Plenty of couples stopped having sex and were probably fine. Big deal, their libidos ebbed. There was still that cozy thing, if you shared the same bed, which he and Carol continued to do, but only because she’d not have wanted to upset the girls with even a fanciful explanation of why Daddy had been exiled to the couch. Exile writ small, the foot-wide moat of cold sheet between them was arguably more painful. She couldn’t bear the sight of him. Occasionally she turned toward him in sleep, but only from habit; stirring to find her cheek on his chest, she’d rebound with a harrumph to the far edge of the mattress. She reliably wrenched the bedding along with, leaving Jackson with nothing but boxers for cover. He’d come to detest sleeping in his underwear. The boxers had achieved the same shamefulness as his briefs in boyhood, when he’d been so mortified by the prospect of his mother spotting a brown smudge at the back that rather than toss them in the laundry he buried them in the trash.
Even if plenty of couples did cheerfully give up on sex, he had never expected Carol and Jackson Burdina to count among them. They may have got it on less often once Flicka was born, but ask Bobby Sands: there was a massive difference between a diet and a hunger strike. The loss created a sense of spoliation that spread far beyond sleep. For if he was not in bed, he was dreading when he would be. That floating, limb-tangled languor between snooze alarms used to be his favorite part of the day.
During the whole of his marriage, Jackson had chafed over a subtle inability to possess his wife. She was elusive; she held herself apart. Although Carol’s repleteness had always awed him, he didn’t covet the same blithe, needless wholeness for himself. However female the image, a little interior absence, that small soft bottomless hole that endlessly cried out for filling, made Jackson a more desirous and therefore a more desirable man. Why, were he suddenly to metamorphose into a kindred creature—a discrete, self-sufficient organism who puttered about his business as she puttered about hers, asking for and expecting nothing, efficiently and tirelessly doing what was required, well—Carol would be goddamned desolate.
For in the past, his frustration with his inability to … not own her, exactly … to have her had supplied Jackson an invigorating sense of purpose, and them both an inexhaustible source of entertainment. She enjoyed keeping herself teasingly just out of reach; he enjoyed playing the hunter who, since he never bagged it, would never run short of prey. But now Carol’s tantalizing quality had hardened to flat-out unavailability, and it was no fun going on safari when there wasn’t a single would-be quarry in the game park.
Since what had begun as his own whimsical, sexually freshening mischief-making had darkened to disaster, his folly came with inbuilt punishment, and Carol needn’t have punished him twice over. Fair enough, he hadn’t been consultative—which was merely by way of saying that he’d wanted to do something devilish, something unexpectedly impish and naughty and for once nothing to do with the kids, because, by God, the poor woman had little enough pop up in her life that wasn’t just another bill or, surprise! a brand-new bacteria to invade Flicka’s corneas. And sure, maybe he hadn’t adhered to the general rule that in relation to any part of the body that’s even halfway functional you leave well enough alone. But otherwise, he didn’t see how the catastrophic fallout of this impetuous tomfoolery was his fault. Could he have predicted the infection, and hadn’t he taken the full course of antibiotics? Hadn’t he done plenty of research beforehand, and after his cousin Larry’s rave testimonial how could he have known that the doctor was a hack? Was he to blame that the results of two exorbitant restorative plastic surgeries were disappointing, and his dick still looked like a lumpy, bun-crushed hotdog with a bite out of the middle? He was suffering plenty already, and Carol’s coldness was undeservedly cruel. Yet she had never revisited the conviction that he had vandalized not his own person but his wife’s. It turned out she really did think that his dick belonged to her—personally belonged to her, with the same simplicity and utterness with which she would own a spatula—and it was she who graciously lent it out from time to time, when he needed to piss.
Moreover, she pressed him into an introspection with which Jackson was impatient. It wasn’t that he didn’t “know himself” or some other claptrap; he just thought navel-gazing was girly and indulgent and pointless. What was done was done, right? So what was the use of an emotional autopsy? No matter how you cut it up, a corpse was a corpse.
Well, his dick was not exactly a corpse. It was worse than that. While deformed and slouching, it was still alive, which made it only more terrible. His dick reminded him of that story they’d read in Mrs. William’s eighth-grade English class called “The Monkey’s Paw”—the beloved son fatally mangled in an accident who was resurrected by evil magic and mooed, all cut to ribbons, behind the front door. Hell, at least in the story you were spared having to look at the thing with the merciful exercise of the please-God-make-it-go-away third wish. His dick was on its second wish—waving and mooing and wanting in.
A few weeks ago, Jackson had done his ever-loving best to try to explain why he did it, although as usual the elaboration seemed to make no difference, and he was left wondering why he’d bothered. “It was just for a kick,” he’d started out. “One of those kooky, jaunty ideas you get, like when you’ve always given chocolates and this year you want to come up with a more outrageous birthday present that for once your wife will remember. We’re surrounded by all these other folks getting piercings, or new noses, or liposuction—who treat their bodies like houses that you redecorate when you feel like it. I’m always fixing people’s houses, right? So I was playing, right? One little gesture, for fun. Jesus, otherwise I’m not getting my stomach banded, I’m not getting ‘man boob’ reduction; I don’t even have a tattoo.”
