The Lay of the Land (18 page)

And of course I know what Clarissa does not permit herself to be fearful of, and is by training hard-wired to confront:
making the big mistake.
Harvard teaches resilience and self-forgiveness and to regret as little as possible. Yet what she
does
fear and can’t say, and why she’s here with me and sometimes stares at me as if I were a rare, endangered and suffering creature, is unbearable pain. Something in Clarissa’s life has softened her to great pain, made her diffident and dodgy about it. She knows such fear’s a weakness, that pain’s unavoidable, wants to get beyond fearing it and out of those smooth boxes. But in some corner of her heart she’s still scared silly that pain will bring her down and leave nothing behind. Who could blame her?

Is it from me, you might reasonably ask, that she’s contracted this instinct for crucial avoidance? Probably, given my history.

Looking after me, though, may be a good means to pre-vision pain—mine, hers, hers about me—and make her ready, toughen her up for the inevitable, the one that comes ready or not, and that only your own death can save you from. It’s true I love her indefatigably and would help her with her “issues” if I could, but probably I can’t. Who am I to her? Only her father.

C
larissa and I reached our usual turn-around point on our beach walk—the paint-chipped, dented-roof Surfcaster Bar, built on stilts behind the beach berm and, due to the past summer’s tourist fall-off, still open after Halloween. Is it the Millennium Malaise, the election, the stock market or everything altogether that’s caused everybody in the country to want to wait and see? Knowing the answer to that would make you rich.

The shadowy, wide-windowed bar had its lights burning inside at a quarter to three. A few silhouetted Sea-Clift bibbers could be seen within. A forceful pepperoni and onion aroma drifted down to the beach, making me hungry.

Clarissa stood on one foot, putting her shoe on, a trick she performed with perfect balance, slipping it on behind her, mouth intent, lip bit, as if she was a splendid-spirited racehorse able to tend to herself.

We’d talked enough about how she and Paul had “turned out,” about me, about what I thought about marriage now that my second one seemed in limbo. We’d talked about how we both felt estranged from world events on the nightly news. It bothered her that a story was important one week, then forgotten the next, how that had to mean something about disengagement, loss of vital anchorage, the republic becoming ungovernable and irrelevant. There wasn’t much we disagreed on.

A colder midafternoon breeze plowed in off the ocean, elevating the kites and Frisbees to brighter heights. We were starting back. Clarissa put her arm on my shoulder and looked beyond me, up to the ghostly drinkers behind the Surfcaster’s picture window. “Einstein said a man doesn’t feel his own weight in free fall,” she said, and looked away toward the pretty, clouded coastal heavens, then gave her head a shake as if to jog loose a less pretentious thought. “Does that go for women, do you think?”

I said, “Einstein wasn’t that smart.” I just felt good about the beach, the breeze, the scruffy little bar above us behind the dune, where men I’d sold houses to were spying down on Clarissa with admiration and desire for the great beauty I’d somehow scored. “He sounds serious but isn’t. You’re not in free fall anyway.”

“I don’t like binary ways of thinking. I know
you
don’t.”

“
And
and
but
always seem the same to me. I like it.”

The long southerly coastline stretched toward my house and now seemed entirely new, observed from a changed direction. Where we were walking was almost on the spot where the team of German sappers came ashore in 1943 with hopes of blowing up something emblematic but were captured by a single off-duty Sea-Clift policeman out for a night-time stroll with his dog, Perky. The sappers claimed to be escaping the Nazis but went to Leavenworth anyway and were sent home when the war was over. Local citizens of German descent wanted a plaque to commemorate those who resisted Hitler, but Jewish groups opposed and the initiative failed, as did an initiative for the policeman’s statue. He was later murdered by shady elements who, it was said, got the right man.

From the south I breathed the pungent, sweet resinous scent from the National Shoreline Park, closed by then for the approaching winter. On the beach, discreetly back against the grassy berm, a family unit of Filipinos, one of our new subpopulations, was holding a picnic. These newcomers arrive in increasing numbers from elsewhere in the Garden State, take jobs as domestics, gardeners and driveway repairmen. One has opened a Chicago-style pizzeria beside my office. Another has a coin laundry. A third, a dirty-movie theater in Ortley Beach. Everyone likes them. Our VFW chapter officially “remembers” their brave support of our boys after the terrible march on Bataan. A Filipino flag flies on the 4th of July.

These beach lovers had established an illegal campfire and were laughing and toasting weenies, seated around on the cold sand, enjoying life. The men were small and compact and wore what looked like old golfer’s shirts and new jeans and sported wavy, lacquered coifs. The women were small and substantial and peered across the sands at Clarissa and me with lowered, guilty eyes.
We’re entitled,
their dark looks said,
we live here.
One man cheerfully waved his long fork at us, a blackened furter hanging from its prongs. A boom box played, though not loud, whatever Filipino music sounds like. We both gave a wave back and plodded toward home.

“As much as you think your life is just another life, it is, I guess,” Clarissa said, her long legs carrying her ahead of me. A flat, nasal New England curtness had long ago entered her inflection, as if words were chosen for how she could say them more than for what they meant. She’s young, and can still show it. She was now bored with me and was no doubt thinking about getting back to the house and on the phone to the new “friend” she’d tentatively invited for Thanksgiving but who didn’t have a name yet—and still doesn’t.

