“You have any kids, Irv?” I say, not at ease—continuity aside—with religious talk today, happier to be led elsewhere.
“No kids,” Irv says. “Didn’t want kids, which is what shot my deal with the second wife. She remarried right away and had a bunch. I don’t even have any contact with her, which is too bad. They shunned me. You wouldn’t think that would happen.” Irv seems amazed but sorrowfully willing to accept life’s mysteries.
“Self-sufficient thinking’s always in short supply in those kinds of places, I guess. Just like with the Baptists and the Presbyterians.”
“I guess Sartre said freedom isn’t worth a nickel unless you can act on it.”
“That sounds like Sartre,” I say, thinking all over again what I’ve always thought about hippie communes, Brook Farms, kibbutzes, goofball Utopian ideals of every stripe: let one real independent emerge, and everybody turns into Hitler. And if a good egg like Irv can’t make it work for him, the rest of us may as well stay where we are. I don’t know what this has to do with continuity, though I’m sure I should.
We pass along by an old building with a dirty junk-store window display piled and jumbled with dented teakettles, wooden hotel coat hangers, busted waffle irons, bits of saddlery, snow tires, empty picture frames, books, lamp shades, plus a whole lot more crap heaped back on a shadowy concrete floor—stuff the last owner couldn’t give away when he went bust and just left. In the glass, though, I unexpectedly and unhappily see myself, in brighter colors than the junk but still dim and, to my surprise, a good half a head shorter than Irv and walking along in a
semi-stooped
posture, as if grasping forces were tightening strings and sinews in my gut, causing me to bunch up, humping my shoulders in a way I sure as hell never imagined myself and, now that I see, am shocked by! Irv, of course, is oblivious to his reflection. But I sternly brace back my shoulders and stiffen up like a clothes dummy, take a deep chest breath, give myself a good erective stretching and work my head around like a lighthouse (not very different from what I did standing on the wall overlooking the Central Leatherstocking Region yesterday, but now with more cause). Irv meanwhile goes back to elaborating on his continuity concerns as we reach the bottom of the hill, passing a low-rent, two-desk real estate office, City of Hills Realty, whose name I don’t recognize from the signs I saw farther back.
“Anyway,” Irv says, tramping right along, not noticing my furious stretching, opening a button on his gold cardigan to cool off in the warm afternoon. “Do you have a lot of friends?”
“Not too many,” I say, my neck worked back, my shoulders squared.
“Same here. Simulators only socialize as a group, but I’d rather take off for a long walk in the desert alone, or maybe go camping.”
“I’ve become an amateur trout fisherman.” I walk a little faster now. Moving my shoulders and neck have also awakened an achiness where I was whacked by the baseball.
“See? There you are,” meaning what I’m not sure. “How ’bout a girlfriend? You fixed up there?”
“Well,” I say, and think an awkward thought about Sally for the first time in too long. I should definitely call South Mantoloking before she gets on the train. Recalculate our plans; aim for tomorrow. “I’m pretty set there, Irv.”
“How ’bout marriage plans?”
I smile at Irv, a man with two wives down and one on deck, a man who hasn’t seen me in twenty-five years yet who’s trying hard to console me against bad events by the honest application of his simple self to mine. Much of human goodness is badly undersold, take it from me. “I’m a bachelor these days, Irv.”
Irv nods, satisfied that we’re in the same semi-seaworthy boat. “I didn’t really explain what I meant about continuity,” he says. “It’s just my Jewish thing. With other people it’s probably different.”
“I guess so.” I’m picturing the ten separate digits of Sally’s phone number, counting the possible rings and her sweet voice in answer.
“I’d think in the realty business you’d get a pretty good exposure to everybody’s wish for it. I mean in the community sense.”
“What’s that?”
“Just continuity,” Irv says, smiling, sensing some resistance and maybe considering just letting the subject go (I would). We’re across the street from the DQ now, having homed in here through some mutual understanding we haven’t needed to voice.
