The Lay of the Land (16 page)

My face, by practice, expresses nothing. Ann and I used to ask each other—when one of us would register a complaint the other couldn’t properly address: “What’s your neurosis allowing you to do that you couldn’t do otherwise?” Mostly the answer was to complain and enjoy it. This might be the urge that Marguerite’s experiencing. “Would you really like to know what to confess, no matter what?” I ask. “Or would you be happy to just quit feeling this way and never confess anything?”

“I guess the latter, Frank. Iss that horrible?”

“Maybe if you murdered somebody,” I say. Put arsenic in their smoothie at the health club. “Did you murder anybody?” Fincher wouldn’t count.

“No.” She clasps her hands and looks distressed, as if she sort of wished she could say she
had
murdered somebody, make me believe it, then take it all back, leaving behind a zesty fragrance of doubt. “I don’t think I have the right character for that,” she says wondrously.

My bet, though, is she’s never done anything wrong. Married a shit, been treated shabbily, forgettably rogered the realtor, but then reconstituted herself, married a better sod who left her well-off and didn’t stick around for
forever.
It’s not all that different from the story behind many doors I knock on, though it doesn’t make much of a climax and I’m not usually a ghost presence. But—the guy with the sailboat that’s driving him nuts; Bettina, the fractious Dutch housekeeper—there
is
the need to tell, which is its own virtue and complaint. That’s why I’m here—it could be the modern dilemma. But like many modern dilemmas, it’s susceptible to a cure.

“I’m not sure we have characters, Marguerite. Are you? I’ve thought a lot about it.” I press my lips together to signal this is my judgment
in re
her problem. Any suspicion that I might
be
the problem is entirely nugatory.

“No.” A quarter smile of recognition emerges onto her whole face. I wonder if I already said this to her sixteen years ago in some post-coital posturings. I hope not. “No, I’m not. I’m Epissscopalian, Frank, but I’m not religious.”

I give a wink of “me, neither” assurance. “We may think we have a character because it makes everything simpler.”

“Yes.”

“But what we do have for sure,” I say supremely, “is memories, presents, futures, desires, hatreds, et cetera. And it’s our job to govern those as much as we can. How we do that may be the only character we have, if you know what I mean.”

“Yes.” She is possibly stumped.

“
Your
job, I think, is to control your memory so it doesn’t bother you. Since from what you say, it shouldn’t bother you. Right? There isn’t even a bad memory there.”

“No.” She clears her throat, lets her eyes drop. I may be veering near privileged subjects, where I don’t want to veer, but the truth is the truth. “And how do I do that, Frank?” she says. “That’s the problem, isn’t it?”

“No. I don’t think that’s the problem at all.” I’m beaming. I certainly
should
have been able to explain this decades back, in the kitchen, over our muffin. Isn’t that where we want our casual couplings to lead us? To someone we can tell something to? Even if there isn’t anything to tell. Maybe it’s me who’s reincarnated. “I don’t think there
is
a problem,” I say enthusiastically. “You just have to believe this feeling of wanting to confess something is a natural feeling. And probably a good omen for the future.” My eyes roam up and catch the knowing gimlet eye of old Purcell, bearing down on me in his white-hunter outfit. I am your surrogate here, I think, not your adversary. It is the genius soul of Sponsoring.

“The future?” Marguerite clears her throat again, stagily. We’ve moved onto the bright future, where we belong.

“Sometimes we think that before we can go on with life we have to get the past all settled.” I am as soulful as a St. Bernard. “But that’s not true. We’d never get anyplace if it was.”

“Probably not.” She’s nodding.

Then neither of us says anything. Silences are almost always affirming. I cast a wary eye down into the aquarium, glass as thick as a bank window and beveled smooth all around its rhomboid to guard against gashed shins, snagged hems, toddlers and pets poking their eyes out. My face is mirrored back in the Buick bumper—as rubbery as the Elephant Man. I see one of the huge, glaucal goldfish looking at me. How would one feed them? Probably there’s a way. Possibly they’re not real—

“Ah yew plannin’ on a big Thanks-givin’?” I hear Marguerite say, Dixie, again, the music in her voice.

