by Richard Ford
“Have you told Sally?” I sensed Clarissa to be writing things down: Dad…cancer…serious. She favored canary yellow Post-its.
“I don’t have her number.” A lie. I had a 44 emergency-only number but had never used it.
“Let’s don’t tell Paul yet, okay? He’ll be strange.” We didn’t need to say he was already strange. “I can get a ride to Neptune with a girl in my theory class. You’ll have to pick me up.”
“I can drive to Neptune.”
“I’ll call when I leave.”
“That’s great.” Great was not what I meant to say. Oh-no-oh-no-oh-no is what I meant to say—but naturally wouldn’t. “What are we going to do?”
“Do some checking around.”
I heard paper tearing on her end, then the other line go click-click, click-click, click-click. Someone else was needing her attention. “What about school?”
She paused. Click-click. “Do you want me not to come?”
I hadn’t felt desperate, but all at once I felt as desperate as a condemned man. My way—the easy way—had seemed like the good way. Her way, the court clerk’s way, was full of woe, after which nothing would be better. What do twenty-five-year-old girls know about prostate cancer? Do they teach you about it at Harvard? Can you Google up a cure? “No. I’m happy for you to come.”
“Good.”
“Thanks.” My heart had gone back to, for my age, normal. “I’m actually relieved.” I was smiling, as though she was standing right in front of me.
“Just don’t forget to pick me up. Think Neptune.”
“I can remember Neptune. Jack Nicholson’s from Neptune. I’ve got cancer, but my brain still works.”
Clarissa moved herself in that night and in two days drove Sally’s LeBaron to Gotham and brought back ten blue milk crates of clothes, books, a pair of in-line skates, a box of CDs, a Bose and a few framed pictures—Cookie and Wilbur and her, me and Cookie in front of a Moroccan restaurant I didn’t remember, her brother Paul in younger days on her mother’s husband’s Hinckley in Deep River, a group of tall, laughing rowing-team girls from college. These she installed in the guest suite overlooking the beach. Cookie drove down on Thursday in her diamond-polished forest green Rover and stood around the living room smoking oval cigarettes, fidgeting and trying to act congenial. She knew something was happening to her, but wanted not to go to extremes.
When Cookie was leaving, I walked out to her car with her. She and Clarissa had stated their good-byes upstairs. Clarissa hadn’t come down. The story was that this was just until I got back on my feet. Though I was on my feet.
As I’ve said, Cookie is teeth-gnashingly beautiful—small and a tiny bit stout, but with a long, dense shock of black hair tinted auburn, black eyes, arms and legs the color of walnuts, silky-skinned, a round Levantine-looking face (in spite of her Down East Yankee DNA), with curvaceous plum-color lips, a major butt and thick eyebrows she didn’t fuss over. Not your standard lesbian, in my experience. Somewhere in the past, she’d incurred a tiny, featherish swimming-pool scar at the left corner of her lip that always attracted my attention like a beauty mark. She wore a pinpoint diamond stud in her right ear, and had a discreet tattoo of a heart with Clarissa inside on the back of her left hand. She spoke in a hard-jaw, trading-floor voice trained to utter non-negotiable words with ease. She’s Log Cabin Republican if she’s an inch tall.
Cookie took my arm as we stood on the pea-gravel drive with nothing to say. Terns cried in the August breeze, which had brought the sound of the sea and an oceany paleness of light around to the landward side of the house. A sweet minty aroma inhabited her blue silk shirt and white linen trousers. I felt the heft of her breast against my elbow. She was happy to give me a little jolt. I was surely happy to have a little jolt, under the circumstances. I was seeing the doctors again the next day.
“I feel pretty good, considering,” Cookie said in her hard-as-nails voice. “How do you feel, Mr. Bascombe?” She never called me Frank.
I didn’t want to ponder how I felt. “Fine,” I said.
“Well, that’s not bad, then. My girlfriend’s taking a furlough. You’ve got cancer. But we both feel okay.” This was, of course, the manner by which every man, woman, child and domestic animal in Cookie’s Maine family accounted for and assessed each significant life’s turning: dry, chrome-plated, chipper talk that accepted the world was a pile of shit and always would be, but hey.
I wondered if Clarissa was at an upstairs window, watching us having our brisk little talk.
“I’m hopeful,” I said, with no conviction.
