The Lay of the Land

  16

  A dual sensation—pleasure and enthusiasm—unexpectedly skirls through my middle by the time I reach Ocean Avenue; and alloyed with it is another bracing sensation, from my arms down to my fists, of complete readiness to “take hold.” I actually envision these words—take hold—in watery letters like an old eight-ball fortune. And there’s also, simultaneously, a seemingly opposite feeling of release—from something. Sometimes we know complex pressures are building and roiling, and can finger exactly what they’re about—a gloomy doctor visit, a big court case before a mean-spirited judge, an IRS audit we wish to God wasn’t happening. And other times, we have to plumb the depths, like seeking a warm seam in a cold pond. Only, this time it’s easy. Full, pleasurable release and bold, invigorating authority both exude from the sudden, simple prospect of handing over the Realty-Wise reins to Mike Mahoney.

  At first blush, of course, it’s a heresy. Except, life on the Next Level is only what you invent. And as Mike pointed out two days ago (and I scoffed at), residential real estate’s all about what somebody invented. I could sign the papers right now and be on top of the world. Even if it’s the worst idea in the world and leaves me rudderless, with yawning angst-filled days during which I never get out of my pj’s, it still feels like the right invention now. And now is where I am. (This feels, of course, like a Permanent Period resurrection. But if it is, I don’t care.)

  There’s no sign of returning 5-K runners here at the corner, or much mid-day traffic, not even post-race street litter—only the starting line, whitewashed across the north-bound side of the avenue. A black man—the docent at Our Lady—is just now carting Father Ray’s aluminum blessing ladder across the lawn to an arched side doorway. He leans the ladder against the stucco exterior, steps in the door, closes it behind him and does not come out again.

  My instinct now is to turn right and get myself home—a better second act with my son, the hoped-for return of my daughter, the crucial call from Sally. The resumption of the day’s best, if unlikely, hopes for itself.

  Only another powerful urging directs me not to turn right, but to cross the median and go left, and north, up the peninsula toward Ortley Beach. I know what I’m up to here. I’m empowered by the dual sense of release and take hold, which don’t come often and almost never together, and so must be heeded as if ordained by God.

  There are—I admit this at risk to myself, though all men know it’s true and all women know men think it—there are ideal women in the world. Sally said it about me in her letter—which means the same is true for how women calculate men. In my view, there’s at least one ideal person for all of us, and probably several. For men, these are the women who make you feel especially smart, that you’re uniquely handsome in a way you yourself always believed you were, who bring out the best in you and, by some generosity or need in themselves, cause you to feel generous, clever, intuitive as hell about all sorts of things and successful in the world exactly the way you’d like to be. Pity the man who marries such a woman, since she’ll eventually drive him crazy with undeserved approval and excessive, unwanted validations. Not that I’d know, having married two “challenger” types, who may have loved me but never looked upon me with less than a seasoned eye, and whose basic watchwords to friend and foe alike were, “Well, let’s just see about that. I’m not so sure.” In any case, they both left me flat as a flounder—though Sally may be coming back at this moment.

  These ideal women can actually make you be smarter than you are, but are finally only suitable for fleeting escapades, for profound and long-running flirtations never acted on, for unexpected driving trips to Boston or after-hours cocktails at shadowy red-booth steak houses like the one Wade Arsenault tried to lure me to yesterday with his Texas-bred, ball-crusher, definitely not ideal daughter, Vicki/Ricki, who anybody’d be smart to steer wide of, but who I once unaccountably wanted to marry. These women are also meant for sweetly intended, affectionate one-nighters (two at the max), after which you both manage to stay friends, conduct yourselves even better than before, possibly even “enjoy” each other a time or two every six months or six years, but never consider getting serious about, since everybody knows that serious ruins everything. Marguerite might’ve qualified, but wasn’t truly ideal.

