Famous Builder (25 page)

***

Some days I can’t believe that Provincetown is still standing.

But there it is along the beach: a little battered, some days a little unsteady on its feet, but walking forward, a trace of wryness in its expression.

And who could have imagined that the story would turn out this way? Polly certainly saw it; so did Jenny, Dan, and Pam. Lynda, who caught me on the street a few days after Wally’s death (she herself would die in a car accident outside Plymouth in two months), hugged me, saying, “Don’t forget about Mark.”

How would things have been different had we not started out in anguish, had someone else not died first?

Love in the New World.

Mark and I stand in our living room, stepping back from the windows, and wait to see who takes what from our giveaway pile at the foot of the driveway. Sometimes it feels okay to let a few things go—not all, but a few. I’m ready to go back to work when I see a young man sifting through a milk crate full of my old shirts. He’s new to town. He has that hungry look; it barely masks his vulnerability, the squint, the touch of trouble in his eyes. He picks up a shirt, chews on his lip. It might very well be the shirt from which Hollis tore off the sleeves all those years ago. The trees shake for a moment. The clouds part, sun bronzing the tips of the leaves. I want to tell him, watch out, dangerous currents in the forecast. Instead, Mark and I stand side by side at the window and wait to see what he’ll do.

A padded brown envelope arrives two days before my birthday. It’s from my youngest brother, Michael, so it’s bound to be entertaining and a little weird, with all the loaded significance of an in-joke. I think of his other recent gifts: a cassette tape of songs from Russ Meyer’s
Beyond the Valley of the Dolls
; a photo album of Greenbriar, an aging Levitt development in Fairfax, Virginia; a coffee mug adorned with the face of Faith Seferis, failed Channel 27 newscaster, from a snapshot he took of the TV screen.

Still, nothing quite prepares me for what I’m holding in my hands: a customized “memory calendar” of Mystic Islands. I laugh and I laugh, absolutely delighted and bewildered by this painstaking, nearly obsessive gesture. I flip through the spiral-bound pages to find NOVEMBER: a green box with a flat roof, faded pink trim, and two 12 × 24 jalousie windows masked with strips of frosted contact paper. Its front yard is but gravel and weeds. Beside the carport: salt-burned hydrangeas, a dented trash can on its side, and a multibranched gas meter resembling something from a science-fiction movie.

***

On the edge of the world, on an isolated thumb of filled-in wetlands, the original Mystic Islands bordered southern New Jersey’s Great Bay, a huge expanse of water once noted for its pristine oyster beds. Its sales office first opened for operation in the late 1950s, its first house occupied not long thereafter. Over the course of 10 years, the developer built over 3,000 waterfront homes on land created through the dredge and fill method, and sold the modest properties to second-home buyers from Ozone Park to Piscataway. Mystic Islands might have continued expanding to this day if the Environmental Protection Agency hadn’t wisely put the kibosh on the destruction of saltwater marshlands back in the early 1970s.

But describing the place’s inimitable attraction isn’t so easy; it’s almost certain to point up the inadequacy and slipperiness of language. Or even worse, the ugly traits of snobbery, elitism. But how else to describe a place whose own residents seem to have mixed feelings about it; where, when you go into the local store to ask for some local postcards, you’re practically hollered at:
Why would you want that?

Perhaps it’s best to take the tour. It’s 1962, and you’ve been lured by the lively advertisements of the
Philadelphia Inquirer
’s real estate section. You drive through the gates down Radio Road past the Rotunda Lounge (a round affair in which community meetings are held), the Mystic Islands Casino (the local bar/restaurant), and the Mystic Islands Playhouse (a huge tin structure—a hangar?—built to keep potential juvenile delinquency in check). Huge blocks of concrete hunker throughout the property; you learn later that they’re the footings of a demolished World War II–era radio tower. You think of German submarines cruising ominously offshore and are fully, entirely interested. Yet nothing readies you for the sight of all those houses. You think of porches, enclosed porches with minuscule windows and pastel siding. The word “functional” comes to mind. But they’re waterfront; every last one on a man-made, navigable lagoon, which lends the streets a festive, Venetian air. You drive over a wooden bridge and you’re out in the marshes, signs everywhere insisting on the future: Future Golf Course, Future Marina, Future Park. You make it to the dead-end cul-de-sac of Radio Road. An already faded sign says PRIVATE BEACH, but someone’s pushed down the chain-link fence, and two figures—two teenage boys—sit on the yellow sand beside the breezeless bay, slapping at the mosquitoes on their arms.

