Shepherd Armstrong Knacker
Merrill Lynch Account Number 934-23F917
August 01, 2005 – August 31, 2005
Net Portfolio Value: $274,530.68
Shep had bustled down his to-do list all day. Lay in groceries. Buy charcoal. Cut up raw vegetables—which no one ever ended up eating. Whip up dip—to which he had, despite his own revulsion, added Nancy’s canned pineapple because he couldn’t think of anything else. Wrap potatoes in tin foil. Set table—with a sense of dismay that the menu could not plausibly sponsor Glynis’s fish slice.
But their guests were late. Every item on the list was crossed off. Shep had nothing to do. Lending his wife’s skepticism about his idyllically idle Afterlife some credence, the absence of an agenda was the one thing these days that Shep couldn’t bear. In some comically microcosmic manner, this chasm of post-dinner-prep inactivity foreshadowed a more frightening abyss. As of yesterday afternoon, Shep had resumed residence on a world that was flat. He would soldier across the map only to plummet vertiginously off its hard edge. Thus, big picture, the evening’s pattern of frenzy to freefall would repeat itself. Shep would feverishly meet every need—fill every prescription, arrange transport and company for every appointment, fetch liquids, plump pillows, and elevate feet. Then suddenly, there would be nothing—there would be nothing—there would be nothing to do.
He double-checked that Glynis was situated comfortably on the screened-in back porch. Too comfortably; she was slumped and asleep. Dressing for the evening had worn her out. He shouldn’t be forcing her to socialize. The timing was terrible. But it had taken two and a half months to get their best friends to dinner. He wasn’t about to withdraw the invitation and go through the same diary-shuffling folderol with Jackson again. He stirred the coals on the barbecue. He’d started the fire too early, and it would be too hot for the steaks. They’d been eighteen dollars a pound. It didn’t matter. But if overcooking them didn’t matter, then he shouldn’t have sprung for New York strips in the first place. He was beginning to lose a grip on why they were having those two for dinner. He was losing a grip on why anyone had anyone to dinner. Why anyone talked to anyone. Or maybe he was mostly uncertain about why he himself would talk to Jackson.
Finally Shep grabbed the hose and went around the backyard topping up his whacky fountains: the festive, kinetic one with the pin-wheels, paddles, and overflowing plastic Snoopy lunchbox that hadn’t especially delighted Zach for his birthday even when the kid was nine; the more industrial structure with a handyman theme that sluiced the water around shovel blades, trowels, and spare lengths of drainage pipe. The fountains’ sheer gratuitousness used to cheer him, but lately the contraptions seemed silly, and he’d taken to disparaging the lot, with sour sarcasm, as “water features.” In a life ruled by grim necessity, gratuitousness itself was one more thing that he could live without.
Nearly an hour after the agreed time, Jackson hustled in from their car with an armload of booze—not only wine and beer, but all the makings for margaritas, as if the game plan for the evening were for everyone to get plastered. Maybe Shep should have phoned to forewarn them that the nature of the occasion had changed.
“You know, it slays me,” Jackson started up right away, and that was assuming he’d ever stopped, “at all these major intersections in Brooklyn? They put traffic cops in the middle, and all they do—all they do—is wave through cars perfectly in sync with the traffic lights. Like, they are just human traffic lights. Do we really need some self-important fuck to point left when the Left Turn Only signal turns green? Do we need to pay this asshole to stand there like an urban scarecrow, when the lights are working for once, and easier to see? You know the only time you don’t see some officious public servant out there is when the signal fails. The lights go black and it’s pandemonium? Not a cop in sight.” It was going to be a long night.
“Oh, and guess what’s the latest on the Net,” he continued, slicing limes.
There was no purpose to interrupting. Jackson was like the topped-up fountains in the backyard, which would burble through the evening and tirelessly recycle the same few gallons of bilge.