  Perfect for affairs is what these women are. They almost always know it (even if they’re married). They realize that given the kind of man they find attractive—usually ruminant loners with minimal but quite specific needs—to strive for anything more lasting would mean they’d soon be miserable and hoping to get things over with fast, and so are happy for the escapade and the cocktails and the rib-eye and the one-nighter where everything works out friendly, and then pretty quick to get back in their own beds again, which is where they (and many others) are happiest.

  “Enlightened” thought by headshrinkers with their own rich broth of problems has twisted these normal human pleasures and delights into shabby, shameful perversions and boundary violations needing to be drummed out of the species because someone’s always seen as the loser-victim and someone’s definition of wholesome and nurturing doesn’t always get validated. But we all know that’s wrong, whether we have the spirit to admit it or don’t. Women are usually full participants in everything they do (including heading off to Mull), and I’m ready to say that when it comes to wholesome, nurturing and long-lasting, a frank, good-hearted roll in the alfalfa, or something close to it, with an enthusiastic and willing female is about as nurturing and wholesome as I can imagine. And if it doesn’t last a lifetime, what (pray tell me) does, except marriages where both parties are screaming inside to let light in but can’t figure out how to.

  The old release-and-take-hold has worked its quickening magic on me and routed me north toward Neptune’s Daily Catch Bistro and (I hope) to Bernice Podmanicsky, who may be my savior for the day just when a savior’s needed. Sally’s call offers some things, but pointedly not others. And she herself authorized a female companion for the day. I’d be a fool to pass on the opportunity, should there be one.

  Bernice Podmanicsky, who’s one of the wait-staff at Neptune’s, is my candidate for the aforementioned ideal woman. A lanky, full-lipped, wide-smiling brunette with big feet, a hint of dark facial hair, but oddly delicate hands with shiny pink nails, a proportionate bosom, solid posterior and runway-model ankles (always my weakness once the butt’s accounted for), Bernice would be considered pretty by some standards, though not by all: mouth too big (fine with me); hair taking root a sixteenth of an inch too far down the forehead (ditto); augmented eyebrows (neutral); libidinous chin dimple when she smiles, which is often; fortyish age bracket (I prefer women with adult experience). Altogether, hard not to like. I’ve known Bernice three years, ever since her long-standing love relationship in Burlington, Vermont, blew a tire and she came down to live in Normandy Beach with her sister Myrna, who’s a Mary Kay franchisee. Waitressing was what she’d always done since college at Stevens Point, where she took art (waitressing leaves time for drawing). She is a reader of serious novels and even abstruse philosophical texts, owing to her father, who was a high school guidance counselor in Fond du Lac, and her mother, who’s in her seventies and a serious painter in the style of Georgia O’Keeffe.

  I actually like Bernice immensely, though there hasn’t been any but the most casual contact between us over the course of the three years. When Sally was my regular dinner companion, Bernice was gregarious and jokey and impudently friendly to both of us. “Oh, you two again. Somebody’s gonna get the wrong idea about you…. And I guess you’ll have the bluefish rare.” But when Sally left, and I was often alone at a window table with a gin drink, Bernice was more candid and curious and personal and (on occasion) clearly flirtatious—which I was happy about. But mostly she was interested and corroborative and even spontaneously complimentary. “I think it’s odd but completely understandable that a man with your background—writing short stories and writing sports and a good education—would be happy selling
houses in New Jersey. That just makes sense to me.” Or “I like it, Frank, that you always order bluefish and pretty much dress the same way every time you come in here. It means you’re sure about the little things, so you can leave yourself open for the big ones.” She smiled so as to show her provocative dimple.

  I told her about my Sponsoring activities and she said I seemed, to her experience, unusually kind and sensitive to others’ needs. Once she even said, “I bet you’ve got a big lineup at your door, handsome, now that you’re single again.” (I’ve heard her call other men “handsome” and could care less.) I decided not to tell her about the titanium BBs situation, for fear she’d feel sorry for me—I couldn’t see a use for pathos—but also because talking about the BBs can convince me I’ve lost the wherewithal even if I still have the wherefore.

