Indecision (12 page)

“Also,” I was saying, “there’s a girl I’d kind of like to see. Natasha van der Weyden?”

A good way to suspend conversation with dad was always to bring up something personal. Very dad-like and typical, I know, but true all the same. It seemed to be part of his syndrome, just identified, of mild, low-level autism.

Golf resumed.

I wondered if dad remembered Natasha. She had visited once upon a time with a large delegation of other kids from St. Jerome’s and her presence had notably coincided with the escape of my mom’s favorite parrot from the cage which dad in his negligence had left open. The bird was discovered jabbering anxiously in the crown of the huge elm on the lawn. I was afraid it would fly away and this would mean dad becoming guilty of one additional thing. A horrible recidivist, he proceeded from crime to crime through twenty-seven years of marriage. At best he was on probation. “You didn’t!” mom would say—but usually he had. He was super-absentminded, and so an unlocked car got stolen, or the trash bins weren’t wheeled down to the road, or ice cream got returned to the pantry, later flooding in slow stages down through the shelves of dry food. My theory was that the more mom complained of these atrocities, the more absentminded dad became, as he more and more mentally took leave of their shared daily world with its vehicles, trash, and foodstuffs.

But so on that long-ago day Natasha had stepped and shimmied up the tree with simian agility, then coaxed the bird onto her shoulder as we family members and Formmates all watched from below. “She’s something else,” mom said. “She’s from Holland,” I said. I couldn’t think what to say. She was more Alice’s friend than mine. Dad said, “I suppose in a few minutes we’ll be calling her parents in Holland.” “She’s saving your ass, Dun.” Delicately Natasha had worked her way back down the trunk, while the wind picked up and all around her the leaves broke the sky into glitter. Down on the ground again, Budge began to say, just as I’d taught him, “What’s up dude? What’s up dude?” and everyone laughed, family happiness restored.

But not for long.

I wondered if I myself would ever marry.

“Is there something on your mind?” Dad was handing me a new club.

“No, no.” I shook my head. “Not yet.”

We knocked off after nine holes and went to have lunch at the clubhouse. Two double scotches arrived in advance of our food, and we toasted, clinking, without either of us proposing an occasion.

“Very peaty,” he said.

“And smoky,” I said.

“Peat-smoke, I think”—an admirable synthesis. He looked at me. “It’s important to stick to something, you know.”

“Pfizer, you mean.”

“I can be taken to mean that.”

I said I would bear that in mind. I felt bad about having spoiled his paean to pharmaceuticals by expressing ambivalence about the job I had already lost. Meanwhile I was pondering the tragic irony of Croxol with regard to morbid embarrassment—and wondering whether it might be, in a similar irony, that Abulinix would force me to decide that my entire personality boiled down to neurochemistry, and I only flattered myself in believing I possessed a free will in need of regular exercise. Then why would I do anything at all? Once you decide you’re only an animal, how do you keep from becoming a vegetable?

Suddenly dad said, “What do you know about Australia?”

“I don’t know, convicts, Aborigines. Marsupials. Just the clichés.”

“Because I’ve met really a very nice woman.”

It was a rude shock. “A woman!”

“Yes, a woman. That’s not such a rare thing. And as it happens she’s from Brisbane. I’ve been thinking I might fly down there and pay her a visit. Fascinating country, Australia.”

“What if she was like Bulgarian? Just as a thought experiment—”

“Well I’m sure she would be a very different person then, Dwight. Australia I imagine as being something like the US in the early sixties. Still open. Kind of raw. New.”

“Dad, man, I thought the whole point of you divorcing mom—which, I mean that’s a serious thing—I thought the whole point was you were
an essentially solitary person.
That’s what you said and I quote.” I may have raised my voice at this point.

The waitress had showed up with our sandwiches. “Veggie burger and—”

I pointed. “The carnage is for him.” And when the waitress had gone I said, “An Australian woman!” Some guy at a nearby table turned his head.

“Frances,” dad said, “happens to be an interesting woman about whom I have simply entertained the possibility she and I might enjoy meeting face-to-face.”

“You did
not
meet her on the internet.”

“Listen now, no cause for alarm. It’s not as if I’m considering relocating to Australia at this point. We’ll discuss this at home.”

“Home!”

