that seemed to do the trick.

W
HEN
I
WOKE UP THIS MORNING
, C
HRISTMAS
E
VE
day, I found myself thinking of Eddie Medley. Something in his voice—the phone message and on the radio—hoarse, frail, but revealing of an inward-tending-ness that spoke of pathos and solitude, irreverence and unexpected wonder. More the
tryer
than I'd first thought, but caked over by illness and time. Even in a depleted state, he seemed to radiate what most modern friendships never do, in spite of all the time we waste on them: the chance that something interesting
could
be imparted, before-the-curtain-sways-shut-and-all-becomes-darkness. Something about living with just your same ole self all these years, and how enough was really enough. I didn't know anyone else who thought that. Only me. And what's more interesting in the world than being agreed with?

But still. Nobody
wants
to see a dying man—not even his mother. Had I thought one thought about Eddie prior to now, he'd have been on the list for jettisoning. But since I no longer
have
to do anything I don't want to do, feeling an active, persistent sensation of reluctance can become a powerful source of interest all its own, after which doing the supposedly unwanted thing can become irresistible. As old Trollope said, “Nothing surely is as potent as a law that may not be disobeyed.” I could at least call Eddie on the telephone.

I therefore hunted up the Haddam “purple pages.” An Edward Medley still resided at #28 Hoving Road, four down and across from my old Tudor family home—long since bulldozed for a rich man's showplace—then rife on the Haddam townscape, but less so now with realty cratered and Bush's recession that Obama took the heat for.

Standing in the kitchen, I called Eddie's number—because I could. A watery-warm, half-sunny springlike morning had turned the tree trunks damp and black and punky. The ground was sogged, almost snowless, and puddled—the grass showing-through still green, the rhododendrons unfurled as if it was March. Three nights before, when I drove to visit my former wife, Ann, in her fancy facility where she has Parkinson's, winter's icy curtain had already descended—rain, sleet, snow, and cold fused together. Today, all was forgiven.

“Mr. Medley's house,” a softly resonant, funereal voice said. A man's. Not Eddie's.

“Hi,” I said. “It's Frank Bascombe calling. I'm trying to reach Eddie. He left me a couple of messages. I'm just calling back.” My heart started whomping—boompety, boomp, boomp, boompety. I knew already. A miscalculation. Potentially a bad one—the sweetening weather possibly was the resolve weakener, along with having too much time on my hands. As I've been told. I began handing the receiver to its wall cradle, as if I'd just seen a burglar's head pass my window and needed to find a place to hide, my heart boompeting . . .

“Is it ole Basset?” A drastic voice buzzed through the extended earpiece, trapping me with my name. Basset Hound. Why are we such fuck-ups? Why couldn't the wrong thing just declare itself without my having to dip a fucking toe in? Errors are errors long before we commit them. “Frank?” Eddie—hoarse, failing, spectral voice and all—had me pinioned via his speaker phone, through which he sounded even more back-from-the-dead than before. And nobody I wanted to talk to. A big, eruptive tussis boiled up through the line. I should've clicked off, “lost” the connection and beat it out the front door. Most people are happy with someone having
tried
. “Are you there, Basset?” Eddie was shouting. The dense webbing in his lungs made a worrisome,
organic groaning noise. “Oh, shit,” he said. “I lost the fucker.”

“I'm here,” I said tentatively.

“He's on! I got him. Okay!” Whoever owned the funereal voice—a male nurse, a hospice worker, a “companion”—also said “Okay,” from the background.

“When're you coming over here?” Eddie shouted. “You better hurry up. I'm hearing bells.”

Not that far away on Hoving Road, Eddie was hearing the same bells I was hearing in my kitchen—the carillon at St. Leo the Great RC, gonging out
Angels we have heard on-high, sweetly singing o'er the plain . . 
.

“Well . . . Look. Eddie . . .” I tried to say.

“Why didn't you call me back, you jackass?” Cough. Groan. Organ deep “Uuuhooo wow. Jesus.”

“I
am
calling back,” I said, irritably. “This
is
calling back. I'm doing it. I was busy.” Boomp-boomp-boomp.

“I'm busy, too,” Eddie said. “Busy getting dead. If you want to catch me live, you better get over here. Maybe you don't want to. Maybe you're that kind of chickenshit. Pancreatic cancer's gone to my lungs and belly. I'm not catching, though . . .”

