So Much for That (14 page)

Jackson rarely saw Shep have trouble with self-control. But the guy’s jaw muscles were clenched, and he was holding his silverware like a pitchfork. “I repeat: the purchasing records for that era are no longer on file. I checked with Pogatchnik. I’ve done exhaustive searches on all the potentially suspect materials we might have worked with at Knack. Once in a while a brand name sounds vaguely familiar. But ‘vaguely familiar’ will never stand up to legal cross-examination. I do not—do not, Glynis—have any physical proof of having ever worked with a particular product whose manufacturer we could haul into court.”

Jackson wondered how many times Shep had recited that same speech. Since this time, too, Glynis gave no sign of having heard it, his guess was several. “When you buy things, and especially when you work with them professionally, you rely on those manufacturers to have a conscience! You have to be able to trust that when you buy a loaf of bread it’s not laced with arsenic! In metalsmithing, I have to be able to assume that if I subject a lump of solder to the torch, it is not going to give off poisonous fumes, or if I slip a piece of silver in the pickle it’s not going to explode! I—”

And then she stopped. Her face suspended in an expression of intense concentration. She cocked her head and looked a little to the side, with her forehead creased.

“I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to think of this,” she said. “In
art school. The soldering blocks. The crucibles for casting, the lining we used. The heat-proof mitts. I’m almost sure they contained…asbestos.”

“
Almost
sure,” Shep said warily. If his wife was in the process of letting him off the hook for involuntary manslaughter, he didn’t look too thrilled about it.

“Well, yes, pretty sure. In fact, very sure. When I think back, I remember one of my teachers mentioning the material in passing. But when you’re a student, you work with what they order. You—trust.”

“You can’t sue the school,” said Shep. “You told me that Saguaro Art School closed years ago.”

“No, but virtually all our supplies were from the same company. I can visualize them perfectly, down to the elliptical logo printed on the bottom of the soldering blocks. The insulation lining for the crucibles was packaged in a cardboard canister with a metal top, like top-shelf whiskey comes in, only wider and shorter. The label was black and green. The mitts: they were cream-colored, printed with little purple flowers and green sprigs, and piped in pink. Those products have surely been discontinued or had the asbestos removed by now, but the company is still in business, because I ordered from them only last year.” Glynis looked up with an expression of beatific revelation, like Mary after the appearance of the Archangel. “
Forge Craft
.”

T
hat was weird,” Jackson said on the way home. Having kept to soda water after one ceremonial glass of champagne, Carol was driving. She was the one who could really stand to cut loose once in a while, and he felt a little guilty that his own—call it
expansiveness
—rarely allowed for that.

“How so?” Her coolness derived from his having, in her view, drunk too much. So she had to take care of him, just as she took care of Flicka. Little wonder that at dinner parties her husband stuck up for the rights of grown-ups. Carol was the consummate grown-up, and he sometimes worried where she found any joy in her life.

“What took her so long to remember she worked with asbestos in art
school? It’s been weeks. Meanwhile, Shep’s been raking himself over the coals about having been careless at Knack.”

“Memory’s fickle.” Though there was hardly another car on I-87, Carol always drove the speed limit.

“I guess this asbestos thing has turned out to be a gold mine for a lot of people.”

“I doubt Glynis cares about the money itself in the slightest,” said Carol. “I’m glad if she’s stopped blaming Shep. He’s going to have his hands full in the coming months without feeling like, on top of everything else, her cancer is all his fault. Still, the asbestos thing—it gives her a sense of purpose. It makes cancer seem bigger than her small personal misfortune; it makes it seem more important than ordinary, pointless bad luck. It connects her to the world: to history, to politics, to justice. I can see why she’d cling to that. Because when you get sick, I think that’s the hardest part: living in a separate universe from everyone else, like having been exiled to a foreign country.”

Much like Shep, Carol wasn’t given to speeches, but when she did say something it came out whole, considered. He knew what she meant, too. When they’d hugged goodbye at the door, the feeling was like being on the deck of an ocean liner with the horn sounding. It was time for the non-passengers to get ashore. When their car reversed out of the drive with their two friends waving on the porch, it was the house that seemed to be pulling away instead, released from its moorings to recede toward a horizon from which it was impossible to send postcards.

“Sort of like Flicka, and the Jewish thing,” said Jackson.

“Yes, exactly.” She seemed unnervingly pleased that they were conducting a successful conversation. “The members of our support group…The fact that FD only afflicts Ashkenazi kids, it makes them feel that gene handed down through the generations amounts to more persecution of the Chosen People, more of God’s testing their faith. As if FD means something.” Carol allowed herself a rare surge of speed. “Of course, it doesn’t.”