“You don’t mess around with that part of your body for ‘fun,’” she’d insisted. “I don’t buy it, Jackson. That the surgery was a ha-ha, a cutesy, off-the-cuff caprice.”
“I’ve said I’m sorry until I’m blue. But I don’t see the point in analyzing it to death. It’s like I went on an expedition, like up some mountain, and the idea for the expedition was just for an adventure, to fill a Saturday afternoon. Then suddenly the weather goes funny and what was a lighthearted lark suddenly turns life-threatening, with gales about to blow you off the cliff and half your party getting hypothermia. It happens, right? But when the helicopters swoop in for the rescue, the medics don’t give you the third degree about the deep, dark motivations behind your sick-fuck decision to go hiking on the weekend.”
“You’re making me tired, Jackson,” said Carol, lids at half-mast. “I don’t mind when you keep people at dinner parties at bay with a water cannon of crapola, but I don’t expect you to spout nonsense at me.”
He clapped his thighs, rose, and paced the bedroom—whose dimensions seemed to grow smaller by the day. He would have to throw her something meatier than the whimsy line. “Look. You want to know the truth?”
“That would be refreshing.”
“It’s awkward.”
“I can’t think of anything more awkward than present circumstances.”
“I …” Nuts, this was definitely, totally awkward. He stuck his head out the door to make sure one of the girls wasn’t up, pressed the knob until it clicked, pushed in the lock, and dropped his voice. “I came home once unexpectedly, since it turned out we had a job in the neighborhood. The girls were in school, so you must have felt … Well, you obviously figured you had the place to yourself. I came looking for you and you must not have heard me, ‘cause you were … distracted. Turns out you were in here, and you’d left the door open.” He stopped, and hoped she could infer the rest of it and instead she crossed her arms and said, “So?” He would have to spell it out.
“I wasn’t spying on you, Carol. I was only going to ask if you wanted to have lunch together. But you were—well, you’d taken all your clothes off and it was the middle of the day, and that was a little weird. You were standing in front of the mirror, and your hands were covered in—I don’t know, something greasy and creamy—”
She laughed. “Hair conditioner. Suave, the cheap stuff. It has the perfect texture.”
“I’m sorry I violated your privacy, and I don’t want you to think I was offended or anything—”
“Why would you be offended?”
“I take that back, actually. I was a little offended.”
“I’m not allowed to masturbate? You should have told me that a long time ago.”
“That’s not what I mean. And offended is the wrong word. I was hurt.”
“Hurt? Jackson, I work incredibly hard, the sales work for IBM is tedious, and sometimes I have to blow off a little steam.”
“You’re not getting it. The point is, you were high as a kite. You were doing something two-handed down there and obviously getting off on watching yourself, and this—so it was conditioner—well, it was all over the place. And you were gasping and talking dirty to yourself. Shit.”
“I obviously made quite an impression. But why on earth didn’t you join me?”
“I wasn’t a part of it. And you’re still not getting it. You were—you were getting off by yourself more than you do with me.” He looked down. There. He’d said it.
She reached for his hand with the tenderness for which he was starved. “So you saw me on my own. It’s a little different. Maybe it is a little more uninhibited without you there. I wish it weren’t, but it’s almost impossible to completely shed self-consciousness with another person, even if you love that person, and even if you are, more or less, relaxed with them. I still don’t see why this little session you walked in on has anything whatsoever to do with your getting botched penis enlargement surgery.”
He always winced when she had to say it plain like that. Since he had his own private rituals whose frequency—that is, previous frequency—he was loath to admit, Jackson was reluctant to get into the fact that for the last couple of years the “session” he’d walked in on had been his touchstone for getting high as a kite himself. Even talking about it now had given him a hard-on. (Or what passed for one. Supposedly he was to be grateful that it roused even to this spongy level of enthusiasm, to which he was alerted mostly because it hurt; the scar tissue from the infection bound the shaft in the middle, like a cock ring stuck halfway up.) Thinking about Carol clutching herself all covered in goo in front of the mirror got him off like nobody’s business. But the home video also tormented him. God, you’d never know it to look at this woman, so composed, so … Well, other people probably thought of Carol as a little tight. He wasn’t about to repeat to her some of the things he’d overheard her say that day—her running commentary of smut would be too embarrassing for both of them, and at once such a turn-on that it would send his dick into agony—but she was a fucking animal! That afternoon, he’d felt so cheated, that he’d lived for years with a wildcat, a wildcat with big bountiful breasts and one hand shoved halfway up her own cunt and her face a contortion of twisted, gory pleasure, and meanwhile for years he’d been having sedate, conventional, well-behaved sex with a domesticated tabby.
“I wanted you to feel that way with me,” he said. “I wanted to introduce something that made you get as excited with me as you do by yourself. I didn’t realize until I saw you by accident that you were—that you were capable of getting that off your head.”
“Haven’t I seemed to enjoy myself with you? We’ve had a lovely sex life. If we hadn’t, why would I be so angry now that we don’t have one?”
“See? Enjoy yourself. A lovely sex life. That’s the kind of language you use when you go on a picnic. I don’t want you to enjoy yourself. I want you to go insane.”