“I'll . . .”

“It
is
goddamn efficient. I'll say that. They knew how to make cancer when they made this shit. Two months ago I was
fine. I haven't seen you in a long time, Frank. Where the hell have you been?” Cough, wheeze. “Uuuhooo,” again.

The mellow male voice said, “Just ease back, Eddie.”

“Okay. Owwww! That goddamn hurts. Owww. OWWW!” Something was crunching against the speaker like Christmas foil. “What're you trying to do to me . . . Frank? Are you coming?”

“I'm . . .” Eddie was way too
much
of a
tryer
, I saw—the way he always was. I never really liked him, agreement or no agreement.

“I'm what? I'm an asshole? Grant a dying man his wish, Frank. Is that too much for you? I guess it is. Jesus.”

“Okay. I'll come,” I said quickly—trapped, miserable. “Sit tight, Eddie.”

“Sit tight?” Cough. “Okay. I'll sit tight. I can do that.”

The soft voice again, “That's good, Eddie. Just . . .” Then the line was empty between us. I was alone and breathless—in my kitchen. A pronged filament of golden sunlight passed through the chilled window from the back yard, brightened the dark countertop in front of me. My heart was still rocketing, my hand clutching the receiver out of which someone had just been speaking to me and now was gone. Too fast. Reluctance to acquiescence. I hadn't meant it to come out this way. Possibly I
didn't
have enough to do. I needed to find strategies to avoid such moments as this.

A
WITTERING URGENCY HAS COMMANDEERED MY DAY
and self. Plans I might've had have gone a-flutter. Packing for my Christmas Day trip to KC is postponed. Practice, which I do for reading-to-the-blind, is now put off 'til later (I'm reading Naipaul—always tricky). I know I've claimed to leave 60 percent of available hours for the unexpected—a galvanizing call to beneficent action, in this case. But what I mostly want to do is nothing I don't want to do.

Still, in thirty minutes, I'm out the door, to my car and the moist, milky winter-warm morning. A big L-10 is just whistling over—so low I can almost see tiny faces peering down, quizzical, as New Jersey's middle plain rises to greet them. On our rare ocean-wind days, the Newark approaches shift westward, and the in-bounds from Paris and Djibouti lumber in at tree tops, so that we might as well live in Elizabeth. The current warm snap also denotes new weather moving across from Ohio, readying a jolly white Christmas for wise stay-at-homes, though a nightmare for the imprudent—me—flying on Christmas Day, using miles.

My Christmas-trip idea, in its first positive iteration, was for a festive family fly-in to ole San Antone (my life-long dream is to visit the Alamo—proud monument to epic defeat and epic resilience), all bankrolled by me, including a stay at the Omni, an early-season Spurs' game, capped off by a big Christmas
almuerzo
at the best “real Mexican” joint money
could buy—La Fogata, on Vance (I did my research). Others could then wander the River Walk and do as others wanted, while Sally and I took a driving trip up to the Pedernales and the LBJ shrines—locales of dense generational interest and meaning; then backtrack through Austin so I could see the Charles Whitman Tower from sixty-six, then be climbing onto Southwest by the twenty-eighth, headed home to the Garden State.

None of which worked out. Sally decided the grievers of South Mantoloking needed her “at this critical holiday season” more than I did. Clarissa, in Scottsdale, is currently having “issues” with her brother, who means to expand his garden-supply business to include a rent-to-own outlet in the building next door—which she and I oppose. They're not talking. In the face of our opposition, Paul has declared the Alamo (the “à la mode” in his parlance) to be an historical bad joke and waste of time and blood, and that no one should ever enter Texas in the first place. Instead, he's insisted I come to KC, where he can grill me about his rent-to-own theories. Not very appealing, to be honest. Though it's what I've decided, since there are days (which must be true for all fathers) when I badly miss my surviving son—as strange a man as he is and will be. Plus, I don't want to be home alone on Christmas.

I am, though, questioning my wisdom this morning—with
the possibility of a weather lockdown at Newark and snow up to my butt. In the world today, no one should experience a wittering urgency without knowing there's a cause somewhere close by, even if you can't see it.

