The Lay of the Land (32 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

U
ntil…music awakens me.
Dum-dee-dum-dee-dum, dum-dee-dum-dee-dum.

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

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

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

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

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

T
he exact status of my marriage to Sally Caldwell requires, I believe, some amplification. It is still a marriage that’s officially going on, yet by any accounting has become strange—in fact, the strangest I know, and within whose unusual circumstances I myself have acted very strangely.

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

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

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

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

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