The Lay of the Land (60 page)

“She’s not coming over today,” Paul says. He’s monkeying with his time capsule while I’m standing here. It has a little silver side door that slides open to permit installation of sacred artifacts. Where do you get one of these things? Is there a Web site? Why are we even down here where I never come? “She said you had cancer. How’s that going?” He frowns at me, then down again, as though this was another encoded joke of ours.

“Oh, it’s great,” I say. “I have a prostate full of radioactive BBs I didn’t have when I saw you last.”

“Cooo-ul. Do they hurt?”

“It—”

“My stepfather had that,” Jill says, the cleft reappearing between her wide-set eyes. A show of sympathy.

“How’d
he
do?”

“He died. But not from that.”

“I see. Well, this is all pretty new to me.” I say this as if we were talking about changing car-repair affiliations. I smile and look around my shadowy basement. In addition to the Block Island map, there’s a large hanging framed reproduction left by the prior owners, depicting the
Lord Barnegat,
famed two-masted whaling schooner that plied the ocean right outside in the 1870s and is currently in a museum in Navesink. I should toss out all this shit and turn the space into a screening room for resale to TV people. “I don’t see life as a perfect mold broken,” I say uncomfortably when neither of them says anything more about my having cancer. Possibly Jill and I share this point of view. What else has Ann blabbed to them?

The cancer topic has struck them both mute, the way it does most people, and I feel suddenly stupid standing here dressed like a nitwit, as if none of us has anything to say to the other on any subject but my “illness.” Aren’t they in the greeting-card business? Though probably we’re all three waiting for one of us to do something unforgivable so we can convulse into a throat-slashing argument and Paul can grab Jill and clear out back to K.C. I think again of him whonking away with this bounteous, one-handed Michigan armful and I admit I’m happy for him.

“The caterers’ll be here at one-forty-five,” I say to have something to say so I can leave. “Did your sister say when she might be back?”

Mention of Clarissa instantly inscribes a displeased/pleased smile on Paul’s beard-encircled lips. His sister is, of course, his eternal subject, though she has always treated him like a dangerous mutant, which he relishes. By taking possession of the most-unsettling-life-course trophy, she has further put him off his game. Jill could be his attempt to wrest back the trophy.

“So did you meet Gandhi’s grandson?” Paul smirks while he goes on fiddling with his time capsule, though he’s nervous, his eyes snapping at Jill, who regards him encouragingly. His mouth breaks into a derisive grin. “He’s into fucking equitation therapy. Whatever that is. He’s probably writing a semi-autobiographical novel, too.” Paul combs one hand back through his mullet and frowns with what I’m supposed to know is dismayed belief. “I like asked him, ‘What’s the most misunderstood airline?’ And he goes, ‘I don’t know. Royal Air Maroc?’ I go, ‘Fucking bullshit. It’s Northwest. It flies to the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul. No contest.’” Paul’s lip curls in its right corner. Something’s setting him off.

“Maybe he didn’t understand what you were getting at,” I say to be fatherly. “I’m guessing she’s not too serious about him anyway.”

“Oh, what a
giant
relief
that
is.” Paul’s odd round face assumes an expression of profoundest disdain.

“I thought he seemed pretty interesting,” Jill says—her first semi-familial utterance and the first uncoded words anybody’s spoken since Paul came back inside. Although, of course, she’s wrong.

“He’s a butthole. Case closed,” Paul snarls. “‘Are you all right? Are
you
all right?’ He’s like a fucking nurse. He’s one of those dipshits who’s always asking people if they’re all right. ‘Are you all right? How ’bout you? Are
you
all right, too? Do you want a fucking foot massage? How ’bout a back rub? Or a blow job? Maybe a high colonic?’” In this frame of mind, as a junior at Haddam High, Paul used to get so angry at his teachers, he’d beat his temples with his palms—the universal SOS for teen troubles ahead. It’s hard to imagine him selling residential real estate.

