Richard Ford - The Lay of the Land

I was in robustest of health (so I thought) in spite of Sally’s unhappy departure — which I assumed wouldn’t last long. I did my sit-ups and stretches, took healthful treks down the Sea-Clift beach every other day. I didn’t drink much. I kept my weight at 178—where it’s been since my last year at Michigan. I didn’t smoke, didn’t take drugs, consumed fistfuls of daily vitamins, including saw palmetto and selenium, ate fish more than twice a week, conscientiously divided each calendar year into test results to test results. Nothing had come up amiss — colonoscopy, chest X ray, PSA, blood pressure, good cholesterol and bad, body mass, fat percentage, pulse rate, all moles declared harmless. Going for a checkup seemed purely a confirming experience: good-to-go another twelve, as though each visit was diagnostic, preventative and curative all at once. I’d never had a surgery. Illness was what others endured and newspapers wrote about.

“Probably nothing,” Bernie Blumberg said, giving me a wiseacre, pooch-mouthed Jewish butcher’s wink, stripping his pale work gloves into a HAZARD can. “Prostatitis. Your gland feels a little smooshy. Slightly enlarged. Not unusual for your age. Nothing some good gherkina jerkina wouldn’t clear up.” He snorted, smacked his lips and dilated his nostrils as he washed his hands for the eightieth time that day (these guys earn their keep). “Your PSA’s up because of the inflammation. I’ll put you on some atomic-mycin and in four weeks do another PSA, after which you’ll be free to resume front-line duties. How’s that wife of yours?” Sally and I both went to Bernie. It’s not unusual.

“She’s in Mull with her dead husband,” I said viciously. “We might be getting divorced.” Though I didn’t believe that.

“How ’bout that,” Bernie said, and in an instant was gone — vanished out the door, or through the wall, or up the A/C vent or into thin air, his labcoat tails fluttering in a nonexistent breeze. “Well, look here now, how’s that husband of yours?” I heard his voice sing out from somewhere, another examining room down a hall, while I cinched my belt, re-zipped, found my shoes and felt the odd queasiness up my butt. I heard his muffled laughter through cold walls. “Oh, he certainly should. Of course he should,” he said. I couldn’t hear the question.

Only in four weeks, my PSA showed another less-than-perfect 5.3, and Bernie said, “Well, let’s give the pills another chance to work their magic.” Bernie is a small, scrappy, squash-playing, wide-eyed, salt ’n pepper brush-cut Michigan Med grad from Wyandotte (which is why I go to him), an ex-Navy corpsman who practices a robust battlefield triage mentality that says only a sucking chest wound is worth getting jazzed up about. These guys aren’t good when it comes to bedside etiquette and dispensing balming info. He’s seen too much of life, and dreams of living in Bozeman and taking up decoy-carving. I, on the other hand, haven’t seen enough yet.

“What happens if that doesn’t work?” I said. Bernie was scanning the computerized pages of my blood work. We were in his little cubicle office. (Why don’t these guys have nice offices? They’re all rich.) His Michigan and Kenyon diplomas hung above his Navy discharge, next to a mahogany-framed display of his battle ribbons, including a Purple Heart. Outside on summer-steamy Harrison Road, jackhammers racketed away, making the office and the chair I occupied vibrate.

“Well”—not yet looking all the way over his glasses—“if that happens, I’ll send you around the corner to my good friend Dr. Peplum over at Urology Partners, and he’ll get you in for a sonogram and maybe a little biopsy.”

“Do they do little ones?” My lower parts gripped their side walls. Biopsy!

“Yep. Uh-huh,” Bernie said, nodding his head. “Nothin’ to it. They put you to sleep.”

“A biopsy. For cancer?” My heart was stilled. I was fully dressed, the office was freezing in spite of the warping New Jersey heat, and silent in spite of the outside bangety-bangety. Cobwebby green light sifted through the high windows, over which hung a green cotton curtain printed with faded Irish setter heads. Out in the hallway, I could hear happy female voices — nurses gossiping and giggling in hushed tones. One said, “Now that’s Tony. You don’t have to say any more.” Another, “What a rascal. ” More giggling, their crepe soles gliding over scrubbed antiseptic tiles. This near-silent, for-all-the-world unremarkable moment, I knew, was the fabled moment. Things new and different and interesting possibly were afoot. Changes could ensue. Certain things taken for granted maybe couldn’t be anymore.

I wasn’t exactly afraid (nobody’d told me anything bad yet). I just wanted to take it in properly ahead of time so I’d know how to accommodate other possible surprises. If this shows a propensity to duck before I’m hit, to withhold commitment and not do every goddamn thing whole hog — then sue me. All boats, the saying goes, are looking for a place to sink. I was looking for a place to stay afloat. I must’ve known I had it. Women know “it’s taken” two seconds after the guilty emission. Maybe you always know.

“I wouldn’t get worked up over it yet.” Bernie looked up distractedly, glancing across his metal desk, where my records lay.

My face was as open as a spring window to any news. I might as well have been a patient waiting to have a seed wart frozen off. “Okay, I won’t,” I said. And with that good advice in hand, I got up and left.

I won’t blubber on: the freezing shock of real unwelcome news, the “interesting” sonogram, the sorry but somehow upbeat biopsy particulars, the perfidious prostate lingo — Gleason, Partin, oxidative damage, transrectal ultrasound, twelve-tissue sample (a lu-lu there), conscious sedation, watchful waiting, life-quality issues. There’re bookstores full of this nasty business: Prostate Cancer for Dummies, A Walking Tour Through Your Prostate (in which the prostate has a happy face), treatment options, color diagrams, interactive prostate CDROMs, alternative routes for the proactive — all intended for the endlessly prostate-curious. Which I’m not. As though knowing a lot would keep you from getting it. It wouldn’t — I already had it. Words can kill as well as save.

And yet. From the grim, unwanted and unexpected may arise the light-strewn and good. My daughter — tall, imperturbable, amused (by me) and nobody’s patsy — re-arrived to my life.

Clarissa is twenty-five, a pretty, stroppy-limbed, long-muscled, slightly sorrowful-seeming girl with hooded gray eyes who’d remind you of a woman’s basketball coach at a small college in the Middlewest. She has a square, inquisitive face (like her mother’s), is pleasant around men without being much interested in them. She is sometimes profane, will mutter sarcastically under her breath, likes to read but doesn’t finally say much (this, I’m sure, she got taught at Harvard). She wears strong contact lenses and frequently stares at you (me) chin down and for too long when you’re talking, as if what you’re saying doesn’t make much sense, then silently shakes her head and turns away. She maintains a great abstract sympathy for the world but, in my mind, seems in constant training to be older, like children of divorce often are, and to have abandoned her girlishness too soon. She’s said to have the ability to give memorable off-the-cuff wedding toasts and to remember old song lyrics, and can beat me at arm wrestling — especially now.

Though truth to tell, Clarissa was never a “great kid,” like the bumper stickers say all kids have to be now. She was secretive, verbally ahead of herself — which made her obnoxious — sexually adventurous (with boys) and too good at school. The fault, of course, is her mother’s and mine. She was loved silly by both of us, but our love was too finely diced and served, leaving her with a distrustful temper and pervasive uncertainties about her worth in the world. What can we do about these things after they’re over?