My Wilson Lane neighborhood, as I drive down to the Choir College and turn toward Haddam's west end, is a far cry from the days when I flogged houses here and my kids were young. Although the casual observer might not notice much has been altered.

Most of the small, frame, President-streets houses, on their manageable fifty-foot lots, look as they have since the boomer '90s. Though residential stock has slowly begun passing into less confident hands—the banks, absentee owners, weekenders from Gotham, and property managements. They mostly keep things ship-shape, but not as if every owner lived in every abode the way they used to.

And more change is already in evidence. A code variance for a chiropractor. A single-hand lawyer's-office conversion where a widow recently lived and died. A holistic wellness center with Pilates and Reiki gurus inside. An online travel agent and copy shop. Following which, it's a quick descent to a head shop, a T-shirt emporium, a RadioShack, and a tattoo/nail salon. Mixed use—the end of life as we know it. Though my bet is I'll be in my resting place before that bad day dawns. If there's a spirit of one-ness in my b. '45 generation,
it's that we all plan to be dead before the big shit train finds the station.

In the eight years since Sally and I arrived back from Sea-Clift, we haven't much become acquainted with our neighbors. Very little gabbing over the fence to share a humorous “W” story. Few if any spontaneous invitations in for a Heineken. No Super Bowl parties, potlucks, or house-warmings. Next door might be a Manhattan Project pioneer, Tolstoy's granddaughter, or John Wayne Gacy. But you'd hardly know it, and no one seems interested. Neighbors are another vestige of a bygone time. All of which I'm fine with.

However, just after Thanksgiving, a month ago, I found a letter in my mailbox, hand-addressed in pencil to RESIDENT. On a sheet of coarse, lined, drugstore bond, in block letters was a message that said, “Sir or Madame. My name is Reginald P. Oakes. I was convicted of carnal knowledge of a juvenile in 2010. I now reside at 28 Cleveland Street, Haddam, New Jersey. 085_.”

“They
have
to do that,” Sally said, finishing a client report at the dining room table. Being a grief counselor-in-training, she's now versed in all things publicly protective and child sensitive. “It's part of their release deal. If you petition the court, he'll have to move. It's pretty unfair, if you ask me.”

I took little note, but not
no
note.

Not long before that, in August, another letter turned
up, this one addressed to me on official blue-and-white American Express letterhead. It contained a brand-new AMEX card in the name of a Muhammad Ali Akbar, who as far as I could find out, no one here-around knew. This letter I hand-delivered to the Haddam PD, but have since heard nothing back. Twice then in the fall, the Garden State Bank, which has foreclosed on two houses on our block, authorized the same police to stage mock hostage extractions in one of the now-empty homes, just a few doors down. We all stood in our yards and watched as SWAT units broke in the front door of what had been a former Democratic mayor's daughter's townhouse, until she got divorced and booted out. There was a lot of wild shouting and bullhorns blaring and lights flashing and sirens whooping, plus the appearance of some kind of robot. After which a tiny African American woman (Officer Sanger, whom we all know) was led out in handcuffs and driven away to “safety.”

How these occurrences foretell changes that'll eventuate in a Vietnamese massage becoming my new neighbor is far from clear. But it happens—like tectonic plates, whose movement you don't feel 'til it's the big one and your QOL goes away in an afternoon.

All signs bear watching: how many visits Animal Control makes to your block in a month; whether the lady across the street marries her Jamaican gardener to secure him
a green card; how often a barking dog appears on the roof next door—like in Bangalore or Karachi; how many Koreans of the same family grouping buy in, in a two-year period. Last week I walked out to sprinkle sno-melt on the walk so the postman, who happens to be named Scott Fitzgerald, wouldn't slip and end up suing me. And right in the crusty grass I found someone's upper plate—as intimate and shocking as a human body part. Who knows who'd left it there—as a joke, out of frustration, as an act of vengeance, or just as a sign of things to come that can't at this late stage in civilization be interpreted. My old, departed friend Carter Knott (an Alzheimer's casualty who one winter night went kayaking off Barnegat Lighthouse and never found the shore again) used to say to me: “The geniuses are the people who spot the trends, Frank, the ones who see Orion where the rest of us assholes just see a bunch of pretty stars.” What's trending around me now and here—my own neighborhood—I'm sure I'll never have the time or genius to figure out.