The whole place seems to be held together by pins and needles.

You turn back. You find it within yourself to check out the “model home mall.” The developer, for some odd reason, has positioned the sewage-treatment plant directly across the lagoon from the sales office, perhaps only to remind you that all properties are connected to city sewers. You walk down the sidewalk, trying to ignore the faint hint of the fecal on the air in favor of more pleasant things: the seagulls on the wires, the slap of a wavelet against a wooden bulkhead. The sewage plant hums louder now, groaning. But you’ve had enough, and you walk back to your car and drive all the way home to Anchorage Point.

***

Is it only that our parents took the tour that year, enumerating its deficiencies in the most energizing, exhilarating manner? Did they fan our inexplicable attraction to the place?

I look at my calendar now, flipping past the house with the multicolored metal tulips in the window boxes. Mortville, I think. If John Waters had grown up in New York or New Jersey, he’d have set one of his early movies here. I can almost hear the late Divine—florid, loud, beautiful—of 117-25 Playhouse Drive calling out the window to her next-door neighbor, played by Edith Massey, or the amazing Jean Hill.

But real people live here with real lives.

As years went by, as soon as I was old enough to drive, my brothers and I drove to Mystic Islands twice a year to pay our homage. I wasn’t even sure what we were looking for: hope, ruin, some combination thereof. Still, something about our exploration must have satisfied, or at least offered the
possibility
of it. We were so compelled by our mascot community that we even took our friends there, some of whom understood its elusive appeal, some of whom refused to. Michael’s friend, Robert Soslow, got it right away, even though he seemed to be more compelled by our devotion than by the place itself. “So Lisicky,” he said cryptically. (We took it as a compliment.) On the other hand, my friend, Mark Champlain, a native Wisconsiner, who would shortly move back to the Midwest, seemed both disturbed by Mystic Islands and by our tender regard for it. Even by our acknowledgment that it existed in the world. “New Jersey,” he mumbled, already thinking about those cold, deep Wisconsin lakes.

His assessment was probably more on the mark than we knew at the time. Nowhere else in the world could you find this conflation of funk and glory, muscularity and decay. In some ways Mystic Islands seemed to distill the true essence of New Jersey in all its nervy contradictions. Certainly my own way of seeing developed from having grown up there; you couldn’t grow up in a place in which refinery abutted farmland, where fancy custom houses were built atop toxic-waste sites, without embracing the
full
of it, without recognizing the fluid relationship between damage and beauty. I suppose there are consequences to this perspective if you don’t keep it in check: detachment, cynicism, a hyperawareness of the gap between appearance and reality. (Now I get it: that New Jersey sense of humor!) But how could one not admit to the monstrous radiance of the Meadowlands, that stretch of wrecked marsh between Linden and Secaucus, that place to which outsiders point when they say:
Jersey.
All that buzzing energy. All those tanks and high tension towers, all those fires and carcinogenic streams, and the World Trade Center towers beyond, ghostly through the scrim of smog. That smell. Poisonous and fabulous. Of course, it’s an ecological disaster. Of course, it embodies shortsightedness and brutality. But as much as I despair about the hole in the ozone layer, global warming, and the destruction of the rain forests, I can’t ignore the otherworldly beauty of the place: the obverse side of heaven. At the very least I’d rather look at it, take it deep within, than pretend it doesn’t exist.

***

Another question: Would Wisconsin be what it is without New Jersey? Mark Champlain cannot fill the tank of his SUV without making sure, in some part, that the refineries of the Meadowlands exist (not to mention wars in the Middle East).

***

One more time: you drive down Radio Road to see the rushing blue sky, the wheeling gulls, the vast tract of marsh past the bridge. A great blue heron dips its bill into the tidal stream, and all at once it takes off, an explosion of flight. It drops the minnow to the reeds. The breeze off the marsh is warm, redolent of cattails, bay mud, and the sweet insides of pilings, telephone poles.

Maybe Mystic Islands seemed to us a huge gesture of faith. Maybe we couldn’t help but be moved by all these efforts to make the very best of one’s limited lot.

