Shepherd Armstrong Knacker
Merrill Lynch Account Number 934-23F917
October 01, 2005 – October 31, 2005
Net Portfolio Value: $152,093.29
Throughout his adulthood, Shep had tried very hard not to sour on people. People he knew; people in general. But he was running out of excuses—for their network of friends who he’d hitherto blithely assumed were decent, generous, and thoughtful; for the halfhearted human race. Though it might not have been a great night, at least Jackson and Carol had finally shown up. That was more than Shep could say for most of the others. In fact, the people in Glynis’s life were proving so consistently disappointing that a choking misanthropy sometimes overcame him late at night, like a miasma from a broken sewer.
Back in March, Deb had been determined that Glynis should find salvation before it was too late. Ruby was committed to getting beyond old rivalries and advancing her relationship with her older sister to a “state of grace.” So Shep had anticipated at the time that his tolerance for his sisters-in-law might, over many months of repeated visits, be put to the test. He’d been prepared for Deb’s piety to wear thin, not to mention her latest fad diet. He knew she’d never stop trying to enlist his secular family in prayer for God’s mercy, or cease badgering his private, inward son to join her in thanksgiving for every extra day that God had granted the boy’s ailing mother. On frequent returns to Elmsford, Ruby’s rigidity might wear as well. He had envisioned getting a shade irked with the way she had to go for a run every single evening, when everyone else was ready to sit down to supper, and he’d sacrificed his own workout yet one more night to prepare it.
Should their visits coincide, he’d foreseen growing weary of watching the sisters vie with each other over who ate less. He was bound to grow impatient with Ruby’s always showing up her plump younger sister by taking only one scrawny drumstick if Deb took two. With Deb’s persistent wistfulness in regard to his wife’s poor appetite, Shep could see himself finally losing his temper—snapping that Glynis’s miserable portions weren’t any mark of superiority, but entailed an inadequate intake of calories, aka starvation, that could eventually kill her if the cancer didn’t. Broadly, he’d been a little worried that, after stays of increasing duration, his sisters-in-law would get on his nerves.
Never in a million years had he expected to be contending with quite the opposite problem: that following that initial rush to his wife’s bedside after her surgery, neither of her sisters would visit again.
All right, both siblings still phoned, but less and less often, and the frequency of these occasional calls had taken an especially sharp nosedive at precisely the point that their sister’s short-lived “recovery” gave way to a resumed deterioration. Meanwhile, at least Hetty continued to call every day, and so reliably at the same witching hour of 10:00 a.m. that you could set your watch by the phone.
In late September, after one call had limped through its fifteen-minute paces with Glynis even more cryptic and sullen than usual, she handed the phone to Shep. “My mother wants to talk to you. Be my guest.”
“Sheppy?” said Hetty, and he cringed. His mother-in-law’s voice had that injured, pouty inflection that Glynis despised, since it sounded more like one of Hetty’s own first-graders unjustly deprived of her lollypop than a retired teacher of seventy-two. In person she was prone to clutch his arm or drape his shoulders, and this puling intonation was the audio equivalent. The fact that she adored “Sheppy” the ideal son-in-law (i.e., that wonderful man who paid for everything) had long driven a wedge between him and Glynis.
“I try so hard to let Glynis know that throughout this time of tribulation I’m there for her. But she can be so—snippy! I know she’s very ill, and I try to take that into account, but …” Hetty began to sniffle. “Just now, she was terribly cruel!”
“You know she doesn’t mean it, Hetty.” Of course Glynis meant it. Whatever she’d said, she meant it and more.
“I’m sorry to have to ask …” He could hear her blowing her nose, could picture one of the ragged reused tissues that populated her housecoats. “But does Glynis want me to call? Does she want to talk to me at all? Because she certainly doesn’t act like it! I don’t want to intrude if my reaching out isn’t welcome.”
Once he’d got his mother-in-law off the phone, Glynis had flown into a fit whose script he knew by heart. “This constant tugging on my sleeve … She’s always trying to get something from me, and I don’t have it! I’ve never had it, and now of all times I really don’t have it! She doesn’t call for me; she calls for herself! I’m supposed to reassure her what a wonderful mother she was, over and over, but she wasn’t, and I won’t and I can’t! I’m supposed to entertain her and comfort her and come up with something to fill all that dead air time day after day after day, and the imposition is outrageous! For pity’s sake, she’s a black hole! Now that for one of the first times in my life, I could actually use a mother! Not another dependent, another problem, another demand, another drain, but a real mother!”
Fortunately flying into a rage had so worn Glynis out that she collapsed on the kitchen love seat and got some sleep. He was glad that she hadn’t pressed him about what Hetty had asked, since he’d not have enjoyed taking the heat for his reply.
Walking with the phone to the back porch, he’d urged Hetty to keep calling. Every day. To not get discouraged, to attribute her daughter’s frequent lashings out to the illness, to absorb all manner of insults and cross remarks and to decline to react. Implicitly, to rise to a level of maturity that she hadn’t a hope in hell of attaining if she was still this far shy at seventy-two. Just who needed whom in that embattled relationship was forever a bone of contention. But the simplest answer was that they needed each other. Glynis hated those phone calls, and actively dreaded them. But if 10:00 a.m. ever came and went without a call from her mother, she would be devastated.
That said? Hetty may have been “there for” her daughter, but she wasn’t here for her daughter. Since that first trip in March, even Glynis’s own mother hadn’t returned to Elmsford. Not once. Shep was incredulous. Moreover, a systematic withdrawal from his wife and her icky might-give-me-cooties cancer was hardly exclusive to her immediate family. It was universal.
Glynis’s cousins, nieces and nephews, neighbors (save the indefatigable Nancy), and most shockingly of all her friends had rung up less and less frequently, speaking more and more briefly. They had all spaced their visits more and more widely, and withstood his wife’s company a steadily shorter period of time.
Shep knew all the standard lines. About not wanting to tax her, or bother her, or interrupt her sleep. About never knowing whether she might be in the hospital, or undergoing chemo, or knocked out from a recent dose. Warned that Glynis was not to be exposed to infections, some friends broke multiple appointments in succession with nagging colds. They were only being considerate. Other excuses were so impressively creative that it would have taken far less effort to skip the arcane explanations to her husband after months of silence than to give the poor woman a buzz.
According to Zach, the Eigers—parents of one of Zach’s regular “hangs,” and Fourth of July barbeque/Christmas Party friends for many years—were so caught up in coaching their older son for the SATs that the exhausting trip from Irvington six miles away was out of the question, though that was a distance Zach regularly traversed on his bike. It went without saying—or at least nobody said it—that these rigorous tutoring sessions by both parents during every available hour of the day must also have precluded so time-consuming and debilitating a gesture as a phone call.
