Let Me Be Frank With You

  All that life has now been poleaxed and strewn around like hay-straw, so that even a hardened disaster-tourist who sees opportunity in everything would have to ask himself: “What can you do with this now? Let it settle back to nature? Walk away and come back in a year or ten? Move to Nova Scotia? Shoot yourself?”

  Here, too, the morning’s bustling with cleanup-removal-and-teardown, line re-stringing, front-loader and backhoe operations. Citizens are about—though many are just standing, hands-on-hips staring at their ruined abodes. As Corporal Alyss has said, it’s easy to see how a person could drive down on a reconnoitering mission and simply never show up again; as if calamity had left a hole in the world on the rim of which everything civilized and positive-tending teeters—spirits, efforts, hopes, dreams, memories . . . buildings, for sure—all in jeopardy of spiraling down and down. I do, in fact, feel smart for having gotten out when the getting was good. Though when you sell a house where you’ve been happy, it’s never that you’re smart. In all such moves one feels the bruise of defeat.

  At the end of Central, where my house sat, there was never an actual street, just a sign—Poincinet Road—and a rough beachfront sand track and five large, grandfathered residences, with the ocean and pearlescent beach stretching out front, the way you’d dream it. Nothing between you and paradise but fucking Portugal. It’s now become an actual street—or had been before the climatological shit train pulled in. I see no sign of Arnie or his Lexus as I turn down the sanded-over asphalt. Though as attested, my former home, number seven—once a tall, light-strewn, board ’n’ batten ’n’ glass beach dazzler—lies startlingly up to the left (not right), washed backwards off its foundation, boosted topsy-turvy across the asphalt, turned sideways, tupped on its side against the grassy-sandy beach berm, and (by water, wind, and the devil’s melee) ridded of its roof. Its back-side exterior wall where I once entered through a red door (gone) is stripped of its two-car garage and torn free of interior fittings (pipes, re-bar, electric), the dangling filaments of which along with whatever else ever connected it to the rest of the world, hanging limp from the house’s exposed “bottom,” which you used not to be able to see. The blond-brick chimney’s gone—though not the stone fireplace, which I can make out in the ripped-open living room. The banistered outside steps have disappeared. The panoramic deck, where I spent happy nights gazing at constellations I couldn’t identify, is bent down and clinging to the broken superstructure by lug bolts I dutifully tightened each fall. What was then glass is now gaping. Studs show through the “open plan” where, in years past, transpired sweet, murmurous late nights with Sally, or merry drinks’ evenings with some old Michigan chum who’d shown up unexpected with a bottle of Pouilly-Fuissé . . . where life went on, in other words.

  The poured gray foundation is what’s left intact—a surprisingly small rectangular pit with a partial set of wooden steps going nowhere. The big Trane heat pump’s in place in the dank water that’s collected. But everything else in the “basement”—bicycles, hope chests, old uniforms, generations of shoes, wine racks, busted suitcases someone’s father owned, boxes and boxes and boxes of stuff you should’ve gotten rid of decades ago—all that’s been sucked up and blown away to some farmer’s field in Lakehurst, to be found, possibly returned, or else put in a museum to commemorate the awesomeness of mother nature when she gets it in her head to fuck with you.

  All four other houses down Poincinet are simply missing, leaving only vacant cellars like my old place. Though opening up the space these houses so recently occupied has reconfigured a new pretty vista—ocean and beach the way they used to be, time immemorial. A lone fisherman in hip waders is visible, casting for stripers with his long pole to the incoming tide. He’s dressed in a bulky cable-knit, heavy gloves, and an orange watch cap, and doesn’t seem to have caught anything. Out at sea, between the land and the fog bank, an unmeasurable distance from where I’m sitting behind the wheel, a great white cruise ship—a wallowing twelve-decker—sits motionless against the gray. Carnival, Princess, Norwegian—one of those. I have a feeling passengers are at the rails, scoping out what used to be New Jersey, taking snaps with their phones and shooting them back to Ashtabula and Boise, as they ply their way toward Great Abaco. I’m not so certain they’re empathetic to our lives ashore.