***

Or maybe we were just embarrassed by the place. Did Mystic Islands give us some voyeuristic, prurient thrill, stirring up our inherent feelings of shame? Could it be, as Michael Cunningham suggests in one of his short stories, that we’re “drawn to humiliation against our will?”

Think of the stand-up comic in a Holiday Inn; the aging businessman performing “My Way” in some Manhattan karaoke bar. Or the chilling crack-ups in John Cassavetes’s films. Or better yet, the young newscaster from the tiny Wildwood station, who flubs her lines, angry at the cameraman for screwing up yet again. Throughout our high-school years my brothers and I watched the broadcast with an almost religious ferocity, almost praying for Faith’s pursed lips to snap, which, believe it or not, they did from time to time.
Stupid
, she seemed to say with every gesture. Stupid, stupid. Human folly, incompetence, mediocrity, self-absorption—she couldn’t bear these qualities in anyone, especially in herself. Paired with the vacant Mary McClaine, former Miss New Jersey, all teeth and smiles and good cheer about the world, Faith fell into a deeper gloom. Their nightly drama lasted for more than two years. Oh, the nasty glances, the sighs. Still, she wouldn’t quit: persistence, persistence. Cup of our darkest thoughts: Faith filled us with as much dread as we could possibly need.

And relieved some psychological pressure. We couldn’t have known what we were getting into, immersing ourselves in the drama of getting ahead (whatever that meant), as we struggled toward roles that felt so far from us. Bobby drawing blueprints for architectural-school applications, Michael auditioning for Juilliard. And what should I do: music, writing, art, some combination of the three? Didn’t failure lurk around every corner? So tempting to throw it all away. Impossible not to be in thrall to flop, fiasco, and disaster, when all around us, in our township of the self-made, behind the masks of achievement and style, the costs of excessive striving were already becoming apparent. The high-school alto who finally recognized she was tone deaf once the entire audience blushed and chattered through her solo in
Fiddler on the Roof.
The divorced mother of three, burdened by the payments on her $350,000 house, arrested for shoplifting frozen dinners (“I had to feed the kids”) from the 7-Eleven beneath the looming Cherry Hill water tower. Our next-door neighbor, months after installing a pool, tennis court, and detached four-car garage, standing outside his house with his hands balled in his pockets as the tax sale commenced in his living room. Even those who seemed to be on the up and up were watched with the most obsessive, exacting eye, while everyone else, with an urgency we couldn’t quite name, hoped at least to be
seen.

No wonder we were soothed by any demonstration of damage outside ourselves. I only see it now: we were only coming to love what might someday happen to us.

***

I’m drinking from my Faith Seferis mug, just as I do several times a week. The ultimate irony is that the place that seemed to be held together by pins and needles still stands after almost forty years, undiminished by flood, hurricane, age, or neglect, both regenerating itself and falling apart at once. Although my brother has attempted to arrange the calendar’s photos from examples of the heroic to the disastrous, chronicling Mystic Islands’s inevitable collapse, it seems to resist a received linear narrative. Sure, it’s become a little more threadbare over time, but the houses haven’t changed as much as I thought they would. In all honesty, the place doesn’t work its charms on me as much as it used to. Maybe it’s only that I’m getting older, and it’s harder and harder to feel so detached from struggle and compromise. How much different that is from when the whole world seemed to be about possibility:
What if?

Sometimes, lying in bed, I like to imagine myself on the streets of Mystic Islands. It’s dark, and if I’m quiet enough, over the crickets and the murmurings of the lagoons, I can hear the lighted windows talking to me:
You who think you’re better, you who think the towers you’re building are going to save you. If you only knew how close you are to us.

It’s the hour when the heels are inevitably blistered, when we’ve strolled past as many canals, funky houseboats, and tall, glamorous windows as we can for one day. Even the obsessive pleasure we’ve taken in trying to perfect our pronunciations of
Prinsengracht
or
Leidesgracht
—the burr of those “g’s” scratching the backs of our throats—is no longer of interest. All those rainy pavements, those brooding clouds blown in from the North Sea: we’re sodden, saturated, and we can’t help but wish to be warmed, to feel the heat of a candle’s flame drying us out from inside.