Richard Ford - The Lay of the Land

Thom’s frowning hard over an open copy of what looks like Foreign Affairs (thick, creamy, deckled pages, etc.) and looks up to smile weakly as my fatherly identity is expressed (in my own kitchen). I mean to proffer only the most carefully crafted, disinterested and hermetically banal sentiments and damn few of them, for fear I’ll say extremely wrong things, after which terrible words from my daughter’s razor tongue will lacerate my head and heart.

Only, Thom’s old —at least forty-six ! And even bumbling through my kitchen like a renter and barely daring a look or to meet his dark eyes — my listing papers being my something to hold on to — I know this character’s rap sheet. And it has DANGER stamped on it in big red block letters. Clarissa has carefully mentioned nothing about him in the last days, only that he “teaches” equestrian therapy to Down’s syndrome kids at a “pretty famous holistic center” over in Manchester, where she volunteers a day a week when she isn’t working in my office. She’s intended him to attract absolutely no vetting commentary from me. Apparently the “whole thing”—the connected boxes versus the complex, well-differentiated big swim I was unarguably in — was still pretty precarious, and she didn’t need other people’s (mine, her mother’s) views making her difficult life harder to navigate. This is all re-conveyed to me now in my kitchen with one look of post-coital lassitude and menace.

Thom, however — Thom is no mystery. Thom is known to me and to all men — fathers, especially — and loathed.

Tall, rangy, long-muscled, large-eyed, smooth-olive-skinned Amherst or Wesleyan grad — read Sanskrit, history of science and genocide studies, swam or rowed till books got in the way; born “abroad” of mixed parentage (Jewish-Navajo, French, Berber — whatever gives you charcoal gray eyes, silky black hair on the back of your hands and forearms); deep honeyed voice that seems made of expensive felt; intensely “serious” yet surprisingly funny, also touchingly awkward at the most unexpected moments (not during intercourse); plays a medieval stringed instrument, of which there are only ten in existence; has mastered Go, was once married to a Chilean woman and has a teenage child in Montreal he’s deeply committed to but rarely sees. Worked in Ghana for the Friends Service, taught in experimental schools (not Montessori), built his own ketch and sailed it to Brittany, wears one-of-a-kind Persian sandals, a copper anklet, black silk singlets suggesting a full-body tan, sage-colored desert shorts revealing a shark bite on his inner thigh from who-knows-what ocean, and always smells like a fine wood-working shop. He’s only at the Equestrian Center now because of an “awakening” on the Going to the Sun Highway, which indicated he had yet to fully deliver on his “promise.” And since he’d grown up with horses in North Florida or Buenos Aires or Vienna, and since his little sister had Down’s, maybe there was still time to “make good” if he could just find the right place: Manchester, New Jersey.

And oh, yes, along the course, he also wanted to make good on some men’s daughters and wives. On Clarissa. My Clarissa. My prize. My lifesaver. My un-innocent innocent. She was number 1001.

If I had a pistol instead of a handful of house-for-sale sheets, I’d shoot Thom right in the chest in the midst of their cheery bagel ’n cream cheese, eggs ’n bacon ambience, let him slump onto his Foreign Affairs and drag him out to the beach for the gulls. (Since I’ve had cancer, I’ve compiled an impressive list of people to “take with me” when things get governmentally irreversible — as they soon will. If I survive the hail of bullets, I’ll happily spend my last days in a federal lockup with books to read, three squares, and limited TV in the senior block. You can imagine who I’ll be seeking out. Thom is my new entry.)

“…This is my dad, Frank Bascombe,” Clarissa mutters, head down over her Orvis catalog. She casually retracts her shoe-less foot out of Thom’s lap, gives her big toe a good scratching, then absently, lightly fingers the tiny red whelp where her diamond nose stud used to be. Breakfast dishes are disposed in front of them — bagel crescents, melted butter globs, a bowl of cereal bits afloat on a gray skim of milk product.

I proffer a hand insincerely across Clarissa. “Hi there,” I say. Big smile.