  I, though, am struck by something I’ve never thought before—even in my role as residential specialist, seeking shelter for those in need. And it is . . . what little difference a house makes once it’s gone. How effortlessly, almost sweetly, the world re-asserts its claim and becomes itself again. People wring their hands and cry bloody murder when a garish new structure rises and casts its ugly shadow; or when a parking lot behind the Pathway paves over the sacred midden of the lost Lenape or a wetland where herons nested and ducks stopped to rest. As if these evils last forever. They don’t. All may not be vanity (though plenty is); but nothing’s here to stay. There’s something to be said for a good no-nonsense hurricane, to bully life back into perspective. It’s always worthy of our notice when we don’t feel precisely the way we thought we would. Easy to say, of course, since I don’t live here anymore.

  Up the beach, opened by the absence of what were people’s houses, the sight line stretches all the way up to Ortley Beach and beyond, to where the old roller-coaster bones sit marooned in seawater. Two tiny, faraway figures are walking a dog along the surf’s lap. A front loader—I hear its distant beeping through my open window—is slowly returning sand to the beach from the blanketed streets. I hear—over the berm, out of sight—the clatter of hammers striking wood, and the cheerful hum of Spanish. How strange life is. One day Reynoso, the next Sea-Clift. “Oh, jes,” one of them shouts (they’re English speakers now). “It’s cunt sniff.” At least I think that’s what the words say. Frolicsome musical notes rise from their radio and over the berm top. They’re gutting or hauling or de-molding someone’s dream home, no doubt wearing surgical masks and rubber gloves against the spores. “Sí, sí, sí pero. Hees husband ees a Navy SEAL.” “Pendejo!” someone answers. “Sex can’t be zhat good. Comprendes?” They all laugh. Good luck is infectious.

  But where’s Arnie? Am I stood up? About to be ambushed from a Lexus parked at a distance? People distrust realtors in a climate of disaster. We’re wildcards in the human deck, always filling out a winning hand. Though not me. Not now.

  My stomach, however, has begun skirling around and ker-clunking. I should’ve bought cashews back at the Hess. It’s almost eleven. My All-Bran is barely recollectable. I put a stick of spearmint in my mouth and let it calm things. Whether you wear falsies or not (I don’t), whether you’ve been eating garlic or onions or pizza or choucroute garnie and brush your teeth eight times a day, being “older” makes you worry that you reek like a monkey’s closet. Sally assures me I don’t, that she’d give me “the signal.” But if the machine’s winding down, its parts start to fester. I’ve lately begun brushing my tongue morning, noon, and night, since the tongue’s the petri dish for every sort of rankness. In general, it’s fair to say that as you get older you experience a complexer relationship with the ongoing—which seems at odds with how it should be.

  I wait in my car, chewing, beside the ruins of my house. There’s no reading matter available. I’ve left the Times at home. Here’s only a pamphlet Dr. Zippee amusedly gave me, depicting the exercise routine for relieving movement-inhibiting neck pain. Cartoons show a little round-headed stick figure rotating his bubble head and smiling to exhibit the golden way to neck happiness. In other squares he’s displaying a mouth-down frown to show the “wrong way”—that leads to traction, invasive surgery-through-the-throat, painkillers, Betty Ford, if not all the way to Rahway. I do feel new Rice Krispies at shoulder level, which makes me wrangle my neck around. Tension’s the culprit; the tension of Arnie Urquhart not goddamn being here like he said he would.

  The only other reading material in my car is a copy of We Salute You, the publication we volunteers put into the hand of each I
raq and Afghanistan returnee the moment after we shake that hand and declare “Welcome home! Thank you for your service!” We Salute You is a useful cache of vital information pertaining to anything the home-leave soldier might need, want, or encounter in the first six hours stateside (assuming no one’s meeting him or her, as surprisingly happens much of the time). We Salute You is printed by a cabal of right-wing, freedom-forum loonies out in Ohio, who nonetheless manage to do a damn good job because they don’t stuff our magazine with any of the gun-control-anti-abortion-back-to-the-stone-age bullshit they do put in their regular anti-Obama mailings. I know, because these publications came to my house, until I made a complaint with the Post Office, after which they still came, right through the election—though by now the crackpot Ohioans might’ve concluded their message didn’t get through.

