The Lay of the Land

  “But how ’bout I mention there’s somebody back at my place who’d love to lay eyes on you?” Wade’s damp mouth wallops shut, suppressing a smile. He’s up to mischief, stroking his Caesarish comb-down like an old Arab. One of his wrinkle-cheeked old squeezes no doubt has a freshly widowed sister from the Wildwoods who’s a “young sixty-eight” and on the hunt.

  “I need to get this window fixed, Wade.”

  “It’s what?” Wade looks affronted. His tongue darts in and out like a viper’s.

  “My window.” I motion backward with my thumb. “It’s trying to rain.”

  “You’re cracked! You need a new connection, mister. There’s something hollow under you, you know that?” Wade’s suddenly talking way too loud and vehement for our close quarters. He’s been sneaking up on this with his questions about hoping and my sexual problems and barbs about my absent wife.

  We’re stopped alongside his Olds. I check in the rearview to see if the cop’s surveilling us, which of course he is. Possibly the empty Fuddruckers’ lot is a rendezvous point in the white-slave market.

  Wade’s eyes fix on me accusingly, making me feel accused. “I don’t think that’s true, Wade.”

  “You’re a goddamn house peddler. You hang around with strangers all the time. You’re gonna be poopin’ in a bag one of these days—if you live long enough. Which you may not.” His old mouth does something between a terrible grin and a furious frown. It’s close to the look my son Paul turned on me last spring in K.C. Only Wade’s upper falsie set sinks a millimeter, so he has to clack it back up with his lowers. I’m happy Wade’s still in touch with who I am.

  “Well.” I glance again at the Asbury cop.

  “Well what?” Wade dips his head like a goose, snorts, then suddenly stares down at his big watchband as if he was on a tight schedule.

  Cold air is still drawing in on my neck. “It may not seem like it, Wade,” I say softly, “but I’m connected enough. Real estate’s a good connecter.”

  “Bullshit. It’s putting stitches in a dead man’s arm.” He blinks, ducks, saws his wrist—the one with his Medi-Ident—across his red nose, then grabs his Panasonic off the seat. “You’re an asshole.”

  “I just told you how I feel about things, Wade. I wasn’t trying to piss you off. My belief is we all have an empty spot underneath us. It doesn’t hurt anything.” I tap my foot on the brake. This needs to end now.

  “You’re in a dangerous spot, Franky.” Wade pops open his big door. “However old you are. Fifty-what?”

  “Two.” Which feels better than fifty-five. I gently bite down on a welt of my left cheek—a bad sign. I’m not going to the Grove with Wade and make woo-woo with some retired reference librarian from Brigantine. I’d end up driving home to Sea-Clift with black vanquishment filling my car like cyanide.

  “Fifty-two doesn’t mean anything!” Wade croaks. “You’re between everything good when you’re fifty-two. You need to get hooked up or you’re screwed. I married Lynette when I was fifty-two. Saved my ass.”

  Wade of course has told me never to get married again, and Lynette, after all, left him for the Lord. Plus, I believe I’m still married. “You were lucky.”

  “I was smart. I wasn’t lucky.” Wade levers one trembling sockless white-shoed foot out and down onto the pavement, then the other, then cautiously scoots his scrawny ass off the seat, holding the door handle for support, emitting a tiny effortful grunt.

  “I guess we might as well think our life’s the way it is ’cause that’s how we want it, Wade.”

  “Haw!” He’s studying down at his feet as if to be sure they know their assignments. “That’s in your brain.”

  “That’s where a lot of stuff goes on.”

  “Think, think, thinky, think. In your life it does. Not mine.” Wade gives my car door a fearsome, dismissive bang shut.

  I power down the passenger window so he’s not shut out. “Don’t think I don’t appreciate your thinking about me.” Think, think, thinky, think.

  “I’ll tell my daughter you gotta think about gettin’ your window fixed instead of seein’ her.” Wade’s mouth wrinkles up bitterly as he starts his staggering departure.

  Daughter?

  “Which daughter?” I say through the window.