“I think you should let this go, okee, honey?” Jill says and smiles at him.

Paul glowers at Jill, then at me, as if he’s just exited a trance—blinking, then smiling. “Issat it?” he says. “You done? That be all? You want cheese on that?” It’s possible he might bark, which is also something he did as a teen.

Someplace, from some sound source I can’t locate, as if it came out of the drywall, I hear music. Orchestral. Ravel’s
Bolero—
the military snares and the twiny oboes, played at high volume. No doubt it’s the Feensters. What more perfect Thanksgiving air? Possibly they’re in the hot tub, staging a musicale for the beach visitors and, of course, to aggravate the shit out of me. At Easter, they played “The March of the Siamese Children” all day long. Last 4th of July, it was “Lisbon Antigua” by Pérez Prado, until the Sea-Clift Police (summoned by me) paid them a courtesy call, which started a row. It’s conceivable that in the cathode-ray tube business, Nick got too close to some bad-actor chemicals that are just now being registered in his behavior. To ask them to turn it down would invite a fistfight, which I don’t feel like. Though I’m happy to call the police again. Then, just as suddenly,
Bolero
stops and I hear voices raised next door and a door slam.

“Look here, you two.” I’m tempted to say
lovebirds,
but don’t. “I’ve got some bees wax of my own to take care of before the food gets here. I want you to treat the place like you own it.”

“Okay. That’s great.” Jill puts her arms behind her and nods enthusiastically.

“No, but wait!” Paul says, and suddenly abandoning his time capsule, he essentially rushes me across the basement. I manage to take one unwieldy backward-sideways step, since he seems maybe to want to go right by me and head up the stairs—to where, I haven’t the foggiest. But instead, he lurches straight into me, thudding me in the chest, expunging my breath and clamping his terrible grip on me. “I haven’t given you a hug yet,
Dad,
” he howls, his whiskery jaw broxed against my shaved face, his belly to my belly. He’s got me grappled around my shoulders, his bare knee, for some reason, wedging between mine the way a high school gorilla would body-press his high school honey. My shocked eyes have popped open wider, so that I see right down into his humid manly ear canal and across the red bumpy landscape of his awful mullet. “Oh, I’ve been
so
bad,” he wails in deepest, crassest sarcasm, clutching me, his head grinding my chest. I want to flee or yell or start punching. “Oh,
Christ,
I’ve just been so terrible.” He’s taken me prisoner—though I mean to get away. I’m backed into the narrow stairwell and manage to anchor one Nike against the bottom riser. Except with Paul grasping and rooting at me, I miss my balance and start listing backward, with him still attached, his glasses frame gouging my cheek. “Ooooh, ooooh,” he boo-hoos in mock contrition. We’re both going over now, except I catch a grip, hand-rasping and painful, on the banister pole, which stops us, saving me from knocking the crap out of myself—snapping a vertebra, breaking my leg, finishing the job Bob Butts started. What’s wrong with life?

“What the fuck, you idiot,” I say, clung to the sloping banister like a gunshot victim. “Are you losing your fucking mind?”

“Bonding.” Paul expels a not-wholesome breath into the front of my block-M sweatshirt. “We’re bonding.”

“Sweetie?” Jill’s beseeching voice. At the angle I’m suspended, and from behind the top of Paul’s head, Jill’s wide, disconcerted face comes into view, looking troubled, as she’s trying to gain a one-handed grip on Paul’s back to pry him off me before I lose my own hand-hold and brain myself on the riser edge. “Sweetie, let your dad up now. He’s gonna hurt himself.”

“It’s
so
important,” Paul murples.

“I know. But—” Jill begins raising him like a child.

“Get off me.” I’m struggling, trying to shout but breathless. “Jesus Christ.” What I’d like to do is wham a fist right in his ear, knock him into a stupor, only I can’t turn loose of the banister without falling. But I would if I could.

