The Lay of the Land (63 page)

“What’s wrong? Are you all right?” I call out. Though why would he be all right and be howling?

Then out from the right bedroom, where I take it Bagosh is and has hit the floor, a good-size bushy-tailed red fox comes shooting into the hallway. “Ahhh,” Bagosh is wailing, “my-Gawd, my-Gawd.” The fox stops, paws splayed, and fixes its eyes on me, hugely blocking the path of escape. Its eyes are dark bullets aimed at my forehead. Though it doesn’t pause long, but turns and re-enters the room where Bagosh is, provoking another death wail (possibly he’s being ripped into now and will have to undergo painful rabies shots). Immediately, the fox comes rocketing back out the bedroom door, claws scrabbling powerfully to gain purchase. For an instant, its spectral, riotous eyes consider the other tiny bedroom—the kids’ room. But without another moment’s indecision, the fox fires off straight toward me, so that I stagger back and to the left and pitch through the arched doorway into the living room and right off my feet onto the filthy green shag, where I land just as the fox explodes after me through the door, claws out and scrabbling right across my block-M chest, so that I catch a gulp of its feral rank asshole as it springs off, straight across to the metal threshold and out into the clean cold air of Timbuktu, where, for all I know, Mike may believe the fox is me, translated by this house of spirits into my next incarnation on earth. Frank Fox.

15

When the Bagoshes’ taillamps have made the turn up onto Ocean Avenue and disappeared ceremoniously into the post noon-time, holiday-emptied streets, Mike and I have ourselves a side-by-side amble down to the bay shore, malodorous and sudsed from last night’s storm.

Sally will have called by now. Paul will have answered and could possibly have blurted things I don’t want her to know (my illness, for one). Though Clarissa will be home, and the two of them can have a sister-brother parsing talk about my “condition,” my upcoming Mayo trip, etc., etc. Possibly Clarissa could also talk to Sally, fill in some gaps, welcome her back on my behalf, no recriminations required. As is often the case, one view is that life is as fucked up as ground chuck and not worth fooling with. But there’s another view available to most of us even without becoming a Buddhist: that with an adjustment or two (Sally moving home to me, for instance), life could perhaps be fine again. No need for a miracle cancer cure. No need for Ann Dykstra to vaporize off the earth. No need for Clarissa to marry a former-NFL-great-become-pediatric-oncologist. No need for Paul to dedicate himself to scaling corporate Hallmark (new wardrobe concepts, a computerized prosthesis for his sugar pie). I can’t say if this view is the soul of acceptance. But in all important ways, it is the Next Level for me and I am in it and still taking breath regularly.

Mike and I trek stonily down toward the bay’s ragged edge. He, it seems, has a proposition for me. The not-good outcome of the Bagosh deal, he believes, only underscores the wisdom and importance of his plan, as well as the “time being right” for me. There’s a bravura opportunity for “everybody,” should I take him seriously, which I do. I’m always more at home with chance and transition than with the steady course, since the steady course leads quickly, I’ve found, to the rim of the earth.

The Bagoshes, not surprisingly, couldn’t get away from us fast enough. Bagosh emerged uninjured from his ordeal—a small tear in his linens, a scuffed wrist (no chance of a bite), his hair disfigured. But the sight of the fleeing fox incited the big poodle, Crackers, to a primordial in-car carnivore rage, so that the kids got deep scratches, broke their computer games and eventually had to pile out on the street, letting Crackers give pursuit out of sight. (He came back on his own.) Mrs. Bagosh, if that’s who the Madonna-faced woman was, didn’t leave the front seat, never lowered her window, did nothing more than say nothing to anyone, including her husband, a silence lasting up to Ocean Avenue, I suspected, but no longer.

Bagosh himself couldn’t have been nicer to me or to Mike. Mike couldn’t have been nicer. And neither could I, since I was responsible for everything. Bagosh said he would “definitely” buy the house on Monday. He and his family, however, had Thanksgiving reservations in Cape May that night, planned to travel up to Bivalve to see the snow geese wintering ground, then on to Greenwich, Hancocks Bridge and around to the Walt Whitman house in Camden before driving home weary but happy on Sunday, back to Buffalo, where there’s now ten feet of snow. He’d be calling. The story made him happy to tell. And even though Mike knew Bagosh had at that moment a choker wad of greenbacks in his shorts pocket and could’ve counted out big bills while I executed a quit-claim deed on my Suburban hood, he seemed jolly about money he would never see. He actually took off his sports-car cap, revealed his bristly dome, rubbed his scalp and joked with Bagosh about what a dog’s breakfast the Bills were making of the regular season, but that with luck a new O.J. would come along in the draft—a possibility that made them both laugh like Polacks. They are both Americans and acted like nothing else.