“Congratulations, then. I am insane. Insanely disappointed and aggrieved. You could have talked about it with me, instead of carving yourself up like a rib roast. For pity’s sake, if all you wanted was a little more kink, I’d have caught the two-for-one sale on conditioner at CVS.”
In her humor he sensed a softening, and he sat beside her on the bed. She’d started wearing a nightgown despite the close, thick summer air, but the door was already locked and nightgowns come off. He put a hand on her thigh. She looked at the hand, then in his eyes; her expression was skeptical but not, for once, hostile. It was a little early after the second plastic surgery—the scars were still red and sensitive—but like a job seeker during an economic downturn he would have to apply for the few openings that came along. When he kissed her she was passive, though she did not recoil. Yeah, as he got into the idea the Monkey’s-Paw mangle mooed again, but nothing could be more painful than this months-long freeze-out.
As Jackson slid his hand up under the nightgown, they were miles from some breakthrough erotic melee with Suave. He was super gentle and super careful, implicitly asking permission with every caress, as if she were still a virgin and had to be broken in nice and slow, rather than his wife and the mother of his children. Still he did finally coax the boring white cotton sack over her head—heaven forbid she’d wear a negligee—and slipped his hands onto those twin scoops of vanilla ice cream. Carol didn’t participate much, but she didn’t stop him. There was only one stage to go, tearing off the damned boxers, an unveiling that now filled him with dread; he should have switched off the light on Carol’s side of the bed when he’d had the chance. As he hastily dragged them off the elastic smarted; he could see her hating to look and yet having to look and so looking and then looking away. His erection was about as good as it got, meaning not very, and though this was hardly the time to entertain such thoughts he had to concede that if anything after all that snipping and pulling and chopping and patching the mutilated nubbin—which looked like some half-chewed chicken neck that had got stuck in a garbage disposal—was now even smaller than it had been to begin with.
When he eased on top of her, Carol’s distorted, twitching face bore superficial resemblance to the expression she’d worn when he caught her slathering her pussy with Suave, but was probably closer to the wobbly grimace of a patient about to submit to a colonoscopy. Since Carol obviously wasn’t going to help, he rose up on one hand and with the other tried to position his disabled ward for entry, wondering if you could organize wheelchair access to a vagina. Pushing at her, he cringed as his dick buckled. He tried one more time by keeping his middle finger underneath the shaft like a makeshift splint, but with one, he had to admit, graceful maneuver Carol was out from under him and standing beside the bed. “I can’t.” Shaking despite the muggy July, she reached for the nightgown scrunched behind her pillow. “I’m sorry. I tried, but even if you could get it in, Jackson, I can’t do it. It’s too repulsive.”
Carol was not a theatrical person, and he didn’t really believe that she rushed to the toilet to throw up. But she did flee to the bathroom and close the door, and she was gone for a long time.
“Yes, Mr. Pogatchnik, it’s just that—”
“You hear me? Not on my time. I’ve cut you plenty slack because of your wife, Knacker. But I’m not running a hospice here. A business is a business.”
Jackson peeked around his partition. Spattered in freckles, Pogatchnik had short legs, a short neck, and short, Vienna-sausage fingers. In that red-and-white striped shirt, big-butt Bermudas, and a backward baseball cap that from this angle looked like a beanie, he needed only a large lollypop to complete the picture of an overgrown toddler. He was the only one in the office with enough natural padding to stay warm in summer togs; by contrast, in mid-August Shep was wearing a down vest, and he’d learned to type in gloves. Pogatchnik clearly took the Alpine gear as admonition, and since June the cycle had only accelerated: Shep arrived in a woolly scarf; Pogatchnik cranked the AC down two more degrees; Shep arrived in ear muffs.
“I’m afraid the phone lines at the World Wellness Group are only open during business hours,” Shep was explaining in a calm, inhumanly even tone that sounded like Carol. “While I’m on hold, I do keep fielding calls for Randy Handy—”
“What did you just call my company?”
“I mean, Handy Randy, of course. That was just, you know, a slip of the tongue.”
“You’re on thin ice, Knacker. Under the circumstances, you figure it’s smart to confuse the name of your only employer with jerking off?”
“No, Mr. Pogatchnik. I don’t know why that came out of my mouth. You must be making me nervous, sir. On account of your—displeasure.”
Fucking hell. It was like listening in on a pipsqueak draftee during basic training, quailing in front of his sergeant back in the days before the volunteer army began coddling the troops with Oreos. It made Jackson mad, and maybe it wasn’t fair, but mad at Shep. The groveling in the next cubicle made him feel personally betrayed. What do you want to bet that “Randy Handy” slip really was a mistake, and not the sly, purposive subversion that it should have been? A recently installed office rule, the “Mr. Pogatchnik” routine was at least not Shep’s ass-lick innovation. In an era when everyone from restaurant patrons to prime ministers went by first names, the absurd formality had gratifyingly warped to the tongue-in-cheek; though the fat red-haired toad was too stupid to notice, all over the office “Mr. Pogatchnik” rang with overt sarcasm.
“Personal calls are personal calls,” said Pogatchnik. “Which you make at lunch, on your own cell.”