I smile stupidly across the table. When I first had my titanium BBs downloaded, I experienced all sorts of strange enervated zonings out and in, often at extremely unhandy moments—across the desk from a client who’d just signed an offer sheet obligating him to pay $75,000 if the deal fell through; or listening to a man tell me how the death of his wife made an instant sale a matter of highest priority. Then, ZAP, I’d be lost in a reverie about a Charlie Chan movie I saw, circa age ten, and whether it was Sidney Toler or Warner Oland in the title role. Again, Psimos says these “episodes” are not relatable to treatment. But I say baloney. I wouldn’t have them if I didn’t have what I
do have.
Either it was the BBs or the
thought
of BBs—a distinction that’s not a difference.

“Do you have childrun?” I’m sure she’s wondering what the hell’s wrong with me.

“Yeah. Absolutely.” I’m fuzzy-woozy. “They’re coming. For Thanksgiving. Two of ’em.” Sponsors aren’t supposed to tell
our
stories. Expanded human contexts lead to random personal assessments. We’re here to do a job, like the State Farm guy. Plus, now that we’ve gotten past it, I don’t want to risk a needless
revisitus
of who was who, when
when
was when. It’s not the key to Marguerite’s mystery. There is no key. There is no mystery. We all live with that revelation.

I abruptly stand right up, straight as a sentry as if on command, but am woozy still. Satisfactory visit. Needs to be over. Done and done well. If I had a clipboard, it’d now be under my arm. If I had a hat, I’d be turning it by its brim.

“Are you leavin’?” Marguerite looks up at me, surprised, but automatically rises (a little stiffly) to let me know it’s okay and not rude if I have to go. She looks hopefully across the strange aquarium table, then takes a hesitant turning step toward the foyer, her two feet going balky, as though they’d gone to sleep in their Guccis. “I ’magine you have other ssstops to make.” (Do I walk like that?)

I’m eager to go, though still light-headed. Sponsor visits are more demanding than they seem and adieus can be unwieldy. People of both genders sometimes need to lavish hugs on you. I’m nervous Marguerite’s going to spin round when we hit the parquet, take both my hands in her two warm ones, bull her way inside the invisible screen, peer into my bleary orbs, smile a smile of lost laughter and past regret and say something outrageous. Like: “We don’t have to pretend anymore.” Though we do! “…fate didn’t intend us…it’s true and it’s sssad…but you’ve counseled me so well…couldn’t you hold me for just a moment?…” I’ll have a heart attack. You think you’ll always be open to these impromptu clenches and whatever good mischief they lead to. But after a while you’re not.

However, Marguerite says, “This election’s made a mess out of everybody’s Thanksssgiving, hasn’t it, Fruank?” She turns to me in the entryway (I’m fearful) but is smiling ruefully, her veined hands folded at her rose pink waist like a schoolmarm. The little joined apples are glowing cheerfully. She clicks on the soft overhead globe, suffusing us in a deathly glow that guarantees, I trust, no smoochy-smoochy.

“I guess so.” My eyes find the brass umbrella stand beside the door, as if one of the umbrellas is mine and I want it back. I must be going, yes, I must be going.

“You know, when I called to assk for a visit today—and I have these vissits quite often—I intended to ask for help in drafting a letter to President Clinton explaining all we have to be thankful for in this country. And then this other funny old business just popped up.”

“Why’d you change your mind?” Why ask
that
! I’ve Sponsored so well up to now! I flinch and move my toes nearer the door. Cold breeze purrs beneath it, chilling my ankles and giving me a shiver.
Heat does not reach front foyer.
A prospective buyer wouldn’t notice this till it’s too late. I grasp the cold brass knob and twist-test it. Left, right.

“I’m really not sssure now.” Marguerite’s eyes cast down, as though the answer was on the floor.

I give the knob a quarter right twist, staring at the dark roots of Marguerite’s hairline, up the regimental center part to nowhere. She looks up at me brazenly, eyes shining not with stayed tears but with resolve and optimism. “Do you think life’s ssstrange, Frank?” At her waist, her fingers touch tips-to-tips. She’s smiling a wonderful, positivistic Margaret Chase Smith smile.

“Depends on what you compare it to.” If it’s death, then no.

