Indecision: A Novel Page 8

“It will help if you turn around.”

  I turned around and shielded my crotch as in a penalty kick.

  “You’re certainly a very curious person,” she said.

  “Except that’s not true! I didn’t even read the document! I wonder what it said.”

  “I don’t mean curious that way. I like you because you’re you. A dozen reasons. You’re Dwight Wilmerding. And now that you’re free to take a better job, I think you’re going to feel much more fulfilled.”

  Vaneetha fell asleep as I whispered some sweet nothings into her ear. Probably their sweetness was rivaled only by their nothingness. Then a few myoclonic jerks told me she was asleep, and I got up to go take a leak. Seeing myself in the mirror I shook my head. “You again.” I always did that—a habit.

  I started gathering up my clothes from the floor. Then I sat down in a chute of streetlamp glow to compose my little valediction or whatever:

  My dear Vaneetha,

  I am flying to Ecuador—can you believe the coincidence?—on Saturday. Sorry if this comes as a shock to you as well. But there is no stopping me when I must learn from my mistakes. I am going to South America mostly in order to do some thinking. Here in New York I have been mistaking the commotion for my own.

  It is also the case that there is another woman in Ecuador. This is Natasha, but only a friend. She speaks Spanish and can keep me from being misunderstood or deceived. However I make no guarantees involving my conduct with her. I feel it would be unphilosophical to do anything but submit to my freedom.

  My provisional conclusion is I should have waited to attain a state of higher personal and professional development before endeavoring to be a suitable partner for such a fine woman as undoubtedly and really very impressively you are. For now I could only be the hindrance I always was.

  I promise I will suffer for this. Hope you won’t.

  Thank you for everything. Maybe there will be more. If you want. Which I doubt. You know how I feel. XO,

  —but instead of signing it I folded it up and put it into my pocket as an ambulance siren blared past and then wavered away. (Ultimately I would use this note as the rough draft for an email I sent from dad’s house the next day.)

  Then I was out on the street, in the TV-screen blue of the night. In front of a deli a man was hosing off the shining sidewalk. He had this particular kind of dark and steep-nosed usurped prince’s face that later on I would recognize as a basic Andean type. At that time I just saw him as foreign. He shut the nozzle to let me pass, and offered with a lowered head just the breath of a smile.

  SEVEN

  The train pulled out of another quiet white-painted town and recovered that slack regular ratcheting sound of all trains. I was on my way to see dad, to play some golf, to sip some scotch, and then in the end, or somewhere in the middle, at an opportune moment, before it slipped past, or maybe, on the other hand, right away, the minute I saw him, first things being first, and just in order to get it over with—anyway I was on my way to ask dad for some money. I had every intention of telling him I had lost my job, and in the context of my resulting penuriousness I would request a loan. Or ask him to take me in for a while once I got back from Ecuador. Or both things, actually. That would make the most sense from an economic point of view, at least if I could deal with the psychic cost of living with him for the first time in fourteen years, and without mom and Alice around to parry him and distribute throughout the household their various counterpointing moods. It would be interesting to see what I decided to do, always assuming I did decide, which I shouldn’t necessarily do. Today was only Abulinix day six.

  We arrived with sighing brakes at the Wassaic station. I stood up and followed a few fellow passengers down the aisle and off the train. There was dad waiting for me in the parking lot inside his fancy new car.

  Suddenly it seemed possible that I would just return to the city, tail between my legs, without saying anything about money. Besides, a plea for funds must gain something in urgency when made from a sketchy third-world country. And yet I really didn’t understand this personal bankruptcy thing of dad’s if he could buy himself a new Audi, fully loaded and lustrously painted with the extract of crushed oyster shells. The vehicle was already notorious. Alice had called it “his new car that’s like painted with the crushed fingernails of illegal combatants” and mom had snorted and said, “We should all be so bankrupt!” I hadn’t had any opinion until now, when I discovered my feeling to be that if that shiny white machine was dad’s car, I didn’t see why I couldn’t be made a small loan.