“Thom van Ronk, sir.” Thom looks up suddenly from Foreign Affairs, now smiling intensely. He shakes my hand without standing. Van Ronk. Not a Berber, but a treacherous Walloon. Clarissa could’ve been smarter than this.

“What’s shakin’ in Foreign Affairs, Thom?” I say. “Brits still won’t go for the Euro? Ruskies struggling with a market economy? The odd massacre needing interpreting?” I smile so he knows I hate him. Every person he’s ever known hates him — except my daughter, who doesn’t like my tone of voice and glares up from her page of Gore-Tex trekking mocs to burn a dead-eyed frown into me promising complex punishments later. They’d be worth it.

“Your son, aka my brother, paid us a visit already this morning,” Clarissa says, nestling her heel back comfy into Thom’s penile package, while he re-finds his place in his important reading material. They seem to have known each other for a year. Possibly they’re already on the brink of the kind of familiarity that leads to boredom — like a ball bearing seeking the ocean bottom. I hope so. Though neither of my wives ever stuck her heel into my package while fingering up breakfast crumbs. At Harvard, there’s probably a course for this in the mental-health extension program: Morning-After Etiquette: Do’s, Don’ts, Better Nots. “He seemed — surprise, surprise — extremely weird.” She casts a bored look out at the beach to where the Shore Police are grilling some local teens freed from school for the holiday. “He’s not as weird, though, as his girlfriend. Miss Jill.” She frowns at the boys, four in all, with shaved heads, butt-crack jeans, long Jets and Redskins jerseys. Two enormous, hulking, hatless policemen in shorts are making the boys form a line and turn their pockets out alongside the black-and-white Isuzu 4 × 4. All of them are laughing.

Clarissa, I understand to be musing over the fact that mere mention of her brother makes her revert to teen vocabulary ten years out-of-date, when Paul was “weird beyond pathetic, entirely out of it, deeply disgusting and queer,” etc. She’s sophisticated enough not to care, only to notice. She and her strange brother maintain an ingrown, not overtly unfriendly détente she doesn’t talk about. Paul admires and is deeply in love with her for being glamorous and a (former) lesbian and for stealing a march on transgressive behavior, which had always been his speciality. (I’m sure he was pleased to meet Thom.) Clarissa recognizes his right to be an insignificant little midwestern putzburger, card writer and Chiefs fan, someone she’d never have one thing to do with if he wasn’t her brother. It’s possible they’re in contact about their mother and me by e-mail, though I’m not sure when they last saw each other in the flesh, or if Clarissa could even be nice to him in person. Parents are supposed to know these things. I just don’t.

Though there’s also an old, murky shadow over their brother-sister bond. When Paul was seventeen and Clarissa fifteen, Paul in a fit of confusion apparently “suggested”—I’m not sure how — that he and Clarissa engage in a “see-what-it’s-like” roll in the hay, which pretty much KO’d further sibling rapport. It’s always possible he was joking. However, three years ago — he told his mother this — Paul was summoned to Maine by Clarissa and Cookie, given a ticket to Bangor, brought down to Pretty Marsh by bus, then forced to sleep in a cold cabin and endure an inquisition for misfeasances he wouldn’t go into detail about (reportedly “the usual brother-sister crap”), though clearly for trying to make Clarissa do woo-woo with him when she was underage and his sister. Paul said the two women were savage. They said he should be ashamed of himself, should seek counseling, was probably gay, wasn’t manly, had self-esteem issues, was likely an addicted onanist and premature ejaculator — the usual things sisters think about brothers. He told Ann he finally just gave in (without specifically admitting to what) when they said none of it was his fault, but was actually Ann’s and mine, and that they felt sorry for him. Then they each gave him a hug that he said made him feel crazy. They ended the afternoon with Paul showing them some of his sidesplitting “Smart Aleck” cards — the Hallmark line he writes for out in K.C. — and throwing his voice into the bedroom, and laughing themselves silly before sitting down to a big lobster dinner. He went home the next day.