Indecision: A Novel Read online

  “Marijuana can have an effect on motivation, you know. Would you say you smoke the drug once a fortnight?” dad said, a pretty accurate guesser.

  “More like in a blue moon.”

  “The point is, to think of the person without thinking of chemistry is like thinking of a house without architecture. There’s no house that’s simply a house you go home to, then you add or remove the design. The design is the house.”

  I could see this was a case you could make and knew that disbelief in a person’s innate character had a serious intellectual pedigree going at least back to Scottish philosopher David Hume. But it was also true that mom and dad had always encouraged me to be true to myself—a phrase actually used—and seemed to have an idea of what this kind of fidelity should entail. So it was kind of disturbing to have dad wiping the human face off the mirror as casually as a smudge.

  I started to say it seemed like people would continue to subscribe to a certain vague regulatory notion of health, that this would have a conservative effect on would-be psychonauts, and that in fact the somewhat scary effort to reengineer the whole human personality was one of the reasons I was kind of down, these days, on Pfizer, where, in fact, as I really should have mentioned earlier—

  “Clearly you haven’t seen what the pharmaceuticals are investing in R & D.”

  I wasn’t getting through. A lot of times it seemed like I’d been well enough educated to be considered a decent audience for dad, but not a qualified interlocutor. If I brought up something he hadn’t thought of before, he ignored me. But if I said something he already knew, he’d say, “Sure. I know.” Like many men, he was impregnable.

  He was reciting statistics when I interrupted him. “I wonder if anyone’s looking into a cure for the kind of mild, low-level autism that’s become such an epidemic in this country. Especially among white suburban males. And that’s been linked to lots of—”

  “Well I don’t know Dwight. I hadn’t heard of that problem.”

  “But now you have.”

  He regarded me with some sort of dim suspicion. “And where did you read about this, this—”

  “Wall Street Journal.” I met his gaze. “Pretty small item.” I shrugged.

  “Since when are you taking the Journal?”

  “I think maybe is it Bristol-Myers Squibb? major Pfizer rival? that’s been looking into this, um, MLLA—”

  He began to taste the concept: “Mild, low-level—”

  “Right, autism. This like mild inability to recognize the basic mental reality of others. Total potential cash cow, they’re thinking. I think. Because it’s definitely an issue out there.”

  Possibly he couldn’t tell if I was fucking with him or had instead given him some valuable information. Unfortunately an online consultation of the WSJ archive was likely to settle the matter.

  “Could be I read it somewhere else,” I allowed. “There’s so much information online . . .”

  He threw an arm around my shoulder, and when I looked to my side I saw up close what relatively hairless knuckles dad has—just some blond downy sprigs alert above the crosshatched flesh. “Well, thank you, Dwight.” I looked in the opposite direction, at the thin silky thatch of hair and the nose tipped with red like that of a kid come in from the cold. With his free hand he visored-up his shades, and there were the old periwinkle eyes, squinting and innocent. “I’m serious here. Thanks for the heads-up. That’s a very interesting piece of news you’ve given me. Old Bristol-Myers, eh? Because I have noticed just that problem, the problem of the low-level—”

  “Yeah.”

  “Even in a place like Lakeville. Salisbury . . . So the scientists are referring to a kind of inability to make what we would consider psychological contact with, with—”

  “Bingo.”

  “With others. Hmm. Old Bristol-Myers . . . Certainly sounds like they’re back on their game. Because what you’re referring to can, I think, be quite a serious problem.”

  Dad returned the sunglasses to their position and there I was in them, reduced and convex, smiling and also beshaded—a huge friendly insect. He turned away and released me. “Hmm. And this low-level, this very mild form of autism, it afflicts Caucasians and males in greater than average numbers? Did the Journal suggest why?”

  “It was a short item. I can’t honestly remember where I read it. I think the scientists must still be at an early phase.”

