The Other Side of the World. Jay Neugeboren

       Tag Sale

      On the morning Seana showed up for my father’s tag sale, I was in Borneo, so that I didn’t get his letter giving me the news until I was back in Singapore. Before his letter came, I’d had no plans to return to the States, and my father, who—quintessential Max—had the finely-tuned habit of rarely if ever putting pressure on me and, thus, of not allowing hopes to become expectations, had never asked if or when I might be coming back.

      I’d been working in Singapore the previous three years for a company that dealt in palm oil, and during the years I worked for them, palm oil had surpassed soy bean oil as the most widely produced vegetable oil in the world. My job, mostly, was to monitor various stages of development, production, and sales—to make sure the contractors we hired did what we’d contracted for, and that what we promised to deliver was delivered safely and at the agreed-upon price. It was the most lucrative job I’d ever had, and though life in Singapore was tolerable—I worked hard, played hard, and was on the receiving end of a multitude of perks—it didn’t thrill me. Borneo did, however, and during some of my visits there—mini-vacations I was able to tack on to business trips—I’d thought of sending my father a round-trip plane ticket so I could show him why it was I found Borneo so enchanting, and why I sometimes fantasized living there for the rest of my life.

      But it wasn’t the news about Seana showing up for my father’s tag sale that made me put this kind of fantasy on hold and, instead, to put in for a leave-without-pay in order to return home. What did that was Nick Falzetti’s death.

      It was because of Nick that I’d gone to Singapore, and he had died in a freak accident on the first Saturday night after my return to Singapore from a weekend in Borneo. Nick and I had been buddies, on and off, when we were undergraduates at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, and for a few years after, and when, during our tenth college reunion we hung out together, he’d sold me a bill of goods on moving to Singapore so I could live the kind of good life he’d been living.

      Nick’s parents lived in Tenants Harbor, a small town a few miles from the Maine coast, about halfway up the state to Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park, and his ex-wife, Trish, whom I’d gone with before she met Nick, lived with their son Gabe not far from Nick’s parents. I wanted to pay my respects to Nick’s family—to his parents and to Trish—but after I’d made the decision to do so, what began to get me down was thinking about the kind of messy stuff Nick, Trish, and I had gotten into way back, and once I’d gone and booked my flight and wrote my father that I was coming home, I found myself imagining, far more than was good for me, what it would be like to be with her again. And I began thinking, too, that she might be far too pleased by news of Nick’s death for anyone’s good.

      By the time I arrived home, my father’s tag sale was history, and Seana, who bought the works, had moved in with him. A good deal for them both, she claimed: She got all his leftovers—and he got her.

      Here’s the ad my father had put in the local papers:

      Tag Sale. Retired University Professor offering material from unpublished and/or abandoned novels and stories. Items include: titles, epigraphs, opening paragraphs, opening chapters, final paragraphs, plot notions and summaries, character sketches, lists, research notes, random jottings, and select journal entries. Saturday and Sunday, 9 AM to 4:30 PM. Rain or shine. 35 Harrison Avenue, Northampton. No book dealers, please.

      Seana—Seana Shulamith McGee O’Sullivan—had been one of my father’s graduate students in the late eighties—his best and brightest, and also, to his ongoing delight, his most successful. Although Seana’s first novel, Triangle, was far too raunchy to have been chosen by Oprah—it was about a mother-daughter-father ménage à trois that had a deliciously happy ending—it wound up outselling most Oprah selections and staying on The New York Times best-seller list for over a hundred weeks.

      I met Seana for the first time in the spring of 1988, when my father let me sit in on one of his at-home writing workshops. I’d just passed my thirteenth birthday—I know this because I’d been Bar Mitzvahed three weeks earlier—and I remember watching Seana sitting cross-legged on the floor next to the fireplace, chewing on and off at a hangnail on her left index finger while the women in the class kept giving her looks of disdain and envy she clearly relished.

      My father always cooked a sumptuous dinner for his students—never boiled up spaghetti or ordered out for pizza—and he served it on our good china, on a white damask linen tablecloth, with napkins to match, and while he and I were doing the dishes afterwards, I asked about Seana and the way the women in the class had been looking at her. “Ah,” my father sighed. And then: “I mean, after all, son, what young woman wouldn’t be resentful and envious of Seana? All that talent and productivity… and beautiful too!”

      For the tag sale—after education, the region’s second largest industry, my father contended—what he’d done was to lay out on our front porch and lawn stuff that had not made its way into his published work, and that, in the time he estimated he had left—he was seventy-two and calculated his remaining productive years at sixteen—he did not expect ever to look at again.

      In addition to being one upon whom nothing was lost, he wrote, he wanted to be one from whom nothing was lost. That, he explained, had been the modest raison d’être for what he’d come to call, before Seana’s arrival, ‘The First and Last Annual Max Eisner Literary Tag Sale.’ But then, as in any good novel, the wonderful and unpredictable had occurred: First (and only) person in line on a bright, chilly New England Saturday morning

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