So Much for That (7 page)

“Of course it isn’t,” Shep found himself saying. “We’ll pay whatever it takes to get Glynis well again.” Given his wife’s milk-money income from a chocolatier, the
we
was more farce. That the
well again
might also qualify as farce Shep was not yet prepared to contemplate.

Nevertheless, as Knox wrote out the contact details of this famously expensive shaman of the black arts, Shep considered this quantity now officially of “no object.” Of course it had no value by itself. Money was a means. But to ends not readily dismissed as “no object.” Food, shelter, clothing. Safety, insofar as there was such a thing, and thus also the capacity for rescue. Efficacy, power, sway. Ease, freedom, choice. Generosity, charity; if not love, for his children, wife, sister, and father, the palpable evidence of love. Education; if not wisdom, its prerequisite of accurate information. If not happiness, comfort, which could stand in for happiness in a pinch. Airplane tickets—experience, beauty, and escape. From the description of their apparent savior in Columbia-Presbyterian, raw, animal survival. For in the face of a virulent cancer, they would not simply follow directions, and marshal their forces of will; they would buy life. They would buy Glynis’s life, day by costly day, and in the end you would be able to affix a price tag to every one.

“So far, do either of you have any questions?” asked Dr. Knox.

“The side effects…” said Glynis. Of course, there was nothing “side” about them. They were effects—big, brutal, and anything but ancillary.

“Each drug and each patient is different. You’ll be alerted what to be prepared for, I promise. Let’s get through the surgery first. Not get ahead of ourselves.”

In the proceeding silence, Shep looked to his wife, then to the oncologist, beginning to panic. He did not want to shake hands and find himself in the car and have the omission, the elision, the craven evasion, steeping the inside of the vehicle like toxic emission fumes. But he also did not understand why he had to be the one to ask. Glynis might have
raised this obvious matter before, but if so she hadn’t shared with him the upshot of such a discussion, and that seemed impossible.

When trying to get up to speed about a disease he’d never heard of before last Friday, through the following weekend Shep had spent hours at the computer. Know thy enemy, he figured. Yet on one medical Web page, well into its patient, hand-holding explanations of every test and treatment that mesothelioma patients might expect, he had finally arrived at a section headed “Survival Rates.” He had nearly memorized the first paragraph, having stared it down for so long:

It was his initial impression that the authors of the text were being patronizing. His first impulse was to scroll down. He had always faced difficulty squarely. But this was different, if only because it was not his difficulty. It was bound, at points, to seem like his difficulty, but he would have to be mindful about that. Still, there was no question that as that paragraph burned on the screen, what bloomed in his gut was terror. He reached for the mouse. He withdrew his hand from the mouse. He did not scroll down. Taking the page’s advice,
skip this page
, he had returned to the same point on the same website three other times. He had never scrolled down. He wasn’t ready. In this office, with a fellow human being who could speak with all that useless kindness, it was time to scroll down.

“What are her chances,” said Shep, so leadenly that he was unable to lift the end of the sentence to imply the interrogative. “How long.” This was no juncture at which to be unclear. He formed the question fully.

“How long has my wife got to live.”

But it was Glynis who spoke. “There’s no way to say. Every patient is different, you heard the doctor. Every patient reacts differently, and, as he said, new drugs are coming on the market all the time.”

His glance darting between them, Dr. Knox seemed to appraise the couple carefully. “It’s important to remain optimistic. I’ve often been pressed for a specific prognosis, and even when I’ve relented I can’t tell you how often I’ve been wrong. How many times I’ve predicted that a patient had such-and-such an amount of time left, and then years beyond the point at which I’d have expected to be sending flowers they’re thrashing their best friends at squash.”

“And it helps, you said,” said Glynis, “that I’m in very good health to begin with. I’m not overweight, my cholesterol is good, I exercise, I don’t have any complicating conditions, and I’m barely fifty years old.”

“Absolutely,” Dr. Knox chimed in. “Committing to a specific doomsday date is like going to war and choosing ahead of time the day on which you plan to lose. In medicine just as in the military, it’s a positive attitude that gets results.”