  “Which daughter?” Wade’s red-rimmed eyes glare in at me, as if I knew we’d been talking about his daughter this whole time, and why was I being such a stupe? Stupe, stupe, stupey, stupe. “I only have one, you nunce. Your girlfriend. You farted around with her till you ran her off right in my front yard. You’re a nunce, you know that? You like being a nunce. You get to do a lot of good thinking that way.” Wade starts struggling toward the front of my car, heading toward his Olds, his Panasonic bumping my fender panels he’s holding onto for balance. I can only see the upper half of him, but he’s not looking at me, as if I’d stopped existing in here.

  But. Daughter!

  For these weeks, traveling to the odd implosion here, another there, a cup of chowder or a piece of icebox pie in a Greek diner, I’ve all but expunged from my thoughts the truth that Wade is father to Vicki (now Ricki), my long-gone dream of a lifetime from when I, as a divorced man, wrote for a glossy New York sports magazine, horsed around with women, suffered dreaminess both night and day and had yet to list my first house. I rashly, wrongly loved nurse Arsenault with my whole heart and libido, was ready to tie the knot, move to Lake Havasu and live in an Airstream off savings (I had none). Only she lacked the necessary whatever (love for me) and sent me packing. So Wade’s wrong about who heave-ho’d who. Vicki shortly afterward married a handsome, clean-cut Braniff pilot, moved to Reno, became a trauma nurse at St. Crimonies, eventually was widowed when Darryl Lee crashed his spotter plane in Kuwait under the command of Bush #1.

  I haven’t seen, spoken to or thought much about Vicki/Ricki, who I guarantee was a yeasty package, since ’84, and wouldn’t recognize her if she shot out of Fuddruckers on a pair of roller skates. Although daughter sets loose deep space-clearing stirrings. Not that I want to see her any more than I want to see the reference librarian from Brigantine. But the thought of Vicki/Ricki—once a bounteous, boisterous, fine-thighed and raven-haired dreamboat—sets my ribs atremble, I’m not ashamed to say it. On the other hand, driving to the Grove on the night before Thanksgiving for a surprise face-to-face, followed by an unwieldy intime in some ennui-drenched south Jersey “steak place,” at the conclusion of which she and I disappear in opposite directions into the teeming night, is far from anything I want to happen to me. Even though I have nothing else to do: early to bed amid sea breezes after maybe getting my window fixed.

  “Maybe Ricki and I can have lunch once the holiday’s over,” I say insincerely out the window to where Wade has navigated around the front of my car. I don’t want him to feel condescended to on the topic of his marriageable daughter. I have some experience there.

  “What?” he snaps. He’s putting his video cam down on the passenger’s side seat as if it was his honored guest.

  “Tell Ricki I said howdy.”

  “Yeah, I’ll do that.”

  “When am I likely to see you again? When’s our next blow-up?” Wade has forgotten I’ve invited him for Thanksgiving, an offer I now silently retract in self-defense.

  “I dunno.” He’s begun crawling into his car from the wrong side.

  “Wade, are you okay in there?” My smile dwindles to a half smile of concern.

  “How do I look?” His baggy ass and the scuffed soles of his slip-ons face me out of his open car door.

  I could get the Asbury cop to come confiscate Wade’s car keys if I thought he’d lost his marbles and presented a threat to the public. Except I’d have to drive him home. “You got your keys?” I sing out hopefully.

  “Kiss my ass.” He’s struggling down onto his donut, his feet to the floor, back to his cushion. I hear him breathe sternly. “Goddamn piece of shit.”

  “What’s happening in there, Wade? You need some he
lp?”

  Wade burns a scowl back at me, then looks at his instruments. “Goddamn door’s busted. Some idiot woman backed into me at CVS. Now get your silly ass out and close my door. You nunce.” He’s got his little biscuit hands fastened to the wheel at ten and two, like Mike Mahoney. His keys dangle from the ignition, where they’ve been the whole time. He gets her cranked as I get out into the cold. It’s sizing up to rain more. Yesterday’s weather is hanging over the seaboard like a bad memory. Plus there’s tropical disturbance Wayne.

  “I wanted you to get to see Vicki,” Wade says. “She wants to see you.” He can’t remember her new name and won’t look at me, only out at the Fuddruckers’ chained and locked front door. He’s resigned more than mad and, like all good fathers, ineptly keeping vigil for his offspring’s improvement. “We’ll have lunch” is not what he wants to hear. Wade wants me in the steak place with his honey bunch, ordering our third martini, with love—belated, grateful, willing, candid, budding and, above all, permanent—saturating the dark, rich airs like gardenias. It’s his last try to set things right before his hour’s called.

