by Richard Ford
The Feensters moved down, eager beavers, on New Year’s Day, ’98, ready to take up their fine new life. Only, their sojourn in Sea-Clift has turned out to be far from a happy one. I frankly believe if they’d stayed in Bridgeport, if Nick had stayed connected to the cathode-ray business, if Drilla had stayed working in the parts department at Housatonic Ford (where they loved her), if maybe they’d bought a transitional house in Noank and kept their rental here, practiced gradualism, not moved the whole gestalt in one swoop to Sea-Clift, where they didn’t know anyone, had nothing to do, weren’t adept at making new connections and, in fact, openly suspected everyone of hating them because of their ridiculous luck, then they might’ve been happier than a typical couple in the Witness Protection Program—which is how they seem.
Their Sea-Clift life seemed to go careening off the rails the instant they arrived. Our beach road, which contains only five houses, once contained twenty and stretched for a mile north along the beach, each large footprint facing the sea from behind a sandy, oat-grass hillock nature had placed in the ocean’s way. We Poincinet home owners—three other residents, plus me (excluding the Feensters)—all understand that we hold our ground on the continent’s fragile margin at nature’s sufferance. Indeed, the reason there are now only five of us is that the previous fifteen “cottages”—grandiloquent old gabled and turreted Queen Annes, rococo Stick Styles, rounded Romanesque Revivals—were blown to shit and smithereens by Poseidon’s wrath and are now gone without a trace. Hurricane Gloria, as recently as 1985, finished the last one. Beach erosion, shoreline scouring, tectonic shifts, global warming, ozone deterioration and normal w&t have rendered all us “survivors” nothing more than solemn, clear-headed custodians to the splendid, transitory essence of everything. The town fathers prudently codified this view by passing a no-exceptions-ever restriction against new construction down our road, grandfathering our newer, better-anchored residences, and requiring repairs and even normal upkeep be both non-expansive and subject to stern permit regulation. In other words, none of this, like none of us, is going to last here. We made our deal with the elements when we closed our deal with the bank.
Except the Feensters didn’t, and don’t, see things that way. They tried, their first summer, to change the road’s name to Bridgeport Road, have it age-restricted and gated from the south end, where we all drive in. When that failed—at a tense planning-board meeting with me and other residents opposing—they tried to close access to the beach farther up, where the old cottages once sat in a regal row. Public use, they argued, deprived them of full enjoyment and drove values down (hilarious, since Adolf Eichmann could own a beach house down here and prices would still soar). This was all hooted down by the surfer community, the surf-casting community, the bait-shop owners and the metal-detector people. (We all again opposed.) Nick Feenster grew infuriated, hired a lawyer from Trenton to test the town’s right to regulate, arguing on constitutional grounds. And when this failed, he stopped speaking to the neighbors and specifically to me and put up signs on his road frontage that said DON’T EVEN THINK OF TURNING AROUND IN THIS DRIVEWAY. KEEP OUT! WE TOW! BELIEVE IT! PRIVATE PROPERTY!!! BEACH CLOSED DUE TO DANGEROUS RIPTIDE. BEWARE OF PIT BULL! They also erected an expensive picket-topped wooden fence between their house and mine and installed motion-sensitive crime lights, both of which the town made them take down. Generally, the Feensters came to seem to us neighbors like the famous family that can’t be made happy by great good luck. Not your worst-nightmare neighbor (a techno-reggae band or an evangelical Baptist church would be worse), but a bad real estate outcome, given that signs were positive at first. And especially for me was it a bad outcome, because while not wanting recipe swapping, drill-bit borrowing or cross-property-line chin-music razz-ma-tazz, I would still enjoy the occasional shared cocktail at sundown, a frank but cordial six-sentence exchange of political views as the paper’s collected at dawn or a noncommittal deck-to-deck wave as the sun turns the sea to sequined fires, filling the heart with the assurance that we’re not experiencing life’s wonders entirely solo.
Instead, zilch.
My misdelivered mail (Mayo bills and DMV documents) all gets tossed in the trash. Only scowls are offered. No apologies are extended when their car alarm whangs off at 2:00 p.m. and ruins my post-procedure nap. There’s no heads-up when a roof tile blows loose and causes a behind-the-wall leak while I’m out in Rochester. Not even a “Howzitgoin?” on my return last August, when I wasn’t feeling so hot. Twice, Nick actually set up a skeet thrower on his deck and shot clay pigeons that flew (I thought) dangerously close to my bedroom window. (I called the cops.)