“You aren’t usually like this, Dwight.”

“Thank you.”

“Let’s talk about these things later on.”

“So if it’s urgent it can wait? Dad, man”—I had to say it—“I’ve lost my job. And I have basically zero point zero in the way of cash. And I have no skills!”

Dad looked confused.

“And what I
do
have is abulia.”

“Abu—what do you have?”

“I
know.
It’s probably hereditary!” I shook my head, bitter and sad with a foretaste of what I might feel when more drunk.

Dad’s reaction to my unemployment news was the same as Vaneetha’s—to order more drinks. And immediately after saying “Christ, Dwight, you’ve really gone south, haven’t you?” he said—tipsy, already free—“You know I love you, you fogbound sonofabitch.” Neither the curse nor the blessing was such a common thing to receive from him, and getting both at once, the far edges of my mind felt lit with feeling while the middle regions kind of sank away, and I hope I don’t sound like a crybaby if I say that in this strange state over my veggie burger at the club, my eyes went kind of moist.

EIGHT

Dad was driving the dogs and me back home on four scotches, too fast around curves and showing a new mood. “And again, what kind of little pizzle of a job was that at Pfizer anyway? Good to hit bottom, sooner the better. It’s a fucking required event, in my book.”

“Have I really hit do you think?”

“Bottomlessness—is that what you’re suggesting? I suppose the world is at bottom a bottomless place. Fine point, Dwight. Well, good on occasion to tip out of your goddam canoe.” He was swearing much more than I was accustomed to.

We passed by the Lakeville Lake, which flashed thinly like water tilted once in a pan.

“Don’t imagine I haven’t wondered. What can be done with Dwight? This isn’t a new one on me. I’m familiar with your performance. On the other hand you’ve got a hell of a pure soul. If you were a girl we’d never have let you out of the house. . . . Frances—the Aussie—of course she asked, and I said, I wrote back to her, I said, ‘My son’s an innocent bastard, it’s a remarkable thing in this day and age.’ But I don’t mean by calling you a bastard . . . Listen, I love your mother with an insufferableness of love that may surpass the insufferability of the woman herself. And look, Dwight, listen now, if I were to show to you, on a chart, how much I miss old Charlie—a quarterly recap, if I plotted the graph—you would see one gruesome goddam shape. It’s been spring outside. Still is. —But I sired you.” He laughed. “I take full responsibility. Glad to do so. Kind of a nonperforming loan. But you turn out a good product. Innocence! Christ!”

“Thank you. I guess.”

We were passing all the streaming landmarks of the family’s life. There to the left was the silo I’d climbed and fallen from miraculously without injury as a kid. And next up was the turnoff to Factory Pond, where I got a puck in the face but scored lots of goals and even had a hat trick in one game.

“You’ll turn out fine,” dad was saying. He laughed again. “Unless you take after me!”

“Either of you.” Mom was an Episcopal nun. “I’ve never heard you talk like this, dad.” And now to the side of the road was the spot where Alice had been nabbed by the cops for spraypainting on the glass doors to the Millerton movie theater LOOK BUT DON’T TOUCH.

“Nice we’re getting fucked up, isn’t it? I believe that’s what you and Alice called it—getting
fucked . . . up . . .
?” He looked around with satisfaction at these words in the way that guys in a car with hip-hop blaring will look around while stopped at a light.

“There were so many terms,” I said. “It was like the Eskimos with snow. Or I guess now they’re called Inuits.”

“Let me ask you then. Alice?—did Alice turn you on to marijuana? I’ve always thought we’re a peculiar family. Because dammit if Alice didn’t steal you from us!”

“No one stole me
yet.
Come on, dad.”

“It might be we didn’t drink together enough, father and son. Getting fucked up. Or perhaps the whole family—yes, I can see it now, fucked up as a family . . .” Musingly he said, “Whenever I touch a drop I have the urge to call Frances. Thank God with the time difference I often don’t. But she has a lovely voice, not brassy in the way of some Australians—”

“I think you maybe exaggerate the role of getting fucked up in me and Alice’s relationship.”

“Ah, but isn’t it in the nature of getting fucked up—to exaggerate a little?”

