So Much for That (25 page)

Shep knew better than to feel wounded, and he stroked her thinning hair. Glynis had an aversion to gushiness, which she associated with Hetty. But something else was exercising her tonight that he didn’t quite understand. Whatever it was, she needed to get it out of her. Like the first couple of days after chemo, he would hold her over the toilet until the last dribble stringed to the bowl.

“All this—sentimentality!” she went on, waving her hands. “It’s just like my mother. They’re trying to make themselves feel better. They’re just
making sure
. They’re just
making sure
, so that later, they don’t have to feel guilty. They did their duty. They said their little piece. They can go back to their happy dinners and happy holidays and happy kiddies and happy biking around Tucson’s cycle paths. Back to their tennis and wine and movies with a clear conscience.”

“You don’t…want them to have a clear conscience?”

“I’m trying to get well. I’m not shooting up that poison every two weeks from sheer perversity, but to get well. And these people—they’re reading me my own obituary, Shepherd! Some afternoons I don’t even feel I’m still in the room. It’s like they’ve come to view the body, like I’m lying in an open casket. Here I’m throwing up, and breaking out in these disgusting rashes, and last week I could hardly swallow because of those sores at the back of my mouth. It’s true I
look
like a cadaver, but I’m still here and I’m going through all this shit to try and stay here. It doesn’t help to have a line of assholes trailing through my bedroom throwing dirt on my grave!”

“Okay,” he said, taking her head to his shoulder. “Now I see.” In all these months, this was as close as she’d ever come to saying the
D
-word.

H
e coaxed her into eating something—mashed potatoes, he proposed, you can eat a little mashed potato, surely. Soothing, smooth. She acceded only because she knew he would keep badgering, and after getting all that bile out of her system she didn’t have the energy to resist him. He peeled and boiled two large bakers, and then mashed them with half a cup of heavy cream and so much butter that it nearly broke the emulsion. He slipped out some leftover roast chicken that was optimistic, but there was no harm in trying. Not hungry himself, he still took out two plates, serving himself a generous helping in a simulation of a hearty appetite. She wouldn’t eat on her own. He took care to add a sprig of parsley and wedge of tomato for inviting color. With his first forkful he made
mmm
-ing noises, just as he had when getting their kids to eat something new and suspicious when they were small. Alas, Glynis looked at her plate as if presented with a freshly swirled patty of bathtub caulking when she wasn’t in the mood for home repair.

“Try a few mouthfuls,” he encouraged. “Maybe a little piece of chicken.”

The amount of potato she skimmed onto her fork would not have fed a hamster.

Shep himself used to have one of those garbage-can metabolisms, shoveling in two-inch stacks of pastrami for lunch with nary a care. But that was in the days he was out on the job, pounding nails, climbing ladders, and hefting fifty-pound bags of cement. Once he assumed a largely managerial role at Knack, he’d started laying on the pounds, and discovered his vanity. Since then, he had joined Glynis in watching the waistline, and in so doing managed to mollify her long-standing resentment that he could eat like a horse while to maintain her figure she had to eat like a sparrow. Thus they’d stocked one-percent milk and those nondairy spreads that tasted like motor oil. Like most of their set in middle age, for years they had both regarded the food in their refrigerator with the wary hostility of grudging hosts forced to billet enemy troops. Since he always felt he could stand to drop a pound or two, his every mouthful had long been subtly tainted with self-reproach, and as for Glynis—well, in this department women were worse. So he felt he could speak for the both of them in having more or less forgotten that food was not purely a temptation to defy. Yet overnight his fears had perfectly inverted. He was watching his wife evaporate before his eyes.

