The Lay of the Land (23 page)

“I’ve lived here almost a whole year now.” Ann walks resolutely beside me. “I can’t say I love Haddam. Not anymore. It’s odd.”

“No,” I say. “Me, either. Or, me, too.”

“But…”

“But what?” We’re back to our old intractable, defensible selves. Asking “What?” means nothing.

“But nothing.” She fishes the clump of jingly keys out of her topcoat pocket and fingers through them beside her car. It was this way when we visited Ralph’s grave on his birthday in the spring: a negotiated peace of little substance or duration, pleasing no one, not even a little. Then she says, “I suppose I should say one more thing.” It’s cold. Clouds are working against the moon’s disk. I’m tempted to put a hand on her shoulder, ostensibly for warmth’s sake. She is wearing golfing clothes, after all, in falling temps.

“Okay.” I do not put a hand on her shoulder.

“All those things I said in there.” She quietly, self-consciously clears her throat. I smell her hair, which still hints of the warm wood inside and something slightly acidic. “I meant all that. And what’s more, I’d live with you again—where you live, if you wanted me to. Or not.” She sighs a businesslike little sigh. No more tears. “You know, parents who’ve lost a child are more likely to die early. And people who live alone are, too. It’s a toxic combination. For both of us, maybe.”

“I already knew that.” Everybody reads the same studies, takes the same newspapers, exhibits the same fears, conceives the same obsessive, impractical solutions. Our intelligence doesn’t account for much that’s new anymore. Only, I don’t find that discouraging. It’s like reading cancer statistics once you’ve been diagnosed—they become a source of misplaced encouragement, like reading last night’s box scores. Misery may not love company. But discouragement definitely does. “Would-you-like-to-come-over-on-Thursday-and-have-Thanksgiving-with-me? I-mean-with-us-with-the-children?” With blinding swiftness these ill-conceived words leave my mouth, taking their rightful place among all the other ill-conceived things I’ve said in life and taking the place of something better I should’ve said but couldn’t say because I was paralyzed by the thought of living with Ann and that she’s now concluded I’m alone.

She clicks her car unlocked and swings the door out. Clean, new-car bouquet floods our cold atmosphere. The dimly lit cockpit begins pinging.

Ann turns her back to me as if to put something inside the car—though she’s carrying nothing—then turns back, chin down, eyes trained on my chest, not my (shocked) face. “That’s nice of you.” She’s smiling weakly, June Allyson-style again.
Ping, ping, ping.
It’s other than the invitation she wanted and a poor substitute—but still. “I think I’d like that,” she says, her smile become proprietary. A smile I haven’t seen trained on me in a hundred years.
Ping, ping, ping.

And just then, as when we are children sick at home with a fever in bed late at night, suddenly everything moves a great distance away from me and grows small. Softened voices speak from a padded tube. Ann, only two feet away, appears leagues away, her pinging Accord all but invisible behind her. The
pinging, ping, ping
comes as if from fresh uncovered stars high in the cold sky.

“That’s great,” her distant voice says.

Ann looks at my face and smiles. We are now not merely on different footings but on different planets, communicating like robots. “You’ll have to give me directions, I guess.”

“I will,” I say robotically, cheeks and lips smiling a robot smile. “But not now. I’m cold.”

“It
is
cold,” she says, ignition key in hand. “When’s Paul arriving?”

“Paul who?”

“Paul, our son.”
Ping, ping.

“Oh.” Everything’s smashing back into close quarters, the night hitting me on the nose. Real sound. Real invitation. Real disaster looming. “Tomorrow, I guess. He’s en route.” For some reason I say
route
to rhyme with
gout,
a way I never say it.

“Is that a new jacket,” she asks. “I like it.”

“Yeah. It is.” I’m stumped.

She looks at me hard. “Do you feel all right, Frank?”

“I do,” I say. “I’m just cold.”

“There are a lot of things we haven’t talked about.”

“Yeah.”

“But maybe we will.” And instead of crossing the gulf of years to give my cold cheek a buss with cold lips, Ann gives me three pats on my barracuda jacket shoulder—pat, pat, pat—like a girl in a riding habit patting the shoulder of an old saddle nag she’s just had a pleasant but not especially eventful ride on. “Paul’s coming to my house for dinner tomorrow. I asked Clary, but she declined, of course.” Same proprietary equitational smile and voice. Time for your rubdown and a nose bag.
Ping, ping, ping.
“I guess I’ll see you for dinner Thursday.”

