Indecision by Benjamin Kunkel Page A

fixture ever since his days back during Nixon as an enthusiastic Valium prescriber, and now apparently the doctor had been caught a week or so before, literally with his pants down, defecating into the fifteenth hole.
    “Ew”—because this is something I don’t like about my parents. Their conversation around me frequently runs to the scatological, and this I find infantilizing—this and my mother’s habit of peeing when I talked to her on the phone—since you don’t have to be a freelance psychoanalyst to feel that making these procedures a public matter between parents and child must be a way of reinforcing an inappropriate intimacy way past the deadline. “I’m really not into hearing this, dad.”
    “As a result of this incident,” dad was saying with serious relish, “Burns has been suspended from the club. For a year!”
    We were walking toward the islandy clump or copse of trees in the direction of which I’d—whoops—hit my ball. Once when I was seventeen I’d deliberately knocked my ball that way in order to duck into the dappled shade and take a hit off of this little one-hitter I’d carried with me at the time, since I was then in the grips of a conviction that weed made you see things more truly, clearly, and that was how I wanted to see dad, in order to check out whether, defamiliarized a little, the guy still was basically a good guy or what. On that occasion when I exited the trees disguised by Visine and breath mints and those aviator-type Ray-Bans we all used to wear, he’d struck me as just some bluff pink-faced ghoul of a commodity-trading genius who had chosen the main features of his life in order to make himself into some weird totem of his social position, instead of—I don’t know—following the mad, barking dictates of his soul wherever those might have led, like possibly to Vermont or else northern California. I mean, how could any free person choose, from the whole universal range, to be this dad and moneyman and golfer, a resident of northwestern Connecticut walking around in WASP casual, going to the reunions, belonging to the clubs, and describing himself—still, or at least then—as a Rockefeller Republican?
    But now in light of my own recent actions and, even more, my damaging reluctance to carry them out, I tried experimenting with the conclusion that dad’s scotch-and-golf-oriented generation wasn’t so different, in terms of courage, from my more weed-and-rock-climbing one; that it was a pretty unusual life that didn’t travesty the better nature of the person inside it; and that dad’s very dad-like knowledge about many things, and intermittent basic decency, and astounding handiness, made him not such a bad person at all, despite any reservations I may have had about the rate of his scotch drinking, and any sorrow I may have experienced at having become, thanks to him, and along with Alice, another child of divorce.
    “What makes it all particularly amusing—” he was saying.
    “Yeah but do I really want to know this?”
    “—is that Burns had just been quoted, in the Times, about ten days before, as one of the last physicians prescribing Croxol—”
    “So would you say seven iron here or—”
    “—despite a certain frequent side effect. Of explosive diarrhea! Which he said—in the Times —had been exaggerated!” Explosive laughter.
    “Dad, man.”
    “Can’t you just picture him because—”
    “I hate this. Don’t you know that yet?”
    “Because what is Croxol prescribed for?” He waited a beat. “For morbid embarrassment.”
    “Hmm . . . The gods’ sense of humor.” This was in order to suggest that my education hadn’t been totally for not. Or is it naught?
    “Precisely! Precisely right. Just how to characterize it.”
    It was touching—he was proud of me. I wondered if I should seize this opportunity to make my confession. But it was turning out that the story of Dr. Burns’s comeuppance was only the overture to a much longer