The Lay of the Land (67 page)

“We asked Detective Marinara to have Thanksgiving with us,” Paul says with barely suppressible glee at the discomfort this will cause me (it does). His fingers, I can see, are working. When he was a boy, he “counted” with his fingers—cars on the highway, birds on wires, individual seconds during our lengthy disciplinary discussions, breaths during his therapy sessions at Yale and Hopkins. He eventually quit. But now he’s counting again in his weird suit, his warty fingers jittering, jittering. Something’s wound him up again—a cop, of course. Jill is aware and smiles at him supportively. They are an even stranger pair all dressed up.

“That’d be great,” I say. “We’ve got plenty of free-range organic turkey.”

“Oh, no. I’m all set there. Thanks.” Marinara continues panning around. This is not a social visit. He pauses to give a lengthy disapproving stare at Nick Feenster, buffing his Vettes in his Lycra space suit, Pérez Prado banging up into the atmosphere, where a whoosh of blackbirds goes over in an undulant cloud. “That’s a plate-full over there, I guess.”

“It is,” I admit. Though the old sympathy again filters up for the poor all-wrong Feensters, who, I’m sure, suffer great needless misery and loneliness here in New Jersey with their Bridgeport social skills. My heart goes out to them, which is better than hoping they’ll die.

Nick has seen Detective Marinara and me observing him across the property line. He stands up from buffing, his Lycra further stressing his smushed genitals, and gives us back a malignant “Yeah? What?” stare, framed by topiary. He doesn’t know Marinara’s the heat. His lips move, but “Lisbon Antigua” blots out his voice. He jerks his head around to fire words off to Drilla—to crank up the volume, probably. She says something back, possibly “don’t be such an asshole,” and he waves his buffing pad at us in disgust and resumes rubbing. Drilla looks wistfully out toward where Poincinet curves to meet 35. She’d be a better neighbor married to someone else.

“I could flash my gold on that clown, tune him down a notch.” Marinara shoots his sweater cuffs out of his jacket sleeves. An encounter would feel good to him about now. Conflict, I’m sure, calms him. He’s a divorcé, under forty. He’s full of fires.

“He’ll quit,” I say. “He has to listen to it, too.”

Marinara shakes his head at how the world acts. “Whatever.” It is the policeman’s
weltanschauung.

Exactly then, as if on cue, the music stops and airy silence opens. Drilla—Bimbo under one arm—stands and walks inside, carrying the boom box. Nick, his voice softened to indecipherability, speaks something appeasing to her. But she goes inside and closes the front door, leaving him alone with his buffing implements. It’s the way I knew it would happen.

I am thinking for this instant, and longingly, about Sally, whose call I’ve now missed. And about Clarissa. It’s 1:30 already. She should be home. The Eat No Evil people will be here soon. All this brings with itself a sinking sensation. I don’t feel thankful for anything. What I’d like to do is get in bed with my book of Great Speeches, read the Gettysburg Address out loud to no one and invite Jill and Paul to go find dinner at a Holiday Inn.

The mixed rich fragrance of salt breeze, Detective Marinara’s professional-grade leather coat and no doubt his well-oiled weapon tucked on his hip, all now enter my nostrils and make me realize once again that this is not a social call. Nothing can make a day go flat like a police presence.

Paul and Jill stand silent, side-by-side in their holiday get-ups. They say nothing, intend nothing. They are as I am—in the thrall of the day and the law’s arrival.

“This is not a social call, I don’t think.”

“Not entirely.” Detective Marinara adjusts his cop’s brogues in the driveway gravel. His precise, intent features have rendered him an appealing though slightly sorrowing customer—like a young Bobby Kennedy, without the big teeth. I have the keenest feeling, against all reason, that he could arrest me. He’s sensed “something” in my carriage, in my house’s too rich
affect
(the redwood, the copper weather vane), my car, my strange children, my white Nikes, something that makes him wonder if I’m not at least complicitous
somewhere.
Surely not in setting a bomb at Haddam Doctors and heedlessly taking the life of Natherial Lewis, but in
something
that still requires looking at. And maybe he’s exactly right. Who can say with certainty that he/she did or didn’t do anything? Why should I be exempted? Lord knows, I’m guilty (of something). I should go quietly. I don’t say these words, but I think them. This may be what Marguerite Purcell experienced, though I’ll never know.