  Around this point I began to feel a little cruel. I recalled mom’s accusation that efforts to get through to dad were often met by a busy signal, and how a year and nine months before, when she’d been screaming out near the pool, wielding a pewter candlestick and making some threatening gestures, he’d displayed great calm and an impressive talent for mimicry by making just the sound you hear when someone else’s line is engaged.

  “I think we’ve all noticed this problem,” he said. “Even you have, I’m sure. Well, good for old Bristol. That it attacks who it does. Because that is precisely the target market. Isn’t it? White suburban men. I’ll be damned.”

  Now I was feeling pretty sad. “It’s really a pleasure to play golf with you, dad. Maybe if we play more often I’ll get better.”

  He barked out a laugh. “Sounds logical.”

  Next hole, he turned to me and let me know that he was very proud of my being employed by Pfizer. Apparently this disclosure was the hole toward which he had driven his earlier, more speculative shots, and now he was just putting his way in. He said the pharmaceuticals were doing fascinating work, just as I’d indicated. “A vanguard industry.”

  “You’re serious?” Things were feeling kind of tragic.

  “Sure.”

  Or maybe it was me getting fucked with now? But I told myself probably not. Besides, the stable behavioral patterns of your parents seemed important to believe in.

  I reminded dad that I was actually only subcontracted to Pfizer and in point of fact employed by another firm providing tech support. “And the rumor is that pretty soon some guys in Mumbai . . .” Meanwhile I wondered if he was trying to win me over to his camp as opposed to mom’s with his ingeniously contrived praise of my (former) employer.

  I told him I had some vacation days coming up, and that in part because New York interfered with my mind by its abundance of advertisements printed in a language I could read, I was considering going off someplace more quiet, less legible, to do a little thinking. “I hope I’ll have enough money, though.”

  “You’re not intending to do some thinking about Pfizer?”

  “Possibly about them. It. About us.”

  “We are not about to enter the Zone again are we Dwight?”

  I experienced a flashback to a childhood Thanksgiving. Probably dad did too. I’d loved cranberry sauce, the savory stuffing, and turkey itself with such equality of love that after a gabbled grace I’d been unable to begin eating, and the more ludicrous the spell of indecision became, the harder to break. I’d been salivating and paralyzed in front of my plate, plunged in what later came to be known as the Zone, until finally dad raised his fork at me saying “Eat! Eat! Dammit, eat!” So I’d shut my eyes, loaded my fork with mystery, and raised it toward the cave of my mouth. The tart surprise of the cranberries I could remember still.

  “Also,” I was saying, “there’s a girl I’d kind of like to see. Natasha van der Weyden?”

  A good way to suspend conversation with dad was always to bring up something personal. Very dad-like and typical, I know, but true all the same. It seemed to be part of his syndrome, just identified, of mild, low-level autism.

  Golf resumed.

  I wondered if dad remembered Natasha. She had visited once upon a time with a large delegation of other kids from St. Jerome’s and her presence had notably coincided with the escape of my mom’s favorite parrot from the cage which dad in his negligence had left open. The bird was discovered jabbering anxiously in the crown of the huge elm on the lawn. I was afraid it would fly away and this would mean dad becoming guilty
of one additional thing. A horrible recidivist, he proceeded from crime to crime through twenty-seven years of marriage. At best he was on probation. “You didn’t!” mom would say—but usually he had. He was super-absentminded, and so an unlocked car got stolen, or the trash bins weren’t wheeled down to the road, or ice cream got returned to the pantry, later flooding in slow stages down through the shelves of dry food. My theory was that the more mom complained of these atrocities, the more absentminded dad became, as he more and more mentally took leave of their shared daily world with its vehicles, trash, and foodstuffs.

  But so on that long-ago day Natasha had stepped and shimmied up the tree with simian agility, then coaxed the bird onto her shoulder as we family members and Formmates all watched from below. “She’s something else,” mom said. “She’s from Holland,” I said. I couldn’t think what to say. She was more Alice’s friend than mine. Dad said, “I suppose in a few minutes we’ll be calling her parents in Holland.” “She’s saving your ass, Dun.” Delicately Natasha had worked her way back down the trunk, while the wind picked up and all around her the leaves broke the sky into glitter. Down on the ground again, Budge began to say, just as I’d taught him, “What’s up dude? What’s up dude?” and everyone laughed, family happiness restored.

