So Much for That (26 page)

Shep had always felt a little guilty about the intensity with which he was attracted to his wife. Physically attracted—he did not confuse the desire with anything more ethereal or romantic. He loved the way she looked, not just well turned out but especially naked, and he worried that he loved the way she looked too much. He was addicted to the rim of her hipbone, to sliding his hand into its hollow, and down into the darkening crease. Because he’d begged her not to, she didn’t shave her bikini line, allowing for the subtle shading and alluring gradation of lighter scrub thickening to a shadowy woods, into whose mysteries he had always ventured with the thrilled trepidation of a boy in a magic forest. She had long legs and sharp, shapely kneecaps. This attraction went back to the first time they met, and was excruciatingly specific to Glynis. It probably qualified as unhealthily obsessive. He would have been embarrassed to admit to his gruff, lewd co-workers at Knack that for the whole of his marriage he’d not been drawn to any woman other than his wife. They would never believe him, or if they did believe him they would pity him as somehow a lesser man with no imagination and no drive.

Perhaps this was true. Perhaps there was something wrong with him, something missing. Yet the fixation was exclusive, and not within his gift to relax. Its strength seemed to wax and wane somewhat, but within a narrow range. At any given time, he might be attracted to Glynis, incredibly attracted to Glynis, or overpoweringly attracted to Glynis.

Early on they’d experimented with the sort of improvisations that in those days had seemed obligatory. But not long into this variety-pack approach to sex, Glynis had arrested the slide of his head down her long, flat stomach and announced with a wicked glint in her eyes, “You know, I really like
fucking
.” It was the most erotic declaration he’d ever heard, and on recollection it still made him hard. So that was what they did. They fucked. Sometimes often, sometimes less so, but he could honestly
say that it had never bored him, never grown tired. Not that it was anyone else’s business, but she liked it a little rough.

Which was giving him some problems these last few months. First there was the incision from the surgery, which he had to take care not to touch. Although she hadn’t wanted him right after; too many hands and instruments had pried inside her, and she couldn’t bear even so kindly a violation, sleeping in a tight, private ball. The scar wasn’t as tender now, and she had gradually grown less protective of it; he was sure that at first she’d felt ashamed—fearful, that she was spoiled. True, he wouldn’t call the red, now browning ridge exactly a turn-on, but it did something else to him, which did feel manly: it broke his heart. It drove him to shelter her, to press her torso against his own and thus place the whole of his mass between his wife and the knifing world.

Eventually it was Glynis who’d had to importune that he stop handling her like china. She had indeed come to seem breakable to him, and under the influence of Alimta she was literally bruisable, so that when he did as she requested she woke the next morning with thumb-shaped purple blotches down her thighs.

The thing was, he knew that he loved her in that finer way. But as much as he relished the mingling of the two, he knew also that this physical desire was separate—a distinct wanting that had to do with line and shape and color, with breasts and hair and smell. It did not have to do with her dry sense of humor, her slyness, the beguiling barbarity of her character. It did not have to do with her willfulness, her infuriating self-destructiveness, or her spiritual alliance with metal. It didn’t even have to do with her sorely underexploited aesthetic talent. It had to do with the proportions of her legs, her long waist, her tiny, hard-muscled ass. It had to do with her dark, secret, forested cunt. For years he had privately anguished about her pending old age—the prospect of which was now a luxury. Inevitably, then, since January he had privately anguished about cancer. He was too attracted to his wife, but he was used to being too attracted, and if all that was left was the nice love, the warm appreciative admiring love without the gutter love, the unseemly, sordid animal love, he would feel lesser, and the love would feel lesser, in its very purity and high-mindedness and mere
goodness smaller and less interesting and less addictive. He did not want to stop being attracted to his wife. It was not easy to face, but for twenty-six years he had not only loved a woman. He had loved a body.

