Richard Ford - The Lay of the Land

“Sherwood B. Nice,” Paul says — not really an answer — though he elevates his chin in a victorious way, possibly having to do with Jill. In the corner of his right eye, a small dent retains an apple redness from the terrible beaning at age fifteen, which he claims not to remember. I’ve never been sure how well he sees, though the doctors back then said he’d have vitreous swimmers, shortened depth perception, and in later life could face problems. Elevating his chin to see out the bottom of his eyes is compensatory. None of this, naturally, is ever discussed. “So. Aaaallll at once,” Paul immediately starts in, bringing his time capsule over to the hatch-cover table. It is his patented Tricky Dick voice. “Just out of nowhere, out of the clear blue.” He hoods his eyes and extends his schnoz like Nixon. “I realized. That what I really needed to do, you understand, was to help others. It was just that simple.” He gives his jowly face a solemn pseudo-Nixon head shake. “I hope you all can understand what I’m getting at here.” This may be his reaction to my get-up. I’m satisfied, though as always to me he is a borderless uncertainty. I don’t even feel like his father — more like his uncle or his former parole officer. It’s good if Jill, queen of Cheboygan, can try to admire, understand and please him, and he her. I bless you. I don’t know what we’re supposed to do now. “How’s your mom?”

“She’s not coming over today,” Paul says. He’s monkeying with his time capsule while I’m standing here. It has a little silver side door that slides open to permit installation of sacred artifacts. Where do you get one of these things? Is there a Web site? Why are we even down here where I never come? “She said you had cancer. How’s that going?” He frowns at me, then down again, as though this was another encoded joke of ours.

“Oh, it’s great,” I say. “I have a prostate full of radioactive BBs I didn’t have when I saw you last.”

“Cooo-ul. Do they hurt?”

“It—”

“My stepfather had that,” Jill says, the cleft reappearing between her wide-set eyes. A show of sympathy.

“How’d he do?”

“He died. But not from that.”

“I see. Well, this is all pretty new to me.” I say this as if we were talking about changing car-repair affiliations. I smile and look around my shadowy basement. In addition to the Block Island map, there’s a large hanging framed reproduction left by the prior owners, depicting the Lord Barnegat, famed two-masted whaling schooner that plied the ocean right outside in the 1870s and is currently in a museum in Navesink. I should toss out all this shit and turn the space into a screening room for resale to TV people. “I don’t see life as a perfect mold broken,” I say uncomfortably when neither of them says anything more about my having cancer. Possibly Jill and I share this point of view. What else has Ann blabbed to them?

The cancer topic has struck them both mute, the way it does most people, and I feel suddenly stupid standing here dressed like a nitwit, as if none of us has anything to say to the other on any subject but my “illness.” Aren’t they in the greeting-card business? Though probably we’re all three waiting for one of us to do something unforgivable so we can convulse into a throat-slashing argument and Paul can grab Jill and clear out back to K.C. I think again of him whonking away with this bounteous, one-handed Michigan armful and I admit I’m happy for him.

“The caterers’ll be here at one-forty-five,” I say to have something to say so I can leave. “Did your sister say when she might be back?”

Mention of Clarissa instantly inscribes a displeased/pleased smile on Paul’s beard-encircled lips. His sister is, of course, his eternal subject, though she has always treated him like a dangerous mutant, which he relishes. By taking possession of the most-unsettling-life-course trophy, she has further put him off his game. Jill could be his attempt to wrest back the trophy.

“So did you meet Gandhi’s grandson?” Paul smirks while he goes on fiddling with his time capsule, though he’s nervous, his eyes snapping at Jill, who regards him encouragingly. His mouth breaks into a derisive grin. “He’s into fucking equitation therapy. Whatever that is. He’s probably writing a semi-autobiographical novel, too.” Paul combs one hand back through his mullet and frowns with what I’m supposed to know is dismayed belief. “I like asked him, ‘What’s the most misunderstood airline?’ And he goes, ‘I don’t know. Royal Air Maroc?’ I go, ‘Fucking bullshit. It’s Northwest. It flies to the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul. No contest.’” Paul’s lip curls in its right corner. Something’s setting him off.