“Know how, like, downtown,” Jackson carried on, “around City Hall, it’s totally impossible to find a place to park? Turns out there’s a reason, and it’s not just that it’s New York and you got to share. It’s the Mooches in government. The city’s issued 142,000 permits that say the rules don’t apply to them. These parasitic pricks put this little card on the dashboard, and bingo, they can park their butts in Authorized Vehicles Only zones and even where it says outright No Parking. In Lower Manhattan, they got over 11,000 spaces to choose from for free. Know how many parking spots the sad-ass general public’s got to choose from down there? Six hundred and sixty-five. That’s not democracy, friend. That’s tyranny. We pay for the paving, the curbing, the pothole repair, the very signs that tell us to fuck off, and they park wherever they want, for no money, and for as long as they damn well please.”
Shep knew better than to ever try parking in Lower Manhattan, and he didn’t care. He shared a glance with Carol, who looked embarrassed. “That’s just Jackson’s ham-handed way of apologizing for being late,” she said. “He insisted on stopping at Astor Liquors on Lafayette, where the tequila would be cheaper, and we spent forty-five minutes looking for a place to park. But since that’s not quite ‘Lower Manhattan,’ I’m afraid we can’t pin our rudeness on City Hall.”
Naturally Carol asked if she could help, while Jackson proceeded to squirt lime juice all over the counters that Shep had just wiped down. And naturally she wanted to go say hello to Glynis. Shep hurried ahead to the back porch to wake her, although their guests finding his wife in a state of catatonic collapse would have been a more edifying introduction to life in Elmsford these days than any bear-hugging glad-to-see-you. Unfortunately, he didn’t arrive in time to restore her turban, which had fallen to the floor. She had always been prideful about her appearance, if Shep shied from the word vain, and she was still prideful.
Carol had been up to her neck in nursing Flicka, whose pneumonia from August had proven tenacious, so Shep couldn’t blame her for not having visited Westchester for six weeks or more. She did a good job of disguising it, but he could read the shock in her face. As far as Carol was concerned, they were still “celebrating” the wonderful news from Glynis’s early July CAT scan that her cancer was in retreat. So she’d have every reason to expect her friend to look, if not robust, at least human-colored and three-dimensional.
But Jackson’s multiple poor excuses and reschedulings had pushed this gathering to mid-September. Its ambiance had grown autumnal in more than a seasonal respect. Shep didn’t usually notice himself. But seeing Glynis through Carol’s eyes, he recognized that his wife’s lush summer foliage had turned. The brown tinge to her skin had grayed, the way a beach vacation tan wanes to a dingy inland mottle that just looks dirty; its off-orange undertone was reminiscent of rancid tea. With the new chemo, Adriamycin (or, in Glynis-speak, “An Aging Mike Tyson,” which lent the drug a pugilistic punch), she’d finally lost most of her hair; when she’d kept a good bit of it with Alimta, they’d hoped that she’d be one of those lucky chemo patients whose locks were spared. There was something horribly naked about the scalp showing through, especially noticeable with the darkness of the few remaining strands. More than the cleavage of a gaping blouse, those bald patches were unnervingly intimate, like something others truly weren’t meant to see. She’d grown thin again, of course, but damned if she didn’t also seem shorter.
Carol’s forced exclamation, “Glynis, that dress is gorgeous!” at least beat Glynis, you look like shit!
Groggy, Glynis looked confused why other people were in the house. The bowl of corn chips on the table seemed to clue her in. “Oh, Carol, thanks. I hope you don’t mind if I don’t get up. You look lovely, too. You work so hard, but no one would ever know it. Always so fresh and—vital.”