Like the house of his dreams the night before her surgery, that body had good bones. But just as you want to be able to walk across a floor and feel a comforting solidity without necessarily envisioning the very joists that prop your feet, you did not especially want to bear witness to the good bones of your wife. As he ran his hand down the ladder of her rib cage, he could feel the underlying structure, the beams with which Glynis was built. He may have always savored the sharpness of her hip-bones, but now they were too sharp, the skin stretched across them like the very cheapest of carpets, so skimpy that you could discern not only cracks between the floorboards but the nails. These days he bedded a sketch of a body, a gesture toward it, a few strokes from which to infer the woman he had gleefully ravished for a quarter century. He fought a shiver. He did not want to find Glynis repellant, and he filled out her form from memory, as he might study an architectural drawing and mentally walk rooms that were mere lines on paper.

“Are you sure you’re up for this?” he whispered.

In response, she reached for where his reluctance was most palpable; he arced in a shying sag. But a metalsmith has powerful hands, and the clasp of her fingers stirred him to remember that his wife was not a corpse. He needn’t shrink from her body as if he might defile her, commit an indecency. Her grip brought a sharp, needy sensation to life, one he had forgotten altogether in the constant, more pressing needs for potatoes, fleece blankets, liquids spiked with cranberry cordial, soft, slow rides to chemo. Men were supposed to think about sex all the time, but he didn’t anymore, and now the remembering was so keen that it hurt.

He was nervous of resting on top of her. Though she had always enjoyed the full weight of him, he didn’t want to crush her, and propped his arms on either side. Easing onto an elbow, he reached for the lubricant on the bedside table, opening the cap with one hand and squeezing a dab of clear jelly onto a forefinger. When they’d first resorted to this small assistance she’d been wounded, as if her enthusiasm had been
found wanting. But he had importuned that her body was under assault, and its failure to grease the skids was in no way a failure of heart. Indeed, when he slipped the finger between her legs the lips were dry; only the smear from the tube made her feel like his wife.

They could still do this. He kissed her, the taste with that metallic tang like sucking on a coin, as if she were no longer merely allied with metal, but were turning into metal from the inside. He looked into her eyes, saddened by their yellow tinge but still he found her there. The pupils were small and permanently frightened. It wasn’t desire he read in them so much as desire for desire, which would have to do. Looking down, he felt sheepishly enormous, spreading and flabby in comparison. She gripped the barrel of his chest, the nails biting. He was sliding in with that diffident tenderness she hated. She took a buttock in each hand and shoved.

So he allowed himself to forget. He allowed himself to fuck her, as hard and as deeply as she had always liked, with that edge of abuse. Coming, he allowed himself to believe that this was the injection that would cure her, for once a mainline that wasn’t full of poison but was full of life. The poison was forty thousand dollars. The elixir was free.

That should have been it. But before she drifted off in his arms, Glynis mumbled distinctly, “So. Do you think you’ll have enough left?”

Shep felt his face burn. He stroked her hair silently (several strands came off in his hand), on the pretext that he didn’t know what she was talking about. But it was nefarious, after you’d lived with a woman for this long, how well she knew you. How she could tell what you were thinking, even if you tried mightily not to think it, to hide the thinking from yourself. Enough of what left? Money, of course.
Only
money, Dad—on what else did the firstborn Knacker so famously dwell?

Should being capable of calculations like the one he’d made earlier this evening mark him as a sinful and selfish man, that was a truth about himself he would have to live with. An Afterlife for one would cost little more than half as much as an Afterlife for two. He would retain the funds for a solo escape, but only if Glynis died soon.

Shepherd Armstrong Knacker
Merrill Lynch Account Number 934-23F917
June 01, 2005–June 30, 2005
Net Portfolio Value: $452,198.43

D
riving Glynis once more to Columbia-Presbyterian, Shep was hard pressed to contrive an analogy for his emotions that was anything short of ridiculous. Like opening the envelope that contained his SAT scores? He hadn’t cared fractionally this much about going to college even in the days when he’d cared about going to college. Like opening the door to Dave’s office the April after he’d sold Knack for a million bucks, and was about to find out how much he owed the feds? Sure, he’d felt a bit sick to his stomach then; The Afterlife was at stake. But he’d been familiar with capital gains rates, and had been prepared for the ballpark. For that matter, Shep’s reputed concern for money was highly exaggerated. So he had never cared this much about any tax bill, even about the check he wrote to the U.S. Treasury in 1997 for close to three hundred thou.

