On the beach, beyond the sandy concrete walk, moms under beach umbrellas lie fast asleep on their heavy sides, arms flung over sleeping babies. Secretaries with a half day off to start the long weekend are lying on their bellies, shoulder to shoulder, chatting, winking and smoking cigarettes in their two-pieces. Tiny, stick-figure boys stand bare-chested at the margins of the small surf, shading their eyes as dogs trot by, tanned joggers jog and elderlies in pastel garb stroll behind them in the fractured light. Here is human hum in the barely moving air and surf-sigh, the low scrim of radio notes and water subsiding over words spoken in whispers. Something in it moves me as though to a tear (but not quite); some sensation that I have been here, or nearby, been at dire pains here time-ago and am here now again, sharing the air just as then. Only nothing signifies, nothing gives a nod. The sea closes up, and so does the land.
I am not sure what chokes me up: either the place’s familiarity or its rigid reluctance to act familiar. It is another useful theme and exercise of the Existence Period, and a patent lesson of the realty profession, to cease sanctifying places — houses, beaches, hometowns, a street corner where you once kissed a girl, a parade ground where you marched in line, a courthouse where you secured a divorce on a cloudy day in July but where there is now no sign of you, no mention in the air’s breath that you were there or that you were ever, importantly you, or that you even were. We may feel they ought to, should confer something — sanction, again — because of events that transpired there once; light a warming fire to animate us when we’re well nigh inanimate and sunk. But they don’t. Places never cooperate by revering you back when you need it. In fact, they almost always let you down, as the Markhams found out in Vermont and now New Jersey. Best just to swallow back your tear, get accustomed to the minor sentimentals and shove off to whatever’s next, not whatever was. Place means nothing.
Down the wide, cool center hall I head to the shadowy, high, tin-ceilinged kitchen that smells of garlic, fruit and refrigerator freon, where I unload my wine into the big Sub-Zero. A “Curtain Call” note is stuck on the door: “FB. Go jump in the ocean. See you at 6. Have fun. S.” No words about where she might be, or why it’s necessary to use both the “F” and the “B.” Perhaps another “F” lurks in the wings.
Sally’s house, as I make my way up toward a nap, always reminds me of my own former family pile on Hoving Road — too many big wainscoted downstairs rooms with bulky oak paneling, pocket doors and thick chair rails, too much heavy plaster and a God’s own excess of storage and closet space. Plus murky, mildewy back stairways, floors worn smooth and creaky with use, dented crown moldings, medallions, escutcheons, defunct gas wall fixtures from a bygone era, leaded glass, carved newel posts and the odd nipple button for a bell only servants (like canines) could hear — a house to raise a family in a bygone fashion or retire to if you’ve got the scratch to keep it up.
But for me, Sally’s is a place of peculiar unease on account of its capacity to create a damned unrealistic, even scary, illusion of the future — which is one more reason I couldn’t stand my own, could barely even sleep in it when I got back from France, in spite of high hopes. Suddenly I couldn’t bear its woozy, fusty, weighted clubbiness, its heavy false promise that since the appearance of things can stay the same, life’ll take care of itself too. (I knew better.) This is why I couldn’t wait to get my hands on Ann’s, with its re-habbed everything — clean sheetrock, new, sealed skylights made in Minnesota, polyurethaned floors, thermopanes, level-headed aluminum siding — nothing consecrated by or for all time, only certified as a building serviceable enough to live in for an uncertain while. Sally, though, who’s already as cut off from her past as an amnesia victim, doesn’t see things this way. She is calmer, smarter than I am, less a creature of extremes. Her house, to her, is just a nice old house she sleeps in, a comfortably convincing stage set for a life played out in the foreground, which is a quality she’s perfected and that I find admirable, since it so matches what I would have be my own.
Up the heavy oak stairs, I make straight for the brown-curtained and breezy bedroom on the front of the house. It has become a point of policy with Sally — whether she’s here or in New York with a vanload of Lou Gehrig’s sufferers seeing Carnival—that I have my own space when I show up. (So far there’s been no quibbling about where I sleep once the sun goes down — her room on the back). But this small, eave-shaded, semi-garret overlooking the beach and the end of Asbury Street has been designated mine, though it would otherwise be a spare: brown gingham wallpaper, an antique ceiling fan, a few tasteful but manly grouse-hunting prints, an oak dresser, a double bed with brass rainbow headboard, an armoire converted to a TV closet, a mahogany clotheshorse, all serviced by its own demure small forest-green and oak bathroom — a layout perfect for someone (a man) you don’t know too well but sort of like.
I draw the curtains, strip down and crawl between the cool blue-paisley sheets, my feet still clammy from being rained on. Only when I reach to turn off the bedside lamp, I notice on the table a book that was not here last week, a red hand-me-down paperback of Democracy in America, a book I defy anyone to read who is not on some form of life support; and beside it, conspicuously, is a set of gold cuff links engraved with the anchor, ball and chain of the USMC, my old service branch (though I didn’t last long). I pluck up one cuff link — it has a nice jeweler’s heft in my palm. I try, leaning on my bare elbow, to remember through the haze of time if these are Marine issue, or just some trinket an old leatherneck had “crafted” to memorialize a burnished valiance far from home.
Except I don’t want to wonder over the origin of cuff links, or whose starchy cuffs they might link; or if they were left for my private perusal, or pertain to Sally calling up last night to complain about life’s congestions. If I were married to Sally Caldwell, I would wonder about that. But I’m not. If “my room” on Fridays and Saturdays becomes Colonel Rex “Knuckles” Trueblood’s on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, I only hope that we never cross paths. This is a matter to be filed under “laissez-faire” in our arrangement. Divorce, if it works, should rid you of these destination-less stresses, or at least that’s the way I feel now that welcome sleep approaches.
I thumb quickly back through the old, soft-sided de Tocqueville, Vol. II, check its yellowed title page for ownership, note any underlinings, margin notes (nothing), then remember my experiment from college: supine, holding the book up at a proper viewing distance, I open it at random and begin to read, testing how many seconds will pass before my eyes close, the book sinks and I fall off the cushiony cliff to dreamland.
I commence: “How Democratic Institutions and Manners Tend to Raise Rents and Shorten the Terms of Leases.” Too boring even to sleep through. Outside I hear girls giggling on the beach, hear the tame surf as a soft, sleep-bringing ocean breeze raises and floats the window curtain.
I thumb back farther and start again: “What Causes Almost All Americans to Follow Industrial Callings.” Nothing.
Again: “Why So Many Ambitious Men and So Little Lofty Ambitions Are to Be Found in the United States.” Possibly I can get my teeth into this at least for eight seconds: “The first thing that strikes a traveler to the United States is the innumerable multitudes of those who seek to emerge from their original condition; and the second is the rarity of lofty ambition to be observed in the midst of universally ambitious stir of society. No Americans are devoid of a yearning desire to rise but hardly any appear to entertain hopes of great magnitude or to pursue lofty aims….”