Let Me Be Frank With You (18 page)

I had no intention of calling him. I'm of the view that calling me doesn't confer an obligation that I have to respond—the opposite model from when I was in the realty business.

Approximately five days later, however, as Sally was leaving for South Mantoloking to resume her grief-counseling duties—her “giveback” to the hurricane relief (a source of growing wonderment and low-grade anxiety for me)—she stopped and stared at me where I was standing in the bathroom, combing my hair in the mirror after a shower. “Whoever that was who called twice last week called back,” she said. “It sounds important. Is his name Arthur?” Sally often starts conversations with me as if they were continuations of talks we'd been having two minutes ago, only it could be three weeks ago, or could have been only in her mind. She lives in her own head much of the time since the hurricane.

“Olive,” I said, frowning at a new dark spot on my temple. “Olive Medley.”

“Is that a name?” She was at the door, watching me.

“It was a nickname. Years ago.”

“Women never give each other nicknames,” she said, “except mean ones. I wonder why?” She turned and started down the stairs. I didn't say I had no intention of calling Eddie back. Sally and I maintain different views of life ongoing, divergences that may not precisely fortify our union as committed second-time spouses, but don't do harm—which
can be the same as good. Sally views life as one thing leading naturally, intriguingly on to another; whereas I look at life in terms of failures survived, leaving the horizon gratifyingly—but briefly—clear of obstructions. To Sally, it would always be good to encounter an old friend. To me, such matters have to be dealt with case by case, with the outcome in doubt to the last.

Indeed, for months now—and this may seem strange at my late moment of life (sixty-eight)—I've been trying to jettison as many friends as I can, and am frankly surprised more people don't do it as a simple and practical means of achieving well-earned, late-in-the-game clarity. Lived life, especially once you hit adulthood, is always a matter of superfluity leading on to less-ness. Only (in my view) it's a less-ness that's as good as anything that happened before—plus it's a lot easier.

None of us, as far as I can tell, are really designed to have
that
many friends. I've done reading on this subject, and statistics from the Coolidge Institute (unfriendly to begin with) show that we each of us devote a maximum of 40 percent of our limited time to the five most important people we know. Since time invested determines the quality of a friendship, having more than five genuine friends is pretty much impossible. I've, for that reason, narrowed my important-time-with-others to time with Sally, to my two children (blessedly in faraway cities), to my former wife, Ann (now in a high-priced
“care facility” uncomfortably close by). Which leaves only one important slot open. And that I've decided to fill by calling my own number—by making
me
my last, best friend. The remaining 60 percent I leave available for the unexpected—although I read for the blind on the radio once every week, and each Tuesday I drive to Newark Liberty to welcome home our returning heroes—which turns out to take up a good bit of the extra.

Like most people, of course, I was never a
very
good friend in the first place—mostly just an occasionally adequate acquaintance, which was why I liked the Divorced Men's Club. Selling real estate is also perfect for such people as me, as is sportswriting—two pursuits I proved pretty good at. I am, after all, the only child of older parents who doted on me—the ne plus ultra of American adult familial circumstances. I was, thus, never in possession of
that
many friends, being always captivated by what the adults were doing. The standard American life-mold, especially in the suburbs, is that we all have a smiling Thorny Thornberry just over our back fence, someone to go to the big game with, or to talk things over late into autumn nights at some roadside bar; a friend who helps you hand-plane the fir boards to the precise right bevel edge for that canoe you hope, next June, to slide together into Lake Naganooki and set out for some walleye fishing. Only, that hasn't been my fate. Most of my friends over time
have been decidedly casual and our contacts ephemeral. And I don't feel I've lost anything because of it. In fact, like many of the things we suddenly stop to notice about ourselves, once we're fairly far down the line we are how we are because we've liked it that way. It's made us happy.