Marion Lott, the owner of Living in Sin with whom Glynis had grown quite chummy while gossiping through her ridiculous employment, had been attentive for a while. Apologizing that Glynis probably wasn’t up for chocolate herself, at first Marion had shown up at the door with a bag of misshapen truffles for Zach and Shep, along with a fruit basket for the patient. But the care packages, and the visits that delivered them, had entirely dribbled off by May. So when in early October Shep ran into Marion at CVS—he was looking for more enema capsules for Glynis—the chocolatier launched into a nervous burble about how busy the shop had become and how they were getting orders now from as far away as Chicago, and then one of her employees got pregnant and had terrible morning sickness, and you know how unpleasant it would be in that case to be around the smell of chocolate, so now she was shorthanded … Oh, and Shep should know the replacement mold-maker had not proven nearly as skillful as Glynis, nor did she have the same sense of line or sense of humor, so he should please tell his marvelous wife how much she was missed … He might have taken pity on the woman and tried to stop her, but pity toward these people didn’t come easily now. With conscious sadism, he let her go on for what must have been a good five minutes. It was a certain style of excuse, the kitchen-sink style, a messy and exhausting approach generally taken by people who weren’t very good at lying. The verbal incontinence was at least a giveaway that she felt guilty.
By contrast, the Vinzanos opted for the big, clean, sweeping excuse that was at least efficient. Glynis had met Eileen Vinzano back when they were both teaching courses in the Fine Arts Department at Parsons, which dated their friendship with Eileen and her husband Paul back more than twenty years. But Shep couldn’t remember having heard from either of them since he’d phoned to deliver the lowdown on the surgery. Not long after he ran into Marion, Eileen finally placed a hasty call, claiming that she and Paul had been out of the country since June.
The tone in which she asked after his wife’s health was uneasy. She was afraid that she’d called too late. Clearly she was braced for something delicately put like, “I’m so sorry to have to tell you this, Eileen, but Glynis passed in September.” (Passed, that’s the idiom she’d expect. As if his wife hadn’t died in agony but had simply walked in front of the house.) He told her instead that Glynis was hanging in there, and explained that they were now on their third cocktail of chemo. But when he offered to put Glynis herself on the phone, Eileen panicked. “No, no, do let her rest!” she’d urged with something close to terror—and what were these people afraid of? “Just please give her my best.”
If one transitive five-minute call since March amounted to Eileen’s “best,” he would hate to see her worst. After all, even for a roving foreign correspondent, five months was a long time to be “out of the country;” Paul was based at ABC in New York. This wasn’t the only dubiously vague explanation Shep was repeatedly offered by “good” friends who had virtually disappeared. Flatly, late on Halloween night he booted his computer solely to copy his medical-update notification list of “Close Friends” and paste it into “Not So Close.” The “Close Friends” file he deleted.
In his more charitable daytime incarnation, Shep conceded that any number of these people had already given emotive testimonies to how important Glynis had been to them. How enormously they admired her work. How much her whole life had been characterized by an elegance and sense of flair. How fondly they remembered this and that event … By delivering impassioned, grandiloquent orations that, as Glynis had noted with such outrage, could have doubled as eulogies, previous visitors had painted themselves into a dramatic corner. It was theatrically unnatural to go from grand proclamations of love and admiration to chitchat about how it looks as if they’re finally going to repave Walnut Street. Multiplied by a factor of ten, the subsequent awkwardness resembled the poor stagecraft of having said florid farewells after a dinner party—flashy, stylish farewells of the kind on which you rather congratulate yourself in the car—only to realize that you’ve left a sweater behind. You have to sheepishly ring the doorbell while your hosts are loading the dishwasher. Voilà, all the stylishness and waggishness and lavish gratitude of your original parting is replaced with a hangdog shuffle in the foyer while they wipe greasy hands on a dish towel and search for your wrap. It was, he supposed, always difficult with the mortally ill to arrange to leave the relationship on a high note. The only gambit that guaranteed a movingly climactic parting was to deliver your tender, tearful, well-rehearsed little speech and then never come back.
Besides, what did you say to Glynis, once medical inquiries were exhausted? She didn’t want to hear about how great your life was, and she was wildly intolerant of complaint. The events of her own life had contracted to the events of the body: inflammations on her arms where the chemo leaked from the cannula and burned her skin; chest drains to suck up the pleural fluid that made it hard for her to breathe; fatigue that got slightly better or paralyzingly worse but never lifted altogether; rashes and swellings and the curious striations in her darkened nails. These were the stories she had to tell, and they were depressing and monotonous to Glynis herself.
Visitors seemed to sense accurately as well that mooting current events—the president’s dubious nomination of his own lawyer to the Supreme Court, the haughty, long-winded speeches that Saddam Hussein was allowed to deliver at his war crimes trial in Iraq—was like bringing up the fascinating configurations of rocks on the moon. Aside from casual schadenfreude in relation to folks who’d also been rained on by a cloud of doom, like the dispossessed in New Orleans, Glynis did not evidence any awareness of the world beyond the confines of their modest house. After all, the average Issue of the Day derived its urgency from the fact that it was really an Issue of Tomorrow: climate change, the degradation of American infrastructure, a rising deficit. You only cared about any of this stuff if you also cared that someday San Francisco could slide into the Pacific, that dozens of cars might before long plummet off a collapsing bridge on I-95, or that your country might soon be owned entirely by China. But Glynis wasn’t troubled by any of these advents. The first two struck her as cheerful. As for the latter stoop sale for the entire United States, well, as far as she was concerned the Chinese could have it.
For the biggest tipoff that she was not in as much denial as she feigned was that Glynis had no interest in the future. That left everyone pretty much stumped. When you weren’t interested in the future you weren’t interested in the present, either. Which left the past, and she really wasn’t interested in that. (The sole exception to this overarching apathy was anything regarding their ongoing case against Forge Craft. The suit always stirred a look in her eyes that Shep recognized from nature shows—when, jaws open and gaze fixed, a panther is poised to pounce on live prey. But Shep avoided raising the subject. His wife’s driving motivator made him queasy: vengeance, and of the most indiscriminate sort.)
Lastly, to be fair—Shep did not feel like being fair, but seeing things from other people’s perspective was a lifelong habit—Glynis was difficult. A variety of subjects was no-go. One subject in particular was circumscribed by heavy red lines, with Do Not Enter signs bristling at every approach. The problem was that under the circumstances this was a big subject, arguably the main subject or even the only subject. As he’d noted at the end of that somewhere between plain failed and outright awful dinner with Carol and Jackson, whenever there was something you weren’t talking about, you couldn’t talk about anything else, either. Thus these visits seemed to skate along on artifice; they did not seem real; they had a pandering quality, a patronizing quality, and, well, a lying quality that was all Glynis’s fault.
But that was as far as his sympathy could extend. Once it stretched this distance it always bungee-corded back to the bleak impression that the duration of his wife’s illness had simply exceeded their compatriots’ famously short attention spans. Mesothelioma having lost its novelty value, she had become one big enough-already. Just as most of them couldn’t run two circuits around a football field without collapsing to the bleachers, their friends and family alike had poor emotional endurance.
Shep was born to a country whose culture had produced the telephone, the flying machine, the assembly line, the Interstate highway, the air-conditioner, and the fiber-optic cable. His people were brilliant with the inanimate—with ions and prions, with titanium and uranium, with plastic that would survive a thousand years. With sentient matter—the kind that can’t help but notice when a confidant suddenly drops off the map the moment the friendship becomes inconvenient, disagreeable, demanding, and incidentally also useful for something at last—his countrymen were inept. It was as if no one had ever sickened before. Ever languished before, ever confronted you-know-what. As if mortality were one of those silly superstitions, like the conviction that one must always drink eight glasses of water a day, that had now been summarily debunked in the Health section of Tuesday’s Science Times.