“You’re not going to marry . . .” I couldn’t bring myself to say the Australian woman’s horrible name. Frank, he’d probably call her. A year and nine months ago dad had been eloquent on the subjects of necessary solitude and marriage as one big mirage of false relation—and now he had a girlfriend.

“No wedding bells for me,” he was saying, “not if I remain lucid and . . . Yet I’m too much alone, if you’ve noticed.”

“That’s like what you asked for!”

“Much too much . . .”

“Alice thinks you drink too much.”

“And don’t you think so?” Another barked-out laugh.

We pulled off Belgo Road onto our driveway and glided through the familiar strobe of leaf-crumbled light. The dogs stood up from the leather seats in the rear, whining in anticipation of being let out to do nothing. And here was the old lawn, green with new grass, a big circle of it enclosed by looping asphalt. And as we swung around to the front door, lurching to a stop in front of slim white Tuscan-type columns, everything looked so formal and pre-arranged that it felt like we should be met there and announced. But of course no one was home since dad had kept the house, while mom herself, feeling nervous and excited—“Like an actress,” she’d said—had gone off to New York.

After disabling the alarm dad went inside to call Frances. “Probably just getting out of bed over there. Down Under. Would you go out back and water my flowers? Then maybe I’ll fork over some money.” I could tell by his harsh tone that he would, and felt some relief at least in the accounting department as I took the dogs behind the house.

I turned the spoked knob clockwise and then stood with the hose above the flowers, waving the spray over the lilies and svelte irises, the blowsy pansies and banks of phlox, as if to soothe and somehow wake them at the same time. Then I turned the faucet almost shut and set the mild silver flow down inside the bermed bed where the climbing hollyhocks and orange heads of calendula grew. It really wasn’t such a bad flower garden for a divorced bankrupt of a father to keep up.

You can eat calendula, so I stuffed some in my mouth. My jaw working, my palate receiving, I tried to do some thinking. Because I could feel there was a thought that needed thinking, or a decision deciding, and it even seemed connected in some way to the dogs or the flowers.

(As a kid I’d been convinced by dad’s lectures about germination that I knew how it was to be a seed. That is, I felt I knew how it was when the seed first split underground and the tucked neck of its original shoot buckled up, tugged by the light while its roots strayed down, and then straightened out and began climbing up through loosening soil toward the open air and light. I was less sure of what the tiny consciousness of a plant went through as it emerged on the ground, paused, and kept mounting. And as for how it was in the end when the leaves came out and the actual colored flowers blew—I had no idea. By then I felt about a plant as I did toward other people. I mean, mom and dad and Alice—they were incomprehensible! One would never do what they did, or
I
never would anyway. Why had they chosen to be themselves? Dim as I was, and the youngest, still I could tell they weren’t delighted with their choices.)

Flowers . . . Dogs . . . The whole fucking dogflower of it all . . . It seemed like the only way I had of thinking about anything was to think about something else. And this really ruined the procedure.

I shut the water off, and threw up my hands, and sat down drunk on the lawn. I was afraid that the shape my life wanted to take would never describe itself to me any more than I could ever accurately describe just the exact mild savor of all these calendula blossoms I had unconsciously started eating one by one. (Yet while I may not be able to say what these flowers tasted like, they did taste like something, and like nothing else but that.)

The grown-up dogs sat protectively to either side of me while Betsy bounded in and out of my lap. Then I heard the whispering of pant legs and turned to see dad approaching with a tumbler in one hand and a rakish look pulling at one side of his face.

“Poor woman.” The smile tugged to one side. But on the other side he looked too wise for this.

“She thinks you like her?” I asked. “Like,
like
-like her?”

“Why do I call her poor woman?”

“Sometimes you seem like a pretty terrible guy.” I must have been doubly drunk to say this.

“What can you do? The trouble with your mother and me is that we’d exhausted our illusions. As you grow up, and you’ll find this, Dwight, you keep getting involved with larger and larger illusions that take longer and longer to fall away. The great hope is eventually to find a delusion that will outlast your life. You’ll do well to marry a woman you won’t realize you can’t live with until you’re both dead. Ha! But Frances? No I won’t marry her. And yet when I think about her I sometimes feel . . . Frankly I feel a capacity for self-deception that makes me feel like a much younger man. I’m in pretty good health, you know, and could go on living for some time.”