The Lay of the Land (64 page)

“Love-based attachments,” Mike says indistinctly enough that I don’t hear the next thing he says—lost in the breeze—something about Sheela and the kids in the Amboys, the discarded part of his history the business biographers will gloss over in the cover stories once he and Benivalle break through to developer’s paradise: “Little Big Man: Tiny Tibetan Talks Turkey to Tantalize Trenders, Trenton to Tenafly.” But who could a new squeeze be—suitable for a forty-something Himalayan in the lower echelons of the realty trade? And in New Jersey? An arranged union, like Bagosh, with a Filipina daughter grown too long in the tooth for her own kind? A monied Paraguayan military widow seeking a young “protégé”? A Tibetan teen flown in like a pizza, on a pledge he’ll care for her always? I wonder what the Dalai Lama says in
The Road to the Open Heart
about monogamy. Probably not much, given his own curriculum vitae.

“So, is that all the news that’s fit to tell?” From my cold merry-go-round, I can address Mike at eye-level. His plaid cap has drifted down an inch and off to the side, so he looks once again like a pint-size mobster.

“No. I want to buy you out.” His now invisible eyes go grim as death. Then again his mouth cracks a big smile, as if what he’s just said was absolutely hilarious. Which it isn’t.

My own mouth opens to speak, but no words are ready.

“I’ve tamed myself,” Mike says, jubilant. A lone passing duck quacks one quack high in the misty sky, as if all the creatures agree, yes, he’s tamed himself.

“From what?” I manage. “I didn’t know you needed taming. I thought you were rounding up your courage.”

“They’re the same.” He, as usual, gets instantly giddy at talk like this—word riddles. “There’s some unhappiness never to be as rich as J. Paul Getty.” Another of Mike’s earthly deities. “Filthy rich,” he adds buoyantly. “But I can make money, too. Helping people this way can make money.”

He means helping them out of their cash. There’s a reason these people don’t get cancer in their countries. And there’s a reason we do. We make things too complicated.

“I believe you want to think about this proposal,” he says. His tough little hands are clasped priest-like. He likes being the presenter of a proposal.
Believe, want, think
—these are words used in new ways.

“I don’t want to sell you my business,” I say. “I like my business. You go develop McMansions for proctologists.”

“Yes,” he says, meaning no. “But if I make a good business proposal and pay you a lot of money, you can transfer ownership, and everything will stay the same.”

“Everything’s already the same. It ain’t broke. Due to old-fashioned competence. Mine.”

“I knew you’d say this,” Mike says happily. For the first time since I’ve known him, he’s talking like the departed Mr. Bagosh, with whom he shares, after all, a stronger regional bond than he shares with me. “I think we should agree, though. I’ve thought about this a great deal. It’ll give you time to travel.”

Travel is code for my compromised health status, which Mike is officially sensitive to, and means in Mike’s enlightened view—Buddhist crappolio—that I “need” to ready myself for the final conjugation by taking a voyage on the
Queen Mary
or the
Love Boat.
He’s “helping” me, in other words, by helping me out of business. “I’ve got time to travel,” I say. “Why don’t we not talk about this anymore. Okay?” I attempt a faint smile that feels unwelcome to my cold cheeks. Munificence is gone. I don’t like being strong-armed or felt sorry for.

“Yes! Okay!” Mike exults. “This is just what I thought. I’m satisfied.” It’s all about him, his confidence level, his satisfaction. I’m as good as out of work, a cat in need of herding.

“Me, too. Good. But I’m not going to sell you Realty-Wise.” I give my sore knees a try at prizing me up off the butt-froze planks. I hold onto the curved hang-on bar that wants to glide away and spill me over. Mike semi-casually secures a light grip on my sweatshirt sleeve. But I’m up and feel fine. The bay breeze cools my neck. My eyes feel like they’ve both just freshly opened all the way. Down Bay Drive, the boy-girl surveyors are walking side-by-side toward a yellow pickup parked farther along the curve, where houses are. One holds the collapsed tripod, the other the striped pole.

“So, you’re not going into business with what’s his name?” I say gruffly.

Mike dusts his little hands together as if dirt was on them. He’s pretending we didn’t have the conversation we just had, and that he feels good about something else. It’s possible he’ll never bring this subject up again. Intention is the same as action to these guys. “No,” he says, pseudo-sadly.