“Oh my.” One eye narrows at me in tolerant ridicule. “That’s really not a very good ansswer. Not for a ssmart boy like yew.”

“You’re right. Sorry.”

“Let’s just ssay it
isss
strange. That’s the thought to ssay good-bye on, isn’t it?”

“Okay.” I give the ponderous door a ponderous tug. Cold damp instantly falls in on us like a tree.

“Thank you ssso much for coming.” Marguerite cocks her pretty head like a sparrow, her nose flicking up. In no way does she mean “Thanks for coming back
finally.
” She extends a soft, bonily mature hand for me to grasp. I take it like a Japanese businessman, give her a firm double-hand up-down up-down, the kind I counsel Mike never to do, then turn loose quick. She looks in my eyes, then down to regard her empty hand, then smiles, shaking her head at life’s weirdness. Women are stronger (and smarter) than men. Whoever doubted it? I attempt my manliest affirming smile, say
good
and
bye
between my lips and teeth, step out onto the bristly mat, into the frigid afternoon that looks like evening. Surprisingly, the red door closes hard behind me. I hear a lock go click, footsteps receding. Miraculously, and not a moment too soon, I’m history (again).

B
ack in the car, my heart—for reasons best known to Dr. DeBakey—
again
goes cavorting.
Whumpetty, whump-de-whumps
like a stallion in a stall when smoke’s in the air. My scalp seizes. My skin prickles. Metallic ozone tang’s in my mouth, as if something foreign had been in the car while I was inside. I sit and try to picture stillness, hold my cheek to the cold-fugged window glass, make myself simmer down so as not to lapse into “a state.” Possibly I should put in my night guard.

Everyone’s wondered: Will I
know
if I’m having a heart attack? The people who’ve had them—Hugh Wekkum, for one—say you can’t
not
know. Only goofballs mistake it for acid reflux or over-excitement when you open the IRS letter. Unless, of course, you
want
to be in the dark—in which case everything’s possible. EMS technicians testify—I read this in the Mayo newsletter I’m now sent whether I want it or not—that when they ask their patients, stretched out on sidewalks turning magenta, or doubled over in the expensive box seats at Shea, or being wheeled off a Northwest flight in Detroit, “What seems to be the trouble, sir?” the answer’s usually “I think I’m having a fucking heart attack, you dickhead. What d’you think’s wrong?” They’re almost always right.

I am
not
having a heart attack, although having a Sea Biscuit heartbeat may mean something’s not perfect, following on my partial fadeout inside Marguerite’s. (The beef ’n bean burrito on an empty stomach is a suspect.) I take a peek through the hazy glass out at #24, cast in shapeless shadows. Lights downstairs are off, though the carriage lamps still burn. But Marguerite is now standing at an upstairs window, looking down at my car, wherein I’m trying to stop my galloping heart. I believe she’s smiling. Enigmatic. Knowing. I’m willing to bet she has no friends, lives isolated in the world of her inventions—helpfully underwritten by gobs of dough. I could go back inside and be her friend. We could speak of matters differently. But instead, I turn the key, set the wipers flopping, the defrost whooshing, the wheels to rolling—the bass
gur-murmur-murmur
of my Suburban’s V-8 fortifying me just like the commercials promise. I am on my way to De Tocqueville and to Ann.

But. Let no man say here was not a successful Sponsoring—even if our present selves were under pressure from our past, which is what the past is good at. It’s not so different from thinking you know people when you don’t. Life
is
strange. What can we do about it? Which is why Sponsors are never concerned with underlying causes. My counsel was good counsel. Significant hurdles were cleared. One talked, one listened. Human character (or a lack thereof) was brought into play. A good future was projected. I’m actually now wondering if Marguerite could’ve been an older sister to Dusty and known nothing of me, only shared certain sibling nervous disorders. People, after all, have sisters. Whoever she was, she had legitimate issues I had a peculiarly good grasp on, and not just about reigniting the pilot light or reading the small print on the dehumidifier warranty. Something real (albeit invented) was bothering someone real (albeit invented). There are few enough chances to do the simple right thing anymore. A hundred years ago this week—in our grateful and unlitigious village past—this kind of good deed happened every day and all involved took it for granted. Looked at this way, Thanksgiving’s not really a mess but more than anything else, commemorates a time we’ll never see again.

