Did you ever take trips in Mississippi with your father?” Ann asks without genuine interest. We are seated opposite each other on the big porch. The Connecticut River, visible now above the serrated treetops, is a-glitter with dainty sailboats sporting rust-colored sails, their masts steadfast as the wind transports them up the current toward Hartford. All boats of a certain class rising on a rising tide.
“Sure, you bet. Sometimes we went over to Florida. Once we went to Norfolk and visited the Great Dismal Swamp on the way back.” She used to know this but has now forgotten.
“Was it dismal?”
“Absolutely.” I smile at her in a collegial way, since that is what we are.
“And so did you two always get along great?” She looks away across the lawn below us.
“We got along pretty great. My mother wasn’t around to complicate things, so we were on our best behavior. Three was more complicated.”
“Women just enjoy disrupting men’s lives,” she says.
We are fixed firmly in two oversize green wicker chairs furnished with oversize flowery cushions of some lush and complex lily-pad pattern. Ann has brought out an ole-timey amber-glass pitcher of iced tea, which Clarissa has fixed and drawn a fat happy face on. The tea and glasses and little pewter ice bucket are situated on a low table at knee level, as we, the two of us, wait for Paul, who was up late and slow now to rustle his bones. (I notice no warm-hearted carryover from our sentimental sign-off at the Vince last night.)
Ann runs a comb-of-fingers back through her thick, athletically shortened hair, which she’s highlighted so sudden blond strands shine from within and look pretty. She’s wearing white golfing shorts and an expensive-looking sleeveless top of some earthy taupe color that fits loose and shows her breasts off semi-mysteriously, and tan, sockless tassel shoes that cause her tanned legs to look even longer and stauncher, stirring in me a low-boil sexual whir that makes me gladder to be alive than I ever expected to feel today. I’ve noticed in the last year a subtle widening of Ann’s wonderful derriere and a faint thickening and loosening of the flesh above her knees and upper arms. To my view, a certain tense girlishness, always present (and which I never really liked), has begun subsiding and been replaced by a softer, womanly but in every way more substantial and appealing adultness I admire immensely. (I might mention this if I had time to make clear I liked it; though I see she is wearing Charley’s pretentiously plain gold band today, and the whole idea seems ridiculous.)
She has not asked me to come inside to wait, though I’d already decided to stay clear of the glassed-in, malaise-filled “family room,” which I can just see into through the long mirror-tinted windows beside me. Charley has of course installed a big antique telescope there, complete with all the necessary brass knobs and fittings, engraved logarithmic calibrations and moon phases, and with which I’m sure he can bring in the Tower of London if he takes a notion. I can also make out the ghostly-white beast of a grand piano and beside it a beaux arts music stand, where Ann and Clarissa almost certainly play Mendelssohn duets for Charley’s delectation on many a cold winter’s eve. It is a tiresome recognition.
Truth is, the one time I ever waited inside (picking up the kids for a day trip to the fish elevator at South Hadley), I ended up waiting alone for nearly an hour, leafing through the coffee-table library (Classic Holes of Golf, Erotic Cemetery Art, Sailing), eventually working my way down to a hot-pink flyer from a women’s clinic in New London, offering an enhance-your-sexual-performance workshop, which made me instantly panicky. Prudenter now just to stay on the porch and risk feeling like a grinning high-school kid forced to make deadpan parental chitchat while I await my date.
Ann has already explained to me how yesterday was much worse than I knew, worse than she explained last night when she said I thought “be” and “seem” were the same concept (which may have been true once but isn’t now). Not only, it seems, did Paul wound poor Charley with an oarlock from his own damned dinghy, but he also informed his mother in the very living room I won’t enter and in front of damaged-goods Charley himself that she “needed” to get rid of “asshole Chuck.” After that, he marched out, got in his mother’s Mercedes wagon and hit off on a brief tear, barrel-assing unlicensed out the driveway at a high speed, missing the very first curve on Swallow Lane and sideswiping a two-hundred-year-old mountain ash on the neighbor’s property (a lawyer, of course). In the process he banged his head into the steering wheel, popped the air bag and cut his ear, so that he had to take a stitch at the Old Saybrook walk-in clinic. Erik, the man from Agazziz, arrived moments after the crash — similar to how he apprehended me — and escorted him home. No police were called. Later he disappeared again, on foot, and came home long past dark (Ann heard him bark once in his room).
She of course called Dr. Stopler, who calmly informed her that medical science knew mighty damn little about how the old mind works in relation to the old brain — whether they’re one and the same pancake, two parts of one pancake, or just altogether different pancakes that somehow work in unison (like an automobile clutch). However, distressed family relations were pretty clear bugaboo factors leading to childhood mental illness, and from what he already knew, Paul did have some qualifying preconditions: dead brother, divorced parents, absent father, two major household moves before puberty (plus Charley O’Dell for a stepdad).
He did allow, though, that when he’d conducted his evaluative “chat” with Paul back in May, prior to his Camp Wanapi visit, Paul had failed entirely to exhibit low self-esteem, suicide ideation, neurological dysfunction; he was not particularly “oppositional” (then), hadn’t suffered an IQ nosedive and didn’t display any conduct disorders — which meant he didn’t set a fire or murder any birds. In fact, the doctor said, he’d demonstrated a “real capacity for compassion and a canny ability to put himself in another’s shoes.” Though circumstances could always change overnight; and Paul could easily be suffering any and every one of the aforementioned maladies at this very minute, and might’ve abandoned all compassion.
“I’m really just pissed off at him now,” Ann says. She is standing, looking out over the porch rail where I first saw her today, staring across the apron of shining river toward the few small white house façades catching the sun from deep in the encroachment of solid greens. Once again I steal an approving look at her new substantial-without-sacrificing-sexual-specificity womanliness. Her lips, I notice, seem fuller now, as if she might’ve had them “enhanced.” (Such surgeries can sweep through the more well-to-do communities like new kitchen appliances.) She rubs the back of one muscular calf with the top of her other shoe and sighs. “You may not know how exactly lucky you’ve had it,” she says, after a period of silent staring.
I mean to say nothing. A careful review of how lucky I am could too easily involve more airing of my “be/seem” misdeeds and tie into the possibility that I’m a coward or a liar or worse. I scratch my nose and can still smell grackle on my fingers.
She looks around at where I sit still not very comfortably silent on my lily pad.
“Would you agree to seeing Dr. Stopler?”
“As a patient?” I blink.
“As a co-parent,” she says. “And as a patient.”