Independence Day

  I luckily enough got into the picture when Sally read my bio and reminiscence about ersatz Wally in the Pine Boughs, saw I was a realtor in central New Jersey and tracked me down, thinking I might help her find bigger space for her business.

  I came over one Saturday morning almost a year ago, and got a look at her—angularly pretty, frosted-blond, blue-eyed, tall in the extreme, with long, flashing model’s legs (one an inch shorter than the other from a freak tennis accident, but not an issue) and the occasional habit of looking at you out the corner of her eyes as though most of what you were talking about was mighty damn silly. I took her to lunch at Johnny Matassa’s in Point Pleasant, a lunch that lasted well past dark and moved over subjects far afield of office space—Vietnam, the coming election prospects for the Democrats, the sad state of American theater and elder care, and how lucky we were to have kids who weren’t drug addicts, young litigators-to-be or maladjusted sociopaths (my luck there may be waning). And from there the rest was old hat: the inevitable usual, with a weather eye out for health concerns.

  At Lower Squankum I turn off then slide over to NJ 34, which becomes NJ 35, the beach highway, and head into the steamy swarm of 4th of July early-bird traffic, those who so love misery and wall-to-wall car companionship that they’re willing to rise before dawn and drive ten hours from Ohio. (Many of these Buckeye Staters, I notice, are Bush supporters, which makes the holiday spirit seem meanly expropriated.)

  Along the beach drag through Bay Head and West Mantoloking, patriotic pennants and American flags are snapping along the curb-side, and down the short streets past the seawall I can see sails tilting and springing at close quarters on a hazy blue-steel sea. Though there’s no actual feel of shimmery patriot fervor, just the everyday summery wrangle of loud Harleys, mopeds, topless Jeeps with jutting surfboards, squeezed in too close to Lincolns and Prowlers with stickers saying TRY BURNING THIS ONE! Here the baked sidewalks are cluttered with itchy, skinny bikini’d teens waiting on line for saltwater taffy and snow cones, while out on the beach the wooden lifeguard stands are occupied by brawny hunks and hunkettes, their arms folded, staring thoughtlessly at the waves. Parking lots are all full; motels, efficiencies and trailer hookups on the landward side have been booked for months, their renter-occupants basking in lawn chairs brought from home, or stretched out reading on skimpy porches bordered by holly shrubs. Others simply stand on old, Thirties shuffleboard pavements, sticks in hand, wondering: Wasn’t this once—summer—a time of inner joy?

  Though off to the right the view inland opens behind the town toward the broad reach of cloudy, brackish estuarial veldt, wintry and sprouted with low-tide pussy willows, rose hips and rotting boat husks stuck in the muck; and, overseeing all, farther and across, a great water tower, pink as a primrose, beyond which regimented housing takes up again. Silver Bay this is, its sky fletched with darkened gulls gliding to sea behind the morning’s storm. I pass a lone and leathered biker, standing on the shoulder beside his broken-down chopper just watching, taking it all in across the panoramic estuary, trying, I suppose, to imagine how to get from here to there, where help might be.

  And I am then into South Mantoloking and am almost “home.”

  I stop along the beach road at a store where LIQUOR is sold, buy two bottles of Round Hill Fumé Blanc ’83, eat a candy bar (my last bite was at six), then walk out onto the windy, salty sidewalk to call for messages, unwilling not to know if the Markhams have resurfaced.

  Message one of five, in fact, is Joe Markham, at noon in the full dudgeon of his helpless state. “Yeah. Bascombe? Joe Markham speaking. Gimme a call. Area code 609 259–6834. That’s it.” Clunk. Words like bullets. Perhaps he can wait a bit.

  Message two. A cold call. “Right. Mr. Bascombe? My name is Fred Koeppel. Maybe Mr. Blankenship mentioned my name.” (Mr. Who?) “I’m considering putting my house on the market up in Griggstown. I’m sure it’ll go pretty quick. It’s a sellers’ market, so I’m told. Anyway, I’d like to discuss it with you. Maybe let you list it if we can work a fair commission. It’ll sell itself, is my view. It’ll just be paperwork for you. My number is …” A commission, fair or unfair, is 6%. Click.