While organizing work crews throughout the rest of the morning, Jackson chewed on a mystery that he’d never got his head around. The rest of the staff had always liked Jackson, or at least they put up with him—and tolerance, in such close-quartered, shoulder-to-shoulder work, believe it or not was something. But they’d always respected Knacker, even if back when Shep called the shots they hadn’t always liked him. He’d run a tight ship. Caught you taking a slug from an open white wine bottle in a customer’s fridge, and you were out on your ear. His lofty business principles may have been subject to mockery behind his back, but his workforce was still proud that stand-up practices brought in a host of repeat customers. When a licensed plumber had left behind a gaping hole in a living room ceiling, Shep would opt for a meticulously cut Sheetrock patch, which was cheaper for the customer, even though replacing the whole panel would’ve taken half the time and made Knack twice the money. He’d put in estimates on the low side when he sensed a homeowner was hard up. He’d stood by his price quotes, too, even when a job turned out more fiddly than they expected. It was their fault, claimed Shep, that a job took three times longer than it was supposed to; they should have seen the problems coming.
Of course, Jackson himself rarely ran over the allotted time, since he was fast—slapdash, Shep sometimes called it, and the word had stung. Jackson was fast but he was good, or good enough—and good enough was good enough. Polished workmanship was wasted on these outer-borough hovels. Most of the dumps they repaired were originally working-class housing stock, built for laundry workers or for that matter for tradesmen like themselves. Unless the place had been gutted and renovated from the ground up, the kind of la-di-da jobs that Shep had specialized in just made the rest of the house look worse. You know, he’d install a new closet door and frame, and it’d be the only door in the place that was parallel to the floor. The effect was to make the rest of the joint look like a funhouse, all out of kilter—as if he’d smeared “Clean me!” on the side of a dusty van.
Back in the Knack days, Jackson had enjoyed an elevated status for having the ear of the boss, almost like being an unofficial VP. But when Shep sold up, and Jackson’s managerial job description did become official? His co-workers’ deference flew right out the window. By contrast—this was the mystery, and Jackson had to admit that it griped him a bit—despite all the razzing about that “escape fantasy” and despite all the public groveling before “Mr. Pogatchnik” and despite having become an overnight nobody like a fairy-tale prince who’d turned himself into a frog, Shep still commanded a regard that never sank below a surprisingly high baseline level. Christ, the guy couldn’t have humiliated himself more completely. Still, whenever a really sticky job came in—like the one this morning where knocking a hole for a pass-through window between the kitchen and the dining room entailed busting through a solid foot of concrete—to whom did the guys turn for advice? Helpful hint: it wasn’t Burdina.
When lunch came around at last, Jackson forced himself to sidle up to Shep’s station. He’d begged off lunch to do “errands” so many afternoons that his avoidance of his best friend was becoming too obvious. The trouble was, he was now committed to omitting from his conversation everything he was going through with Carol; just as in boxing, none of his topics could target below the waist. While he could always resort to Mugs and Mooches, a tirade wasn’t as satisfying when its purpose was purely diversionary. “You have to make some call, or can you grab a bite?”
“Forty minutes isn’t enough time to get through to a human being at that switchboard,” said Shep. “The thing is, I got sent a bill they totally refused. It’s for fifty-eight K and change, too. The secretary at Goldman’s office said it may have been some number entered wrong. One digit off, anywhere on the form, and they refuse to pay the whole thing.”
“You realize what a fair whack of their ‘administration costs’ are, don’t you?” said Jackson. “According to Carol, these companies hire scads of people whose whole job it is to find ways not to pay the medical expenses of people they’re supposedly insuring. She says these fucks are so good at it that on average they manage to weasel out of thirty percent of the bills they get sent.”
“Yeah, well, whenever they ‘weasel out of it,’ or some middleman transposes a number, the full bill goes straight to yours truly. I’ve got forty-five days to appeal this thing, and it’s already been a month. After the forty-five days are up, I’m stuck with it. And this is just one glitch. These minions at Wellness query everything. Goldman says they even tell him which drugs he can prescribe. He wanted Glynis to use Dermovate along with a course of cetirizine for her skin rashes, but no—Wellness nixed them both. They said use calamine lotion. Which is a joke. No explanation, as usual. I guess they’re not obliged to provide one. But these people aren’t doctors. I don’t understand how business graduates of two-year junior colleges are making decisions about what to prescribe my wife.”
“Health insurance is health insurance,” boomed from behind them. “You got any coverage whatsoever, and you’re complaining?” It was Mr. Pogatchnik, who regarded eavesdropping as a privilege of high office. “That contract costs me a fortune, Knacker.”
“Yes, I realize it’s a major line item. In my day—”
“It’s not your day. Haven’t we got that straight yet? It’s not your day. Repeat after me?”
“So don’t imagine you have any idea. When you ran this joint, you were covering a fraction of the workforce I run now. I may have replaced that Cadillac plan you had for Knack with a serviceable little Ford Fiesta. Still, in just eight years, per head? The small-business employer premium has doubled.”
“Hey, it costs what it costs, right?” said Shep, and Jackson was relieved to detect, for once, a seditious glitter in his friend’s expression.
