The Lay of the Land (36 page)

“That’s not really necessary, is it?”

“Yes. I’m in command of my necessaries. You be in command of yours.”

“Don’t be bad to me about this. It flabbergasts me as much as it does you.”

“That isn’t true. I’m not exhilarated. Why are
you
exhilarated? I answered that
for
you, but I don’t like my answer.”

“
Mmmmmm.
I think it’s just so strange, and so familiar. I’m not mad at him anymore. I was for years. I was when I first saw him. It was like meeting the President or some famous person. I know him so well and then there he is and of course I don’t know him. There was something exciting about that.” She looked at me, put her hands atop each other on my cold knee and smiled a sweet, tired, imploring, mercy-hoping smile. It would’ve been wonderful if we hadn’t been talking about her ex-dead husband and the disaster he was casting our way, but instead about how good something was, how welcome, how much we missed something we both loved and now here it was.

“I don’t feel that way,” I said. I was on solid ground not feeling what she felt. It occurred to me that how she felt toward Wally was a version of being married to him, which was a version of the truth I mentioned before and couldn’t argue with. But I didn’t have to like it.

“You’re right,” she said patiently.

And then we didn’t speak for a little while, just sat breathing in the cold air, each of us fancifully, forcefully seeking a context into which our separate views—of Wally, and disaster—could join forces and fashion an acceptable and unified response. I was further from the middle of events and had some perspective, so that the heavier burden fell on me. I’d already started suiting up in the raiments of patient understander. Oh woe. Oh why?

“Something has to happen,” Sally said with unwanted certainty. “Something had to happen when Wally left. Something has to happen now that he’s back.
Nothing
can’t happen. That’s my feeling.”

“Who says?”

“Me,” she said sadly. “I do.”

“
What
has to happen?”

“I have to spend some time with him.” Sally spoke reluctantly. “You’d want to do the same thing, Frank.” She wrinkled her chin and slightly puffed her compressed lips. She often took on this look when she was sitting at her desk composing a letter.

“No, I wouldn’t. I’d buy him a first-class ticket to anyplace he wanted to go in Micronesia and never think about him again. Where’re you planning to spend time with him? The Catskills? The Lower Atlas? Am I supposed to be there, too, so I can get closer to
my
needs? I’m close enough to them now. I’m sitting beside you. I’m married to you.”

“You
are
married to me.” She actually gasped then and sobbed, then gasped again and squeezed my hand harder than anybody’d ever squeezed it, and shook her head from side to side, so tears dashed onto my cheek. It was as if we were both crying. Though why I would’ve been crying, I don’t know, since I should’ve been howling again, shouting, waving my bloody fists in the air as the earth split open. Inasmuch as, with her certainty dawning like a new alien sun, split it did, where it stays split to this day.

I
’ll make the rest short, though it’s not sweet.

I buttoned the buttons on my moral investigator’s labcoat and got busy with the program. Sally said she’d be willing to invite Wally down to Sea-Clift—either to a rental she would arrange for him (using who as agent?), or to our house, where he could put up in one of the two guest rooms for the short time he’d be here. The oddest things can be made to seem plausible by insisting they are. Remember Huxley on Einstein. Remember the Trojan Horse. Or else, Sally said, she and he could “go away somewhere” (the Rif, the Pampas, the Silk Road to Cathay). They wouldn’t be “together,” of course, more like brother and sister having a
wander,
during which crucial period they’d perform what few in their situation (how many are in that situation?) could hope to perform: a putting to rest, an airing, a re-examination of old love allowed to wither and die, saying the unsayable, feeling the unpermitted, reconciling paths not taken and those taken. Cleanse and heal, come back stronger. Come back to me. Yes, there might be some crying, some shouting, some laughter, some hugging, some crisp slappings across the face. But it would be “within a context,” and in “real time,” or some such nonsense, and all those decades would be drained of their sour water, rolled up and put away like a late-autumn garden hose, never to leave the garage again. In other words, it
was
a “good thing” (if not for everybody)—life’s mystery dramatized, all is artifice, connected boxes, etc., etc., etc.

Interesting. I thought it was all pretty interesting. A true experiment in knowing another person—me knowing her,
not
her knowing Wally, who I didn’t give a shit about. A revealing frame to put on Sally’s life and into which I could see, since this was between Sally and me—which I still think is true. Can you always tell a snake from a garden hose?

