Richard Ford - The Lay of the Land

“Did you know you can have an orgasm without an erection?”

“I don’t want one of those.”

“Women do it, sort of,” she said, “not that you’d be interested. Men are all about hardness, and women are all about how things feel.” All about : yet another item on the outlawed list. “Not too difficult to choose, really.”

“This isn’t funny to me,” I said, utterly daunted.

“No, none of it is. It’s just my homework. It’s my lab report in my filial-responsibility class.” Clarissa smiled at me indulgently, after which I went back to the office in a daze.

N ext day, we met again over lunch and Clarissa, now dressed in a faded River Club polo and khaki trousers that made her look jaunty and businesslike, told me she basically had it all figured now. We could put a plan in force so that when I went back to Urology Partners in Haddam on Friday to review my treatment options, I’d be “holding all the cards.”

Hopkins and Sloan Kettering were first-rate, but the real brain-trust treasure trove was Mayo in Rochester. This came from computer rankings, from a book she’d read overnight and from a Harvard friend whose father was at Hopkins but liked Mayo and could probably get us in in a jiffy.

The options, she felt, were pretty much straightforward. My Gleason score was relatively low, general health good, my tumor positioned such that radioactive iodine-seed implants, with a titanium BB delivery system, could be the “way to go” if the Mayo doctors agreed. Having “the whole thing yanked,” she said (here her eyes fell to the toasted eggplant napoleon I’d bitten the bullet and brought back), was better in the philosophical sense that having no transmission is better than keeping an old beat-up one that might explode. But the side effects of “a radical” involved “lifestyle adjustments and a chance of impairment” (adult diapers, possibly a flat-line on my vascular events). The procedure itself was tolerable, though drastic, and in the end you might not live any longer, while “quality-of-life issues” could be “problematic.”

“It’s a trade-off,” she said, and bit her lower lip. She looked across at me and seemed not to like this conversation. It was no longer a lab report, but words that shed shadowy light on another’s future in, as it’s said, real time. “Why not take the easier route if you can?” she said. “I would.” As always, the best way out is not through.

“They put seeds in?” I said, baffled and contrary.

“They put seeds in,” Clarissa said. She was reading from a sheet of paper she’d printed out. “Which are the size of sesame seeds, and you get anywhere up to ninety, under general anesthetic, using stainless-steel needles. Minimal trauma. You’re asleep less than an hour and can go home or wherever you want to go the same day. They basically bombard the shit out of the tumor cells and leave the other tissue alone. The seeds stay in forever and become inert in about three months. Once they’re in, there’s some minor side effects. You might pee more for a while, and it might hurt some. You can’t let babies sit in your lap, at first, and you have to try not to cough or sneeze real hard, because you can launch one of these seeds out through your penis — which I guess isn’t cool. But you won’t set off airport security, and the risk to pets is low. You won’t infect anybody you have sex ”—on the restricted list—“with. And you probably won’t be incontinent or impotent. Most important”—she squinted at the paper as if her eyes were blurring, and scratched a finger into the thick hair above her forehead—“you won’t be letting this take over the core of your manhood, and the chances are in ten years you’ll be cancer-free.” She looked up and turned her lips inward to form a line, as if this hadn’t necessarily been so pleasant, but now she’d done it. “If you want me to,” she said, picking up a scrap of eggplant and bringing it purposefully toward her mouth, “I’ll go out to Mayo with you. We can have a father-daughter thing, with you having your radioactive seeds sown into your prostate.”

“I don’t think that’s the job for the daughter,” I said. I’d already decided to do whatever she said. Talking to your father about his dysfunctions and impairments wasn’t a job for the daughter, either. But there we were. Who else would I want to help me? And who would?

“Okay,” Clarissa said amiably. “I don’t mind, though. I don’t know what the daughter’s job really is.” She chewed her eggplant while staring at me, leaning on her knobby elbows. She looked like a teen eating a limp French fry. She quietly burped and looked surprised. “It’d be nice if the wife was around. That’s a different screenplay, I guess. Marriage is a strange way to express love, isn’t it? Maybe I won’t try it.”

I, at that instant, thought of “the wife,” just like people do in movies but almost never in actual life. We usually think about absolutely nothing in these becalmed moments, or else about having our tires rotated or buying a new roll of stamps. Writers, though, like to juice these moments to get at you while you’re vulnerable. What I actually did think of, however, was Sally — sitting down to this very glass-topped breakfast table last June, with the hot sun on the water and bathers standing in the surf, contemplating immersion. A tiny biplane had buzzed down the beachfront, pulling a fluttering sign that said NUDE REVIEW — NJ 35 METEDECONK. I had the New York Times flattened out to the sports page and was skimming a story about a Lakers win, before heading to the obits. It was the morning Sally told me she was leaving for Scotland with her long-presumed-dead former husband, Wally, who’d strangely visited us the week before. She loved me, she said, always would, but it seemed to her “important” (there are so many of these slippery words now) to finish “a thing” she’d started — her ossified marriage, which I’d thought was kaflooey. It seemed, she said, that I didn’t “all that much need” her, and that “under the circumstances” (always treacherous) it was worse to be with someone who didn’t need you than to let someone who maybe did be alone — i.e., Wally, a boy I’d actually gone to military school with but never knew before he showed up in my house. In other words (I supplied this part), she loved Wally more than me.

I sat there while Sally said some other things, wondering how in hell she could conclude I didn’t need her, and what in hell “need” meant when another person’s “need” was in question.

Then I cried. But she left anyway.

And that was that — right at the table where Clarissa said she’d go to Mayo with me to have my prostate radiated and (as the world says) “hopefully” my life saved.

“I understand the drive south of Red Wing along the Mississippi is gorgeous in the summer.” Clarissa was standing, stacking my lunch plate onto hers.

“What’s that?” My interior head, for many plausible reasons, felt restless — my grip on the moment, her offer, Sally’s departure, the setting overlooking the Sea-Clift beach, the idea of Red Wing, my newly defined physical condition and survival possibilities all scrabbling for attention.

“I was thinking about what I could do while you were in the hospital. I looked Minnesota up on the Web.” She smiled the beautiful smile I knew would sink a thousand ships, but was now saving mine. “Minnesota’s okay. In the summer anyway.”

“I’m sorry, sweetheart. I wasn’t paying attention.” I smiled up at her.

“I don’t blame you,” Clarissa said, moving her long bones and having a stretch in the sunlight that fell in on us out of the August sky. Oddly enough, and for an instant, I felt glad about everything. “If I’d heard what you heard,” she said, “I wouldn’t pay much attention, either.” And that was finally the way the whole matter was decided.