These days when he went shopping, he checked the calorie count on the label, and if it wasn’t high enough he put the product back. He spurned “Healthy Choice” soups for chowders he could spike with half-and-half. The fridge was stuffed with sour cream, cheese (soft ones like brie, as greasy as possible), pâté, and happy discoveries from the bakery section like pecan or mud pie, which ran to six hundred calories a slice. The freezer was stuffed with ice cream—never frozen yogurt but the real thing: rocky road or banana split. The pantry was packed with short-bread and bottles of fudge sauce; it hadn’t seen a rice cake or water biscuit in months. There was, in retrospect, an animal rationality to maximizing fuel per dollar, as through all the years previous their lavishing just as much money on bags of air—puffed corn, pillows of baked chips—had been contrastingly insane. Yet if the new permissiveness had a dreamlike quality of fantasy come true—behold, you may now eat the richest, sweetest dishes that you please, and the more the better—the caloric carte blanche was tragically mistimed. Finally his wife could eat all the
foods she had denied herself for decades, and they all repulsed her. Hell, if he were really a loyal husband, he’d be forcing these mashed potatoes through a hose into her mouth, as if plumping a duck for foie gras.

“You remember how on research trips we’d go on ten-mile walk-abouts all day, taking notes and photographs, all on two cups of coffee?” Shep recalled. “Resisting the pad Thai or the samosas from street vendors, turning a blind eye to all those pastries in Portugal? Man, what a waste. If I have a single regret, it’s ever having let you skip lunch. You’d have had a few more weeks’ leeway this spring, and at least in those days you might have enjoyed the stuff going down.”

“You wouldn’t have wanted a fat wife, would you?”

“Yes. Right now? I would love a fat wife. I wish you were a blubber ball. I wish you were
enormous
. In fact, from what I know now, I don’t understand why doctors don’t advise everybody to lay on twenty extra pounds while they’ve got the chance. I might not advocate outright obesity. But there’s a reason for fat. It’s a resource.”

She nibbled a few fluffs off of the tips of the tines, and put down the fork. “It is ironic. I guess I’ve put a fair bit of effort into staying slim. And now I’m punished for it. There’s a lesson in there somewhere, though I’m not sure what it is.”

“You’ve got to stop eating only as much as you feel like.”

“I don’t really
feel like
any.”

“That’s the point. It’s a job. Now, you can do better than that.” There was a hint of menace in his voice, a surprising undercurrent of pending physical violence. He could see it coming to that, too. Unfortunately, Petra and Ruby’s perseverance had never been Glynis’s strong suit, but defiance was. The harder he pressed her to choke down those potatoes, the more forcefully she’d push them away. But he was getting desperate. Most of the time, he didn’t notice what she looked like; he was used to it, much as through his childhood he was largely unaware of the pong of paper mills that fugged his hometown. Yet once in a while he would catch a glimpse of her out of the corner of his eye, apprehending his wife as he might a stranger. Her cadaverousness—the sunken sockets, the striated breastplate, the wrists he could loop with his thumb and
forefinger—would suddenly hit him like the piercing reek of Berlin, New Hampshire, after his family had been on vacation in the mountains.

Glynis took one more smear of potato, and set the fork down with resolution. Displaying a childlike deviousness, she had mounded the remainder, reducing its perimeter to make it look as depleted as possible. She had tucked the shred of chicken breast under the rim of the plate. He gave up, and cleared their settings; while enticing her to eat more of hers, he had somehow dispatched his own portion. As for putting on twenty pounds as insurance against disease, he was well on his way to taking his own advice. He ate the same butter-fortified meals that she did, and had always that Presbyterian aversion to throwing anything away. Glynis would eat two tablespoons of couscous soaked in half a cup of olive oil, and he’d polish off the bowl. The time he once spent at the gym he now spent at the A&P. Despite his own lauding of “leeway,” he’d worked out one way or another his whole life, and the soft, slackening spread of his midsection was the one personal sacrifice he felt most keenly. Still, Shep had decided not to worry about it. There was plenty of time to take the weight off—plenty of time after. Given his natural pragmatism, it took effort to keep from forming in his mind too clearly after what.

S
hep had lured her back to bed, but Glynis was still wakeful. He lay beside her, and left the light on. She trailed a finger pensively over the chain-saw scar at the base of his neck. Following on a long silence that suggested an uncertainty over how to bring the subject up, at last she announced, “The Afterlife.”

The topic hadn’t arisen in weeks. So she had seen the beach on his screen.

“I know we’ve talked about this ad nauseam,” she continued, “but after all these years I still don’t quite get it. What it was you needed so badly to get away from. What it was you hoped to find.”

