“Sorry to hear that. About what?”
“Stuff, I guess. I don’t know.” I hear the weatherman on Good Morning America giving us the good news for the weekend. Paul has activated his TV now and doesn’t want to talk more about his mother’s marital dustup; he simply wants to announce it so he can refer to it usefully on our trip. For a while I’ve sensed (with an acuity unique to ex-husbands) that something wasn’t right with Ann. Early menopause, early nostalgia all her own, late-breaking regret. All are possible. Or maybe Charley has a honey, some little busty button-nosed waitress from the boatyard diner in Old Saybrook. Their union, though, has lasted four years, which seems long enough under the circumstances — since its chief frailty is that Charley’s nobody anyone in her right mind should ever marry in the first place.
“So look. Your ole Dad’s got to go sell a house this morning. Slam home my pitch. Reel in the big fish.”
“D. O. Volente,” Paul says.
“You got it. The Volente family from Upper High Point, North Carolina.” He has decided, from his one year of Latin, that D. O. Volente is the patron saint of realtors and must be courted like a good Samaritan — shown every house, given the best deals, accorded every courtesy, made to pay no vigorish — or bad things will happen. Since the rubber incident our life has largely been conducted as a reticule of jokes, quips, double entendres, horse laughs, whose excuse for being, of course, is love. “Be a pal to your mother today, okay, pal?” I say.
“I’m her pal. She’s just a bitch.”
“No she’s not. Her life’s harder than yours, believe it or not. She has to deal with you. How’s your sister?”
“Great.” His sister Clary is twelve and as sage as Paul is callow.
“Tell her I’ll see her tomorrow, okay?”
The volume suddenly zooms up on the TV, another man’s voice blabbing at a high-decibel level about Mike Tyson making 22 mil for beating Michael Spinks in ninety-one seconds. “I’d let him sock me in the kisser for half that much,” the man says. “Did you hear that?” Paul says. “He’d let him ‘sock him in the kisser.’” He loves this kind of tricky punning talk, thinks it’s hilarious.
“Yeah. But you be ready to go when I get there tomorrow, okay? We have to hit the ground running if we expect to get to Beaton, Texas.”
“He was Beaton to the punch, then socked in the kisser. Are you gonna get married again?” He says this shyly. Why, I don’t know.
“No, never. I love you, okay? Did you look at the Declaration of Independence and those brochures? I expect you to have your ducks in a row.”
“No,” he says. “But I’ve got one, okay?” This refers to a real joke.
“Tell me. I’ll use it on my clients.”
“A horse comes into a bar and orders a beer,” Paul says, deadpan. “What does the bartender say?”
“I give up.”
“‘Gee, why the long face?’”
Silence on his end of the line, a silence that says we each know what the other is thinking and are splitting our sides in silent laughter — the best, giddiest laughter of all. My right eyelid gives a predictable flicker. Now would be a perfect moment — with silent laughter as sad counterpoint — to think a melancholy thought, ponder a lost something or other, conduct a quick review of life’s misread menu of what’s important and what’s not. But what I feel instead is acceptance hedging on satisfaction and a faint promise for the day just beginning. There is no such thing as a false sense of well-being.
“Great,” I say. “That’s great. But what’s a horse doing in a bar?”
“I don’t know,” Paul says. “Maybe dancing.”
“Having a drink,” I say. “Somebody led him to it.”
Outside, on the warming lawns of Cleveland Street, Skip McPherson shouts, “He shoots, he scooooores!” Restrained laughter floats up, a beer can goes kee-runch, another manly voice says, “Old slapshot, ooold slapshot, yesssireeobert.” Down the block I hear a diesel growl to life like a lion waking. The streets crew is up and going.
“I’ll catch you tomorrow, son,” I say. “Okay?”
“Yeah,” Paul says, “catch you tomorrow. Okay.” And then we hang up.
2
On Seminary Street at 8:15, Independence Day is the mounting spirit of the weekend, and all outward signs of life mean to rise with it. The 4th is still three days off, but traffic is jamming into Frenchy’s Gulf and through the parking lot at Pelcher’s Market, citizens shouting out greetings from the dry cleaners and Town Liquors, as the morning heat is drumming up. Plenty of our residents are already taking off for Blue Hill and Little Compton; or, like my neighbors the Zumbros, with time on their hands, to dude ranches in Montana or expensive trout water in Idaho. Everyone’s mind-set reads the same: avoid the rush, get a jump, hit the road, put pedal to the metal. Exit is the seaboard’s #1 priority.
My first order of business is to make an early stop at one of two rental houses I own, with a mind to collecting the rent, then do a quick sweep through the realty office to drop off my editorial, pick up the key for the house I’m showing in Penns Neck and have a last-minute map-out session with the Lewis twins, Everick and Wardell, the agency’s “utility men,” regarding our planned participation in Monday’s holiday events. As it happens, our part simply amounts to handing out free hot dogs and root beer from a portable “dogs-on-wheels” stand I myself own and am lending to the cause (all proceeds to Clair Devane’s two orphaned children).
Up Seminary, which since the boom has become a kind of Miracle Mile “main street” none of us ever wished for, all merchants are staging sidewalk “firecracker sales,” setting out derelict merchandise they haven’t moved since Christmas and draping sun racks with patriotic bunting and gimmicky signs that say wasting hard-earned money is the American way. Virtual Profusion has laid in extra bunches of low-quality daisies and red bachelor buttons to draw the bushed businessman or seminarian hiking home in a funk but determined to seem festive (“Say it with cheap flowers”). Brad Hulbert, our gay shoe-store owner, has stacked boxes of one-size-only oddities along his front window and stationed his tanned and bored little catamite, Todd, on a stool behind an open-air cash register. And the bookstore has hauled out its overstocks — piles of cheap dictionaries, atlases and unsellable ’88 calendars, plus last season’s computer games, all of it heaped high on a banquet table to be eyed and picked over by larcenous teens like my son.
For the first time, though, since I moved here in 1970, two businesses on Seminary have left their stores standing empty, their management clearing out under cover of darkness, owing people money and merchandise. One has since resurfaced in the Nutley Mall, the other hasn’t been heard from. Indeed, many of the high-dollar franchises — places that never staged a sale — have now gone through takeovers and Chapter 11 reorganizations and given way to second-echelon high-dollar places where sales are a way of life. This spring, Pelcher’s postponed a grand reopening of its specialty meat-and-cheese boutique; a Japanese car dealership suddenly went belly-up and now sits empty on Route 27. And on the weekend streets there’s even a different crowd of visitors. In the early Eighties, when the Haddam population ballooned from twelve to twenty thousand, and I was still writing for a flashy sports magazine, our typical weekenders were suave New Yorkers — rich SoHo residents in bizarre getups and well-heeled East Siders come down to “the country” for the day, having heard it was a quaint little village here, one worth seeing, still unspoiled, approximately the way Greenwich or New Canaan used to be fifty years ago, which was at least partly true, then.