Let Me Be Frank With You (7 page)

A few vestigial Negroes have managed to hold on—by their teeth. Since my wife, Sally, and I moved back to Haddam from The Shore, eight years ago, and into the amply treed President streets—“white housing,” roughly the same vintage and stock as the formerly all-black heritage quarter—we've ended up on “lists” identifying us as soft touches for Tanzanian Mission Outreach, or some such worthwhile endeavor. We're likewise the kind of desirable white people who don't show up grinning at
their
church on Sunday, pretending “we belong, since we're all really the same under the skin.” Probably we're not.

Snowflakes had begun sifting onto my driveway where I saw the black woman at my door, though a raw sun was trying to shine, and in an hour the sidewalk would have puddles. New Jersey's famous for these not-north/not-south weather
oddities, which render it a never-boring place to live—hurricanes notwithstanding.

Every week I read for the blind at WHAD, our community station, which was where I was just then driving home from. This fall, I've been reading Naipaul's
The Enigma of Arrival
(thirty minutes is all they or I can stand), and in many ways it's a book made for hearing in the dark, in a chill and tenebrous season. Naipaul, despite apparently having a drastic and unlikable personality, is as adept as they get at throwing the gauntlet down and calling bullshit on the world. From all I know about the blind from the letters they send me, they're pissed off about the same things he's pissed off about—the wrong people getting everything, fools too-long suffered, the wrong ship coming into the wrong port. Despair misunderstood as serenity. It's also better to listen to Naipaul and me alone at home than to join some dismal book club, where the members get drunk on pinot grigio and go at each other's throats about whether this or that “anti-hero” reminds them of their ex-husband Herb. Many listeners say they hear my half hour, then go off to sleep feeling victorious.

Across the street, my neighbor Mack Bittick still had his
NO SURRENDER ROMNEY
-
RYAN
sign up, though the election's long lost for his side. It sat beside his red-and-white
FOR SALE BY OWNER
, which he'd stationed there as if the two signs
meant the same thing. He's an engineer and former Navy SEAL whose job was eliminated by a company in Jamesburg that makes pipeline equipment. He's got big credit card bills and is staring at foreclosure. Mack flies the Stars and Stripes on a pole, day and night, and is one of the brusque-robust, homeschooling, canned-goods-stock-piling, non-tipper, free-market types who're averse to paying commissions on anything (“It's a goddamn
tax
on what we oughta get for fuckin' free by natural right . . .”) and don't like immigrants. He's also a personhood nutcase who wants the unborn to have a vote, hold driver's licenses, and own handguns so they can rise up and protect him from the revolution when it comes. He's always eager to pick my old-realtor brain, sounding me out about trends and price strategies, and ways to bump up his curb appeal on the cheap, so he can maximize equity and still pocket his homestead exemption. I do my utmost to pass along the worst possible realty advice: never
ever
negotiate; demand your price or fuck it; don't waste a nickel on superficial niceties (your house should look “lived in”); don't act friendly to potential buyers (they'll grow distrustful); leave your Tea-Party reading material and gun paraphernalia out on the coffee table (most home buyers already agree with you). He, of course, knows I voted for Obama, who he feels should be in prison.

W
HEN THE RED
-
COATED BLACK WOMAN AT MY FRONT
door realized no one was answering, and that a car had crunched into the snowy driveway, she turned and issued a big welcoming smile down to whoever was arriving, and a demure wave to assure me all was well here—no one hiding in the bushes with burglar tools, about to put a padded brick through my back window. Black people bear a heavy burden trying to be normal. It's no wonder they hate us. I'd hate us, too. I was sure Mack Bittick was watching her through the curtains.

For a moment I thought the woman might be Parlance Parker—grown-up daughter of my long-ago housekeeper, Pauline, from the days when I lived on Hoving Road, on Haddam's west side, was married to my first wife, our children were little, and I was trying unsuccessfully to write a novel. Pauline ran our big Tudor house like a boot camp—mustering the children, working around Ann, berating me for not having a job, and sitting smoking on our back steps like a drill sergeant. Like me, she hailed from Mississippi and, because we were both now “up north,” could treat me with disdain, since I'd renounced all privileges to treat her like a subhuman. Pauline died of a brain tumor thirty years ago. But her daughter Parlance recognized me one Saturday morning in the Shop 'n Save and threw her arms around me like a lost
relation. Since then she's twice shown up at the door, wanting to “close the circle,” tell me how much her mother loved us all, hear stories about the children (whom she never knew), and generally re-affiliate with a lost part of life over which she believes I hold dominion.