What I do say apprehensively is, “What gives, then?” The corners of Paul’s mouth and also his bad eye twitch toward me. “What gives, then?” is gangster talk he naturally relishes.

“Just standard cop work, Mr. Bascombe.” Marinara produces a square packet of
QUIT SMOKING
,
NOW
gum from his jacket pocket, unsheathes a piece, sticks it in his mouth and thoughtlessly pockets the wrapper. Possibly he wears a nicotine “patch” below his BORN TO RUN tattoo. “We’re pretty sure we got this thing tied up. We know who did it. But we just like to throw all our answers out the window and open it up and look one last time. You were on our list. You were there, you knew the victim. Not that we suspect you.” He is chewing mildly. “You know?”

“I tell people the same thing when they buy a house.” I do not feel less guilty.

“I’m sure.” Detective Marinara, chewing, looks appraisingly up at my house again, taking in its modern vertical lines, its flashings, copings, soffit vents, its board-and-batten plausibility, its road-facing modesty and affinity for the sea. My house may be an attractive mystery he feels excluded from, which silences him and makes him feel out of place now that he’s decided murderers don’t live here. Belonging is no more his metier than mine.

“Must be okay to wake up here every day,” he says. Paul and Jill have no clue what we’re talking about—my car window, an outstanding warrant, an ax murder. Children always hear things when they don’t expect it.

“It’s just nice to wake up at all,” I say, to be self-deprecating about living well.

“You got that right,” Marinara says. “I wake up dreading all the things I have to do, and every one of them’s completely do-able. What’s that about? I oughta be grateful, maybe.” He gazes up Poincinet Road, along the line of my neighbors’ large house fronts to where only empty beach stretches far out of sight. A few seaside walkers animate the vista but don’t really change its mood of exclusivity. The air is grainy and neutral-toned with moisture. You can see a long way. On the horizon, where the land meets the sea, small shore-side bumps identify the Ferris wheel Bernice and I admired on our evenings together months ago. I wonder again where and how my daughter is, whether I’ve missed Sally’s call. Important events seem to be escaping me.

“Detective Marinara was considerate enough to give me his business card to put in the time capsule.” Paul speaks these words abruptly and, as always, too loud, like someone introducing quiz-show contestants. Jill inches in closer, as if he might lift off like a bottle rocket. She touches her prosthesis to his hand for reassurance. “I gave him one of my Smart Aleck cards.” Paul, my son, mulleted, goateed, softish and strange-suited, again could be any age at this moment—eleven, sixteen, twenty-six, thirty-five, sixty-one.

“Okay, yeah. Okay.” Marinara jabs a hand (his wristwatch is on a gold chain bracelet) into his leather jacket pocket, where his
QUIT SMOKING
packet went, and fishes out a square card, which he looks at without smiling, then hands to me. I have, of course, seen Paul’s work before. My impolitic response to it was the flash point in last spring’s fulminant visit. I have to be cautious now. The card Marinara hands me seems to be a photograph, a black and white, showing a great sea of Asians—Koreans, Chinese, I don’t know which—women and men all dressed in white Western wedding garb, fluffy dresses and regulation tuxes, all beaming together up into an elevated camera’s eye. There must be no fewer than twenty thousand of them, since they fill the picture so you can’t see the edge or make out where the photograph’s taken—the Gobi Desert, a soccer stadium, Tiananmen Square. But it’s definitely the happiest day of their lives, since they seem about to be married or to have just gotten that way in one big bunch. Paul’s sidesplitting caption below, in red block letters, says “
GUESS WHAT
????” And when opened, the card, in bigger red Chinese-looking English letters, shouts “WE’RE PREGNANT!!!”

Paul is staring machine-gun holes into me. I can feel it. The card I stupidly didn’t respond to properly last spring featured a chrome-breasted, horse-faced blonde in a fifties one-piece bathing suit and stiletto heels, grinning lasciviously while lining up a bunch of white mice dressed in tiny racing silks along a tiny starting stripe. It was clearly a
still
from an old porn movie devoted to all the interesting things one can do with rodents. The tall blonde had dollar bills sprouting out her cleavage and her grin contained a look of knowing lewdness that unquestionably implicated the mice. Paul’s caption (sad and heart-wrenching for his father) was “Put Your Money Where Your Mouse Is.” I didn’t think it was very funny but should’ve faked it, given the fury I unleashed.

