Duplicity

Chapter 7

“Besides,” my father added, “if there’s something you really want to see, I’ll happily take you. There’s no reason for you to drive alone.”

Oh, but there were reasons, two of them. First: to drive my father’s spiffy car with him not in it, so I could go fast, as fast as I wanted to go, which was very fast; second: to get away from him, from my father. How I longed to escape him and his bacon and eggs and rounds of Parcheesi and gin rummy and aimless walks along the course of which he would regale me with Spinoza and Erasmus and Plutarch and Plato and Descartes and all the rest of his dull f*****g philosophers. It’s all coming back to me, this event tinged with shame and remorse. Hey, I was sixteen. Not a prime audience for Spinoza. What I wanted were girls, a girl, any girl. To be seen by said hypothetical girl in my father’s non-hypothetical Alfa, tooling around in aviator sunglasses with the top down, one hand barely steering, my opposite elbow slung loosely over the driver’s side door. In search of this conjectural encounter, I’d have driven all the way back to Connecticut, siphoning gas all the way, on the off chance that said girl would bear witness to this cameo starring yours truly and an Italian sports car.

My father refused to hand over the keys, denying me my fantasy, igniting the fuse of the outburst that would occur a short while later during one of our post-breakfast rambles.

Dad wore his tweed eight-panel newsboy cap — his “thinking cap,” he called it. He wore it always on his walks, even in hot weather, and it got, gets, very hot down here. He claimed it made him think better. His “negative capability cap.” He had his whatchamacallit, his shillelagh, too, that also apparently helped get his philosophical neurons firing. Anyway, we were walking. Along these lake access roads there’s little to see but acres of scruffy loblolly pine, good for paper pulp, but not much to look at. The subject that morning: dualism, the role of opposing equal forces in philosophy, science, politics, and religion — good and evil, darkness and light, mind and body, yin-yang, particle and wave, socialism vs. capitalism. As always my father did all the talking. If memory serves me, he was going on about Plato’s first argument in the Phaedo, the Argument of Opposites, how whatever has an opposite must come from or be a product of that opposite. For instance, if we consider some entity to be tall, or taller, that entity can only have arrived at its tallness from having been shorter. If something is “darker,” it obtained its darkness from a state of being less dark, or lighter. The process works in both directions: that is, things can become taller, but they also can become shorter; things can become sweeter, but they can also become more bitter. We awaken from the state of sleep and go to sleep from having been awake. Each state depends on the other. Similarly, since dying comes from living, living must come from dying. Life depends on death and vice-versa. According to Socrates, as recorded by Plato in the Phaedo, it is only during the very fleeting interim between death and rebirth that the soul exists apart from the body and thus has the chance to glimpse the Forms unmingled with matter in their pure, undiluted fullness. Death liberates the soul, increasing by an order of magnitude its apprehension of The Truth. This, according to Socrates by way of Plato, is why the philosophical soul isn’t afraid of death and actually looks forward to death as a form of liberation, as a release from the isolating, insular, soul-crushing solitary confinement of the body.

This — or something along its lines — is what my philosopher father went on and on about that morning during our after-breakfast stroll, with me walking a dozen sullen steps behind him, hearing but only half listening to him, still enormously pissed off that he wouldn’t hand over the keys to his snazzy Alfa. How far we had walked, how long my father had gone on about dualities and opposites, I’m not sure. At some point I blurted: “Jesus, Dad, do we have to always talk about this stuff? Can’t we for once talk about something else for a change?”

My father stopped, turned, looked at me, his eyes wet with dismayed confusion.

“I mean,” I went on, “can’t we have a goddamn normal conversation? Do you always have to lecture me like I’m one of your goddamn students?”

My father smiled. It wasn’t a real smile but an expression of discomfort and anxiety that tightened his lips so they curved upward at the edges, the same look I’d seen on his face a day or two before when I put a gouge into the hull of his boat, having failed to prevent it from colliding with the dock. I knew then that I had injured him no less than I’d injured that boat, which made me feel awful. Which made me angry — at myself. Which anger caused me to lash out again.

“Jesus,” I snapped, “how do you live like this?”

“Like what?” My father tucked his chin in wonderment. “How is it that I live, Stewie, in your enlightened objective view?” — asked in the same soft, placating voice he must have used with his students, though I could see he was rattled.

“Questioning everything! Mulling, probing, brooding, analyzing, vivisecting — as if life’s some pickled frog your biology teacher made you dissect. Christ, how the f**k can you stand it?”

Instead of waiting for an answer, which would only have resulted in another interminable philosophical disquisition, I took off. Not running, exactly, but at a very fast walk, as fast as my two feet could carry me without leaving the ground simultaneously.