Because there was no protocol. The bravest face he could put on this baffling social attrition was that these people had never been taught how to behave in relation to a whole side of life—the far side—that had been staring them in the face since they had a face. Maybe their mothers had taught them not to eat with their elbows on the table or never to chew with their mouths open. But no parent had ever sat them down to explain that this is what you do and say when someone you at least claim to care about is deathly ill. It wasn’t in the curriculum. Grim solace, many of these shabby specimens of the species would confront the same oops-just-remembered-there’s-somewhere-I-gotta-be when they got sick. But by then they would feel too wretched themselves to spare feeling badly in retrospect about having turned their backs on Glynis Knacker in 2005.
With an acrid taste in his mouth, Shep sometimes recalled the fulsome offers of assistance with which friends and family had met the initial bad news. The Eigers had encouraged him to let them know anything they could do to lighten his load, but had never made an unsolicited gesture of any kind; surely they realized that he would never ask them to escort Glynis to her chemotherapy, to sit with her by the padded armchair for hours. Eileen Vinzano had gone on at length about how she could help Shep keep the house clean. Nothing would be too lowly, she swore, not even toilets or kitchen floors. But that was before the Vinzanos went “out of the country.” Meantime, he’d been obliged to hire a Hispanic girl to come in once a week to do the cleaning he couldn’t keep up with, and Eileen had yet to break a nail on a toilet brush. A former neighbor in Brooklyn, Barbara Richmond, had proposed a regular regime of dropping by whole prepared dinners that had only to be popped into the microwave, a virtually full-time catering service that had reduced in the end to one pie. Glynis’s first cousin Lavinia had declared that she’d be glad to move in for weeks at a time! Just so they had someone on hand to run errands and keep Glynis company. Naturally she had never ensconced herself in Amelia’s room, and she’d been MIA since April. Did these people remember having made those extravagant offers in the first flush of rash compassion? If they did remember, did they imagine that Shep himself had forgotten? He was not by nature a grudge bearer, but he had not forgotten.
Of course, as letdowns went, Beryl was in a class by herself. An additional $8,300 per month for their father’s nursing home was accelerating the ravagement of Shep’s resources. Even assuming that he was hardhearted enough to contemplate such a prospect, the Merrill Lynch account was now much too depleted to finance a solo retirement to Pemba or anywhere else. The issue was now covering the co-pays, co-insurance, and prescription charges for Glynis’s treatment, period. So on the phone with Beryl in early November he hazarded the notion that they might have to start thinking about transferring their father from Twilight Glens to a public home. He might as well have suggested sending the man to Auschwitz.
“Those public homes are cesspools!” Beryl shrieked. “They let you lie for days in your own shit, and then you get bedsores. Public homes are always understaffed, and the nurses are sadistic. The food is awful, if you’re lucky enough to get any, since some of these biddies are so neglected that they starve to death. You can forget any facilities like at Twilight—no rec rooms, no physical therapy machines. They don’t have any events—no classes, no sing-alongs. Maybe a few magazines, and that’s about it.”
“Well, besides a steady supply of detective novels, about all Dad really requires is a stack of newspapers and a pair of scissors.”
“But these public places are like Dumpsters for the elderly! Old ladies in wheelchairs slumped in hallways with their mouths open, drooling on their nighties and mumbling about how tonight they’re going to the prom with Danny because they think it’s still 1943. You’d do that to your own father? He’d never forgive you, and neither would I.”
Personally Shep suspected that the difference between public and private care was exaggerated. He’d seen plenty of dementia at Twilight, and plenty of drool there, too. Unless he was leading the congregation in a rendition of the Doxology, Gabriel Knacker would never participate in any “sing-along” in the most palatial of institutions. Nevertheless, Beryl’s grim image had popular currency. So he’d not have minded that she conjured the stereotype had it truly been fear for their father’s misery that had brought the picture to life. Nor would he have minded her insisting so strenuously on continuing private care if Beryl were helping to pay for it.
He did mind that her righteous defense of their father’s comfort hailed from somewhere else. The sole purpose of the transfer he’d suggested was to shift the fiscal burden to the public purse. It was his own fault that she knew the sequence of events that would accomplish this modern financial miracle, because he’d told her himself in July. To qualify Dad for Medicaid, first and foremost they’d have to sell the house. Or, as she surely alluded to the structure out of his hearing, her house. (Maybe Jackson’s idea was technically feasible: simply refusing to pay Twilight and letting the cogs of bureaucracy creak along until the government seized the property. After all, to his quiet amazement, Shep and Beryl had no legal obligation to care for their father or to pay his bills. Yet that wasn’t the way Shep Knacker had ever conducted his affairs. Walking out on his obligations and expecting someone else to clean up the mess seemed sloppy, disrespectful, negligent, and irresponsible. He was, Shep thought wryly, who he was.) The proceeds of the property sale would go to nursing home fees until their father was officially indigent. Bye-bye free digs, bye-bye inheritance—and that was the source of the outrage piping through the telephone.
Still, Shep lacked the resolve to fight her. He had his own misgivings about public nursing homes, and a strong sense of filial duty. Twilight was probably nicer. Dad might not have liked it there much, but he was at least getting used to it. Besides, were Shep to keep hemorrhaging $99,600 per annum a juncture would rapidly arrive at which he would not pay for Twilight not because he was a bad son but because he did not have the money. Obviously, it was wasteful to spend down his own last remaining dime before ending up in the exact same place: shifting Dad out of Twilight, liquidating the pension fund, selling the house. Yet in its simplicity, perfect helplessness might prove a blessing. Jackson was surely right, that in a country that confiscated up to half of your earnings, and that demanded an additional backhander every time you did anything from buy a screwdriver to go fishing, you were not truly free. But in that case, there was a genuine liberty to be found in going broke.
Meanwhile, Shep tried to talk to his father roughly twice a week. The broken femur seemed to be mending, slowly. But for the first half of November the phone at his father’s bedside rang unanswered. Rather than talk directly to Twilight staff, he made the mistake of getting the medical lowdown from Beryl. All she said was that he seemed to be losing weight. Or that’s what the staff must have said, since that was the same phone call in which Beryl had announced that she was “on strike.”
“You can’t expect me to keep visiting him all the time. It’s not fair. Just because I’m nearby I shouldn’t have to take on that whole burden. Really, Shep, I’m starting to feel used. I can’t take it. Visiting is too depressing. I have a film to edit, and I have to protect my, you know, chi.”
“How often do you regard as ‘visiting all the time’?”
“I’m just not into it, Shepardo. All I hear about when I do go is why I haven’t been to see him in so long, when it seems like I just saw him, like, that morning. If you think it’s so important for him to enjoy the constant attentions of family, you’re going to have to come up here once in a while yourself.”
Shep sighed. “Do you have any idea what I’m dealing with here?”