I got out of my car, advertising my own welcoming “I know you're probably not robbing me” smile. The woman was not Parlance. Something told me she was also not one of the AME Sunrise Tabernacle ladies either. But she was someone. That, I could see.

“Hi!” I sang out in my most amiable, Christmas-cheer voice. “You're probably looking for Sally.” There was no reason to believe that. It was just the most natural-sounding thing I could think to say. Sally was actually in South Mantoloking, counseling grieving hurricane victims—something she's been doing for weeks.

The woman came down onto the walk, still smiling. I was already cold, dressed only in cords, a double-knit polo, and a barracuda jacket—dressed for the blind, not for the winter.

“I'm Charlotte Pines, Mr. Bascombe,” the woman said, smiling brightly. “We don't know each other.”

“Great,” I said, crossing my lawn, snow sifting flake by flake. The still-green grass had a meringue on top that had begun to melt. Temps were hovering above freezing.

Ms. Pines was medium sized but substantial, with a shiny, kewpie-doll pretty face and skin of such lustrous, variegated browns, blacks, and maroons that any man or woman would've wished they were black for at least part of every day. She was, anyone could see, well-to-do. Her red coat with a black fur collar I picked out as cashmere. Her black boots hadn't come cheap either. When I came closer, still stupidly grinning, she took off one leather glove, extended her hand, took mine in a surprisingly rough grip, and gave it a firm I'm-in-charge squeezing. I felt like a schoolboy who meets his principal in Walmart and shakes hands with an adult for the first time.

“I'm making a terrible intrusion on you, Mr. Bascombe.”

“It's fine,” I said. “I like intrusions.” For some reason I was breathless. “I was just reading for the blind. Sally's over in Mantoloking.” I had the Naipaul under my arm. Ms. Pines was a lady in her waning fifties. Snow was settling into the wide part of her beauty-parlor hair, the third not covered by her tam. She'd spoken very explicitly. Conceivably she had moments before gotten out of a sleek, liveried Lincoln now waiting discreetly down the block. I took a quick look down Wilson but saw nothing. I saw what I believed was a flicker in the Bitticks' front curtains. Black people don't visit in our neighborhood that often, except to read the meter or fix something. However, that Ms. Pines had simply
appeared
conferred
upon me an intense feeling of well-being, as if she'd done me an unexpected favor.

“I haven't met your wife,” Ms. Pines said. Somewhere back in the distant days she'd been a considerable and curvaceous handful. Even in her Barneys red coat, that was plain. She'd now evolved into dignified, imposing pan-African handsomeness.

“She's great,” I said.

“I'm certain,” Ms. Pines said and then was on to her business. “I'm on a strange mission, Mr. Bascombe.” Ms. Pines seemed to rise to a more forthright set-of-shoulders, as if an expected moment had now arrived.

“Tell me,” I said. I nearly said
I'm all ears
, words I'd never said in my life.

“I grew up in your house, Mr. Bascombe.” Ms. Pines' shoulders were firmly set. But then unexpectedly she seemed to lose spirit. She smiled, but a different smile, a smile summoning supplication and regret, as if she
was
one of the AME ladies, and I'd just uttered something slighting. She swiveled her head around and regarded the front door, as if it had finally opened to her ring. She had a short but still lustrous neck that made her operate her shoulders a bit stiffly. Everything about her had suddenly altered. “Of course it looks very different now.” She was going on trying to sound pleasant. “This was back in the sixties. It seems much smaller to
me.” Her smile brightened, as she found me again. “It's nicer. You've kept it nice.”

“Well, that's great, too,” I said. I'd proclaimed greatness three times now, even though sentimental returns of the sort Ms. Pines was making could never be truly great. “Mightily affecting.” “Ambiguously affirming.” “Bittersweet and troubling.” “Heart-wrenching and sad.” All possible. But probably not great.