No, for driving to get the results of Glynis’s first CAT scan since beginning chemotherapy there was no parallel. They didn’t talk. They had already talked. No amount of talk would affect the shrinking or
expanding shadows on her slides. She was the same, she was better, or she was worse. The verdict was not on their efforts. That was one problem with a frivolous comparison to test results of the educational sort, whose scores rated having performed well or badly; they were outcomes you had ordained. However much Shep’s father may have regarded his son as an alien philistine, the man had successfully inculcated in his firstborn a drive to be good, to do good, and to do well. Yet whether Glynis was
doing well
would not issue from either of them having
done well.
Having always strived for excellence even in humble endeavors like installing a new bathroom vanity, Shep was confounded by consequences at once so vital, yet determined solely by the heedless decree of fate. His anxiety was therefore akin to the way Jackson must feel when the greyhounds were off and running and he’d placed a sizeable bet on a dog.

Shep distracted himself by considering Dr. Goldman. Vigorous and aggressive, the internist was a roughly handsome man; at six-feet-who-knows, he was
large
. While you couldn’t call him fat, a fleshy midsection did betray him as a man of appetites. Likely no stranger to a rack of ribs or a double Scotch, he displayed the very failure to take his own advice that Shep had missed in Dr. Knox—who, fit, trim, and younger by fifteen years, was by conventional measures far better looking. So why was Philip Goldman the more attractive man? Objectively his handsomeness was very “rough” indeed—which was to say that he wasn’t handsome at all. His broad face was smashed flat, and his eyes were set too close together—small and almost piggy. Yet he moved with energy and self-conviction, swallowing hallways in the same hungry lunges with which he doubtless downed a meal. He
moved
like a man who was killingly handsome, and thus he swept you up in the illusion that he was. His appeal was kinetic, and would never translate to static photographs. A smitten girlfriend would proudly show his snapshot to a confidante, and the friend would privately shake her head, flummoxed by what on earth the poor woman saw in this homely lug.

Frankly, Shep was a little jealous. It wasn’t only that the doctor was better educated, more successful, and rich. There was an inti
macy between the doctor and his patient that Shep couldn’t equal with twenty-six years of marriage. He didn’t know what you called his wife’s unquestioning devotion to her doctor if it wasn’t love. She had merely trusted Dr. Knox, which was atypical enough; she
believed
in Dr. Goldman, and with a passion that felt erotic. When her husband admonished her to eat, she dug in her heels. But when toward the end of May
Dr. Goldman
urged her to eat, Glynis had made a proper project of gaining weight, cheerfully requesting her every favorite dish. Whatever had inspired her fuller cheeks shouldn’t matter, but Shep was still bugged.

Shep’s absenteeism was already teetering into the danger zone with Pogatchnik; at least Goldman’s obliging this early evening appointment had enabled him to put in a full day at work.

In silence, Shep held hands with Glynis from the parking garage to the office on the seventh floor, using his free hand to hit the car’s key fob and punch elevator buttons. Before knocking timidly on the door, he paused to lock eyes with his wife. It was the kind of glance that defendants and their spouses might share while the jury files in. Glynis was innocent, but this judiciary was capricious.

The door swept open. “Mr. and Mrs. Knacker, please come in!”

Shep took one look at Goldman’s beaming face and thought:
Not guilty
.

“You’re looking well!” Goldman cried, shaking Shep’s hand and laying a second palm on the forearm for added warmth. (Shep was not looking well. After months of mopping up his wife’s high-calorie leftovers, he looked more like Goldman every day, but several inches shorter and absent the poetry-in-motion magic trick.) When he shook hands with Glynis—“And you’re looking
very
well!”—her wiry metacarpus was every bit a match for the big doctor’s clasp. She may have under-served her talent, but even intermittent filing, sawing, and polishing had produced the fiercest grip of any woman Shep knew.

