Richard Ford - The Lay of the Land

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 Vof 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.”