The Lay of the Land (31 page)

“Sure. Good. Okay.” He goes reaching in his trousers for his keys. “Have a happy Thanksgiving.” He puts the accent on the
giving,
not on the
thanks
as we longer-term Americans do.

“Okay.” I sound and feel vapid.

“Do you explode fireworks?” His car lights flash on by themselves.

“Different holiday,” I say. “This is just eating and football.”

“I can’t always keep things straight.” He looks at me inside my cold cockpit and seems delighted. A minor holiday miscue lets him feel momentarily less American (in spite of his lapel-pin flag) and makes his other errors, failures and uncertainties feel more forgivable, just parts of those things that can’t be helped. It’s not a wrong way to feel—less responsible for everything. Mike closes the door, taps the glass with his pinkie ring and gives me a silly, grinning half bow with a thumbs-up, to which I involuntarily (and ridiculously) give him a half bow back, which delights him even more and into another thumbs-up but no bow. I am the hollow, echoing vessel between the two of us now. I have my patience and forbearance for my ride home, but as this long day of events comes to its close, I have little more to show.

Part 2

7

At 3:00 a.m., I’m suddenly awake, which is not unusual these days. A late-night call to the toilet, or else something from the day ahead or the day past, abruptly breaking through the tent of sleep to invade my brain and set my heart to beating fast. Sleep’s a gossamer thing for over-fifties, even women. Normally, I can breathe deep and slow, adjust my hearing to the hiss of the sea, project my mind into the oceany dark and am asleep without realizing I’m not awake. Though when that doesn’t avail—and sometimes it doesn’t—I seek repose by editing my list of prospective pallbearers, noting a crucial addition or deletion, depending on my mood, followed by a review of who I intend to leave what to when the day comes, then reviewing all the cars I’ve owned, restaurants I’ve eaten in and hotels I’ve slept in during my fifty-five years of ordinary life. And if none of these performs, I inventory all the acceptable ways of committing suicide (without scaring the shit out of myself—all cancer patients do this). And if nothing else works—sometimes that happens, too—I file through the names of every woman I ever made love to in my entire life (surprisingly more than I’d have thought), at which point sleep comes in half a minute, since I’m not really very interested, whereas with the others, I sort of am. Clarissa has told me that when sleep eludes her, she recites a South-Sea Fijian mantra, which goes: “The shark is not your demon, but the final resting place of your soul.” This I’d find disturbing, so that if it ever did put me to sleep, it would give me a bad dream, which would then wake me up and I’d be stuck till morning.

My room now is cold and nearly lightless but for the red numerals on the clock, the ocean sighing toward daylight, still hours on. I’ve been dreaming I rescued a stranger from the sea outside my house and have been declared a hero (a sure sign of
needing
rescue). I awoke to hear the sound of my own name whispered in the night air.

“Frank-ee,” I hear, “Frank-ee.” My heart’s racing like Daytona, my fingers and arms up to my shoulder webby and immobilized with slowed blood flow and dormancy. Normally, I maintain the recommended Dead Crusader position—flat on my back, feet together, wrists crossed on my chest as though a sword is in hand. But I’m surprisingly on my stomach and may possibly have been swimming in the sheets. My neck aches from my Bob Butts tussle. I’ve popped a sweat like an athlete on a jog. “Frank-ee.” Then I hear boisterous laughing. “Haw, haw, haw.” A door slamming.
Splat.

When I arrived home last night from Haddam, a sports car, a shiny, pale blue, underslung Austin-Healey 1000, sat beside Sally’s LeBaron convertible in the driveway, its motor warm (I checked). Green-numeral
LIVE FREE OR DIE
license plates. A red Gore sticker was half torn off its back bumper. Later, I climbed the stairs to my bedroom and heard Clarissa’s radio, low and soft, tuned to the all-night jazz station in Philadelphia—Arthur Lyman playing “Jungle Flute” on a piano. A bottle lip clinked against a glass rim, a hushed man’s (not a very young man’s) voice was saying, humorously, “Not so bad. I wouldn’t say. Not so bad.” Silence opened as the two took in my footfalls and my door squeaking and a cough I felt required to cough, if only to say, Yes, things’re fine. Fine, fine. Things’re all fine. Then another tinkle-clink, Clarissa’s languorous laugh, the word
father
casually spoken in a low but not too low voice, and then silence.

But now the door splat outside the house. My name whispered, then “Haw, haw, haw.” Clearly, it’s my neighbors.