“We’re both dealing with stuff. And he’s your father, too.”
He reluctantly promised to try to make it back up to New Hampshire soon. As they wrapped up the call, Beryl raised, “Before I forget, what’s the deal with the heating? I just got some, I don’t know, eviction notice type thing from the gas company.”
“I transferred the bill to your name. I’m sure I mentioned that.”
“Well, to my name, fine, but you don’t expect me to pay it?”
He took a deep breath. “Yes, I do.”
“Do you know how much it costs to heat this place during the winter?”
“Of course I do. I’ve been paying the fuel bills for years.”
“Look, I’m doing the house-sitting. House-sitters aren’t expected to cover utilities. Sometimes they’re even paid to take care of places.”
“You want me to put you on salary?” Shep asked incredulously. Beryl had nimbly inverted her co-optation of the family home into a big favor. It was just the kind of ingenuity in his sister that had always wowed him.
“I don’t have the money for the gas bill, period. So unless you want me sitting here with icicles in my nose while I burn the furniture to keep from perishing, you’re going to have to send them a check.”
Beryl had discovered the giddy liberation of penury years ago. He was envious.
Shep headed up to Berlin Thanksgiving weekend, planning only one Saturday overnight. The traffic coming home would be horrific, but at least an evening visit and another Sunday morning during a season of traditional family get-togethers might temporarily alleviate his father’s sense of abandonment.
Twilight Glens was no country club, but it looked clean; perhaps the slight fecal whiff penetrating the astringent disinfectant was inevitable in any facility caring for the old and sick. For that matter, like the blackened Victorian hospital of his childhood, the institution might have benefitted from a few streaks of grime, which would have provided the plain square building a little character. As it was, Twilight had been given an architectural lobotomy. In fact, Shep was impressed. Surely such a perfect dearth of identity constituted as much of an achievement in the physical world as it would have in the social sphere, were an individual to succeed in generating no personality whatsoever. The lobby and hallways were decorated with potted plants and anodyne prints. The linoleum was bright and beige. Private rooms were trimmed in blond polished maple. The effect was dreamscape. After all, some nights your mind simply wasn’t up to contriving one more backdrop with satisfying symbolism, and Twilight was the kind of non-place where your brain sets forgettable, second-rate adventures: those aimless confabulations with poor logic, distortions of passing acquaintances who don’t matter to you, and frustrated searches for a bathroom.
At least when Shep spotted his father from the hallway, the old man wasn’t catatonic or burbling about his upcoming high school prom, but was propped in bed wearing his reading glasses, intently underscoring a passage in The New York Times. Terrific: business as usual. But when Shep went in and kissed his father’s cheek, he was unnerved. The weight loss was more dramatic than he’d been prepared for. Shep had had enough of living in the fattest country in the world while watching the people he most cared about evaporate.
“What’s the article about?” asked Shep, pulling up a chair. The bedside table was layered with clippings, just as he’d imagined.
“About how much these blasted CEOs are getting paid. Millions, tens of millions a year! It’s obscene. While the rest of the world is starving.” Stahving. Unlike his son, Gabe Knacker had clung gladly to his Hampster accent.
“Yeah, well, in case you’re wondering, I didn’t pay myself tens of millions of dollars a year when I ran Knack.” This was as close as he would come to alluding to Twilight’s price tag, about which his father had never inquired. The Reverend seemed under the convenient illusion that the government was still picking up the tab.
“In my view,” his father growled, “no single human being can be so gosh-darned important” (impahtent) “that he’s worth ten million a year. Not one soul, not even the president. Well—especially this president.”
“But if you think there’s a limit to how much you should pay any one person as a salary,” Shep speculated, “is there also a limit to how much you should pay to keep any one person alive?”
His father grunted, the rivulets in his furrowed forehead deeper and more numerous than in July.
Shep laughed. “I’m sorry. I meant that abstractly. It’s not like Beryl and I are trying to decide whether your existence is cost-effective.”
“I didn’t take it personally. It’s a good question is all. What a life is worth, in dollars. When resources aren’t infinite, which they never are. When money spent on one person isn’t spent on another.”
(Pahsonally … what a life was wahth … resahses aunt infinite … isn’t spent on anuthuh—music to Shep’s ears, in which a N’ Hampshah accent was the very soundtrack of earthiness and probity.)
“It’s not as neat as that,” said Shep. “Like, if Twilight Glens saves five bucks by giving you generic ibuprofen instead of Advil, the money doesn’t end up in Nairobi Hospital. But … the question still bothers me.”
“Glynis.”
“Yes.”
“You don’t have any choice. You have to do everything in your power to help your wife.”
“That is the … expectation.”
“But theoretically,” said his father, sitting up straighter and putting on a display of vigor that Shep hoped was not an act, “how would you arrive at a number? You’re allowed to spend a hundred thousand dollars on a single life, but not a hundred thousand and one?” (The Reverend’s citation of this laughably small figure elicited a wan smile from his son.) “And the wealthy will always be able to circumvent any limits. You cap expenditure on health care, you really only cap it for poor people.”
His father was still sharp, and Shep thought, this is the kind of conversation that I’ll miss when he’s gone.
“More importantly,” Gabriel added, “how is Glynis?”
“The chemo is wearing her down. She’s always angry, and at this point that’s a good sign. It’s when she stops being angry that I’m afraid of.”
“There’s nothing to fear.” Feeyuh. “She’ll have to make her peace: with herself, with you, and with all her friends and family. I know it’s hard to see it this way, but grave illness is an opportunity of sorts. An opportunity you don’t get when you’re run over by a bus. She has a chance to reflect. A chance to turn to God, though I’m not holding my breath for that. Certainly a chance to say all the things that she wouldn’t want to go unsaid before she’s gone. In the strangest way, she’s fortunate. I hope for both your sakes that this is a time you’re very close.”
“I doubt Glynis thinks of cancer as ‘an opportunity.’ Although I’m damned if I know what she does think. She doesn’t talk about it, Dad. As far as I can tell, she still believes she’s undergoing chemo to get better. There’s none of this—saying of last things. Is that normal?”
“In this area, there is no normal.” Nahmal. “And what would it matter if she were abnormal, when that’s the way she is? People hold onto life with more ferocity than you have any idea. Or maybe you do have an idea now.”
“She’s always been so honest. Scathingly so. Frighteningly so. And now, with the biggest thing she’s ever had to be honest about …”
“Remember: you don’t know what it’s like. I may have broken my leg and had a scare,” scayuh, “but I still don’t know what it’s like, either. Neither of us will until it happens to us. You have no idea how you might react. Maybe in the very same way. Withhold thy judgment.” Gabriel’s tone wryly mocked his own sermons, and Shep was glad of any inclination toward the withholding of judgment, with which his father had always cudgeled him in the past.
“There’s one other thing I wanted to ask you,” said Shep. “When you were a minister. You’d have had plenty of dealings with folks who were ill. In your day, were people … good about that? Attentive? Did they stick by each other? And I mean, to the end. The whole ugly, bitter end.”