“Come on, Sweetie.” Jill has both her milky arms—hand and handless—about Paul’s sides. My nose is against her shoulder—the sweet smell of lilacs possibly associated with her Ekberg bosoms. Though it’s still an awful moment.

And then I’m loose and able to pull myself up. Paul is six inches in front of me, his bleared right orb glowing behind his spectacles, his mouth gaping, heaving for air, his gray pupils fixed on me.

“What’s wrong with you?” I let myself sit down onto the third stair leading up to the kitchen. I’m still breathless. Jill still has a wrestler’s grip around the middle of Paul’s red Chiefs shirt. He looks dazed, surprised but pleased. He may feel things couldn’t have turned out better.

“Are you one of those people who shies away from physical intimacy with loved ones?” He’s now speaking in a deep AM dee-jay voice, dead-eyed.

“Why are you such an asshole, is what I want to know.”

“It’s easier,” he snaps.

“Than what, for Christ’s sake? Than to act like a human being?”

Paul’s round face inches closer. Jill’s still got him. His body smells metallic—from his time capsule—his breathing stertorous as a smoker’s (which I hope he isn’t). “Than being like you.” He shouts this. He is furious. At me.

Except I haven’t done anything. Meant no harm or injury—other than to love him, which might be enough. This is all loss. “What’s so terrible about me? I’m just your old man. It’s Thanksgiving Day. I have cancer. I love you. Why is that so bad?”

“Because you hold everything fucking
down,
” Paul shouts, and he accidentally spits in my face, catching my eyelid. “You smother it.”

“Oh bullshit.” I’m shouting back now. “I don’t smother
enough.
How the hell would you know? What have you ever restrained?” I almost blurt out that someone ought to smother
him,
though that would send the wrong message. I begin hoisting my aching self off the stair, using the banister. “I’ve got things to do now. Okay?” My hand burns, my knees are quaky, my heart’s doing a little periwinkle in its cavity. Outside the sliding glass door, where the light’s diaphanous, the late-morning beach—what I can see of it—stretches pristine, sprigged up with airy yellow beach grass and dry stems. I wipe my son’s cool saliva off my eyelid and address Jill, who’s peering at me as if I might expire like her stepfather in Cheboygan. I wonder if I’d get used to her having only one hand. Yes.

I try to smile at her over my son’s shoulder, as if he wasn’t there anymore. “Maybe you two just oughta take a long walk down the beach.”

“Okee,” Jill says—good, staunch Michigan beauty who sees her job.

“You need to take the hostility quiz.” Paul’s eyes dance behind their specs. “It was on a napkin in a diner down in Valley Forge.”

“Maybe I’ll do that later.” I am defeated.

“‘How many times a week do you give the finger? Do you ever wake up with your fists clenched?’ Let’s see—” He’s forgotten how I smother things and make his difficult life unlivable. I’m sure he meant it when he said it. His mind is cavorting now, his way of letting the past go glimmering. “‘Do you think people are talking about you all the time? Do you think a lot about revenge?’ I forget the rest.” He stares expectantly, blinking, as if he needs re-acclimating—to me, to being here, to his niche in the world. There is nothing wrong with my son. It’s us.
We’re
not normal. No wonder life seems better in Kansas City.

I have nothing available to say to him. He has placed himself outside my language base, to the side of my smothering fatherly syntax and diction, complimentary closes, humorous restrictive clauses and subordinating conjunctions. We have our cocked-up coded lingo—winks, brow-archings, sly-boots double, triple, quadruple entendres that work for us—but that’s all. And now they’re gone, lost to silence and anger, into the hole that is our “relationship.” I bless you. I bless you. I bless you. In spite of all.

14

Hurriedly now, or I’ll have nothing to show for the day. It’s past 10:30. I head up Ocean Ave, my duct-taped window holding fast. I check the news-only station from Long Branch for something on the Haddam hospital explosion that might keep me out of the lineup tomorrow. But there’s only holiday traffic updates, a brewing controversy over the new 34-cent stamp, last night’s Flyers’ stats and Cheney doing swell in the Georgetown Hospital.