“I think I’ll go have a swim at the River Club,” she said. “Then I think I’ll get drunk. What’re you going to do?” She squeezed my arm to her side like I was her old uncle. We were beside her Rover. Her name was worked into the driver’s door, probably with rubies. My faded red Suburban sat humped beside the house like a cartoon jalopy. I admired the deep, complex tread of her Michelins—my way to sustain a moment with an arm wedged to her not inconsiderable breast. If Cookie’d made the slightest gesture of invitation, I’d have piled in the car with her, headed to the River Club and possibly never been heard from again. Lesbian or no lesbian. Girlfriend’s father or no girlfriend’s father. The world’s full of stranger couples.
“I’ve got a good novel to read,” I said, though I couldn’t think of its author or its title or what it was about or why I’d said that, since it wasn’t true. I was just thinking she was a stand-up girl, touching and unforgettable. I couldn’t conceive why Clarissa would let her go. I’d have lived with her forever. At least I thought so that morning.
“Did you get rid of Pylon Semiconductor?”
“I’ll do it tomorrow,” I said, and nodded. Squeeze, squeeze, squeeze—my arm, arm, arm.
“Don’t forget. Their quarterlies’re out way below projected. There’ll be a change at CFO. Better get busy.”
“No. Yes.” Wilbur, the mournful yellow-eyed Weimaraner, stood in the backseat, looking at me. Windows were left open for his benefit.
“You know I love Clarissa, don’t you?” she said. I was learning to like her hacksaw delivery.
“I do.” She was pulling away. This was all I was getting.
“Nothing good comes easy or simple. Right?”
“That’s been my experience.” I smiled at her. Can you love someone for three minutes?
“She just needs some context now. It’s good for her to be here with you.”
Context was another of their frictionless Harvard words. Like persuasive. It meant something different to my demographic group. To my quartile, context was the first thing you lost when the battle began. I didn’t much like being a context—even if I was one.
“Where’s your father,” I asked. Her father was rich as a sheikh, I’d been told, had done things murky and effortless for the CIA sometime, somewhere. Cookie disapproved of him but was devoted. Another impossible parent in a long line.
Mention of the pater made her brain go spangly, and she smiled at me glamorously. “He’s in Maine. He’s a painter. He and my mom split.”
“Are you his context?”
“Peter raises Airedales, builds sailboats and has a young Jewish girlfriend.” (The venerable trifecta.) “So probably not.” She shook her fragrant hair, then pressed a button on her key chain, snapping the Rover’s locks to attention, taillights flashing hello. Wilbur wagged his nubby tail inside. “I hope you feel better,” she said, climbing in. I saw the ghost outline of her thong through her white pants, the heartbreaking bight of her saddle-hard butt. She smiled back at me from the leather driver’s capsule—I was gooning at her, of course—then let her gaze elevate to the house, as if a face was framed in a window, mouthing words she could take heart from: Come back, come back. She didn’t know Clarissa very well.
“I’m hopeful, remember,” I said, more to Wilbur than to her.
She fitted on her heavy black sunglasses, pulled her seat belt across and kicked off her sandals to grip
the pedals of her rich-man’s sporting vehicle meant for the Serengeti, not the Parkway. “Why does this feel so goddamned strange?” she said, and looked sorrowful, even behind her mirroring shades. “Isn’t it strange? Does this feel strange to you?” Reflected in her Italian lenses I was a small faraway man, pale and frail and curved—insignificant in lurid-pink plaid Bermudas and a red tee-shirt that had Realty-Wise on it in white block letters. She switched on the ignition, shook out her hair.
“It’s a little strange,” I admitted.
“Thank you.” She smiled, her elbows on the steering wheel. Frowning and smiling were not far apart in her repertoire and went with the voice. “Why is that?” Wilbur nuzzled her ear from the backseat. A plaid blanket had been installed—also for his benefit. She closed the door, laid her arm on the window ledge so I could see the heart with my daughter’s name scored on her plump little dorsum.
“Uncharted territory.” I smiled.
A single limpid tear wobbled free from beneath her glasses’ frame. “Ahhh.” She might’ve noticed the tattoo.
“But it’s all right. Uncharted territory can be good. Take it from me.” I’d happily have adopted her if she wouldn’t let me sleep with her at the River Club.
“Too bad you weren’t my father.”
Too bad you’re not my wife, flashed in my mind. It would’ve been an inappropriate thing to say, even if true. She should’ve been with Clarissa, like I should’ve been with Sally. There were a hundred places I should’ve been in my life when I wasn’t.
