The Lay of the Land (37 page)

Clarissa struggled onto her feet like a kid at school after recess. She dusted off the seat of her pants and gave her hair a shake. It would’ve been a perfect day for a flight to Flint. Maybe by cocktail hour all would be settled, Wally packed off in another yellow taxi and happy to be, life resumable back at the Salty Dog stage, where I’d departed it a few days before.

“Is Sally a second child?” We were still standing in the middle of the road, as though expecting something. I was taking pleasure in the flashing yellow light of the town’s front-loader, a half mile up the beach.

“She had a brother who died.”

“I’m trying to be sympathetic to her. Second children have a hard time getting what they need. I’m a second child.”

“You’re a third child. You had a brother who died when you were little.” Clarissa has scant memory of her dead brother and no patience with trying to feel what she doesn’t really feel. Me, I feel like I’m Ralph’s earthly ombudsman and facilitator to the living. It is my secret self. I give (mostly) silent witness.

“That’s right.” She was briefly pensive then, in deference to “my loss,” which was her loss but different. “If Mom came back from the dead, would you invite her over for a visit?”

“Your mother’s not dead,” I said irritably. “She’s living in Haddam.”

“Divorce is kind of like death, though, isn’t it? Three moves equal a death. A divorce equals probably three-quarters of a death.”

“In some ways. It never ends.” And how would this day rate, I wondered. Six-sixteenths of a death? About the same for Sally. And who cared about The Wall? Morbid dimness had always complicated his life, landing him over and over in strange situations, and not knowing what to do about it.

“I’m just trying to distract you,” Clarissa said. “And humor you.” She rehooked her arm through mine and bumped me with her girlathlete’s shoulder. She smelled of shampoo and clean sweat. The way you’d want your daughter to smell. “Maybe you should keep a diary.”

“I’ll commit suicide before I keep a fucking diary. Diaries are for weaklings and old queer professors. Which I’m not.”

“Okay,” she said. She was never sensitive to insensitive language. We were starting to stroll up Poincinet Road, past the fronts of my neighbors’ houses—all similarly handsome board-and-batten edifices with green hydrangeas ready to sprout their showy blooms. Ahead, where our newer settlement stopped and where the old mansions had been blown away, there was open, sparsely populated beach and grass and sea. I could see a tiny ant in the hazy distance. It was Cookie. Poot, the Egyptian dog, had found her and was trotting along.

“I thought life isn’t supposed to be like this when you love someone and they love you,” I said to Clarissa, more speculative than I felt. “That intelligence won’t get you very far. That’s your father’s perspective.”

“I knew that.” She kicked road sand with her rubied toenail. Already things with her and Cookie were wearing through. I couldn’t have known, but she could. “What do you think’s gonna happen?”

“With Sally and Wally?” I gave myself a moment to wonder, letting sea breeze make my ears feel wiggly, my view of the beach grown purposefully wide and generous. Such views are supposedly good for the optic muscle, and the soul. Something seemed to be riding on what I said, as if I was the cause of whatever happened to us all. “I can guess,” I said breezily, “but I tend to guess bad outcomes. Most horses don’t win races. Most dogs finally bite you.” I smiled. I felt foolish in the situation I was in.

“Let’s hear it anyway,” Clarissa said. “It’s good to pre-vision things.”

“Well. I think Wally’ll stay around a few days. I’ll forget exactly why I don’t like him. We’ll talk a lot about real estate and spruce trees. We’ll be like conventioneers in town from Iowa. Men always do that. Sally’ll get sick of us. But then by accident, I’ll walk into a room where they are, and they’ll immediately shut up some highly personal conversation. Maybe I’ll catch them kissing and order Wally out of the house. After which, Sally’ll be miserable and tell me she has to go live with him.”

Cookie was waving to us from out on the beach, waving a stick that Poot expected her to throw. I waved back.

Clarissa shook her head, scratched into her thick hair and looked at me with annoyance, her pretty mouth-corners fattened in disapproval. “Do you really believe that?”

“It’s what anybody’d think. It’s what Ann Landers would tell you—if she isn’t dead.”

“You’re crazy-hazy,” she said and punched me too hard on the shoulder, as if a slug in the arm would cure me. “You don’t know women very well, which isn’t news, I guess.”

Cookie’s clear, happy voice was already talking over the distance, telling something she’d seen out in the ocean—a shark’s fin, a dolphin’s tail, a whale’s geyser—something the dog had gone after, trusting his Egyptian ancestry against impossible odds. “I don’t believe it,” Cookie said gaily. “You guys. You should’ve seen it. I wish you could’ve seen.”