It may not have been politic for Shep to notice, but Carol did indeed look lovely. Perhaps uneasy about outshining the hostess—Carol was like that; she would have considered the matter—she had clearly dressed down for the evening. Yet the just-threw-any-old-thing-on gambit had backfired. You could hardly blame the poor woman for looking her best at her simplest. The solid aqua shift only emphasized her willowy figure, and bound a bit across the breasts in a way that called attention to them. That was surely an accident, of course. The flimsy little sundress may have been a back-of-the-closet thing—it draped in those anatomically incorrect pleats distinctive to having wilted for months if not years on a hanger—and didn’t fit that well. But as a consequence the nipples poked noticeably behind the material, and it was hard not to stare. Glynis didn’t really have breasts anymore. The implicit contrast might have made any once equally handsome woman feel a little bitter. If so, his wife seemed to get the better of that bitterness with some success. In fact, no one but Shep could appreciate what an effort Glynis was making, though her voice was frail.
Jackson roistered in with a tray, the pitcher of margaritas brimming, the tumblers encrusted with too much salt. He had a careless side that had sometimes brought the friends to loggerheads when Jackson was still a jobbing handyman in Shep’s employ, and it was probably best for everyone, customers included, that he’d moved up to a managerial post. Everything Jackson did ran to excess.
“Shep tells me you’ve been prescribed a new cocktail,” he said, pouring Glynis a large measure. “Thought I’d oblige.”
Glynis did not appear to get the allusion. (Shep had been disappointed to discover that on a Darwinian level Nature regards a sense of humor as dispensable.) As Jackson poured the rest of the round, she looked at her glass as if at a photograph from better times. Glynis wasn’t supposed to drink much on An Aging Mike Tyson, which Jackson could have known had he asked. The glass did make a cheerful prop, though the fact that it was just that helped to underscore the theatrical quality of this whole event. They would execute the stage directions of Another Boisterous Dinner with Jackson and Carol, because no one had scripted whatever this was instead.
“You folks been following the schemozzle with Katrina?” Jackson introduced.
For once Shep was glad for current events, a formal Topic that would get them through the corn chips.
“Yeah, we’ve been keeping CNN on pretty much all day,” said Glynis.
She might have added that she was relishing Katrina. Glynis had always harbored a mischievous, dark aspect, but now it was no longer a mere aspect. She loved watching destruction—the big bountiful houses of the sort she and her husband had never bought for themselves filled with acrid, oily water to the second floor. The stranded black matriarchs waving fruitlessly on rooftops for rescue that would never come, who now knew they were alone in the world and no one cared. Well, he could sense Glynis responding coolly, welcome to the club. Other people’s suffering did not disquiet her. Glynis did nothing but suffer, and if others suffered too that was only fair. She seemed gratified by the prospect of one whole city that would not survive her. Had she her way, she might have clutched at others too, New York signally among them, to drag down with her to the bowels of the earth, like the end of Carrie. In a fell swoop of self-liberation, Glynis had relinquished her empathy for other people, defiantly reflecting back the very apathy about her own fate that she increasingly perceived in would-be well-wishers. She could tell, you know, however dutifully a few friends still attended her bedside, that they were relieved to leave.
“It’s been so awful, seeing all those people in New Orleans lose everything,” said Carol, her sympathy laudable but boring. “It pinched the budget a little, but I absolutely had to send a check to the Red Cross.”
“You’re kidding,” Jackson said sharply.
“Think of it as from my earnings if you have to,” said Carol. “I wouldn’t have been able to live with myself if I didn’t do something.”
“But we’ve already paid to ‘do something’!” her husband exclaimed.
“How do you figure that? It’s the whole point of having a country, isn’t it? To rally around, to lend each other a hand in hard times.”
“The whole point of having a government is to lend people a hand in hard times!” said Jackson, who had already powered through his first margarita. “That’s what taxes ought to be for. Sidewalks. And hurricanes!”
“And health insurance,” said Shep. “For a guy who claims he doesn’t believe in big government, you sure expect them to take care of a lot of shit.”
“No, I don’t. Like, I don’t expect to pour three billion dollars a week into a sandbox in the Middle East, or to carry half the fucking loafers in my own country on my back. But, yeah, if my pocket’s gonna be picked through legalized larceny, I want some pittance of a service in return. I don’t want my wife working a job she hates just so my kid can go to the hospital. And I expect if a whole city drowns because of more incompetent civic management of its levees, somebody from D.C. will give the poor fuckers a bottle of water, a fistful of crackers, and a lift to dry ground! It’s just one more example of the tiny handful of tasks that this monster of a government might be good for, and here they can’t even be bothered to hand those guys a towel.”