4

I should say something about having cancer, since my health’s on my mind now like a man being followed by an assassin. I’d like not to make a big to-do over it, since my view is that rather than
good
things coming to those who wait,
all
things—good, bad, indifferent—come to
all
of us if we simply hang around long enough. The poet wasn’t wrong when he wrote, “Great nature has another thing to do to you and me…What falls away is always. And is near.”

The telescoped version of the whole cancer rigamarole is that exactly four weeks after my wife, Sally Caldwell, announced she and her posthumous husband, Wally (a recent, honored guest in our house), were reconvening life on new footings and blah, blah, blah, blah, in earnest hope of gaining blah, blah, blah, blah, and better blah, blah, blah, blah,
I
happened to notice some dried brown blood driblets at about pecker height on my bedsheets, and went straight off to Haddam Medical Arts out Harrison Road to find out what might be going on with what.

I was in robustest of health (so I thought) in spite of Sally’s unhappy departure—which I assumed wouldn’t last long. I did my sit-ups and stretches, took healthful treks down the Sea-Clift beach every other day. I didn’t drink much. I kept my weight at 178—where it’s been since my last year at Michigan. I didn’t smoke, didn’t take drugs, consumed fistfuls of daily vitamins, including saw palmetto and selenium, ate fish more than twice a week, conscientiously divided each calendar year into test results to test results. Nothing had come up amiss—colonoscopy, chest X ray, PSA, blood pressure, good cholesterol and bad, body mass, fat percentage, pulse rate, all moles declared harmless. Going for a checkup seemed purely a confirming experience: good-to-go another twelve, as though each visit was diagnostic, preventative and curative all at once. I’d never had a surgery. Illness was what others endured and newspapers wrote about.

“Probably nothing,” Bernie Blumberg said, giving me a wiseacre, pooch-mouthed Jewish butcher’s wink, stripping his pale work gloves into a
HAZARD
can. “Prostatitis. Your gland feels a little smooshy. Slightly enlarged. Not unusual for your age. Nothing some good gherkina jerkina wouldn’t clear up.” He snorted, smacked his lips and dilated his nostrils as he washed his hands for the eightieth time that day (these guys earn their keep). “Your PSA’s up because of the inflammation. I’ll put you on some atomic-mycin and in four weeks do another PSA, after which you’ll be free to resume front-line duties. How’s that wife of yours?” Sally and I both went to Bernie. It’s not unusual.

“She’s in Mull with her dead husband,” I said viciously. “We might be getting divorced.” Though I didn’t believe that.

“How ’bout that,” Bernie said, and in an instant was gone—vanished out the door, or through the wall, or up the A/C vent or into thin air, his labcoat tails fluttering in a nonexistent breeze. “Well, look here now, how’s that husband of yours?” I heard his voice sing out from somewhere, another examining room down a hall, while I cinched my belt, re-zipped, found my shoes and felt the odd queasiness up my butt. I heard his muffled laughter through cold walls. “Oh, he certainly should. Of course he should,” he said. I couldn’t hear the question.

Only in four weeks, my PSA showed another less-than-perfect 5.3, and Bernie said, “Well, let’s give the pills another chance to work their magic.” Bernie is a small, scrappy, squash-playing, wide-eyed, salt ’n pepper brush-cut Michigan Med grad from Wyandotte (which is why I go to him), an ex-Navy corpsman who practices a robust battlefield triage mentality that says only a sucking chest wound is worth getting jazzed up about. These guys aren’t good when it comes to bedside etiquette and dispensing balming info. He’s seen too much of life, and dreams of living in Bozeman and taking up decoy-carving. I, on the other hand, haven’t seen enough yet.

“What happens if that doesn’t work?” I said. Bernie was scanning the computerized pages of my blood work. We were in his little cubicle office. (Why don’t these guys have nice offices? They’re all rich.) His Michigan and Kenyon diplomas hung above his Navy discharge, next to a mahogany-framed display of his battle ribbons, including a Purple Heart. Outside on summer-steamy Harrison Road, jackhammers racketed away, making the office and the chair I occupied vibrate.