She must’ve thought it was a good thing to have said, though, because when I was silent, standing staring at her, what she said was, “Yep.” She patted Wilbur’s head on her shoulder, clamped the big Rover into gear—its muffling system tuned like a Brahms organ toccata—and began easing out my driveway. “Don’t forget to sell your Pylon,” she said out the window, wiping her tear with her thumb as she rolled over the gravel and onto Poincinet Road and disappeared.
What Clarissa did—while I drove off to the Realty-Wise office on Tuesday, indomitably showed two houses, performed an appraisal, scrounged a listing, attended a closing and generally acted as if I didn’t have prostate cancer, just a touch of indigestion—was to attack “my situation” like a general whose sleeping forces have suffered a rear-guard sneak attack and who needs to reply with energetic force or face a long and uncertain campaign, whose outcome, due to attrition and insubordination and bad morale among the troops, is foregone to be failure.
Dressed in baggy gym shorts and a faded Beethoven tee-shirt, she brought her laptop to the breakfast room and set up on the glass-topped table that overlooks the ocean through floor-to-ceiling windows and simply ran down everything in creation that had to do with what I “had.” She spent all week, till Friday, researching, clicking on this, printing that, chatting with cancer victims in Hawaii and Oslo, talking to friends whose fathers had been in my spot, waiting on hold for hot lines in Atlanta, Houston, Baltimore, Boston, Rochester, even Paris. She wanted, she said, to get as much into her “frame” as she could in these crucial early days so that a clear, confident and anxiety-allaying battle plan could be drafted and put in place, and all I (we) had to do was make the first step and the rest would take care of itself just the way we’d all like everything to—marriage, buying a used car, parenting, career choices, funeral arrangements, lawn care. I’d show up from the realty office in rambling but wafer-thin good spirits at 12:45, armed with a container of crab bisque or a Caesar salad or a bulldog grinder from Luchesi’s on 98th Ave. We’d sit amidst her papers and beside her computer, drink bottled water, eat lunch and sort through what she’d learned since I’d escaped—on the run, you can believe it—five hours before.
I was far too young for “watchful waiting,” she’d determined, whereby the patient enters a Kafkaesque bargain with fate that maybe the disease will progress slowly (or not progress), that normal life will fantastically reconvene, many years march triumphantly by, until another whatever picks you off like a sniper (hit by a tour bus; a gangrenous big toe) before the first one can finish you. It’s great for seventy-five-year-olds in Boynton Beach, but not so hot for us fifty-fives, whose very vigor is the enemy within, and who disease tends to feast on like hyenas.
“You’ve got to do something,” Clarissa said over her picked-at sausage and pepper muffaletta. She looked to me—her father in a faltering spirit—like a glamorous movie star playing the part of a fractious, normally remote but frightened movie daughter, performing just this once her daughterly duty for a dad who’s not been around for decades but now finds himself in Dutch, and is played by a young Rudy Vallee in a rare serious role.
A second opinion was nondiscretionary—you just do it, she said, licking her fingertips. Though, she added (Beethoven glaring at me, leonine), that a nutritional history that’s included “lots of dairy” and plenty of these rollicking sausage torpedoes was definitely one of many “contributing toxic elements,” along with too little tofu, green tea, bulgur and flax. “The literature,” she said matter-of-factly, stated that getting cancer at my age was a “function” (another of the banned words) of the unwholesome Western lifestyle and was “a kind of compass needle” for modern life and the raging nineties tuned to the stock market, CNN, traffic congestion and too much testosterone in the national bloodstream. Blah, blah, blah, blah. Chinese, she said, never get prostate cancer until they come to the U.S., when they join the happy cavalcade. Mike, in fact, was now as much at risk as I was, having lived—and eaten—in New Jersey for more than a decade. He wouldn’t believe a word of this, I told her, and would burst out yipping at the thought.
I looked wistfully out at the sparkling summer ocean, where yet another container ship was plying the horizon, possibly loaded with testosterone, seeming not to move at all, just sit. Then I imagined it filled with all the ordained foods I’d never eaten: yogurt, flaxseed, wheat berries, milk thistle—but unable to get to shore because of the American embargo. Come to port, come to port, I silently called. I’ll be good now.
“Do you want to know how it all works?” Clarissa said like a brake mechanic.
“Not all that much.”
