Indecision: A Novel Read online

  After disabling the alarm dad went inside to call Frances. “Probably just getting out of bed over there. Down Under. Would you go out back and water my flowers? Then maybe I’ll fork over some money.” I could tell by his harsh tone that he would, and felt some relief at least in the accounting department as I took the dogs behind the house.

  I turned the spoked knob clockwise and then stood with the hose above the flowers, waving the spray over the lilies and svelte irises, the blowsy pansies and banks of phlox, as if to soothe and somehow wake them at the same time. Then I turned the faucet almost shut and set the mild silver flow down inside the bermed bed where the climbing hollyhocks and orange heads of calendula grew. It really wasn’t such a bad flower garden for a divorced bankrupt of a father to keep up.

  You can eat calendula, so I stuffed some in my mouth. My jaw working, my palate receiving, I tried to do some thinking. Because I could feel there was a thought that needed thinking, or a decision deciding, and it even seemed connected in some way to the dogs or the flowers.

  (As a kid I’d been convinced by dad’s lectures about germination that I knew how it was to be a seed. That is, I felt I knew how it was when the seed first split underground and the tucked neck of its original shoot buckled up, tugged by the light while its roots strayed down, and then straightened out and began climbing up through loosening soil toward the open air and light. I was less sure of what the tiny consciousness of a plant went through as it emerged on the ground, paused, and kept mounting. And as for how it was in the end when the leaves came out and the actual colored flowers blew—I had no idea. By then I felt about a plant as I did toward other people. I mean, mom and dad and Alice—they were incomprehensible! One would never do what they did, or I never would anyway. Why had they chosen to be themselves? Dim as I was, and the youngest, still I could tell they weren’t delighted with their choices.)

  Flowers . . . Dogs . . . The whole fucking dogflower of it all . . . It seemed like the only way I had of thinking about anything was to think about something else. And this really ruined the procedure.

  I shut the water off, and threw up my hands, and sat down drunk on the lawn. I was afraid that the shape my life wanted to take would never describe itself to me any more than I could ever accurately describe just the exact mild savor of all these calendula blossoms I had unconsciously started eating one by one. (Yet while I may not be able to say what these flowers tasted like, they did taste like something, and like nothing else but that.)

  The grown-up dogs sat protectively to either side of me while Betsy bounded in and out of my lap. Then I heard the whispering of pant legs and turned to see dad approaching with a tumbler in one hand and a rakish look pulling at one side of his face.

  “Poor woman.” The smile tugged to one side. But on the other side he looked too wise for this.

  “She thinks you like her?” I asked. “Like, like-like her?”

  “Why do I call her poor woman?”

  “Sometimes you seem like a pretty terrible guy.” I must have been doubly drunk to say this.

  “What can you do? The trouble with your mother and me is that we’d exhausted our illusions. As you grow up, and you’ll find this, Dwight, you keep getting involved with larger and larger illusions that take longer and longer to fall away. The great hope is eventually to find a delusion that will outlast your life. You’ll do well to marry a woman you won’t realize you can’t live with until you’re both dead. Ha! But Frances? No I won’t marry her. And yet when I think about her I sometimes feel . . . Frankly I feel a capacity for self-deception that makes me feel like a much younger man. I’m in pretty good health, you know, and could go on living for some time.”

  “How did you ever become a dad like this?”

  “Very simple operation.”

  “Seriously, should cynics . . . father?”

  “You’re suggesting they should just masturbate in the public square? Along the lines of their founder?”

  This remark bewildered me.

  “Don’t worry.” Dad looked at me with this wicked charm that made you imagine his long-ago way with the ladies. “It’s only lately that I’ve come to realize the vanity of . . .” He shrugged and sighed. “Of all my years of trading. Fathering. Husbanding. I had my system, the system worked, the system failed.”

  “You mean Commodysis?”