I returned to the house. Where else could I go? Except for those acres of loblolly pine there was nowhere to escape to. And I wanted — I needed — to escape. So I went back to the house, which had the advantage of being on water. Dad’s house, this one, features what realtors call “big water” — a grand, open view of the lake. It truly is a fantastic view, the sort of view that expands the mind while fostering the impression that all sorts of things — things that bounded by dry land would seem impractical if not altogether impossible — fall within the realm of possibility. It was this view, united with my need to escape, that beckoned me back to my father’s house that morning.

The keys to Dad’s Alfa being unavailable, I availed myself of the next best, in fact the only other, means of conveyance: my father’s beloved Adirondack guideboat, the one I had dented, and that hung by a pulley system from his cathedral ceiling. I had only to undo the (blue, 5/8”, nylon) rope from its cleat, lower the boat, open one set of French doors, put the boat on its dolly, grab the two wooden oars from the wall hooks they clung to, and roll the thing out onto the deck and down the ramp my father had built for that purpose, then on down the sloped lawn to the strip of beach a few yards from the dock, where I’d give it a shove and — as it gained buoyancy — jump in. Having maneuvered myself inelegantly into the central folding caned seat, with some initial awkwardness, I’d start rowing. No keys or permission required.

I’d rowed my father’s boat often enough with him in the other seat to know the procedure. I’d even taken it for a brief solo run, under my father’s solicitous dockside gaze, the voyage that culminated in my dinging the hull into the dock. Now, though, I was on my own, the whole lake mine. It was my enraged, remorse-driven intention to row across it, all 15,000 flooded acres. Or until it got dark, whichever came first.

• •

Though with her stiff prissy Queen Anne-style caned seats she didn’t look it, my father’s boat — which he’d named after my brother and me, with Stewart on the port bow, and Gregory on the starboard — was an impressively fast rowboat, as fast as a man-powered vessel built for purposes other than racing could be. Even propelled by my less-than-coordinated strokes, she sliced through that morning’s glassy water such that within a few strokes all that remained of my father’s A-frame was a gray dot on the shore. Except for one flat-bottomed fishing boat there were no other vessels on the lake. It was too early in the day for pontoon boats, jet skis, wake boats, and other pleasure craft. A faint, ghostly mist danced on the water.

A few more strokes carried me out into wide-open water; a few more had me within sight of the dam to which the lake owed its existence. Seeing it, alone out there with all that fresh water separating me from the rest of the world, for the first time since my father had picked me up at the airport (once I grew old enough to fly on my own we’d abandoned the long-distance drive), I felt something close to freedom. Anyway it would have to do.

I rowed hard, eager to be anywhere and nowhere, each stroke carrying me further not only from my father but from myself. I’m not sure how long I rowed — long enough to raise twin blood blisters on each of my palms — when I found myself at the mouth of a cove. By then I’d passed a dozen coves like it, yet for some reason this one enticed me, I can’t say why. I steered my father’s boat into it. Like most cynics — I was as cynical then as I am now, if not more so — buried alive under my cynicism was an optimist begging to be exhumed. What is cynicism if not a method of pre-empting disappointment?

As the boat rounded the bend and four Detweilers — myself, my father (as represented by his boat), and his twin boys (ditto) — entered that cove, though the pessimist in me would have denied the existence of any such entity, I couldn’t help feeling the hand of God or Fate or Destiny or What-have-you upon that rowboat, guiding it and us: father, sons, and Holy Ghost (me). With each stroke more and more I felt something extraordinary was about to manifest itself. It would appear around that bend, in that cove.

So it did. From behind a stand of pine trees, the same unprepossessing loblolly pines that surrounded the lake, it came into view: an A-frame like my father’s in every respect, almost: a modified A-frame with a pitched roof, gray siding and slate-blue shutters, with an identical deck, an identical dock, an identical sloped lawn sprouting identical sweetgum trees. If all that wasn’t weird enough, between the two sweetgum trees closest to the dock a striped hammock had been strung, identical to my father’s striped hammock, but with different-colored stripes. Otherwise, everything was the same, so much so that for a moment I felt that without realizing it I’d rowed the boat in an enormous circle back to where I’d started.

But this was a different house, in a different cove, one with a less grandiose view, and that, furthermore, faced east, into the rising sun, the glare from which blinded me as I kept rowing, my back to the house that was my object, sighting it from time to time over my shoulder, whereas my father’s house faced west, away from the rising sun, toward those sunsets, that were — still are — spectacular.

So this had to be a different house. Still, everything about it, aside from its location, was identical. It had to have been built by the same contractor. For all I knew there were dozens like it dotting the lake’s shores, making my remarkable discovery not-so-remarkable. Still, it struck me then as freakish, an episode straight out of The Twilight Zone. It wouldn’t have surprised me to see my father’s snazzy Alfa parked under an aluminum carport in the driveway, or my father himself waving at me from the dock of that alternative, quantumly entangled universe.