The Lay of the Land (35 page)

I might’ve gone crazy right then. I should’ve let her mount the stairs (I heard the guest room floorboards squeezing), waited for her to get her shoes shucked and herself plopped wearily onto the cold counterpane, then roared upstairs, proclaiming and defaming, vilifying and contumelating, snatching knobs off doors, kicking table legs to splinters, cracking mirrors with my voice—laying down the law as I saw it and as it should be and as it served and protected. Let everybody on Poincinet Road and up the seaboard and all the ships at sea know that I’d sniffed out what was being served and wasn’t having it and neither was anybody else inside my walls. One party left alone to his heartless devices, in his own heartless living room, while another heartless party skulks away to dreamland to revise fate and providence, ought to produce some ornate effects. No fucking way, José. This shit doesn’t wash. My way or the highway. Irish (or Scots) need not apply. Members only. Don’t even think of parking here.

But I didn’t. And why I didn’t was: I felt secure. Even though I could feel something approaching, like those elephants who feel the stealthy footfalls of those Pygmy spear toters far across savannas and flooded rivers. I felt at liberty to take an interest, to put on the white labcoat of objective investigator, be Sally’s partner with a magnifying glass, curious to find out what these old bones, relics and potsherds of lost love had to tell. These are the very moments, of course, when large decisions get decided. Great literature routinely skips them in favor of seismic shifts, hysterical laughter and worlds cracking open, and in that way does us all a grave disservice.

What I did while Sally slept in the guest room was make myself a fresh Salty Dog, open a can of cocktail peanuts and eat half of them, since bluefish at Neptune’s Daily Catch had become a dead letter. I switched off the lights, sat a while in the leather director’s chair, hunkered forward over my knees in the chilly living room and watched phosphorescent water lap the moonlit alabaster beach till way past high tide. Then I went upstairs to my home office and read the
Asbury Press
—stories about Elián González being pre-enrolled at Yale, a plan to make postmodern sculpture out of Y2K preventative gear and place it on the statehouse lawn in Trenton, a CIA warning about a planned attack on our shores by Iran, and a lawsuit over a Circuit City in Bradley Beach being turned down by the local planning board—with the headline reading
HOW’S THE DOWNTICK AFFECTING HOLIDAY SHOPPING
?

I rechecked my rental inventory (Memorial Day was three weeks away). I took note that the NJ Real Estate
Cold Call
reported four million of our citizens were working, while only 4.1 percent of our population was not—the longest economic boom in our history (now giving hissing sounds around the edges). Finally, I went back down, turned on the TV, watched the Nets lose to the Pistons and went to sleep on the couch in my clothes.

This isn’t to suggest that Wally’s re-emergence hadn’t caught my notice and didn’t burn my ass and cause me to think that discomforting, messy, troublesome readjustments wouldn’t need to take place, and soon. Readjustments requiring Wally being declared un-dead, requiring divorcing, estate re-planning and updated survivorship provisos, all while recriminations cut the air like steak knives, and all lasting a long time and raking everybody’s patience, politeness and complex sense of themselves over the hot coals like spare ribs. That was going to happen. I may also have felt vulnerable to the accusation of marital johnny-come-lately-ism. Though I’d have never met Sally Caldwell, never married her (I might still have romanced her), had it not been that Wally was gone—we all thought—for good.

What I, in fact, felt was: on my guard—but safe. The way you’d feel if crime statistics spiked in your neighborhood but you’d just rescued a two-hundred-pound Rottweiler from the shelter, who saw you as his only friend, whereas the wide world was his enemy.

Sally’s and my marriage seemed as contingency-proof as we could construct it, using the human materials we’re all equipped with. The other thing about second marriages—unlike first ones, which require only hot impulse and drag-strip hormones—is that they need good reasons to exist, reasons you’re smart to pore over and get straight well beforehand. Sally and I both conducted independent self-inquiries back when I was still in Haddam, and each made a clear decision that marriage—to each other—promised more than anything else we could think of that would probably make us both happy, and that neither of us harbored a single misgiving that wasn’t appropriate to life anyway (illnesses—we’d share; death—we’d expect; depression—we’d treat), and that any more time spent in deciding was time we could spend having the time of our lives. Which as far as I’m concerned—and in fact I know that Sally felt the same—we did.

