Let Me Be Frank With You (11 page)

“Yes, I think it is,” Ms. Pines said softly, relative to my
house and being in it and its helping. “I was never allowed back as a girl. I left for debate club that day, then nothing was ever again as it had been. You don't think things like that can happen. Then you find out they both can and will. So, yes. It's revealing to come here. Thank you.” Ms. Pines smiled at me almost grudgingly. This was the grainy, human, non-race-based contact our President has in mind for us. Too bad the collateral damage has to be so high.

I knew Ms. Pines was now searching for departing words. She was too savvy to deal off the “c” card—abominable
closure
. She was seeking she knew not what, and would know she'd found it, only afterward. If she could've framed a question for me, it would've been the age-old one: What should I now do? How should I go on with the rest of my life now that I've experienced all this? Natural disaster is adept at provoking that very question. Though why ask me? Of course she hadn't.

“Umm-hmm,” Ms. Pines was heard to “say,” having recovered from the brief séance she'd induced in herself, in my house, in me. She was ready to go—spryly up and out of her café chair, big patent purse swagged in her un-injured hand, a flattening-neatening pat given to secure her tam. She looked down to her green suit front, as if it might've been littered with something. I wasn't at all ready for her to leave. There could be more to say, some of it never said before. How
often does that happen? Still, I jumped up and grabbed her coat. She'd performed and received what she came for, relegated as much of her burden as possible to the house. And to me. Su casa
es
mi casa.

“Many times I thought of killing myself, Mr. Bascombe. Very many. I wasn't brave enough. That's how it felt.” She turned and let me help her coat on, careful with her hurricane-damaged wrist. I handed over her gloves. “Maybe I had something else yet to do.”

“You did,” I said. “You do.”

“Umm-hmm,” Ms. Pines said.

Another zephyr of Old Rose passed my nostrils. I patted her cashmere shoulder the way you'd pat a pony. She acknowledged me with a confident look—the way a pony might. It's a solid gain to experience significant life events for which no words or obvious gestures apply. Awkward silence can be perfect. The whisper of the gods, Emerson says.

“I read, Mr. Bascombe—I think it was in
Time
. . .” Ms. Pines was leading me toward my front door, past the murderous basement, as if she'd neutralized it. “It said there's a rise in world corruption now. Everyone's taking bribes. Narcissism's on the increase. We're twenty-third in happiness in America. Bhutan is first, apparently. Somebody said there's been a systematic extermination of joy in the United States.” Her green-topped head was bobbing in front of
me. I couldn't see her pretty face. “Isn't that something?”

“I read that.” I had. “It was some gloomy Eastern European in a smelly suit. Those guys don't like anything.”

“Exactly.” Ms. Pines turned to me, restored to who she'd been, possibly better. She smiled—confident, self-aware—and extended her small, chestnut hand for me to shake. I gently did.

Out through my front door's sidelights, where there was no longer snow falling, I glimpsed across Wilson Lane the Bitticks' frosted front lawn. A short, round white woman in a quilted coat and quilted boots was hammering a
GOOD BUY REALTY
“
FOR SALE
—
NEW PRICE
” sign into the stiff grass—the equivalent of a buzzard landing in your yard. Fresh realities had dawned there, a grainier view of the situation (bank push-back, almost certainly). Mack had taken down his Romney-Ryan poster, just today, and struck his flag. New neighbors would be arriving (a Democrat, if I had a choice; married, no kids, earnest souls I'd be happy to wave to on my morning trip out for the paper, but not much more. I ask less of where I live than I used to).

“Do
you
find it hard to be here, Mr. Bascombe?” Ms. Pines said as I opened the front door for her. The air space between the storm and the coffered oak door was still and chilly. “You lived in Haddam prior to now, I know. I know some things about you. I kept up with who subsequent owners were, after we left. It's what I could do.”

The round woman driving the
GOOD BUY
sign into the Bitticks' yard stopped and looked our way: two people, a man and a woman, talking about . . . what? A new job as a housekeeper? An FBI reference check on a neighbor in line for a government job?
Not
a family tragedy of epic proportion, requiring years to face, impossible to reconcile, with much left to accomplish and not much time to do it.