  We Salute You is printed for each U.S. port of troop entry—L.A., New York–Newark, Boston, Houston, Seattle, even Detroit. It’s twenty gray newsprint pages (an online edition’s in the works) full of important phone numbers, e-mail and postal addresses for whatever geographical area the trooper or marine or airman first puts a foot down on home soil. Panic attack, suicide, drug and alcohol abuse helpline numbers are included. Veteran-friendly taxi companies. Directions to transportation hubs. Numbers to purchase a phone card. Every church you can think of, including Muslims, atheists, and Agnostics Anonymous. All these numbers are, of course, obtainable by anyone—though not in such an easy, free-of-charge, depoliticized format. There’s also plenty of less expectable info. Clean Vietnamese massage boutiques. Outfitters for mule pack-ins to the Sierras. A clearinghouse for online sites to help you find a former girlfriend who’s abandoned you. Chat-line numbers dealing with revenge issues. Private phone numbers of all U.S. congressmen and senators. Sites for how to buy Cuban cigars and condoms by the gross. There’s an LGBT strength-in-numbers line. Even a number for a Socrates Death-With-Dignity support league, where psychologists with degrees from Oberlin and Macalester try to talk a soldier back from the brink while seeming to understand that death might seem the only option.

  Our mission, of course, occasionally fails. One young sailor from Piscataway, three days out of Kandahar, stuffed the exhaust pipes of his Trans-Am with stolen copies of We Salute You’s and slipped the surly bonds in the Washington Crossing State Park parking lot—a note taped to the steering wheel saying “Here’s the future. Get ready for it.” There’s nothing you can do when someone’s ready to go, though possibly a handshake didn’t hurt.

  MY CAR CLOCK NOW SAYS ELEVEN FIFTEEN. THE striper guy is stowing his gear in his bucket and notching his hook to his rod handle. The tide’s come in. He’s fished with his back to the mayhem ashore as if it wasn’t there.

  The tiny, distant beach figures with the trotting dog alongside have come clearly into view. They turn out to be the Glucks, unsociable neighbors from when I lived here. Arthur’s a defrocked Rutgers professor (plagiarism—the usual “overlookings” and “carelessnesses”). He’s trudgering along with his plump wife, Allie Ann, and an all-but-immobilized, low-riding fat brown dog I’d have sworn they had ten years ago, which would make it eighteen. “Poot.” The Glucks, who must be in their late eighties, are preserved not much better than their dog and are walking with old-age difficulty along the tide-narrowed beach, arms looped, chins lowered, dressed like Eskimos, leaning into each other so that they look like one lumpy human package. Are they here, I wonder, to survey the ruins? Their house has vanished. Or did they get away (like me) and buy into staged-retirement in Somerville that buses them to the Whole Foods, keeps Columbia-trained M.D.s onsite 24/7, and lets them keep their ’95 Electra ’til the State takes the keys. I’d rather jump in my watery basement hole than talk to them. What rueful recognitions would glint in their beady eyes? “Oh, yes of course, Mr. Bascombe. Of course, of course, OF COURSE!” How many old acquaintances, neighbors, former teachers, fellow marines have we all caught a glimpse of in an unexpected place and dived in an alley rather than face for a second? All because: (1) We don’t want to; (2) There’s too much unsaid that doesn’t need to be said—a Chinese wall of words that would fall on top of us and we’d die; (3) We know others feel the very same way about us. We’re, most of us, the last persons anyone in his right mind wants to talk to on any given day, including Christmas.

  I ease down in my seat and raise my window in case the Glucks see me. But they don’t so much as glance at my car, parked fifty meters from where their house once staunchly stood. They plod along the empty beach like specters, their dog at their knees. Where would they be going but back into the fog?

  And then all of a sudden, I don’t want to be here anymore—at all. Whatever inland protections I’ve come armed with have worn away and rendered me—a target. Of loss. Of sadness. The thing I didn’t want to be and explicitly why I haven’t ventured down here in these last weeks, and shouldn’t have now. I have these sensations more than I like to admit, since they make me feel that something bad is closing in—like the advance of a shadow across a square of playground grass where I happen to be standing. When the shadow covers the last grass blade, the air goes suddenly chill and still, and all is up for me. Which will ultimately be only true. So who’d blame me for feeling it now, and here?

  But I’m ready to cease and desist. Being here makes me feel guilty-without-context. Like being present when someone you know, but don’t know well, all at once falls into a pit of despair and starts blubbering, and you can’t do anything except wish the hell he or she would stop. I feel not a straw of blame for anything hereabouts, yet somehow feel implicated by everything’s dilapidation and sad future. This is more than I bargained for—much more—yet doesn’t seem actually to be anything. Just stupid, stupid, stupid. I am. Again.

