It’s best at this moment not to think much along these lines. Though this I’m sure is another reason why the Markhams come to mind on a weekend when my own life seems at a turning or at least a curving point. Likely as not, Joe and Phyllis know how these things work as well as I do and are scared shitless. Yet, while it’s bad to make a wrong move, as maybe I did with the Volvo, it’s worse to regret in advance and call it prudence, which I sense is what they’re doing roving around East Brunswick. Disaster is no less likely. Better — much, much better — to follow ole Davy Crockett’s motto, amended for use by adults: Be sure you’re not completely wrong, then go ahead.
By ten-thirty I’m past bland, collegiate Middletown and up onto Route 9, taking in the semi-panoramic view of the Connecticut (vacationers assiduously canoeing, jet skiing, windsurfing, sailing, paraskiing or skydiving right into the drink), and then straight downstream the short distance to Deep River.
My chief hope of a secondary nature here is not to lay eyes on Charley, for reasons I perhaps have brought to light already. With luck he’ll be nursing his lumpy jaw out of sight, or else waxing his dinghy or sighting a plumb line or doodling in his sketchbook — whatever rich dilettante architects do when they’re not competing in marathon gin rummy matches or tying their bow ties blindfolded.
Ann understands I don’t precisely loathe Charley, only that I believe that whenever she tells him she loves him there’s an asterisk after “love” (like Roger Maris’s home run title), referencing prior, superior attainment in that area, as though I’m certain she’ll one day pitch it all and begin life’s last long pavane with me and me alone (though neither of us seems to want that).
In nearly all my preceding visits, I’ve ended up feeling I’d snuck onto the property by way of a scaled fence and left (for wherever I’m taking my children — the mollusk exhibit at Woods Hole, a Mets game, a blustery ferry ride to Block Island for a little stolen quality time) as though I was one step ahead of the law. Ann says I fabricate these feelings. But so what? I still have them.
Charley, unlike me, who thinks everything’s mutable, is the sort of man who puts his trust in “character,” who muses when alone about “standards” and bona fides, “parsing” and “winnowing out men from boys,” but who (it’s my private bet) stands at the foggy mirror in the locker room at the Old Lyme CC thinking about his dick, wishing he had a bigger one, considering if a rectangular glass doesn’t distort proportions, deciding eventually that everybody’s looks smaller when viewed by its hypercritical owner and that, in absolute terms, his is bigger than it looks because he’s tall. Which he is.
One evening, standing together out below the knoll where his house sits, our shoes nuzzling the pea-gravel path that leads down to his boathouse, beyond which is a dense, pinkly-rose-infested estuarial pond protected from the Connecticut by a boundary of tupelo gums, Charley said to me, “Now, you know, Frank, Shakespeare must’ve been a pretty damn smart cookie.” In his big bony hand he was cradling one of his drop-dead vodka gimlets in a thick, hand-blown Mexican tumbler. (He hadn’t offered me one, since I wasn’t staying.) “I took a look at everything he wrote this year, okay? And I think history’s writers just haven’t moved the bar up much since six-teen-whatever. He saw human weakness better than anybody ever did, and sympathetically at that.” He blinked at me and rolled his tongue around behind his lips. “Isn’t that what makes a writer great? Sympathy for human weakness?”
“I don’t know. I never thought a thing about it,” I said bleakly but churlishly. I already knew Charley thought it was “odd” that a man who once wrote respectable short stories would “end up” selling real estate. He also had views about my living in Ann’s old house, though I never asked what they were (I’m sure they’re prejudicial).
“All right, but how do you see it?” Charley sniffed through his big Episcopalian nose, furrowing his silver eyebrows as if he were smelling a complex bouquet in the evening’s mist that was available only to him (and possibly his friends). He was clad in his usual sockless deck shoes, khaki shorts and a tee-shirt, but with a thick blue zippered sweater I’d seen thirty years ago in a J. Press catalogue and wondered who in the hell would buy. He is of course as fit as a greyhound and maintains some past master’s squash ranking for oldsters.
“I don’t really think literature has anything to do with moving the bar up,” I said distastefully (I was right). “It has to do with being good in an absolute sense, not better.” I now wish I could’ve punctuated this with a shout of hysterical laughter.
“Okay. That’s hopeful.” Charley pulled on his long earlobe and looked down, nodding as though he were visualizing the words I’d said. His thick white hair glowed with whatever light was left in the twilight. “That’s really a pretty hopeful view,” he said solemnly.
“I’m a hopeful man,” I said, and promptly felt as hopeless as an exile.
“Fair enough then,” he said. “Do you suppose in a hopeful way you and I are ever going to be friends?” He half raised his head and looked at me through his metal-rim glasses. “Friend” I knew to be, in Charley’s view, the loftiest of lofty human conditions men of character could aspire to, like Nirvana for Hindus. I never wanted to have friends less in my life.
“No,” I said bluntly.
“Why’s that, do you think?”
“Because all we have in common is my ex-wife. And eventually you’ll feel it’s okay to discuss her with me, and that would piss me off.”
Charley held onto his earlobe, his gimlet in his other hand. “Might be.” He nodded speculatively. “You’re always coming across something in someone you love that you can’t fathom, aren’t you? So then you have to ask somebody. I guess you’d be an obvious choice. Ann’s not that simple, as I’m sure you know.”
He was doing it already. “I don’t know,” I said. “No.”
“You maybe oughta have another go at it, like I did. Maybe you’d get it right this time.” Charley rounded his eyes at me and nodded again.
“Why don’t you have a go at a flying fuck at whatever’s in range,” I said moronically, and glared at him, feeling fairly willing to throw a punch irrespective of his age and excellent physical condition (hoping my children wouldn’t see it). I felt a chill rise then like a column of refrigerated air right off the pond, making my arm hairs prickle. It was late May. Little house lights had printed up across the silver plane of the Connecticut. I could hear a boat’s bell clanging. At that moment I felt not truly angry enough to cold-cock Charley, but sad, lonesome, lost, unhappy and useless alongside a man I wasn’t even interested in enough to hate the way a man with character would.
“You know,” Charley said, zipping his sweater up to his glunky Adam’s apple and tugging his sleeves as if he’d felt the chill himself. “There’s something about you I don’t trust, Frank. Maybe architects and realtors don’t have that much in common, though you’d think we would.” He eyed me just in case I might be about to produce guttural sounds and spring at his throat.