  But not for long.

  I wondered if I myself would ever marry.

  “Is there something on your mind?” Dad was handing me a new club.

  “No, no.” I shook my head. “Not yet.”

  We knocked off after nine holes and went to have lunch at the clubhouse. Two double scotches arrived in advance of our food, and we toasted, clinking, without either of us proposing an occasion.

  “Very peaty,” he said.

  “And smoky,” I said.

  “Peat-smoke, I think”—an admirable synthesis. He looked at me. “It’s important to stick to something, you know.”

  “Pfizer, you mean.”

  “I can be taken to mean that.”

  I said I would bear that in mind. I felt bad about having spoiled his paean to pharmaceuticals by expressing ambivalence about the job I had already lost. Meanwhile I was pondering the tragic irony of Croxol with regard to morbid embarrassment—and wondering whether it might be, in a similar irony, that Abulinix would force me to decide that my entire personality boiled down to neurochemistry, and I only flattered myself in believing I possessed a free will in need of regular exercise. Then why would I do anything at all? Once you decide you’re only an animal, how do you keep from becoming a vegetable?

  Suddenly dad said, “What do you know about Australia?”

  “I don’t know, convicts, Aborigines. Marsupials. Just the clichés.”

  “Because I’ve met really a very nice woman.”

  It was a rude shock. “A woman!”

  “Yes, a woman. That’s not such a rare thing. And as it happens she’s from Brisbane. I’ve been thinking I might fly down there and pay her a visit. Fascinating country, Australia.”

  “What if she was like Bulgarian? Just as a thought experiment—”

  “Well I’m sure she would be a very different person then, Dwight. Australia I imagine as being something like the US in the early sixties. Still open. Kind of raw. New.”

  “Dad, man, I thought the whole point of you divorcing mom—which, I mean that’s a serious thing—I thought the whole point was you were an essentially solitary person. That’s what you said and I quote.” I may have raised my voice at this point.

  The waitress had showed up with our sandwiches. “Veggie burger and—”

  I pointed. “The carnage is for him.” And when the waitress had gone I said, “An Australian woman!” Some guy at a nearby table turned his head.

  “Frances,” dad said, “happens to be an interesting woman about whom I have simply entertained the possibility she and I might enjoy meeting face-to-face.”

  “You did not meet her on the internet.”

  “Listen now, no cause for alarm. It’s not as if I’m considering relocating to Australia at this point. We’ll discuss this at home.”

  “Home!”

  “You aren’t usually like this, Dwight.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Let’s talk about these things later on.”

  “So if it’s urgent it can wait? Dad, man”—I had to say it—“I’ve lost my job. And I have basically zero point zero in the way of cash. And I have no skills!”

  Dad looked confused.

  “And what I do have is abulia.”

  “Abu—what do you have?”

  “I know. It’s probably hereditary!” I shook my head, bitter and sad with a foretaste of what I might feel when more drunk.

  Dad’s reaction to my unemployment news was the same as Vaneetha’s—to order more drinks. And immediately after saying “Christ, Dwight, you’ve really gone south, haven’t you?” he said—tipsy, already free—“You know I love you, you fogbound sonofabitch.” Neither the curse nor the blessing was such a common thing to receive from him, and getting both at once, the far edges of my mind felt lit with feeling while the middle regions kind of sank away, and I hope I don’t sound like a crybaby if I say that in this strange state over my veggie burger at the club, my eyes went kind of moist.

  EIGHT

  Dad was driving the dogs and me back home on four scotches, too fast around curves and showing a new mood. “And again, what kind of little pizzle of a job was that at Pfizer anyway? Good to hit bottom, sooner the better. It’s a fucking required event, in my book.”

  “Have I really hit do you think?”

