At the end of Central, where my house sat, there was never an actual street, just a sign — Poincinet Road — and a rough beachfront sand track and five large, grandfathered residences, with the ocean and pearlescent beach stretching out front, the way you’d dream it. Nothing between you and paradise but fucking Portugal. It’s now become an actual street — or had been before the climatological shit train pulled in. I see no sign of Arnie or his Lexus as I turn down the sanded-over asphalt. Though as attested, my former home, number seven — once a tall, light-strewn, board ’n’ batten ’n’ glass beach dazzler — lies startlingly up to the left (not right), washed backwards off its foundation, boosted topsy-turvy across the asphalt, turned sideways, tupped on its side against the grassy-sandy beach berm, and (by water, wind, and the devil’s melee) ridded of its roof. Its back-side exterior wall where I once entered through a red door (gone) is stripped of its two-car garage and torn free of interior fittings (pipes, re-bar, electric), the dangling filaments of which along with whatever else ever connected it to the rest of the world, hanging limp from the house’s exposed “bottom,” which you used not to be able to see. The blond-brick chimney’s gone — though not the stone fireplace, which I can make out in the ripped-open living room. The banistered outside steps have disappeared. The panoramic deck, where I spent happy nights gazing at constellations I couldn’t identify, is bent down and clinging to the broken superstructure by lug bolts I dutifully tightened each fall. What was then glass is now gaping. Studs show through the “open plan” where, in years past, transpired sweet, murmurous late nights with Sally, or merry drinks’ evenings with some old Michigan chum who’d shown up unexpected with a bottle of Pouilly-Fuissé… where life went on, in other words.
The poured gray foundation is what’s left intact — a surprisingly small rectangular pit with a partial set of wooden steps going nowhere. The big Trane heat pump’s in place in the dank water that’s collected. But everything else in the “basement”—bicycles, hope chests, old uniforms, generations of shoes, wine racks, busted suitcases someone’s father owned, boxes and boxes and boxes of stuff you should’ve gotten rid of decades ago — all that’s been sucked up and blown away to some farmer’s field in Lakehurst, to be found, possibly returned, or else put in a museum to commemorate the awesomeness of mother nature when she gets it in her head to fuck with you.
All four other houses down Poincinet are simply missing, leaving only vacant cellars like my old place. Though opening up the space these houses so recently occupied has reconfigured a new pretty vista — ocean and beach the way they used to be, time immemorial. A lone fisherman in hip waders is visible, casting for stripers with his long pole to the incoming tide. He’s dressed in a bulky cable-knit, heavy gloves, and an orange watch cap, and doesn’t seem to have caught anything. Out at sea, between the land and the fog bank, an unmeasurable distance from where I’m sitting behind the wheel, a great white cruise ship — a wallowing twelve-decker — sits motionless against the gray. Carnival, Princess, Norwegian — one of those. I have a feeling passengers are at the rails, scoping out what used to be New Jersey, taking snaps with their phones and shooting them back to Ashtabula and Boise, as they ply their way toward Great Abaco. I’m not so certain they’re empathetic to our lives ashore.
I, though, am struck by something I’ve never thought before — even in my role as residential specialist, seeking shelter for those in need. And it is… what little difference a house makes once it’s gone. How effortlessly, almost sweetly, the world re-asserts its claim and becomes itself again. People wring their hands and cry bloody murder when a garish new structure rises and casts its ugly shadow; or when a parking lot behind the Pathway paves over the sacred midden of the lost Lenape or a wetland where herons nested and ducks stopped to rest. As if these evils last forever. They don’t. All may not be vanity (though plenty is); but nothing’s here to stay. There’s something to be said for a good no-nonsense hurricane, to bully life back into perspective. It’s always worthy of our notice when we don’t feel precisely the way we thought we would. Easy to say, of course, since I don’t live here anymore.
Up the beach, opened by the absence of what were people’s houses, the sight line stretches all the way up to Ortley Beach and beyond, to where the old roller-coaster bones sit marooned in seawater. Two tiny, faraway figures are walking a dog along the surf’s lap. A front loader — I hear its distant beeping through my open window — is slowly returning sand to the beach from the blanketed streets. I hear — over the berm, out of sight — the clatter of hammers striking wood, and the cheerful hum of Spanish. How strange life is. One day Reynoso, the next Sea-Clift. “Oh, jes,” one of them shouts (they’re English speakers now). “It’s cunt sniff.” At least I think that’s what the words say. Frolicsome musical notes rise from their radio and over the berm top. They’re gutting or hauling or de-molding someone’s dream home, no doubt wearing surgical masks and rubber gloves against the spores. “Sí, sí, sí pero. Hees husband ees a Navy SEAL.” “Pendejo!” someone answers. “Sex can’t be zhat good. Comprendes?” They all laugh. Good luck is infectious.
But where’s Arnie? Am I stood up? About to be ambushed from a Lexus parked at a distance? People distrust realtors in a climate of disaster. We’re wildcards in the human deck, always filling out a winning hand. Though not me. Not now.
My stomach, however, has begun skirling around and ker-clunking. I should’ve bought cashews back at the Hess. It’s almost eleven. My All-Bran is barely recollectable. I put a stick of spearmint in my mouth and let it calm things. Whether you wear falsies or not (I don’t), whether you’ve been eating garlic or onions or pizza or choucroute garnie and brush your teeth eight times a day, being “older” makes you worry that you reek like a monkey’s closet. Sally assures me I don’t, that she’d give me “the signal.” But if the machine’s winding down, its parts start to fester. I’ve lately begun brushing my tongue morning, noon, and night, since the tongue’s the petri dish for every sort of rankness. In general, it’s fair to say that as you get older you experience a complexer relationship with the ongoing — which seems at odds with how it should be.
I wait in my car, chewing, beside the ruins of my house. There’s no reading matter available. I’ve left the Times at home. Here’s only a pamphlet Dr. Zippee amusedly gave me, depicting the exercise routine for relieving movement-inhibiting neck pain. Cartoons show a little round-headed stick figure rotating his bubble head and smiling to exhibit the golden way to neck happiness. In other squares he’s displaying a mouth-down frown to show the “wrong way”—that leads to traction, invasive surgery-through-the-throat, painkillers, Betty Ford, if not all the way to Rahway. I do feel new Rice Krispies at shoulder level, which makes me wrangle my neck around. Tension’s the culprit; the tension of Arnie Urquhart not goddamn being here like he said he would.
The only other reading material in my car is a copy of We Salute You, the publication we volunteers put into the hand of each Iraq and Afghanistan returnee the moment after we shake that hand and declare “Welcome home! Thank you for your service!” We Salute You is a useful cache of vital information pertaining to anything the home-leave soldier might need, want, or encounter in the first six hours stateside (assuming no one’s meeting him or her, as surprisingly happens much of the time). We Salute You is printed by a cabal of right-wing, freedom-forum loonies out in Ohio, who nonetheless manage to do a damn good job because they don’t stuff our magazine with any of the gun-control-anti-abortion-back-to-the-stone-age bullshit they do put in their regular anti-Obama mailings. I know, because these publications came to my house, until I made a complaint with the Post Office, after which they still came, right through the election — though by now the crackpot Ohioans might’ve concluded their message didn’t get through.