  Dad released the dogs from the backseat before even acknowledging me. They trotted forward snorting and wiggling, sneezing and wagging their tails, first Marshall, a glossy half-Rottweiler mutt, three years old, who leapt like a deer from all fours, and then our half–Rhodesian ridgeback, Frank, chubby and blond, who liked sniffing and rooting with his nose like a pig. One dog a deer and the other one a pig—it was strange. But stranger to me still was this new dog hanging around all timid and small in the neighborhood of dad’s pant cuffs: a yellow lab puppy, by the look of her.

  Marshall was squirming with frantic happiness, licking shyly at my hands. I knelt down to pat him while Frank laid his muzzle against my thigh, and dad came up to me with the puppy slipping in his arms. “Cave Canem,” he festively said—Latin for Beware of Dog.

  “Hey, dad, man.”

  He set the puppy down while I stood up. Then we squeezed the breath out of each other. Ever since roughly the middle of Clinton’s first term, when hugging seems to have become acceptable mainstream practice among straight or straight-acting men, we’ve always hugged upon greeting and saying goodbye.

  “So who’s the new dog? Why didn’t you email me? I mean a puppy—that’s an event.”

  “Nothing I could have written would be like Betsy in person. Isn’t she just a little—aren’t you Betsy?” Dad dangled his hand near the puppy’s mouth and little miniature Betsy leapt up to chew on it with her clean new teeth.

  “Doesn’t look like a mutt,” I said. Usually it was only mutts—the only true dogs, according to dad’s former idea—that he rescued from the pound.

  “Sometimes, Dwight, you reach a certain age—you just want a yellow lab. You’re willing to buy one. You’ve worked all your life, you’ve raised two ungrateful children.” The friendliness of his cynicism was the nice, but not the consistent thing about it. “You’ve at last divorced the woman you love. The woman well-lost . . .”

  A serious reader, dad had gone through many volumes in his office, and from his tone of voice more than from my own strictly limited erudition I could sometimes tell when he was alluding.

  “I’ve lost something too,” I said, or more mumbled it maybe.

  Together we drove to the club, dogs and puppy panting away in the backseat. And probably here is the place to explain that when I was a kid we had another dog: a large fit golden retriever named Mister, very regal in the face, with a pale coat flaring in cowlicks all across his back and an attitude of stoical sadness that only being played with or petted could placate for a while. Mom and dad were physically shy with me and Alice except when spanking us, and we were also shy with each other, unless sumo wrestling or playing karate, so that all of us showed Mister an affection that was plainer and more extravagant than anything that passed between us actual humans except in times of crisis. Yet this attention to Mister seemed also to be the emblem of our basic mutual filial thing, implying as it did what large volumes of love-grade emotion must get trafficked invisibly between us if this was how we treated—I mean, nice as he was—our dog. Our feeling for Mister kind of took the measure of our hearts, is my guess.

  “Only nine holes,” dad assured the dogs when we left them with windows half down and a biscuit each.

  Out on the links, typically we’d discuss which club for me to use, then I’d whack the ball. Then dad would hit his own ball. Then we would walk in the direction of the errant ball and the well-placed ball, discussing thing
s in general, such as money, sports, and current events. I think one time we used Tiger Woods for all three.

  Though I didn’t golf so well, I did enjoy dressing golf-style, since to me all uniforms—and, in this particular case, some pistachio-colored pants and a pink-and-mocha sort of argyle sweater that had fit me a lot better in the Third Form—seemed to loan the body a rare sense of purpose.

  It was a nice morning, heating up, with voluble birds happy in the trees. You could distinctly feel our whole part of earth easing itself down toward summer.

  First hole, dad peered weirdly—stagily—into the little cylindrical hollow. Before scooping out the ball he said, “Burns spared this one,” and chuckled. I wasn’t sure whether I should know what he was talking about. When he made the same enigmatic comment at the next hole—“Spared this one too”—I was like, “Huh?”