“Well”—not yet looking all the way over his glasses—“if that happens, I’ll send you around the corner to my good friend Dr. Peplum over at Urology Partners, and he’ll get you in for a sonogram and maybe a little biopsy.”

“Do they do little ones?” My lower parts gripped their side walls. Biopsy!

“Yep. Uh-huh,” Bernie said, nodding his head. “Nothin’ to it. They put you to sleep.”

“A biopsy. For cancer?” My heart was stilled. I was fully dressed, the office was freezing in spite of the warping New Jersey heat, and silent in spite of the outside bangety-bangety. Cobwebby green light sifted through the high windows, over which hung a green cotton curtain printed with faded Irish setter heads. Out in the hallway, I could hear happy female voices—nurses gossiping and giggling in hushed tones. One said, “Now that’s Tony. You don’t have to say any more.” Another, “What a
rascal.
” More giggling, their crepe soles gliding over scrubbed antiseptic tiles. This near-silent, for-all-the-world unremarkable moment, I knew, was the
fabled
moment. Things new and different and interesting possibly were afoot. Changes could ensue. Certain things taken for granted maybe couldn’t be anymore.

I wasn’t exactly afraid (nobody’d told me anything bad yet). I just wanted to take it in properly ahead of time so I’d know how to accommodate other possible surprises. If this shows a propensity to duck before I’m hit, to withhold commitment and not do
every goddamn thing
whole hog—then sue me. All boats, the saying goes, are looking for a place to sink. I was looking for a place to stay afloat. I must’ve known I had it. Women know “it’s taken” two seconds after the guilty emission. Maybe you always know.

“I wouldn’t get worked up over it yet.” Bernie looked up distractedly, glancing across his metal desk, where my records lay.

My face was as open as a spring window to any news. I might as well have been a patient waiting to have a seed wart frozen off. “Okay, I won’t,” I said. And with that good advice in hand, I got up and left.

I
won’t blubber on: the freezing shock of
real
unwelcome news, the “interesting” sonogram, the sorry but somehow upbeat biopsy particulars, the perfidious prostate lingo—Gleason, Partin, oxidative damage, transrectal ultrasound, twelve-tissue sample (a lu-lu there), conscious sedation, watchful waiting, life-quality issues. There’re bookstores full of this nasty business:
Prostate Cancer for Dummies, A Walking Tour Through Your Prostate
(in which the prostate has a happy face), treatment options, color diagrams, interactive prostate CDROMs, alternative routes for the proactive—all intended for the endlessly prostate-curious. Which I’m not. As though knowing a lot would keep you from getting it. It wouldn’t—I already had it. Words can kill as well as save.

And yet. From the grim, unwanted and unexpected may arise the light-strewn and good. My daughter—tall, imperturbable, amused (by me) and nobody’s patsy—re-arrived to my life.

Clarissa is twenty-five, a pretty, stroppy-limbed, long-muscled, slightly sorrowful-seeming girl with hooded gray eyes who’d remind you of a woman’s basketball coach at a small college in the Middlewest. She has a square, inquisitive face (like her mother’s), is pleasant around men without being much interested in them. She is sometimes profane, will mutter sarcastically under her breath, likes to read but doesn’t finally say much (this, I’m sure, she got taught at Harvard). She wears strong contact lenses and frequently stares at you (me) chin down and for too long when you’re talking, as if what you’re saying doesn’t make much sense, then silently shakes her head and turns away. She maintains a great abstract sympathy for the world but, in my mind, seems in constant training to be older, like children of divorce often are, and to have abandoned her girlishness too soon. She’s said to have the ability to give memorable off-the-cuff wedding toasts and to remember old song lyrics, and can beat me at arm wrestling—especially now.

Though truth to tell, Clarissa was never a “great kid,” like the bumper stickers say all kids have to be now. She was secretive, verbally ahead of herself—which made her obnoxious—sexually adventurous (with boys) and too good at school. The fault, of course, is her mother’s and mine. She was loved silly by both of us, but our love was too finely diced and served, leaving her with a distrustful temper and pervasive uncertainties about her worth in the world. What can we do about these things after they’re over?

