The connection was clearer, then went vacant a long moment. I don’t talk to people on the phone that much anymore.
“Why do weathermen all wish for a fuckin’ sunny day?” Arnie said, now at a distance from the phone. He’d put me on speaker and seemed to be talking out of the past.
“It’s in their DNA,” I said from my front window.
“Yep, yep.” Arnie sighed a great rattling sigh. Cars were audibly whizzing past wherever he was.
“Where are you, Arnie?”
“Pulled over on the goddamned Garden State, by Cheesequake. Heading down to Sea-Clift, or whatever the fuck’s left of it.”
“I see,” I said. “How’s your house?”
“Do you see, Frank? Well, I’m glad you fuckin’ see.”
Back in the bonanza days of the now-popped realty bubble, I sold Arnie not just a house, but my house. In Sea-Clift. A tall, glass-and-redwood, architect-design beach palace, flush up against what seemed to be a benign and glimmering sea. Anybody’s dream of a second home. I saw to it Arnie coughed up a pretty penny (two-point-eight, no “vig” on a private sale). Sally and I had decided to move inland. I was ready to take down my shingle. It was eight years ago, this fall — two weeks before Christmas, like now.
In my defense, I’d made several calls up to Arnie’s principal residence in Hopatcong, to learn how his/my beach house had weathered the storm. I’d called several old clients, including my former realty partner. All their news was bad, bad, bad. In Haddam, Sally and I lost only two small oak saplings (one already dead), half the roof on her potting shed, plus a cracked windshield on my car. “A big nothing,” as my mother used to say, before making a pppttt farting noise with her lips and laughing out loud.
“I called you, probably three times, Arnie,” I said, feeling the curdling, giddy sensation of being a liar — though I’m not, not about this.
The Elizabethtown guy gave me the thumbs-up as he headed out to his truck. Our water usage for November — not a problem.
“That’s like calling the corpse to say you’re sorry he’s dead.” Arnie’s speaker-phone voice faded out and in from Cheesequake. “What were you going to suggest, Frank? Take me to lunch? Buy your house back? There’s no fuckin’ house left down there, you jackass.”
I didn’t have an answer. Patent gestures of kindness, commiseration, fellow-feeling, shared sorrow and empathy — all are weak sisters in the fight against real loss. I’d only wanted to know the worst hadn’t happened — which, I saw, it hadn’t. Though Sea-Clift was where the big blow had come ashore like Dunkirk. No chance to dodge a bullet.
“I’m not blaming you, Frank. That’s not why I’m on the blower here.” Arnie Urquhart is an ancient Michigan Wolverine like me. Class of ’68. Hockey. Rhodes finalist. Lambda Chi. Navy Cross. We all talked like that in those breezy, troubled days. The blower. The crapper. The Z-machine. The libes. The gazoo. Boogies. Gooks. Hogans… it’s a wonder any of us were ever allowed to hold a paying job. Arnie owns and runs — or did — a carriage-trade seafood boutique in north Jersey and has made a mint selling shad roe, Iranian caviar, and imported Black Sea delicacies the FDA doesn’t know about — all of it delivered in unidentifiable, white panel trucks — to Schlumberger execs for exclusive parties no one hears about, including President Obama, who wouldn’t be invited, since in the high-roller Republicans’ view, chitlins’ and hog-maws wouldn’t be on the menu.
“How can I help, Arnie?” I was watching the Elizabethtown truck motor away down Wilson Lane. Clients’ first target of opportunity when a home sale goes sour — no matter when — is almost always the realtor, whose intentions are almost always good.
“I’m on my way down there now, Frank. Some Italian piece of shit called me up at home. Wants to buy the lot and the house — whatever’s left of it — for five hundred grand. I need some advice. You got any?” More cars whizzing.
“I’m not using any of mine, Arnie,” I said. “What’s the situation down there?”
I, of course, knew. We’d all seen it on CNN, then seen it and seen it and seen it ’til we didn’t care anymore. Nagasaki-by-the-sea — with the Giants and Falcons just a tempting channel click away.