  “Pardon me,” dad said, because he and mom—one item they agreed on—didn’t like it when I’d say huh? They considered it a shame to waste all that money on a young man’s education if he still put his elbows on the table and said huh?

  “I mean what. Regarding Dr. Burns?”

  So dad related the scandal. Burns had been a community fixture ever since his days back during Nixon as an enthusiastic Valium prescriber, and now apparently the doctor had been caught a week or so before, literally with his pants down, defecating into the fifteenth hole.

  “Ew”—because this is something I don’t like about my parents. Their conversation around me frequently runs to the scatological, and this I find infantilizing—this and my mother’s habit of peeing when I talked to her on the phone—since you don’t have to be a freelance psychoanalyst to feel that making these procedures a public matter between parents and child must be a way of reinforcing an inappropriate intimacy way past the deadline. “I’m really not into hearing this, dad.”

  “As a result of this incident,” dad was saying with serious relish, “Burns has been suspended from the club. For a year!”

  We were walking toward the islandy clump or copse of trees in the direction of which I’d—whoops—hit my ball. Once when I was seventeen I’d deliberately knocked my ball that way in order to duck into the dappled shade and take a hit off of this little one-hitter I’d carried with me at the time, since I was then in the grips of a conviction that weed made you see things more truly, clearly, and that was how I wanted to see dad, in order to check out whether, defamiliarized a little, the guy still was basically a good guy or what. On that occasion when I exited the trees disguised by Visine and breath mints and those aviator-type Ray-Bans we all used to wear, he’d struck me as just some bluff pink-faced ghoul of a commodity-trading genius who had chosen the main features of his life in order to make himself into some weird totem of his social position, instead of—I don’t know—following the mad, barking dictates of his soul wherever those might have led, like possibly to Vermont or else northern California. I mean, how could any free person choose, from the whole universal range, to be this dad and moneyman and golfer, a resident of northwestern Connecticut walking around in WASP casual, going to the reunions, belonging to the clubs, and describing himself—still, or at least then—as a Rockefeller Republican?

  But now in light of my own recent actions and, even more, my damaging reluctance to carry them out, I tried experimenting with the conclusion that dad’s scotch-and-golf-oriented generation wasn’t so different, in terms of courage, from my more weed-and-rock-climbing one; that it was a pretty unusual life that didn’t travesty the better nature of the person inside it; and that dad’s very dad-like knowledge about many things, and intermittent basic decency, and astounding handiness, made him not such a bad person at all, despite any reservations I may have had about the rate of his scotch drinking, and any sorrow I may have experienced at having become, thanks to him, and along with Alice, another child of divorce.

  “What makes it all particularly amusing—” he was saying.

  “Yeah but do I really want to know this?”

  “—is that Burns had just been quoted, in the Times, about ten days before, as one of the last physicians prescribing Croxol—”

  “So would you say seven iron here or—”

  “—despite a certain frequent side effect. Of explosive diarrhea! Which he said—in the Times—had been exaggerated!” Explosive laughter.

  “Dad, man.”

  “Can’t you just picture him because—”

  “I hate this. Don’t you know that yet?”

  “Because what is Croxol prescribed for?” He waited a beat. “For morbid embarrassment.”

  “Hmm . . . The gods’ sense of humor.” This was in order to suggest that my education hadn’t been totally for not. Or is it naught?

  “Precisely! Precisely right. Just how to characterize it.”

  It was touching—he was proud of me. I wondered if I should seize this opportunity to make my confession. But it was turning out that the story of Dr. Burns’s comeuppance was only the overture to a much longer conversation about the role of pharmaceuticals in our American society.

  Dad had raised his eyebrows and was tapping his index finger on his cranium. “This,” he was saying, “is the new frontier.” The Croxol fiasco notwithstanding, he had decided to make pharmaceutical concerns pretty central to his recovering portfolio and he felt it was one of the smartest things he’d done.

  “But aren’t you bankrupt, I mean . . . ?”

  “I was.” He stopped walking and looked off—I did too—into the hazy distance. “I was, as you say, bankrupt. Had to put the house in your mother’s name. True. But no one in commodities made it through 2000. You know that much.”

