Richard Ford - The Lay of the Land

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.