I’m certain I’ve missed Mike’s house prospects, though I may not now be in the best realty fettle—after my “conflict” with my son—and am just as likely to scare clients away. Plus, I’m missing my call from Sally and, at the very least, depriving myself of an easeful morning in bed following last night’s ordeal. I’d like to settle my blood pressure and stopper the seep of oily stress into my bloodstream before I show up in the phlebotomy line at Mayo on Wednesday. Even in stolid Lutheran Rochester, where sheikhs, pashas and South American genocidists go for tune-ups, and where they’ve seen everything, I still want to make as good a biomedical impression as possible, as if I was selling myself as a patient. If Paul’s right that I hold everything down, my wish would be that I could hold down more.

Sea-Clift, viewed out my Suburban window on late Thanksgiving morning, is as emptied, wide-streeted and spring-y as Easter Sunday—despite the Yuletide trimmings. No cars are parked along the boulevard shopfronts. Wreathed traffic lights are flashing yellow. The regular speed trap—a black-and-white Plymouth Fury “hidden” behind the fire station load lugger—is in position and manned (we locals know) by a rubber blow-up cop named “Officer Meadows” for a since-deceased chief fired for sleeping on the job. My Realty-Wise office at 1606 looks unpromising as I pass it. Only the crime-barred Hello Deli and Tackle Shop is lighted inside and doing business—three cars angled in, another Salvation Army red-kettle tender out front chatting with a pair of joggers in running gear. The Coastal Evacuation signs leading to the bay bridge and points inland appear to have been heeded, leaving the rest of us to fend for ourselves.

A beach town in off-season doldrum may seem to have blissfully reclaimed its truest self, breathing out the long-awaited sigh of winter. But in Sea-Clift, a nervous what-comes-next uneasiness prickles down the necks of our town fathers due to last summer’s business slowdown. Growth, smart or maybe even stupid, is the perceived problem here; how to grow an entrepreneurial culture where our hands-on family-based service commitment could survive till doomsday (because of the beach), but will never go all the way to gangbusters without a tech sector, a labor-luring signature industry, a process-driven mentality or a center of gravity to see to it we get rich as shit off beaucoup private dollars. In other words, we’re just a place, much like another.

I, of course, moved here for these very reasons: because I admired Sea-Clift’s
face
to the interested stranger—seasonal, insular, commuter-less, stable, aspirant within limits. There was no space to grow
out
to, so my business model pointed to in-fill and retrench, not so different from Haddam, but on a more human scale. My house-moving plan on Timbuktu is the perfect case in point. You could teach it over at Wharton. To me, commerce with no likelihood of significant growth or sky-rocketing appreciation seems like a precious bounty, and the opposite of my years in Haddam, when
gasping increase
was the sacred article of faith no one dared mention for fear of the truth breeding doubt like an odorless gas that suffocates everybody.

Mine, of course, is not the view of the Dollars For Doers Strike Council, who sit Monday mornings in the fire station bullpen and who’ve seen the figures and are charged to “transition” Sea-Clift into the “next phase,” from under-used asset to vitality pocket and full-service lifestyle provider using grassroots support. This, even though we all like it fine here. Permanence has once again been perceived as death.

