“I was just reading Carl Becker, who’s terrific,” I said, though on alert. “He thought that the whole Declaration of Independence was an attempt to prove rebellion was the wrong word for what the founding fathers were up to. It was a war over a word choice. That’s pretty amazing.”
She sighed. “What was the right word?”
“Oh. Common sense. Nature. Progress. God’s will. Karma. Nirvana. It pretty much all meant the same thing to Jefferson and Adams and those guys. They were smarter than we are.”
“I thought it was more important than that,” she said. Then she said, “Life seems congested to me. Just suddenly tonight. Does it to you?” I was aware coded messages were being sent, but I had no idea how to translate them. Possibly, I thought, this was an opening gambit to an announcement that she never wanted to see me again—which has happened. (“Congested” being used in its secondary meaning as: “unbearable.”) “Something’s crying out to be noticed, I just don’t know what it is,” she said. “But it must have to do with you and I. Don’t you agree?”
“Well. Maybe,” I said. “I don’t know.” I was propped up by my bed lamp, under my favorite framed map of Block Island, the musty old annotated Becker on my chest, the window fan (I’ve opted for no air-conditioning) drawing cool, sweet suburban midnight onto my bedcovers. Nothing I could think of was missing right then, besides sleep.
“I just feel things are congested and I’m missing something,” Sally said again. “Are you sure you don’t feel that way?”
“You have to miss some things to have others.” This was an idiotic answer. I felt I might possibly be asleep but tomorrow still have a hard time convincing myself this conversation hadn’t happened—which is also not that infrequent with me.
“I had a dream tonight,” Sally said. “We were in your house in Haddam, and you kept neatening everything up. I was your wife somehow, but I felt terrible anxiety. There was blue water in our toilet bowl, and at some point you and I shook hands, standing on your front steps—just like you’d sold me your own house. And then I saw you shooting away out across the middle of a big cornfield with your arms stretched out like Christ or something, just like back in Illinois.” Where she’s from, the stolid, Christian corn belt. “It was peaceful in a way. But the whole effect was that everything was very, very busy and hectic and no one could get anything done right. And I felt this anxiety right in my dream. Then I woke up and I wanted to call you.”
“I’m glad you did,” I said. “It doesn’t sound like anything that bad, though. You weren’t being chased by wild animals who looked like me, or getting pushed out of airplanes.”
“No,” she said, and seemed to consider those fates. Far away in the night I could hear a train. “Except I felt so anxious. It was very vivid. I don’t usually have vivid dreams.”
“I try to forget my dreams.”
“I know. You’re very proud of it.”
“No I’m not. But they don’t ever seem mysterious enough. I’d remember them if they seemed very interesting. Tonight I dreamed I was reading, and I
was
reading.”
“You don’t seem too engaged. Maybe now isn’t a good time to talk seriously.” She sounded embarrassed, as if I was making fun of her, which I wasn’t.
“I’m glad to hear your voice, though,” I said, thinking she was right. It was the middle of the night. Little good begins then.
“I’m sorry I got you up.”
“You didn’t get me up.” At this point, though, and unbeknownst to her, I turned out my light and lay breathing, listening to the train in the cool dark. “You just want something you’re not getting, is my guess. It’s not unusual.” In Sally’s case, it could be any one of a number of things.
“Don’t you ever feel that way?”
“No. I feel like I have a lot as it is. I have you.”
“That’s very nice,” she said, not so warmly.
“It
is
nice.”
“I guess I’ll be seeing you tomorrow, won’t I?”
“You bet. I’ll be there with bells on.”
“Great,” she said. “Sleep tight. Don’t dream.”
“I will. I won’t.” And I put the phone down.