“You’ll get a kick out of it, Frank,” Arnie said, disembodied in his car. “Where is it you live now?”
“Haddam.” Sally had come to the door from the kitchen in her yoga clothes, holding a tea mug to her lips, breathing steam away, looking at me as if she’d heard something distressing and I should possibly hang up.
A loud truck-horn blare cracked the silence where Arnie was. “Ass Hole,” Arnie shouted. “Haddam. Okay. Nice place. Or it was once.” Arnie bumped something against the speaker. “My house—your house — is sixty yards inland now, Frank. On its side — if it had a side. The neighbors are all worse off. The Farlows tried to ride it out in their safe room. They’re goners. The Snedikers made a run for it at the last minute. Ended up in the bay. Barb and I were at Lake Sunapee at my son’s. We watched it. I saw my house on TV before I saw it in person.”
“I guess that could be good news.”
Arnie didn’t respond.
“What d’you want me to do, Arnie?”
“I’m driving down to meet the cocksuckers. Flip companies. You heard of them? Speculators.” Arnie had started speaking in some kind of tough-guy, Jersey gangster growl.
“I heard about them.” I’d read about it all in the Times.
“So you see the whole deal. I need your advice, Frank. You used to be honest.”
“I’ve been out of the realty business a while, Arnie. My license is expired. All I know is what I read in the newspaper.”
“It’ll make you more reliable. Take away the profit motive. I’m not planning to shoot you, if you’re worried about that.”
“I hadn’t quite gotten to there, Arnie.” Though I had. It had already happened. Once in Ortley Beach, once in Sea Girt. Listing agents shot sitting at their desks, typing out offer sheets.
“So. Are you gonna show up? I could say you owe me.” Another truck’s withering horn went blasting past. “Jesus. These fucks. I’m gonna get killed out here. So?”
“Okay, I’ll come,” I said, just to get Arnie off the road shoulder and on to the scene of destruction.
“Eleven o’clock tomorrow. At the house,” Arnie said. “Or where it used to be. You might recognize it. I’m driving a silver Lexus.”
“I’ll be there.”
“Are we gonna have NHL this year, Frank?” Hockey. Destruction’s great leveler.
“I haven’t really kept up, Arnie.”
“The shit-for-brains players,” Arnie said. “They got the best deal they’ll ever get. Now they’ll have to settle for less. Sound familiar?” As always, Arnie was on management’s side. “Hail to the Victors, Frank.”
“Champions of the West, Arnie.”
“Mañana en la mañana.” Which seemed to be how Arnie said thanks.
OUT ON LITTLE LEAGUE WORLD CHAMPIONS BOULEVARD, Toms River, nothing looks radically changed stormwise. In a purely retinal sense, the barrier island across the bay has done its god-given work for the inland communities, though much lies in ruins here, back in the neighborhoods. Traffic is anemic along the once — Miracle Mile, headed toward the bridge. It’s plain, though, that Toms River has claimed some survivor’s cred. A beardless Santa sits on a red plastic milk crate in front of the Launch Pad coffee hut (he’s clearly a Mexican), a red, printed-cardboard sign resting against his knee. COFFEE GIVES YOU COURAGE. FELIZ NAVIDAD. I wave, but he only stares back, as if I might be giving him the finger. Farther on, the Free At Last Bail Bonds has only a single car parked in front, as do a couple of boxy, asbestos-sided bars set back in the gravel lots. Days were — before The Shore got re-discovered and prices went nuts — you could drive over from Pottstown, take the kids and your honeybee for a weekend, and get away for a couple hundred. All that’s a dream now, even after the storm. A big sign — part of its message torn off by the winds — advertises the Glen Campbell Good-bye Tour. Half of Glen’s smiling, too-handsome face remains, a photo from the ’60s — before Tanya and the boozing and the cocaine. A paper placard in front of one of the bars — stolen off someone’s lawn after the election — has been re-purposed and instead of “Obama-Biden” now announces, “We’re Back. So Fuck You, Sandy.”