Shep might have been heartened by Jackson’s compassion for their hapless compatriots in Louisiana, save for the little gladness that palpably energized the tirade. The poorly concealed delight reminded him of Glynis. Their friend was all too grateful for any turn of events, no matter how dire, that serviced his beloved construct: those wily, rapacious Mooches leeching off the pea-brained, pushover Mugs. Whenever someone else’s misfortune validated your personal view of the world, maybe it was commonplace to feel more satisfaction than sorrow. But if Jackson’s was a standard weakness, it was a weakness still: a glorying in having been right all along, regardless of how many other people’s happiness had been sacrificed to prove it.
“It’s because they’re black,” said Carol. “They’re Democrats, if they vote at all.”
“Yeah, I know you think that, and everybody thinks that,” said Jackson. He dunked a celery stick in the dubious dip, took one bite, and slipped the remainder of the celery onto the table. “But I think it’s simpler than that, and creepier than that. You’ve got a government that’s really just a giant corporation, whose driving purpose is its own self-perpetuation and infinite enlargement. So it never occurs to them to help people. That’s not their business, helping people. Their business is helping themselves and their little contractor friends, period. In fact, mark my words, the clean-up will end up lining more crony contractor pockets, and when it’s over the contractors will be rich and the place will still look like a mud flat. Millions if not billions of dollars later, those poor bastards will still be living with shorted-out freezers reeking from rotting shrimp. Thomas Jefferson is rolling over in his grave, man. This country is a parody of what it was meant to be. A travesty.”
“Is there any place you think is better?” asked Shep.
“No,” Jackson said readily. “Of course not. They’re all the same. It’s human nature, man. You give anybody the power to take other people’s money, as much as they want, you think over time they’ll start taking less? Or work more for it, when they can get away with doing practically nothing? Governments are all the same, man. They eat their own countries until there’s nothing left. They’re cannibals.”
Carol rolled her eyes. “Right. So we shouldn’t have one. And we’d have no army to protect us, no one to defend our borders.”
You would think, being married to the man, Carol would have known better.
“A million Mexicans and Central Americans a year wading across the Rio Grande, and you think our borders are protected?” Jackson cried. “And that army of ours, this whole superpower shtick, makes us targets. Two guys walking down the street in Riyadh, one from the States and one from Lithuania. Who’s going to get kidnapped? The American! Which hotel in the Philippines is going to get suicide-bombed, the one that puts up locals, the one that caters to the Chinese, or the one renowned for drawing Americans? You think the towelheads are hot to blow up the Finns, or the Argentines, or the natives of New Guinea? The Japanese haven’t had an army since World War Two, and they’re snug as bugs.”
Shep was about to point out, “That’s because they’ve had the U.S. to back them up,” or to object that he’d seen somewhere that the Japanese had reversed all that and now maintained the fifth largest army in the world. But he stopped himself. He didn’t want to fuel this conversation, which didn’t seem headed anywhere he wanted to go. Kissing his wife on the forehead as an opportunity to straighten her hastily donned turban—she shot him a look of gratitude—he slipped off to turn the potatoes, and to lay the steaks on the grill.
The solitude of the backyard was a relief, the fountains’ trickle lending the plain crabgrass landscape the tranquility of a rock garden. It didn’t make much sense to invite folks over only to seize on an excuse to escape them. Still, Jackson’s railing at the heavens had changed. The words were the same, but the spirit was no longer jubilant, or playfully seditious; it was plain angry. None of that badinage altered the way the world worked an iota, so if it didn’t amount to genuine entertainment there wasn’t much point.