“What it costs is too damn much,” said Pogatchnik, who would no more be aware of his reputation for the flabby, faux-profound tautology than he would understand the word itself. “I just renewed, too, and your wife was cited as one of the justifications for jacking the price. I sure hope you’re sweet on the lady, ‘cause she’s costing me a mint.”
“I am very fond of my wife, thank you.”
“Anyway, all the new hires are on contract, no benefits. So count yourself lucky.”
“I do count myself lucky,” said Shep numbly. “But the new guys. If they get sick, or their kid does. What do they do?”
“Emergency room, or suck it up. Point is, it’s not my problem. The way it oughta be, in my book. They want some fancy insurance package, they can buy it themselves.”
“Private plans …” said Shep. “You don’t pay them enough …”
“I pay them what I pay them. Pretty decent wages, too, since otherwise most of these wets would be packing pork or picking grapefruit.”
“But this medical stuff can be—life and death,” Shep submitted with a nauseating tentativeness. “Offering no benefits seems—a little harsh.”
“I am what I am, right? I’m not handing out ice cream. I’m a businessman. If I don’t turn a profit you’re all out on the street. Besides, am I responsible for buying my employees groceries? Am I supposed to find them apartments? Aren’t food and shelter matters of ‘life and death,’ too?”
“Fair enough,” Shep conceded.
“Next thing you know I’m supposed to spring for their flat-screen TVs and premium cable fees. Which, by the way, would be a hell of a lot cheaper than fucking health insurance, even if I threw in a new dinette set and a book of all-you-can-eat coupons for Pizza Hut.”
“Yeah, I been meaning to ask,” said Jackson, “I wanted to swap my sausage for pepperoni.”
“I hire people,” Pogatchnik bullied on, not the least interested in banter that put his ingrate employees and management on the same side. “I don’t adopt them. Least of all do I adopt their whole goddamned families. You two—for now—I’m stuck with. But I’m telling you, this shit, this big communist cradle-to-grave employment shit, is over. It doesn’t make any earthly sense that just because I take on an employee to clear other people’s hairy drains, suddenly I’m supposed to pay for his ingrown toenails. The insulin for his diabetes because he eats too many Krispy Kreme Bavarian custards. His hernia operation after he bangs his squeeze on the side with too much gusto. His ten-year-old’s ADD medication, if only because nobody admits to having a kid anymore who’s thick as pig shit. The five months his blind, harelipped, one-legged premature baby with the mind of an eggplant spends in intensive care, when it should have been thrown out with the bathwater. Not to mention the billions of dollars his wife’s terminal cancer costs before she kicks the bucket anyway, since nobody in this country can die anymore without dragging the entire economy down with them.”
Pogatchnik’s pause baited Shep to take offense, but ever since “So long, asshole!” his self-demoted employee had been a paragon of restraint.
“Unless I quit being held ransom for health insurance, for this whole crowd?” Pogatchnik carried on. “Handy Randy would go under. Realize that’s one of the main reasons American companies are moving overseas, don’t you? Health insurance. Hell, I’d move this outfit to China, too, if only my Mexicans could commute to Queens from Beijing. You guys came to me today, you could have a job. That’s all. A job is a job. As for cancer, you’d die on your own dime. So you chumps don’t like the World Wellness Group, you know where the door is. I’d replace you with a couple of Guatemalans at a fraction of the salary who’d be grateful for the paycheck, who wouldn’t give me any lip, who wouldn’t misspeak the name of the company kind enough to employ their sorry asses, and who wouldn’t have an attitude problem because one of them is delusional and still thinks he’s the boss.”
“Just used up fifteen minutes of our lunch break,” Jackson muttered once they’d escaped to Seventh Avenue. “Not enough time for the line at Brooklyn Bread. Guess we’ll just walk. Bastard.”
“He is who he is, right?” said Shep, and they launched toward Prospect Park.
“I hate to admit it,” Jackson said on Ninth Street, “but Pogatchnik has a point. I don’t know what those new-hire sons of bitches are supposed to do when they get run over by a delivery truck. Still, plenty of those guys have big families. How’s a little operation like Randy Handy going to cover all their medical expenses? I’m not sure why it should have to.”
“Somebody’s gotta pay for it.”
They’d been so anxious to get away from Pogatchnik that Shep had forgotten to leave behind his down vest, which he now stuffed in his backpack. The sweltering sun had been a relief after the ice cave of the office, but only for a minute or two. Shep rolled up his sleeves; even after forgoing their joint weight-training sessions for months, he still had powerful arms. As for the poor fuck’s steady weight gain since January, Jackson battled between an unattractive satisfaction and dismay.
“But the employer thing, it’s just a historical fluke,” Jackson said authoritatively; what the heck, he could probably fill out this entire walk with factual information. That was what real men traded with each other anyway. Properly edified, Shep would never be able to object that he’d been filibustered. “Until about the 1920s, there was no such thing as health insurance. You got a medical bill, you paid it. Even then, private plans were few and far between, really just meant to cover catastrophe. The employer-sponsored thing developed during World War Two, when labor was scarce. Big companies were making bids for the handful of guys left who weren’t in the army, but they were hog-tied by government wage controls, so they couldn’t offer higher salaries. To get around the laws, they added health cover as a come-hither. It was a little perk. Didn’t cost much, since everybody in those days keeled over fast and young. You couldn’t spend that much on people’s medical care, because nobody had invented chemo, or heart transplants, or the MRI. Pogatchnik thinks he’s being funny, but throwing in health benefits back then really wasn’t so different from tossing the flunkies a coupon for pizza.”