At one point a year ago, I asked one of my competitors, in strict confidence, to make a cold call to the Feensters, representing a nonexistent, high-roller, all-cash client, to find out if Nick might take the money and go the hell back to Bridgeport, where he belongs. The colleague—a nice, elderly ex-Carmelite nun who’s hard to shock—said Nick stormed at her, “Did that asshole Bascombe put you up to this? Why don’t you go fuck yourself,” then bammed the phone down.
A couple of us up the road have discussed the mystery of what we think of as the “Toxic Feensters,” standing out on sand-swept Poincinet on warm afternoons through the fall. My neighbors are a discredited presidential historian retired from Rutgers, who admitted fudging insignificant quotes in his book about Millard Fillmore and the Know-Nothing Party of 1856, but who sued and won enough to live out his years in style. (College lawyers are never any good.) There’s also a strapping, bulgy-armed, khaki-suited petroleum engineer of about my age, from Oklahoma, Terry Farlow, a bachelor who works in Kazakhstan in “oil exploration,” comes home every twenty-eight days, then returns to Aktumsyk, where he lives in an air-conditioned geodesic dome, eats three-star meals flown in from France and sees all the latest movies courtesy of our government. (I guarantee you’re never neighbors with people like this in Haddam.) Our third neighbor is Mr. Oshi, a middle-aged Japanese banker I’ve actually never talked to, who works at Sumitomo in Gotham, departs every morning at three in a black limousine and never otherwise leaves his house once he’s in it.
We’re an unlikely mix of genetic materials, life modalities and history. Though all of us understand we’ve tumbled down onto this slice of New Jersey’s pretty part like dice cast with eyes shut. Our sense of belonging and fitting in, of making a claim and settling down is at best ephemeral. Though being ephemeral gives us pleasure, relieves us of stodgy house-holder officialdom and renders us free to be our own most current selves. No one would be shocked, for instance, to see a big blue-and-white United Van Lines truck back down the road and for any or all of us to pack it in without explanation. We’d think briefly on life’s transience, but then we’d be glad. Someone new and possibly different and possibly even interesting could be heading our way.
None of us can say we understand the unhappy Feensters. And as we’ve stood evenings out on the sandy road, we’ve stared uncomprehending down Poincinet at their showy white house marred by warning signs about towing and pit bulls and dangerous but fallacious riptides, their twin aqua-and-white ’56 Corvettes in the driveway, where they can be admired by people the Feensters don’t want to let drive past. Everything that’s theirs is always locked up tight as a bank. Nick and Drilla go on beach power walks every day at three, rain, cold or whatever, yellow Walkmen clamped on their hard heads, contrasting Lycra outer garments catching the sun’s glow, fists churning like boot-camp trainees, eyes fixed straight up the beach. Never a word, kind or otherwise, to anyone.
Arthur Glück, the defamed, stoop-shouldered ex-Rutgers prof, believes it’s a Connecticut thing (he’s a Wesleyan grad). Everyone up there, he says, is accustomed to bad community behavior (he cites Greenwich), plus the Feensters aren’t educated. Terry Farlow, the big Irishman from Oklahoma, said his petroleum-industry experience taught him that conspicuous new wealth unaccompanied by any sense of personal accomplishment (salvaging cathode-ray tubes not qualifying as accomplishment)
often unhinges even good people, wrecks their value system, leaves them miserable and turns them into assholes. The one thing it never seems to do, he said, is make them generous, compassionate and forgiving.
It seemed to me—and I feel implicated, since I sold them their house and made a fat 108K doing it—that the Feensters got rich, got restless and adventuresome (like anybody else), bought ocean-front but somehow got detached from their sense of useful longing, though they couldn’t have described it. They only know they paid enough to expect to feel right, but for some reason don’t feel right, and so get mad as hell when they can’t bring all into line. A Sponsor visit, or a freshman course on Kierkegaard at a decent community college, would help.