When the Bagoshes were all loaded in and maneuvering the big Lincoln around on Timbuktu, Mike stood beside me, hands thrust in his sweater pockets. “Wrong views result in a lack of protection, with no place to take refuge,” he announced solemnly. I took this to mean I’d fucked up, but it didn’t matter, because he had more significant things in mind.

“I loused this up,” I said. “I apologize.”

“It’s good to
almost
sell a house,” he said, already upbeat. The Bagosh children were waving at us from inside their warm, plush car (unquestionably at the command of their father). The little girl—wispy, sloe-eyed, with a decorative red dot on her forehead—held up Crackers’ paw so he could wave, too. Mike and I both waved and smiled our good-byes to dog, money and all as the Lincoln, its left taillight blinking at the intersection, rumbled out of sight forever.

“I’d rather have their money than their friendship,” I said. I noticed that I’d ripped my 501s somewhere in the house. My second fall of the day, third in two days. A general slippage. “Did he say what he thought he wanted the house for?”

“He didn’t know,” Mike said. “The idea just appealed to him. It’s why I didn’t want him to go inside.” He looked at me to say I should’ve known that, then smiled a thin, indicting smile meant not to be condescending.

“I’m an essentialist in things,” I said. “I believe humans buy houses to live in them, or so other people will.”

Mike didn’t attempt a reply, just looked up at the frosted clouds quickly forming. I cast a speculative eye up at the unsold green house, raised and allowing the glimpse of fenced back yards on Bimini Street. Possibly Thanksgiving wasn’t really a great day to sell a house. On a day to summon one’s blessings and try to believe in them, it might be common sense not to risk what you’re sure you have.

L
ast night’s storm has widened the bay’s perimeter and shoved water up onto Bay Drive, where it exudes swampy-sweet odors of challenged septics. Yellow fluff rides in the weeds where the black-billed swans have foraged. This part of the bay shore has remained undeveloped due to seventies-era open-space ordinances mandating jungle gyms, slides and merry-go-rounds for younger, child-bearing families in the neighborhood. These apparatuses are here but now disused and grown dilapidated on the skimpy beach. A billboard announcing
WE CAN DO IT IF WE TRY
has been erected on the bay’s sandy-muddy shore. I’m not sure what this message means. Possibly save the bay. Or possibly that condos, apartments and shops will soon be here where there’s now a pleasant vista across the water, and that the families with kids will have to do their own math or else take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut.

The two swans have moved off among the Yacht Club buoys. Bits of white Styrofoam, yellow burger wrappers and a faded red beach ball have washed in among the weeds with last night’s blow. A gentleman is working alone on his black-hulled thirty-footer, readying it for winter storage. His white-helmeted kid plays with a cat on the dock plankings. Thanksgiving now and here feels evasive, the day at pains to seem festive. It’s cold and damp. The usual band of bad air along the far, cluttered Toms River horizon has been washed away in the night. I have noted in our walk down that I am not keen to walk as fast as Mike, whose little green loafers step out lively as he talks in his businessy voice. I’m hoping not to forget his name in mid-announcement of his developer plans. I want to be upbeat and comradely—even if I don’t feel that way. We can, after all, always set aside our real feelings—which usually don’t amount to a hill of beans anyway, and may not even be genuine—and let ourselves be spontaneous and bounteous with fast-flowing vigor, just as when we’re at our certifiable best. This is the part of acceptance I welcome, since it has down-the-line consolations.

On our walk down, Mike has said matter-of-factly that the last two nights have been a “great sufferance” to him, that he dislikes dilemmas (the middle way should preclude them), hates causing me “uncertainty,” is uncomfortable with ambition (though he’s been practicing it for a coon’s age), but has had to concede these “pressures” are a part of modern life (here in America, apparently not in Tibet) and there’s no escaping them (unless of course you can get stinking rich, after which you have no real problems). I was curious if he was fingering a pack of Marlboros in his sweater pocket and would’ve preferred to be puffing away Dick Widmark-style as he spieled all this out to me.