“Yeah, well now the pie comes with mushrooms, and anchovies, and extra cheese.”
“The problem’s not the pizza, it’s the insurance companies, man! They’re fucking evil, man! They’re parasites, parasites on other people’s suffering!”
“They’re not evil, Jacks, they’re just companies. Jesus, you sound like my father.”
“Do they produce anything? Do they improve anything? Do they do anything for anybody, besides their own employees and shareholders? Even McDonalds makes hamburgers. Those cunts at Wellness, they just shuffle paper. All they accomplish is a little redistribution of wealth, mostly to themselves. They’re Mooches pure and simple.”
“They’re private enterprises. They’re supposed to turn a profit.”
“That’s the whole point, dickhead! That is the whole fucking point!”
They’d hit the park; maybe Jackson had grown a mite vociferous, since a lady nearby side-eyed him with recognizable urban alarm, shimmying her stroller rapidly in the opposite direction.
Jackson made an effort to moderate his tone to a level that didn’t threaten the safety of small children. “You remember what you told me about gambling? How if most people didn’t, on average, lose, there wouldn’t be a gambling industry in the first place? For there to be money in it, the big picture has to be fixed.”
“Yeah, sure,” said Shep. “But you’re not, still—?”
“Give me a break, I’ve sworn off the dogs completely,” Jackson said hurriedly. So long as he was keeping his trap shut about everything else in his life, he might as well make it a clean sweep and lie about the works. “I just mean, health insurance works the same way, right? Any insurance. For these companies to run in the black, the majority of their customers have to lose. On average, you have to pay in more over your lifetime than you draw, or these companies wouldn’t exist in the first place.”
“Well, I guess the hard cases are subsidized by guys who live on rice milk and pay high premiums for forty years, and then drop dead in the street. You know, guys like that.” Shep nodded toward an ostentatiously lean, shirtless runner showing off his gray-haired pecs and carrying a dumbbell in each hand. You didn’t stay that taut and skinny past fifty without being a pain in the ass, and at a glance Jackson pitied the man’s family. Puffing to overtake a female jogger up ahead in the midday heat, this geezer didn’t simply run; he was “a runner.” It was obvious that the pill’s miserable circuit around Prospect Park was the most important thing in his life. Fucking pathetic.
“On the other hand,” Shep went on, “Flicka, Glynis—they’ve both cost scads more than either of our families have paid in. We’re the Mooches here. We’ve lucked out.”
“Here we go, yet another improbably upbeat take on a national disaster. You seriously feeling lucky?”
“Good fortune is relative.”
Jackson got a little tired of Shep’s ceaseless reasonableness, his prissy, Sunday school sense of perspective. “My point stands. The very fact that these companies have to turn a profit means most people pay in more than they get out, period. So health insurance is, ipso facto, a scam.”
“Ipso facto!” Shep chuckled. “Sounds like a fifties detergent slogan. ‘Use Whiz, and, ipso facto! Stains vanish!’ I don’t know where you pick this stuff up.”
“I read a lot. You should try it.”
“Yeah, right. After I work all day, hit the A-and-P, make dinner, fetch Glynis her meds, and water, and skin cream … Give her a shot in the ass of Neupogen after drugging her out with lorazepam to keep her from getting hysterical about the needle … Keep her company because she can’t sleep, do the laundry at two in the morning and pay the bills at three … Then I can put my feet up with a big, thick, educational tome before the alarm rings at five.”
“What’s the diff? Flicka, pal, is a full-time job by herself, and I fit in plenty of books.”
“You’ve got Carol.”
It was the very subject of recent reflection that indeed Jackson did not “have” Carol, now less than ever. “Yeah, well, this isn’t a contest.”
“A contest over which of us feels more sorry for themselves? Now, that could be vicious.”
“I never said I felt sorry for myself,” said Jackson.
“Well, I do.”
“Why would you feel sorry for me?” Jackson snapped. Shep shot his friend a look. “I meant I feel sorry for myself, dickhead. Feeling sorry for you, too, would be a tall order.”
“Well, skip it then.”
They strode on in stiff silence.
Jackson had noticed that whenever he bought a new pair of shoes, he went through a period thereafter when he couldn’t stop looking at other people’s shoes—wondering why they might have chosen that particular pair, appraising them as handsome or hideous. The same phenom now pertained to other men’s dicks. With every jogger and dog walker they passed, he found himself compulsively checking out the mound under the fly, bitterly eying the well-endowed. Cyclists in their tight Lycra attracted his gaze to the groin, where they surely packed smooth, straight, functional equipment that they foolishly took for granted. Now a whole park full of jocks probably thought he was a fag.
“Glynis went in for another blood transfusion yesterday,” Shep said after a bit, making a stab at convivial conversation. “Her white blood cell count was knee-high. They had to cancel her chemo. She’s not strong enough.”
“At least she gets a break,” Jackson grunted.