They sat before the desk. Shep was glad for the chair. He felt shaky. Asterisks were spinning in his visual field, as if the office swarmed with flies. He prayed that Goldman wasn’t the round-up type, who would cast a merely middling outcome in glowing terms.

The doctor bombed to his seat, clasped his hands behind his head, and tipped rearward in his spring-backed chair with one cordovan on the edge of the desk. His lab coat was open, his shirt crumpled, his hair in disarray; he was a bit of a slouch. But then, any specialist with patients flying in from New Zealand and Korea could afford to look unkempt. “Well, boys and girls, I have fabulous news!”

Shep dropped his shoulders in relief. The internist was a man of science, not a car salesman, and by code of practice couldn’t turn back the odometer on a last-legs clunker.

“The evil shrinketh before the mighty hand of righteousness,” Goldman proceeded gleefully. “I know that Alimta is a bastard, Mrs. Knacker, and you’ve been a real trouper.” (This much beloved term
real trouper
was apparently medical shorthand for
does not wake doctor in middle of night when suffering side effects hospital staff have already prepared her for.
) “But it’s been worth it. I’ll be honest: that one biphasic patch is being stubborn. But it hasn’t got any larger either, so we’ve arrested its progress. The other two are significantly reduced in size. We’re not seeing any metastasis, either.”

Shep reached around Glynis’s neck and kissed her forehead in blessing. They squeezed each other’s hands while tumbling over one another to exclaim, “That’s wonderful! That’s terrific! We’re so grateful!”

Goldman loaded a CD into his computer, showing them cross-sections of Glynis’s organs, which looked like slices of a fancy game terrine in an upscale restaurant. Shep castigated himself for ever thinking critically about Philip Goldman. Maybe the guy really was handsome. Shep wasn’t a female, so who was he to judge? And if Glynis “believed” in her doctor, the faith had been well placed.

By contrast, Shep felt traitorous, cynical, and shallow for having been a doubter, a religious skeptic. His sudden groundswell realignment in relation to his wife’s disease was none too subtle, leaving him to wonder if all along he’d suffered from an attitude problem. He didn’t buy into this New Age business of sending out “negative energy”—or he didn’t think he bought it. Nonetheless, any atmospheric contribution he might have made to his wife’s convalescence (might they dare now to call it “recov
ery”?) had been to her detriment. Since the internist produced more tangible redemption than either Gabe Knacker’s traditional Presbyterianism or Deb’s barmy born-again sect in Tucson, it was time to convert. To become a loyal, tithing parishioner of Philip Goldman’s church.

Exercising his newfound faith, Shep regarded the doctor with fresh appreciation. You could tell from the assurance of his gestures that this was a man used to giving speeches to large audiences of rapt medical professionals. To having his articles published in
The Lancet
, and being sent lesser authors’ research for review. To having dying people beg him to take their cases, perhaps in tears. Yet he did not seem self-important; that is, he didn’t broadcast a compensatory bluster that would camouflage a private sensation of fraudulence. No, Goldman just seemed important.

The doctor pointed out the contrast between Glynis’s last CAT scan and the latest. To the naked eye, the differences looked depressingly slight; it would take work, this conversion, spurning a natural agnosticism and getting with the program. Throughout, Goldman employed the inclusive first-person plural:
we’ve
shrunk this,
we’ve
shrunk that. But the pronoun was over-generous.
We
had done nothing, as Goldman knew very well.

The doctor’s most conspicuous appetite was for accomplishment, and his drive for excellence put in the shade Shep’s sorry aim to match roofing patches with original slates. Maybe Goldman liked Glynis; he liked being liked, so it was hard to tell. But his primary relationship was with her cancer. She was therefore a vehicle for his own beatification. In taming her malignancy, he was probably pleased on her behalf; he was unquestionably pleased on his own. More project than person, Glynis was an instrument for the furtherance of this doctor’s galloping ambition, and not only to do good but to do
well
.

