Arnie’s taken no notice. “A hybrid, I suppose.” He’s still appraising my car. “Like you, Frank.” He’s all of a sudden supremely satisfied — with something. Dismay and house grief have vanished in the fog. I’m getting myself back on my feet. But has something happened? Is it what I feared — Arnie’s turning on me? Possibly he’s packing a PPK and will simply shoot me for once selling him a house that’s now worth chicken feed. I’ve let myself in for this. Men are a strange breed.
“A hybrid of what, Arnie,” I say with difficulty. “What am I a hybrid of?”
“I’m yanking your schwantz, Frank. You look a little peakèd. You takin’ care of yourself?” I’m down off this berm now, my shoes full of cold sand, my ass damp. Arnie, for his part, looks robust, which was what his cosmetic work was in behalf of. He looks to have swelled out his chest a few centimeters and deepened his voice. I don’t like being said to be peakèd. “You oughta do yoga, Frank.”
I’m back on his level, though unsteady. “I let the machine maintain itself, Arnie.”
“Okay,” Arnie says. “Probably smart.” He’s possibly thinking about his cosmetic work in contrast to peakèd me. New grille. New bumpers. In my view, though, Arnie looks like somebody who used to be Arnie Urquhart. Age and change have left him squirrelly, and unpredictable — to himself. This is what I witness.
I come to stand beside my Sonata’s front headlamp. I’m Christmas cold. Arnie’s blocking my path back inside now — unless I want to go around and crawl in the passenger door. I’d like to get in and crank up the heat. But I don’t want to seem to want to leave. Arnie — wax-works weirdness and all — is still a man who’s lost his house, endured an insult I haven’t. He’s deserving of a little slack being cut. Our sympathies are most required when they seem least due.
Fog’s retreated toward the water’s edge, as if the tide change has created a vacuum. A tangy fish stink is all around. I look up through the blue-white mist and can see another Air-Tran jet spiriting upward. I’ve heard it but haven’t registered.
“I need to act quick, I guess,” Arnie says, back to his house and the charade that I’m here for real reasons. “That’s the way, isn’t it?”
“Sometimes,” I say, finding the warm hood surface with my hand.
“Fish business is the same. ‘Let it sit, you might as well quit. Then you’re in the shit.’”
I smile, as if that idea sized up all of life. “It’s better than ‘hurry up and wait.’”
“That’s the old man’s mantra.” Arnie sniffs, looks down at his own spoiled shoes.
At this small distance of five feet, not looking at him, but letting my eyes roam anywhere but into contact with his, Arnie (in my fervid mind) has magically become not himself, but another boy I also went to Michigan with — Tapper Spitz. I used to bump into Tap in the strangest of places over the years. The Mayo Clinic urology waiting room. The Philadelphia airport cell-phone lot. On the sidewalk outside the My Office bar on Twenty-First and Madison. Tap was likewise a Wolverine puckster. He and Arnie probably knew each other. What did the poet tell us? “All memory resolves itself in gaze.” It’s much easier at this stressed, empty moment to imagine I’m out here with ole Tapper than that I’m out here with ole Arn. I happen to know Tapman L. Spitz died doing the thing he loved best — para-skiing down the Eiger on his sixty-fifth birthday. RIP ole Tapper.
“My wife doesn’t like it down here.” Arnie/Tapper snuffles his big, as-yet-unaltered schnoz, then folds his thick arms — not easy in his severely tailored mafia coat. He’s staring again up at his house, as if it was where it belonged. I’m supposed to know he means his new wife, not the nice, plump-pastie Ishpeming girl I met at the closing, who seemed pleased with life. He shakes his head. “She won’t even come down here.”
“A reason to cut it loose,” I say. Tapper’s already sadly fading back where he came from. His service rendered.
“Oh yeah.” Arnie’s voice is lonely. He’s still leaning on my car door, blocking me. A gull has spied us and begun a savage, rhythmical screeching. Get off the beach, you assholes! It’s ours! We want it back. You did your worst. BEAT IT! “What’s the most mysterious thing you know, Frank?” Arnie says, and looks speculative, his lacquered cheeks fattened. He’s ready for our conversation to be over, he just doesn’t know how to end it — his brain speeding ahead to thoughts of growing his fish business, luring his diplomat daughter home to run things, getting his young wife to take more interest in his interests, having things work out better than his makeover makes him feel. His wrecked house, I’m certain, will be gone by New Year’s.
“I don’t know, Arnie. What universe is our universe inside of? Why do so many people have pancreatic cancer all of a sudden? How does a thermos work? I could come up with several.”
Arnie unfolds his crossed arms, pushes his palms back through his hair, both sides, Biden-like, clears his throat, then steps away from my car as if he’s realized he was keeping me out of it (my chance now to get out of the chill). Arnie has creases deep as the Clipperton Trench in both his big earlobes. Possibly he feels dark intimations, but wouldn’t recognize them.
I inch forward. My neck is already stiffening up after my partial tumble. I’ve strained something. Arnie’s standing back as if he’s sold my car to me and is watching me enjoy it for the first time. I’m trying not to be in a rush to get in. Precisely what’s happening here between us, I don’t really know. A small-scale mystery in itself.
“Did you ever meet Obama, Frank?” Arnie’s harsh mouth is raveled by a look of familiar distaste. Why he’d ask this is beyond me.
“Never have, Arnie. No.” My hand’s on the door handle, squeezing it. “He’s not really my kinda guy.”
“You voted for him, didn’t you?”
“Both times. I think he’s great.”
“Yeah, yeah. I figured.”
My guess is Arnie did, too, but can’t admit it.
Over the berm, from where saw and hammering noises have previously floated, the scratchy radio comes on again, at first too loud, then softer. You’re once, twice, three times a la-a-dee.. . Who sings that? Peabo Bryson? Ludacris? “Eees like, okay, Serena Williams if she was a man,” a man’s Spanish-spiced voice begins into the cold air over the music. “Se-re-na Williams eees a man!” another male voice says back. “Nooo! Hom-braaay!” They all crack up. Life’s good if you’re them.
“You’re taller than you used to be, aren’t you, Frank?” Arnie’s coming toward me now, a smile opening on his strange, half-woman face — as if he knows he’s wasted my time but means to make it right before all is lost, the beach returned to the dominion of the gulls, all trace of us gone.
“I have the personality of a shorter man, Arnie.” I’m trying to get in my car before Arnie gets closer. I fear an embrace. It could damage my neck and render me an invalid. Bonding heads the list of words I’ve ruled out. Emerson was right — as he was about everything: an infinite remoteness underlies us all. And what’s wrong with that? Remoteness joins us as much as it separates us, but in a way that’s truly mysterious, yet completely adequate for the life ongoing.
Arnie (the idiot) does indeed mean to clap his surprisingly long, leather-cased, net-minder arms around me and pull me — like a puck — into his bosom. A save. I have nowhere to escape to, but try to duck my head as he engulfs me, awfully.
“Enough,” I say, my mouth muffled against his goddamn mobster coat, which smells like the inside of his Lexus but also like some epicene men’s fragrance Arnie no doubt sprays on, après le bain, with his Russian wife keeping stern watch, tapping her toe like Maggie to Jiggs.