I’M ON MY PILGRIM’S WAY TONIGHT — IT’S ONLY 5:10 but could easily be midnight — to visit my former wife, Ann Dykstra, a resident now of the Beth Wessel Wing at the Community at Carnage Hill, a state-of-the-art, staged-care facility, out here in what was once, when we were married, forty years ago, the verdant Haddam hinterlands. The “Community” today borders a Robert Trent Jones faux links course, hidden from the road by a swatch of woods, the leaves now down. A birch-bark canoe “institute” sits off to the left in deeper timber, its lights busily yellowing the snow-flittery night. Other grand houses are semivisible, accessible by gates with uniformed protection. Once it was possible to cast my eye over almost any piece of settled landscape here-around and know how it would look in the future; what uses it’d be set to by succeeding waves of human purpose — as if a logic lay buried within, the genome of its later what’s-it. Though out here, now, all is frankly enigma. Probably it’s my age — which explains more and more about me, like a master decryption code. In New Jersey we’ve now built to the edge of the last million acres of remotely developable land. We’re on track to use it up by midcentury. Property taxes are capped, but no one wants to sell, since no one wants to buy. All of which keeps prices high but values low. (I’ve seen only one lonely Sotheby’s sign the whole way here.) Householders of many of these expensive piles are now renting their eight-thousand-foot trophy villas to Rutgers students with rich parents — taking the long view about upkeep and wear and tear when the lease comes up.
Meanwhile Haddam itself is countenancing service cutbacks. Too much money’s “lost” to wages, the Republicans on the Boro council say. The budget gap’s at fifteen mil. Many old town-fixture employees have been pink-slipped in these days before Christmas. The previous manger scene, mothballed a decade ago, the wise men all portrayed as strapping Aryans instead of dusky Levantines and Negroes, has been revived — the rental company for the race-appropriate manger having upped their prices. Holly boughs now adorn only every third lamppost on Seminary Street. Santa’s magic sleigh on the Square now has a smaller driver at the reins — the original, life-size Santa was stolen, possibly by the Rutgers students. Three prime storefronts are currently sitting empty (unthinkable in earlier days). Townhouse construction — a well-known morbid sign — goes on apace across from where my son Ralph Bascombe lies buried in the cemetery under a linden tree, lately broken off by the hurricane. Rumor has it a Dollar Store and an Arby’s are buying in where Laura Ashley and Anthropologie once thrived. “The middle isn’t holding” was The Packet’s Yeatsian assessment.
Though every Haddam citizen I have a word with — not that many, admittedly — seems on board with the new austerity, even if it promises a dead stop to what was once our reality. “Feeling the pinch,” “cinching the family belt up two notches,” appear to make us feel at one with the rest of the world’s economic downturn — which we know to be bad, but not that bad, not yet, not here.
Possibly I’m the only one paying close attention. I still possess a municipal memory from my years of selling and reselling, mortgaging and re-mortgaging, eventually overseeing the razing and replacing of many a dream home. Clearly, though, some wound has scarred our psyche. And it’s a mystery how it will sort out before the last sprawl-able acre’s paved over and there’s no place left to go but away and down.
MY MISSION INTO THE NIGHT’S SINISTER WEATHER, four days before Christmas, is to deliver to Ann a special, yoga-approved, form-fitted, densely foamed and molded orthopedic pillow, which she can sleep on, and that’s recommended by neurologists in Switzerland to homeopathically “treat” Parkinson’s — of which she’s a new sufferer — by reducing stress levels associated with poor sleep, which themselves are associated with neck pain, which is associated with too-vivid dreams, all associated with Parkinson’s. Ann has resided in the Beth Wessel, able-bodied/independent wing since last June. She has her own two-bedroom, Feng-Shui-approved apartment, does her own cooking, drives her own Focus, occasionally sees old friends from De Tocqueville Academy, where she once coached the Lady Linksters, and has even acquired a “boyfriend”—a former Philadelphia cop named “Buck.” (He has a last name, but I can’t pronounce it, since it’s Polish.) Buck’s a large, dull piece of cordwood in his seventies, given to loose-fitting permanently-belted trousers, matching beige sweatshirts of the kind sold at Kmart, big galunker, imitation-suede shoes, and the thinnest of thin pale hosiery. Somewhere, someone convinced Buck that a sculpted “imperial” and a pair of black horn-rimmed Dave Garroway specs would make him look less like a Polish meatball, and make people take him more seriously, which probably never happens — though he’s officially on the record as “handsome.” He could pass as the “good” cop who genially interrogates the poor black kid from the projects, until he suddenly loses his temper, bulges his eyes, balls up his horseshoe fists in the kid’s face, and scares the shit out of him. Buck’s carrying around a different John Grisham book every time I see him and refers to himself only as a “first responder.” (I’ve seen his old Blazer in the parking lot with “Frst Rspndr” on his yellow Jersey plate.) I regularly encounter him lurking in the big public “living room”—he doesn’t have enough to do, with no robberies and home invasions to get his mitts into. He likes the idea that Ann (who he infuriatingly calls “Miss Annie”)… that Ann and I “go way back,” which isn’t quite the word for it; and that he and I share private, implicitly sexual understandings about her that men such as we are would never speak about, but that in the aggregate are “special,” possibly symbolic, and render us both lucky-to-have-lived-this-long foot soldiers in Miss Annie’s army.
Like me, Buck’s a prostate “survivor,” and his personal talk is the sort that would drive Ann straight to the rafters. It includes his rank disdain for Viagra (“… no need for that junk. I prize my stiffy, lemme tell ya…”); his die-hard fandom for the Flyers; the existence of a “horse pill,” obtainable online that makes “us prostate guys piss like Percherons,” thereby avoiding the “men’s room blues.” Needless to say he doesn’t like Obama and blames him for shit-canning the American dream by creating a “lost decade” when it came to “little people keeping up.” “He’s a nice enough guy”—meaning the President—“but he wasn’t ready to assume the mantle…” Yippity, yippity, yippity. Bush of course was ready. Ann, I’m convinced, spends time with him only to display for me the limitless variety of Homo sapiens who can easily fill my long-empty shoes. Though why should affairs of his heart (and hers) be less inscrutable than the affairs of my own?
It’s not, however, the simplest of emotional transits to be driving out four days before Christmas to visit my ex-wife (we’ve been divorced thirty years!) in an extended-care facility, suffering an incurable and fatal disease, and with whom I’ve not been all that friendly, but who’s now a twenty-minute drive away and somehow or other presenting issues. Relations end nowhere, as the poet said.