“Yeah, but the cancer gets a break, too. Goldman’s decided she can’t tolerate the Alimta and cisplatin anymore, and when she does go back to chemo they’ll change the cocktail. How do you like that word, huh? Cocktail.” Jackson had to hand it to him, Shep was really trying—either to pretend everything was fine between them, or to make it fine.
Jackson made a grudging effort in return. “Yeah, I picture this gorgeous Tiffany martini glass, gleaming with sweat and toothpicked with a stuffed olive—only what’s shimmering inside isn’t Bombay gin and a splash of vermouth, but strychnine.”
Yet Jackson had no sooner congratulated himself for being so supportive than it grew hard to pay attention, because he was tortured by a memory from about ten years before. He’d been replacing the rickety risers of some schmuck’s staircase, and though a one-man job it stretched over three or four days; by happenstance, the landing was right outside this loser’s study. Jackson had always prided himself on being a lively presence in other people’s homes, not just your average tight-lipped hired brawn. So long as a customer seemed obviously glad to lend an ear, he kept up a running patter—sometimes about the job itself, but more often about your basic issues of the day. Sort of like whistling while you work, but less annoying. Given Jackson’s status as a well-rounded autodidact—like, he had taught himself the meaning of autodidact—edifying narration gave these homeowners a chance to learn something. The soundtrack provided free stimulation, free information, and they should have been grateful that he didn’t charge extra for it.
But when Jackson was heading out on the third day of the riser job, Shep had pulled him aside and said, “This guy in Clinton, he wants you to, well … He wants you to shut up.” Apparently the riser guy was some kind of fiction writer—and Jackson had the measure of the twit, so he was unquestionably some posturing amateur—and couldn’t “concentrate” with all the commentary from the staircase. The customer was completely full of shit, since he’d eaten up everything Jackson had said, and was doubtless already planning to use this improbably intelligent, verbally agile, larger-than-life “character” from the world of home repair in one of his otherwise dull, unpublishable short stories.
Yeah, Jackson had dispatched the rest of the job keeping his mouth shut—or when he remembered to keep his mouth shut—but he’d have appreciated a little more solidarity from Shep. Instead, when Jackson had objected that you know what these pompous writer types are like: horrified by the blank screen and just dying for any distraction, any excuse to escape the impoverished confines of their pygmy imaginations, and “I’m telling you that customer was rapt, like he was practically taking notes,” Shep didn’t agree, Yeah, I bet he was, too, but interrupted and said, “Look, keep a lid on it, right? Just this once? We got work to do, they got work to do. You’re not a talk show host, you’re a handyman.” That was really putting the boot in, since Shep knew full well that Jackson detested the word handyman, which he’d lobbied hard to replace on their business cards with something more dignified, something less low rent—you know, like domestic construction consultant. But no, the cards had to say handyman, because that’s the word that customers “understood.” Worse, Shep had pretty much implied that Jackson’s running commentary got on everyone’s nerves, and that this was merely the first guy to lodge a formal complaint. Well, Jackson had been supportive as all get-out through the sale of Knack and the deep-sixing of Pemba and now with Glynis, and frankly that support hadn’t always worked the other direction.
“These blood transfusions take, like, five hours,” Shep was explaining. “And Glynis still gets faint when they put in the cannula. Still, this neighbor of ours, Nancy, has been incredible. Comes with Glynis whenever I can’t go. Holds her hand and distracts her with recipes and shit—so Glynis comes home yesterday able to recite every ingredient in a complicated cottage-cheese-and-pineapple dip that sounds disgusting. The idea is to keep her from watching the needle. That’s not a small job, either. Lately they’re having a hard time finding a vein, and have to jab her several times. Nancy’s unbelievably boring, but nice. I’m starting to not care about boring. All I care about is nice.”
Jackson wasn’t sure if this compliment to some broad he’d never met was meant as a veiled reproof. Faithful at first, he hadn’t gone to see Glynis for several weeks. Entertaining customers was one thing; keeping up the packaged rant with a friend going through hell had admittedly grown artificial. But he didn’t know what to talk to her about otherwise, and he had his own problems.
“Meanwhile, they’ve moved my father out of Androscoggin Valley,” Shep continued, “and into a private nursing home nearby. It’s meant to be only temporary, while he recuperates. But he doesn’t believe it. He’s convinced he’s been dumped there for the rest of his life, like a sack of old clothes tossed in a Goodwill drop-off. So he gives Beryl a lot of grief. My sister’s solution is just not to visit him.”
“Neat,” said Jackson, with a guilty recognition that he’d arrived at the same solution to the Glynis problem.
“That means I’ll have to keep taking trips to New Hampshire. Which is tricky, since I can’t leave Glynis alone for long. I can’t take any more vacation or personal days than I absolutely have to. Still, I don’t want him to feel abandoned. Oh, and the Medicare people have cut him off, since they’ve now covered his ‘crisis care.’ So this Twilight Glens place is all on my dime. Eight grand a month, believe it or not, and a three-month deposit up front. With every aspirin extra.”