I’ve begun to enjoy the lake-like bay, the clanking halyards of the remaining Yacht Club boats, the rain-cleared vista across to the populous mainland, even the distant sight of the newer homes down the shore, from the go-go nineties. There’s nothing wrong with development if the right people do the developing. At the gritty water’s edge, with the wind huskier, I can see that the
WE CAN DO IT
billboard has a tiny Domus Isle Realty logo at its bottom corner, an artist’s conception of a distant desert atoll with a lone red palm silhouetted. Unfortunately, though maybe only in my view, the desert-island motif calls to mind Eniwetok, not some South Sea snug-away where you’d like to buy or build your dream house, but in any case has nothing at all to do with Sea-Clift, New Jersey. I’ve met the owners, two former sports-TV execs from Gotham, a husband and wife team, and by most accounts, they’re perfectly nice and probably honest.

Farther down Bay Drive, where it approaches the first of the newer nineties homes, a two-person survey crew has set up—a man with a tall zebra stake and a girl bent over a svelte-looking digital transit on a tripod. Something’s already afoot, out ahead of public approval and opinion. These two are working where a sign designates
CABLE CROSSING.
I can make out the tiny red digitalized numerals in the transit box, glowing at me each time the young surveyor girl stands up to take a sight line.

There’s absolutely no reason to drag out Mike’s epic new-vistas announcement and spend all day out here where it’s cold and gusty. I’m ready to get on board, whatever it is. I regret our last collaboration hasn’t been a money-maker. Averages of showings-to-sales run 12 percent, and we came close on an unpromising day. I want to get home in case Sally hasn’t called. But because Mike’s a Buddhist, he can only proceed the way he wants to proceed and not the way anybody else does, which means he often has to be humored.

In my rising spirit, I take a cold seat on the low barn-red kids’ merry-go-round and give it a rounding push with my toe, so that Mike has to come where I am to speak his piece.

“So’re we gonna jump into the McMansion business with our new pecorino
cumpari
?” I say, and give another spin around. The wrecked old contraption squalls with a metal-on-metal
skweeeee-er
that unfortunately nullifies my spirited opening. I’m succeeding in feeling munificent, but can’t be sure how long it’ll last.

“Tom’s a real good guy,” Mike says gravely.

I can’t hear that well as the merry-go-round takes my gaze past the surveyors, across the bay, past the nineties housing, then back to Mike, who’s stationed himself legs apart, arms folded like an umpire. His brow’s furrowed and he looks frustrated that I won’t be still.

“Yep, yep, yep,” I say. “He seemed pretty solid—for a bozo developer.” Benivalle, however, also once knew my precious son Ralph—whose death I have now accepted—and thus occupies a special place in my heart’s history book. But I don’t want to piss Mike off after I’ve queered the Bagosh deal like an amateur, so I stop the merry-go-round in front of him and offer up a general smile of business forgiveness for quitting on me when I’m not feeling my best.

“I think now’s the right time to make a change,” Mike says, seeming to widen his eyes to indicate resolution, his pupils large behind his glasses. “I think it’s time to get serious about real estate, Frank. Bush is going to win Florida, I’m sure. We’ll see a turn-around by fiscal ’01.” I don’t know why Mike has to sear his little self-important gaze into my brain just to tell me what he’s going to do.

“You could be right.” I try to look serious back. I’d like to take another spin on the old go-round, but my ass is frozen on the boards and what I need to do is stand up. Only then I’d tower over Mike and ruin his little valedictory. I just want him to get on with it. I’ve got places to go, telephone calls to answer, children to be driven crazy by.

“People need to stay the course, Frank,” he says. “If it isn’t broken, don’t break it, you know. Stick with old-fashioned competence. Thanksgiving’s a good time for this.” Mike uncorks a giant happy-Asian smile, as if I’d just said something I haven’t said. He’s, of course, kidnapping Thanksgiving for his own selfish commercial lusts, the same as Filene’s. “I’ve got a new person in my life,” Mike says.

“A new what?” I suspected it.

“A new lady friend.” He rises fractionally on the soles of his shoes. “You’ll like her.”

“What about your wife?” And your two kids at their laptops? Don’t they get to make the transition, too? What about the soulful, clear-sighted immigrant life that delivered you to me? And old-fashioned competence not breaking what isn’t broken? “I thought you two were reconciling.”

“No.” Mike tries to look tragic, but not too. He doesn’t want to go where what he’s said gets all blurred up with what he means. A true Republican.

But it’s okay with me. I don’t want to go there either.