The Feensters appear unimplicated. Nick has set up shop in his driveway and is giving his twin ’56 vintage Vettes the careful hand-waxing they deserve and frequently get (cold-weather bonding issues, what the hell). Drilla, in a skirt and sweater, is seated on the front step, hugging her knees and petting Bimbo in her lap as if now was July. Nick is, as usual, luridly turned out in one of his metallic Lycra bodysuits—electric blue, showing off his muscles and plenty of bulgy dick—the same outfit the neighborhood is used to seeing during his and Drilla’s stern-miened beach constitutionals, when they each listen to separate Walkmen. Though because it’s wintry, Nick has added some kind of space-age silver-aluminum anorak you’d buy in catalogs only lottery winners from Bridgeport get sent for free. Seen through his derelict topiary, he is a strange metallic sight on Thanksgiving. Though if Nick wasn’t such an asshole, there’d be something touching about the two of them, since clearly they don’t know what to do with themselves today, and could easily end up gloomy and alone at the Ruby Tuesday’s in Belmar. Likewise, if Nick weren’t such an asshole, I’d walk over and ask them to come join our family sociality, since there’s too much food anyway. Possibly next year. I give him a noncommittal wave as I pass and turn in my own drive. Nick repays it with a black stare of what looks like disgust, though Drilla, clutching the dog, waves back smally and smiles in the invisible sunshine—her smile indicating that if a man like Nick is your husband, nothing’s easy in life.
However, it’s my own driveway that’s cause for concern. If I’d noticed in time, I might’ve driven back to the office, listened to Mike’s business proposal, sold the whole shitaree, then come home a half hour later in a changed frame of mind.
Paul and his lofty Jill are out on the pea-gravel drive in holiday attire and absorbed in an arms-folded, head-nodding confab with a man I don’t know but whose chocolate brown Crown Vic sits on the road by the arborvitae and Paul’s ramshackle gray Saab. Possibly this is a client prospect who’s tracked me down, holiday or no, in hopes I’ll have the key to the beach house he’s noticed in the Buyer’s Guide and can’t wait to see. Paul may be dry-running his new agent’s persona, gassing about time capsules, greeting-card pros and cons, the Chiefs’ chances for the Super Bowl and how special it is being a New Jersey native.
Only this guy’s no realty walk-up, nor is his car a usual car. His body language lacks the tense but casual hands-in-pockets, feet-apart posture of protective customer indecision. This man is dapper and small, with both hands free at his sides like a cop, with thick blunt-cut Neapolitan hair, a long brown leather jacket over a brown wool polo and heavy black brogues with telltale crepe soles. He looks like a cop because he is a cop. Plenty of ordinary Americans living ordinary citizen lives dress exactly this way, but nobody looks this way dressed this way but cops. It’s no wonder crime’s on the uptick. They’ve given away the element of surprise to the element—to the window bashers, hospital bombers and sign stealers of the world.
But why is a cop in my driveway? Why is his brown cop car with MUNICIPAL license plates conspicuously parked in front of my house on Thanksgiving, dragging my family outside when law-abiding citizens should be inside stuffing their faces and arguing?
Clarissa. A heart flutter, a new burning up my back. He is an emissary of doleful news. Like in The Fighting Sullivans, when the grief squad marches up the steps. Her re-entry to conventionality has already come to ruin. Not thinkable.
All three turn as I climb out, leaving Mike’s business plan on the seat, my gait hitched again and slowed. I’m smiling—but only out of habit. The Feensters—I couldn’t hear it from my car—have their boom box at its usual high decibels, apparently to aid in waxing. “Lisbon Antigua” again—their way of getting their Thanksgiving message out: Fuck you.
“Hi,” I say. “What’s the trouble here, Officer?” I intend this to be funny, but it isn’t. There can’t be bad news.
“This is Detective Marinara, Frank,” Paul says in the most normal of imaginable voices, tuned to the exquisite pleasure of saying “Detective Marinara.” I can smell cops. Though this, thanks to the signs above, will not be about Clarissa, but me.
Paul and Jill—she’s looking at me sorrowfully, as though I’m Paul’s crippled parent—have transubstantiated themselves since our basement get-together. Jill has severely pulled much of her long, dense yellow hair “back,” but left skimpy fringe bangs, plus a thick, concupiscent braid that swags down behind her like a rope. From her travel wardrobe, she’s chosen a green flare-bottomed pantsuit with some sort of shiny golden underhue and a pair of clunky black shoes that show off the length of her feet and that, as an ensemble, renders her basically gender-neutral. She’s also attached a flesh-tinted holiday hand prosthesis, barely detectable as not the real thing, though not flexible like a hand you’d want. Paul, from somewhere, has found a strange suit—a too-large summer-weight blue-gray-and-pink plaid with landing-strip lapels, gutter-deep cuffs and English vents—a style popular ten years before he was born and that everyone joked about even then. With his mullet, his uncouth beard-stache and ear stud, his suit makes him look like a burlesque comedian. He looks as if he could break out a ukelele and start crooning in an Al Jolson voice. Just seeing him makes me long for sweet and affirming Bernice. She could set things right in a heartbeat, though I don’t really know her.
“I’m impressed with your place here, Mr. Bascombe.” Detective Marinara scans around and grins at the way some people can live, but not him: ocean-front contemporary, lots of glass and light, high ceilings—the works. He’s a small, handsome, feline-looking man with long, spidery fingers, dark worried eyes and a small shapely nose. He could’ve been a sixth-man guard in Division III, maybe for Muhlenberg, who only heeded the call to police work because of his “soshe” degree and a desire to stay close to his folks in Dutch Neck. These guys make detective in a hurry and aren’t adept at cracking skulls.
“I’d be happy to sell it to you,” I say, and try to look happy. “I’ll move out today.” I’m not comfortable standing in front of my house with a cop, as if I’m soon to be leaving in handcuffs. Though it could happen to any of us.
“I was down at my sister’s,” Detective Marinara says. “I told you she lives in Barnegat Acres.” His interested eyes survey around professionally. They pass my busted duct-taped window, Sally’s LeBaron, pass the Feensters, my son, Jill. “They do the whole Italian spread,” he says. “You need to take a breather though. So I wandered down here. Your son happened to be outside.”
“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 mal
ignant “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 c
ould 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.