  Message three. “Joe Markham.” (Basically the same news.) “Yeah. Bascombe. Gimme a call. Area code 609 259–6834.” Clunk. “Oh yeah, it’s one or whatever on Friday.”

  Message four. Phyllis Markham. “Hi, Frank. Try to get in touch with us.” Bright as a sprite. “We have some questions. Okay? Sorry to bother you.” Clunk.

  Message five. A voice I don’t recognize though briefly imagine to be Larry McLeod: “Look, chump! Ah-mo-ha-tuh-fuck-you-up, unu-stan-where-ahm-cummin-frum? Cause”—more distinct now, as if somebody else was talking—“I’m like sicka yo shit. Got it, chump? Fuckah?” Clunk. We get used to these in the realty biz. The police philosophy is, if they’re calling, they’re harmless. Larry, however, wouldn’t leave such a message no matter how hot under the collar he’d gotten at my thinking I deserve to be paid money for letting him live in my house. Some part of him, I believe, is too dignified.

  I’m relieved there’s no call from Ann or Paul, or worse. When Paul was hauled away to juvenile detention by the Essex P.D. and Ann had to go get him out, it was Charley O’Dell who called to say, “Look, Frank, this’ll all parse out right. Just hold steady. We’ll be in touch.” Parse out. Hold steady. WE? I haven’t wanted to hear such niceness again, but been touchy I might have to. Charley, though (obviously at Ann’s request), has since then been mum about Paul’s problems, leaving them for his real parents to hassle over and try to fix.

  Charley, of course, owns his own probs: a big, dirty-blond, overweight, bad-tempered, pimply-faced daughter named Ivy (who Paul refers to as IV), a student in an experimental writing program in NYC, who’s currently living with her professor, aged sixty-six (older even than Charley), while writing a novel surgerying her parents’ breakup when she was thirteen, a book that (according to Paul, who’s had parts read to him) boasts as its first lines: “An orgasm, Lulu believed, was like God—something she’d heard was good but didn’t really believe in. Though her father had very different ideas.” In another life I might be sympathetic to Charley, but not in this one.

  Sally’s rambling dark-green beach house at the end of narrow Asbury Street is, when I hike up the old concrete seawall steps alongside and attain the beach-level promenade, locked, and she surprisingly gone, though all the side-opening windows upstairs and down are thrown out to catch a breeze. I am still early.

  I, for a while, have had my own set of keys, though for a moment I simply stand on the shaded porch (plastic wine sack in hand) and gaze at the quiet, underused stretch of beach, the silent, absolute Atlantic and the gray-blue sky against which more near-in sailboats and Windsurfers joust in the summer haze. Farther out, a dark freighter inches north on the horizon. It is not so far from here that in my distant, postdivorce days I set sail for many a night’s charter cruise with the Divorced Men’s Club, all of us drinking grappa and angling for weakfish off Manasquan, a solemn, hopeful, joyless crew, mostly scattered now, most remarried, two dead, a couple still in town. Back in ’83 we’d come over as a group, using the occasion of a midnight fishing excursion to put an even firmer lock on our complaints and sorrows—important training for the Existence Period, and good practice if your resolve is never to complain about life.

  On the beach, beyond the sandy concrete walk, moms under beach umbrellas lie fast asleep on their heavy sides, arms flung over sleeping babies. Secretaries with a half day off to start the long weekend are lying on their bellies, shoulder to shoulder, chatting, winking and smoking cigarettes in their two-pieces. Tiny, stick-figure boys stand bare-chested at the margins of the small surf, shading their eyes as dogs trot by, tanned joggers jog and elderlies in pastel garb stroll behind them in the fractured light. Here is human hum in the barely moving air and surf-sigh, the low scrim of radio notes and water subsiding over words spoken in whispers. Something in it moves
me as though to a tear (but not quite); some sensation that I have been here, or nearby, been at dire pains here time-ago and am here now again, sharing the air just as then. Only nothing signifies, nothing gives a nod. The sea closes up, and so does the land.