“Some did, some didn’t. For me, it was my job to stick by them. One of the things the ministry is good for—even if you don’t give it much credence yourself.” The admonishment was almost welcome. It issued from the father he remembered, and in Twilight that was a relief. “Why do you ask?”
“People … her friends, even immediate family. They’ve—lots of them have deserted her. I’m embarrassed for them. And this disappearing act so many folks have pulled, well, it hurts her feelings, even if she pretends that she’s glad to be left alone. I’m very discouraged. I wonder if people have always been so—weak. Disloyal. Spineless.”
“Christians accept a duty to care for the sick. Most of my parishioners took that commitment seriously. Your secular friends only have their own consciences to prod them, and that’s not always enough. There’s no substitute for deeply held beliefs, son. They call you to your finest self. Tending the sick is hard work, and it’s not always pretty; I don’t need to tell you that now. When you’re relying on some flimsy notion that coming by with a casserole would be thoughtful”—an odd spasm of concern crossed the old man’s face, and he briefly closed his eyes—”that tuna bake may not … may not make it to the oven.”
“Dad, are you okay?”
Reaching for a buzzer, his father said, “I’m sorry, son, I know you just got here. But you’re going to have to leave me alone for a minute with the aide.”
A few awkward minutes passed, while his father curled in acute concentration and couldn’t talk. Bedpan in tow, a Filipino bustled in, wearing whites ill-suited to her purpose. Shep waited in the hall. She came out a while later with a ball of sheets. A watery brown stain betrayed that she hadn’t arrived in time.
“Fifteen times a day if it’s once,” Gabriel grumbled in fresh pajamas when Shep returned. “You imagine a body gets used to this, think again. It’s humiliating.”
Shep stirred uneasily, and moved his chair a few extra inches from the bed. “You pick up some sort of bug?”
“You could say that. A bug the size of a small dog. Clostridium difficile. Or c-diff, as it’s affectionately known around here.”
“What’s that?”
“One of those infections that take hold of whole hospitals. Half the patients in this institution have it. Nurses wash their hands here like Macbeth, which far as I can tell doesn’t make a darned bit of difference. Notice, even in the hallway? It smells. They’re pumping me full of antibiotics, but so far that’s like trying to shoot an elephant with a pop gun. Gotta lick this thing, too, since it’s the biggest obstacle to my going home.”
The even bigger obstacle was Beryl, but Shep had other matters on his mind. He stood up, hands held from his side, fingers extended, trying to remember every surface he’d touched since he came in. “I can’t apologize enough, Dad. But I have to go.”
In the hallway men’s room, Shep sudsed his hands for minutes, and on up the arm, turning the taps on and off with a paper towel whose dispenser he had cranked with the tail of his shirt. He used the same shirttail to open the restroom door.
“You asked—I should say demanded—that I come up here to visit Dad,” he charged Beryl after his twenty-minute shower back at the house. “Before I obliged, why didn’t you tell me he had one of those hospital infections?”
“What does it matter?”
“These superbug strains are antibiotic-resistant. I can’t be exposed to something like that!”
Beryl looked perplexed. “You’re pretty healthy. It’s mostly old people who are at risk. I can see being worried about Dad, but I don’t understand why you’re so worried on your own account. It’s a small risk to take for the sake of your own father.”
“Even if I didn’t come down with it, I could become a carrier!”
“Well, that’s not great I guess, but so … ?”
“Glynis. Remember her? My wife. Glynis’s immune system is shattered. Something like c-diff could kill her.”
“Christ, you’re being awfully melodramatic.”
“I’ll show you melodramatic,” said Shep, and stalked back out to his car.
He arrived back home at 5:00 a.m. on Sunday, and took another shower. He threw his clothes in the washer and turned both wash and rinse temperatures to the maximum. He felt badly about trying to expunge any remnant of his own father’s person, but this was no time to be sentimental. He helped himself to a backup prescription for antibiotics that Glynis kept on hand for emergency infections, and popped two pills before curling on the couch downstairs for a couple of restless hours’ sleep. He was at war with himself. His stool wasn’t loose; in fact, he was constipated, and the bready fast food on the drive to New Hampshire should make matters worse. The idea of keeping a physical distance from Glynis was intolerable. But if there was any risk …
He couldn’t afford for his wife to be afraid of him; he was her primary nurse. Thus once Glynis woke, surprised to find him home so soon, he explained that after a long, fruitful but, for his father, tiring visit, he’d headed back last night to avoid holiday traffic. When he neither kissed nor touched her she didn’t seem to notice, though his standoffishness may have registered on an unconscious level. So he was especially pleased on her behalf that for once that afternoon she was expecting a visitor.
Petra Carson had stopped by more doggedly than most of his wife’s friends, in spite of the fact that Glynis’s old rival from Saguaro Art didn’t have a car, and had to take the train from Grand Central. She always insisted on a taxi to and from the station, too, mortified by putting Shep to extra trouble.
He didn’t mean to eavesdrop, but because of Thanksgiving Isabel hadn’t given the house its regular Thursday once-over last week. So once he led Petra up to the bedroom where Glynis was resting, he went back to cleaning the bathroom down the hall. (Glynis’s last enema had been messy.) Petra must have left the bedroom door ajar, since their conversation was audible even over the TV that Glynis kept on low now all day.
Shep had always liked Petra. Glynis might have found her colleague’s work glib and conventional, but the woman herself had a seriousness and social rebelliousness that he admired. (Her second marriage at forty-seven was to a boy of twenty-five.) Thus it wouldn’t come naturally to Petra to observe her friend’s implicit Do Not Enter signs; they were, she would shrug, only signs. She put him in mind of Jed, Shep’s tear-away next-door neighbor in boyhood. They’d been exploring one afternoon, and came across a fenced field—what Hampsters called puckerbrush—with “No Trespassing” plastered all over it. “We can’t go in there,” Shep had said, and Jed said, “Why not?” Shep said, “It says, ‘No Trespassing,’” and Jed said, “So?” And lifted the wire. That little moment had been a revelation: when he ducked under the wire and nothing happened. Apparently rules have only as much power as you accord them. Well, Petra was a lift-the-wire type. Having advanced to the perimeter of her friend’s no-go area, she ducked right in.
“So what’s it like?” he heard Petra ask. “How does it feel? What do you find yourself thinking?”
“What’s what like?” Glynis was not going to help.
“I don’t know … Facing the inevitable, I guess.”
“The inevitable,” Glynis repeated sourly. “Are you not facing it, too?”
“Abstractly.”
“It’s anything but abstract.”
“Well, of course. And of course, yes, we’re all in the same leaky boat, I suppose.”
“Then you tell me what it’s like.”
“You sure don’t make it any easier, do you?”
“It’s not easy for me,” Glynis snapped. “Why should I make it easy for you?”
“I just don’t think we should spend this time—this limited time—talking about rivets.”
“That’s the way we spent the other time: on rivets. It was the same time—our time, our ‘limited time,’ all there is. If it’s wasteful now, it was wasteful then. So according to you, we should have been getting together all those afternoons to talk about death.”
“That might have been a different kind of waste.”
“Well, go ahead then. If that’s what you want. Talk about death. I’m all ears.”
“I … Sorry, I don’t know what to say.” Petra sounded embarrassed.