Which is to say we practiced the sweet legerdemain of adulthood shared. We formally renounced our unmarried personalities. We generalized the past in behalf of a sleek second-act mentality that stressed the leading edge of life to be all life was. We acknowledged that strong feelings were superior to original happiness, and promised never to ask the other if she or he really, really, really loved him or her, in the faith that affinity was love, and we had affinity. We stressed nuance and advocated that however we seemed was how we were. We declared we were good in bed, and that lack of intimacy was usually self-imposed. We kept our kids at a wary but (at least in my case) positive distance. We de-emphasized becoming in behalf of being. We permanently renounced melancholy and nostalgia. We performed intentionally pointless acts like flying to Moline or Flint and back the same day because we were “archaeologists.” We ate Thanksgiving and Xmas dinners at named rest stops on the Turnpike. We considered buying a pet refuge in Nyack, a B&B in New Hampshire.

In other words, we put in practice what the great novelist said about marriage (though he never quite had the genome for it himself). “If I should ever marry,” he wrote, “I should pretend to think just a little better of life than I do.” In Sally’s case and mine, we thought a
lot
better of life than we ever imagined we could. In the simplest terms, we really, really loved each other and didn’t do a lot of looking right or left—which, of course, is the first principle of the Permanent Period.

Because today is November 22nd and not last May, and I have cancer and Sally is this morning far away on the Isle of Mull, I am able to telescope events to make our decade-long happy union seem all a matter of clammy reasons and practicalities, as though a life lived with another was just a matter of twin isolation booths in an old fifties quiz show; and also to make everything that happened seem inevitable and to have come about because Sally was unhappy with me and with us. But not one ounce of that would be true, as gloomy as events became, and as given as I am to self-pity and to doubting I was
ever
more than semi-adequate in bed, and that by selling houses I never lived up to my potential (I might’ve been a lawyer).

No, no, no, no and no again.

We
were
happy. There was enough complex warp and woof in life to make a sweater as big as the fucking ocean. We lived. Together.

“But she couldn’t have been
so
happy if she left, could she?” said the little pointy-nose, squirrel-tooth, bubble-coifed grief counselor I sadly visited up in Long Branch just because I happened to drive by and saw her shingle one early June afternoon. She was used to advising the tearful, bewildered, abandoned wives of Fort Dix combat noncoms who’d married Thai bar girls and never come home. She wanted to offer easy solutions that led to feelings of self-affirmation and quick divorces. Sugar. Dr. Sugar. She was divorced herself.

But that’s not true, I told her. People don’t always leave because they’re unhappy, like they do in shitty romance novels written by lonely New England housewives or in supermarket tabloids or on TV. You could say it’s my fatal flaw to believe this, and to believe that Wally’s return to life, and Sally leaving with him, wasn’t the craziest, worst goddamn thing in the fucking world and didn’t spell the end of love forever. Yet that’s what I believed and still do. Sally could decide
later
that she’d been unhappy. But since she left, the two polite postcards I’ve received have made no mention of divorce or of not loving me, and that’s what I’m choosing to understand.

W
hen Sally came down later that night and found me asleep on the couch beside the can of Planters with the TV playing
The Third Man
(the scene where Joseph Cotten gets bitten by the parrot), she wasn’t unhappy with me—though she certainly wasn’t happy. I understood she’d just come unexpectedly face-to-face with
big contingency
—the thing we’d schemed against and almost beaten, and probably the only contingency that could’ve risen to eye level and stared us down: the re-enlivening of Wally. And she didn’t know what to do about it—though I did.