“That’s probably smart. I didn’t want to say that before.”

“I think so.” He gives his little Black Watch cap a straightening as we begin walking back to the cars.

Mike is pleased by my rebuff of his unfriendly takeover try. He knows I know it’s nothing more than what I did with old man Barber Featherstone and how the world always works. Plus, he’s smart. He knows he’s succumbed to the little leap into the normal limbo of life. That he’s facing down the big fear of “Is this it?” by agreeing “Yes, this
is.
” He also knows I might sell him Realty-Wise after all, possibly even very soon, and that he can then start video-taping virtual tours, building Web-based rental connections, adding a new Arabic-speaking female associate, change the company name to Own It…TODAY!.com, subscribe to recondite business studies from Michigan State and concentrate more on lifestyle purchasing than essentialist residential clientele. In two to twelve years, when he’ll be my age now, he’ll be farting through silk. One hardly knows how or when or by what subtle mechanics the old values give way to new. It just happens.

T
ommy Benivalle taught me some invaluable—” Mike’s maundering on as we trudge at my slower pace back up Timbuktu. Ahead, his new-values silver Infiniti and my broke-window, old-values, essentialist Suburban sit end to end in front of 118, perched sturdily up on its girders. “Only a fool—” Mike rattles on. I’m not interested. I was his mentor and am now his adversary—which probably mean the same thing, too. I admire him but don’t particularly like him today, or the fresh legions he commands. How much life do I have to accept? Does it all come in one day?

“So, are you putting on a big holiday feed bag with your new squeeze?” I say this just to be rude. We stand mid-street, looking exactly like what we are—a pair of realtors. Mike’s eyes move toward my Suburban. The duct-taped back window may be a worrisome sign that he needs to hurry up with his business proposal, get the deal nailed down before the mental-health boys show up. There
was
the puzzling scene at the August on Tuesday. I could be discovered tomorrow sitting silently in the office, “just thinking.” He could be forced to negotiate with Paul.

“She’s got her big place up in Spring Lake. The kids come. They’re Jewish. It’s a big scene.” Mike nods a sage “not my kind of thing” nod. He’s gone back to talking like a Jerseyite.

But I knew it! A dowager, a late-model divorcée like Marguerite. She’s adopted “little Mike-a-la,” who’s giving her “investment counsel” over and above his unspecified services of a consensual nature. The kids, Jake, a Columbia professor, Ben, a fabric artist on Vinal-haven, and one daughter, Rachel, who lives alone in Montecito and can’t seem to get started. They all keep the zany parent on a frugal budget so she can’t ruin their retirements with her funny enthusiasms. Mike’s “interesting,” a minority, resembles the Dalai Lama—plus, who cares, if he makes “Gram” happy and keeps her away from ballroom dancing. At least he’s not a Mexican.

“Do they let you carve the turkey and serve?” I don’t try to suppress a smirk, which he hates but won’t show. He knows what he’s up to and doesn’t care if I know. It’s business, not a love-based attachment.

“I’ll just drop by late,” he says, and frowns, not at me, but at how he’ll pass the night. He is, as we all are, taking his solaces as they come. “I have the business proposal already written up.” He produces a white Realty-Wise business envelope from his sweater pocket, rolled up with the listing sheets for 118. This he proffers like a summons, bowing slightly. I’m not sure Tibetans even bow. It may be something he picked up. Though I, the defendant, accept it and bow back (which I can’t seem to prevent myself from doing) before folding it and stuffing it in my Levi’s back pocket like junk mail.

“I’ll read this someday. Not today.”

“That’s splendid.” He is elated again. It pleases him to conduct business in the street, in the elements, far from the ancestral cradle. To Mike, this is a sign of progress: the old lessons from the life left behind still viable here in New Jersey.

“Am I going to see you again?” My hand’s on my cold door handle. “I don’t know what you’re doing. I thought you were moving your base of operations over to Mullica Road. You’re a mystery wrapped in a small enigma.”

“Oh, no.” His smile—all intersecting angles—radiates behind his specs. He’s risen onto his little toes again, Horatio Alger-style. “I work for you. Until you work for me. Everything’s the same. I love you. I keep you in my prayers.”