With the clairvoyance of hindsight, it might also have worked that if the Feensters were dead set on Sea-Clift, they would’ve been smarter to stay away from ocean-front and put their new fecklessly gotten gains into something that would keep longing alive. Longing can be a sign of vigor, as well as heart-stopping stress. They might’ve done better down here by diversifying, maybe moving into their own Bimini Street bungalow, adding a second storey or a greenhouse or an in-ground pool, then buying a bigger fixer-upper and fitting themselves into the Sea-Clift community by trading at the hardware store, subbing out their drywall needs to local tradesmen, applying for permits at the town clerk’s, eating at the Hello Deli and gradually matriculating (instead of bulling in), the way people have from time’s first knell. They could’ve invested their lottery winnings in boutique stocks or a miracle-cure IPO or a Broadway revival of Streetcar and felt they were in the thick of things. Later, they could’ve turned their cathode-ray-tube business into a non-profit to help young victims of something—whatever old cathode-ray tubes do that kills you—and made everyone love them instead of loathing them and wishing they’d go the hell away. In fact, if one or the other of them would get cancer, it would probably have a salubrious effect on their spirits. Though I don’t want to wish that on them yet.
The bottom line is: Living the dream can be a lot more complicated than it seems, even for lottery winners, who we all watch shrewdly, waiting to see how they’ll fuck it up, never give any loot away to AIDS hospices or battered children’s shelters or the Red Cross, the good causes they’d have sworn on their Aunt Tillie’s grave they’d bankroll the instant their number came up. This is, in fact, one reason I keep on selling houses—though I’ve had a snootful of it, don’t need the money and occasionally encounter bad-apple clients like the Feensters: because it gives me something to feel a productive longing about at day’s end, which is a way to register I’m still alive.
Frank-ee.” A heavy pause. “Frank-ee.” My name’s being called from the chilled oceany night, beyond the windows I’ve left open to invigorate my sleep. There are no sounds from Clarissa’s room, where she’s entertaining Mr. Lucky Duck, and where they may even be asleep now—she in bed, he on the floor like a Labrador (there’s so little you can do to make things come out right).
I climb stiffly out, blue-pajama-clad, and go to the window that gives down upon the sand and weedy strip of no-man’s-land between me and the Feensters, the ground where the fence used to be. No light shines from the three window squares on the three stacked levels of white wall facing my house. We’re bunched together too close in here despite the choker prices. Lots were platted by a local developer in cahoots with the planning board and who saw restrictions coming from years away and wanted to retire to Sicily.
Faint fog drifts from sea to land, but I can see a shadowy triangular portion of the Feensters’ front yard, where the gay bankers planted animal topiary the Feensters have let go to hell in favor of aggressive signage. A grown-out boxwood rhino and part of a boxwood monkey are ghostly shapes in the mist. Seaward I can see the pallet of shadowed beach, with a crust of white surf disappearing into the sand. In the night sky, there’s the icebox glow of Gotham and, in the middle distance, the white lights and rigging lines of a commercial fisher alone at its toils. In these times of lean catches, local captains occasionally dispose of private garbage on their overnight flounder trips. A fellow in Manasquan even advertises burials at sea (ashes only) beyond the three-mile limit, where permits aren’t required. Many things seem thinkable that once weren’t.
From between the houses, the Glücks’ big tomcat, William Graymont, strolls toward the beach to scavenge what the shorebirds have left, or perhaps snare a plover for his midnight meal. When I tap the glass, he stops, looks around but not at me, flicks his tail, then continues his leisurely trek.
No one’s said my name again, so I’m wondering if I dreamed it. But all at once a light snaps on in the Feensters’ third-floor bathroom, the Grecian marble ablution sanctum off the spacious master suite. Television volume blaring yesterday’s news headlines goes on, then instantly goes silent. Drilla Feenster’s head and naked torso pass the window, then pass again, her bottle-blond hair in a red plastic shower cap, heading for the gold-nozzled shower. Possibly it’s their usual bathing and TV hour. I wouldn’t know.
But then rounding the front outside corner of the house in pajamas, slippers, a black ski parka and a knit cap, Nick Feenster appears, talking animatedly into a cell phone. One hand holds the instrument to his ear like a conch shell, the other a retractable leash attached to Bimbo, their pug. A big man with a tiny dog could signal a complex and giving heart, if not straight-out homosexuality, but not in Nick’s case. (Bimbo is the “pit bull” referred to on the sign.) Nick’s gesturing with the hand holding Bimbo’s leash, so that each time he gestures, Bimbo’s yanked off his little front paws.