“Okay.”

“Call me. Tell me how to get there.”

“Yes. I will. I’ll call you.”
Ping, ping.

She looks at me as if to say, I know you might die right here and now, but we’re going to pretend you won’t and everything’ll be fine, old fella. And it is in this manner we manage our good-bye.

A
s if someone, someone
else,
someone in a panic, someone like me but not me, was piloting my dark capsule, I am down the drizzly midnight De Tocqueville entrance lane like a NASCAR driver, my tires barely registering the speed moguls, skidding on each curve, sending deer, possum and catamount leaping into the sheltering woods, until I’m out past the signage, out the gate and
out,
back onto 27, headed into town. I of course have to piss.

And, no surprise, I am locked in a fury of regret, self-reproach and bafflement. Why, why, why, why, why did I
have
to ask? Why can’t I be trusted
not
to ask? What hysteria chip in my personal hard drive impels me to self-evident disaster? Does anything teach us anything? Do seventeen years of perfectly acceptable divorced life, following clear-cut evidence of incompatibility,
not
dictate steering wide of Ann Dykstra, no matter how much I love her?
Does
cancer make you stupid as well as sick? If there was a Sponsor, a palmist, a shrink open late, dispensing mercy and wisdom to drop-ins, I’d beg, write a big check, dedicate quality hours. As stated, our intelligence doesn’t account for much.

I wish, for the very first time, for a cell phone. I’d call Ann from the car and leave a cringing message: “Oh, I’m a terrible, terrible man. Mistake after mistake after mistake. You were always right about me. Just please don’t come for Thanksgiving. We’d have an appalling time. I’ve booked you an A-list banquette at the Four Seasons, selected the right Dom Pérignon, arranged for Paul Newman and Kate Hepburn to be on your either side (where they’ll definitely want to talk to you), ordered the baked Alaska in advance. Keep the limo, take a friend…. Just keep away on Thanksgiving. Even though you love me. Even if I’m dying. Even if you’re lonely. Take my word for it.”

If we’d only had our just-finished conversation on the phone—from home, without the tears, the sock feet, the lonely, converted, over-heated squash court—none of this would be happening. When I was at Mayo I met a hog farmer from Nebraska up on the urology floor, same as me, but who’d had a stroke and could barely speak to anyone. His happy, fat, grinning, scrubbed-face farm wife did the talking while he worked his eyebrows and nodded and smiled at me furiously but in total silence. Except on the phone, the wife told me, old Elmer’d yak and laugh and philosophize hours on end and never miss a beat or a connection, could even tell dirty jokes. Something’s to be said for disembodied communication. Too much credit’s given to the desultory
intime.
It’s why the governor’s never at the prison when the deed’s being done.

I stop on the darkened roadside in front of a big, well-treed, hedge-banked, wide-lawned Norman Tudor that was actually moved to its present site twenty years ago from the Seminary grounds. There are few cars on this stretch of 27, so I can shuffle unnoticed up against the dark, dripping cedar hedge, in the damp leaf duff, and piss out the two cups I’ve accumulated since I can’t remember when but which have suddenly begun to make me panicky. A diaper would be a fail-safe, but I’m holding the line there.