“Do you ever think that you were born in New Jersey and thanked your lucky stars, since you could’ve been born in south Mississippi like me and had to spend years getting it out of your system?” There was not much for us to talk about. I was vamping.

Something about the Filipinos had turned her disheartened. Possibly their small prospects had begun to seem like hers.

“I guess I don’t think about that enough.” She smiled at me, hands deep in her khaki pockets, her cross-trainers toeing through the tide-dry sand, eyes bent down. This was suddenly a female persona younger than she was and attractive to boys, who were now on the agenda. And then it vanished. “So, what’re the big persuasive questions, Frank?”
Persuasive
was another favorite word, along with
vertical
and
horizontal.
It was serious-sounding and made her seem like a smart no-bullshitter. Not a kid. You’re persuasive, you’re not persuasive. She was trying to pre-vision me again.

“The
really big
ones. Let’s see,” I said. “Can I remember my shoes are in the shoe shop before thirty days go by and they get donated to the Goodwill? What’s my PIN number? Which’re the big scallops? Which Everly Brother’s Don? Have I actually seen
Touch of Evil
or just dreamed I did? Like that.” I turned my attention to an acute and perfect
V
of geese winging low a quarter mile offshore, headed, it seemed, in the wrong direction for the season. The eyesight’s good, I thought, better than my daughter’s, who didn’t see them.

“Should I become like you, then?” Tall, handsome, unwieldy girl that she is, sharp-witted, loyal and as attentive to goodness as Diogenes, she almost seemed to want me to say,
Yep. And let me keep you forever; let nothing change any more than it has. Be me and be mine. I won’t be me forever.

“Nope, one of me’s enough,” is what I did say, and with a thud in the heart, watching the geese fade up the flyway until they were gone into a bracket of sun far out in the autumn haze.

“I don’t think it’d be so bad to be you,” she said. Outlandishly, then, she took my right hand in her left one and held it like she did when she was a schoolgirl and was briefly in love with me. “I think being you would be all right. I could be you and be happy. I could learn some things.”

“It’s too late for that,” I said, but just barely.

“Too late for me, you mean.” My hand in hers.

“No. I don’t mean that,” I said. Then I didn’t say much more, and we walked home together.

W
hat Clarissa
actually
did for me was take a firm grasp on the suddenly slack leash of my cancer-stunned life, which I’d begun to let slip almost the instant I got the unfavorable biopsy news.

You think you know what you’ll do in a dire moment: pound blood out of your temples with your fists; scream monkey noises; buy a yellow Porsche with your Visa card and take a one-way drive down the Pan-American Highway. Or just climb into bed, not crawl out for weeks, sit in the dark with bottles of Tanqueray, watching ESPN.

What I did was transcribe onto a United Jersey notepad a shorthand version of what the doctor read off: my new diagnosis. “Pros Ca! Gleas 3, low aggr, confined to gland, treatment ops to disc, cure rate + with radical prostetec, call Thurs.” This note I stuck on my electric pencil sharpener, then I drove up to Ortley Beach and showed a small sandy-floored, back-from-the-beach prefab to a couple who’d lost their son in Desert Storm and who’d lived under a cloud ever since, but one day snapped out of it and decided a house near the ocean was the best way to celebrate mourning’s closure. The Trilbys, these staunch citizens were. They felt good about life on that day, whereas they’d been miserable for a decade. I knew they didn’t want to go home empty-handed and had more to be happy about than I did to be morose. So, for a few hours I forgot all about my prostate, and before the hot August afternoon was concluded, I’d sold them the house for four twenty-five.

That night, I slept perfectly—though I did wake up twice with no thought that I had cancer, then remembered it. The next day, I called Clarissa in Gotham to leave a message for Cookie about some tech stocks she’d advised me to unload, and almost as an afterthought mentioned I might have to put up with “a little surgery” because the sawbones over at Urology Partners seemed to think I had minor…prostate cancer! My heart, exactly the way it did sitting out front of Marguerite’s house, lurched
bangety-bang-bang
like a cat trapped in a garbage pail. My hands went sweaty on the desktop in my at-home office. I got light-headed, tight-brained, seemed unable to keep the receiver pressed to my ear, though of course it was mushed so close it hurt for a week.

“What kind of surgery?” Clarissa spoke with her competent, efficient cadence, like a veteran court clerk.

“Well, probably they just take it out. I—”

“Take it out! Why? Is it that bad? Do you have a second opinion?” I knew her dark eyebrows were colliding and her gold-flecked gray irises snapping with new importance. Her voice was more serious than I hoped mine sounded, which made me want to cry. (I didn’t.)

I said, “I don’t know.” The receiver wobbled in my hand and pinched the helix of my ear.

“When’re you seeing this doctor again?” She was terrifyingly businesslike. “This doctor” indicated she thought I’d gone to a cut-rate, drive-thru cancer clinic in Hackensack.

“Friday. I guess maybe Friday.” It was Monday.

“I’ll come down tonight. You’ve got insurance, I hope.”

“It’s not that urgent. Prostate cancer’s not like bamboo. I’ll survive tonight.” I’d already looked at my Blue Cross papers, contemplated not surviving the night.

“Have you told Mom?”

I jabbingly imagined telling Ann—a “by the way” during one of our coffee rendezvous. She’d be not too interested, maybe change the subject:
Yeah, well that’s too bad, ummm.
Divorced spouses—long divorced, like Ann and me—don’t get over-interested in each other’s ailments.

“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.”

C
larissa 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.