Ann asks him in a private voice if he has what he needs (he has), if he has money (he does), if he knows where to meet in Penn Station (yes), if he feels all right (no answer). He cuts his knifey eyes at me and screws up one side of his mouth as if we’re somehow in league against her. (We aren’t.)
Then Ann abruptly says, “So okay, you don’t look great, but go wait in the car, please. I want to have a word with your father.”
Paul wrinkles his mouth into a mirthless little all-knowing look of scorn having to do with the very notion of his mother talking to his father. He has become a smirker by nature. But how? When?
“What happened to your ear, by the way?” I say, knowing what happened.
“I punished it,” he says. “It heard a bunch of things I didn’t like.” He says this in a mechanistic monotone. I give him a little push in the direction he’s come from, back through the house and out toward the car. And so he goes.
I’d appreciate it if you’d try to be careful with him,” Ann says. “I want him back in good shape for his court appearance Tuesday.” She has sought to lead me the way Paul has gone, “back through,” but I’m having no part of her sinister house beautiful, with its poisonous élan, spiffy lines and bloodless color scheme. I lead us (I’m still inexplicably limping) down the steps to the lawn and around via the safer grass and through the shrubberies to the pea-gravel driveway, just the way a yardman would. “I think he’s injury prone,” she says quietly, following me. “I had a dream about him having an accident.”
I step through the green-leafed, thick-smelling hydrangeas, blooming a vivid purple. “My dreams are always like the six o’clock news,” I say. “Everything happening to other people.” The sexual whir I experienced on seeing Ann is now long gone.
“That’s fine about your dreams,” she says, hands in pockets. “This one happened to be mine.”
I don’t wish to think about terrible injury. “He’s gotten fat,” I say. “Is he on mood stabilizers or neuroblockers or something?”
Paul and Clarissa are already conferring by my car. She is smaller and holding his left wrist in both her hands and trying to raise it to the top of her head in some kind of sisterly trick he’s not cooperating with. “Come on!” I hear her say. “You putz.”
Ann says, “He’s not on anything. He’s just growing up.” Across the gravel lot is a robust five-bay garage that matches the house in every loving detail, including the miniature copper weather vane milled into the shape of a squash racket. Two bay doors are open, and two Mercedeses with Constitution State plates are nosed into the shadows. I wonder where Paul’s station wagon is. “Dr. Stopler said he displays qualities of an only child, which is too bad in a way.”
“I was an only child. I liked it.”
“He’s just not one. Dr. Stopler also said”—she’s ignoring me, and why shouldn’t she? — “not to talk to him too much about current events. They cause anxiety.”
“I guess they do,” I say. I am ready to say something caustic about childhood to seal my proprietorship of this day — revive Wittgenstein about living in the present meaning to live forever, blah, blah, blah. But I simply call a halt. No good’s to come. All boats fall on a bitter tide — children know it better than anyone. “Do you think you know what’s making him worse, just all of a sudden?”
She shakes her head, grips her right wrist with her left hand, and twists the two together, then gives me a small bleak smile. “You and me, I guess. What else?”
“I guess I was wanting a more complicated answer.”
“Well, good for you.” She rubs her other wrist the same way. “I’m sure you’ll think of one.”
“Maybe I’ll have put on my tombstone ‘He expected a more complicated answer.’”
“Let’s quit talking about this, okay? We’ll be at the Yale Club just for tonight if you need to call.” She looks at me in a nose-wrinkled way and slouches a shoulder. She has not meant to be so harsh.
Ann, in amongst the hydrangeas, and for the first time today looks purely beautiful — pretty enough for me to exhale, my mind to open outward, and for me to gaze at her in a way I once gazed at her all the time, every single day of our old life together in Haddam. Now would be the perfect moment for a future-refashioning kiss, or for her to tell me she’s dying of leukemia, or me to tell her I am. But that doesn’t happen. She is smiling her stalwart’s smile now, one that’s long since disappointed and can face most anything if need be — lies, lies and more lies.
“You two have a good time,” she says. “And please be careful with him.”
“He’s my son,” I say idiotically.
“Oh, I know that. He’s just like you.” And then she turns and walks back toward the yard, continuing on, I suspect, out of sight and down to the water to have her lunch with her husband.
8
Clarissa Bascombe has snugged something tiny and secret into Paul’s hand as we were leaving. And on our way up to Hartford, on our way up to Springfield, on our way to the Basketball Hall of Fame, he has held it without acknowledgment while I’ve yodeled away spiritedly about what I’ve thought will break our ice, get our ball rolling, fan our coals — start, via the right foot, what now feels like our last and most important journey together as father and son (though it probably isn’t).
Once we swerve off busy CT 9 onto busier, car-clogged I-91, go past the grimy jai alai palace and a new casino run by Indians, I set off on my first “interesting topic”: just how hard it is right here, ten miles south of Hartford, on July 2, 1988, when everything seems of a piece, to credit that on July 2, 1776, all the colonies on the seaboard distrusted the bejesus out of each other, were acting like separate, fierce warrior nations scared to death of falling property values and what religion their neighbors were practicing (like now), and yet still knew they needed to be happier and safer and went about doing their best to figure out how. (If this seems completely nutty, it’s not, under the syllabus topic of “Reconciling Past and Present: From Fragmentation to Unity and Independence.” It’s totally relevant — in my view — to Paul’s difficulty in integrating his fractured past with his hectic present so that the two connect up in a commonsense way and make him free and independent rather than staying disconnected and distracted and driving him bat-shit crazy. History’s lessons are subtle lessons, inviting us to remember and forget selectively, and therefore are much better than psychiatry’s, where you’re forced to remember everything.)
“John Adams,” I say, “said getting the colonies all to agree to be independent together was like trying to get thirteen clocks to strike at the same second.”
“Who’s John Adams?” Paul says, bored — his pale, bare, beginning-to-be-hairy legs crossed in a concertedly unmanly manner, one Reebok with its Day-Glo-yellow lacing hiked up threateningly near the gearshift lever.
“John Adams was the first Vice President,” I say. “He was the first person to say it was a stupid job. In public, that is. That was in 1797. Did you bring your copy of the Declaration of Independence?”
“Nuhhhn.” This may mean either.
He is staring out at the reemerged Connecticut, where a sleek powerboat is pulling a tiny female water-skier, billowing the river’s shiny skin. In a bright-yellow life vest, the girl heels waaaaay back against her towrope, carving a high, translucent spume out of the crusty wake.