The Silk Road strategy didn’t appeal to me, for obvious reasons. I suggested (these things
do
happen) that we invite The Wall down for a week (or less). He could bivouac upstairs, set out all his toilet articles in the guest’s bath. We could meet the way I used to meet Ann’s previous, now dead, architect husband, Charley O’Dell—with stiffened civility, frozen-smile, hands-in-pockets mildness that only now and then sprang into psychotic dislike, with biting words that wounded and the threat of physical violence.

I could do better. I had nothing to fear from an
ex
-dead man. I’d tin his ears about the real estate business, let him experience Mike Mahoney, talk over the election, the Cubs, the polar ice cap, the Middle East. Though mostly I’d just stay the hell away from him, fish the Hendrickson hatch at the Red Man Club, spend a day with Clarissa and Cookie in Gotham, test-drive new Lexuses, sell a house or two—whatever it took, while the two of them did what they needed to do to get that moldy old hose put away on the garage nail of the past tense.

On the twenty-ninth of May, Wally “the Weasel,” as he was known in military school, my wife’s quasi-husband, father of her two maniac children, Viet vet, combat casualty, free-lance amnesiac, cut-and-run artist
par excellence,
heir to a sizable North Shore fortune, meek arborist, unmourned former dead man and big-time agent of misrule—my enemy—
this
Wally Caldwell entered my peaceful house on the Jersey Shore to work his particular dark magic on us all.

Clarissa and Cookie came down for the arrival to give moral support. Clarissa, who was still wearing a tiny diamond nostril stud (since jettisoned), felt it was an “interesting” experiment in the extended-family concept, but basically nonsensical, that something was “wrong” with Sally and that I needed to keep my “boundaries” clear and that they (being Harvard lesbians) knew all about boundaries—or something to that effect.

Sally became convulsively nervous, oversensitive and irritable as the hour of Wally’s arrival neared (I affected calm to show I didn’t care). She snapped at Clarissa, snapped at me, had to be talked to by Cookie. She smoked several cigarettes (the first time in twenty years), drank a double martini at ten o’clock in the morning, changed her clothes three times, then stood out on the deck, sporting stiff white sailcloth trousers, new French espadrilles, a blue-and-white middy blouse and extremely dark sunglasses. All was a calculated livery betokening casual, welcoming resolution and sunny invulnerability, depicting a life so happy, invested, entitled, entrenched, comprehended, spiritual and history-laden that Wally would take a quick peek at the whole polished array—house, beach, lesbian kids, damnable husband, unreachable lemony ex-wife, then hop back in his cab and start the long journey back to Mull.

I will concede that the real Wally, the portly, thin-lipped, timidly smiling, gray-toothed, small-eyed, suitcase-carrying, thick-fingered bullock who struggled out of the Newark Yellow Cab, didn’t seem a vast challenge to my or anyone’s sense of permanence. I had perfect no-recollection of him from forty years ago and felt strangely, warmly (wrongly) welcoming toward him, the way you’d feel about a big, softhearted PFC in a fifties war movie, who you know is going to be picked off by a Kraut sniper in the first thirty minutes. Wally had on his green worn-smooth corduroys—though it was already summery and he was sweltering—a faded, earthy-smelling purple cardy over a green-and-ginger rugger shirt, under which his hod-carrier belly tussled for freedom. He wore heavy gray woolen socks, no hat and the previously mentioned smelly but not mud-spackled Barbour from his days nerdling about the gorse and rank topsoil of his adopted island paradise.

He brought with him a bottle of twenty-year-old Glen Matoon and a box of Cohiba
Robustos
—for me. I still have the cigars at the office and occasionally consider smoking one as a joke, though it’d probably explode. He also brought—for Sally—a strange assortment of Scottish cooking herbs he’d obviously gotten for his parents at the Glasgow airport plus a tin of shortcakes for “the house.” He was at least six feet two, newly beardless and nearly bald, weighed a fair seventeen stone and spoke English in a halting, swallowing, slightly high-pitched semi-brogue with a vocabulary straight out of the seventies U.S. He said Chicago Land, as in “We left Chicago Land at the crack of dawn.” And he said “super,” as in “We had some super tickets to Wrigley.” And he said “z’s,” as in “I copped some righteous z’s on the plane.” And he said “GB,” as in “I banged down a GB” (a gut bomb) “before we left Chicago Land, and it tasted super.”

