Ann is not as scary as this makes her sound. Normally she’s a pert, sharp-eyed, athletic, sixty-nine-year-old-with-a-fatal-disease who you’d be happy to know and talk to about most anything — golf, or what a goofball Mitt Romney is. (The Romneys and the Dykstras were social acquaintances in the old, halcyon Michigan days, before Detroit rolled over and died.) This is the Ann I mostly encounter. Though we’re never all that far from bedrock matters. And she has a knack of getting me under her magnifying glass for the sun to bake me a while before I can exit back home to second-marriage deniability.
The Default Self, my answer to all her true-thing issues, is an expedient that comes along with nothing more than being sixty-eight — the Default Period of life.
Being an essentialist, Ann believes we all have selves, characters we can’t do anything about (but lie). Old Emerson believed the same. “… A man should give us a sense of mass…,” etc. My mass has simply been deemed deficient. But I believe nothing of the sort. Character, to me, is one more lie of history and the dramatic arts. In my view, we have only what we did yesterday, what we do today, and what we might still do. Plus, whatever we think about all of that. But nothing else — nothing hard or kernel-like. I’ve never seen evidence of anything resembling it. In fact I’ve seen the opposite: life as teeming and befuddling, followed by the end.
Therefore, where Ann’s concerned, to harmonize these dissonants, I mean to come before her portraying as close to human mass as I’m able — my Default Self — and hope that’s acceptable.
The vision of a Default Self is one we’ve all wrestled with even if we’ve failed to find it and gone away frustrated. We’ve eyed it hungrily, wishing we could figure it out and install it in our lives, like a hair shirt we could get cozy in. Though bottom line, it’s not that different from a bedrock self, except it’s our creation, rather than us being its. In the first place, where Ann’s concerned, I come here sporting my Default Self, wanting to put her at ease and let her feel right about things. She’s never going to discover she’s been wrong about me all these years. But she could be more comfortable with me and so could I. Second, the Default Self allows me to try not to seem the cynical Joe she believes me to be and won’t quit trying to prove. Trying to cobble up the appearance of a basic self that makes you seem a better, solider person than someone significant suspects you are—that can count. It counts as goodwill, and as a draw-down on cynicism, even if you fail — and you don’t always — which is the real charmed union marriage should offer its participants. Third, the Default Self is just plain easier. As I’ve said, its requirements are minimal and boiled down in a behavioristic sense. And fourth — which is why it’s the tiniest bit progressive — there’s always the chance I’ll have an epiphany (few as these are) and discover that due to this stripping away and Ann’s essentialist rigor, she’ll be proved right; that I do have a mass and a character peeping reluctantly out from behind the arras like Cupid — which is not a bad outcome at all.
The risk of this, of course, is that if I’m found to have a self and character, Ann will decide I was even more false and uncaring when we were married, and loathe me even more for concealing myself — like Claude Rains, unwinding his bandages to disclose the invisible man. Worse than a mere nothing. Though I would argue that I would be an invisible man who loved Ann Dykstra all there was in me to love, even if she never really believed I was there. In the end, it’s hard to win against your ex-wife, which is not new news.
A GIGANTIC DOUGLAS FIR, A-SPARKLE AND A-SPANGLE with a gold star on top and positioned with geometric precisioning, shines out through the great beveled-glass doors of Carnage Hill. All other side windows are alight with electric candles, like an old New England church. I’ve steered over to the shadowy side lot to avoid the venal valet boys, who go through your glove box, steal your turnpike change, eat your mints, change the settings on your radio, and drive your car to their girlfriends’—then expect a big tip when they return your car warm and odorous.
The freezing rain, when I get out, has become hard, popping snow pellets, stinging my cheeks and denting my Sonata hood and making it easy to fall down and bust my ass. Back down the hill, through the empty trees toward Mullica Pond, late-day light is surprisingly visible in the low western sky — a streak of yellow above a stratum of baby blue. New Jersey’s famous for its discordant skies. “The devil’s beating his wife,” my father used to say when rain fell from a sunny firmament. It reminds me, though, that it’s still before six and not midnight. My happy birthday dinner with Sally still lies ahead.
Carrying Ann’s cumbersome pillow under-arm in its plastic sleeve, I hurry past the smirking valet twerps, on into the big boisterous, bright-lit foyer with the dazzling humongous Christmas fir scratching the cathedral ceiling, and where all is festive and in a commotion.
The chief selling point of Carnage Hill and all such high-end entrepôts isn’t that sick, old, confused, lonely and fed up don’t exist and aren’t major pains; but, given that they are, it’s better here. In fact, it’s not only better than anywhere you could be under those circumstances, it’s better than anywhere you’ve ever been, so that circumstances quit mattering. In this way, being sick to death is like a passage on a cruise ship where you’re up on the captain’s deck, eating with him and possibly Engelbert Humperdinck, and no one’s getting Legionnaires’ or being cross about anything. And you never set sail or arrive anywhere, so there’re no bad surprises or disappointments about the ports of call being shabby and alienating. There aren’t any ports of call. This is it.
Tonight there are tons of Christmas visitors strewn through the public rooms and toward the back out of sight — grandkids teasing grandpaw, married duos checking on the surviving parent, wives visiting staring husbands, a priest sitting with parishioners, offering up Advent benedictions, plus a pitch to leave it all to the church. There’s a cheery murmur of voices and soft laughter and dishes tinkling and oo’s and ahh’s, along with a big fire roaring in a giant fireplace. It could be Yellowstone. A standing sign says a “book group” is meeting in the library, led by a Haddam High English teacher. They’re discussing Dickens — what else? I can make out a herd of wheeled walkers and oxy-caddies clustered close around a holly-decked lectern, the aged owners trying to hear better. A wine-and-cheese social’s being set up by the big picture window overlooking a pond and another Christmas tree afloat on a little island. Cinnamon/apple-cider odor thickens the atmosphere. Floors are polished. Chandeliers dusted. The Muzak’s giving out Andy, singing hot-digitty, dog-digitty… I always feel I’ve shrunk two jacket sizes when I come inside — either because I feel “at one” with the wizened residents, or because I loathe it and aim to be as invisible as Claude Rains.
I am of course known here. I often spy old realty clients, though I can usually swerve and not be seen and get down the corridor of the Beth Wessel, where Ann’s “flat” is, overlooking yet another decorative pond with real ducks. Though sometimes I’m trapped by Ann’s faux beau, the Philly flatfoot — Buck — who lies in wait for a chance to yak about “Miss Annie” and his stiffy, and what it sounds like when he takes a drug-aided “major whiz” in the visitor’s john (like “a fuckin electric drill,” he said last time). I’m hoping with stealth to miss them all.