The Lay of the Land (70 page)

“Life’s interesting,” I say from under my mask.

“Oh
yeah.”

Suddenly, there’s lots of outside light and a burst of cold air. The door, which I can see, has opened, and my stretcher is moving. The face of a bright-eyed, smiling young nurse, a black woman in a long white labcoat, and corn-rows with gold beads intertwined and tortoiseshell glasses, is staring into my face. She’s saying, “Mr. Bascombe? Mr. Bascombe? Can you tell me how you feel?”

I say, “Yes. I don’t feel like a big ole boy, that’s one thing.”

“Well then, why don’t you tell me how you are,” she says. “I’d like to know.”

“Okay,” I say. And as we move along, that is what I begin to do—with all my best concentration, I begin to try to tell her how I am.

Thanksgiving

Violence, that imposter, foreshortens our expectancies, our logics, our next days, our afternoons, our sweet evenings, our whole story.

At 23,000 feet, the land lies north and east to the purple horizon. Terminal moraine, which in summer nurtures alfalfa fields, golf courses, sod farms, stands of yellow corn, is now masked and frozen white, fading into dusk. Wintry hills pass below, some with frail red Christmas lights aglitter on tiny porches, then a gleaming silver-blue river and the tower trail of our great midwestern power grid. It is all likable to me. Minnesota.

My fellow passengers on Northwest Flight 1724 (world’s most misunderstood airline), all thirty of us, are Mayo bound. O’Hare straight up to Rochester. The blond, heavy-boned, duck-tailed flight attendant—a big Swede—knows who her passengers are. She acts jokey-light-hearted if you’re just flying up for a colonoscopy—“the routine lube job”—but is chin-set, hard-mouth serious if your concerns are more of an “impactful,” exploratory nature. As usual, I fall into the mid-range of patient-passenger profiles—those who’re undergoing successful treatment and on our way to Rochester to hear encouraging news. At 23,000 feet, no one is the least bit reluctant to discuss personal medical problems with whoever fate has seated next to them. Above the engines’ hum, you hear earnest, droning heartland voices dilating on what an aneurysm
actually
is, what it feels like to undergo an endoscopy or a heart catheterization (“The initial incision in your leg’s the goddamn worst part”) or a vertebra fusion (“They go in through the front, but of course you don’t feel it, you’re asleep”). Others, less care-laden, discuss how “the Cities” have changed—for the better, for the worse—in the years they’ve been coming up here; where’s the best muskie fishing to be found (Lake Glorvigen); whether it was King Hussein or Saddam Hussein who was a Mayo patient once upon a time (AIDS and “the syph” are rumored); and what a good newspaper
USA Today
has turned out to be, “especially the sports.” Many tote thick manila envelopes containing crucial evidentiary X rays from elsewhere.
BRAIN, SPINE, NECK, KNEE
are stamped in red. I have only myself—and Sally Caldwell—plus a prostate full of played-out BBs destined to be with me forever. And I have my thoughts for a sunny prognosis and a good start to year two of the young Millennium, which includes a new direction in the Presidency—one it’s hard to see how we’ll survive—though the enfeebled new man’s little worse than his clownish former opponent, both being smirking cornpones unfit to govern a ladies’ flower show, much less our frail, unruly union.

Sally, beside me on the aisle of our regional Saab 340 turboprop, is reading a book encased in one of the crocheted book cozies women years ago employed to sneak
Peyton Place
or
Bonjour Tristesse
into the beauty parlor (my mother did it with
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
), books requiring privacy for full enjoyment. Sally’s reading a thick paperback called
Tantrism and Your Prostate,
by a Dr. White. She’s assured me there’re strategies woven into his recommendations that are part of our (my) natural maturing process and pretty much common sense anyway, and will clear out a lot of underbrush and open up some new paths we’ll both soon be breathless to enter. The sex part is still a source of concern—for me but not, apparently, for Sally—since we’ve yet to fully reconvene since she returned from Blighty and I cleared customs at Ocean County Hospital from my successful gunshot surgery, which left amazingly small scars and wasn’t nearly as bad as you’d imagine (pretty much the way it happens on
Gunsmoke
or
Bonanza
). I
did
wake up on the operating table, though the Pakistani surgeon, Dr. Iqbal, just started laughing at my shocked, popped-opened peepers and said, “Oh, well, my goodness, look who can’t stand to miss anything.” They put me out again in two seconds, and I have no memory of pain or fear, only of Dr. Iqbal laughing. The two .32 slugs are at home on my bedside table, where I have in the past two weeks studied them for signs of significance and found none. Sally believes there’s nothing to worry about on the sexual front and that she knows everything’ll kick into gear once I regain full strength and get some good news in Rochester.