I’m fearful he may hug, kiss, high-five or double-hander me. Two male hugs in one morning is a lot. Men don’t have to do that all the time, even though it doesn’t mean we’re not sensitive. I open the car door and stiffly get myself inside before the inescapable happens. I shut the door and lock it. Mike’s left standing out on Timbuktu in his black sweater with its fake-fur collar and his little Black Watch cap. He’s speaking something. I can hear the buzz of his voice, but not the sense, through the window. I don’t care what he’s saying. It’s not about me. I get the motor started and begin to mouth words he’ll “understand” through the window glass. “Abba-dabba, dabba-dabba, dabba-dabba-dabba, dabba-dabba,” I say, then smile, wave, bow in my car seat. He says something back and looks triumphant. He gives me the thumbs-up sign and nods his head proudly. “Abba dabba, dabba, dabba-dabba,” I say back and smile. He nods his head again, then steps back, effects a small wave, laughs heartily. And that is it. I’m off.

16

A dual sensation—pleasure and enthusiasm—unexpectedly skirls through my middle by the time I reach Ocean Avenue; and alloyed with it is another bracing sensation, from my arms down to my fists, of complete readiness to “take hold.” I actually envision these words—
take hold
—in watery letters like an old eight-ball fortune. And there’s also, simultaneously, a seemingly opposite feeling of
release
—from something. Sometimes we know complex pressures are building and roiling, and can finger exactly what they’re about—a gloomy doctor visit, a big court case before a mean-spirited judge, an IRS audit we wish to God wasn’t happening. And other times, we have to plumb the depths, like seeking a warm seam in a cold pond. Only, this time it’s easy. Full, pleasurable release and bold, invigorating authority both exude from the sudden, simple prospect of handing over the Realty-Wise reins to Mike Mahoney.

At first blush, of course, it’s a heresy. Except, life on the Next Level is only what you invent. And as Mike pointed out two days ago (and I scoffed at), residential real estate’s all about what somebody invented. I could sign the papers right now and be on top of the world. Even if it’s the worst idea in the world and leaves me rudderless, with yawning angst-filled days during which I never get out of my pj’s, it still feels like the right invention now. And now is where I am. (This feels, of course, like a Permanent Period resurrection. But if it is, I don’t care.)

There’s no sign of returning 5-K runners here at the corner, or much mid-day traffic, not even post-race street litter—only the starting line, whitewashed across the north-bound side of the avenue. A black man—the docent at Our Lady—is just now carting Father Ray’s aluminum blessing ladder across the lawn to an arched side doorway. He leans the ladder against the stucco exterior, steps in the door, closes it behind him and does not come out again.

My instinct now is to turn right and get myself home—a better second act with my son, the hoped-for return of my daughter, the crucial call from Sally. The resumption of the day’s best, if unlikely, hopes for itself.

Only another powerful urging directs me not to turn right, but to cross the median and go left, and north, up the peninsula toward Ortley Beach. I know what I’m up to here. I’m empowered by the dual sense of release and take hold, which don’t come often and almost never together, and so must be heeded as if ordained by God.

There are—I admit this at risk to myself, though all men know it’s true and all women know men think it—there
are
ideal women in the world. Sally said it about me in her letter—which means the same is true for how women calculate men. In my view, there’s at least one ideal person for all of us, and probably several. For men, these are the women who make you feel especially smart, that you’re uniquely handsome in a way you yourself always believed you were, who bring out the best in you and, by some generosity or need in themselves, cause
you
to feel generous, clever, intuitive as hell about all sorts of things and successful in the world exactly the way you’d like to be. Pity the man who marries such a woman, since she’ll eventually drive him crazy with undeserved approval and excessive, unwanted validations. Not that I’d know, having married two “challenger” types, who may have loved me but never looked upon me with less than a seasoned eye, and whose basic watchwords to friend and foe alike were, “Well, let’s just see about that. I’m not so sure.” In any case, they both left me flat as a flounder—though Sally may be coming back at this moment.

These ideal women can actually
make
you be smarter than you are, but are finally only suitable for fleeting escapades, for profound and long-running flirtations never acted on, for unexpected driving trips to Boston or after-hours cocktails at shadowy red-booth steak houses like the one Wade Arsenault tried to lure me to yesterday with his Texas-bred, ball-crusher, definitely
not
ideal daughter, Vicki/Ricki, who anybody’d be smart to steer wide of, but who I once unaccountably wanted to marry. These women are also meant for sweetly intended, affectionate one-nighters (two at the max), after which you both manage to stay friends, conduct yourselves even better than before, possibly even “enjoy” each other a time or two every six months or six years, but never consider getting serious about, since everybody knows that serious ruins everything. Marguerite might’ve qualified, but wasn’t truly ideal.

