The Lay of the Land (19 page)

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.

W
hat 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.

N
ext day, we met again over lunch and Clarissa, now dressed in a faded River Club polo and khaki trousers 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.”