Sally’s hand, her right hand, grazes mine when we encounter turbulence and go buffeting along over the oceany chop, while our fellow passengers—all regional flying veterans and all fatalists—start laughing and making
woo-hoo
-ing noises. Someone, a woman with a nasal Michigan voice, says, “Up-see-daisee. Ain’t this fun now?” None of us would mind that much if our ship went down or was hijacked to Cuba or just landed someplace other than our destination—some fresh territory where new and unexpected adventures could blossom, back-burnering our inevitables till later.

Since she’s been back from her own
Wanderjahr,
Sally has seemed unaccountably happy and hasn’t wanted to sit down for a full and frank debriefing, which is understandable and can wait forever if need be. I was in the hospital some of the time, anyway, and since then there’s been plenty to do—police visits and sit-down interviews with prosecutors, an actual lineup at the Ocean County Court House, where I identified the perpetrators, all this along with Clarissa’s difficulties in Absecon. (The pint-size accomplices were twins
and
Russians, boyfriends of the faithless Gretchen. It turns out there’s a story there. I, however, am not going to tell it.)

Paul and Jill, it should be said, proved to be much better than average ground support in all our difficulties, although they’ve now driven back to K.C. to celebrate the Yule season “as a couple.” Paul and I were never precisely able to get onto the precise same page because I was in the hospital, but we now seem at least imprecisely to be reading the same book, and since I was shot, he has seemed not as furious as he was before, which may be as good as these things get. I don’t know to this moment if he and Jill are married or even intend to be. When I asked him, he only smoothed his beard-stache and smiled a crafty, uxorious smile, so that my working belief has become that it doesn’t matter as long as they’re “happy.” And also, of course, I could be wrong. He did, as an afterthought, tell me Jill’s last name—which is Stockslager and not Bermeister—and I’ll admit the news made me relieved. But again, as to Sally’s and my true reconciliation (in both the historical and marital senses), it will come in time, or never will, if there’s a difference. In her letter, she said she didn’t know if there was a word that describes the natural human state for how we exist toward each other. And if that’s so, it’s fine with me.
Ideal
probably wouldn’t be the right word; sympathy and necessity might be important components. Though truthfully, love seems to cover the ground best of all.

When she arrived the day after Thanksgiving, Sally carried with her a wooden box containing Wally’s cremains. (I was zonked in the Ocean County ICU and she didn’t actually bring the box up there.) Wally, it seems, had just been a man who no matter how hard he tried could never find full satisfaction with life, but who actually came as close to happiness as he ever would by living alone, or as good as alone, as a bemused and trusted arborist on a remittance man’s estate (there are words for these people, but they don’t explain enough well enough). His nearly happy existence all went directly tits-up when Sally forcibly re-inserted herself into his life for reasons that were her own and were never intended to last forever—though poor Wally didn’t know that. After a few weeks together on Mull, Wally grew as grave as a monk, then gradually morose, apparently feared his paradise on earth would now not be sustainable, but could not (as he couldn’t from the start) explain to Sally that marriage was just a bad idea for a man of his solitary habits. She said she would’ve welcomed hearing that, had tried lovingly to make him discuss it and put some fresh words in place, but hadn’t succeeded and saw she was spoiling his life and was already planning to leave. But with no place else to run away to, and not realizing he could just stay in Mull, and thus in a fit of despair and incommunicable fearfulness and sorrow, Wally took a swim with a granite paving stone tied to his ankle and set his terrible fears and unsuitedness for earth adrift with the outward tide. She said when he was found he had a big smile on his round and innocent face.

Sally has admitted—seated at the same glass-topped breakfast table overlooking the ocean where she’d told me she was leaving and gave me her wedding ring only a short, eventful six months ago—that she simply never made Wally happy enough, though she loved him, and it was too bad they couldn’t have gotten a divorce like Ann and I did and freed each other from the past. In time, I will find words to explain to her that none of this is as simple as she thinks, and in doing so possibly help explain herself
to
herself, and let her and Wally off some hooks—one of which is grief—hooks they couldn’t get off on their own. It’s my solemn second-husbandly duty to do such things. In these small ways, there’s been appreciable progress made in life in just the twelve days since I got out of Ocean County. We both feel time is precious, for obvious reasons, and don’t want to waste any of it with too much brow beetling.