“I didn’t think so. Why should I know, then?”
When Glynis raised the volume of the TV Shep could no longer make out their conversation. He suspected that this pervasive belligerence, aggression, and at times overt hostility greeted many of his wife’s remaining visitors, which would obviously run some of them off for good.
When Petra emerged twenty minutes later, he invited her downstairs for coffee. She declined the coffee, but said she could definitely use a “debrief,” and collapsed onto the living room couch. He was glad she wasn’t calling for a taxi right away. Jackson had become so dark and intermittently silent and then explosive that Shep had cut a wide berth since that dinner. He didn’t have many people to talk to.
“God, it’s hot in here,” she said, flapping her shirt. “That’s why coffee is the last thing I need. What is it, eighty, eighty-five?”
“Glynis gets cold. How about a beer, then?”
“That’s the ticket, thanks. But Jesus, keeping the whole house this warm must cost you a fortune!”
“Yes, it does.” He was always impressed when anyone acknowledged the side of this nightmare that was supposed to be incidental.
He fetched them each a Brooklyn Brown Ale. Petra wasn’t a bad-looking woman for over fifty, even wearing a button-down burned with acid holes and baggy jeans splashed with flux: studio togs. Like so many metalsmiths who fashioned adornments, she never wore jewelry. Her hair was frazzled, her nails jagged and black. Her palms were creased in crimson, from the polishing compound called rouge—the closest thing she wore to makeup. Petra was one of those people who didn’t seem to care about her appearance, or beyond that; who didn’t seem aware of being seen. A rare quality, and refreshing.
“So—can she hear me down here?” Petra asked quietly.
“No. The chemo has done a number on her hearing.”
“She’s not looking good, Shep.”
“It’s getting pretty grim,” he admitted.
“I guess I want to apologize. I should really apologize to Glynis, but I don’t think she’d let me. She won’t let me talk about anything, really, and when I try, she gets mad.”
“It’s not only you. And if you think that’s mad, try mentioning Forge Craft.”
“What’s up with that asbestos suit, anyway?”
“We’ve had lots of foot-dragging delay tactics from Forge Craft; only to be expected. But what’s keeping the case from going forward right now is Glynis. She has to give a deposition, and then be subject to cross-examination from the company’s lawyers. A couple of times the deposition has had to be rescheduled because it was too close to chemo and Glynis felt too sick. But a couple of other times she seemed well enough—or as well as she was going to get—and she still insisted on putting it off.”
“I can understand procrastinating. It doesn’t sound like a lot of fun. All that pressure on her to remember everything just so, to not get mixed up, when she’s talking about thirty years ago. Funny, though, how clearly she seems to recall those products we worked with. I mean, we were in the same metal classes. To me, the tools, the supplies, and the materials are all a blur. I sure as hell don’t remember any tiny printed purple flowers with green stems on the heat-proof mitts, that’s for sure.”
“I don’t want to ruin your day, but theoretically you could have been exposed to asbestos at Saguaro, too.”
“Yeah, that’s occurred to me. Except that I have this weird memory …”
“Of what?”
“Oh, never mind. It can’t be right. I must be confused. Glynis obviously has keener powers of recall than I do.” Petra took a long slug of her beer, and slid the bottle in front of the Wedding Fountain. For a long, awkward beat only the trickle of its sluices filled the stifling, overheated air.
“Listen,” she began. “I—I said I wanted to apologize. I meant for not coming up here more often. For not being in better touch.”
He braced himself for the usual slew of justifications: it’s been a terribly busy time for her, she had these demanding commissions that had to be produced on deadline …
“I have no excuse,” she said instead. “This has been a slack year. I make my own schedule. I could come up any time, and all the time. And it would obviously be no skin off my nose to call all the time, too. I just don’t.”
“You’ve been in better touch than most of her friends.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. I’m surprised to hear that. She’s always inspired powerful loyalty. She’s a weird one, your wife, but that ferocity she’s got, that wickedness, that slashing fuck-you defiance—which she still has, even if lately it’s making her a pain in the butt—well, a lot of people adore it. Feed off it, even.”
“For a while,” said Shep, “when the visits were subsiding, she still got a fair amount of email. You know, how are you holding up, we’re thinking of you. Personally, I think it’s a medium for cowards. But at least those two-liners were better than nothing. Now I retrieve her email for her, and it’s all spam. Except for the daily call from her mother, the phone can go quiet for days.”
Petra put a hand to her forehead. “I have a Post-it note on the lid of my computer. It says, ‘CALL GLYNIS,’ in caps. I pasted it there back in February. A couple of months later I added some exclamation marks. They didn’t make any difference. I’m used to that note now. It was chartreuse, but it’s faded now, and a little dirty. Part of the landscape. I know what it says, I know why it’s there, and I think about calling Glynis all the time, but I don’t. Instead of calling I feel terrible about not calling, as if my stupid feeling terrible is doing Glynis any favors.
“Yeah, sure,” she went on after chugging half the beer. “I come up once in a while, and call once in a while, but when I do I have to put a gun to my head, and I don’t understand that. I know she’s sometimes been prickly with me … You know, she just hasn’t produced very much, which I can’t explain, either, since she’s really talented. I guess I should have told her so to her face at some point, but she’s a highly original designer, and her execution is actually better than mine—that is, even better, since I’m no slouch—because she’s such a perfectionist. I know she resents how much I sell, and I know she thinks it’s crap, too. Well, I don’t think it’s crap, so that’s okay. I know my stuff is mainstream, and that’s why it sells, too. So that’s caused a little friction. But, hey, I’ve always enjoyed our friction. We’ve had an energy together. I’ve loved getting into it with her, over the whole craft-versus-art thing, or even, I don’t know, whether roasted radicchio is disgusting (which it is; it turns a hideous shade of purple-brown). I’ve never avoided her company before. Why am I not a better friend? Now, when she needs me more than ever? I should be up here every week, or practically every day! She’s dying, isn’t she?”
Shep sat back with a jolt. He wasn’t used to having that question put so squarely. “Probably. Don’t tell Glynis.”
“She has to know. She has to know better than anybody.”
“‘Knowing’ is a funny thing. She refuses to know it. When you refuse to know something do you have to know it first? Or can you unknow things? She never talks about it.”
“Not even to you? I find that incredible.”
“Maybe there’s nothing to say.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Doesn’t she ask how you’ll manage without her? Whether you’ll stay in Westchester once Zach’s out of the house? I know you hate it here. Or how you feel about getting married again? How she feels about that? Does she want a funeral, and what would she like it to be like? Does she want to be buried or cremated? Is there any paperwork to take care of while she’s got the chance to leave things in order? Is there anyone she’d like to leave one of her pieces, or would she like me to try to get her body of work—such as it is—into a gallery or museum?”
“Glynis doesn’t regard any of that as her problem. As for leaving things neat and tidy, I think she’d rather leave everything a big mess. As retaliation. She’s spiteful, you know that. It’s charming, actually. Besides, maybe she understands death better than we think. That is, if she’s not here, I’m not here. Westchester isn’t here. If Glynis dies, everything dies. Why should she care if I move or remarry when I no longer exist?”