“I don’t really think communities are continuous, Irv,” I say. “I think of them—and I’ve got a lot of proof—as isolated, contingent groups trying to improve on an illusion of permanence, which they fully accept as an illusion. If that makes any sense. Buying power is the instrumentality. But continuity, if I understand it at all, doesn’t really have much to do with it. Maybe realty’s not that commanding a metaphor.”
“I guess that makes sense,” Irv says, pretty certainly not buying a word of it, though he ought to be satisfied since my definition of community fits right into a general notion of simulation as well as his personal bad experience on the kibbutz. (“Community” is actually one of those words I loathe, since all its hands-on implications are dubious.)
I am braced up straighter now, almost as erect and tall as Irv, though he’s meatier from all his months with a Galil strapped to his back while hoeing the dry ground and keeping an eagle eye out for murderous, uncommunity-oriented Arabs.
“Does that seem like enough, though, Frank? The
illusion
of permanence?” Irv says this committedly. It is a subject he no doubt wrangles over with everybody, and may be his
true interest
, one that makes his happy life a sort of formal investigation of firmer stuff beyond the limits of simulation; rather than like mine, a journey toward someplace yet to be determined but that I have good hope for.
“Enough for what?”
We’ve crossed to the DQ, which true to the old town is an “oldie” itself, in lackluster disrepair since Oneonta has yet to blossom into a destination resort. It’s nowhere as nice as Franks, though there are enough similarities to make me feel at home standing in front of it.
“It’s still all tied up in my mind with continuity,” Irv says, arms folded, reading the hand-lettered menu board from where we’re stopped at the back of a short queue of native Oneontans. I scan down for a “dipped” cone, my all-time fave, and feel for just this fleeting moment incongruously happy. “I was remembering while I was waiting for you at the hospital”—Irv allows a look of good-willed perplexity to pass over his big Levantine mouth—“that you and I were around Jake’s house together while our parents were married. I was right there when your mother died. We knew each other pretty well. And now twenty-five years of absence go by and we bump into each other up here in the middle of the north woods. And I realized—I realized it pacing around up there worried about Jack and his eye—that you’re my only link to that time. I’m not gonna get all worked up over it, but you’re as close to family as anyone there is for me. And we don’t even know each other.” Irv, even as he’s making his ice cream choice, and without actually looking at me, lays his big, fleshy, hairy, pinkie-ringed hand heavily onto my shoulder and shakes his head in wonderment. “I don’t know, Frank.” He looks at me furtively, then stares hard at the big menu. “Life’s screwy.”
“It is, Irv,” I say. “It’s screwy as a monkey.” I put my smaller hand on Irv’s shoulder. And though we don’t splutter forward and glom onto each other at the end of the DQ line, we do exchange a number of restrained but unambiguous shoulder pats and glance squeamishly into each other’s faces in ways that on any other day but this odd one would set me off up the hill at a dead run.
“We’ve probably got a lot of things to talk about,” Irv says prophetically, keeping his heavy hand where it is, so that I feel forced to keep mine where
it
is, in a sort of unwieldy, arms-length non-embrace. Several Oneontans waiting in front of us have already cast threatening now-just-don’t-get-me-involved-in-this frowns our way, as though dangerously unsuppressed effusions were about to splash on everybody like battery acid, with violence a likely outcome. But this is as far as it’s going; I could easily tell them as much.
“We might, Irv,” I say, not knowing what those things could be.
A shadowy someone inside the Dairy Queen slides back the rickety glass on the SORRY CLOSED window and says from inside, “I can help you down here, folks.” The Oneontans all give us a hesitant look as if Irv and I might suddenly rush the other window, though we don’t. They turn back toward their own original window, consider it skeptically, then as a group all shift over to number two, giving Irv and me a straight shot to the front.
O
n our way back up the hill we walk side by side, as solemn as two missionaries, I with my fast-dissolving “dip,” Irv with a pink “strawberry boat” that snugs perfectly into the palm of one big hand. He seems to be elated but containing his feelings of transcendence owing to the sober protocol of Paul’s (Jack’s) injury.