Nick’s voice is loud but muffled. “Frankly, I don’t get it,” he seems to be saying, with gestures accompanying and Bimbo bouncing and looking up at him as if each jerk was a signal. “Frankly, I think you’re making a biiiig mistake. A biiiig mistake. Frankly, this is getting way out of control.”
Frankly. Frankly. Frank-ee. Frank-ee. There’s so little that’s truly inexplicable in the world. Why should it be such a difficult place to live?
The lighted bathroom square goes unexpectedly black—a purpose possibly interrupted. Nick, who’s a husky, heavy-legged, former power lifter and has toted prostrated victims out of smoke-filled tenement stairwells, goes on talking in the cold, fog-misted yard (to whom, I don’t even wonder). A yellow second-floor light square pops on. This in the cypress kitchen-cum-vu room—Mexican tile fireplace, facing Sonoran-style, silver-inlaid, hand-carved one-of-a-kind couches, Sub-Zero, commercial Viking, built-in Cuisinart and a Swiss wine cellar at cabinet level. Almost too fast, the first-floor window brightens. A sound, a seismic disturbance up through the earth’s crust, permeating Nick’s bedroom slippers—an intimation only misbehaving husbands can hear—causes Nick abruptly to snap his cell phone closed, frown a suspicious frown upwards (at me! He can’t see me but senses surveillance). Then, in a strange, bumpy, big man’s slightly balletic movement, reflecting the fact he’s freezing his nuts off, Nick, with Bimbo struggling to keep up, beats it back around the house, past the topiary monkey and out of sight. Whatever he intends to say he’s been up to outside—to Drilla, who’s noted his absence and thought, What the fuck?—is just now larruping around in his brain like an electron.
I stare down into the sandy, weedy non-space Nick has vacated in guilty haste. Something’s intensely satisfying about his absence, as if I’ll never have to see him again. I think I hear, but probably don’t hear, voices far away, buffered by interior walls, a door slammed hard. A shout. A breakage. The odd socketed pleasure of someone else’s argument—not your night shot to hell, not your heart crashing in your chest, not your head exploding in anger and hot frustration, as when Sally left. Someone else’s riot and bad luck. It’s enough to send anyone off to bed happy and relieved, which is where, after a pit stop, I return.
Until…music awakens me. Dum-dee-dum-dee-dum, dum-dee-dum-dee-dum.
My bedroom’s lit through with steely wintry luminance. I’m shocked to have slept till now—7:45—
with light banging in, the day underway and noise downstairs. Rich coffee and bacon-fat aromas mix with sea smells. I hear a voice particle. Clarissa. Hushed. “We have to be…He’s still…not usually so…” Mutter, mutter. A clink of cup and saucer. Knife to plate. A kitchen chair scrapes. A car murmurs past on Poincinet Road. The sounds now of the ball getting rolling. I’ve clenched my teeth all night. Small wonder.
The music’s from the Feensters’. Show tunes at high volume out the vu-room sliding door, past the owl decoy that keeps seagulls at bay. My Fair Lady. “…And oooohhh, the towering fee-ling, just to kn-o-o-o-w somehow you are ne-ah.” The Feensters often sit out on their deck in their hot tub during winter, drink Irish coffee and read the Post, wearing ski parkas, all as a way of smelling the roses. This morning, though, music’s needed to put some distance between now and last night, when Nick was “walking the dog” at 3:00 a.m.
I lie abed and stare bemused at the stack of books on my bedside table, most read to page thirty, then abandoned, except for The Road to the Open Heart, which I’ve read a good deal of. Much of it’s, of course, personally impractical, though you’d have to be a deranged serial killer not to agree with most of what it says. “On the one hand make concessions, on the other take the problem seriously.” It’s no wonder Mike does so well selling houses. Buddhism wrote the book on selling houses.
Recently I’ve also dipped into The Fireside Book of Great Speeches, a leftover from Paul’s HHS Oratory Club. I’ve sought good quotable passages in case a moment arises for valedictory words this Thursday. The speeches, however, are all as boring as Quaker sermons, except for Pericles’ funeral oration, and even he’s a little heavy-handed and patented: “Great will be your glory if you do not lower the nature that is within you.” When is that not ever true? Pericles and the Dalai Lama are naturals for each other. Convalescence is supposed to be a perfect time for reading, like a long stint in prison. But I assure you it isn’t, since you have too much on your mind to concentrate.