“But she loves you.”
“The love dies, too. Sometimes I think she’s not being evasive, or lying to herself, or living in a fantasy world. Sometimes I think she’s a spiritual genius.”
Petra laughed. “You’re a very generous man.”
“Yeah, well. That’s one more thing that Glynis could never stand about me.”
“What’s the prognosis, then?”
“Her doctor claims not to believe in prognoses. But according to my Web research … Well, I suspect she’s right on schedule.”
“Which means?”
“That you’re right. That you should probably try to visit more often.”
The next evening, while making Glynis another fat-max-out dinner in the usual optimistic quantities and taking care to keep washing his hands, Shep considered Amelia. Of the long list of neglectful characters in this drama, their own daughter may have been the most disappointing. It was a rare business for Glynis to be more forgiving than Shep, but he himself could not readily overlook Amelia’s behavior, which Glynis called understandable and Shep called appalling.
Granted, Amelia had finally returned home again in August, with the backseat of her compact piled with groceries. She was technically present in the house for the better part of a day, but spent most of that time preparing an elaborate meal of cannelloni (she even made the pasta), a fancy Italian bread salad that demanded plenty of chopping, and chilled parfait glasses of zabaglione. Making the family a complicated dinner from scratch seemed like a generous gesture. But Glynis had recently started the Adriamycin, and her anti-nausea drugs were only so effective. So she couldn’t manage much of the meal. The timing was bad; she’d been up most of the night before, and the preparations took so long that once they finally sat down to eat Glynis had trouble keeping her eyes open. Worse, something about the lavish exercise had seemed diversionary. Amelia intently stirred and diced and whisked the hours away, while Glynis faded in and out on the love seat, apologizing that she couldn’t be much help. Surely his wife would have been far more pleased had Amelia instead shown up with a frozen creamed chicken from Swanson and spent the whole day propped on the other end of that love seat, talking with her mother.
By contrast, with no further prompting from his father, Zach had got into the habit after school of drifting into his parents’ bedroom and stretching out next to his mother. Shep didn’t think they talked much. She’d be watching the Food Channel, which bored Zach senseless. Nevertheless, that was once more how he’d found them when he came home from work tonight: Zach’s eyes calmly trained on a recipe for “Everything-Bagel Coleslaw” while he lightly held his mother’s hand. Shep was very proud of his son.
When Zach drifted into the kitchen for a sandwich, Shep asked, “So how was school?” ashamed of resorting to a question that he’d hated being asked as a kid himself.
“It sucked,” said Zach, avoiding eye contact. “It sucked yesterday, and it’ll suck tomorrow, so you can stop asking that.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t have any choice.”
“Yeah, you said that, too. So give it a rest.”
Reluctantly, Shep had slipped into his son’s room shortly before the fall term started to inform the boy that they would have to withdraw him from his private school. Sudden relocation for his junior year meant separation from his friends, more restrictive electives, larger classes, and less luxurious facilities. Getting it all over at once, Shep added that they wouldn’t be able to finance a fancy private college, either; the boy should consider a state school, and even there he’d have to apply for financial aid and take out some student loans. At the time, Zach had allowed himself one outburst, never repeated. When his father explained that their remaining funds had to be reserved for his mother’s medical bills, the boy exploded, “What’s the point? She’s going to die anyway. So what are you buying? At least with an education you get your money’s worth.”
Their sixteen-year-old hadn’t meant to sound heartless. He was his father’s son. His reasoning had been eminently sensible.
“By the way,” said Zach, nodding at the rosemary chicken thighs that Shep had just pulled out of the toaster oven, “Mom says no chicken. She’s sick of it.”
Shep took a deep breath. He’d still not caught up on sleep, what with merely dozing yesterday morning, after fifteen hours of driving. He was tired. But among the many rights he had abdicated since January was the right to be tired.
He put the chicken aside to cool. What Glynis was and wasn’t sick of changed on a dime, and by tomorrow the chicken might appeal. He found some ground sirloin patties in the freezer and carefully defrosted them in the microwave on 20 percent power, turning them after every sixty seconds. He fried the meat. She liked it rare.
He arranged Glynis’s tray. Trying to make the spread more tantalizing, he picked some sprigs of ivy from the porch creeper and put them with some water in a hand-painted crystal vase from their trip to Bulgaria. He delivered the tray, then retrieved his own plate to eat in the chair beside her. He wondered idly if Petra was right, that he should be aggrieved that his wife didn’t ever ask about his plans after—and then he stopped. After what? How could they ever talk about “after” when they never got to the “what”?
Glynis was once more glued to the Food Channel. It was what she kept on most of the time now. He might have found her fixation on cooking shows more encouraging had the amount of food she watched not been inversely proportional to the amount she ate.
“You know what floors me,” she said, not yet touching the food, which would soon get cold, “is the way people expect me to have some kind of answer. As if I must have discovered the Big Secret, and I’m supposed to come across with a blinding vision, a cloud-parting revelation from on high. Shit, on top of chemo, and chest drains, and MRIs, I’m supposed to part the waters for everyone else. It’s fucking unreasonable. It’s outrageous, really. I mean, what a burden to dump on someone who already feels like cat puke: What’s the meaning of life. How have you changed. How does everything look from there. Now that you’ve seen the light, tell us what’s really important. Christ, I’m sick, I’m not running an ashram. Just like my mother, everybody wants something from me. And then when I don’t come across, I’m a big disappointment. I’m made to feel inadequate just because I can’t crawl to the bathroom for an enema, choke down fifty pills on the hour, and recite the Gutenberg Bible at the same time.”
This was as close as she’d come to discussing her conversation with Petra. “I can see how it might seem like an imposition,” he said. “But I can also see how people might think you could tell them something. About what it’s like to face down … something they never have.”
“Well, they’ll have to get their fucking salvation somewhere else. The Church of Glynis Knacker is closed for refurbishment.” Finally she took a bite. “What did you do to the rice?” she asked irritably, as a chirpy girl on TV cracked a raw egg onto a steak tartare and made a joke about salmonella.
“I cooked it in chicken broth,” he said. “I thought that would make it more nutritious.” Substituting broth for water was an idea he’d picked up from the Food Channel.
“Tastes awful. I don’t like it.” She pushed the plate to the edge of the tray. “I’d rather have plain.”
“All right,” he said patiently, picking up the tray. “I’ll make some plain, then.”
He left his own meal to get cold. Downstairs, he scraped the offending rice back into the pot. He boiled more rice. When the rice finished steaming, he allowed it to rest, the way it said to in The Joy of Cooking. He placed pats of butter over the top—half a stick or more—then fluffed the grains with a fork. He microwaved her plate, again at 20 percent power to keep from overcooking the beef, and returned to the bedroom.
She took one bite of the new rice and chewed for a long time. That would be all she ate of the rice. This was par for the course. Lately she was prone to make very specific and sometimes obscure requests for a dish that she was craving, and nothing else would do. He always fulfilled her wishes. The last request was for Chinese sesame noodles, which absolutely had to be from Empire Szechuan in Manhattan. Fetching the take-out on the way home from work had cost him two hours in rush-hour traffic. She’d eaten one bite of the noodles, too. He thought he understood. The idea of food grew ever more enticing as the reality of food grew ever more vile.