He explains to me, though, that lately he’s been going through an “odd passage” in life, one he associates with getting to be forty-five (instead of being Jewish). He complains of feeling detached from his own personal history, which has eventuated in a fear (kept within boundaries by his demanding simulator work) that he is diminishing; and if not in an actual physical sense, then definitely in a spiritual one. “It’s hard to explain in literal terms and make it seem really serious or clear,” he assures me.
I look upward when he says this, my sticky napkin squeezed into a tight dry ball in my palm, my jaw beginning to ratchet tight again after our respite. High above us, sea gulls circle dizzyingly and in great numbers on the clear afternoon air waves, framed by the old green hardwood crowns up the hillside, high enough to seem to make no sound. Why gulls, I wonder, so far from a sea?
Fear of diminishment of course is a concept I know plenty about under the title “fear of disappearance,” and would be happy to know not much more. Though in Irv’s case it has occasioned what he calls the “catch of dread,” a guilty, hopeless, even deathly feeling he experiences just at the moment when anyone else in his right mind might expect to feel exultation—upon seeing sea gulls in dizzying great numbers on a matte of blue sky; or upon stealing an unexpected glimpse down a sun-shot river valley (as I did just yesterday) to a shimmering glacial lake of primordial beauty; on seeing unreserved love in your girlfriend’s eyes and knowing she wants to dedicate her life only to your happiness and that you should let her; or just smelling a sudden, heady perfume on a timeworn city sidewalk as you turn a crumbling corner and spy a bed of purple loosestrife and Shasta daisies in full bloom in a public park you had no reason to expect was there. “Little things
and
large,” Irv says, referring to whatever has made him feel first wonderful, then terrible, then lessened, then potentially canceled altogether. “It’s crazy, but I feel like some bad feeling is sort of eating away at me on the edges.” He jabs with his plastic spoon at the bottom of his corrugated pink boat and furrows his big-lug brows.
To tell the truth, I’m surprised to hear this kind of dour talk out of Irv. I’d have guessed his Jewishness plus native optimism would’ve sheltered him—though of course I’m wrong. Native optimism is that humor most vulnerable to sneak attacks. About Jewishness I don’t know.
“My view of marriage”—Irv has earlier admitted a strange unwillingness to tie the knot and make little hard-body Erma Mrs. Ornstein #3—“is that I’m still ready to go whole hog and lose myself in it, but really since about ’86 or so I’ve had this feeling, and this goes along with the dread, of just losing myself period, and in Erma’s case of maybe losing myself into the wrong person and being eternally sorry.” Irv looks over at me to see, I assume, if I’ve changed in appearance, having now heard his bitter admissions. “And I do love her, too,” he adds as a capper.
We are nearly back to the hospital lawn. The old, settling houses up above the sidewalk behind aged hickories and oaks seem less decrepit now for having been viewed twice in different moods and lights. (A cornerstone principle for your hard-to-sell listing: make ’em see it twice. Things can look better.) I turn and gaze back down the hill and over town. Oneonta seems like a sweet and homey place—admittedly not a place I’d want to sell real estate, but still a fine place to live once your family has gone off and left you to your own devices for combating loneliness. The gulls I’ve seen have suddenly vanished, and the afternoon air above the treetops is now swept through by evening swifts, taking insects and filling the sky like motes. (I should call the Markhams, as well as Sally, but these needs recede, each as they are counted.)
“Any of that stick to your wall?” Irv says earnestly, knowing he’s blathered on like a mental patient and I’ve said zilch, except it’s allowable now since we’re brothers.
“All of it does, Irv.” I smile, hands down deep in my pockets, letting the warm breeze lave me before I turn back toward the hospital. Naturally, I’ve felt what Irv is feeling five hundred times over and have no single solution to offer, only the general remedies of persistence, jettisoning, common sense, resilience, good cheer—all tenets of the Existence Period—leaving out the physical isolation and emotional disengagement parts, which cause trouble equal to or greater than the problems they ostensibly solve.
Someone from a passing pickup, a tee-shirted white kid with a mean red mouth and a plump, sneering girlie with her hands parked behind her head, shouts out his window something that sounds like
honi soit que mal y pense
but isn’t, then floors it, laughing. I wave at him good-naturedly, though Irv is captained by his probs.