  Several times, I’ve stayed late at the Bistro, feeling better about myself and also about Bernice. Sometimes her shift would end and she’d come out from the kitchen in a pea jacket over her pink waitress dress and walk over and say, “So, Franklin”—not my name—“happy trails to you.” But then she’d sit and we’d talk, during which occasions I’d become the funniest, cleverest, the wisest, the most instructive, the most complex, enigmatic and strangely attractive of all men, but also the best, most attentive listener-back that anybody on earth had ever heard of. I’d quote Emerson and Rochefoucauld and Eliot and Einstein, remember incisive, insightful but obscure historical facts that perfectly fitted into our discussions but that I never remembered talking about to anyone else, all the while dredging up show-tune lyrics and Bud & Lou gags and statistics about everything from housing starts in Bergen County to how many salmon pass through the fish ladder up at Bellows Falls in a typical twenty-four-hour period during the spring run. I became, in other words, an ideal man, a man I myself was crazy about and in love with and anybody else would be, too. All because—though I never specifically said so to her—Bernice was herself an ideal woman. Not ideal per se, but ideal per diem, the only place ideal really makes much difference. I realize as I say all this that my “Bernice experience” and my current willingness to rekindle it represents another small skirmish into the Permanent Period and away from the strict confines of the Next Level. Sometimes, though, you have to seek help where you know you can find it.

  On late after-shift evenings, I sometimes would walk outside the Bistro with Bernice onto the warm beach-town sidewalk, when the air was cooling and things were buzzing last summer and, later on, after my procedure, and when most visitors had gone home in September. We’d stand at the curb or walk, not holding hands or anything like that, down to the beach and talk about global warming or Americans’ inexplicable prejudice against the French or President Clinton’s sadly missed opportunities and the losses that won’t ever be recovered. I always had, when I was with Bernice, unusual takes on things, historical perspectives I didn’t even know I possessed, bits of memorized speeches and testimony I’d heard on Public Radio that somehow came back to me in detail and that made me seem as savvy as a diplomat and wise as an oracle, with total recall and flawless sense of context, all of it with a winning ability to make fun of myself, not be stuffy or world-weary, but then at a moment’s notice to be completely ready to change the subject to something she was interested in, or something else I knew more about than anybody in the world.

  In all of this rather ordinary time together, Bernice had persistently positive things to say about me: that I was young for my age (without knowing my age, which I guessed she guessed was forty-five), that I led an interesting life now and had a damn good one in front of me, that I was “strangely intense” and intuitive and probably was a handful, but not really a type-A personality, which she knew she didn’t like.

  I said about her all the good things that I thought: that she was “a major looker,” that her independent “Fighting Bob” La Follette instincts were precisely what this country needed, that I’d love to see her “work” and had a hunch it would wow me and I’d be drawn to it, implying but not actually saying that she wowed me and I was drawn to her (which was sort of true).

  Once, Bernice asked me if I’d like to take a drive and smoke some reefer (I declined). And once she said she’d finished a “big nude” just that day and would be interested to know what a guy with my heightened sensibilities and intuition would think about it, since it was “pretty abstract” (I assumed it was a self-portrait and burned to see it). But I declined that, too. I understood that how we felt, standing out on the curb or at the edge of the beach, where the street came to an end and the twinkling shank of the warm evening opened out like a pathway of stars to where the old ferris wheel turned like a bracelet of jewels down at the Sea-Clift Fun Pier—I understood that how we felt was good and might conceivably get better if we had a Sambuca or two and a couple of bong hits at her place and took a look at her big nude. But then pretty quickly who we really were would assert itself, and it wouldn’t feel good for long and we’d end up looking back at our moment on the curb, before anything happened, with slightly painful nostalgia—the way emigrants are said to feel when they leave home, thrilled to set sail for the new land, where life promises riches but where hardships await, and in the end old concerns are only transported to a new venue, where they (we) go back to worrying the same as before. When you’re young, like my daughter, Clarissa, and maybe even my son, you don’t think like that. You think that all it takes is to get free of one box and into a bigger one out in the mainstream. Change the water in your bowl and you become a different fish. But that’s not so. No siree, Bob, not a bit. It’s also true that because of the fiery BBs in my prostate, and despite early-morning and even occasionally late-night erectile events giving positive testimony, I wasn’t sure of my performance ratings under new pressures and definitely didn’t want to face another failure when so few things seemed to be going my way.