To his surprise, Shep reacted badly to her use of the past tense. Since they
had
talked about this ad nauseam, he fought an irritation that she could conceivably still not “get it.” But expressing irritation to
Glynis—or anger, exasperation, even a mild negative like dismay—was now against the rules. Battling to remain serene, he tried one more time to put it into words.

“What would I like to get away from? Complexity. Anxiety. A feeling I’ve had my whole life that at any given time there’s something I’m forgetting, some detail or chore, something that I’m supposed to be doing or should have already done. That nagging sensation—I get up with it, I go through the day with it, I go to sleep with it. When I was a kid, I had a habit of coming home from school on Friday afternoons and immediately doing my homework. So I’d wake up on Saturday morning with this wonderful sensation, a clean, open feeling of relief and possibility and calm. There’d be nothing I had to do. Those Saturday mornings, they were a taste of real freedom that I’ve hardly ever experienced as an adult. I never wake up in Elmsford with the feeling that I’ve done my homework.”

“But you’re accustomed to homework. With nothing to do you’d be climbing the walls. How would you have filled your day, making fountains?”

“I would make fountains,” he said temperately, closing his eyes, “if I wanted to make fountains.”

“But coming to any understanding of what you ‘want’ is the hardest job in the world. It seems to me that what you were always designing for yourself was a massive existential crisis.”

Again that past tense, pricking his neck like a sharp-cornered care label, and Shep had never quite got his head around that word,
existential
. “Maybe it would turn out that I don’t especially want anything.”

“So, what, you’d lie around and nap? Take it from me, that’s nothing to get excited about.”

To the contrary, it sounded fantastic. The alarm would ring in an hour and twenty minutes.

“You can’t take pleasure in your leisure, because it’s been forced on you,” he said. “And because you feel like shit. So it’s the time we have while feeling
well
that’s precious. I’m not just squandering my ‘life’ on botched Sheetrock jobs in Queens. I’m squandering my
healthy life
. You of all people should appreciate how raw the deal is. We slave away
during the few years that we’re capable of enjoyment. Then what’s left are the years we’re old and sick. We get sick on our own time. We only get leisure when it weighs on us. When it’s useless to us. When it’s no longer an opportunity but a burden.”

In truth, he had given this matter of how to fill The Afterlife more thought than she realized. He did not venerate lassitude, or lassitude alone. He might learn to dive; the marine life around Pemba was spectacular, and several outfits rented gear. Snorkeling presented an appealingly low-tech alternative. They played a game on the island called
bao
, involving the distribution of sixty-four seed pods over thirty-two carved-out bowls, an agreeably unfathomable pastime that put much emphasis on grace and finesse. Or
keram
, which looked to be a hilarious cross between checkers, hockey, and pool; shuttling pucks against each other on an uneven homemade wooden table would surely prove a diversion one was in little danger of taking too seriously. Otherwise, he had always found his greatest satisfactions—which is to say, the feeling you got from doing something rather than having already done it—undertaking discrete, utterly elective physical projects: painting a porch that would easily make it another season, knocking together a spice cabinet whose shelves were tailor-spaced to fit the stainless-steel canisters from Zabar’s, and—yes, Glynis, even if you find it comical—building fountains. So he might learn to carve a canoe. There were plenty of these crude boats called
mtumbwis
on the island, and chipping a trough from a log with dull hand-tools might take a fabulously long time.

“But Shepherd,” Glynis interrupted his reverie. “It seems obvious that what you were really trying to get away from all those years was yourself.”

Oh God, that old saw. The amount of effort it took to keep from getting annoyed was stupendous. “I have no problem with
myself
. What I would like to get away from is other people.”

“Like me.”

“Gnu?” He propped himself up on an elbow and turned her toward him. “I have never in all my life considered you
other people
.”

He slipped his hand around her neck, noting mournfully how pronounced its tendons had grown, how prominent the veins. Nevertheless,
it was still Glynis’s neck. The breasts at the gape of her nightgown were smaller, though they’d never been large; the nipples had darkened and the skin was starting to crenulate, but they were still Glynis’s breasts. He kissed her. She returned his kiss with all the hunger so little in evidence during their impromptu supper.