The Lay of the Land (14 page)

With all these provisos and safety nets and firewalls, you might expect most callers to be elderly shut-ins or toxic cranks who’ve savaged all their friends and now need a new audience. Or else cancer victims who’ve gotten sick of their families (it happens) and just need somebody new to stare intensely into the face of. And some are. But mostly they’re just average souls who need you to go out to their garage to see if their grandfather’s hand-carved cherry partners’ desk has been stolen by their nephew, the way it was foretold in a nightmare. Or who want you to write a dunning letter to the water department about the three-hour stoppage in June—while the main line was being repaired—demanding an adjustment in the next month’s bill.

There are also prosperous, affluent, young-middle-aged, 24/7 type A’s. These people are often the least at ease and typically want something completely banal and easy—to tell you a joke they think is hilarious but can’t remember to tell anybody they know because they’re too busy. Or women who want to yak about their kids for thirty minutes but can’t because it’s incorrect—in their set—to do that to their friends. Or men who ask me what color Escalade looks good against the exterior paint scheme of their new beach house in Brielle. But on three separate occasions—one woman and two men—the question I answered was (based on just two minutes’ acquaintance) did I think she or he was an asshole. In each case, I said I definitely didn’t think so. I’ve begun to wonder, since then, if this isn’t the underlying theme of most all my Sponsorees’ questions (especially the rich ones), since it’s the thing we all want to know, that causes most of our deflected worries and that we fear may be true but find impossible to get a frank opinion about from the world at large. Am I good? Am I bad? Or am I somewhere lost in the foggy middle?

I wouldn’t ordinarily have thought that I’d get within two football fields of anything like Sponsoring, since I’m not a natural joiner, inquirer or divulger. Yet I know the difficulty of making new friends—which isn’t that the world’s not full of interesting, available new people. It’s that the past gets so congested with lived life that anyone in their third quartile—which includes me—is already far enough along the road that making a friend like you could when you were twenty-five involves so much brain-rending and boring catching up that it simply isn’t worth the effort. You see and hear people vainly doing it every day—yakkedy, yakkedy, yakkedy: “That reminds me of our family’s trips to Pensacola in 1955.” “That reminds me of what my first wife used to complain about.” “That reminds me of my son getting smacked in the eye with a baseball.” “That reminds me of a dog we had that got run over in front of the house.” Yakkedy, yakkedy and more goddamn yakkedy, until the ground quakes beneath us all.

So—unless sex or sports is the topic, or it’s your own children—when you meet someone who might be a legitimate friend candidate, the natural impulse is to start fading back to avoid all the yakkedy-yak, so that you fade and fade, until you can’t see him or her anymore, and couldn’t bear to anyway. With the result that attraction quickly becomes avoidance. In this way, the leading edge of your life—what you did this morning after breakfast, who called you on the phone and woke you up from your nap, what the roofing guy said about your ice-dam flashings—
that becomes all your life is
: whatever you’re doing, saying, thinking, planning
right then.
Which leaves whatever you’re recollecting, brooding about, whoever it is you’ve loved for years but still need to get your head screwed on straight about—in other words, the important things in life—all of
that
’s left unattended and in need of expression.

The Permanent Period tries to reconcile these irreconcilables in your favor by making the congested, entangling past fade to beige, and the present brighten with its present-ness. This is the very deep water my daughter, Clarissa, is at present wading through and knows it: how to keep afloat in the populous hazardous mainstream (the yakkedy-yak and worse) without drowning; versus being pleasantly safe in your own little eddy. It’s what my more affluent Sponsorees want to know when they make me listen to their unfunny jokes or crave to know if they’re good people or not: Am I doing reasonably well under testing circumstances? (Thinking you’re good can give you courage.) It also happens to be precisely the dilemma my son Paul has settled in his own favor in the embedded, miniaturized mainstream life of Kanzcity and Hallmark. He may be much smarter than I know.

Depth may be all that Sponsoring really lacks—with sincerity as its mainstay. Most people already feel in-deep-and-dense enough with life involvement, which may be their very problem: The voice is strangled by too much woolly experience ever to make it out and be heard. I know I’ve felt that way more in this fateful year than ever before, so that sometimes I think I could use a Sponsor visit myself. (This very fact may make me a natural Sponsor, since just like being a decent realtor, you have to at least harbor the suspicion that you have a lot in common with
everybody,
even if you don’t want to be their friend.)