It would be untruthful to pretend that what Sally was wrestling with last night was some want or absence I didn’t feel myself. And perhaps I’m simply a poor bet for her or anybody, since I so like the tintinnabulation of early romance yet lack the urge to do more than ignore it when that sweet sonority threatens to develop into something else. A successful practice of my middle life, a time I think of as the Existence Period, has been to ignore much of what I don’t like or that seems worrisome and embroiling, and then usually see it go away. But I’m as aware of “things” as Sally is, and imagine this may be the first signal (or possibly it’s the thirty-seventh) that we might soon no longer “see” each other. And I feel regret, would like to find a way of reviving things. Only, as per my practice, I’m willing to let matters go as they go and see what happens. Perhaps they’ll even get better. It’s as possible as not.
T
he matter of greater magnitude and utmost importance, though, involves my son, Paul Bascombe, who is fifteen. Two and a half months ago, just after tax time and six weeks before his school year ended in Deep River, he was arrested for shoplifting three boxes of 4X condoms (“Magnums”) from a display-dispenser in the Finast down in Essex. His acts were surveilled by an “eye in the sky” camera hidden above the male hygiene products. And when a tiny though uniformed Vietnamese security person (a female) approached him just beyond the checkout, where as a diversionary tactic he’d bought a bottle of Grecian Formula, he bolted but was wrestled to the ground, whereupon he screamed that the woman was “a goddamned spick asshole,” kicked her in the thigh, hit her in the mouth (conceivably by accident) and pulled out a fair amount of hair before she could apply a police stranglehold and with the help of a pharmacist and another customer get the cuffs on him. (His mother had him out in an hour.)
The security guard naturally enough has pressed criminal charges of assault and battery, as well as for the violation of some of her civil rights, and there have even been “hate crime” and “making an example” rumblings out of the Essex juvenile authorities. (I consider this only as election-year bluster plus community rivalry.)
Meanwhile, Paul has been through myriad pretrial interviews, plus hours of tangled psychological evaluations of his personality, attitudes and mental state—two of which sessions I attended, found unremarkable but fair, though I have not yet seen the results. For these proceedings he has had not a lawyer but an “ombudsman,” who’s a social worker trained in legal matters, and who his mother has talked to but I haven’t. His first actual court date is to be this Tuesday morning, the day after the 4th of July.
Paul for his part has admitted everything yet has told me he feels not very guilty, that the woman rushed him from behind and scared the shit out of him so that he thought he might be being murdered and needed to defend himself; that he shouldn’t have said what he said, that it was a mistake, but he’s promised he has nothing against any other races or genders and in fact feels “betrayed” himself—by what, he hasn’t said. He’s claimed to have had no specific use in mind for the condoms (a relief if true) and probably would’ve used them only in a practical joke against Charley O’Dell, his mother’s husband, whom he, along with his father, dislikes.
For a brief time I thought of taking a leave from the realty office, sub-letting a condo somewhere down the road from Deep River and keeping in touch with Paul on a daily basis. But his mother disapproved. She didn’t want me around, and said so. She also believed that unless things got worse, life should remain as “normal” as possible until his hearing. She and I have continued to talk it over every bit—Haddam to Deep River—and she is of the belief that all this will pass, that he is simply going through a phase and doesn’t, in fact, have a syndrome or a mania, as someone might think. (It is her Michigan stoicism that allows her to equate endurance with progress.) But as a result, I’ve seen less of him than I’d like in the last two months, though I have now proposed bringing him down to Haddam to live with me in the fall, which Ann has so far been leery of.
She has, however—because she isn’t crazy—hauled him to New Haven to be “privately evaluated” by a fancy shrink, an experience Paul claims he enjoyed and lied through like a pirate. Ann even went so far as to send him for twelve days in mid-May to an expensive health camp in the Berkshires, Camp Wanapi (called “Camp Unhappy” by the inmates), where he was judged to be “too inactive” and therefore encouraged to wear mime makeup and spend part of every day sitting in an invisible chair with an invisible pane of glass in front of him, smiling and looking surprised and grimacing at passersby. (This was, of course, also videotaped.) The camp counselors, who were all secretly “milieu therapists” in mufti—loose white tee-shirts, baggy khaki shorts, muscle-bound calves, dog whistles, lanyards, clipboards, preternaturally geared up for unstructured heart-to-hearts—expressed the opinion that Paul was intellectually beyond his years (language and reasoning skills off the Stanford charts) but was emotionally underdeveloped (closer to age twelve), which in their view posed “a problem.” So that even though he acts and talks like a shrewd sophomore in the honors program at Beloit, full of sly jokes and double entendres (he has also recently shot up to 5’ 8,” with a new layer of quaky pudge all over), his feelings still get hurt in the manner of a child who knows much less about the world than a Girl Scout.