  I am not sure what chokes me up: either the place’s familiarity or its rigid reluctance to act familiar. It is another useful theme and exercise of the Existence Period, and a patent lesson of the realty profession, to cease sanctifying places—houses, beaches, hometowns, a street corner where you once kissed a girl, a parade ground where you marched in line, a courthouse where you secured a divorce on a cloudy day in July but where there is now no sign of you, no mention in the air’s breath that you were there or that you were ever, importantly you, or that you even were. We may feel they ought to, should confer something—sanction, again—because of events that transpired there once; light a warming fire to animate us when we’re well nigh inanimate and sunk. But they don’t. Places never cooperate by revering you back when you need it. In fact, they almost always let you down, as the Markhams found out in Vermont and now New Jersey. Best just to swallow back your tear, get accustomed to the minor sentimentals and shove off to whatever’s next, not whatever was. Place means nothing.

  Down the wide, cool center hall I head to the shadowy, high, tin-ceilinged kitchen that smells of garlic, fruit and refrigerator freon, where I unload my wine into the big Sub-Zero. A “Curtain Call” note is stuck on the door: “FB. Go jump in the ocean. See you at 6. Have fun. S.” No words about where she might be, or why it’s necessary to use both the “F” and the “B.” Perhaps another “F” lurks in the wings.

  Sally’s house, as I make my way up toward a nap, always reminds me of my own former family pile on Hoving Road—too many big wainscoted downstairs rooms with bulky oak paneling, pocket doors and thick chair rails, too much heavy plaster and a God’s own excess of storage and closet space. Plus murky, mildewy back stairways, floors worn smooth and creaky with use, dented crown moldings, medallions, escutcheons, defunct gas wall fixtures from a bygone era, leaded glass, carved newel posts and the odd nipple button for a bell only servants (like canines) could hear—a house to raise a family in a bygone fashion or retire to if you’ve got the scratch to keep it up.

  But for me, Sally’s is a place of peculiar unease on account of its capacity to create a damned unrealistic, even scary, illusion of the future—which is one more reason I couldn’t stand my own, could barely even sleep in it when I got back from France, in spite of high hopes. Suddenly I couldn’t bear its woozy, fusty, weighted clubbiness, its heavy false promise that since the appearance of things can stay the same, life’ll take care of itself too. (I knew better.) This is why I couldn’t wait to get my hands on Ann’s, with its re-habbed everything—clean sheetrock, new, sealed skylights made in Minnesota, polyurethaned floors, thermopanes, level-headed aluminum siding—nothing consecrated by or for all time, only certified as a building serviceable enough to live in for an uncertain while. Sally, though, who’s already as cut off from her past as an amnesia victim, doesn’t see things this way. She is calmer, smarter than I am, less a creature of extremes. Her house, to her, is just a nice old house she sleeps in, a comfortably convincing stage set for a life played out in the foreground, which is a quality she’s perfected and that I find admirable, since it so matches what I would have be my own.

  Up the heavy oak stairs, I make straight for the brown-curtained and breezy bedroom on the front of the house. It has become a point of policy with Sally—whether she’s here or in New York with a vanload of Lou Gehrig’s sufferers seeing Carnival—that I have my own space when I show up. (So far there’s been no quibbling about where I sleep once the sun goes down—her room on the back). But this small, eave-shaded, semi-garret overlooking the beach and the end of Asbury Street has been designated mine, though it would otherwise be a spare: brown gingham wallpaper, an antique ceiling fan, a few tasteful but manly grouse-hunting prints, an oak dresser, a double bed with brass rainbow headboard, an armoire converted to a TV closet, a mahogany clotheshorse, all serviced by its own demure small forest-green and oak bathroom—a layout perfect for someone (a man) you don’t know too well but sort of like.

  I draw the curtains, strip down and crawl between the cool blue-paisley sheets, my feet still clammy from being rained on. Only when I reach to turn off the bedside lamp, I notice on the table a book that was not here last week, a red hand-me-down paperback of Democracy in America, a book I defy anyone to read who is not on some form of life support; and beside it, conspicuously, is a set of gold cuff links engraved with the anchor, ball and chain of the USMC, my old service branch (though I didn’t last long). I pluck up one cuff link—it has a nice jeweler’s heft in my palm. I try, leaning on my bare elbow, to remember through the haze of time if these are Marine issue, or just some trinket an old leatherneck had “crafted” to memorialize a burnished valiance far from home.