Shep was familiar with this talk of illness as armed confrontation: the “battle” with cancer, whose patients are invariably classified as “real fighters,” with “an arsenal” of treatments at their disposal with which to “defeat” an invasion of wayward cells. But the analogy felt wrong. His small experience so far was more one of bad weather. So it was as if the doctor had declared they would “go to war” with a snowstorm, or a gale wind.

“Yes, well, I didn’t mean to sound pessimistic, and there must be a huge variation…” Shep dutifully backed down. Still, he was surprised. Given her ferocity, her defiance, her darkness—of the two, he was far more constitutionally inclined toward the very optimism that Knox was promoting—he would have classed Glynis as the scroll-down type. Doubtless there were more things he would find out about her as this proceeded. Maybe you never really knew anyone until they were dying.

Thus blocked from “getting ahead of themselves,” Shep worked backward.

“Asbestos,” he said. He found it odd that they had spoken so long without anyone mentioning the word. “Mesothelioma is associated
almost exclusively with asbestos. How could my wife have been exposed to that?”

“She and I have discussed this, and I’m afraid we didn’t solve the mystery. She tells me that, to her knowledge, she’s never worked with the material. Nor, I gather, have you ever had the insulation replaced in your home. But it was once so pervasive…and it only takes a single inhaled or ingested fiber…The gestation period for mesothelioma is anywhere from twenty to fifty years. That makes it incredibly difficult to identify a particular product as the provenance of the disease. Does it really matter?”

“It matters to me,” said Glynis hotly. Her demeanor thus far had been so meek; finally in the flash of anger, she sounded like herself.

“If some stranger on the street stabbed you in the belly with a butcher knife, wouldn’t you want to know who it was?”

“Maybe…” said Dr. Knox. “But I’d be much more concerned with getting to a hospital to be patched up. If the misfortune was the result of ‘wrong place, wrong time,’ who—or in this case what—was the culprit would mostly be a matter of idle curiosity.”

“There’s nothing
idle
about my curiosity,” said Glynis. “Since I’m about to be slit open and gutted like a fish, then pumped full of drugs that make me throw up and go bald and sleep all day—sleep if I’m lucky—I would
rather
like to know who did this to me.”

The oncologist chewed on his inside cheek. This office must have seen its fair share of impotent fury. “Maybe I should have asked before. What do you do for a living, Mr. Knacker?”

“I run—I work for a company that does household repairs. We send out handymen, basically. Provide the materials…”

The eyes of the physician sharpened. “Do you, or have you done, any of this kind of work yourself?”

Handyman
sounded down-market—it had always had a low-class ring to his father, and Jackson had invented all sorts of clunky euphemisms to avoid using the word—but Shep refused to regard the occupation as shameful. If Glynis, too, preferred to describe his more executive capacity at dinner parties, he saw nothing ignoble about physical labor. He was more likely to find ignoble lolling for years at a desk. “Sure, of course.”

“And would you have worked with insulation, or cement products…fireproofing, soundproofing, roofing materials…gutters, rainwater pipes…vinyl flooring, plaster…water tanks?”

Shep felt a flicker of wariness, an intuition that this was the point at which savvy criminals in police interviews took the fifth. The innocent, by contrast, believed that they had nothing to hide, and idiotically blabbed their hearts out. Little wonder that
innocent
had two connotations: without sin, and ignorant. “All of the above, at one time or another. Why? I never took Glynis out on the job. If any of those materials had asbestos in them, wouldn’t I be the one who got sick?”

“You might have brought fibers home on your clothes. In fact, I came across a story recently about a woman with mesothelioma in Britain, who’s suing their Ministry of Defence. Her father was an insulation engineer at a naval dockyard, and she’s certain that she was exposed to asbestos from hugging her father as a child.”

As a grown man, Shep rarely blushed, but now his cheeks stung. “That seems far-fetched.”

“Mmm,” said Dr. Knox. “A single fiber, on the hand, touched to the mouth? Unfortunate, but not far-fetched.”