  Though based on history, there’s nothing I can do. The last thing Vicki Arsenault ever said to me sixteen years ago, from her bachelorette apartment in Pheasant Run on the Hightstown Pike, by phone to my former, since-demolished family home in Haddam, was, “Woo, boy-hidee, you like to of fooled me.” She talked in a wide, east Dallas, barrel-racer lingo, just right for barrooms, bronco-buster sex and no bullshit but hers. I loved it.

  “How did I fool you, sweetheart? I love you so much,” I said. It was spring. The copper beech was in abundance. The wisteria and lilacs in bloom. The dreamy time of love’s labors lost.

  “‘Sweetheart’?” she pooh-poohed. “Love me? Opposites cain’t love. Opposites just attract. And we’re done through with that. Least I am. But I almost took a tumble. I’ll give you that.” I remember her wonderful tongue-cluck, like a jockey signaling giddy-up.

  “I still want you to marry me,” I said. And I dearly did—would’ve in a minute and been happy. Although it would’ve been the lamp business more than the realty business, the unexamined life more than the life steeped in reflection and contingency. Win-win.

  “Yeah, but first we’d get married”—I knew she was beaming her big Miss Cotton Bowl smile—“and then we’d have to get divorced. And I need somebody who’ll get me all the way to death. And that id’n you.”

  Death. Even then!

  “I’ll give a call in the next couple days, Wade.” I’m leaning into his open door, radiating bad faith. “Maybe Ricki’ll have time to grab lunch. It’d be good to catch up.” The prospect makes my brain swell.

  Wade carefully uncouples his spectacles from his crusted ears and gives his old eyes a good knuckle-kneading that’s probably painful. He turns toward me, sockets hollowed, pale and knobby, his left pupil orbited out to left field. Age is not gentle or amusing.

  “I can’t talk you into it?” he says, insulted.

  “I guess not, Wade.” I smile the way you would into the upside-down mirror of an iron-lung patient. “I’ll call. We’ll stage a lunch.”

  “You’re not vital anymore. You know that?” He sniffs as if my words carried a bad odor, then looks disgusted and shakes his head. His Olds is idling. The Asbury cop, his gray exhaust visible in falling temps, eases out into traffic and slowly motors away. The wind has a bite that stings my butt. Across the access road, the Parkway groans with the hum-bum-bum sounds of pre-Thanksgiving hurry-up.

  “I’m working on vital,” I say. “It’s on my short list.” I try a smile.

  “Hunh,” Wade grumps. He doesn’t know what I’m talking about. “You’re a nunce. I already said that.”

  “Could be true.” I’m holding his car door open.

  “Remember the three boats, Franky?” The three boats parable is Wade’s favorite. He’s told me the three boats story six times in support of six different points of reference—most recently the presidential race and the American people’s blindness to the obvious.

  “I do, Wade. I only get three boats.”

  “What?” He can’t hear me. “You only get three, and you already had two.” He gives me a mean threat-look across the seat, where his silver Panasonic lies full of new implosion footage. “This is your last one.” My first pair of boats, I take it, symbolizes my two marriages, though they could also reference my prostate condition.

  “Okay, I’ll give it some serious thought. Maybe it’ll make me more vital. I hope so.”

  “How long has it been for you?” Wade drops the Olds into gear, causing a sinister metal-on-metal ker-klunk.

  “How long’s what been? There’s been a lot of ‘it’s’ this year. Hard to keep ’em straight.”

  “Since you were with anybody?” His scraggly old brows dart up lewdly.

  “Since I was with anybody?” Wade’s lips tremble with a hint of below-the-belt seaminess. “What do you mean?” I’m still holding open the passenger door, but I must be squeezing it, because my thumb’s gotten numb. What’s the matter with the world all of a sudden?

  “Ah, forget it. The hell with you.” He’s scowling up into his rearview. Conversation over. He’s ready to make a move.

  “I don’t want to think about the implications of what you’re saying, Wade.” Why does this sound so pompous and stupid?

  “Yeah, yeah,” Wade growls. “Think, think, thinky, think. Where do you think you’re gonna end up?”