  “Nor was the vanity all in vain, don’t you agree? We’ve had our nicely appointed lives. We haven’t added any material privations to the more spiritual varieties of our suffering. We’ve been able to address ourselves to pains other than those of social inferiority. That’s been quite nice.” I’d always admired the way dad could talk. “And I put you and Alice through those schools which—well, it remains quite prestigious that you went to St. Jerome’s. Yet it does come to seem somewhat in vain. In a sense. Vita longa, ars brevis, is how you wind up feeling. You survive your rationale. But I shouldn’t be saying all this—not to you I shouldn’t.” For a moment he looked genuinely concerned. “You can’t understand what I’m saying on the cheap, Dwight! You have to fucking do something. Don’t see the vanity until the end, all right?” He laughed. “Find a job, a girl! The Dutch one may do. Sure. Wasn’t there some particular thing she did? This is the tall blond girl with the freakish smile? Am I remembering correctly?” He looked at me again. “But did they really never teach in your courses about Diogenes Laertius? The inventor of cynicism as it were?”

  “I don’t think they had us read that. It probably would be discouraging to the young.”

  “What books did you read, Dwight? All those goddamned schools . . .”

  I began providing him with an annotated bibliography as, trailed by the dogs, we went inside the house.

  Always the same, the smell of the house was always a surprise: cool and somehow mineral, with a sort of iron flatness beneath the pleading richness of dark wood and moist sense of venerable rugs. Not strong at all, still the smell was stronger if there weren’t any cooking smells, as there weren’t today in the swept-bare quiet and overwhelming bachelorhood of the place. The smell of the house took up innumerable lost and scattered moments of the past and fused them for a second. I got a sudden white blast of pure life—and then the flare was gone.

  Recovered, I said, “So the question, according to Quine, is whether the guy is seeing a single, discrete entity that you and I would consider a rabbit—”

  “All right.”

  “Or just a bunch of separate rabbit instances.”

  “For Christ’s sake . . . One hundred thousand dollars . . .”

  Dad settled in the big rolling chair on the far side of his desk and produced his checkbook from a drawer. This was in his office. Marshall and Frank each turned a semicircle, then sank on their flannel dog beds, while I sat down like an anxious—and drunk—loan applicant on the other side of the desk. Puppy Betsy scratched and licked at my hand, which I wiped off on my shirt before reaching for the check dad was handing me.

  “Should tide you over until you find your feet. Ha!”

  I folded it up without looking at the amount—I was afraid it would cause inappropriate degrees of either glee or dismay. “Thank you more than I can say.”

  “You wouldn’t think of doing graduate work in philosophy, would you?”

  “Oh, no.” The idea appalled me. “Never.”

  “Good.” He poured out two or three fingers of scotch for us both. “I hope you’ve given up on that stuff. I blame myself for not directing you better. And for my influence.” He gestured sweepingly at the books on the wall. Thirty years of evenings were stored between the pages somehow without taking up any space. “However, Dwight, mostly I blame you.”

  “That makes sense.”

  I sipped at my scotch. I’d kind of lost track of my mood. On the wall facing me was this darkly lustrous portrait in oils of mom as young Charlie. There was also a heavy clock—think captain’s quarters—on the mantel above the fireplace, and beside the computer one of those high-
tech crane-necked lamps with a weighted base. When I was a kid, and in fact up until right about now, the office had always seemed to represent a world of considerable ballast, not easily knocked around by rough seas. And dad too was impressively solid, thick through the chest and broad-shouldered, with the heavy-boned face distinguished by the long nose, faintly cleft at the end, that had been passed down through the generations until it stopped with him. (I had my mom’s nose, and Alice had her own.) But now all the fatherous solidity seemed less so . . .

  “Just sits there,” dad said. “You just fucking sit there. Well I have one goddam piece of advice for you, Dwight. And I’m sorry I’m swearing so much. Obscenity has really lost its power don’t you think? But—what are you looking at?”

  It was the Dwight in the photograph on another wall, in black mortarboard and gown, looking into the camera with his head cocked to one side in this curious expectant way I recognized from somewhere.