“No,” I said. “It's been the easiest thing in the world. Most everyone I knew from before is gone or dead. I don't make much of an impression on things now—which is satisfying. We just have so much chance to make an impression. It seems fair. It's the new normal.” I smiled a smile I hoped would be one of mutual understanding—what I hadn't had words for before, but believed we felt together.

“All right,” Ms. Pines said. “That's a good way to put it. I like the way you say things, Mr. Bascombe.”

“Call me Frank,” I said, again.

“All right, Frank, I will.”

She smiled and let herself out the storm door, took her careful steps down the still-icy steps and was gone.

O
UT THE
H
ADDAM
G
REAT
R
OAD
,
JUST PAST
five, freezing rain has turned the blacktop into after-hours, dodge-em cars. Only a few of us are braving it, our headlights glaring off the pavement like sheeny novas. A Ford Explorer (why is it always a Ford Explorer?) has already gone in the ditch, its driver waving me on with a shrug. A wrecker's on its way.

Off in the trees on both sides, immense, manorial houses twinkle through. Yuletide spruces framed in picture windows blaze outward, sharing Christmas cheer with the less monied. Years ago, I drove out here on just such a gloomy-wintry night to hand-deliver a two-million-dollar, full-price offer on a slant-roof, architect-designed monstrosity that's long since been torn down, and calamitously hit a
dog
, precisely next door to the house I was hoping to sell. As with the Explorer, I went straight in the ditch, but clambered out, up, and across the black-ice road to bring whatever helpless help I could to
the poor wrecked beast, who'd made a
whump
when I hit it, boding ill. (I, of course, feared it was my clients' dog.) There the poor thing lay, in the ice-crusted grass in front of number 2605, breathing deep, rasping, not-long-for-this-world breaths, its sorrowing eyes resigned and open to the snowy night—its last—not offering to move or even to notice me beside it on my knees, my cold hand on its hairy, hard ribs, feeling them rise and fall, rise and fall. It was a hound, a black and tan, somebody's old lovebug—a wiggly crotch sniffer and shoe muncher bought for the kids yet surviving on after they'd gone, and prime now to be hit. “What can I do for you, ole Towser?” I said these absurd words, knowing their answer—“Nothing, thanks. You've done enough.” After minutes, I hiked up to the house I was selling, shamefaced and in shock. I informed my clients what I'd terribly done. We all three walked down to the road in the snow, but the old boy had passed beyond us and was (because it was damn cold) grown stiff and peaceful and perfect. They didn't know whose dog it was—a hunter's, strayed away in the night, they thought, though it was past the season for that. My clients—the Armentis, long since beyond life's pale themselves—felt a sorrow for me and my plight, and let me go home with the promise to “do something about the dog” in the morning. I shouldn't worry. It was a terrible night to be out—which it was. In my realtor's memory they accepted the offer following some testy back-and-forths with
the young Bengali buyers—I often recollect such matters more positively than was true. It was a long time ago. Twenty years, at least. The dog, of course, lives on.

I'
M ON MY PILGRIM
'
S WAY TONIGHT
—
IT
'
S ONLY
5:10 but could easily be midnight—to visit my former wife, Ann Dykstra, a resident now of the Beth Wessel Wing at the Community at Carnage Hill, a state-of-the-art, staged-care facility, out here in what was once, when we were married, forty years ago, the verdant Haddam hinterlands. The “Community” today borders a Robert Trent Jones faux links course, hidden from the road by a swatch of woods, the leaves now down. A birch-bark canoe “institute” sits off to the left in deeper timber, its lights busily yellowing the snow-flittery night. Other grand houses are semivisible, accessible by gates with uniformed protection. Once it was possible to cast my eye over almost any piece of settled landscape here-around and know how it would
look
in the future; what uses it'd be set to by succeeding waves of human purpose—as if a logic lay buried within, the genome of its later what's-it. Though out here, now, all is frankly enigma. Probably it's my age—which explains more and more about me, like a master decryption code. In New Jersey we've now built to the edge of the last million acres of remotely developable land.
We're on track to use it up by midcentury. Property taxes are capped, but no one wants to sell, since no one wants to buy. All of which keeps prices high but values low. (I've seen only one lonely Sotheby's sign the whole way here.) Householders of many of these expensive piles are now renting their eight-thousand-foot trophy villas to Rutgers students with rich parents—taking the long view about upkeep and wear and tear when the lease comes up.