  “Go fuck yourself. Okay?” I stand back and give his car door a powerful slam closed. I can just hear him say, “Yeah, maybe I will.”

  Wade’s begun backing up, using his mirror in the tried-and-true manner of the old and joint-frozen. I have to step lively since he hauls on the wheel like a stevedore, swerves and nearly swipes my foot. I can see his mouth working, in furious converse with the face in the rearview.

  “Be careful, Wade,” I call out. He’s glued to his mirror and can’t see the fat red postpole holding aloft the gold sunburst Fuddruckers’ WORLD’S GREATEST HAMBURGERS sign, plus a smaller white one that says EAT HEALTHY! TRY AN OSTRICH BURGER!

  The old Eighty Eight crunches straight into the postpole with a hollow metallic bung noise, the whole vehicle caroming back and jangling to a stop, giving Wade a jolt inside. He glowers up at the mirror, half-cocks his head around as three black letters off the Ostrich Burger sign spiral down—the O, the N and the H—and clatter onto his rusted-through vinyl roof.

  Wade’s twisted around, facing back, able now to see the pipe he’s smacked. Without looking, he sends the Olds lurching forward in “D,” burns rubber, then stabs the brakes and stops again, the motor racing to indicate he’s somehow gotten into “N.”

  “Wade!” I shout. “Hold it. Hold it.” I’m coming to give assistance, in spite of Wade being the shameless procurer for his own daughter. I’ll have to take charge of him now, transport him home in my vehicle, meet Vicki/Ricki, go to dinner, etc., etc., none of which I want to do. Too bad the Asbury cop’s left already. He could arrest Wade, call the EMS and Ricki could claim him in the Monmouth County ER, where she’d know all the procedures.

  Wade’s mouth’s still working vigorously. He fires a look of betrayal out at me, seeing I’m coming to help him. I’m to blame for all of this. If I’d gone down to the Grove and made everybody happy, none of this horseshit would be happening. I don’t know what made me think I could befriend the father of a former love interest who spurned me. These conjunctions aren’t meant to happen except among the primitive Yanomami. Not in New Jersey.

  Wade’s staring down at his dashboard. Rust and road crap have dislodged from the Olds’ chassis, though nothing seems broken or hanging. One of the Ostrich Burger letters has slid off his roof and lodged under the passenger-side wiper blade. It is an H. The sign now reads EAT EALTHY.

  I step out in front of Wade’s car and raise my hand like an Indian. I see he’s furious. He could easily run me over. You read about these deaths in the paper e
very day. Wade grimaces at me through the windshield. His engine suddenly kicks up a mighty whaaaa, and I start backpedaling, my hand still up in the original peace sign, and almost stumble back on my ass as he socks it into “D” again and the Olds springs ahead with a screech, headed toward the EXIT and the traffic-clogged business street leading to the Parkway. I’m all out of the way but can feel the Olds’ side panel whip past me. It’s as if I’m not here, not even a holiday statistic. Wade’s fighting the wheel to get himself into the EXIT side of the curb-cut. His shoulder dips left, his hands still at ten and two. Brack, brack, brack. The old Eighty Eight judders, bucks, then judders again—probably the parking brake’s on—heading across the empty lot into the ENTRANCE side, not the EXIT. “Wade!” I shout again, and start walking toward his car, its brake lights glowing, exhaust shooting out. I’ll help him. I’ll drive him. The Olds dips stopped, then noses out toward the traffic that’s backed up at the red light. Though the red immediately goes to green, and the cars commence smoothly forward. Wade’s head is oscillating back and forth, hawking a place in the line, his mouth still going. I’m moving toward him. I haven’t helped him. I’m very aware of that, but I will—for all the difference it’ll make. A young woman in a blue Horizon full of kids smiles at Wade, waves a hand, motions his beater out into the flow. And in just that number of precious seconds and before I can get there to give help, Wade smoothly becomes traffic, his taillights blending into the flux of the street and on under the Parkway overpass. And gone.

  12

  Eyes peeled, I cruise busy 35 South—Bradley Beach, Neptune, Belmar. I’m expecting a storefront to be open at 3:30 on Thanksgiving eve, with GLASS on the menu. These places thrive on every street corner in America, though they vanish when you want one. Cultural literacy’s never perfect.