“You don’t think I’m doing this right, do you?” said Glynis, once she’d shoved the barely touched plate to the far edge of the tray a second time.
“Doing what?”
“You know,” she croaked. “I’m supposed to be gracious. Philosophical. Kind. Loving and magnanimous and brave. Think I don’t know the drill? I’m supposed to be like that little girl in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. What’s her name. Nell. Selfless … schlock.”
“Nobody’s asking you to do anything or to be any particular way.”
“Bullshit. You think I don’t know, but I know. What you think. What Petra thinks. What everyone thinks, when they think about me at all, which is,” she coughed, “hardly ever. On top of everything else, I’m supposed to have cancer well.”
“Just getting through the day is having cancer well.”
“Oh, what a load of crap. That’s one of those—soft—blah—lines. I can’t stand it. I feel as if I’m trapped in a Top Forty by the Carpenters. Look at Petra. She used to fight her corner. Now she comes over and it’s like having a visit from a vanilla pudding. I can say anything. Your work stinks. You’re a hack. She just takes it. What do you people think I’ve become?”
“Sick, that’s all. That means it’s not you but everyone else who’s supposed to be kind. Gracious. Like you said.”
“Kind? It’s not ‘kind’ to treat me like some—evil queen who’ll cut off your head if you don’t always tell her she’s the fairest in the land. And you’re the worst. You never get mad at me anymore! You don’t call me on anything! I can hurl any abuse I want, like Linda Blair spewing green pus. All I hear back is that’s lovely green pus Glynis, now why don’t you wait while I wipe this off and then I’ll plump your pillows. You’re so endlessly fucking nice. It makes me sick. All the niceness, it makes me even sicker. You’ve always been a pushover. But now you’re well on your way from worm to grub.”
In sloshing her hand across the tray on “grub,” she upset the vase with the ivy. Its neck shattered against the plate. The water spilled into the food and over the sheet. Shep put his own plate aside. He nimbly picked the shards of glass from the bed and then from the carpet. “I’ll get you some fresh sheets,” he promised.
“Look at you! Now you’re literally on your knees! What’s wrong with you? Why don’t you say, ‘Glynis you stupid cunt’? Why don’t you say, ‘Glynis clean it up yourself’? I just called you a grub! What do I get in response? I’ll get you some fresh sheets. You’re not even a grub! A grub has more guts! You’ve turned into some kind of—amoeba!”
He stood and picked up the tray. “Glynis, you’re tired, that’s all.”
“Tired, I’m always tired! So what?”
There was rice on the sheets. Though they were fresh from two days ago, drying them would not suffice. He would have to wash them. “I don’t know what you want from me.”
“That’s what I mean! It’s always what I want. Don’t you want anything anymore? You’ve—disappeared! You’re not even there. You’re a service provider. You could be replaced with a good Japanese robot.”
“Glynis. Why are you trying to hurt me.”
“God, that was a relief. Just a tiny glimmer of self-defense. Just a smidgeon. A soupçon. A pinch.” She flicked a grain of rice on the sheet with her thumb and forefinger but couldn’t marshal any propulsive strength, and the grain stuck to her finger. “But to answer your question? I’ll hurt you because you’re the only person I can get my hands on. And maybe to check if you’ve got any feelings to hurt.”
“I have lots of feelings, Glynis.” Yet his delivery was stoic. With the many subjects she avoided—her future, not to mention her lack of future—he’d often felt deprived of all that she didn’t tell him. So perhaps she might also sense and resent all that he didn’t tell her.
“You ask me what I want?” she snarled. “I want someone who wants. You never even fuck me anymore.”
He was surprised. “I’ve assumed you weren’t up for it.”
“Screw what you think I’m up for! Want something for yourself!”
“All right,” he said. “I’ll try.”
“More of the same. Compliance. So you will ‘try’ to ravish me. You will ‘try’ to rape me, in the same spirit you will ‘try’ to get me more cranberry juice. Compliance, nothing but compliance! Do you think that’s sexy? All this nauseating goodness. It’s no sexier to me than Jackson’s sniveling defeatism is to Carol.”
He was not sure how to manage this. She was in a very volatile humor. He did not want to make everything worse. But if he tried too hard not to make everything worse he’d put his foot in it with his very carefulness and make everything worse. “I’m supposed to feel bad for being too good?”
Though the very tentativeness of his tone might have inflamed her further, she shook her turbaned head in what looked like pity. “Look, you’re amazing. The tirelessness. The patience. The unflagging devotion. Never a harsh word. Never a complaint. Working at that shitty job and caring for me morning to night—or more like night to morning. Any day now I expect to see your photograph on the cover of Time. But I don’t want a paragon, I want a husband. I miss you. I don’t know where you went. I think you’re the same man who announced a little less than a year ago that he was moving to East Africa with or without me. Where did that guy go, Shepherd? I want a human being! I want a man who has limits! Who’s sometimes cranky, who sometimes feels resentful, if not homicidal. A real man who at least occasionally gets pissed off!”
He thought hard. “I got pissed off with Beryl.”
“Twenty years too late, too. But I mean me. I want you to get pissed off with me! I refuse to believe that all this schlepping and fetching and schmoing is not driving you crazy!”
“All right.” He was still standing, holding the tray—regrettably, a pose of servitude. “I didn’t like it very much—” He would have to start again. Glynis was right. The very vocabulary of such discourse was vanishing from his head. “I was annoyed when you asked for different rice.”
“Bravo,” Glynis taunted.
It was hard to remember how people talked to each other, well people, spouses. How he used to talk to Glynis. “I was annoyed because I knew that if I went to the trouble of making another pot you wouldn’t eat more than a mouthful.”
“That’s right.” She did seem strangely gratified, and all he’d had to say was that he’d been put out. “And that’s all I did eat, wasn’t it?”
“Yes. And the rice made with broth—I’d noticed the preparation on TV. I’d remembered to buy the broth at the A-and-P. I was only trying to make the rice a little more interesting, and better for you. Instead of thanking me, you punished me. You said the chicken-broth rice tasted bad. That annoyed me, too. Because the real story is that everything tastes bad. The real story is that instead of making rice at all I could have mixed up a fresh batch of cement. It’s all cement to you, and that isn’t my fault. It would make a big difference to me if you were sometimes a little more appreciative of how hard I work to make you comfortable and to … to keep you alive.”
“There now,” said Glynis. “Was that so hard?”
Shep surprised himself. He started to cry. He had not cried since the night he read his wife’s prognosis online.
He probably hadn’t contracted c-diff, and sometimes the risk of doing something is exceeded by the risk of not doing it. So he put the tray on the floor. He crawled onto the bed, lying on the wet part of the sheet. He rested his head on his wife’s shrunken chest. She stroked his hair. She was probably not feeling very well—and that would be, as ever, a gross understatement. But for the first time since their delusional dinner at City Crab, he had the impression that she was happy. It had never occurred to him: that one of the things a woman “made comfortable” day in and day out might most have missed was doing the comforting.