Since Camp Unhappy, he has also begun exhibiting an unusual number of unusual symptoms: he has complained about an inability to yawn and sneeze properly; he has remarked about a mysterious “tingling” at the end of his penis; he has complained about not liking how his teeth “line up.” And he has from time to time made unexpected barking noises—leering like a Cheshire, afterwards—and for several days made soft but audible
eeeck-eeecking
sounds by drawing breath back down his throat with his mouth closed, usually with a look of dismay on his face. His mother has tried to talk to him about this, has re-consulted the shrink (who’s advised many more sessions), and has even gotten Charley to “step in.” Paul at first claimed he couldn’t imagine what anybody was talking about, that all seemed normal to him, then later he said that making noises satisfied a legitimate inner urge and didn’t bother others, and that they should get over their problems with it, and him.
In these charged months I have tried, in essence, to increase my own ombudsman’s involvement, conducting early-morning phone conversations with him (one of which I’m awaiting hopefully this morning) and taking him and now and then his sister, Clarissa, on fishing trips to the Red Man Club, an exclusive anglers’ hideaway I joined for this very purpose. I have also taken him once to Atlantic City on a boys-only junket to see Mel Tormé at TropWorld, and twice to Sally’s seashore house, there to be idle-hours bums, swimming in the ocean when syringes and solid human waste weren’t competing for room, walking the beach and talking over affairs of the world and himself in a nondirected way until way after dark.
In these talks, Paul has revealed much: most notably, that he’s waging a complex but losing struggle to forget certain things. He remembers, for instance, a dog we had years ago when we were all a nuclear family together in Haddam, a sweet, wiggly, old basset hound named Mr. Toby, who none of us could love enough and all doted on like candy, but who got flattened late one summer afternoon right in front of our house during a family cookout. Poor Mr. Toby actually clambered up off the Hoving Road pavement and in a dying dash galumphed straight to Paul and leaped into his arms before shuddering, wailing once and croaking. Paul has told me in these last weeks that even then (at only age six) he was afraid the incident would stay in his mind, possibly even for the rest of his life, and ruin it. For weeks and weeks, he said, he lay awake in his room thinking about Mr. Toby and worrying about the fact that he was thinking about it. Though eventually the memory had gone away, until just after the Finast rubber incident, when it came back, and now he thinks about Mr. Toby “a lot” (possibly constantly), thinks that Mr. Toby should be alive still and we should have him—and by extension, of course, that his poor brother, Ralph, who died of Reye’s, should also be alive (as he surely should) and we should all still be we. There are even ways, he’s said, in which all this is not that unpleasant to think about, since he remembers much of that early time, before bad things happened, as having been “fun.” And in that sense, his is a rare species of nostalgia.
He has also told me that as of recently he has begun to picture the thinking process, and that his seems to be made of “concentric rings,” bright like hula hoops, one of which is memory, and that he tries but can’t make them all “fit down flush on top of each other” in the congruent way he thinks they should—except sometimes just before the precise moment of sleep, when he can briefly forget about everything and feel happy. He has likewise told me about what he refers to as “thinking he’s thinking,” by which he tries to maintain continuous monitorship of all his thoughts as a way of “understanding” himself and being under control and therefore making life better (though by doing so, of course, he threatens to drive himself nuts). In a way his “problem” is simple: he has become compelled to figure out life and how to live it far too early, long before he’s seen a sufficient number of unfixable crises cruise past him like damaged boats and realized that fixing one in six is a damn good average and the rest you have to let go—a useful coping skill of the Existence Period.