But this time, I’m ready—though the cold driveway setting isn’t ideal. I’ve slowly creased my lips to form two thick mouth-corners of insider irony. I narrow my eyes, turn and regard Paul with a special Chill Wills satchel-faced mawp he’ll identify as my instant triple-entendre tumbling to all tie-ins, hilarious special nuances and resonances only the truly demented and ingeniously witty could appreciate and that no one should even be able to think of, much less write, without having gone to Harvard and edited the
Lampoon.
Except
he
has and can, even though he’s in love with a big disabled person, is twenty pounds too pudgy and has mainstreamed himself damn near to flat-line out in K.C. You can hang too much importance on a smile of fatherly approval. But I’m not risking it.

“Okay, okay, okay,” I say in dismissal that means approval. Standard words of approval would be much riskier. I do my creased-mouth Chill Wills mawp again for purposes of Paul’s re-assessment and so we can travel on a while longer functioning as father and son. Parenthood, once commenced, finds its opportunities where it can. “Okay. That’s funny,” I say.

“I’m willing to admit”—Paul is officiously brimming with pleasure, while smoothing his beard-stache around his mouth like a seamy librarian—“that they rejected that one as too sensitive, ethnically. It was one of my favorites, though.”

I’m tempted to comment that it pushes the envelope, but don’t want to encourage him. His plaid joker’s jacket is probably stuffed with other riotous rejects. “Grape Vines Think Alike.” “The Elephant of Surprise.” “The Margarine of Error.” “Preston de Service”—all our old yuks and sweet guyings from his lost childhood now destined for the time capsule, since Hallmark can’t use them. Too sensitive.

And then for the second time in ten minutes we are struck dumb out here, all four of us—me, Marinara, Paul and Jill—aware of something of small consequence that doesn’t have a name, as though a new sound was in the air and each thinks the others can’t hear it.

Loogah-loogah-loogah, blat-blat-blat-a-blat
—a sound from down Poincinet Road. Terry Farlow, my neighbor, the Kazakhstan engineer, has fired up his big Fat Boy Harley in the echo chamber of his garage. We all four turn, as if in fear, as the big CIA Oklahoman rolls magisterially out onto his driveway launching pad, black-suited, black-helmeted as an evil knight, an identically dressed Harley babe on the bitch seat, regal and helmeted as a black queen.
Loogah, loogah, loogah.
He pauses, turns, activates the automatic garage-door closer, gives his babe a pat to the knee, settles back, gears down, tweaks the engine—
blat-a-blat-BLAT-blat-blat-blat
—then eases off, boots up, out and down Poincinet, idling past the neighbors’ houses and mine with nary a nod (though we’re all four watching with gaunt admiration). He slowly rounds the corner past the Feensters’—Nick ignores him—accelerates throatily out onto 35, and begins throttling up, catches a more commanding gear, then rumbles on up the highway toward his Thanksgiving plans, whatever they might offer.

To my shock, I can’t suppress the aching suspicion that the helmeted, steel-thighed honey, high on the passenger perch, gloved hands clutching Terry’s lats, knees pincering his buns, inner-thigh hot place pressed thrillingly to his coccyx, was Bernice Podmanicsky, my almost-savior from the day’s woolly woes, and who I was just thinking might still be reachable. Wouldn’t she know I’d sooner or later be calling? The Harley, already a memory up Route 35, stays audible a good long time, passing through its gears until it attains its last.

I’ve handed back Detective Marinara’s “We’re Pregnant” card. He studies it a moment, as though he’d never really looked before, then effects a mirthless, comprehending smile at all the grinning brides and beaming grooms. This is not what Paul had in mind: vague amusement. I’m close enough to smell Marinara’s
QUIT SMOKING
gum, his breath, cigarette-warm and medicine-sweet. He dyes his hair its shiny shade of too-black black, and down in his bristly chest hair, tufted out of his brown polo, he wears a gold chain—finer than his watchband—with a gold heart and tiny gold cross strung together. My original guess was Dutch Neck, but now I think Marinara hails from the once all-Italian President streets of Haddam—Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Cleveland, etc.—a neighborhood where I once resided, where Ann resides today and where once Paul and Clarissa were sweet children.

“Maybe you want to come in and try that organic turkey,” I say. “And some organic dressing and mock pumpkin pie with plain yogurt for whipped cream.” Paul and Jill grin warm encouragement for this idea, as if Detective Marinara was a homeless man we’d discovered to have been a first violinist with the London Symphony and can nurse back to health by adopting him into our lives and paying for his rehab.