My other reason for getting involved in Sponsoring is that Sponsoring carries with it a rare optimism that says some things can actually work out and puts a premium on inching beyond your limits, while rendering Sponsorees less risk-averse on a regular daily basis and less like those oldsters in their blue New Yorkers who won’t make a mistake for fear of bad results that’re coming anyway.

And of course the final reason I’m a Sponsor is that I have cancer. Contrary to the TV ads showing cancer victims staring dolefully out though lacy-curtained windows at empty playgrounds, or sitting alone on the sidelines while the rest of the non-cancerous family stages a barbecue or a boating adventure on Lake Wapanooki or gets into clog dancing or Whiffle ball, cancer (little-d death, after all), in fact, makes you a lot more interested in other people’s woes, with a view to helping with improvements. Getting out on the short end of the branch leaves you (has me, anyway)
more
interested in life—any life—not less. Since it makes the life you’re precariously living, and that may be headed for the precipice, feel fuller, dearer, more worthy of living—just the way you always hoped would happen when you thought you were well.

Other people, in fact—if you keep the numbers small—are not always hell.

The last thing I’ll say, as I pull up in front at #24 Bondurant Court, residence of a certain Mrs. Purcell, where I’m soon to be inside Sponsoring a better outcome to things, is that even though other people are worth helping and life can be fuller, etc., etc., Sponsoring has never actually produced a greater sense of connectedness in me, and probably not in others—the storied lashing-together-of-boats we’re all supposed to crave and weep salty tears at night for the lack of. It could happen. But the truth is, I feel connected enough already. And Sponsoring is not about connectedness anyway. It’s about being consoled by connection’s opposite. A little connectedness, in fact, goes a long way, no matter what the professional lonelies of the world say. We might all do with a little less of it.

N
umber 24, where lights are on inside, is built in the solid, monied, happy family-home-as-refuge style, houses Haddam boasts in fulsome supply, owing to its staunch Dutch-Quaker beginnings and to a brief nineteenth-century craving for ornamental English-German prettiness. Vernacular, this is sometimes called—neat, symmetrical, gray-stucco, red-doored Georgians with slate roofs, four shuttered front windows upstairs and down, a small but fancy wedding-cake entry, curved fanlight with formal sidelights, dentil trim and squared-off (expensive) privet hedges bolstering the front. Intimations of heterodoxy, but nothing truly eye-catching. Thirty-five hundred square feet, not counting the basement and four baths. A million-two, if you bought it this very afternoon—complete with the platinum BMW M3 sitting in the side drive—though with the risk that a surveilling neighbor will come along before you sign the papers and snake it away for a million-two-five so he can sell it to his former law partner’s ex-wife.

Bondurant Court is actually a cul-de-sac off Rosedale Road. Three other residences, two of them certifiable Georgian stately homes, lurk deep within bosky, heavily treed lawns on which many original willows and elms remain. The third home-like structure is a pale-gray flat-roofed, windowless concrete oddity with a Roman-bath floor plan built by a Princeton architect for a twenty-five-year-old dot-com celebrity who no one speaks to for architectural reasons. Children aren’t allowed to go there on Halloween or caroling at Christmas. Rumors are out that the owner’s moved back to Malibu. I’m surprised not to see a Lauren-Schwindell sign out front, since one of my former colleagues sold him the lot.

Number 24—the great neighbor-houses’ little sister—would be a great buy for a new divorcée with dough, or for a newly-wed lawyer couple or a discreet gay M.D. with a Gotham practice who needs a getaway. If I could’ve sold easy houses like this, instead of overpriced mop closets you couldn’t fart in without the whole block smelling it, I might’ve stayed.

And like clockwork, as I stride up the flagstones toward the brass-knockered red door—two shiny brass carriage lamps turning on in unison—I experience the anti-Permanent Period williwaws lifting off of me and the exhilaration of whatever’s about to open up here streaming into my limbs and veins like a physic. One could easily wonder, of course, about a Mr. Definitely Wrong being set to spring out from the other side of the heavy door—John Wayne Gacy in clown gear, waiting to eat me with sauerkraut. What would the termite guy or the Culligan Man do, faced as they are with the same imponderables on a daily basis? Just use the old noodle. Stay alert for the obviously weird, attend your senses, drink and eat nothing, identify exits. I’ve, in fact, never really feared anything worse than being bored to bits. Plus, if they’re gonna, they’re gonna—like the little town in Georgia the tornado ripped a hole through when everybody was at church on Sunday, believing such things didn’t happen there.

