I luckily enough got into the picture when Sally read my bio and reminiscence about ersatz Wally in the Pine Boughs, saw I was a realtor in central New Jersey and tracked me down, thinking I might help her find bigger space for her business.
I came over one Saturday morning almost a year ago, and got a look at her — angularly pretty, frosted-blond, blue-eyed, tall in the extreme, with long, flashing model’s legs (one an inch shorter than the other from a freak tennis accident, but not an issue) and the occasional habit of looking at you out the corner of her eyes as though most of what you were talking about was mighty damn silly. I took her to lunch at Johnny Matassa’s in Point Pleasant, a lunch that lasted well past dark and moved over subjects far afield of office space — Vietnam, the coming election prospects for the Democrats, the sad state of American theater and elder care, and how lucky we were to have kids who weren’t drug addicts, young litigators-to-be or maladjusted sociopaths (my luck there may be waning). And from there the rest was old hat: the inevitable usual, with a weather eye out for health concerns.
At Lower Squankum I turn off then slide over to NJ 34, which becomes NJ 35, the beach highway, and head into the steamy swarm of 4th of July early-bird traffic, those who so love misery and wall-to-wall car companionship that they’re willing to rise before dawn and drive ten hours from Ohio. (Many of these Buckeye Staters, I notice, are Bush supporters, which makes the holiday spirit seem meanly expropriated.)
Along the beach drag through Bay Head and West Mantoloking, patriotic pennants and American flags are snapping along the curb-side, and down the short streets past the seawall I can see sails tilting and springing at close quarters on a hazy blue-steel sea. Though there’s no actual feel of shimmery patriot fervor, just the everyday summery wrangle of loud Harleys, mopeds, topless Jeeps with jutting surfboards, squeezed in too close to Lincolns and Prowlers with stickers saying TRY BURNING THIS ONE! Here the baked sidewalks are cluttered with itchy, skinny bikini’d teens waiting on line for saltwater taffy and snow cones, while out on the beach the wooden lifeguard stands are occupied by brawny hunks and hunkettes, their arms folded, staring thoughtlessly at the waves. Parking lots are all full; motels, efficiencies and trailer hookups on the landward side have been booked for months, their renter-occupants basking in lawn chairs brought from home, or stretched out reading on skimpy porches bordered by holly shrubs. Others simply stand on old, Thirties shuffleboard pavements, sticks in hand, wondering: Wasn’t this once — summer — a time of inner joy?
Though off to the right the view inland opens behind the town toward the broad reach of cloudy, brackish estuarial veldt, wintry and sprouted with low-tide pussy willows, rose hips and rotting boat husks stuck in the muck; and, overseeing all, farther and across, a great water tower, pink as a primrose, beyond which regimented housing takes up again. Silver Bay this is, its sky fletched with darkened gulls gliding to sea behind the morning’s storm. I pass a lone and leathered biker, standing on the shoulder beside his broken-down chopper just watching, taking it all in across the panoramic estuary, trying, I suppose, to imagine how to get from here to there, where help might be.
And I am then into South Mantoloking and am almost “home.”
I stop along the beach road at a store where LIQUOR is sold, buy two bottles of Round Hill Fumé Blanc ’83, eat a candy bar (my last bite was at six), then walk out onto the windy, salty sidewalk to call for messages, unwilling not to know if the Markhams have resurfaced.
Message one of five, in fact, is Joe Markham, at noon in the full dudgeon of his helpless state. “Yeah. Bascombe? Joe Markham speaking. Gimme a call. Area code 609 259–6834. That’s it.” Clunk. Words like bullets. Perhaps he can wait a bit.
Message two. A cold call. “Right. Mr. Bascombe? My name is Fred Koeppel. Maybe Mr. Blankenship mentioned my name.” (Mr. Who?) “I’m considering putting my house on the market up in Griggstown. I’m sure it’ll go pretty quick. It’s a sellers’ market, so I’m told. Anyway, I’d like to discuss it with you. Maybe let you list it if we can work a fair commission. It’ll sell itself, is my view. It’ll just be paperwork for you. My number is …” A commission, fair or unfair, is 6 %. Click.
Message three. “Joe Markham.” (Basically the same news.) “Yeah. Bascombe. Gimme a call. Area code 609 259–6834.” Clunk. “Oh yeah, it’s one or whatever on Friday.”
Message four. Phyllis Markham. “Hi, Frank. Try to get in touch with us.” Bright as a sprite. “We have some questions. Okay? Sorry to bother you.” Clunk.
Message five. A voice I don’t recognize though briefly imagine to be Larry McLeod: “Look, chump! Ah-mo-ha-tuh-fuck-you-up, unu-stan-where-ahm-cummin-frum? Cause”—more distinct now, as if somebody else was talking—“I’m like sicka yo shit. Got it, chump? Fuckah?” Clunk. We get used to these in the realty biz. The police philosophy is, if they’re calling, they’re harmless. Larry, however, wouldn’t leave such a message no matter how hot under the collar he’d gotten at my thinking I deserve to be paid money for letting him live in my house. Some part of him, I believe, is too dignified.
I’m relieved there’s no call from Ann or Paul, or worse. When Paul was hauled away to juvenile detention by the Essex P.D. and Ann had to go get him out, it was Charley O’Dell who called to say, “Look, Frank, this’ll all parse out right. Just hold steady. We’ll be in touch.” Parse out. Hold steady. WE? I haven’t wanted to hear such niceness again, but been touchy I might have to. Charley, though (obviously at Ann’s request), has since then been mum about Paul’s problems, leaving them for his real parents to hassle over and try to fix.
Charley, of course, owns his own probs: a big, dirty-blond, overweight, bad-tempered, pimply-faced daughter named Ivy (who Paul refers to as IV), a student in an experimental writing program in NYC, who’s currently living with her professor, aged sixty-six (older even than Charley), while writing a novel surgerying her parents’ breakup when she was thirteen, a book that (according to Paul, who’s had parts read to him) boasts as its first lines: “An orgasm, Lulu believed, was like God — something she’d heard was good but didn’t really believe in. Though her father had very different ideas.” In another life I might be sympathetic to Charley, but not in this one.
Sally’s rambling dark-green beach house at the end of narrow Asbury Street is, when I hike up the old concrete seawall steps alongside and attain the beach-level promenade, locked, and she surprisingly gone, though all the side-opening windows upstairs and down are thrown out to catch a breeze. I am still early.
I, for a while, have had my own set of keys, though for a moment I simply stand on the shaded porch (plastic wine sack in hand) and gaze at the quiet, underused stretch of beach, the silent, absolute Atlantic and the gray-blue sky against which more near-in sailboats and Windsurfers joust in the summer haze. Farther out, a dark freighter inches north on the horizon. It is not so far from here that in my distant, postdivorce days I set sail for many a night’s charter cruise with the Divorced Men’s Club, all of us drinking grappa and angling for weakfish off Manasquan, a solemn, hopeful, joyless crew, mostly scattered now, most remarried, two dead, a couple still in town. Back in ’83 we’d come over as a group, using the occasion of a midnight fishing excursion to put an even firmer lock on our complaints and sorrows — important training for the Existence Period, and good practice if your resolve is never to complain about life.