Though outsiders would never have guessed, Carol was much more of a nihilist than her husband. She sat for hours numbly at her computer
doing sales outreach for IBM, filled the humidifier in Flicka’s bedroom before fetching a new roll of Saran Wrap for their sadly plastic version of tucking their daughter in, and for years had risen wearily at 1:00 a.m. to pour the first of the night’s two cans of Compleat into Flicka’s feeding bag—all without any sense of mission. She just did it.

P
aying Wendy in cash, Jackson reasoned that the nurse may have been worth it, since by some miracle both girls were asleep. As he and Carol got ready for bed, he waited for her to finish brushing her teeth before darting into their master bathroom himself, catching a startled expression as he closed the door in her face. “It’s for your sake,” he explained through the door. “Have to cut a wicked fart.”

How many times a day was he going to have to fart? This was going to be trickier than he realized, and he wondered if he’d thought his strategy through. He took advantage of his privacy to inspect matters, since
matters
had begun to hurt. He’d been relieved at first that the “discomfort” was so minimal; the real story was that the local was only now wearing off.

By the time he emerged, Carol was in bed, her bare breasts curved over the top sheet. For her slender figure, they were unusually full, the kind of knockers that other women were always trying to buy and couldn’t. That said, the lesson that you either had it or you didn’t was not one he could accept on his own behalf.

“What’s with the boxers?”

“Oh, I’ve been meaning to tell you.” He had rehearsed this all day.

“That appointment I had this morning. Seems I’ve got some kind of skin condition, probably from showering in the gym. The dermatologist warned me that it was microbial or something.” He’d picked up the word from a pharmaceutical ad on the news the night before. “It’s contagious, and you could pick it up if I’m not careful.”

“Well, let me see it!”

“No way. It’s kind of gross. I don’t want to turn you off.”

Carol slid down the pillows. “Since when do you ever turn me off?”

God, it was a waste, with those cherry nipples like the garnish on a two-scoop banana split. He loved her with her hair down, and had been wanting to pick the bobby pins out all night. Nevertheless, though most guys would consider him lucky, for Jackson desiring his wife was always accompanied by a gnawing little torture. He never felt quite up to her. Even after having been married these many years, he was never quite sure what she saw in him.

“That’s the other thing,” he said. “We can’t—not for a while. This thing takes a long time to clear up, or that’s what he told me.”

“I still wish you’d let me take a look at it.”

“You’ve nursed Flicka all day,” he said, slipping in beside her with a discreet glance at his fly, which did indeed stay closed with the help of the safety pin. “You don’t have to nurse me, too.”

He didn’t relish lying to her about the boxers, but she wouldn’t have understood if he’d been straight—if he’d explained that when you give someone a present, especially a really big present, you had to wrap it first.

Shepherd Armstrong Knacker
Merrill Lynch Account Number 934-23F917
February 01, 2005–February 28, 2005
Net Portfolio Value: $664,183.22

T
he Sunday before the surgery, Glynis wasn’t supposed to eat any solids. Out of camaraderie, Shep felt he shouldn’t eat anything, either. To his embarrassment, he got hungry. The fridge was packed with leftovers from the dinner with Jackson and Carol the night before. Fasting with so much food destined to go bad seemed perverse. So he would wait until she went to the bathroom, then stick a surreptitious finger in the hummus.

Zach came home from his overnight with a fellow
hikikomori
, hacked off a hunk of cold roast beef, and went straight to his room. Depleted and radiating an anxiety she wouldn’t articulate, Glynis watched TV in the den. Whenever he checked on her, another pharmaceutical ad was reminding them of all the other ailments that lay in wait, and if they didn’t slay you, the cures would:

Accompanied by the strumming guitar and uplifting flute cadenzas that in his boyhood typified alternative folk services in his father’s church, these warnings were all delivered with a lilting, lobotomized pleasantness—the tone of voice in which one might read bedtime stories to small children about mischievous bears and over-curious kittens. Meantime, ads for high blood pressure medicine alternated with ads for salt-and-vinegar potato chips, ads for high cholesterol medicine with ads for two-for-one pizza, ads for acid reflux medicine with ads for a chain restaurant’s baby-back ribs. Averse to inferring conspiracy, he perceived only an odd sort of balance.

He kept trying to come up with comforting things to say. He repeatedly fought the impulse to assure her that she’d come through surgery with flying colors, because he obviously had no idea. Yet absent sham clairvoyance, he could do little but ferry Glynis more apple juice than she wanted. Last night’s voluble dinner now seemed improbable. Today Shep and his wife had barely spoken. Only a warm hand on her neck
seemed to make a difference. This was a time of the body. To communicate was to communicate with the body.