In any case, I rescheduled my Mayo post-procedure checkup, which will be tomorrow at nine with blunt-fingered Dr. Psimos. And since Chicago was, in a sense, on the way, Sally asked me to go with her to Lake Forest to present a solid-front
fait accompli
when she delivered Wally’s ashes to the aged parents. It is an unimpartably bad experience to have your son die
once
in a lifetime, as my son Ralph did. And even though I have officially accepted it, I will never truly get over it if I live to be a hundred—which I won’t. But it is unimpartably worse and in no small measure strange to have your son die
twice.
And even though I knew nothing to say to his parents and didn’t really want to go, I felt that to meet someone who knew Wally as an adult, as I did in a way, and who knew his odd circumstances and could vouch for them, and who was at the same time a total stranger they’d never see again, might prove consoling. Not so different from a Sponsor visit, when you settle it all out.

The elderly Caldwells were rosy-cheeked, white-haired, small and trim Americans, who welcomed Sally and me into their great fieldstone manse that backs up on the lake and is probably worth eight million and will one day be turned into a research institute run by Northwestern to study (and interpret) whatever syndrome Wally suffered from that made everybody’s life a monkey house. I couldn’t help thinking it could also be turned into four luxury condos, since it had superb grounds, mature plantings and drop-dead views all the way to Saugatuck. A big conical blue spruce was already up and elaborately lighted in the long drawing room with the stone fireplace, where Sally (I guessed) first re-encountered Wally last May. The Caldwells were soon to be off to a
do
at the Wik-O-Mek that evening and wanted us to come along and stay over, since there would be dancing. I’d have died before doing anything like that and, in fact, managed to work into the conversation that unfortunately I’d recently been shot in the chest (which seemed not to surprise them all that much) and had trouble sleeping, which isn’t true, and Sally said we were really just stopping by on our way up to Mayo for my checkup and needed to get going—as if we were driving all the way. They both acted cheerful as could be, fixed us each an old-fashioned, talked dishearteningly about the election (Warner described all their neighbors as decent Chuck Percy Republicans) and how they felt the economy was headed for recession, witness the tech sector and capital-spending cuts. Constance took grateful but unceremonious possession of Wally’s ashes—a small box upholstered in black velvet. They both guardedly mentioned Sally’s two children in a way that made me sure they sent them regular whopper checks. Then they talked about what an exotic life Wally had chosen to live—“Strange and in some ways exciting,” Constance said. We all sat around the huge but cozy spruce-and-apple-wood-scented room and drank our cocktails and thought about Wally as if he was both with us and as if he had never lived, but definitely not as though he’d sharked my wife away from me—even if unwillingly. At some point all four of us started to get not-surprisingly antsy and probably fearful of our words beginning to take on meanings we might regret. Sally and Constance excused themselves, in a southern way, to go upstairs together with the cremains box. Warner took me out the French doors to the low-walled patio, which was snowy and already iced in. He wanted me to see the lake, frozen and blue, and also where he’d put up his fancy covered and heated one-man practice tee he could use all winter. He wondered if I played golf—as though he was sizing me up as a son-in-law. I said no, but that my former wife was a golf coach and played for the Lady Wolverines in the sixties. With a pixyish grin—he looked nothing like Wally, which leads to speculation—he said he’d played for the purple and white when he came back from the Marianas. We had nothing else to say after that, and he walked me around the outside of the big rambling house through the gleaming crust of snow to where the ladies were just then exiting the front door (it was their standard way to hustle you out). And in no more than three minutes, after we’d all uncomfortably hugged one another and said we’d definitely visit somewhere, someday on the planet, Sally and I headed out the drive, out of Lake Forest, back toward the Edens and toward O’Hare.

But since there was still plenty of light left and I had my old orienteering feel for streets and cardinal points—realtors all think we have this, but can be calamitously wrong—I said I wanted to drive past my mother’s last address in Skokie, where she’d lived while I was in college, with Jake Ornstein, her good husband, and where she’d died in 1965. We got off at Dempster Avenue and drove east to where I thought it would intersect, via a tricky set of small-street maneuverings, with Skokie Boulevard. Everything felt familiar to me, equipped as I was with the sense of near-belonging I’d had from thirty-five years ago, when I used to ride over from Ann Arbor on the old New York Central and be picked up at the LaSalle Street Station by my mother. But when I got to where I thought Skokie Boulevard should’ve been (possibly my old-fashioned was working on me), there was a big but past-its-prime shopping mall, with an Office Depot and a poorly patronized Sears as its anchors and a lot of vacant store spaces in between. I realized then that somewhere toward the back of the employee-parking section of the Sears was where my mother and Jake’s house had been—a blue-roofed, single-dormer, center-stoop, quasi-Colonial Cape where my mother had lived out her last days, and where I’d gone to see her before being officially rendered an orphan at age nineteen.