  “Bottomlessness—is that what you’re suggesting? I suppose the world is at bottom a bottomless place. Fine point, Dwight. Well, good on occasion to tip out of your goddam canoe.” He was swearing much more than I was accustomed to.

  We passed by the Lakeville Lake, which flashed thinly like water tilted once in a pan.

  “Don’t imagine I haven’t wondered. What can be done with Dwight? This isn’t a new one on me. I’m familiar with your performance. On the other hand you’ve got a hell of a pure soul. If you were a girl we’d never have let you out of the house. . . . Frances—the Aussie—of course she asked, and I said, I wrote back to her, I said, ‘My son’s an innocent bastard, it’s a remarkable thing in this day and age.’ But I don’t mean by calling you a bastard . . . Listen, I love your mother with an insufferableness of love that may surpass the insufferability of the woman herself. And look, Dwight, listen now, if I were to show to you, on a chart, how much I miss old Charlie—a quarterly recap, if I plotted the graph—you would see one gruesome goddam shape. It’s been spring outside. Still is. —But I sired you.” He laughed. “I take full responsibility. Glad to do so. Kind of a nonperforming loan. But you turn out a good product. Innocence! Christ!”

  “Thank you. I guess.”

  We were passing all the streaming landmarks of the family’s life. There to the left was the silo I’d climbed and fallen from miraculously without injury as a kid. And next up was the turnoff to Factory Pond, where I got a puck in the face but scored lots of goals and even had a hat trick in one game.

  “You’ll turn out fine,” dad was saying. He laughed again. “Unless you take after me!”

  “Either of you.” Mom was an Episcopal nun. “I’ve never heard you talk like this, dad.” And now to the side of the road was the spot where Alice had been nabbed by the cops for spraypainting on the glass doors to the Millerton movie theater LOOK BUT DON’T TOUCH.

  “Nice we’re getting fucked up, isn’t it? I believe that’s what you and Alice called it—getting fucked . . . up . . . ?” He looked around with satisfaction at these words in the way that guys in a car with hip-hop blaring will look around while stopped at a light.

  “There were so many terms,” I said. “It was like the Eskimos with snow. Or I guess now they’re called Inuits.”

  “Let me ask you then. Alice?—did Alice turn you on to marijuana? I’ve always thought we’re a peculiar family. Because
dammit if Alice didn’t steal you from us!”

  “No one stole me yet. Come on, dad.”

  “It might be we didn’t drink together enough, father and son. Getting fucked up. Or perhaps the whole family—yes, I can see it now, fucked up as a family . . .” Musingly he said, “Whenever I touch a drop I have the urge to call Frances. Thank God with the time difference I often don’t. But she has a lovely voice, not brassy in the way of some Australians—”

  “I think you maybe exaggerate the role of getting fucked up in me and Alice’s relationship.”

  “Ah, but isn’t it in the nature of getting fucked up—to exaggerate a little?”

  “You’re not going to marry . . .” I couldn’t bring myself to say the Australian woman’s horrible name. Frank, he’d probably call her. A year and nine months ago dad had been eloquent on the subjects of necessary solitude and marriage as one big mirage of false relation—and now he had a girlfriend.

  “No wedding bells for me,” he was saying, “not if I remain lucid and . . . Yet I’m too much alone, if you’ve noticed.”

  “That’s like what you asked for!”

  “Much too much . . .”

  “Alice thinks you drink too much.”

  “And don’t you think so?” Another barked-out laugh.

  We pulled off Belgo Road onto our driveway and glided through the familiar strobe of leaf-crumbled light. The dogs stood up from the leather seats in the rear, whining in anticipation of being let out to do nothing. And here was the old lawn, green with new grass, a big circle of it enclosed by looping asphalt. And as we swung around to the front door, lurching to a stop in front of slim white Tuscan-type columns, everything looked so formal and pre-arranged that it felt like we should be met there and announced. But of course no one was home since dad had kept the house, while mom herself, feeling nervous and excited—“Like an actress,” she’d said—had gone off to New York.