But was it actual grief? The spectacle-grim-oddness of the whole bewilderment might require an entirely new emotion — a fresh phylum of feeling, matched by a new species of lingo.
“Yes, I think it is,” Ms. Pines said softly, relative to my house and being in it and its helping. “I was never allowed back as a girl. I left for debate club that day, then nothing was ever again as it had been. You don’t think things like that can happen. Then you find out they both can and will. So, yes. It’s revealing to come here. Thank you.” Ms. Pines smiled at me almost grudgingly. This was the grainy, human, non-race-based contact our President has in mind for us. Too bad the collateral damage has to be so high.
I knew Ms. Pines was now searching for departing words. She was too savvy to deal off the “c” card — abominable closure. She was seeking she knew not what, and would know she’d found it, only afterward. If she could’ve framed a question for me, it would’ve been the age-old one: What should I now do? How should I go on with the rest of my life now that I’ve experienced all this? Natural disaster is adept at provoking that very question. Though why ask me? Of course she hadn’t.
“Umm-hmm,” Ms. Pines was heard to “say,” having recovered from the brief séance she’d induced in herself, in my house, in me. She was ready to go — spryly up and out of her café chair, big patent purse swagged in her un-injured hand, a flattening-neatening pat given to secure her tam. She looked down to her green suit front, as if it might’ve been littered with something. I wasn’t at all ready for her to leave. There could be more to say, some of it never said before. How often does that happen? Still, I jumped up and grabbed her coat. She’d performed and received what she came for, relegated as much of her burden as possible to the house. And to me. Su casa es mi casa.
“Many times I thought of killing myself, Mr. Bascombe. Very many. I wasn’t brave enough. That’s how it felt.” She turned and let me help her coat on, careful with her hurricane-damaged wrist. I handed over her gloves. “Maybe I had something else yet to do.”
“You did,” I said. “You do.”
“Umm-hmm,” Ms. Pines said.
Another zephyr of Old Rose passed my nostrils. I patted her cashmere shoulder the way you’d pat a pony. She acknowledged me with a confident look — the way a pony might. It’s a solid gain to experience significant life events for which no words or obvious gestures apply. Awkward silence can be perfect. The whisper of the gods, Emerson says.
“I read, Mr. Bascombe — I think it was in Time…” Ms. Pines was leading me toward my front door, past the murderous basement, as if she’d neutralized it. “It said there’s a rise in world corruption now. Everyone’s taking bribes. Narcissism’s on the increase. We’re twenty-third in happiness in America. Bhutan is first, apparently. Somebody said there’s been a systematic extermination of joy in the United States.” Her green-topped head was bobbing in front of me. I couldn’t see her pretty face. “Isn’t that something?”
“I read that.” I had. “It was some gloomy Eastern European in a smelly suit. Those guys don’t like anything.”
“Exactly.” Ms. Pines turned to me, restored to who she’d been, possibly better. She smiled — confident, self-aware — and extended her small, chestnut hand for me to shake. I gently did.
Out through my front door’s sidelights, where there was no longer snow falling, I glimpsed across Wilson Lane the Bitticks’ frosted front lawn. A short, round white woman in a quilted coat and quilted boots was hammering a GOOD BUY REALTY “FOR SALE — NEW PRICE” sign into the stiff grass — the equivalent of a buzzard landing in your yard. Fresh realities had dawned there, a grainier view of the situation (bank push-back, almost certainly). Mack had taken down his Romney-Ryan poster, just today, and struck his flag. New neighbors would be arriving (a Democrat, if I had a choice; married, no kids, earnest souls I’d be happy to wave to on my morning trip out for the paper, but not much more. I ask less of where I live than I used to).
“Do you find it hard to be here, Mr. Bascombe?” Ms. Pines said as I opened the front door for her. The air space between the storm and the coffered oak door was still and chilly. “You lived in Haddam prior to now, I know. I know some things about you. I kept up with who subsequent owners were, after we left. It’s what I could do.”
The round woman driving the GOOD BUY sign into the Bitticks’ yard stopped and looked our way: two people, a man and a woman, talking about… what? A new job as a housekeeper? An FBI reference check on a neighbor in line for a government job? Not a family tragedy of epic proportion, requiring years to face, impossible to reconcile, with much left to accomplish and not much time to do it.
“No,” I said. “It’s been the easiest thing in the world. Most everyone I knew from before is gone or dead. I don’t make much of an impression on things now — which is satisfying. We just have so much chance to make an impression. It seems fair. It’s the new normal.” I smiled a smile I hoped would be one of mutual understanding — what I hadn’t had words for before, but believed we felt together.
“All right,” Ms. Pines said. “That’s a good way to put it. I like the way you say things, Mr. Bascombe.”
“Call me Frank,” I said, again.
“All right, Frank, I will.”
She smiled and let herself out the storm door, took her careful steps down the still-icy steps and was gone.
The New Normal
OUT THE HADDAM GREAT ROAD, JUST PAST five, freezing rain has turned the blacktop into after-hours, dodge-em cars. Only a few of us are braving it, our headlights glaring off the pavement like sheeny novas. A Ford Explorer (why is it always a Ford Explorer?) has already gone in the ditch, its driver waving me on with a shrug. A wrecker’s on its way.
Off in the trees on both sides, immense, manorial houses twinkle through. Yuletide spruces framed in picture windows blaze outward, sharing Christmas cheer with the less monied. Years ago, I drove out here on just such a gloomy-wintry night to hand-deliver a two-million-dollar, full-price offer on a slant-roof, architect-designed monstrosity that’s long since been torn down, and calamitously hit a dog, precisely next door to the house I was hoping to sell. As with the Explorer, I went straight in the ditch, but clambered out, up, and across the black-ice road to bring whatever helpless help I could to the poor wrecked beast, who’d made a whump when I hit it, boding ill. (I, of course, feared it was my clients’ dog.) There the poor thing lay, in the ice-crusted grass in front of number 2605, breathing deep, rasping, not-long-for-this-world breaths, its sorrowing eyes resigned and open to the snowy night — its last — not offering to move or even to notice me beside it on my knees, my cold hand on its hairy, hard ribs, feeling them rise and fall, rise and fall. It was a hound, a black and tan, somebody’s old lovebug — a wiggly crotch sniffer and shoe muncher bought for the kids yet surviving on after they’d gone, and prime now to be hit. “What can I do for you, ole Towser?” I said these absurd words, knowing their answer—“Nothing, thanks. You’ve done enough.” After minutes, I hiked up to the house I was selling, shamefaced and in shock. I informed my clients what I’d terribly done. We all three walked down to the road in the snow, but the old boy had passed beyond us and was (because it was damn cold) grown stiff and peaceful and perfect. They didn’t know whose dog it was — a hunter’s, strayed away in the night, they thought, though it was past the season for that. My clients — the Armentis, long since beyond life’s pale themselves — felt a sorrow for me and my plight, and let me go home with the promise to “do something about the dog” in the morning. I shouldn’t worry. It was a terrible night to be out — which it was. In my realtor’s memory they accepted the offer following some testy back-and-forths with the young Bengali buyers — I often recollect such matters more positively than was true. It was a long time ago. Twenty years, at least. The dog, of course, lives on.