Except for the boozy longing (which I ignore), there’s no shocker here. East Brunswick’s well known for dreary, down-market, cookie-cutter uniformity. It is not a viable alternative even to Penns Neck, though I’m surprised the Markhams came around so soon. It’s too bad they couldn’t have taken the evening, shot up to Susquehanna for Annie and chicken piccante. They’d have laughed, they’d have cried, and Phyllis could’ve found ways to start getting over worrying about the prison in her back yard. Of course, it won’t surprise me if “old man Hanrahan’s” house is realty history by now. Good things don’t hang around while half-wits split hair follicles, even in this economy.
I instantly put in a call to Penns Neck, to get Ted on the alert for an early-morning offer. (I’ll get Julie Loukinen to deliver it.) But the phone rings and rings and rings and rings. I repunch it, taking care to mentally picture each digit, then let it ring possibly thirty times while I stare down the front hall past the old grandfather clock and the portrait of General Doubleday and through the open screen door into the night and farther through trees to the diamond-twinkle lights of another, grander inn across on the lakeshore, a place I didn’t see this afternoon. All the ranked windows there are warmly lit, car headlights coming and going like some swank casino in a far-off seaside country. Out on the Deerslayer’s porch the high backs of the big Adirondack rockers are swaying as my fellow guests snooze away their spaghetti dinners, murmur and chuckle about the day — something bust-a-gut hilarious somebody’s son has piped up with in front of the Heinie Manusch bust, something else about the pros and cons of opening a copy shop in a town this size, something further about Governor Dukakis, whom someone, probably a fellow Democrat, laughingly refers to as “that Beantown Jerkimo.”
But nothing in Penns Neck. Ted may have slipped off to an Independence Day open house across the fence.
I try Sally’s number, since she said to call and since I intend to renew our amorous connections the instant I let Paul off in Gotham, a time that now feels many miles and hours from now but isn’t. (With one’s children everything happens in a flash; there’s never a now, only a then, after which you’re left wondering what took place and trying to imagine if it can take place again so’s you’ll notice.)
“Hello-o,” Sally says in a happy, airy voice, as if she’d just been in the yard, pinning up clothes on a sunny line.
“Hi,” I say, relieved and cheered for an answer somewhere. “It’s me again.”
“Me again? Well. Good. How are you, Me? Still pretty distracted? It’s a wonderful night at the beach. I wish you could distract yourself down to here. I’m on the porch, I can hear music, I ate radicchio and mushrooms tonight, and I’ve had some nice Duck’s Wing fumé blanc. I hope you two’re having as splendid a time wherever you are. Where are you?”
“In Cooperstown. And we are. It’s great. You should be here.” I picture one long, shiny leg, a shoe (gold, in my mind) dangling out over her porch banister into darkness, a big sparkling glass in her lounging hand (a banner night for women tipplers). “Have you got any company?” Apprehension’s knife enters my voice; even I hear it.
“Nope. No company. No suitors scaling the walls tonight.”
“That’s good.”
“I guess,” she says, clearing her throat just the way Phyllis did. “You’re extremely sweet to call me. I’m sorry I asked you about your old wife today. That was indiscreet and insensitive of me. I’ll never do it again.”
“I still want you to come up here.” This is not literally true, though it’s not far from true. (I’m certain she won’t come anyway.)
“Well,” Sally says, as though she were smiling into the dark, her voice going briefly weak, then coming back strong. “I’m thinking very seriously about you, Frank. Even though you were very rude or at least odd on the phone today. Maybe you couldn’t help it.”
“Maybe not,” I say. “But that’s great. I’ve been thinking seriously about you.”
“Have you?”
“You bet. I thought last night you and I came to a crossroads, and we went in the wrong direction.” Something in the South Mantoloking background makes me think I hear surf sighing and piling onto the beach, a blissful, longed-for sound here in the steamy Deerslayer hallway — though conceivably it’s only weak batteries in Sally’s cordless phone. “I think we need to do some things a lot differently,” I say.
Sally has a sip of her fumé blanc right by the receiver. “I thought over what you said about loving someone. And I thought you were very honest. But it seemed very cold too. You don’t think you’re cold, do you?”
“No one ever told me I was. I’ve been told about plenty of other faults.” (Some quite recently.) Whoever’s playing “Lullaby of Birdland” in the living room stops and switches straight into “The Happy Wanderer” at an allegretto clip, the heavy bass notes flat and metallic. Someone claps along for two bars, then quits. A man out on the porch laughs and says, “I think I’m a happy wanderer myself.”
“So I’ve just had this odd feeling all afternoon,” Sally says. “About what you said and what I said to you, about being noncommittal and smooth. That is how you are. But then if I have strong feelings about you, shouldn’t I just follow them? If I have a chance? I believe I could figure things out better when I was younger. I certainly always thought I could alter the course of things if I wanted to. Didn’t you say you had a tidal something or other about me? Tides were in it.”
“I said I had a tidal attraction to you. And I do.” Possibly we can move beyond smooth and noncommittal here. Someone — a woman — starts loudly singing “Balls-de-reee, balls-de-rah” in a quavery voice and laughing. Possibly it’s the loudmouth in polka dots who gave me the barbarous eyeball.
“What does that mean, tidal attraction?” Sally says.
“It’s hard to put into words. It’s just strong and persistent, though. I’m sure of that. I think it’s harder to say what you like than what you don’t.”
“Well,” Sally says almost sadly. “Last night I thought I was in a tide pulling me toward you. Only that isn’t what happened. So I’m not very sure. That’s what I’ve been thinking about.”
“It’s not bad if it’s pulling you toward me, is it?”
“I don’t think so. But I got nervous about it, and I’m not used to being nervous. It’s not my nature. I got in the car and drove all the way to Lakewood and saw The Dead. Then I had my radicchio and mushrooms by myself at Johnny Matassa’s, where you and I had our first encounter.”
“Did you feel better?” I say, fingering up two Annie ducats, wondering if a character in The Dead reminded her of me.
“Not completely. No. I still couldn’t understand if the unchangeable course was toward you or away from you. It’s a dilemma.”
“I love you,” I say, totally startling myself. A tide of another nature has just swirled me into very deep, possibly dark water. These words are not untrue, or don’t feel untrue, but I didn’t need to say them at this very moment (though only an asshole would take them back).
“I’m sorry,” Sally says, reasonably enough. “What is it? What?”