He was, this once-dead Wally, not the strangest concoction of
Homo sapiens
genetic material ever presented to me (Mike Mahoney has retired that jersey number), but he was certainly the most complexly pathetic and ill-starred—a strangely wide-eyed, positive-outlook type, ill at ease and conspicuous in his lumpy flesh, but also strangely serene and on occasion pompous and ribald, like the downstate SAE he was back when life was simpler. How he made it in Mull is a mystery.

Needless to say, I loathed him (warm feelings aside), couldn’t comprehend how anybody who could love me could ever have loved Wally, and wanted him out of the house the second he was in it. We shook hands limply, in the manner of a cold prisoner exchange on the Potsdam bridge. I stared. He averted his small eyes, so I couldn’t feel good about being insincerely nice to him and show Sally this was worthy of my patience—which I know she hoped.

I spoke tersely, idiotically. “Welcome to Sea-Clift, and to our home,” which I didn’t mean. He said something about “whole layout’s…super,” and that he was “chuffed” to be here. Clarissa instantly took me by the crook of my elbow and led me out to the road in front of the house, where we stood without speaking for a while in the thick spring breeze that stirred the vivid shoreline vegetation toward Asbury Park and points north. Dust from the town front-loader far up the beach, its yellow lights flashing, indicated civic efforts to relocate mounds of sand that had drifted over the promenade during the winter. We were making ready for Memorial Day.

Arthur Glück’s dog, Poot, part Beagle, part Spitz, that looks like a dog from ancient Egypt and scavenges everyone’s house (except the Feensters’), waited in the middle of Poincinet Road, staring at Clarissa and me as though it was clear even to him that something very wrong was underway, since events had driven all the humans out to the road in the morning, where it was his turf, his time, and where he knew how things worked.

Clarissa let go of my arm and just sat down in the middle of the sandy roadway—her gesture for separating us two from Sally and Wally, who’d already by fits and starts disappeared inside the house, though the door was left open. No one would’ve been driving down the road. Still, her gesture was a stagy, unplanned one I appreciated, even though it made me nervous and I wished she’d get up. Cookie, wise girl, had decided on a walk up the beach. I should have gone with her.

“You’re a
way
too tolerant dude,” Clarissa said casually, keeping her seat in the road, leaning back on one elbow and shielding her eyes from the noon-time sun. I felt even more awkward because of where she was and what she wasn’t feeling. “Which isn’t to say Mr. Wally isn’t pretty much a
Wind in the Willows
kind of character in need of a good ass-kicking. It’s pretty zen of you. In the girl community, this wouldn’t stand up.” Clarissa’s nose stud sparkled in the brassy light, and made me touch my nose, as though I had one in mine. She was wearing tissue-thin Italian sandals that exhibited her long tanned feet and ankles, and a pair of cream-colored Italian harem pants with a matching tank top that showed her shoulders. She was like a mirage, languorous but animated.

“I’m not zen at all.” Mike’s hooded-eye, scrunched face appeared in my mind like one of the Pep Boys. He knew nothing of this day’s events, but definitely would’ve approved of what I was doing.

“Don’t you feel strange? It’s pretty strange to have old Wally down here for a visit.” Clarissa wrinkled her nose and squinted up at me as if I was the rarest of vanishing species.

“I had a good picture in my mind of how this would all happen,” I said. “But now that he’s here, I can’t remember it.” I looked at the house, my house, felt stupid being out in my road. “I think that’s very human, though, to expect something and then have the expected event supplant the expectation. That’s interesting.”

“Yep,” Clarissa said.

What I didn’t say was even odder. That while I felt officially pissed off and deeply offended, I was not feeling that this fiasco was a real fiasco, or that my life was fucked up, or that any of the important things I hoped to do before I was sixty were going to be impossible to do. In other words, I felt tumult, but I also felt calm, and that I’d probably feel different again in another thirty minutes—which is why I don’t pay fullest attention to how I feel at any given moment. If I’d told this to Clarissa, she would’ve thought I was suffering from stress-induced aphasia, or maybe having a stroke. Maybe I was. But what I knew was that you’re stuck with yourself most of the time. Best make the most of it.