Clarissa’s and my relationship has been what anyone would expect, given divorce, given a brother she barely remembers but who died, given another brother she doesn’t much trust or like, given a pompous stepfather she detested until he grew sick (then unexpectedly loved), given parents who seemed earnest but not ardent and given strong intelligence nurtured by years away at Miss Trustworthy’s School in West Hartford. She and I together are fitful, loving, occasionally overcomplicating, occasionally heated and rivalrous and often lonely around each other. “We’re normal enough,” Clarissa says, “if you back away a few feet”—this being her young person’s faultless insight, wisdom not given to me.

I am, however, completely smitten by her. I do not believe she is permanently a lover of women, though I signed off on her orientation long ago and regret the dazzling Cookie’s no longer around, since Cookie and I hit it off better than I do with most women. Clarissa’s and my cohabitation during my convalescence has allowed her to think of me as a sympathetic, semi-complex-if-often-draining, not particularly paternal “older person” who happens to be her father, on whom she can hone her underused nurturing skills. And at the same time I’ve put into gear my underused fatherhood skills and tried to offer her what she needs—for now: shelter, a respite from love, a chance to exhale, have serious talks and set her shoulders straight before charging toward her future. It is her last chance to have a father experiencing his last chance to have the daughter he loves.

T
hree weeks ago, the day after Halloween, Clarissa and I were taking my prescribed therapy walk together up the beach at Sea-Clift, me in my Bean’s canvas nomad’s pants and faded blue anorak (it was cold), Clarissa in a pair of somebody else’s baggy khakis and an old pink Connemara sweater of mine. Dr. Psimos says these walks are tonic for the recovering prostate, good for soreness, good for swelling, and the sunlight’s a proven cancer fighter. Walking around every day with cancer lurking definitely commits one’s thoughts more to death. But the surprise, as I already said, is that you fear it
less,
not more. It’s a privilege, of an admittedly peculiar kind, to get to think about death in an almost peaceful frame of mind. After all, you share your condition—a kind of modern American condition—with 200,000 other Americans, which is comforting. And this stage of life—well past the middle—seems in fact to be the ideal time to have cancer, since among its other selling points, the Permanent Period helps to cancel out even the most recent past and focuses you onto what else there might be to feel positive about. Not having cancer, of course, would still be better.

On our beach walk, Clarissa began declaiming lengthily about the presidential election (which hadn’t happened yet). She detests Bush and adores our current shiftless President, wishes he could stay President forever and believes he exhibited “courage” in acting like a grinning, slavering hound, since, she said, his conduct “revealed his human-ness” (I was willing to take his human-ness on faith, along with mine, which we need not exhibit to people who don’t want us to). It’s clear she identifies him with me and would make unflattering high-horse excuses for me the way she makes them for him. These same-sex years of her life have left her not exactly a feminist, which she was in spades at Miss Trustworthy’s, but strangely tolerant toward men—which we all hoped would be the good bounty of feminism, though so far have little to show for it. Looked at another way, I’m satisfied to have a daughter who has sympathy to excess, since she’ll need it in a long life.

One of her current career thoughts for life after Sea-Clift and her life without Cookie, is to find employment with a liberal congressman, something Harvard graduates can apparently do the way the rest of us catch taxis. Only, she loathes Democrats for being prissy and isn’t truly sure what party she fits in with. My secret fear is that she’s pissed away her vote on sad-sack, know-it-all Nader, who’s responsible for this smirking Texas frat boy stealing a march into the power vacuum.

When her declaimings were over, we walked along the damp sand without saying much. We’ve taken many of these jaunts and I like them for their freedom to seem everyday-normal and not just the discipline of disaster. Clarissa was carrying her black cross-trainers, letting her long toes grip the caked sand where the ocean had recently withdrawn. Tire tracks from the police patrols had dented the beach surface in curvy parallels stretching out of sight toward Seaside Park, where a smattering of autumn beach habitués were sailing bright Frisbees for Border Collies, building sand skyscrapers, flying box kites and model planes or just leisurely walking the strand in twos and threes in the breeze and glittering light. It was two o’clock, normally a characterless hour in the days after the time change. Evening rushes toward you, although I’ve come to like these days, when the Shore’s masked with white disappearing winterish light yet nothing’s nailed down by winter’s sternness. I’m grateful to be alive to see it.