Friendship, in fact, has always seemed over-rated. Back in my military-school yearbook, if some poor cadet was ever shackled with the phrase “A stalwart friend,” it always meant he was a pariah whom nothing else could be said or done for. Ditto college. Supposedly—this was also in the Coolidge Institute study—emotional closeness has declined 15 percent per year in the last decade, due to social and economic mobility eroding “genuine connectedness”—which we probably didn't need anyway. Many things, in truth, that pass through my life and mind and which I might be inclined to “share” with a friend, I have nothing to say about. All the information we're constantly collecting and storing up in our brains and that we trust we'll later have a use for . . . what am I or any of us supposed to do with all of it? Especially at age sixty-eight? What am I supposed to do, for instance, with the fact that armadillos cause leprosy? Or that dog bites are on the uptick? Or that there's a rise in the religiously unaffiliated and a trend toward less community involvement? Or that tsetse flies nurse their young, just like Panda bears? It beats me. I could put it on Facebook or Twitter. But, as Eddie Medley
says, everybody knows everything, and already doesn't know what to do with it. I'm not on Facebook, of course. Though both my wives are.

Is this “economizing on others” nothing but a blunt, shoring-up defense
against
death's processional onset (as half the jury might argue)? Or, as the other half would agree, is it a blunt, shoring-up
acceptance
of the very same thing? I'd say neither. I'd say it's a simple, goodwilled, fair-minded streamlining of life in anticipation of the final, thrilling dips of the roller coaster. During which ride I don't want to be any more distracted than I already am.

In any case, most of my friends are already dead or, like Eddie, soon will be. Every week, my reading in
The Packet
involves—first thing—a visit to the
Corrections
box on page two, for concise, reliable attendance on setting the record straight, once and for all. It's satisfying to have
something
be correct—no matter what the subject is—even on the second try. After that, once I see if there's anyone I know who's croaked, I read at least one non-celebrity obituary—what in newpapers of yore used to be called the “Deaths of Others” page (no four-star generals or nonagenarian actresses or Negro League standouts). I do this, of course, to honor the deceased, but also quietly to take cognizance of how much any life can actually contain (a lot!), while acknowledging that for any of us a point comes when most of life's been lived and
there's much less of it than there used to be, and yet what's there is not to be missed or pissed away in a blur. It's a true corrective to our woolly, reflexive shiverings about “the end.” Jettisoning friends (I could provide a list, but why bother, there weren't many) . . . jettisoning friends, along with these small, private acts of corrective thinking, has altogether made death mean a great deal less to me than it used to; but better yet, has made life mean a great deal more.

So far I haven't spoken about any of this to Sally, although I mean to. She would only tell me—since she now sees the world through a prism of grief—that I started feeling this way because of the hurricane and the terrible, anonymous death it exacted; and that my actions (jettisoning friends, etc.) are a version of deep grief, which she could counsel me about if I'd let her. Since October she's been dedicating herself, over on The Shore, to elderly Jersey-ites who've lost everything, trying to give them something to look forward to at average age ninety-one. (What could that be?) Though lately I've noticed her more and more staring at me, as she did when I was combing my hair in the bathroom, and she was questioning me about Eddie. By staring, it's almost as if she wants to ask me, “Where did you come from?” Or more to the point, “Where did
I
come from? And why, by the way, am I here now?” I take this to be some unknown-by-me-yet-well-documented syndrome of grief
counseling, and itself another consequence of the hurricane, like the callers on WHAD are always going on about. Sally's at present studying for her state grief-counseling “certification” and is only an “adult trainee”—though she's proved herself skillful and is much in demand at the disaster sites. But if you're a grief counselor and hard at the hard business of counseling the truly grieved—whereas I'm only here on the sidelines and not, in my opinion, suffering any evident grief—then the natural inclination would be to suspect that I'm either irrelevant, or that I'm suffering an even worse grief than anyone knows. Or third, that I'm a malcontent who has too much time on his hands and needs to find better ways to be useful. Determining which of those is true isn't so easy in any life.

On another occasion, when I noticed Sally staring at me in the undisguisedly estimating way she's lately adopted, she said—wrinkling her nose as if she smelled something bad—“Sweetheart, have you ever thought of writing a memoir? Your life's had a pretty interesting trajectory, if you ask me.”