I wouldn’t have been wrong about Sally, even not knowing women very well, and never having said I did. I’d always been happy to know and like them one at a time. But about some things, even men can’t be wrong.

W
ally was in my house in Sea-Clift for five uncomfortable days. I tried to go about my diurnal duties, spending time early-to-late in the office where I had summer renters arriving, plumbers and carpenters and cleaning crews and yard-maintenance personnel to dispatch and lightly supervise. I sold a house on the bay side of Sea-Clift, took a bid on but failed to sell another. Mike sold two rental houses. He and I drove to Bay Head to inspect an old rococo movie house, the Rivoli Shore—where Houdini had made himself disappear in 1910. Maybe we wanted to buy it, find somebody to run it, go into limited partnership with a local Amvets group, using state preservation money and turn it into a World War II museum. We passed.

Normally, I’d have been home for lunch, but in grudging deference to what was going on in my house, I ate glutinous woodsman’s casserole one day, Welsh rarebit another, ham and green beans a third at the Commodore’s table at the Yacht Club, where I’m a non-boating member. Two times, I ate at Neptune’s Daily Catch, where I had the calzone, flirted with the waitress, then spent the afternoon at my desk, burping and thinking philosophically about acid reflux and how it eats potholes in your throat. I explained to Mike that Sally was having an “old relative” to visit, though another time I said an “old friend,” which he noticed, so he knew something was weird.

Each evening I went home, tired and ready for a renewing cocktail, supper and an early-to-bed. Wally was most times in the living room reading
Newsweek,
or on the deck with my binoculars, or in the kitchen loading up a dagwood or outside having a disapproving look at the arborvitae and hydrangeas or staring out at the shorebirds. Sally was almost never in sight when Wally was, leaving the impression that whatever they were carrying on between them during the day and my absence—hugging, face slapping, laughing that ended in tears—was all pretty trying, and I wouldn’t like seeing her face then, and in any case she needed to recover from it.

Toward Wally—who’d taken to wearing gray leisure-attire leather shorts that exposed his pasty bulldog calves above thick black ankle brogues and another rugby shirt, this time with
Mackays
printed on front—toward Wally, I dealt entirely in “So, okay, howzit goin’?” “Did you get to do some walking?” “Are they feeding you enough in here?” “Thought of going for a swim?” And to me, Wally—large, sour earth-smelling, full-cheeked, with a tired, timid smile I disliked—toward me, Wally dealt in “Yep.” “Super.” “Oh yeah, hiked up to the burger palace.” “Great spread here, looverly, looverly.”

I certainly didn’t know what the hell any of us were doing—though who would? If you’d told me the two of them never so much as spoke, or went for polka lessons, or read the
I Ching
together, or shot heroin, I’d have had to believe it. Was it, I wondered, that everything was just too awkward, too revealing, too anxious-making, too upsetting, too embarrassing, too intimidating, too intrusive or just too private to exhibit in front of me—the husband, the patient householder, the rate-payer, the sandwich-bread buyer? And also now a stranger?

Sally made dinner for us all three on night two. A favorite—lamb chops, Cajun tomatoes and creamed pearl onions. This was not the worst dinner I ever attended, although conceivably it was the worst in my own house. Sally was nervous and too smiley, her limp worsening notably. She cooked the lamb chops too long, which made her mad at me. Wally said his was “astounding” and ate like a horse. I had three stout martinis and observed the dinner was “perfect, if not astounding.” And, as I’d predicted, I forgot more or less who Wally was, let myself act like he was one or the other of Sally’s cousins, talked at length about the history of Sea-Clift, how it had been founded in the twenties by upstart Philadelphia real estate profiteers as a summer resort for middle-middle citizens from the City of Brotherly Love, how its basic populace and value system—Italians with moderate Democratic leanings—hadn’t changed since the early days, except in the nineties, when well-heeled Gothamites with Republican preferences who couldn’t afford Bridgehampton or Spring Lake started buying up land from the first settler’s ancestors, who pretty quick wised up and started holding on to things. “Okay. Sure, sure,” Wally said, mouth full of whatever, though he also said “thas brillian” a few times when nothing was brilliant, which made me hate him worse and made Sally get up and go to bed without saying good night.

In bed each night with Sally returned—though asleep when her head hit the pillow—I lay awake and listened to Wally’s human noises across in “his” room. He played the radio—not loud—tuned to an all-news station that occasionally made him chuckle. He took long, forceful pisses into his toilet to let off the lager he drank at dinner. He produced a cannonade of burps, followed by a word of demure apology to no one: “Oh, goodness, who let that go?” He walked around heavily in his sock feet, yawned in a high-pitched keening sound that only a man used to living alone ever makes. He did some sort of brief grunting calisthenics, presumably on the floor, then plopped into bed and set up an amazing lion’s den of snarfling-snoring that forced me to flatten my head between pillows, so that I woke up in the morning with my eyes smarting, my neck sore and both hands numb as death.

