I was beginning to panic in the search for something friendly to say. A taste of iron had appeared in my mouth, though no time at all, time as we understand it, had passed. I brought out, “How was your game?” Having taken a shower, he must have played a game-tennis, most likely.
“Good, Ben,” he said in his thoughtful, preppy, deferential, and delicately hesitant way. “We got three sets in. And yours?”
“Lousy as usual. It’s like I have an enfeebling disease and don’t know it. I sank a putt on the last hole, though; that’ll bring me back.” My auditor resumed rubbing himself with the towel, discreetly keeping his genitals covered as he did so. He was about to turn away; I blurted, “Seeing you here reminds me, I must be due for a checkup.”
Dr. Chafetz turned his back. Black fur covered his shoulder blades with symmetrical whorls like hurricane clouds and formed a dark downy triangle at the base of his spine, above his buttocks with their more transparent gauze. “Sure thing,” he said over his epauletted shoulder, with his accommodating, preppy ease. “Call my office for an appointment, Ben. We’ll work you in.”
The midsummer refulgence takes to itself the dust of days. The trees’ green is a duller tint, as if in a Barbizon painting whose varnish has darkened. Purple loosestrife, acres of it, blooms in the broad marsh we see from the fourth fairway, as its dogleg curves around a pond choked with lilies. Gloria’s garden holds a fluffy, morning-wet profusion of cosmos and daisies, veronica and salvia, black-eyed Susans on their wavy stems and tall thistles with their little blue sea-urchins. This year, for the first time that I can remember, she has brought to vegetable health a single dahlia of an indecently vivid pearly pink, the lush electric flesh-blush of a maiden’s labia.
In town, hydrangeas flourish by the porches, in color mostly that rinsed blue which suggests balls of laundry. Vacant roadside spaces play host to goldenrod and chicory. The goldenrod nods, bowing to its own allergen-rich weight, while the chicory aspires, its stems darting upward like lines connecting dots. On the walk down to the mailbox I admire the clusters of orange rowan berries on the two spindly trees that Jeremy and I spared last fall by the stone retaining wall, orange berries that, along with the tiny white berries, like beads of frost, on the cedars, suggest Christmas From my bathroom window as I shave I notice a rusty ting to the topmost leaves of the burning bush that has over grown the path the previous owners had laid through their rock garden. Here and there in the woods, a sugar maple flashes the merest pinch of yellow while the other trees-the oak, the beech, the sassafras shaped like a Tiffany lampshade-hold on to their green monotone. On the little pears a few worm-warped bubbles of fruit are shaping up, and the blueberry bushes, I noticed the other day, are producing more cankers than berries, and their leaves have been chewed to lace by Japanese beetles.
In early August the dusks start shifting in, so there is an elegiac, dimmed, dry quality to the seven-thirty hour, which in July still abounds with blue sky, high clouds, and mental lemonade. The garage is silent-the swallows and their cheeping, dipping trio of hatchlings have departed for Peru, leaving the nest woven of mud still cupped against a rafter. The dew-whitened cobwebs of earthbound spiders are conspicuous on the morning lawn, as ominous as the streaks of cirrus where cumulus yesterday ruled. Monstrous fungoid growths have overnight appeared in the grass, some resembling the toadstools in children’s books but others shaped, like cancers, by nothing but the random outward push of greedily growing cells. At a kick, the brown mass, tougher than it looks, scatters into meaty shreds.
Several days after my appointment, Dr. Chafetz called to say that the PSA test on my blood had come back with a reading of 11. He paused.
“Is that bad?” I asked.
“Not, not extremely bad,” he said, with his deferential hesitancy, a preppy near-stutter. “But it is high.”
“What’s considered normal?” I felt I was dragging information out of him. He was already deep in a medical crisis that hadn’t yet pulled me in, and down. My mind was darting about within the meagre facts, looking for a way out.
“Anything under four”, he said. “Even five asks for a second look.”
I held stubbornly silent, annoyed at his embarrassment on my behalf. Whose PSA count was this, mine or his?
He offered, “Your prostate didn’t feel unusually enlarged in my manual investigation. Or seem to have any rough spots.”
Seem to have? What was he doing up there-gathering vague impressions? “Well, O.K. What’s the next step?” I asked, so briskly his voice came out as not just deferential but boyishly scared. I was the Kapo, he the naked, shivering, doomed prisoner.
“A biopsy. In Boston. We have ties with an excellent man at MGH, a urologist. We’ll set you up with an appointment.”
Where did this “we” he was suddenly hiding behind come from? “What’s his name?”
“Carver.”
“It would be.” I laughed, encouragingly. I had to bring the boy through this.
“Dr. Andrew,” he, interrupted, went on.
“Handy Andy,” said I, irrepressible, unkillable, immortal
Hanging up, I wandered through the rooms of the house It was as if each had been given a scrubbing; a film of tin drearily familiar had been removed. The house appeared splendid, ample, priceless. It came to me as I passed through the rooms that I was and always had been a slightly different person in each one. In the dining room, with its torn an stained antique wallpaper of fantastical vistas through the ages-temples, grottoes, castles, cathedrals; Rome, Jerusalem, Athens, Nineveh; Alps and the Alhambra, snow peaks and spiky cypresses-and its standing platoon of Gloria’s shining mahogany antiques, I was courteous, host with lurking eighteenth-century graces and a grave gray-haired timbre. In the kitchen, where I microwaved a cup of water hot enough to soften up a teabag and extracted a low-sodium pretzel from the breadbox, I was Everyman, a stomach on legs, a trousered relic of the paleotechnological era when refrigerators and electric stoves still had weight and thick skins. In the dark little library I became a crabbed squire, a cranky country hobbyist, a nineteenth-century-minded custodian of uniform sets of Balzac and Dickens, O. Henry and Winston Churchill (the statesman, not the American novelist). In the living room, which I moved through on my way to the veranda, I was momentarily a breezy, translucent person, a debonair proprietor of mirrored and velvet-hung spaces carpeted by a single great rose-and-blue Tabriz; I became a throwback to a romantic time of gin parties and yachting, a light-hearted butterfly emerged from the narrow and dour chrysalis of that asphalt-shingled farmhouse lonely in its tilted field of drab winter stubble, on the edge of a dying industrial town. From Hammond Falls to Haskells Crossing: not much of a pilgrimage, really, considering that I had had nearly sixty-seven years to nudge my way along.
The out-of-doors, too, as I settled on the wicker sofa (which creaked under my new weight of dread), loomed with a defining distinctness, a dazzling room of another sort, in which I was an insignificant insect rapturously enrolled, for these brief bright instants of my life, in a churning, shining, chirping, birthing, singing, dying cosmic excess. From the quasars to the rainbow shimmer on my dragonfly wings, everything was an extravagance engraved upon the obsidian surface of an infrangible, eternal darkness.
My pulse fluttered. I felt girlish with my secret. I told Doreen before I told Gloria. Doreen couldn’t understand that it was a big deal yet; she had no idea where the prostate gland was and her whole face wrinkled with disgust when I told her. Gloria statuesquely enlarged at the news into the tragic grandeur of eventual widowhood. Long cast in the role of wife, she had endured years of dull lines, but now at last the part was proving worthy of her gifts. She foresaw her new, elevated status and wished to do nothing henceforth less than impeccably wifely and loving: I could see the determination written on her otherwise smooth, broad forehead. She would see me through to the next world and then take as her reward a singular dignity, no longer regent on behalf of a senescent male but queen absolute. She would pour forth the melody from the center of the stage.