Then I’m back in the car and headed into Haddam, relieved, vaguely exhilarated, as only a blessed leak can bestow, though with my jaw screwed down even tighter, a faint flicker-rill in my lower abdomen more or less where I calculate my aggrieved prostate to be, my blood pressure for sure spiked, my life shortened by another thirty seconds—all this because I have now traitorously returned myself to the everyday, detail-shot, worry-misery-gnawing mind-set that I
hate
: how to un-invite the unwisely invited dinner guest who’ll torpedo the otherwise-nice-enough family meal. This is what Clarissa experiences as linked boxes, the slippy-sliding world within worlds of everyone’s
feelings
being on the line
all the time,
of perfect evenings with perfect overachiever dinner partners, the world of keeping calendars straight, of not forgetting to call back, always sending a note, the world of ducks-in-a-row,
i
’s dotted,
t
’s crossed and recrossed, of making sure the wrong person is
never
invited, or else everything’s fucked up horrible and you’re to blame and no one gets one ounce of closure. It’s the world she’s fled, the social Pleistocene tar pit that the Permanent Period is dedicated to saving you from by canceling unwanted self-consciousness, dimming fear-of-the-future in favor of the permanent, cutting edge of the present. By this measure, I shouldn’t care if Ann comes to Thanksgiving dressed as Consuelo the Clown, squirts everybody with seltzer, honks her horn and sings arias till we’re ready to strangle her. Because, in a little while it’ll be over, no one will be any different and the day will end as it would’ve anyway: me half-asleep in front of the TV, watching the second game on Fox. It’d be a thousand times better—for my prostate, for my diastole and systole, for my life span, mandibular jaw muscles, embattled molars—for me just to rear back, har off a big guffaw, throw open the doors, push out the food, crack open my own big bottle of DP and turn ringmaster to the whole joyless tent-full.

Except that’s not how I fucking well feel about it.

And how I
do
feel is not good. My Easter-egg-with-the-downsized-family-inside’s been cracked. The usual Permanent Period protocols aren’t restoring order. My brain’s buzzing with unwanted
concerns
it wasn’t buzzing with an hour ago.

When I first got my bad prostate news in August, and in the hours before Clarissa became my partisan-advocate, I stood out on the deck, stared at the crowded beach and silvered Atlantic and thought how just one day before this day I didn’t know what I then knew. I tried to drift back to the bliss that didn’t know enough to count itself bliss, have a moment of reprieve, stuff the genie back in. Several times I even said out loud to the warm wind and the aroma of sunblock and salt and seaweed, as transistors buzzed the top-40 countdown and no one noticed me watching from above—I’d say, “Well. At least nobody’s told me I have cancer.” But of course before fresh well-being could swell in my chest and return me inside with a precious moment captured, I was reduced to gulping, squeezing, straining tears and feeling worse than if I’d never kidded myself. Don’t try this.

And what’s zooming around my brain now is the certainty that Ann Dykstra knows next to nothing about me anymore—except what the kids tell her privately—nothing about Sally or about the particulars of my condition, and hasn’t bothered to ask. That may be what she meant by “more to talk about,” which puts it mildly. But for starters, I’m married and holding out hope I can stay that way. My medical condition is “subtly nuanced,” though that may not mean much to her, since she buried one husband only two years ago. Women have things wrong with them just like men, and, as far as I can tell, don’t act as bothered by it. Ann probably assumes I’m adrift and ought to be grateful for any life raft heaved my way. I’m not.

Plus, why would
she
be attracted to
me
? And now? I must be much paler from my ordeal. I’m definitely thinner. Am I stooped, too? (I said I never look.) Are my cheekbones knobby? My clothes grown roomy? I’m sure this is how old age and bad health dawn on you—gradually and unannounced. Just all at once people are trying to persuade against things you want to do and always have done:
Don’t
climb that ladder.
Don’t
drive after dark.
Don’t
postpone buying that term life. The Permanent Period,
again,
is set against this type of graduated obsolescence. But its strengths again seem in retreat.

Ann, of course, has also crudely played the “Ralph card” by referring to parents who lost children and the connecting path to early death—which is close to a cheap shot and offers no reason for us to get back together. I mean, if having my son die condemns me to an early exit, can that mean there are interesting new choices open that weren’t before? Becoming a synchronized sky diver? Sailing alone around the world in a handmade boat? Learning Bantu and ministering to lepers? No. It’s information that releases me to do nothing different and, in fact, almost challenges me to do nothing at all. It’s like dull heredity, whereby you learn you have the gene that causes liver cancer, only you’re too old for the transplant. Better not to know.

Though the truest, deep-background reason Ann is courting me (I know her as only an ex-husband can) is for a private whiff of the unknown, to provide the extra beat in her own life by associating it with a greater exigence than the Lady Linksters can offer:
me,
in other words, my life, my decline, my death and memory. Her daughter’s on a similar search. If you think this kind of mischief is unthinkable, then think again. As I used to preach to my poor lost students at Berkshire College back in ’83, when I wanted them to write something that wasn’t about their roommate’s acne or how it felt to be alone in the dorm after lights were out and the owls were hooting: If you can say it, it can happen.