The Lay of the Land

by Richard Ford

  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.

  Three 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 ab
out 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.

  “What’s it like to be fifty-six?” Clarissa said breezily, sandy shoes adangle, her strides long and slew-footed.

  “I’m fifty-five. Ask me next April.”

  She adapted her steps to mine to stress a stricter precision for dates. I’m aware that she purposefully chooses subjects that are not just about her. She has always been a careful conversationalist and knows, in her Wodehousian manner, how to be a capital egg—though she’s much on her own mind lately. “I’m wrong a lot more,” I said. “That’s one thing. I walk slower, though I don’t much care. It probably makes you think I deal well with a challenging world. I don’t. I just walk slower.” She kept her stride with mine, which made me feel like an oldster. She’s as tall as I am. “I don’t worry very much about being wrong. Isn’t that good?”

  “What else?” she said, concertedly upbeat.

  “Fifty-five doesn’t really have all that much. It’s kind of open. I like it.” We have never discussed the Permanent Period. It would bore or embarrass her or force her to patronize me, which she doesn’t want to do.

  Clarissa crossed her arms, clutched her shoes, toes askew in a dancer’s stride she used to practice when she was a teen. My own size tens, I noticed, were slightly pigeoned-in, in a way they never were when I was young. Was this another product of prostate cancer? Toes turn in….

  “Who do you think’s turned out better, me or Paul?” she said.

  I had no answer for this. Though as with so many things people say to other people, you just dream up an answer—like I told Marguerite. “I don’t really think about you and Paul turning out, per se,” I said. I’m sure she didn’t believe me. She’s mightily concerned with the final results of things these days, which is what her furlough with me at the beach is all about in a personal-thematic sense: how to make her outcome not be bad, in the presence of mine seeming not so positive. A part of her measures herself against me, which I’ve told her is not advisable and encourages her to be even older than she can be.

  Between my two offspring, she is the “interesting,” gravely beautiful star with the gold-plated education, the rare gentle touch, the flash temper and plenty of wry self-ironies that make her irresistible, yet who seems strangely dislocated. Paul is the would-be-uxorious, unfriendly non-starter who pinballed through college but landed in the mainstream, sending nutty greeting-card messages into the world and feeling great about life. These things are never logical.

  But when it comes to “turning out,” nothing’s clear. Clarissa’s become distant and sometimes resentful with her mother since declaring herself to “be with” Cookie her sophomore year in college, and now seems caught in a stall, is melancholy about love and loss, and exhibits little interest in earning a living, pursuing prospects or making a new start—something I want her to do but am afraid to mention. Yet at the same time she’s become an even more engaging, self-possessed, if occasionally impulsive, emerging adult, someone I couldn’t exactly have predicted when she was a conventional, girlish twelve, living with her mother and stepfather in Connecticut, but am now happy to know. (I’ve loaned her Sally’s beater LeBaron convertible as transportation, and since Halloween have put her to work with Mike making cold calls at Realty-Wise, which she halfway enjoys.)

  Paul, on the other hand, has rigorously fitted himself in—at least in his own view. He’s purchased a substantial two-storey redbrick house (with his mother’s and my help) in the Hyde Park district of K.C., drives a Saab, has gotten fat, endured early hair loss, raised a silly mustache-goatee, and—his mother’s told me—asks every girl he meets to marry him (one may now have said yes).

  But by striving hard to “turn out,” Paul has rejected much, and for that reason replicated in early adulthood precisely who he was when he was a sly-and-moody, unreachable teenager, rather than doing what his sister did. And by finding a “home” institution that cultivates harmlessly eccentric fuzzballs like himself and lets them “thrive and create” while offering a good wage and benefits package, Paul has witnessed independence, success-in-his-chosen-environment and conceivably flat-out happiness. All things I apparently failed to provide him when he was a boy.

  Paul now lives snugly in the very town where he finally, by a circuitous routing, graduated college—UMKC—(a certain kind of American male fantasy is to live within walking distance of your old dorm). He now attends three university film series a week, has all of Kurosawa and Capra committed to memory, admits to no particular political affinities, enrolls in extension courses at the U, sits on a citizen watchdog committee for crimes against animals and wears bizarre clothes to work (plaid Bermudas, dark nylon socks, black brogues, occasionally a beret—the greeting-card company couldn’t care less). He has few friends (though three who’re Negroes); he takes vacations to the Chiefs’ training camp in Wisconsin, eats too much and listens to public radio all day long. He disdains wine tastings, book and dance clubs, opera, Chinese art, dating services and fly-tying groups, preferring ventriloquism workshops, jazz haunts downtown and hopeless snarfling after women, which he calls “moonlighting as a gynecologist.” All he shares with his sister is a temper and a wish somehow to be older. In Paul’s case, this means a life lived far from his parents—a fact that his mother finds to be a shame but to me seems bearable.

  When I visited Paul in K.C. last spring—this was before my cancer happened and before Sally departed—we sat at a little bookshop/pastry/coffee place near his new house, which he wouldn’t let me visit due to phantom construction work going on. (I never got inside, only drove past.) While we were sitting and both having a chestnut éminence and I was feeling okay about the visit (I’d stopped by on a trip to my old military school reunion), I imprudently asked how long he intended to “hold out here in the Midwest.” Whereupon he vi
ciously turned on me as if I’d suggested that dreaming up hilarious captions for drug-store card-rack cards wasn’t a life’s work with the same gravitas as discovering a vaccine for leukemia. Paul’s right eye orbit isn’t the exact shape as his left one, due to a baseball beaning injury years ago. His sclera is slightly but permanently blood-mottled, and the tender flesh encircling the damaged eye glows red when he gets angry. In this instant, his slate-gray right eye widened—significantly more than the left—as he glared, and his mustache-goatee, imperfect teeth and doofus get-up (madras Bermudas, thin brown socks, etc.) made him look ferocious.

  “I’ve sure as fuck done what you haven’t done,” he snarled, catching me totally off guard. I thought I’d asked a newsy, innocent question. I tried to go on eating my éminence, but somehow it slid off its plate right down into my lap.

  “What do you mean?” I grabbed a paper napkin out of the dispenser and clutched at the éminence, heavy in my lap.

  “Accepted life, for one fucking thing.” He’d become suffused in anger. I had no idea why. “I reflect society,” he growled. “I understand myself as a comic figure. I’m fucking normal. You oughta try it.” He actually bared his teeth and lowered his chin in a stare that made him look like Teddy Roosevelt. I felt I’d been misunderstood.

  “What do you think I do?” I was leveraging the sagging pastry back up onto its lacy paper plate, having deposited a big black stain on my trousers. Outside the bookshop, a place called the Book Hog, shiny Buicks and Oldses full of Kansas City Republicans cruised by, all the occupants giving us and the bookstore looks of hard-eyed disapproval. I wished I was leagues away from there, from my son, who had somehow become an asshole.

  “You’re all about development.” He snorted lustily, as if development meant something like sex slavery or incest. I knew he didn’t mean real estate development. “You’re stupid. It’s a myth. You oughta get a life.”