Next door on Poincinet Road, eighteen feet from my south wall, my immediate neighbors are the Feensters, Nick and Drilla. I sold them their house in ’97. Nick is a former Bridgeport firefighter who became a millionaire recycling old cathode-ray tubes, and then to his shock won the Connecticut lottery. Not the big one. But the big-enough one. He and Drilla had been weekenders in Sea-Clift, plus two set-aside weeks in August, consigning to me their pink, white-trimmed Florida-style bungalow on Bimini Street to rent for a fortune, May to October, which is our season. But when the big money rolled in, they sold the pink bungalow, Nick quit work, they pulled up stakes in Bridgeport and let me put them into #5 Poincinet Road—a modern, white-painted, many-faceted, architect’s dream/nightmare with metal-banistered miradors, copper roof, decks for every station of the sun, lofty, mirrored triple-panes open on the sea, imported blue Spanish tile flooring (heated), intercoms and TVs in the water closets, in-wall vacuums and sound system, solar panels, a burglar system that rings in Langley, built-in pecky cypress everythings, even a vintage belted Excalibur that the prior owners, a gay banking couple with an adopted child who couldn’t stand the damp, just threw in for the million eight, full-boat, as a housewarming present. (Nick sold it for a mint.)

The Feensters moved down, eager beavers, on New Year’s Day, ’98, ready to take up their fine new life. Only, their sojourn in Sea-Clift has turned out to be far from a happy one. I frankly believe if they’d stayed in Bridgeport, if Nick had stayed connected to the cathode-ray business, if Drilla had stayed working in the parts department at Housatonic Ford (where they loved her), if maybe they’d bought a transitional house in Noank and kept their rental here, practiced gradualism, not moved the whole gestalt in one swoop to Sea-Clift, where they didn’t know anyone, had nothing to do, weren’t adept at making new connections and, in fact, openly suspected everyone of hating them because of their ridiculous luck, then they might’ve been happier than a typical couple in the Witness Protection Program—which is how they seem.

Their Sea-Clift life seemed to go careening off the rails the instant they arrived. Our beach road, which contains only five houses, once contained twenty and stretched for a mile north along the beach, each large footprint facing the sea from behind a sandy, oat-grass hillock nature had placed in the ocean’s way. We Poincinet home owners—three other residents, plus me (excluding the Feensters)—all understand that we hold our ground on the continent’s fragile margin at nature’s sufferance. Indeed, the reason there are now only five of us is that the previous fifteen “cottages”—grandiloquent old gabled and turreted Queen Annes, rococo Stick Styles, rounded Romanesque Revivals—were blown to shit and smithereens by Poseidon’s wrath and are now gone without a trace. Hurricane Gloria, as recently as 1985, finished the last one. Beach erosion, shoreline scouring, tectonic shifts, global warming, ozone deterioration and normal w&t have rendered all us “survivors” nothing more than solemn, clear-headed custodians to the splendid, transitory essence of everything. The town fathers prudently codified this view by passing a no-exceptions-ever restriction against new construction down our road, grandfathering our newer, better-anchored residences, and requiring repairs and even normal upkeep be both non-expansive and subject to stern permit regulation. In other words, none of this, like none of us, is going to last here. We made our deal with the elements when we closed our deal with the bank.

Except the Feensters didn’t, and don’t, see things that way. They tried, their first summer, to change the road’s name to Bridgeport Road, have it age-restricted and gated from the south end, where we all drive in. When that failed—at a tense planning-board meeting with me and other residents opposing—they tried to close access to the beach farther up, where the old cottages once sat in a regal row. Public use, they argued, deprived them of full enjoyment and drove values down (hilarious, since Adolf Eichmann could own a beach house down here and prices would still soar). This was all hooted down by the surfer community, the surf-casting community, the bait-shop owners and the metal-detector people. (We all again opposed.) Nick Feenster grew infuriated, hired a lawyer from Trenton to test the town’s right to regulate, arguing on constitutional grounds. And when this failed, he stopped speaking to the neighbors and specifically to me and put up signs on his road frontage that said
DON’T EVEN THINK OF TURNING AROUND IN THIS DRIVEWAY. KEEP OUT
!
WE TOW
!
BELIEVE IT
!
PRIVATE PROPERTY
!!!
BEACH CLOSED DUE TO DANGEROUS RIPTIDE. BEWARE OF PIT BULL
! They also erected an expensive picket-topped wooden fence between their house and mine and installed motion-sensitive crime lights, both of which the town made them take down. Generally, the Feensters came to seem to us neighbors like the famous family that can’t be made happy by great good luck. Not your worst-nightmare neighbor (a techno-reggae band or an evangelical Baptist church would be worse), but a bad real estate outcome, given that signs were positive at first. And especially for me was it a bad outcome, because while not wanting recipe swapping, drill-bit borrowing or cross-property-line chin-music razz-ma-tazz, I would still enjoy the occasional shared cocktail at sundown, a frank but cordial six-sentence exchange of political views as the paper’s collected at dawn or a noncommittal deck-to-deck wave as the sun turns the sea to sequined fires, filling the heart with the assurance that we’re not experiencing life’s wonders
entirely
solo.