The wave of heat was followed by a wave of cold, as Glynis turned to him and her expression was accusatory. First he’s so caught up in his “own little world” that his wife doesn’t confide that she’s being tested for a deadly disease, and now he gave it to her.

S
hep finally broke their silence as he unlocked the car in the parking garage on Ft. Washington. “I thought asbestos was banned a long time ago.”

“It’s
still
not banned,” said Glynis, bundling furiously into the passenger seat. “The EPA
finally
banned the shit in 1989, but in 1991 the industry got the ban overturned in court. You can’t use it in insulation and some other whathaveyou anymore, that’s all, or building anything new.”

Shep was immediately struck by the homework Glynis had done on this subject—there was no way that this regulatory timeline had been
long lodged in her head as general knowledge—when she had conspicuously refrained from availing herself of the copious information at her fingertips about her illness. She was hazy on the side effects of drugs whose names and downsides were meticulously listed on a host of websites; she would not
scroll down
. Yet her searches on their home computer had apparently regarded not what was happening to her or what would happen to her next, but who was to blame. The misdirection of her energies was painfully typical.

“I’m not quite sure how I could have known.” He didn’t start the car, though he stared intently out the windshield as if he were driving.

“The materials I used to work with were the same ones everyone used. Licensed plumbers, professional roofers…I never cut corners, or used a material that I knew other repairmen were careful to avoid.”

“You could easily have known, and you should have! Evidence about the dangers of asbestos goes back to
1918
. The evidence was really beginning to accumulate by the 1930s, but the industry had the research suppressed. The specific link between asbestos and mesothelioma was made in 1964. That was before you even started Knack! By the 1970s, that asbestos could kill you was basically a known fact. I grew up surrounded by these stories, and so did you!”

“Glynis, try to think back,” said Shep, keeping his voice calm, reasoning, quiet. “During the early years I was putting in twelve-, sometimes fourteen-hour days getting Knack off the ground. I didn’t have time to read the papers front to back. Much less to bury my nose in a microscopic list of ingredients every time I opened a can.”

“We’re not talking about your not having time to follow every twist and turn of peace talks in the Middle East. You had an obligation to keep up with health and safety issues that bore directly on your work. And to do whatever modest research might have been required to choose safe products over
lethal
ones. Never mind just you—or, by the way, your wife and children. What about your employees?”

“I no longer have employees,” he said quietly. “Glynis, why are you doing this? Are you getting back at me for Pemba?”

She was not to be sidetracked. “All these companies being sued up
the wazoo for decades right and left, but no, you stick your head in the sand and totally ignore it!”

Shep himself had never been a man for causes. It was his nature to see two sides of things; worse, many sides, so that acquaintances often mistook him for having no opinions at all. He was attuned to particularities, complexities, and extenuating circumstances. He wasn’t critical of ideologues; he found Jackson entertaining. There were causes whose proponents had prevailed and improved matters. He was glad that his wife could vote, and that blacks no longer had to use separate water fountains. It was clearly a fine thing, too, that some firebrands had demonized asbestos, so that his own co-workers were no longer replacing insulation that could kill them, and wouldn’t risk being cast in this terrible role of contaminant by their own wives.

Nonetheless, he had also founded a company, and had a better-than-average understanding of what a company was: neither ogre nor abstraction. It was an amalgam of many people—including the odd slipshod employee or ruthlessly bottom-line zealot who could single-handedly undermine decades of collective diligence. It was an intersection of many products, each of which was connected to yet another company, also of many people, decent people who didn’t always feel like going to work every morning and still did, and each with its host of obligations—to stockholders, investors, health plans, and pensions. Yet a company was also an entity that somebody loved. Not that he was excusing poor practice, but corporate malfeasance was therefore both diffuse, and deeply personal. Given the diffusion, he couldn’t see the satisfaction in pointing the finger at “a company,” much less at “an industry.” After all, look at Glynis. In preference to railing at “an industry,” she was clearly far more gratified to locate a guilty party whom she could literally get her hands on.