“Maybe he didn’t understand what you were getting at,” I say to be fatherly. “I’m guessing she’s not too serious about him anyway.”

“Oh, what a giant relief that is.” Paul’s odd round face assumes an expression of profoundest disdain.

“I thought he seemed pretty interesting,” Jill says — her first semi-familial utterance and the first uncoded words anybody’s spoken since Paul came back inside. Although, of course, she’s wrong.

“He’s a butthole. Case closed,” Paul snarls. “‘Are you all right? Are you all right?’ He’s like a fucking nurse. He’s one of those dipshits who’s always asking people if they’re all right. ‘Are you all right? How ’bout you? Are you all right, too? Do you want a fucking foot massage? How ’bout a back rub? Or a blow job? Maybe a high colonic?’” In this frame of mind, as a junior at Haddam High, Paul used to get so angry at his teachers, he’d beat his temples with his palms — the universal SOS for teen troubles ahead. It’s hard to imagine him selling residential real estate.

“I think you should let this go, okee, honey?” Jill says and smiles at him.

Paul glowers at Jill, then at me, as if he’s just exited a trance — blinking, then smiling. “Issat it?” he says. “You done? That be all? You want cheese on that?” It’s possible he might bark, which is also something he did as a teen.

Someplace, from some sound source I can’t locate, as if it came out of the drywall, I hear music. Orchestral. Ravel’s Bolero— the military snares and the twiny oboes, played at high volume. No doubt it’s the Feensters. What more perfect Thanksgiving air? Possibly they’re in the hot tub, staging a musicale for the beach visitors and, of course, to aggravate the shit out of me. At Easter, they played “The March of the Siamese Children” all day long. Last 4th of July, it was “Lisbon Antigua” by Pérez Prado, until the Sea-Clift Police (summoned by me) paid them a courtesy call, which started a row. It’s conceivable that in the cathode-ray tube business, Nick got too close to some bad-actor chemicals that are just now being registered in his behavior. To ask them to turn it down would invite a fistfight, which I don’t feel like. Though I’m happy to call the police again. Then, just as suddenly, Bolero stops and I hear voices raised next door and a door slam.

“Look here, you two.” I’m tempted to say lovebirds, but don’t. “I’ve got some bees wax of my own to take care of before the food gets here. I want you to treat the place like you own it.”

“Okay. That’s great.” Jill puts her arms behind her and nods enthusiastically.

“No, but wait!” Paul says, and suddenly abandoning his time capsule, he essentially rushes me across the basement. I manage to take one unwieldy backward-sideways step, since he seems maybe to want to go right by me and head up the stairs — to where, I haven’t the foggiest. But instead, he lurches straight into me, thudding me in the chest, expunging my breath and clamping his terrible grip on me. “I haven’t given you a hug yet, Dad, ” he howls, his whiskery jaw broxed against my shaved face, his belly to my belly. He’s got me grappled around my shoulders, his bare knee, for some reason, wedging between mine the way a high school gorilla would body-press his high school honey. My shocked eyes have popped open wider, so that I see right down into his humid manly ear canal and across the red bumpy landscape of his awful mullet. “Oh, I’ve been so bad,” he wails in deepest, crassest sarcasm, clutching me, his head grinding my chest. I want to flee or yell or start punching. “Oh, Christ, I’ve just been so terrible.” He’s taken me prisoner — though I mean to get away. I’m backed into the narrow stairwell and manage to anchor one Nike against the bottom riser. Except with Paul grasping and rooting at me, I miss my balance and start listing backward, with him still attached, his glasses frame gouging my cheek. “Ooooh, ooooh,” he boo-hoos in mock contrition. We’re both going over now, except I catch a grip, hand-rasping and painful, on the banister pole, which stops us, saving me from knocking the crap out of myself — snapping a vertebra, breaking my leg, finishing the job Bob Butts started. What’s wrong with life?