Instead, zilch.

My misdelivered mail (Mayo bills and DMV documents) all gets tossed in the trash. Only scowls are offered. No apologies are extended when their car alarm whangs off at 2:00 p.m. and ruins my post-procedure nap. There’s no heads-up when a roof tile blows loose and causes a behind-the-wall leak while I’m out in Rochester. Not even a “Howzitgoin?” on my return last August, when I wasn’t feeling so hot. Twice, Nick actually set up a skeet thrower on his deck and shot clay pigeons that flew (I thought) dangerously close to my bedroom window. (I called the cops.)

At one point a year ago, I asked one of my competitors, in strict confidence, to make a cold call to the Feensters, representing a nonexistent, high-roller, all-cash client, to find out if Nick might take the money and go the hell back to Bridgeport, where he belongs. The colleague—a nice, elderly ex-Carmelite nun who’s hard to shock—said Nick stormed at her, “Did that asshole Bascombe put you up to this? Why don’t you go fuck yourself,” then bammed the phone down.

A couple of us up the road have discussed the mystery of what we think of as the “Toxic Feensters,” standing out on sand-swept Poincinet on warm afternoons through the fall. My neighbors are a discredited presidential historian retired from Rutgers, who admitted fudging insignificant quotes in his book about Millard Fillmore and the Know-Nothing Party of 1856, but who sued and won enough to live out his years in style. (College lawyers are never any good.) There’s also a strapping, bulgy-armed, khaki-suited petroleum engineer of about my age, from Oklahoma, Terry Farlow, a bachelor who works in Kazakhstan in “oil exploration,” comes home every twenty-eight days, then returns to Aktumsyk, where he lives in an air-conditioned geodesic dome, eats three-star meals flown in from France and sees all the latest movies courtesy of our government. (I guarantee you’re never neighbors with people like this in Haddam.) Our third neighbor is Mr. Oshi, a middle-aged Japanese banker I’ve actually never talked to, who works at Sumitomo in Gotham, departs every morning at three in a black limousine and never otherwise leaves his house once he’s in it.

We’re an unlikely mix of genetic materials, life modalities and history. Though all of us understand we’ve tumbled down onto this slice of New Jersey’s pretty part like dice cast with eyes shut. Our sense of belonging and fitting in, of making a claim and settling down is at best ephemeral. Though being ephemeral gives us pleasure, relieves us of stodgy house-holder officialdom and renders us free to be our own most current selves. No one would be shocked, for instance, to see a big blue-and-white United Van Lines truck back down the road and for any or all of us to pack it in without explanation. We’d think briefly on life’s transience, but then we’d be glad. Someone new and possibly different and possibly even interesting could be heading our way.

None of us can say we understand the unhappy Feensters. And as we’ve stood evenings out on the sandy road, we’ve stared uncomprehending down Poincinet at their showy white house marred by warning signs about towing and pit bulls and dangerous but fallacious riptides, their twin aqua-and-white ’56 Corvettes in the driveway, where they can be admired by people the Feensters don’t want to let drive past. Everything that’s theirs is always locked up tight as a bank. Nick and Drilla go on beach power walks every day at three, rain, cold or whatever, yellow Walkmen clamped on their hard heads, contrasting Lycra outer garments catching the sun’s glow, fists churning like boot-camp trainees, eyes fixed straight up the beach. Never a word, kind or otherwise, to anyone.

Arthur Glück, the defamed, stoop-shouldered ex-Rutgers prof, believes it’s a Connecticut thing (he’s a Wesleyan grad). Everyone up there, he says, is accustomed to bad community behavior (he cites Greenwich), plus the Feensters aren’t educated. Terry Farlow, the big Irishman from Oklahoma, said his petroleum-industry experience taught him that conspicuous new wealth unaccompanied by any sense of personal accomplishment (salvaging cathode-ray tubes not qualifying as accomplishment) often unhinges even good people, wrecks their value system, leaves them miserable and turns them into assholes. The one thing it never seems to do, he said, is make them generous, compassionate and forgiving.