  Now, though, I believe is the time—if ever one was ordained—for Bernice and me to lash our tiny boats together, at least for the day, and set sail a ways toward sunset. Nothing permanent, nothing that even needs to last past dark, nothing specifically venereal or proto-conjugal (unless that just happens), but still an occasion, an eleventh-hour turn toward the unexpected—the very thing that can happen in life to let us know we’re human, and that could even prove I’m the handful Bernice always knew I’d be and perhaps still am. All this, of course, if it seems like a good idea to her.

  Neptune’s Daily Catch Bistro, I already know from our local Shore weekly, is serving its twenty-dollar turkey ’n trimmings buffet to all Ortley Beach seniors, eleven to two. Bernice—because she casually told me—is without companionship today and only working to give herself something to do, then heading home with a jug of Chablis to “watch the Vikes and Dallas at 4:05,” before turning in early. My guess is if I cruise in right at one, almost now, and tell her I’m taking her away for a holiday feast, she’ll beg off with the boss, leave her apron on the doorknob, see the whole idea as a complete blast that I’ve had planned for weeks, feel secretly flattered and relieved and sure she’s had me pegged right and that I’m fuller of surprises than she imagined and that all her appreciation of me these years wasn’t wrong or wasted. In other words, she’ll recognize that I recognize her as the ideal woman, and that even if she’s home in time for the nightly news, she’ll have gotten more than she bargained for—which is all that usually counts with humans.

  And as an added inducement, bringing Bernice Podmanicsky for Thanksgiving dinner will drive my kids crazy. Worse than if I’d brought home a Finnish midget from the circus, a six-foot-eight fag comb-out assistant from Kurl Up ’n Dye in Lavallette, or a truckload of talking parrots that sing Christmas carols a cappella. It’ll drive them—Paul especially—into paralyzed, abashed and scalding, renunciating silence, which is what I may now require of my Thanksgiving festivity. Loathing will run at warp speed. Sinister “What’s happened to him?” grimaces will radar between siblings who already don’t like each other. Your kids
may be the hapless victims of divorce and spend their lives “working out” their “issues” on everybody in sight, but they damn straight don’t want you to have any issues, or for their boats to get rocked while they’re doing their sanctified “work.” They want instead for you to provide them a stable environment for their miseries (they might as well be adopted). Except my view is that if kids are happy to present us aging parents with their own improbabilities, why not return the favor? A diverse table of Paul, Jill, Clarissa, Thom, Bernice and myself seems more or less perfect. As is often the case, given time, “things” come into better focus.

  And yet. Best case? It could bring out the unforeseeable best in everybody and cause Thanksgiving to blossom into the extended-family, come-one-come-all good fellowship the Pilgrims might (for a millisecond) have thought they were ringing in by inviting the baffled, mostly starved Indians to their table. Paul’s time capsule could turn out to be the rallying projectile he may—or may not—want it to be. Clarissa could send Thom away two-thirds through the bulgur course, and we could all laugh like chimps at what a sorry sack he was. Bernice could do her full repertoire of America’s Dairyland imitations. We might even ask the Feensters in and watch them combust. I could be made happy by any or all or none of these, and the day could end no worse than it began. Though I’d still like Bernice Podmanicsky with me, just as my personal friend against the difficulties that are likely waiting. She would think it was all—whatever it was—a riot or a trip or awesome, and be agreeable when we excused ourselves from the table to take a sunset stroll on the beach, where we could both make ourselves feel ideal all over again, after which I could take her home for the second half of the Vikes’ game—which I might stay for. I’d tell Sally all about it later and be certain she wouldn’t care.