This fall, after the summer down-tick—fewer visitors, fewer smoothies and tomato pies, fewer boogie-board and chalet rentals (I credit the election and the tech-stock slide)—new plans went on the table for revitalizations. The Council floated a town naming-rights initiative to infuse capital (“BFI, New Jersey” was seriously suggested, but met with a cold shoulder from citizens). A proposal came up to abandon the “seasonal concept” and make Sea-Clift officially “year-round,” only no one seemed to know how to do that, though all were for it until they figured out they’d have to work harder. There was support for dismantling a lighthouse in Maine and setting it on the beach, but regulations forbid new construction. The Sons of Italy offered to expand the Frank Sinatra contest to include a permanent “New Jersey Folk Traditions” exhibit to go on the Coastal Heritage Trail (no one’s taken this seriously). The most ambitious idea—which
will
take place, though not in my lifetime—is to reclaim acres of Barnegat Bay itself for revenue-friendly use: a human tissue–generator lab or possibly just a golf course. But no one’s identified partnering capital or imagined how to buy off wetlands interests. Though one day I’m sure a man will rollerblade from where the Yacht Club used to be across to the condom plant in Toms River without noticing that once a great bay was here. The only new idea that seems to be genuinely percolating is an Internet rental-booking software package (Weneedabreak.com) that’s worked in towns farther north, and that Mike’s all for. In all these visionings, however, my attitude’s the same: Quit fretting, keep the current inventory in good working order, rely on your fifties-style beach life and let population growth do its job the way it always has. What’s the hurry? We’ve already built it here, so we can be sure in time they’ll come. This is why I’m not on the Dollars For Doers anymore.

J
ust ahead, at the left turn onto Timbuktu Street, I see the scheduled Turkey Day 5-K Sea-Clift-to-Ortley-and-back road race nearing its start time in front of Our Lady of Effectual Mercy RC church. A crowd—a hundred or so singleted body types—mingles on the cold grassy median right where I have to turn. The runners—string-thin men and identical females in weightless shorts, expensive-as-hell running shoes, numbered Turkey Day racing bibs and plastic water bottles—are dedicatedly goading themselves into road race mentality, stretching and twisting, prancing and bending and ignoring one another, hands on hips, heads down, occasionally erupting into violent bursts of in-place jogging to fire their muscles into exertion mode. They are, I have to say, a handsome, healthy, sinewy, finelylimbed bunch of sociopathic greyhounds. Most are in middle years, all obviously scared silly of serenity and death, a fixation that makes them emaciate themselves, punish their bones and brains (many of the women quit menstruating or having the slightest interest in sex) and cut themselves off from friend, foe and family—everyone except their “running friends”—in order to pad out along the dark early-morning streets of America, demonstrating sentience. My time in the USMC, three decades back, and in spite of what Ann says about my suitability, made me promise myself that if I got out alive, I’d never hasten a step as long as I lived, unless real life or real death was chasing me. I pretty much haven’t.

On the margins of the crowd are the usual wheelchair athletes—chesty, vaguely insane-looking, leather-gloved men and women strapped into aerodynamic chairs with big cambered wheels and abbreviated bodies like their owners. There are also spry oldsters—stiff, bent-over and balding octogenarians of both genders, ready to run the race with extinction. And set apart from these are the true runners, a cadre of regal, tar-black, starved-looking, genuine Africans—women and men both, a few actually barefoot—chatting and smiling calmly (two talk on cell phones) in anticipation of tearing all the neurotic white racers brand new Turkey Day assholes. For all the runners, it’s hopeful, I know; but to me it’s a dispiriting spectacle to witness on a morning when so much less should be strived for under a wide, pale-clouded and slightly pinkish sky. I feel the same way when I go in a hardware store to have a new tenant’s key cut and smell the cardboard and corrugated-metal and feed-store aromas of all the dervish endeavors a human can be busily up to if he’s worth a shit: recaulking that shower groin with space-age epoxies, insulating the weather-side spigot that always freezes, re-hanging the bathroom door that opens the wrong way and clutters the nice view down the hall that reveals a slice of ocean when the trees aren’t in leaf. It gives me the grims to think of what we humans do that no one’s life depends on, and always drives me right out the door into the street with my jagged new key and my head spinning. It’s no different from Mike’s idea of putting up magnum-size “homes” on two-acre lots with expectations of luring hard-charging young radiologists and probate lawyers who’d really be just as happy to go on living where they live and who need six thousand square feet like they need a bone in their nose. Neither am I sure that the second-home market, where I ply my skills, is immune from the same complaint.