Only, I wanted her to know none of it was bad news. Not to me. It was
good
news, in that it gave us—the two of us, cold here together—a
great
new connection that didn't need to go further than my front yard, but might. This was how things were always supposed to work out.

Previous-resident returns of this sort, in fact, happen all the time and have happened to me more than once. Possibly in nineteenth-century Haddam they didn't. But in twenty-first-century Haddam they do—where people sell and buy houses like Jeep Cherokees, and where boom follows bust so relentlessly realtors often leave the
FOR SALE
sign in the garage; and where you're likely to drive to the Rite Aid for a bottle of Maalox and come home with earnest money put down on that Dutch Colonial you'd had your eye on and just happened to see your friend Bert the realtor stepping out the front door with the listing papers in hand. No one wants to stay any place. There are species-level changes afoot. The place you
used to live and brought your bride home to, taught your kid to ride his bike in the driveway, where your old mother came to live after your father died, then died herself, and where you first noticed the peculiar tingling movement in your left hand when you held the
New York Review
up near the light—
that
place may now just be two houses away from where you
currently
live (but wished you didn't), though you never much think about having lived there, until one day you decide to have a look.

At least four prior owner/occupants have come to visit houses I've lived in over these years. I've always thrown the doors open, once it was clear they weren't selling me burial insurance and I'd gotten my wallet off the hall table. I've just stood by like a docent and let them wander the rooms, grunting at this or that update, where a wall used to be, or recalling how the old bathroom smelled on Sunday mornings before church. On like that, until they can get it all straight in their minds and are ready to go. Usually it takes no longer than ten minutes—standard elapsed time for re-certifying sixty years of breathing existence. Generally it's the over-fifties who show up. If you're much younger, you've got it all recorded on your smartphone. And it's little enough to do for other humans—help them get their narrative straight. It's what we all long for, unless I'm mistaken.

“I don't suppose, Mr. Bascombe . . .” Ms. Pines was taking
another anxious peek around at my house, then back to me, smiling in her new defeated way. “. . . I don't suppose I could step in the front door and have one quick look inside.” Kernels of dry snow were settling onto her cheeks, her coat shoulders and the onyx uppers of her boots. My hair had probably gone white. We were a fine couple. Though right at that second I experienced a sudden, ghostly whoosh of vertigo—something I've been being treated for, either along with or because of C-3 neck woes. The world's azimuth just suddenly goes catty-wampus—and I could end up on my back. Though it can also, if I'm sitting down, be half agreeable—like a happy, late-summer, Saturday-evening zizz, when you've had a tumbler of cold Stoli and the Yanks are on TV. In my bed table I have pages of corrective exercise diagrams to redress these episodes. My “attack” on the lawn just whooshed in and whooshed out, like a bat flitting past a window at dusk. One knows these moments, of course, to be warnings.

“Okay. Sure. You bet you can,” I almost shouted this, trying to make myself not seem demented. Ms. Pines looked at me uncertainly, possibly stifling the urge to ask, “Are you okay?” (No more grievous words can be spoken in the modern world.) “Come with me,” I said, still too loud, and grappled her plump arm the way an octogenarian would. We lurched off toward my stoop steps, which were snow covered
and perilous. “Watch your step here,” I said, as much to myself as to her.

“This is very kind of you,” Ms. Pines said almost inaudibly, coming along in my grip. “I hope it's not an inconvenience . . .”

“It's
not
an inconvenience,” I said. “It's nothing at all. Su casa es mi casa . . .” I said the reverse of what I meant. It's not that unusual anymore.

T
HE BIG
LG,
WHICH
I'
D LEFT ON IN THE LIVING
room when I'd gone for my blind-reading, was in full ESPN cry when I opened the front door, the sound jacked way up. On the screen a beefy, barrel-shaped man in camo gear—face smudged with self-eliminating paint, and seated in a camo'd wheelchair—was just at that moment squeezing off, from an enormously-scoped, lethally-short-barreled black rifle propped on some kind of dousing stick, a terrible bullet aimed in the direction of a gigantic bull elk, possibly two thousand yards away across a pristine, echoing Valhalla-like mountainscape.