Perfect for
affairs
is what these women are. They almost always know it (even if they’re married). They realize that given the kind of man they find attractive—usually ruminant loners with minimal but quite specific needs—to strive for anything more lasting would mean they’d soon be miserable and hoping to get things over with fast, and so are happy for the escapade and the cocktails and the rib-eye and the one-nighter where everything works out friendly, and then pretty quick to get back in their own beds again, which is where they (and many others) are happiest.

“Enlightened” thought by headshrinkers with their own rich broth of problems has twisted these normal human pleasures and delights into shabby, shameful perversions and boundary violations needing to be drummed out of the species because someone’s always seen as the loser-victim and someone’s definition of wholesome and nurturing doesn’t always get validated. But we all know that’s wrong, whether we have the spirit to admit it or don’t. Women are usually full participants in everything they do (including heading off to Mull), and I’m ready to say that when it comes to wholesome, nurturing and long-lasting, a frank, good-hearted roll in the alfalfa, or something close to it, with an enthusiastic and willing female is about as nurturing and wholesome as I can imagine. And if it doesn’t last a lifetime, what (pray tell me) does, except marriages where both parties are screaming inside to let light in but can’t figure out how to.

The old release-and-take-hold has worked its quickening magic on me and routed me north toward Neptune’s Daily Catch Bistro and (I hope) to Bernice Podmanicsky, who may be my savior for the day just when a savior’s needed. Sally’s call offers some things, but pointedly not others. And she herself authorized a female companion for the day. I’d be a fool to pass on the opportunity, should there be one.

Bernice Podmanicsky, who’s one of the wait-staff at Neptune’s, is my candidate for the aforementioned ideal woman. A lanky, full-lipped, wide-smiling brunette with big feet, a hint of dark facial hair, but oddly delicate hands with shiny pink nails, a proportionate bosom, solid posterior and runway-model ankles (always my weakness once the butt’s accounted for), Bernice would be considered pretty by some standards, though not by all: mouth too big (fine with me); hair taking root a sixteenth of an inch too far down the forehead (ditto); augmented eyebrows (neutral); libidinous chin dimple when she smiles, which is often; fortyish age bracket (I prefer women with adult experience). Altogether, hard not to like. I’ve known Bernice three years, ever since her long-standing love relationship in Burlington, Vermont, blew a tire and she came down to live in Normandy Beach with her sister Myrna, who’s a Mary Kay franchisee. Waitressing was what she’d always done since college at Stevens Point, where she took art (waitressing leaves time for drawing). She is a reader of serious novels and even abstruse philosophical texts, owing to her father, who was a high school guidance counselor in Fond du Lac, and her mother, who’s in her seventies and a serious painter in the style of Georgia O’Keeffe.

I actually like Bernice immensely, though there hasn’t been any but the most casual contact between us over the course of the three years. When Sally was my regular dinner companion, Bernice was gregarious and jokey and impudently friendly to both of us. “Oh, you two again. Somebody’s gonna get the wrong idea about you…. And I guess you’ll have the bluefish rare.” But when Sally left, and I was often alone at a window table with a gin drink, Bernice was more candid and curious and personal and (on occasion) clearly flirtatious—which I was happy about. But mostly she was interested and corroborative and even spontaneously complimentary. “I think it’s odd but completely understandable that a man with your background—writing short stories and writing sports and a good education—would be happy selling houses in New Jersey. That just makes sense to me.” Or “I like it, Frank, that you always order bluefish and pretty much dress the same way every time you come in here. It means you’re sure about the little things, so you can leave yourself open for the big ones.” She smiled so as to show her provocative dimple.

I told her about my Sponsoring activities and she said I seemed, to her experience, unusually kind and sensitive to others’ needs. Once she even said, “I bet you’ve got a big lineup at your door, handsome, now that you’re single again.” (I’ve heard her call other men “handsome” and could care less.) I decided
not
to tell her about the titanium BBs situation, for fear she’d feel sorry for me—I couldn’t see a use for pathos—but also because talking about the BBs can convince me I’ve lost the wherewithal even if I still have the wherefore.