During the five days of Wally’s visit, I twice asked Sally how things were going. The first time—this was two seconds before she fell into sleep, leaving me in bed listening to stertorous Wally—she said, “Fine. I’m glad I’m doing this. You’re magnificent to put up with it. I’m sorry I’m cranky….”
Zzzzzzz.
Magnificent. She had never before referred to me as magnificent, even in my best early days.

The other time I asked, we were seated across the circular glass-topped breakfast table. Wally was still upstairs sawing logs. I was heading off to the Realty-Wise office. It was day three. We hadn’t said much about anything in the daylight. To freshen the air, I said, “You’re not going to leave me for Wally, are you?” I gave her a big smirking grin and stood up, napkin in hand. To which she answered, looking up, plainly dismayed, “I don’t think so.” Then she stared out at the ocean, on which a white boat full of day-fishermen sat anchored a quarter mile offshore, their short poles bristling off one side, their boat tipped, all happy anglers, hearts set on a flounder or a shark. They were probably Japanese. Something she noticed when she saw them may have offered solace.

But “I don’t think so”? No grateful smile, no wink, no rum mouth pulled to signal no worries, no way, no dice. “I don’t think so” was not an answer Ann Landers would’ve considered insignificant. “Dear Franky in the Garden State, I’d lock up the silverware if I were you, boy-o. You’ve got a rough intruder in your midst. You need to do some night-time sentry duty on your marriage bed. Condition red, Fred.”

W
ally gave no evidence of thinking himself a rough intruder or a devious conniver after my happiness. In spite of his strange splintered, half North-Shore-fatty, half earnest-blinking-Scots-gardener persona (a veteran stage actor playing Falstaff with an Alabama accent), Wally did his seeming best to spend his days in a manner that did least harm. He always smiled when he saw me. He occasionally wanted to talk about beach erosion. He advised me to put more aluminum sulfate on my hydrangeas to make the color last. Otherwise he stayed out of sight much of the time. And I now believe, though no one’s told me, that Sally had actually forced him to come: to suffer penance, to show him that abandonment had worked out well for her, to embarrass the shit out of him, to confuse him, to make him miss her miserably and make me seem his superior—plus darker reasons I assume are involved in everything most of us do and that there’s no use thinking about.

But what else was she supposed to do? How else to address past and loss? Was there an approved mechanism for redressing such an affront besides blunt instinct? What other kind of synergy reconciles a loss so great—and so weird? It’s true I might’ve approached it differently. But sometimes you just have to wing it.

Which explains my own odd conduct, my fatal empathy (I guess), and even Wally’s attempts to be stolidly, unpretentiously present, subjecting himself to whatever penitent paces Sally put him through in the daylight, essaying to be cordial, taking interest in the flora and fauna and in me at cocktail hour, eating and drinking his scuppers over, burping and snorting like a draft horse in his room at night, then making an effort to get his sleep in anticipation of the next day’s trials.

He and I never talked about “the absence” (which Sally said was his name for being gone for nearly thirty years) or anything related to their kids, his parents, his other life and lives (though of course he and Sally might’ve). We never talked about when he might be leaving or how he was experiencing life in my house. Never talked about the future—his or Sally’s or mine. We never talked about the presidential election, since that had a root system that could lead to sensitive subjects—morality, dubious ethics, uncertain outcomes and also plainly bad outcomes. I wanted to keep it clear that he was never for one instant welcome in my house, and that I pervasively did not like him. I don’t know what he thought or how he truly felt, only how he
was
in his conduct, which wasn’t that bad and, in fact, evidenced a small, unformed nobility, although heavy-bellied and gooberish. I did my best. And maybe he did his. I picked up some interesting tips about soil salinity and its effect on the flowering properties of seashore flora, learned some naturopathic strategies for combating the Asian Long-Horned Beetle. Wally heard my theories for combating sticker shock and enhancing curb appeal, got some insider dope about the second-home market and how it’s always wedded to Wall Street. There was a moment when I even thought I
did
remember him from eons ago. But that moment vanished when I thought of him together with Sally on the beach while I was alone eating tough, frozen woodsman’s casserole at the Yacht Club. In the truest sense, we didn’t get anywhere with each other because we didn’t want to. Men generally are better at this kind of edgy, pointless armistice than women. It’s genetic and relates to our hoary history of mortal combat, and to knowing that most of life doesn’t usually rise to that level of gravity but still is important. I’m not sure it’s to our credit.