  Though should I just sit—motor thrumming, hoping the continental edge will re-buoy me? Should I turn on the Fanfare again (Obama used it for his Lincoln Memorial speech, where it worked)? Should I climb out into the foggy chill and have a poke round my old edifice, possibly spy something I left a decade back? A plastic laundry hamper? A bicycle pump with Bascombe painted on in red nail polish? What the fuck am I supposed to do? Anyone else would drive off. I’m worried, of course, about picking up a roof tack in my radials.

  OUTSIDE MY CAR WINDOW, ARNIE URQUHART, OR A man I take to be him, stands, talking, silenced by my closed glass. (Where’s the Lexus hidden?) He’s pointing beyond the berm and the ruin of my old house—his old house—a stack of sticks rained down from the sky. Conceivably I’ve fallen into a carbon monoxide fugue. Has he been here long? Have we had our meeting already? Have I made everything right by him, the way I once did?

  Arnie seems to me to be talking about the Twin Towers, which is possibly why he’s pointing north. I used to believe I could see them from my deck, though it was only clouds and light playing tricks. “It must’ve taken some real nuts to do that,” Arnie’s saying, as I lower my window. We’re suddenly very close to each other. “That huge skyscraper just coming right at you, three hundred miles a fuckin’ hour. Fascinating, really.” I can’t open my door because Arnie’s in the way. A current of damp, foggy ocean air sifts around me where I’ve been warm in here. When I was in college in Ann Arbor, I loved the cold. But no more. “We bring our disasters down to our own level, don’t we, Frank,” Arnie’s saying. “But those poor people really couldn’t. So we’re lucky down here in a way. You know?” Arnie turns toward the wrecked corpse of his house. “Remember that place? Boy, oh boy.” Out of the ocean’s hiss, a foghorn moans. Surprising it would be working when nothing else is.

  “Nature always has another thing to do to us, I guess, Arnie.” It’s my best go-to Roethke line and fits most human situations. Arnie and I traded stories about poor old Ted when I sold him the house.

  “Take the lively air, Frank.” Arnie says and begins walking toward the uprooted house, as if he’s abandoned all thought of me. “Climb the hell out and tell me what I’m supposed to do with this wreck.” He’s talking into t
he breeze. “I’d say I have a problem here, wouldn’t you?”

  Arnie Urquhart is changed and changed dramatically from the last time I saw him—at the closing, a decade ago. Every year he’s sent me a Christmas card, each one with a shiny color photo showcasing several smiling, healthy-as-all-get-out humans, grouped either on a dense, oak-shaded lawn, grass as green as Augusta, a big, white, rambling red-shuttered house in the background; or the same bunch in cabana attire, tumbled together on the sand, all grins, with a sparkling ocean behind and a golden retriever front and center. I assumed the beach picture to be taken more or less where we are at present, depicting the righteous outcome of things when life goes the way it ought to. At one point a smiling brown face became part of the Christmas showcase (female, pretty, young, in some kind of ethnic or tribal costume). Then two years later that face was replaced by an even more broadly smiling blond girl who I thought (for some reason) was Russian. I might’ve noticed the change in Arnie’s looks right then, if I’d been looking closely. But I was never bored enough.

  But sometime in the decade Arnie’s undergone considerable “work.” The Arnie Urquhart I sold my house to—age fifty-four—was a stout, balding, round-belly, thick-knuckled old Wolverine net-minder and only son of a crusty Eastport lobsterman. Arnie had made it off the boat on his hockey skills, then studied history and became a scholar. After graduation, he drove dutifully back to Eastport to be stern-man for his ailing pop, but got “kicked off by the ole man for my own good.” After which, he picked up an MBA at Rutgers, worked a decade in institutional provisioning, then went out with his own ideas and made a ton of money running a fancy fish boutique, catering to big-money types in Bernardsville and Basking Ridge. With his Maine-boy solidity, athlete’s doggedness, and a lifetime gnosis regarding fish, Arnie (who was a quick read) figured out that what he was selling was authenticity—his (as well as Asian Arowana and Golden Osetra). The Schlumberger and Cantor-Fitzgerald bosses all adored him. He showed up personally in the van with his sleeves rolled up, meaty forearms bared, grinning and ready to give great service at a top price. He toted trays, set out canapés, made tireless trips back to the shop, saw to it that every single fishy thing was better than perfect. He reminded his rich customers of the get-your-hands-dirty (and smelly) New England work ethic that made this republic great, powerful, and indomitable and always would, and that they’d gone to Harvard, Yale, and Dartmouth to make sure they never got any closer to than the length of Arnie’s sweaty arm.