This is not true at all. My life's fine, in most ways, but doesn't have a “trajectory.” It's only the budding mental-health professional in Sally to want to compliment and encourage me—a form of freelance counseling. Though less likably, saying this gives the spurious concept of a “trajectory” a pointless life of its own. In other words, it gives me
something different to deal with instead of what I
am
dealing with—which, happily enough, is not that much.

“Not really,” I said in reply to the memoir-trajectory suggestion. I was at that moment on my knees, tightening a threaded drain-collar under the kitchen sink, where the coupling had leaked and rotted the floorboards. I wasn't being completely truthful. Years ago, when my career as a novelist went south, and before I signed on to be a sportswriter in New York, I'd thought (for about twenty minutes) of writing “something memoiristic” about the death of my young son Ralph Bascombe. At that time, all I could come up with was a title, “In the Hands of a Lesser Writer” (which seemed merely accurate), and a good first line, “I've always suffered fools well, which is why I sleep so soundly at night.” I had no idea what that meant, but after writing it, I had nothing else to say. Most memoirists don't have much to say, though they work hard trying to turn that fact into a vocation. “Truth is,” I said to Sally from up under the sink, “I've been decommissioning polluted words out of my vocabulary lately. You may not have noticed. I'm keeping an inventory.” I cocked my head around and smiled up at her from the kitchen floor like a happy plumber. I didn't want to dismiss her suggestion out of hand, though neither did I want to give it serious thought. I knew that my decommissioning words could very easily make her think I was unhinged. She already believes that because I
had a happy childhood, I've probably suppressed a host of bad things (which I hope is true). Any thought of saying I was also now jettisoning friends would've made an even more airtight argument for my holding on to a “secret grief”—something I have no evidence of and don't believe.

She gave me another one of the “looks”—hip thrown, mouth mumped, brows worried, arms crossed, right foot wagging on its heel, the way you might stand in line at Rite Aid when things were taking too long.

“Will you tell me something?” Her thumbs began touching the tips of her fingers on both hands—doing it, then doing it again, like a compulsive.

“I'll try,” I said, back tightening the threaded collar on the sink drain with a pipe wrench four times bigger than I needed but that once belonged to my father and thus was sacred.

“What do you think of me?”

Cooped up under the fetid sink—plastic cleanser bottles, astringents, nasty sponges, Brillo pads, colorful scrubbers, a couple of grimy mousetraps, and the sweet-smelling yellow-plastic garbage pail unhealthily near my face—I managed to say, “Why do you want to know that?”

“Things can change,” she said. “I know that.”

“Not
everything
,” I said. “That's why most memoirs aren't any good. It takes genius to make that fact interesting.”

“Oh,” Sally said.

What I thought she really meant by asking such a question for no good reason was: “What do
I
think of
you
?” It's not an unusual question. Married people ask it night and day whether they know it or not, especially second-tour veterans like us. They just rarely say it—like Sally didn't. I was being routinely evaluated. It happens. But I still didn't want to write a memoir. Reading for the blind and welcoming home heroic soldiers at the airport is plenty enough for me as “my contribution”—and therapy.

“I love you,” I said, as the collar snugged satisfyingly against the pipe and bit into the white silicone I'd applied.

“Do you really think you do?” Her pretty head and face and mouth and eyes were above me. Possibly she was looking out the kitchen window at our snowy back yard. Our lawyer neighbors had swagged tiny white Christmas lights all through the leafless oak boughs. Their back yard glittered and shone. They are party givers.

“I think it and live it,” I said, fingering the pipe and the emulsion for a guilty hint of moisture, and finding none. I began backing out with my huge wrench.

“I love you. I . . .” Sally started to say something more, then paused and stepped aside so I could climb up, holding the lip of the sink. “I guess I'm under a strain with my clients. I feel a little incognito.” She took a sip from a glass of Sancerre
she'd poured without my knowing it. Tiny tree lights outside were twinkling in the afternoon gloom of mid-December. “You're not grieving at all,
are
you?” A tear in her left eye but not her right. Her wonderful asymmetry. One of her legs is also slightly shorter than its mate—and yet perfect.