“It’s a chain reaction,” she said. “Poorly differentiated cells, cells without good boundaries, run together in a kind of sprawl.”
“Doesn’t sound unfamiliar.”
“I’m speaking metaphorically.” She lowered her chin in her signature way to bespeak seriousness, gray eyes on me accusingly. “Your prostate is actually the size of a Tootsie Roll segment, and where your bad cells are, the biopsy says—down in the middle—is good.” She sniffed. “Would you like to know exactly how an erection works? That’s pretty amazing. Physically, it seems sort of implausible. In the books it’s referred to as a ‘vascular event.’ Isn’t that amusing?”
I stared across the table and did not know how to say “no more,” other than to scream it, which wouldn’t have sounded as grateful as I wanted to seem.
“It’s interesting,” she said, looking down at her papers as if she wanted to dig one out and show me. “You probably never had problems, did you, with your vascular events?”
“Not that often.” I don’t know why I picked that to say, except it was true. What we were talking about now was all strangely true.
“Did you know you can have an orgasm without an erection?”
“I don’t want one of those.”
“Women do it, sort of,” she said, “not that you’d be interested. Men are all about hardness, and women are all about how things feel.” All about: yet another item on the outlawed list. “Not too difficult to choose, really.”
“This isn’t funny to me,” I said, utterly daunted.
“No, none of it is. It’s just my homework. It’s my lab report in my filial-responsibility class.” Clarissa smiled at me indulgently, after which I went back to the office in a daze.
Next day, we met again over lunch and Clarissa, now dressed in a faded River Club polo and khaki trous
ers that made her look jaunty and businesslike, told me she basically had it all figured now. We could put a plan in force so that when I went back to Urology Partners in Haddam on Friday to review my treatment options, I’d be “holding all the cards.”
Hopkins and Sloan Kettering were first-rate, but the real brain-trust treasure trove was Mayo in Rochester. This came from computer rankings, from a book she’d read overnight and from a Harvard friend whose father was at Hopkins but liked Mayo and could probably get us in in a jiffy.
The options, she felt, were pretty much straightforward. My Gleason score was relatively low, general health good, my tumor positioned such that radioactive iodine-seed implants, with a titanium BB delivery system, could be the “way to go” if the Mayo doctors agreed. Having “the whole thing yanked,” she said (here her eyes fell to the toasted eggplant napoleon I’d bitten the bullet and brought back), was better in the philosophical sense that having no transmission is better than keeping an old beat-up one that might explode. But the side effects of “a radical” involved “lifestyle adjustments and a chance of impairment” (adult diapers, possibly a flat-line on my vascular events). The procedure itself was tolerable, though drastic, and in the end you might not live any longer, while “quality-of-life issues” could be “problematic.”
“It’s a trade-off,” she said, and bit her lower lip. She looked across at me and seemed not to like this conversation. It was no longer a lab report, but words that shed shadowy light on another’s future in, as it’s said, real time. “Why not take the easier route if you can?” she said. “I would.” As always, the best way out is not through.
“They put seeds in?” I said, baffled and contrary.
“They put seeds in,” Clarissa said. She was reading from a sheet of paper she’d printed out. “Which are the size of sesame seeds, and you get anywhere up to ninety, under general anesthetic, using stainless-steel needles. Minimal trauma. You’re asleep less than an hour and can go home or wherever you want to go the same day. They basically bombard the shit out of the tumor cells and leave the other tissue alone. The seeds stay in forever and become inert in about three months. Once they’re in, there’s some minor side effects. You might pee more for a while, and it might hurt some. You can’t let babies sit in your lap, at first, and you have to try not to cough or sneeze real hard, because you can launch one of these seeds out through your penis—which I guess isn’t cool. But you won’t set off airport security, and the risk to pets is low. You won’t infect anybody you have sex”—on the restricted list—“with. And you probably won’t be incontinent or impotent. Most important”—she squinted at the paper as if her eyes were blurring, and scratched a finger into the thick hair above her forehead—“you won’t be letting this take over the core of your manhood, and the chances are in ten years you’ll be cancer-free.” She looked up and turned her lips inward to form a line, as if this hadn’t necessarily been so pleasant, but now she’d done it. “If you want me to,” she said, picking up a scrap of eggplant and bringing it purposefully toward her mouth, “I’ll go out to Mayo with you. We can have a father-daughter thing, with you having your radioactive seeds sown into your prostate.”