He didn’t want to tell her what he was thinking. His thoughts were selfish, but there was too much time. Too much empty space and suffocating quiet. So he couldn’t stop himself from wondering if there was anything, any single prospect no matter how small, to which he was looking forward.

He hated his work. He hated hating it, too; to despise the company he had brought into the world seemed a parental betrayal. He feared his son’s getting older almost as much as Zach did—since lately that’s all the boy appeared to do, just get older, not wiser or clearer, no more determined or firm in himself. He dreaded suing Forge Craft for damages, when the damage was done; civil jurisprudence would entail more forms, procedures, and postponements, in which Glynis’s medical circumstances were drowning him already. And he was hardly relishing the imminent arrival of Glynis’s family from Arizona. He would put them up while Glynis recovered. Feed them, ferry them to the hospital, keep them entertained. The controlled neutrality he had maintained in relation to his in-laws for years now was bound to slide to impatience.

He tried to think conventionally, to anticipate the joyful day of his daughter’s marriage. But Amelia was at that age when she’d doubtless marry the wrong boy, whom she’d rapidly outgrow. He would know this, despoilingly, on the day. At her wedding reception, he pictured his toast to the happy couple as forced, himself already mournful over their pending divorce. He pictured all the other guests speculating wanly about how long this one was likely to last, while making cynically good use of the open bar. Posing for group snapshots, he would envision the prints shoved ashamedly into a bottom drawer. The lavish flowers would wither in his mind’s eye as in time-lapse photography. It would descend on the father of the bride like a divine vision that within a few years these two flushed and devoted young people would no longer possess each other’s current email addresses.

Nevertheless, Amelia was the type who’d expect a wedding with all the bells and whistles. A modern woman who, over the course of her
life, would blithely recite “til death do us part” two or three times with no sense of self-consciousness. She was a girl-girl. Clothes. As scathing about violation of the rules of fashion as her mother felt above them. Her hopped-up, hectic determination to have “fun” was a little tiring. He worried that the intensity of her resolve to live it up in her twenties betrayed a corresponding pessimism about her life thereafter. He worried, too, that she saw her own father as the embodiment of the very party’s-over adulthood that the girl was so desperate to forestall.

He was glad, he supposed, that she had earned a degree. Yet he wondered whether the abundance of the information provided by a $200K Dartmouth BA in “media studies” might have been available through a free trial subscription to
The Atlantic Monthly
and a basic cable package including Turner Classics for fifty dollars a month. His daughter’s dubious degree had alone decimated the savings he’d accrued previous to the sale of Knack. Shep may not have expected his own father to send him through school, but it was customary now: a child had a right to a university education. So he should not resent the expense, and therefore he did not resent it. Yet after decades of single-ply, Turkey-burger stinting, actually to be punished for the frugality had been, well—disconcerting. His cash assets had flat out disqualified Amelia from financial aid.

He kept it to himself, of course, that he found Amelia’s style of dress—the bare midriff, the skimpy tops, the glitter on her breasts—not so much risqué as obvious. Trying too hard to be a woman, and therefore childish. Consequently, in that vision of her wedding, he foresaw her coming to loggerheads with her classically tasteful mother, who—

Who would not be there.

In relation to Glynis, there was nothing to look forward to. Nothing. While friends would never have described Shep Knacker as irksomely sunny, he was an optimist all the same. Yet he did not understand what an optimist could contemplate when not a single cheerful advent plausibly awaited in his future.

Amelia called late afternoon. She surprised him. So demonstrably upset by the news at first, she would surely have planned to visit before
the surgery. Her reason for demurring—having to work through the weekend on the next issue of the money-losing, negligible-circulation arts journal that she helped to edit—sounded generic. His daughter’s pep talk with her mother was short. Of course, today he’d no right to complain that anyone else in the family had nothing to say.

Shep sneaked another skewer of cold shrimp, which he shielded ascending the stairs. He stood before his son’s door. What a radical gesture it had come to seem, simply crossing this threshold. His first knock was soft, inaudibly deferential. He tried more loudly a second time. After formally opening the door, Zach stood blocking the entrance, as if his father were trying to sell him something.

“Mind if I come in?”

He did mind. But Zach was, on the surface, well behaved. He drew back to resume his seat at the computer. Feeling a little foolish still holding the bamboo skewer, Shep sat springily on the edge of the bed, ill at ease. It wasn’t the posters of bands he’d never heard of, or the mess. It was the plain fact of not being welcome. Kids never seemed aware that “their” rooms were a generous conceit on the part of the parent who paid for the entire house. It was Shep’s right, legally, morally, and financially, to walk into this room whenever he liked. Then again, some dim consciousness that in truth children had no territory may have explained why they defended their illusion of territory with such ferocity.

