The Lay of the Land (17 page)

“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 viciously 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.”

“I
do
believe in development.” I said, and geezered around to see who was moving away from us in the shop, sure some would be. Some were.

“If the key fits, wear it.” Paul burned his merciless gap-toothed Teddy Roosevelt smile into me. His short, nail-gnawed fingers began twiddling. This conversation could never have happened between me and my father.

“What’s your favorite barrier?” he said, fingers twiddling, twiddling.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“The language barrier. What’s your favorite process?” He smirked.

“I give up,” I said, my crushed
éminence
pathetic and inedible back up on its greasy paper plate.

Paul’s eyes gleamed, especially the injured one. “I know you do. It’s the process of elimination. That’s how you do everything.”

I was back in my rental car, needless to say, and headed to the airport in less than an hour. I will be a great age before I try my luck with a visit there again.

C
larissa’s state of precarious maturation couldn’t be more different. Since college, she’s started a master’s at Columbia Teachers, intending to do work with severely disabled teens (her brother’s mental age), volunteered in a teen-moms shelter in Brooklyn, trained for the marathon, taken some acting lessons, campaigned for local liberals in Gotham and generally lived the rich, well-appointed girl-life with Cookie—who’s a foreign-currency trader for Rector-Speed in the World Trade Center and owns a power co-op on Riverside Drive, looking out at New Jersey. All seemed in place for a good long run.

Only, during this Gotham time—four years plus since college—Clarissa has told me, her life seemed to grow more and more
undifferentiated,
“both vertically and horizontally.” Everything, she noticed, began to seem a part of everything else, the world become very fluid and seamless and not too fast-paced, though all “really good.” Except, she wasn’t, she felt, “exactly facing all of life all the time,” but was instead living “in linked worlds inside a big world.” (People talk this way now.) There was school. There was her group of female friends. There was the shelter. There were the favorite little Provençal restaurants nobody else knew about. There was Cookie’s many-porched Craftsman-style house on Pretty Marsh in Maine (Cookie, whose actual name is Cooper, comes from the deepest of unhappy New England pockets). There was Cookie, whom she adored (I could see why). There was Wilbur, Cookie’s Weimaraner. There were the Manx cats. Plus some inevitable unattached men nobody took seriously. There were other “things,” lots of them—all fine as long as you stayed in the little “boxed, linked” world you found yourself in on any given day.
Not
fine, if you felt you needed to live more “out in the all-of-it, in the big swim.” Getting outside, moving around the boxes, or over them, or some goddamn thing like that, was, I guess, hard. Except being outside the boxes had begun to seem the only way it made sense to live, the only “life strategy” by which the results would ever be clear and mean anything. She had already begun thinking all this before I got sick.

My coming down with cancer amounted to nothing less than a great opportunity. She could take a break from her little boxed-linked Gotham world, claim some “shore leave,” dedicate herself to me—a good cause that didn’t require complete upheaval or even a big commitment, but which made her feel virtuous and me less bamboozled by death—while she lived at the beach and did some power thinking about where things were headed. “Pre-visioning,” she calls this brand of self-involved thinking, something apparently hard to do in a boxed-linked world where you’re having a helluva good time and anybody’d happily trade you out of it, since one interesting box connects so fluidly to another you hardly notice it’s happening because you’re so happy—except you’re not. It’s a means of training your sights on things (pre-visioning) that are really happening to you the instant they happen, and observing where they might lead, instead of missing all the connections. Possibly you had to go to Harvard to understand this. I went to Michigan.

Clarissa seems to think I live completely in the very complex, highly differentiated larger world she’s interested in, and that I “deal with things” very well all at once. She only believes this because I have cancer and my wife left me both in the same year and I apparently haven’t gone crazy yet—which amazes her. Her view is the view young people typically take of older citizens, assuming they don’t loathe us: That we’ve all seen a lot of stuff and need to be intensely (if briefly) studied. Though surviving difficulties isn’t the same as surviving them well. I don’t, in fact, think I’m doing that so successfully, though the Permanent Period is a help.

But there have been days during this rather pleasant, recuperative autumn when I’ve looked at my daughter—in the kitchen, on the beach, in the realty office on the phone—and realized she’s at that very moment pre-visioning me, wondering about my life, reifying me, forecasting my eventualities as presentiments of her own. Which I suppose is what parents are for. After a while it may be
all
we’re for. But there have also been gloomy days when rain sheeted the flat Atlantic off New Jersey, turning the ocean surface deep mottled green, and mist clogged the beach so you couldn’t see waves yet could view the horizon perfectly, and Clarissa and I were both in slack, sorry-sack spirits—when I’ve thought she might fancifully envy me being “ill,” for the way illness focuses life and clarifies it, brings all down to one good issue you can’t quibble with. You could call it the one big box, outside which there isn’t another box.

Once, while we were watching the World Series on TV, she suddenly asked if she might’ve had a twin sister who’d died at birth. I told her no but reminded her she’d had an older brother who died when she was little. And of course there was Paul. It was just a self-importanc-ing question she already knew the answer to. She was trying to make sure that what was true of herself was what she knew about, and wanted to hear it from me before it was too late. It’s similar to what Marguerite asked in our Sponsor visit. In a woman Clarissa’s age, you could say it was a respectable form of past-settlement, though again I’m not sure a settled past makes any difference, no matter how old you get to be.