Richard Ford - The Lay of the Land

“What the fuck, you idiot,” I say, clung to the sloping banister like a gunshot victim. “Are you losing your fucking mind?”

“Bonding.” Paul expels a not-wholesome breath into the front of my block-M sweatshirt. “We’re bonding.”

“Sweetie?” Jill’s beseeching voice. At the angle I’m suspended, and from behind the top of Paul’s head, Jill’s wide, disconcerted face comes into view, looking troubled, as she’s trying to gain a one-handed grip on Paul’s back to pry him off me before I lose my own hand-hold and brain myself on the riser edge. “Sweetie, let your dad up now. He’s gonna hurt himself.”

“It’s so important,” Paul murples.

“I know. But—” Jill begins raising him like a child.

“Get off me.” I’m struggling, trying to shout but breathless. “Jesus Christ.” What I’d like to do is wham a fist right in his ear, knock him into a stupor, only I can’t turn loose of the banister without falling. But I would if I could.

“Come on, Sweetie.” Jill has both her milky arms — hand and handless — about Paul’s sides. My nose is against her shoulder — the sweet smell of lilacs possibly associated with her Ekberg bosoms. Though it’s still an awful moment.

And then I’m loose and able to pull myself up. Paul is six inches in front of me, his bleared right orb glowing behind his spectacles, his mouth gaping, heaving for air, his gray pupils fixed on me.

“What’s wrong with you?” I let myself sit down onto the third stair leading up to the kitchen. I’m still breathless. Jill still has a wrestler’s grip around the middle of Paul’s red Chiefs shirt. He looks dazed, surprised but pleased. He may feel things couldn’t have turned out better.

“Are you one of those people who shies away from physical intimacy with loved ones?” He’s now speaking in a deep AM dee-jay voice, dead-eyed.

“Why are you such an asshole, is what I want to know.”

“It’s easier,” he snaps.

“Than what, for Christ’s sake? Than to act like a human being?”

Paul’s round face inches closer. Jill’s still got him. His body smells metallic — from his time capsule — his breathing stertorous as a smoker’s (which I hope he isn’t). “Than being like you.” He shouts this. He is furious. At me.

Except I haven’t done anything. Meant no harm or injury — other than to love him, which might be enough. This is all loss. “What’s so terrible about me? I’m just your old man. It’s Thanksgiving Day. I have cancer. I love you. Why is that so bad?”

“Because you hold everything fucking down, ” Paul shouts, and he accidentally spits in my face, catching my eyelid. “You smother it.”

“Oh bullshit.” I’m shouting back now. “I don’t smother enough. How the hell would you know? What have you ever restrained?” I almost blurt out that someone ought to smother him, though that would send the wrong message. I begin hoisting my aching self off the stair, using the banister. “I’ve got things to do now. Okay?” My hand burns, my knees are quaky, my heart’s doing a little periwinkle in its cavity. Outside the sliding glass door, where the light’s diaphanous, the late-morning beach — what I can see of it — stretches pristine, sprigged up with airy yellow beach grass and dry stems. I wipe my son’s cool saliva off my eyelid and address Jill, who’s peering at me as if I might expire like her stepfather in Cheboygan. I wonder if I’d get used to her having only one hand. Yes.

I try to smile at her over my son’s shoulder, as if he wasn’t there anymore. “Maybe you two just oughta take a long walk down the beach.”

“Okee,” Jill says — good, staunch Michigan beauty who sees her job.

“You need to take the hostility quiz.” Paul’s eyes dance behind their specs. “It was on a napkin in a diner down in Valley Forge.”

“Maybe I’ll do that later.” I am defeated.

“‘How many times a week do you give the finger? Do you ever wake up with your fists clenched?’ Let’s see—” He’s forgotten how I smother things and make his difficult life unlivable. I’m sure he meant it when he said it. His mind is cavorting now, his way of letting the past go glimmering. “‘Do you think people are talking about you all the time? Do you think a lot about revenge?’ I forget the rest.” He stares expectantly, blinking, as if he needs re-acclimating — to me, to being here, to his niche in the world. There is nothing wrong with my son. It’s us. We’re not normal. No wonder life seems better in Kansas City.

I have nothing available to say to him. He has placed himself outside my language base, to the side of my smothering fatherly syntax and diction, complimentary closes, humorous restrictive clauses and subordinating conjunctions. We have our cocked-up coded lingo — winks, brow-archings, sly-boots double, triple, quadruple entendres that work for us — but that’s all. And now they’re gone, lost to silence and anger, into the hole that is our “relationship.” I bless you. I bless you. I bless you. In spite of all.

Hurriedly now, or I’ll have nothing to show for the day. It’s past 10:30. I head up Ocean Ave, my duct-taped window holding fast. I check the news-only station from Long Branch for something on the Haddam hospital explosion that might keep me out of the lineup tomorrow. But there’s only holiday traffic updates, a brewing controversy over the new 34-cent stamp, last night’s Flyers’ stats and Cheney doing swell in the Georgetown Hospital.

I’m certain I’ve missed Mike’s house prospects, though I may not now be in the best realty fettle — after my “conflict” with my son — and am just as likely to scare clients away. Plus, I’m missing my call from Sally and, at the very least, depriving myself of an easeful morning in bed following last night’s ordeal. I’d like to settle my blood pressure and stopper the seep of oily stress into my bloodstream before I show up in the phlebotomy line at Mayo on Wednesday. Even in stolid Lutheran Rochester, where sheikhs, pashas and South American genocidists go for tune-ups, and where they’ve seen everything, I still want to make as good a biomedical impression as possible, as if I was selling myself as a patient. If Paul’s right that I hold everything down, my wish would be that I could hold down more.

Sea-Clift, viewed out my Suburban window on late Thanksgiving morning, is as emptied, wide-streeted and spring-y as Easter Sunday — despite the Yuletide trimmings. No cars are parked along the boulevard shopfronts. Wreathed traffic lights are flashing yellow. The regular speed trap — a black-and-white Plymouth Fury “hidden” behind the fire station load lugger — is in position and manned (we locals know) by a rubber blow-up cop named “Officer Meadows” for a since-deceased chief fired for sleeping on the job. My Realty-Wise office at 1606 looks unpromising as I pass it. Only the crime-barred Hello Deli and Tackle Shop is lighted inside and doing business — three cars angled in, another Salvation Army red-kettle tender out front chatting with a pair of joggers in running gear. The Coastal Evacuation signs leading to the bay bridge and points inland appear to have been heeded, leaving the rest of us to fend for ourselves.

A beach town in off-season doldrum may seem to have blissfully reclaimed its truest self, breathing out the long-awaited sigh of winter. But in Sea-Clift, a nervous what-comes-next uneasiness prickles down the necks of our town fathers due to last summer’s business slowdown. Growth, smart or maybe even stupid, is the perceived problem here; how to grow an entrepreneurial culture where our hands-on family-based service commitment could survive till doomsday (because of the beach), but will never go all the way to gangbusters without a tech sector, a labor-luring signature industry, a process-driven mentality or a center of gravity to see to it we get rich as shit off beaucoup private dollars. In other words, we’re just a place, much like another.