“I wanted to check if you had any questions,” said Shep. “About what happens next.”

“Happens?” Zach gave no indication that he had any idea what his father was talking about.

First Amelia, and now this. “To your
mother
,” said Shep, as if reminding the boy that he had one.

“They’re going to operate. And then she’ll come home and take drugs and she’ll lose her hair and shit.” The boy’s phrasing was crude, but uninflected.

“That’s pretty much it.”

“So why would I have any questions,” said Zach, stating this very question in the declarative. “It’s on TV all the time.”

“Not—all of it,” his father said lamely. Cancer in the world of entertainment was a neat one-word expedient for the disposal of characters who had served their purpose, and would vanish politely off-camera. It added gravitas to a series in danger of seeming trivial. It provided a plot twist from which primary players reliably recovered in an episode or two—never more than a season.

“So what part do they leave out?”

Agony, he wanted to say. Time, he wanted to say. Money, he did not even want to say, but that, too. “I guess we’ll find out the hard way.”

The boy was incurious. He should have had questions. Yet it was not as if Zach had no sense of mystery, as if he regarded the world as known. To the contrary, the appurtenances of his life were nothing but mystery. Take that computer. When Shep was fifteen, he did his homework on a typewriter. It was electric. He may not have completely understood the circuitry through which a tap on a key raised the arm of a letter. Still, he could watch the arm rise, inspect the three-dimensional backward
a
affixed to the metal. He could grasp the elementary process by which it struck an inky ribbon and stained a black
a
-shaped mark on a physical piece of paper. But when Zach typed an
a
, it was magic. His iPod was magic. His digital TV was magic. The Internet was magic. Even his father’s car, the machine through which boys once achieved their first dominion over the physical world, was now controlled by a computer. Diagnosis of malfunction didn’t involve tinkering with an engine and getting covered in oil. The car plugged into another impenetrable computer at the dealership. Were anything to go wrong with the technical furniture of Zach’s life—and these days, machines didn’t sputter on you, develop a funny hissing sound, or start to squeak; they either worked, or they stopped dead—the notion of fixing it himself would never enter his head. There were sorcerers for such things, although the concept of repair had itself grown arcane; one was far more likely to go out and buy another machine that magically worked, then magically didn’t. Collectively, the human race was growing ever more authoritative about the mechanics of the universe. Individually, the experience of most people was of accelerating impotence and incomprehension. They
lived in a world of superstition. They relied on voodoo—charms, fetishes, and crystal balls whose caprices they were helpless to govern, yet without which the conduct of daily life came to a standstill. Faith that the computer would switch on one more time and do as it was asked had more a religious than a rational cast. When the screen went black, the gods were angry.

At that moment, Shep had his first glimpse of why Zach might seem to be getting older in an exclusively temporal sense. Nothing the boy had been taught in school had supplied him the slightest jurisdiction over the forces that controlled his life. Second-year algebra failed even fractionally to inform him about what to do when their broadband service cut off besides call Verizon—the sorcerers; it failed to illuminate what “broadband service” really was, beyond merciful access to magic. This passive, unmastering relation to the material world permanently suspended his son in the powerless dependency of childhood. So it made perfect sense that Zach would be uninquisitive about his mother’s treatment. Modern medicine’s hocus-pocus was surely as supernatural as everything else.

Supernatural? Shep wanted to recall to his son the slick, membranous skin between the leaves of an onion. That, he would say, is like the onion’s
mesothelium
. It will be tedious, but it won’t be fancy: they will slice her like a vegetable. And then pick, bit by bit, the tiny shreds of that onion skin that look peculiar—too stiff or too slimy or the wrong color. Sewing her back up is not so different from the way we truss a Turkey at Thanksgiving, to keep the stuffing in. This is the old world, he wanted to say. This is the world of typewriters and vegetables part spoiled, and what makes it so frightening to me and your mother isn’t that it’s inconceivable, but that we understand it.

“I think it would be nice if you helped keep your mother company today,” said Shep. It was exactly the sort of near-order that his own father would have delivered.

“I don’t know how,” said Zach.

Shep almost rejoined,
I don’t know how, either
, and could not fathom how they had all been reduced to such rudimentary social ineptitude.
Presumably people had been falling catastrophically ill since before the species walked upright. There ought to have been a protocol, perhaps a strict one.

“She’s only watching TV,” Zach added.

“Then go watch it with her.”

“We don’t like the same stuff.”

“Go watch whatever she wants to watch, and at least seem to enjoy it.”