Meanwhile Haddam itself is countenancing service cutbacks. Too much money's “lost” to wages, the Republicans on the Boro council say. The budget gap's at fifteen mil. Many old town-fixture employees have been pink-slipped in these days before Christmas. The previous manger scene, mothballed a decade ago, the wise men all portrayed as strapping Aryans instead of dusky Levantines and Negroes, has been revived—the rental company for the race-appropriate manger having upped their prices. Holly boughs now adorn only every
third
lamppost on Seminary Street. Santa's magic sleigh on the Square now has a smaller driver at the reins—the original, life-size Santa was stolen, possibly by the Rutgers students. Three prime storefronts are currently sitting empty (unthinkable in earlier days). Townhouse construction—a well-known morbid sign—goes on apace across from where my son Ralph Bascombe lies buried in the cemetery under a linden tree, lately broken off by the hurricane. Rumor has it a
Dollar Store and an Arby's are buying in where Laura Ashley and Anthropologie once thrived. “The middle isn't holding” was
The Packet'
s Yeatsian assessment.

Though every Haddam citizen I have a word with—not that many, admittedly—seems on board with the new austerity, even if it promises a dead stop to what was once our reality. “Feeling the pinch,” “cinching the family belt up two notches,” appear to make us feel
at one
with the rest of the world's economic downturn—which we know to be bad, but not
that
bad, not yet, not here.

Possibly I'm the only one paying close attention. I still possess a municipal memory from my years of selling and reselling, mortgaging and re-mortgaging, eventually overseeing the razing and replacing of many a dream home. Clearly, though,
some
wound has scarred our psyche. And it's a mystery how it will sort out before the last sprawl-able acre's paved over and there's no place left to go but away and down.

M
Y MISSION INTO THE NIGHT
'
S SINISTER WEATHER
, four days before Christmas, is to deliver to Ann a special, yoga-approved, form-fitted, densely foamed and molded orthopedic pillow, which she can sleep on, and that's recommended by neurologists in Switzerland to homeopathically “treat” Parkinson's—of which she's a new sufferer—by
reducing stress levels associated with poor sleep, which themselves are associated with neck pain, which is associated with too-vivid dreams, all associated with Parkinson's. Ann has resided in the Beth Wessel, able-bodied/independent wing since last June. She has her own two-bedroom, Feng-Shui-approved apartment, does her own cooking, drives her own Focus, occasionally sees old friends from De Tocqueville Academy, where she once coached the Lady Linksters, and has even acquired a “boyfriend”—a former Philadelphia cop named “Buck.” (He has a last name, but I can't pronounce it, since it's Polish.) Buck's a large, dull piece of cordwood in his seventies, given to loose-fitting permanently-belted trousers, matching beige sweatshirts of the kind sold at Kmart, big galunker, imitation-suede shoes, and the thinnest of thin pale hosiery. Somewhere, someone convinced Buck that a sculpted “imperial” and a pair of black horn-rimmed Dave Garroway specs would make him look less like a Polish meatball, and make people take him more seriously, which probably never happens—though he's officially on the record as “handsome.” He could pass as the “good” cop who genially interrogates the poor black kid from the projects, until he suddenly loses his temper, bulges his eyes, balls up his horseshoe fists in the kid's face, and scares the shit out of him. Buck's carrying around a different John Grisham book every time I see him and refers to himself only as a “first responder.” (I've
seen his old Blazer in the parking lot with “Frst Rspndr” on his yellow Jersey plate.) I regularly encounter him lurking in the big public “living room”—he doesn't have enough to do, with no robberies and home invasions to get his mitts into. He likes the idea that Ann (who he infuriatingly calls “Miss Annie”) . . . that Ann and I “go way back,” which isn't quite the word for it; and that he and I share private, implicitly sexual understandings about her that men such as we are would never speak about, but that in the aggregate are “special,” possibly symbolic, and render us both lucky-to-have-lived-this-long foot soldiers in Miss Annie's army.