When Shep filtered back up to the porch, intending to poke his head in to ask how everyone wanted their steaks, Jackson had routed some printout from his pocket, which was always ominous. “A hundred years ago, we were the most prosperous country on earth, right? We had the largest middle class on earth, right? And we had no national debt. We also had none of the following taxes.”
Jackson smoothed out his sheaf, which was crumpled and creased, as if he’d given this performance more than once. Each time he reached the word tax he hit the table, turning the recitation into something between a poetry reading and a hip-hop concert. “Accounts receivable tax, building permit tax, commercial driver’s license tax, cigarette tax, corporate income tax, dog license tax, not to mention the big daddy of them all: federal income tax—”
As Jackson paused briefly to draw a breath, Shep registered that the list was alphabetical, and they’d barely made it through F.
“Federal unemployment tax, fishing license tax, food license tax, fuel permit tax, gasoline tax, hunting license tax, inheritance tax, inventory tax, IRS interest charges tax (that’s tax on tax), IRS penalties tax (more tax on tax), liquor tax, luxury tax—”
“Honey, that’s enough,” said Carol.
“Marriage license tax, Medicare tax, property tax—”
“Sweetie, we get the picture. Would you please give it a rest?”
“Road usage tax, recreational vehicle tax, sales tax, state income tax—”
“If you don’t shut up right now—!”
“School tax, service charge tax, Social Security tax—”
“—I swear I will drive right out of here without you!”
“Look, pumpkin, hang on one minute, would you? State unemployment tax, telephone federal excise tax—”
This time it was Carol who hit the table, with the full flat of her hand, and it was loud. “What are you so mad about, Jackson? Really? What is so terrible about your life?”
“Telephone federal, state, and local surcharge tax,” Jackson muttered quickly, absent the percussive theatrics.
“That’s it!” Carol stood up.
“Whoa, sit back down. We can skip the rest, then. I’m finished.”
“You bet you are,” she said, and remained standing, towering over her round-shouldered spouse. “So you can answer my question. You have a decent house. Your daughter has a genetic condition, but she’s at least still alive, isn’t she? You eat well,” she nodded at her husband’s gut, “a little too well. What do you want that you don’t have? Why do you feel so put-upon, so taken advantage of, so weak and sniveling and resentful? Who are all these other people you think are controlling your life, and why are they always winning? Why don’t you ever feel in control, why do you always feel defeated and impotent, and as your wife, do you expect me to find that attractive? Why don’t you feel like a man, Jackson? Why do you feel so—small?”
Jackson glared. Sloshing another margarita into his tumbler, he washed most of the remaining salt into the glass. Glynis and Shep looked away, embarrassed. Carol might sometimes plunge into the political fray, but she was usually the voice of reason, not to mention of kindness, and her tone erred merely on the side of the firm. For her to air dirty emotional laundry in front of friends was unprecedented.
The other three may have imagined that Shep streaked out the screen door because he refused to participate in hanging his best friend out to dry. But the truth was he’d been dying to read the same riot act to Jackson himself for years, and Carol’s what’s-your-problem was overdue. He’d never understood what fired Jackson from the inside, where the heat was from.
No, he’d just remembered the abandoned grill. When he reached the steaks, now less worthy for their table than for resurfacing a patio, he flooded with guilty remorse. The New York strips had trusted him. When he brought the platter of shrunken meat and charred potatoes back to the porch, Jackson was grumbling, “Nobody likes to be had. To be taken. It’s universal. You remember when that kid came to the door, offering to wash the windows for twenty bucks? You gave it to him, and he ran off on his bike. Never saw him again. You were hacked off. It wasn’t the twenty bucks, you admitted it yourself. It was being swindled.”
“I was angry at myself,” said Carol, who’d at least sat back down. “I’d been foolish.”
“Right, well that’s the way I feel. Made a fool of.”
“No, I didn’t feel made a fool of. I had been foolish. I deserved it.”
“Maybe I feel that way, too.” The couple shared a look.
After Shep fetched the salad from the fridge and opened the wine, Carol announced, “Jackson would like to apologize.”