  Except I don’t want to wonder over the origin of cuff links, or whose starchy cuffs they might link; or if they were left for my private perusal, or pertain to Sally calling up last night to complain about life’s congestions. If I were married to Sally Caldwell, I would wonder about that. But I’m not. If “my room” on Fridays and Saturdays becomes Colonel Rex “Knuckles” Trueblood’s on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, I only hope that we never cross paths. This is a matter to be filed under “laissez-faire” in our arrangement. Divorce, if it works, should rid you of these destination-less stresses, or at least that’s the way I feel now that welcome sleep approaches.

  I thumb quickly back through the old, soft-sided de Tocqueville, Vol. II, check its yellowed title page for ownership, note any underlinings, margin notes (nothing), then remember my experiment from college: supine, holding the book up at a proper viewing distance, I open it at random and begin to read, testing how many seconds will pass before my eyes close, the book sinks and I fall off the cushiony cliff to dreamland.

  I commence: “How Democratic Institutions and Manners Tend to Raise Rents and Shorten the Terms of Leases.” Too boring even to sleep through. Outside I hear girls giggling on the beach, hear the tame surf as a soft, sleep-bringing ocean breeze raises and floats the window curtain.

  I thumb back farther and start again: “What Causes Almost All Americans to Follow Industrial Callings.” Nothing.

  Again: “Why So Many Ambitious Men and So Little Lofty Ambitions Are to Be Found in the United States.” Possibly I can get my teeth into this at least for eight seconds: “The first thing that strikes a traveler to the United States is the innumerable multitudes of those who seek to emerge from their original condition; and the second is the rarity of lofty ambition to be observed in the midst of universally ambitious stir of society. No Americans are devoid of a yearning desire to rise but hardly any appear to entertain hopes of great magnitude or to pursue lofty aims….”

  I set the book back on the table beside the Marine cuff links and lie now more awake than asleep, listening to the children’s voices and, farther away, nearer the continent’s sandy crust, a woman’s voice saying, “I’m not hard to understand. Why are you so goddamn difficult?” Followed by a man’s evener voice, as if embarrassed: “I’m not,” he says, “I’m not. I’m really, really not.” They talk more, but their sounds fade in the light airishness of Jersey seaside.

  Then, suddenly, peering up at the brassy fan listlessly turning, I for some reason wince—whing-crack!—as though a rock or a scary shadow or a sharp projectile had flashed close and just missed maiming me, making my whole head whip to the right, setting my heart to pounding thunk-a, thunk-a, thunk-a, thunk-a, exactly the way it did the summer evening Ann announced she was marrying Frank Lloyd O’Dell and moving to Deep River and stealing my kids.

  But why now?

  There are winces, of course, and there are other winces. There is the “love wince,” the shudder—often with accompanying animal groan—of hot-rivet sex imagined, followed frequently by a sense of l
oss thick enough to upholster a sofa. There is the “grief wince,” the one you experience in bed at 5 a.m., when the phone rings and some stranger tells you your mother or your first son has “regretfully” expired; this is normally attended by a chest-emptying sorrow which is almost like relief but not quite. There is the “wince of fury,” when your neighbor’s Irish setter, Prince Sterling, has been barking at squirrels’ shadows for months, night after night, keeping you awake and in an agitation verging on dementia, though unexpectedly you confront the neighbor at the end of his driveway at dusk, only to be told you’re blowing the whole dog-barking thing way out of proportion, that you’re too tightly wrapped and need to smell the roses. This wince is often followed by a shot to the chops and can also be called “the Billy Budd.”

  What I have just suffered, though, is none of these and has left me light-headed and tingling, as if an electrical charge had been administered via terminals strapped to my neck. Black spots wander my vision, my ears feel as though glass tumblers were pressed over them.

  But then, just as quickly, I can hear the beach voices again, the slap of a book being closed, a feathery laugh, somebody’s sandy sandals being slapped together, a palm being smacked on someone’s tender red back and the searing “owwwweeee,” while the tide fondly chides the ever-retreating shingle.

  What I feel rising in me now (a consequence of my “big-time wince”) is a strange curiosity as to what exactly in the hell I’m doing here; and its stern companion sensation that I really ought to be somewhere else. Though where? Where I’m wanted more than just expected? Where I fit in better? Where I’m more purely ecstatic and not just glad? At least someplace where meeting the terms, conditions and limitations set on life are not so front and center. Where the rules are not the game.