  “College seems like a long time ago,” I said. It wasn’t really what I was thinking.

  “Listen, Dwight, I have a piece of advice for you. All right? There is no worse preparation for adulthood than having been a child. Do you hear me? Be a fucking kid and you get trained in that business and forget all about time. But listen, here is my fatherly advice. I suppose I ought to have dispensed it more often—and to a more plausible son.” I sensed he was trying to be angrier than he was, and putting on a roar. “Don’t make a career out of your childhood! Do you understand me? Don’t make a career out of your childhood or you’ll never adapt yourself to any other. Is that understood?”

  “There are some decisions I’m really eager to make,” I said. “Once the Abulinix starts to—”

  “But you already know what you know!”

  “What do I know?” I knocked back the rest of my scotch for courage, and smiled at him.

  “Sonofabitch!”

  He sent me ducking as a miniature stapler came flying at my head.

  “Good! Good! Duck and cover! Cower and hide!” Suddenly he paused. “Do you know what I don’t trust about those SOBs?”

  I unshielded my face and looked at him. “Which ones?”

  The box of a VCR head cleaner came flying at me and I hit the floor. “Great! Great! Good! Cower from the Great Satan! But let me tell you the reason I don’t trust those Wasabi Muslims—that’s the terrorist kind—it’s for one single reason! They don’t drink is why I don’t trust them! If what you want is an education in human frailty . . .” He nodded at his glass and swished it around. “If what you want is a humanizing tolerance for weakness and the varieties of failure . . .” He polished off the rest of the tumblerful. “I tell you what you do. Hell, there would be worse things for you to do than to set yourself up as the premier liquor distributor to the Arab world. Just do not play dead, you hear me!” At the words play dead Frank the dog got up, looked at dad with a look of put-upon exhaustion, and rolled over onto his back, legs straight in the air. I observed this noble, baffled obedience from my crouch on the floor.

  “Oh come here, Frank, come,” dad said with almost a sob, and when the dog got up and laid his muzzle against dad’s thigh, he—dad—gently removed a little ball of sleep with his thumb from one of the creature’s baleful, intelligent eyes. “There, you’re a good one.” Looking at me he added, “Take it from me, you lousy sonofabitch. Whom I love!”

  He threw a heap of paper clips—they lightly rained on me.

  “Listen: Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise.”

  “What are you saying.”

  “For Christ’s sake! You know what you are, you illiterate goddam . . .”

  He shook his head while selecting the word, and from down on the ground I noticed something. That look, in the picture of me? It was the look of a dog awaiting a treat! I was filled with horror, and sprang up onto my knees in an agony of comprehension. “I’m a dog! I’m a dog! Oh no! That’s what I know! I’m a seed that grew into a dog!”

  Soon it became evident to me from dad’s confusion that this wasn’t what he’d been about to say. Nevertheless, still kneeling on the rug, I went ahead and said, “It’s horrible! I’m always doing what the humans say. I’m always hoping my innocence will forgive me—it’s so corrupt!” Was this the Abulinix I could already feel? “I admit it! I’m a dog.”

  “Nothing’s wrong with dogs,” dad said defensively.

  “They’re inhuman!”

  At this Betsy launched herself at my face and licked me on the neck. Sunlight was falling slantwise through the south-facing windows, and the dust across the panes was lit up from the side, golden-ish, like pollen, and giving off an air of immense drowsy fertility, as I swayed with feeling on the floor. Maybe I was drunker than I guessed. I got up to my feet and sat back down in the chair.

  “And what,” dad asked, “do you propose to do with yourself, now that you’re no longer a dog?”

  “I want to start a new life.”

  “Ah you’ll grow old doing that.”

  I stood up and went to the other side of the desk. I put my hand on dad’s shoulder. He looked at it like he did not know this hand.

  “Just don’t eat any more of my goddam flowers,” he said.

  “I’m going to go up and pass out in my room.”

  I walked out of dad’s office, blocked only once by the doorjamb. “Good night,” he called out after me, the dogs all barking when his voice was raised. “Good night,” he called again—it was five in the afternoon—as the dogs continued barking.