“For what?” her husband protested.
“It’s okay, Carol,” said Glynis, pulling herself up in the caned armchair. “If he weren’t going on about taxes, he’d just be going on about something else.”
“But this is supposed to be a celebration,” Carol insisted. “Jackson seems to have forgotten why we’re here. But I haven’t. Both of us are so, so relieved you’re getting better, Glynis. I swear, when Shep told me about that CAT scan, I cried. So I’d like to propose a toast.” Carol raised her glass. “To recovery. To the miracle of modern medicine. To getting together like this for steaks and margaritas when Glynis is totally well again, and then maybe I’ll let Jackson bitch about taxes!”
It was a brave stab at reversing the fractious tone of this gathering, but neither Glynis nor Shep lifted a glass.
“Sorry, Carol,” said Shep. “We may have to drink to something a little more modest. To hopes for a raised white blood cell count or something.”
Carol looked from Shep to Glynis, and put her glass back down. “What’s wrong?”
“We got the results of another scan yesterday,” said Shep. “Last time, Goldman invited us to his office. So I guess I should have known that the news was …” He reconsidered terrible, then pretty terrible, as well as lousy and unsatisfactory, and finally discarded even bad. “That the news was less encouraging than last time when he preferred to tell us over the phone. I guess we’re lucky we didn’t get an email.”
“Which would have said?” asked Carol.
“That …” From the beginning, Shep had shunned euphemisms by policy, but under the circumstances he didn’t have the heart to use the word cancer one more time. “That the situation has advanced. In retrospect, I regret that we didn’t get to toast the last scan when we had the chance. This one—well, the results just aren’t so great.”
“It’s only a setback,” said Glynis staunchly.
“Yes,” said Shep. “That’s what I meant. We’ve had a setback.”
“It simply means that I may be on chemo a little bit longer,” said Glynis.
“Yes,” Shep recited. “It may mean that Glynis is on chemo a little bit longer.”
“Shit, that’s a drag,” said Jackson.
“I’m so sorry, that’s …” Carol seemed to be rifling her own mental thesaurus. “That’s disappointing. How dis—how much less encouraging is it?”
Shep tried to catch Carol’s eye, but she had directed the question to Glynis.
“It’s not as good as we’d hoped, that’s all,” Glynis said irritably. “But my tolerance of the An Aging—Adriamycin seems to be holding”—the cough, for illustrative purposes, was inopportune—”and there’s a whole slew of other drugs we haven’t tried yet, too.” She met Carol’s eyes with a challenge, until Carol lowered her gaze.
“Yes, the therapies available these days are amazing,” Carol conceded, eyes darting to her plate. “Everything I read says that cancer of every kind gets more survivable by the day. That more and more it’s just a disease that you have to manage, like lots of other chronic conditions that people live with: herpes, bad backs. I—I’m sure they can turn this thing around. Sometimes they have to find just the right drug, right? Experiment until they hit it.” Looking back up, she managed a smile. Carol was a great deal more astute than she seemed at first meeting. Within a minute or two, she’d got with the program.
Yet whenever there’s something you’re not talking about—Shep was damned if he understood how this worked—it became mysteriously impossible to talk about anything else, either. In no time as they chewed laboriously through their overcooked beef—Glynis didn’t touch hers—the foursome was at a loss for conversation.
“Glynis, can you not eat something?” Carol said tentatively after a maw of silverware clink. “It must be important to keep your strength up. And the beef may be on the well-done side, but it’s obviously of very high quality.”
Glynis poked at her steak. “I don’t want to get into the particulars at dinner. But I can’t look at anything like this without imagining how difficult it’ll be to … to get it out the other end.”
“Ah,” said Carol.
The steak knives made an unpleasant screeching sound when they sawed down to china. By now Shep wished that Jackson would bring up something usefully enraging, like the Alternative Minimum Tax. After another ten minutes during which, in a single desperate interjection, Carol admired the bottled salad dressing, he was tempted to bring up the AMT himself.