Several times, I’ve stayed late at the Bistro, feeling better about myself and also about Bernice. Sometimes her shift would end and she’d come out from the kitchen in a pea jacket over her pink waitress dress and walk over and say, “So, Franklin”—not my name—“happy trails to you.” But then she’d sit and we’d talk, during which occasions I’d become the funniest, cleverest, the wisest, the most instructive, the most complex, enigmatic and strangely attractive of all men, but also the best, most attentive listener-back that anybody on earth had ever heard of. I’d quote Emerson and Rochefoucauld and Eliot and Einstein, remember incisive, insightful but obscure historical facts that perfectly fitted into our discussions but that I never remembered talking about to anyone else, all the while dredging up show-tune lyrics and Bud & Lou gags and statistics about everything from housing starts in Bergen County to how many salmon pass through the fish ladder up at Bellows Falls in a typical twenty-four-hour period during the spring run. I became, in other words, an ideal man, a man I myself was crazy about and in love with and anybody else would be, too. All because—though I never specifically said so to her—Bernice was herself an ideal woman. Not ideal
per se,
but ideal
per diem,
the only place ideal really makes much difference. I realize as I say all this that my “Bernice experience” and my current willingness to rekindle it represents another small skirmish into the Permanent Period and away from the strict confines of the Next Level. Sometimes, though, you have to seek help where you know you can find it.

On late after-shift evenings, I sometimes would walk outside the Bistro with Bernice onto the warm beach-town sidewalk, when the air was cooling and things were buzzing last summer and, later on, after my procedure, and when most visitors had gone home in September. We’d stand at the curb or walk, not holding hands or anything like that, down to the beach and talk about global warming or Americans’ inexplicable prejudice against the French or President Clinton’s sadly missed opportunities and the losses that won’t ever be recovered. I always had, when I was with Bernice, unusual takes on things, historical perspectives I didn’t even know I possessed, bits of memorized speeches and testimony I’d heard on Public Radio that somehow came back to me in detail and that made me seem as savvy as a diplomat and wise as an oracle, with total recall and flawless sense of context, all of it with a winning ability to make fun of myself, not be stuffy or world-weary, but then at a moment’s notice to be completely ready to change the subject to something she was interested in, or something else I knew more about than anybody in the world.

In all of this rather ordinary time together, Bernice had persistently positive things to say about me: that I was young for my age (without knowing my age, which I guessed she guessed was forty-five), that I led an interesting life now and had a damn good one in front of me, that I was “strangely intense” and intuitive and probably was a handful, but not really a type-A personality, which she knew she didn’t like.

I said about her all the good things that I thought: that she was “a major looker,” that her independent “Fighting Bob” La Follette instincts were precisely what this country needed, that I’d love to see her “work” and had a hunch it would wow me and I’d be drawn to it, implying but not actually saying that
she
wowed me and I was drawn to her (which was sort of true).

Once, Bernice asked me if I’d like to take a drive and smoke some reefer (I declined). And once she said she’d finished a “big nude” just that day and would be interested to know what a guy with my heightened sensibilities and intuition would think about it, since it was “pretty abstract” (I assumed it was a self-portrait and burned to see it). But I declined that, too. I understood that how we felt, standing out on the curb or at the edge of the beach, where the street came to an end and the twinkling shank of the warm evening opened out like a pathway of stars to where the old ferris wheel turned like a bracelet of jewels down at the Sea-Clift Fun Pier—I understood that how we felt was good and might conceivably get better if we had a Sambuca or two and a couple of bong hits at her place and took a look at her big nude. But then pretty quickly who we really were would assert itself, and it wouldn’t feel good for long and we’d end up looking back at our moment on the curb, before anything happened, with slightly painful nostalgia—the way emigrants are said to feel when they leave home, thrilled to set sail for the new land, where life promises riches but where hardships await, and in the end old concerns are only transported to a new venue, where they (we) go back to worrying the same as before. When you’re young, like my daughter, Clarissa, and maybe even my son, you don’t think like that. You think that all it takes is to get free of one box and into a bigger one out in the mainstream. Change the water in your bowl and you become a different fish. But that’s not so. No siree, Bob, not a bit. It’s also true that because of the fiery BBs in my prostate, and despite early-morning and even occasionally late-night erectile events giving positive testimony, I wasn’t sure of my performance ratings under new pressures and definitely didn’t want to face another failure when so few things seemed to be going my way.