  I paused at the foot of the stairs, with their worn blue runner still cascading in place through the years. “Glad we had this conversation,” I yelled.

  “About time!”

  At the top of my voice I said, “Everything takes longer than you think.”

  “Not life,” I thought I heard him grumble. Unless it was something about a wife.

  The words were still ringing indistinctly in my ears as the plane took off from JFK the next day, forcing my back against the seat and adding its torque of actuality to the fact that I was leaving. I sat in my seat and watched the fragile city dwindle to a model of itself—a touching sight, like there was no strength in numbers. And then there was nothing but the mirroring ocean down there, flashing and bright but also really dark.

  Part Two

  NINE

  The driver relieved me of my backpack and threw it into the trunk like an abducted child. Natasha opened the right rear door of the taxi and motioned me in. She sat down on one side of me while Brigid—that was her name—came around and sat down on the other. There was kind of a kidnapping feeling going on as they pulled the doors simultaneously shut. “You’re like double agents,” I said. Because there were two of them.

  The taxi lurched away from the terminal and Natasha leaned forward, looking across me to Brigid. “Dwight is very mystical. He has mystical ways of knowledge.”

  “Untrue,” I assured Brigid, then turned to Natasha, who should know better. “That’s not true.”

  “But how did you recognize Brigid was waiting for you? She didn’t wave to you?”

  “She knew me is how I knew her. Plus Brigid is white.” I turned to Brigid. “I mean you are, Brigid. You’re a white person, I mean—”

  “Yes,” she admitted.

  “Not that the Ecuadoris aren’t white. In part. Some of them. I understand. But—”

  “Yes I confess. I gave him the secretive wink of all white people in conspiracy.” Natasha and I were supposed to laugh, but didn’t. “That was funny,” she complained in her slight, unlocatable accent.

  I was really curious who this Brigid person was, but it seemed rude to ask right in front of her. It struck me as possible that Natasha had told me all about her many years ago, or else in a recent email that I’d forgotten the moment I logged off. Of course it was just as possible that Natasha hadn’t mentioned this other woman at all, and unable to recall whether Natasha was generally considerate and forewarning or not, I couldn’t gue
ss whether this was likely. Meanwhile I felt kind of disloyal in my divided attentions. Then again it was only fair since Brigid was the one inquiring how my flight had been.

  “Good enough, I guess.” I turned suavely to Natasha. “Since I’m here.”

  “Nice that we all are here. Next up Cuncalbamba!”

  “This is a picturesque town—” Brigid began to explain. Was she going too?

  “In a beautiful valley,” Natasha added.

  Brigid: “Very near the cloud forest.”

  Natasha: “But not nearly so wet.”

  “The climate is like an ideal.”

  “Everyone loves Cuncalbamba.”

  “That sounds nice,” I said to them both; and I guess it did. But by the time the cab had deposited us on the steep empty street, and Natasha was unlocking a fourth consecutive door in order to lead us into her apartment, I was feeling more anxious than enthusiastic about my visit to this country, and in particular afraid that thieves or revolutionaries would set upon us the moment we went back outside through the four locked doors in the morning.

  I put my pack down and walked to the window to take in the view through the bars. The city of Quito was laid out in glittery drifts down below, and moody-looking mountains loomed to what was possibly the north. Off in the distance a cloud dangled a single branching nerve of lightning. Despite the fact that my brain was prickling with dread, I turned around and was like, “So I’m very glad to be here Natasha.”

  “I know you’re going to have such a great time.”

  I would have felt more convinced if she hadn’t started to yawn.

  “Should we—I don’t want to offer you your own liquor—but shouldn’t we have a drink or something?” Brigid had disappeared into the bedroom, and now that Natasha and I were alone I desired some quality time.

  “It’s very late, Dwight—it’s past midnight.”

  “I know, same time zone as New York.” I looked around the bare, unfamiliar room. “That’s the strange thing.”