Her surrogacy was obscurely unsettling. Yet Shep couldn’t identify what was wrong with it. He was ordinarily an advocate of healthy self-interest. For Goldman to have conflated his patient’s survival and his personal conquest was in Glynis’s interest, too. She didn’t need another well-wisher, Shep told himself, another friend. She needed a competent,
skillful technician who did the best job he knew how, and why the man made that maximum effort was his business. For that matter, maybe Shep should reverse who was using whom. He and Glynis were hijacking Goldman’s ego to serve their own purposes, and looked at this way the scenario seemed perfectly cheerful.

“Since it’s working,” the doctor wrapped up, “and you seem to tolerate the drugs better than the average bear, for now we should keep hitting the cancer with Alimta and—with ‘A Lift into Manhattan.’” As the doctor shot Glynis a conspiratorial smile, Shep tried valiantly not to feel wounded that she’d let Goldman in on their private joke. “I’m a little concerned about your blood count. But we have plenty of other options at our disposal if your tolerance slips, or your progress with Alimta flags.” He rattled off a list of alternative drugs, and then asked about the current side effects. Glynis played them down.

I
t was summer. For the first time that season, it felt like summer, and the luscious weather was not a mockery. In the long light of early July, the sun was only now setting behind Hackensack, flashing tangerine sheets across the Hudson. Driving with thrust, Shep recalibrated the future. Maybe she’d pull through after all. Maybe he wouldn’t have to go to Pemba by himself. Maybe there would still be sufficient funds in the Merrill Lynch, if not for the relaxed, luxurious second life he’d planned, enough to get by, to pick up a small house for a song and eat papayas. Maybe he would still have to prevail upon her to go, but maybe this experience will have changed her, given her a glimpse of how little time was left even for people who didn’t have cancer. Maybe he would order up that kingfish, by candlelight, for two.

“How’d you like to eat out tonight?” he proposed. “I could give you a real ‘Lift into Manhattan.’”

“It’s a little risky, with other people’s germs…” said Glynis. “But what the hell. Let’s celebrate. I’d love to go to Japonica, but sushi is probably pushing it.”

No matter how many restaurants he sampled, up against it like this
Shep often drew a blank, and they’d end up at some heavily advertised tourist joint like Fiorello’s because it was the only name he could dredge up. But this evening was charmed. “City Crab?”

“Perfect!”

Bejeweled like a tiara, the George Washington Bridge had just switched on its lights. Undergoing maintenance, the span on the Manhattan side had been unlit for years now, leaving a single lit peak on the New Jersey end to dangle to darkness mid-river; the lopsided effect had been visually vexing. Tonight at long last the whole bridge was lit shore to shore. The renewed symmetry seemed to mean something. A rhythm and balance had been restored.

Being out in public was a novelty now. The evening got off to a rocky start when they noticed a patron coughing nearby, and insisted on being reseated. When the waitress acted miffed, Glynis played her trump card: “My immune system is compromised. I have cancer.” After moving them swiftly upstairs, the waitress brought a complimentary amuse-bouche with the establishment’s apologies. Once the girl left, Glynis muttered, “At least mesothelioma is good for something.”

Glynis hadn’t been strictly forbidden alcohol, and Shep scanned the wine list. He didn’t much care about champagne, interchangeable with Mountain Dew in his view, and Glynis would likely sip a single flute. Still he chose a pricey Veuve Cliquot. He wasn’t buying champagne. Like most people, he suspected, he was buying the
idea
of champagne.

“To your health,” he toasted, pleased to note that in low lighting his wife’s chemo-tinged skin color could pass for a tan. She looked fetching in her cream satin turban, which so suited her long, sharp face that onlookers might easily assume that she’d opted for the swaddling as a style statement.

“I’ve been meaning to tell you,” said Glynis, tucking into her crab cakes. “I’ve been getting
loads
of ideas for new flatware projects. Like in the car just now. I got an image of a salad serving set, two nested spoons—one larger and thicker, the other thinner and more sinewy, both different but perfectly cupped. Forged, not cast, all on a slight curve…It’s hard to explain.”