All marriages—all everythings—tote around contingencies whether we acknowledge them or don’t. In all things good and giddy, there’s always one measly eventuality no one’s thought about, or hasn’t thought about in so long it almost doesn’t exist. Only it does. Which is the one potentially fatal chink in the body armor of intimacy, to the unconditional this ’n that, to the sacred vows, the pledging of troths, to the forever
anythings.
And that is: There’s a back door
somewhere
to every deal, and there a draft can enter. All promises to be in love and “true to you forever” are premised on the iron contingency (unlikely or otherwise) that says, Unless, of course, I fall in love “forever” with someone else. This is true even if we don’t like it, which means it isn’t cynical to think, but also means that someone else—someone we love and who we’d rather have
not
know it—is as likely to know it as we are. Which acknowledgment may finally be as close to absolute intimacy as any of us can stand. Anything closer to the absolute than this is either death or as good as death. And death’s where I draw the line. Realtors, of course, know all this better than anyone, since there’s a silent Wally Caldwell in every deal, right down to the act of sale (which is like death) and sometimes even beyond it. In every agreement to buy or sell, there’s also the proviso, acknowledged or not, that says “unless, of course, I don’t want to anymore,” or “that is, unless I change my mind,” or “assuming my yoga instructor doesn’t advise against it.” Again, the hallowed concept of character was invented to seal off these contingencies. But in this wan Millennial election year, are we really going to say that this concept is worth a nickel or a nacho? Or, for that matter, ever was?

S
ally stood at the darkened thermal glass window that gave upon the lightless Atlantic. She’d slept in her clothes, too, and was barefoot and had a green L.L. Bean blanket around her shoulders in addition to the French sweater. I’d opened the door to the deck, and inside was fifty degrees. She’d turned off
The Third Man.
I came awake studying her inky back without realizing it was her inky back, or that it was even her—wondering if I was hallucinating or was it an optical trick of waking in darkness, or had a stranger or a ghost (I actually thought of my son Ralph) entered my house for shelter and hadn’t noticed me snoozing. I realized it was Sally only when I thought of Wally and of the despondency his renewed life might promise me.

“Do you feel a little better?” I wanted to let her know I was here still among the living and we’d been having a conversation earlier that I considered to be still going on.

“No.” Hers was a mournful, husky, elderly-seeming voice. She pinched her Bean’s blanket around her shoulders and coughed. “I feel terrible. But I feel exhilarated, too. My stomach’s got butterflies and knots at the same time. Isn’t that peculiar?”

“No, I wouldn’t say that was necessarily so peculiar.” I was trying my white investigator’s labcoat on for size.

“A part of me wants to feel like my life’s a total ruin and a fuck-up, that there’s a right way to do things and I’ve made a disaster out of it. That’s how it feels.” She wasn’t facing me. I didn’t really feel like I was talking to
her.
But if not to her, then to who?

“That’s not true,” I said. I could understand, of course, why she might feel that way. “You didn’t do anything wrong. You just flew to Chicago.”

“There’s no sense to spool everything back to sources, but I might’ve been a better wife to Wally.”

“You’re a good wife. You’re a good wife to
me.
” And then I didn’t say this, but thought it: And fuck Wally. He’s an asshole. I’ll gladly have him big-K killed and his body Hoffa’d out for birdseed. “What do you feel exhilarated about?” I said instead. Mr. Empathy.

“I’m not sure.” She flashed a look around, her blond hair catching light from somewhere, her face appearing tired and marked with shadowy lines from too-sound sleep and the fatigue of travel.

“Well,” I said, “exhilaration doesn’t hurt anything. Maybe you were glad to see him. You always wondered where he went.” I put a single cocktail peanut into my dry mouth and crunched it down. She turned back to the cold window, which was probably making her cold. “What’s he going to do now,” I said, “have himself re-incarnated, or whatever you do?”

“It’s pretty simple.”

“I’ll keep that in mind. What about the being-married-to-you part? Does he get to do that again? Or do I get you as salvage?”

“You get me as salvage.” She turned and walked slowly toward me where I sat staring up at her, slightly dazzled, as if she
was
the ghost I’d mistook her for. Her little limp was pronounced because she was beat. She sat on the couch and leaned into me so I could smell the sweated, unwashed dankness of her hair. She put her hand limply on my knee and sighed as if she’d been holding her breath and didn’t realize it till now. Her coarse blanket prickled through my shirt. “He’d like to meet you,” she said. “Or maybe I want him to meet you.”

“Absolutely,” I said, and could identify a privileged sarcasm. “We’ll invite some people over. Maybe I’ll interest him in a summer rental.”