Sea-Clift police are of course a presence, a pair of thick-necks in helmets and jodhpurs on giant white-and-black Kawasakis, waiting to be escorts. A green EMS meat wagon sits beyond the crowd at the curb, its attendants sharing a smoke and a smirk. The priest from Our Lady of Effectual Mercy, Father Ray, wearing his dress-down everyday white surplice, has mounted a metal stepladder at the curb and is using a bullhorn and an aspergill to bless the race and runners: May you not fall down and bust your ass; may you not tear your Achilles or blow out an ACL; may you not have an aneurysm in your aorta with no one to give you last rites; may you have a living will that leaves all to the RC Church; now run for your lives in the name of the Father, the Son, etc., etc., etc.

I need to make my turn here, cross the median cut and the white markings the race organizers have painted on the pavement. All the milling soon-to-be-racers give me and my Suburban the cloudy eye, as if I might be about to plow into them, cut a bloody swath right through. What’s this Suburban all about, their hard looks say. Do you
need
a boat that big? There oughta be a special tax on those. What’s with the window and the fucking tape? Is this guy local?

I’m grinning involuntarily as I make the turn, my head ducking, nodding unqualified 5-K approval along with my guilty admission that I’m not one of them, not brave enough, will have to try harder. I mustn’t accidentally hit the horn, punch the accelerator, veer an inch off course, or risk setting them to yelling and contesting and reviewing their civil rights. But seeing them congregated and intent, so pre-preoccupied, so vulnerably clad and unprotected, so much one thing, makes me feel just how much I’m a realtor (in the bad sense); even more so now than in my last Haddam days, when I felt coldly extraneous and already irremediably what I was—a house flogger, cruising the periphery of all the real goings-on: the shoe-repair errands, the good-results doctor and dental visits, the 5-K races, the trips to the altar to kneel and accept the holy body and blood of keerist on a kee-rutch. I felt something akin to this somber sensation when I didn’t give Bud Sloat a ride in Haddam on Tuesday.

But I’m sorry to be here feeling it now. Though it is but another in the young day’s cavalcade of good-for-my-soul, Next Level acceptances for which I’ll be thankful: I am this thing, seller of used and cast-off houses, and I am not other. It’s shocking to note how close we play to unwelcome realizations, and yet how our ongoing ignorance makes so much of life possible. However, gone in a gulp are all the roles I might still inhabit but won’t, all the new learning curves I’d be good at, all the women who might adore me, the phone calls bearing welcome news and foretelling unimagined happiness, my chance to be an FBI agent, ambassador to France, a case worker in Mozambique—the one they all look up to. The Permanent Period permitted all that, and the price was small enough—self-extinguishment, becoming an instrument, blah, blah, blah. And now it’s different. The Next Level means me to say yes to myself just when it feels weirdest. Is this what it means to be mainstreamed like my son?

“I’m one of you,” I want to say to these joggers out my window like a crowd in a jogger republic undergoing a coup. “The race is ahead of me, too. I’m not just this. I’m that. And that. And that. There’s more to me than meets your gimlet eye.” But it isn’t so.

A bare coffee-colored arm flags out of the milling crowd, with a squat body attached and a face I know above the three blue stars ’n bars of the Honduran flag worn as a singlet. This is Esteban, from the Cormorant Court roofing crew, waving happily to me,
el jefe,
his gold restorations flashing in the hidden sun’s glint. He’s socked into the runner crowd, way more a part of things than I feel. My thumb juts to tap the horn, but I catch myself in time and wave instead. Though it’s then I have to press across the opposing lane of Ocean Ave and onto Timbuktu. The electric carillon in Our Lady commences its pre-race clamor, startling the shit out of me. The runner crowd shifts as one toward the starting line and up goes the gun (Father Ray is the shooter). I carry through with my turn, extra careful, since the motorcycle cops are eyeing me. But in an instant, I’m across and anonymous again as the gun goes off and the beast crowd swells with a sigh, and then all of it’s behind me.