Ordinarily Jackson would have sympathized, even though after selling Knack Shep had more in the bank than he himself would ever see in one place. But none of his ostensibly restorative operations had been covered by either World Wellness or IBM’s outfit, since technically they constituted elective plastic surgery. So he’d been forced to charge all his medical bills to credit cards, at 22 percent interest; he was still paying off the original surgery as well, and those were just the debts that Carol knew about. Barely managing the minimums, he wasn’t the usual soft touch for Shep’s batty benevolence.
“As ever,” Shep was droning on, “I’ve got to pay Zach’s tuition, and keep topping up Amelia’s rent—”
“Why are you such a pushover?” Jackson exploded. “With your dad, just don’t go up to Berlin, right? You can’t. Your wife has cancer. Period. And when the next bill from that nursing home arrives, just don’t pay it. Fuck, you have the power! What do you think will happen, they’ll toss him on the street? It’s bad, but it’s not that bad. You’ve told me he’s got that house, which disqualifies him from Medicaid. Well, fine, when you don’t pay the bill, this private shit hole will just transfer him to a public shit hole, right? I bet there’s not much difference, when you’re pissed off anyway and flat on your back. Then Medicaid will step in, and maybe they’ll commandeer the house. Let ‘em have it! Let ‘em kick your self-centered, asshole sister out on her butt. Just walk away, bro! And while you’re at it, pull Zach out of that overpriced sports club and resign yourself that he’s an average fuck-off student who might as well be average and fucking off in a public school that you already pay for! Tell Amelia she’s a grown-up now, and if her salary doesn’t cover her rent and her own goddamned health insurance then she gets another job that does, whether or not it fulfills her tender creative urges! Why are you the only one who has to be responsible? Why can’t you throw people on their own devices the way you’ve always been thrown on yours? Why can’t you start to treat other people the way, for years, they’ve been treating you?”
“I am who I am.” Shep’s delivery was so robotic that it was impossible to tell if he was joking.
They about-faced, and marched back in silence. Jackson didn’t know if he was supposed to apologize, but he was disinclined to. He realized that he was being irrational, but it kept sneaking back all the same: this conviction that the “whimsical” notion that had vaporized his sex life and still made it hard to take a leak was in some measure Shep Knacker’s fault. Hey, that explanation he’d delivered Carol was genuine enough. He had almost walked in on her, and he had found the exhibition simultaneously exciting and disturbing. But there was a little more to it than that, not that he would ever let on to Carol, because, to add insult to injury, the additional explanation was clichéd. If she knew, she’d have contempt for him—that is, even more contempt for him, assuming that was possible. The whole nightmare would never have gone down in the first place if it hadn’t been for Shep.
Moreover, despite the guy’s earlier assertion that the scale of their respective travails “wasn’t a contest,” Jackson wondered if, all kidding aside, there wasn’t a subtle element of competition in Shep’s catalogue of woes after all. Shep always had to cast himself as the hero, the stoic who could bear up under all manner of impositions, the Atlas on whose shoulders the fates of nations rested. Jackson tired of his friend’s infeasible virtue—the empathy, the bending over backward to see the other side, that numb-sucker-taking-it thing—and maybe he’d let fly just now to show this patsy how it was done: See? You don’t sigh and take out the checkbook again; you get mad.
Besides, Flicka was more of a handful than Shep had any idea, and now Jackson was supposed to bow down and defer to Shep’s terrible situation with Glynis’s terrible illness. Well, Shep wasn’t the only one dealing with the fact that someone he loved was probably going to die. In fact, Jackson sometimes wanted to grab and shake the guy. Now do you understand what’s it’s been like for me, ever since Flicka was diagnosed in her crib because she couldn’t, of all things, cry? Never knowing when the one person you count on to make life seem worth living will suddenly make a rude, unannounced exit and then it turns out, gosh, you were right—actually, now life really isn’t worth living? Shep did realize, didn’t he, that even though Flicka now set an alarm to pour in her own cans of Compleat, her father still got up at his old shift of 4:00 a.m. most nights, pretending to get a glass of water, but really just to glide by Flicka’s room and make sure she was still alive? Because that’s how most of these kids disappeared on you: just went to sleep and never woke up. Nuts, according to that last CAT scan, Glynis seemed to have a hope in hell. But no test result was ever going to come in for Flicka that would suddenly open up a future with a career and a family of her own. Busy playing the supportive friend this afternoon, Jackson had yet to mention that Flick had been readmitted to New York Methodist the day before. The chest infections were recurring with greater frequency, and they were getting worse. The antibiotics were growing less effective, and a host of predatory microscopic crud was thriving out there that was immune to the drugs altogether. Simple family hangs like the one this spring, when he gave his kids that eighth-grade test from 1895, well, he couldn’t remember having engaged in the same rambunctious afterdinner teasing since. Carol had to piss all over it, but they’d been having a good time.
There was even something showily turn-the-other-cheek about Shep’s bringing up graciously as they neared Handy Randy, “I wondered if you’d found a hole in your schedule yet,” after having been berated as a moron and a sap.
“Yeah, right,” said Jackson. “That celebration, about Glynis’s CAT scan. Sure thing, I’ll check my diary soon as we get back.”
In having repeatedly shied from the invitation, Jackson had no idea whether he was envious of their good news about the upbeat CAT scan, or if he just didn’t trust it.