Everything happens everywhere. Look at the fucking election.

Ding-dong. Ding-dong. Ding-dong.

A melodious belling. I turn and re-survey the cul-de-sac—wet, cold, bestilled, its other ponderous residences all bearing lawn signs:
WARNING. THIS HOUSE IS PATROLLED.
The big Georgians’ many leaded windows glow through the trees with antique light, as though lit by torches. No humans or animals are in view. A police car or ambulance
wee-up, wee-ups
in the distance. Cold air hisses with the rain’s departure. A crow calls from a spruce, then a second, but nothing’s in sight.

Noises become audible within. A female throat is cleared, a chain lock slid down its track. The brass peephole darkens with an interior eye. A dead bolt’s conclusively thrown. I rise a quarter inch onto my toes.

“Just a moment, pu-lease.” A rilling, pleasant voice in which, do I detect, the undertones of Dixie? I hope not.

The heavy door opens back. A smiling woman stands in its space. This is the best part of Sponsoring—the relief of finally arriving to someone’s rescue.

But I sense: Here is not a complete stranger. Though from out on the bristly welcome mat, the back of my head feeling a breeze flood past into the homey-feeling house, I can’t instantly supply coordinates. My brow feels thick. My mouth is half-open, beginning to smile. I peer through the angled door opening at Mrs. Purcell.

It couldn’t be a worse opening gambit, of course, for a Sponsor to stare simian-like at the Sponsoree, who may already be fearful the visitor will be a snorting crotch-clutcher escapee from a private hospital, who’ll leave her trussed up in the maid’s closet while he makes off with her underthings. The risk for doing Sponsor work in Haddam is always, of course, that I might know my Sponsoree: a face, a history, a colorful story that defeats disinterest and ruins everything. I should’ve been more prudent.

Except maybe not. Some days, I see whole crowds of people who look exactly like other people I know but who’re, in fact, total strangers. It’s my age and age’s great infirmity: overaccumulation—the same reason I don’t make friends anymore. Sally always said this was a grave sign, that I was spiritually afraid of the unknown—unlike herself, who left me for her dead husband. Though I thought—and still do—that it was actually a positive sign. By thinking I recognized strangers I, in fact,
didn’t
recognize, I was actually reaching out to the unknown, making the world my familiar. No doubt this is why I’ve sold many, many houses that no one else wanted.

“Are you Mr. Fruank?” Dixie’s definitely alight in the voice: bright, sweet and rising at the end to make everything a happy question; vowels that make
you
sound like
yew, handle
like
handull.
Central Virginia’s my guess.

“Hi. Yeah. I’m Frank.” I extend an affirming hand with a friendlier smile. I’m not a leering crotch-clutcher or a dampened-panty faddist. Sponsors omit last names—which is simpler when you leave.

“Well, Ah’m Marguerite Purcell, Mr. Fruank. Why don’t you come in out of this
b-r-r-r
we’re havin’.” Marguerite Purcell, who’s dressed in a two-piece suit that must be raw silk of the rarest French-rose hue, with matching Gucci flats, steps back in welcome—the most cordial-confident of graceful hostesses, clearly accustomed to all kinds, high to low, entering her private home on every imaginable occasion. Haddam has always absorbed a small population of dispirited, old-monied southerners who can’t stand the South yet can only bear the company of one another in deracinated enclaves like Haddam, Newport and Northeast Harbor. You catch glimpses of their murmuring Town Cars swaying processionally out gated driveways, headed to the Homestead for golf-and-bridge weekends with other white-shoed W&L grads, or turning north to Naskeag to spend August with Grandma Ni-Ni on Eggemoggin Reach—all of them iron-kneed Republicans who want us out of the UN, nigras off the curbs and back in the fields, the Suez mined, and who think the country missed its chance by not choosing ole Strom back in ’48. Hostesses like Marguerite Purcell never have problems money can’t solve. So what am I doing here?