  I did know but never, even after lengthy explanation, did I get exactly why. I knew money had been managed for institutional clients, and that it had been invested at high risk, generating high returns, in gambles on foreign-exchange rates, actual commodities, interest rates, and so on. You took an average directional movement of this, and some relative strength indicators from that, and figured in some four-day average true ranges, and you fed this stuff to the computer until arrows came on-screen telling you to get in or out, and this meant being, until 2000, a hero among commodities traders, profiled in Barron’s and elsewhere, and a mystery to your wife and kids, all of whom liked complaining that you weren’t a good listener but then turned into, like, hypocrite deaf-mutes the moment you tried to explain to them the baroque system your semidipsomaniacal genius had devised one evening when you were supposedly in your office reading literature books.

  Dad said, “I’m speaking to you as a private individual now. The drug companies are the place to be.”

  It was like I was being taken into his confidence as a potential investor in my own right. Dad’s confidence in the pharmaceutical industry gave me some faith that the Abulinix might be starting to work and I said, “There’s probably, dad, something that I should—and that might be of interest on a somewhat different, but also related—”

  “People have so much money these days, Dwight—have you noticed this? They’ve really bought up most of the goods they’re going to want.” This was the place where Alice would have noted in chilling tones that it was in fact a tiny minority of the global count that dad was including in his category of people. And I would have said, “You know what he means, Al,” because it just seemed like too much for dad to have two kids who felt that the best response to the available pleasures was a constant awareness of those unable to enjoy them.

  “But that’s outer goods,” dad was saying. “There we’re sated. Consumer electronics, SUVs. In fact this is one reason the economy’s so sluggish. There’s a lot of excess manufacturing capacity in this world, this”—he pointed to my golf clubs with one of his—“this world of what you and I would call physical things. But the market for what are essentially inner goods—this has only begun to be tapped.”

  Dad and I often had these very zeitgeisty conversations—they seemed to be an aspect of the father-son relationship.
For a couple of years whenever we went golfing or skiing he’d initiate dialogue about how nice it was that we’d won the Cold War. It was like we’d chipped in together. “During the Cold War you felt like you had a reason to get up in the morning. Now what have we got?” The words had seemed to imply a certain sympathy with me, since my own reasons for getting up in the morning were unknown to us both, hence I was studying philosophy at Eureka Valley, in order to learn them.

  We proceeded from hole to hole underneath the low Connecticut sky. “Ten years,” dad was saying, “and people won’t be so suspicious of drugs. Sure, the Arabs might be. But we’re chemistry. That’s what we are. We just have to wait for this realization to trickle all the way down. Food, exercise, sexual intercourse, warmth—all these things function like drugs. They modify your mood and perspective. That’s how it’s always been. Mark my words, this distinction between natural and artificial, when this is your brain but then it’s your brain on drugs—that will frankly come to be seen as so much twentieth-century superstition. It’s a last hangover from the—don’t tell Charlie I said this—but from the old religious concept of the ‘soul.’ ”

  “But you and mom were always worried if my brain was on drugs.”

  “Well Dwight”—and here he sailed a long straight beauty of a shot down the fairway. “Would you look at that.” If I’d been on mushrooms there would have been the lovely fading arc of a tracer in the air. “Well marijuana is not exactly a performance-enhancer. I trust you’re not still using that stuff.”

  “Very rarely.” We went off to the rough to fetch my ball. “It can be pleasant and relaxing.” The phrase enjoyed a certain currency in our family. When mom had come into my adolescent bedroom one night to tell me what sex was, and how it would be okay if eventually I had it with someone I loved and even, when desperate, with myself, she let me know that it could be pleasant and relaxing. This was the same phrase with which dad had defended himself against Alice’s accusations of excessive drinking. And even Alice herself, during the great Lesbianism Scare of 1992, had suggested with heavy sarcasm that the girl-on-girl lifestyle could likewise be pleasant and relaxing.