I don’t talk to people on the phone that much anymore.

“Why do weathermen all wish for a fuckin’ sunny day?” Arnie said, now at a distance from the phone. He’d put me on speaker and seemed to be talking out of the past.

“It’s in their DNA,” I said from my front window.

“Yep, yep.” Arnie sighed a great rattling sigh. Cars were audibly whizzing past wherever he was.

“Where are you, Arnie?”

“Pulled over on the goddamned Garden State, by Cheesequake. Heading down to Sea-Clift, or whatever the fuck’s left of it.”

“I see,” I said. “How’s your house?”

“Do you see, Frank? Well, I’m glad you fuckin’ see.”

Back in the bonanza days of the now-popped realty bubble, I sold Arnie not just a house, but my house. In Sea-Clift. A tall, glass-and-redwood, architect-design beach palace, flush up against what seemed to be a benign and glimmering sea. Anybody’s dream of a second home. I saw to it Arnie coughed up a pretty penny (two-point-eight, no “vig” on a private sale). Sally and I had decided to move inland. I was ready to take down my shingle. It was eight years ago, this fall—two weeks before Christmas, like now.

In my defense, I’d made several calls up to Arnie’s principal residence in Hopatcong, to learn how his/my beach house had weathered the storm. I’d called several old clients, including my former realty partner. All their news was bad, bad, bad. In Haddam, Sally and I lost only two small oak saplings (one already dead), half the roof on her potting shed, plus a cracked windshield on my car. “A big nothing,” as my mother used to say, before making a pppttt farting noise with her lips and laughing out loud.

“I called you, probably three times, Arnie,” I said, feeling the curdling, giddy sensation of being a liar—though I’m not, not about this.

The Elizabethtown guy gave me the thumbs-up as he headed out to his truck. Our water usage for November—not a problem.

“That’s like calling the corpse to say you’re sorry he’s dead.” Arnie’s speaker-phone voice faded out and in from Cheesequake. “What were you going to suggest, Frank? Take me to lunch? Buy your house back? There’s no fuckin’ house left down there, you jackass.”

I didn’t have an answer. Patent gestures of kindness, commiseration, fellow-feeling, shared sorrow and empathy—all are weak sisters in the fight against real loss. I’d only wanted to know the worst hadn’t happened—which, I saw, it hadn’t. Though Sea-Clift was where the big blow had come ashore like Dunkirk. No chance to dodge a bullet.

“I’m not blaming you, Frank. That’s not why I’m on the blower here.” Arnie Urquhart is an ancient Michigan Wolverine like me. Class of ’68. Hockey. Rhodes finalist. Lambda Chi. Navy Cross. We all talked like that in those breezy, troubled days. The blower.