Sally touches my left hand as if to say, Don’t let these nice souls give you the blues. We’ll be landing soon.
Natalie goes on to say that Burt has just retired after thirty-five years working for a company that makes laundry starch — another solid family-owned outfit in K.C. — which made a place for him in the accounting department once his eyes got to be a problem. They have kids “out west,” which Sally admits she does, too, allowing Natalie to know we’re second-timers. Natalie says the two of them are thinking of going ahead and moving up to Rochester after selling their family home in Olathe. “At least get a condo,” she says, since they’re up and back so much now. They like Burt’s cancer doctor, who’s had them to dinner once, and feel they could fit well into the Rochester community, which is not so different from K.C. “A good deal less crime.” They’ll just need to get used to the winter, which seems a fun idea to her. They’ve made some “relator” appointments to see some places in between Burt’s tests. “Health’s the last frontier, isn’t it?” Natalie hoods her eyes and looks straight to me, as if this is a fact men need to be aware of. I smile back a smile of false approval, though my mind runs to the idea of a barium enema self-administered on a cold bathroom floor, which is what I always think of when I envision my “health”—either something not good or else something that was good but will soon be no more. A permanent past tense. A lost frontier, not just the last one. Health’s a word I never use.
Getting on to the end, then.
Paul, as I said, along with Jill, has returned to K.C. and to the sweet feasible life of greeting cards and giving words to feelings others lack their own words for. On the day I left the hospital, we buried Paul’s time capsule behind the house in a quiet ceremony that was very much like burying a dog or a goldfish. Paul put in some of his riotous rejects, Jill put in a lock of her yellow hair for purposes of DNA, later on. Detective Marinara (whose name turns out to be Lou) put in a broken pair of handcuffs Paul had wangled out of him, in addition to his police business card. Sally put in a smooth granite pebble off the beach at Mull and another off our beach in Sea-Clift. Clarissa, with Cookie present, put in the mahogany gearshift knob off Thom’s Healey. Mike put in his signed Gipper photo and a green prayer flag. Ann did not attend, although she was invited and may now have made some positive strides with her daughter. I, as a joke, put in one of the spent titanium BBs (packaged in a plastic baggie), which I apparently “passed” on the operating table in Toms River, no doubt when I woke up in mid-surgery and everyone had a good laugh at my expense. Paul was pleased, made a couple of corny wisecracks about the Millennium, and then we covered the little missile up with sand. (I’m sure in the next big blow it’ll be unearthed and washed away and turn up in Africa or Scotland, which will work out just as well.) For whatever Paul may have said to Ann or Ann to him about wanting to break into the real estate industry, this never came up between us — a relief, since his style of everyday mainstream life would never adapt well to the need to coax and coddle and be confessor, therapist, business adviser and risk assessor to the variety of citizen pilgrims who cross my threshold most days. He would like them, do his level best for them, but ultimately think everything they said was a riot and wouldn’t understand the heart from which their words drew strength — much as he doesn’t understand mine. He is a different kind of good man from most. And though I love him and expect him to live long and thrive, I don’t truly understand him much, cannot do much for him except be happy he’s where he is and with his love, and that he will know increase in his days. Perhaps over time, if I have time, I will even come to know them better than I do.
As to Mike and the sale of Realty-Wise, I have elected to take a Tibetan partner. In the time that I was laid up, he not only sold the Timbuktu house-on-wheels to a wholly different Indian client — they apparently come in droves when they come — but also sold 61 Shore Road, cracked piers and all, plus four chalets, to Clare Suddruth, who showed up Friday morning after Thanksgiving with Estelle, having called the emergency number when I didn’t answer, and was so eager to get his money out of his pocket and into somebody else’s that Mike feared he might be “losing an inner struggle” (experiencing a psychotic detachment) and possibly wasn’t responsible for his acts. A call to the bank settled that. Mike also turned down a listing on the Feensters’ beach house when he was approached by poor dead Drilla’s sister, and discreetly passed the business along to Sea-Vu Associates. Nick, it turns out, had many more enemies than the two Russian kids, and had not been as fastidious in his personal affairs as would’ve been needed to keep him above ground.
At first, Mike didn’t see how partnership would suit his ambitions or his arrangements with his Spring Lake dowager. But I convinced him that in the long run, which might not be such a long run, all will be his to buy out. I said I was not ready for éminence grise status or to retire to an island, and that in the coming housing climate with a big shiny bubble around it, he’d be smarter to be half-in instead of all the way, to retain some liquidity, keep a diverse portfolio and his options open for the deal you can’t see coming until it’s suddenly there. He has his children to think about, I reminded him, and a soon-to-be former wife he may someday feel differently about. We’re not having a new shingle made or opening a bigger office, though we’ve subscribed to the Michigan State Newsletter and to “Weneedabreak.com.” On his business card it will soon say “Mike Mahoney, Co-Broker,” and he is thinking of enrolling in an executive boot camp in the Poconos, which I approve of. On the scale of human events and on the great ladder that’s ever upward-tending, this has left him satisfied. At least for now.
Winds buffet us. Our flying culvert makes a sudden shimmying eee-nyaw-eee noise, and a tiny red seat belt emblem illuminates above me. The big brassy stewardess, whose name tag says Birgit, stands up like a friendly stalag matron and begins talking into a telephone receiver turned upside down, working her dark mannish eyebrows at the comedy of knowing none of us can understand anything she says. Though we’re all veterans of this life. We know where we’re descending to. No one’s surprised or applauding. “Here goes nuttin’,” someone says behind me and guffaws. Sally Caldwell, sweet wife of my middle season, squeezes my hand, smiles a falsely gay smile, rolls her eyes dreamily and leans to give me a “be brave” kiss on my oddly cold cheek.
Below us I see the whited landscape stamped out in squares despite the early snow and failing light. It is nearly four. We pass, lowering, lowering over farms and farmettes and farm-equipment corrals, single stores with gas pumps along the ribbon of Route 14, where Clarissa and I walked and talked and sweated last August. Settlement’s thickening and widening to include vacant baseball diamonds, a Guard armory with starred tanks and trucks out back (in case the fuckers make it this far inland, and they might), the Applebee’s, the red blinking tower of an old AM transmitter morphed now into all new radiography — cell phone, cable, radar, NORAD, government surveillance. I don’t yet see the great Mayo citadel with its own antennas and helipads, ICBM launchers and surface-to-air missiles to shoot down marauding microbes, but it’s there. It’s what we’ve come for. I press my cheek to the cold window, try to see the airport out ahead, establish the world on a more human scale. But I see only another jet, tiny and at an incalculable distance, its own red beacons winking, vectored for some different landing.