So Much for That (13 page)

In widening the discussion to Japan, Shep implied that it was now all right to talk about something else besides disease. Even Glynis seemed relieved.

“Those
hiki-kimchi
, or whatever,” said Jackson. “Precocious moochery is what that is. You gotta give these guys credit for figuring out so young that when you refuse to take care of yourself, someone else will come along and roll your sushi for you.”

“But it’s hardly an enviable life,” said Carol. “Not what any of us would want for Zach.”

His wife’s persistent sincerity sometimes grew trying. “Hey, Shep, I been thinking about that problem of my titles not being sufficiently flattering to my would-be public.” Jackson plunged a triangle of pita bread into the hummus with the pretense of an appetite. “So check this out:
Just Because You’re a Quailing, Lily-Livered Twit Who Folks Smarter and Gutsier Than You Are Bleeding White Doesn’t Mean You’re Not Still a Nice Person
.”

It went over well.

“Speaking of being bled white,” said Glynis, “Beryl came over the
other night. Can you believe she expected us to put up the entire down payment on a Manhattan apartment?”

“Why not throw in a yacht while you’re at it?” said Jackson. “Christ, that woman is Mega-Mooch. Ever notice how these arty bohemian types think we owe them a living? As if we’re all supposed to feel so grateful that they’re creating
meaning
and
beauty
for us poor uncultured Neanderthals. Meantime, they’re always shaking a tin can in our faces—for another government grant, or a Midtown penthouse courtesy of Meany Capitalist Older Brother.” He and Beryl had met once: oil and water. She thought he was a heartless right-wing kook, and he thought she was a soft-headed liberal pill. Whenever Shep’s sister came up in conversation, Jackson couldn’t contain himself.

“But, sweetheart,” said Carol, “I thought Mooches were supposed to be ‘smarter and gutsier.’ I thought you admired them. In which case, you look up to Beryl, right?”

“I prefer folks getting away with murder who know they’re getting away with murder. Instead Beryl has that attitude like she’s the victim of some terrible injustice. As if the world needed another documentary. She should turn on the box. They’re chockablock, and most of them bore the shit out of me, frankly.”

When Jackson trailed their host to offer a hand in the kitchen, Shep remarked, “Say, you all right? You’re walking funny.”

“Aw, just overdid it in the gym. Pulled something.” The line had worked on Carol.

D
inner was lavish, with a roast and a profusion of side dishes. Worried about interactions, Jackson made an initial effort to go easy on the wine, but it seemed that every time he reached for his glass it was empty again. At length he gave up and gave in. This was a special night, and not to enter into the spirit of the occasion would have been churlish. The evening had revved into high gear, albeit with a jittery underpinning, everyone laughing too readily, too hard, and too long. At least boisterousness beat moping.

“Been following the Michael Jackson trial?” Shep brought up.

The self-styled “King of Pop” was being charged one more time for messing with little boys at his sick-fuck fun-land ranch. “Yeah, the prosecution’s making a mess of it,” said Jackson. “He’ll get off.”

“I can’t follow the details,” said Carol. “I get too distracted by that face—all the plastic surgery. His face is always the real story for me. It exerts a warped, train-wreck fascination.”

“You know, it used to be that when you had mental problems, they stayed in your head,” said Shep. “Now we all have to look at them.”

“I know what you mean,” said Glynis. “It’s like now everyone wears their neuroses on their sleeves. We used to be surrounded by a bunch of passably normal-seeming people who went home and peered miserably in the mirror. Now you walk down the street and women have breasts the size of Hindenburgs. Men in dresses on hormones are wearing push-up bras, and you can tell from the fold in their Lycra tights that they’re all carved up with some grotesque gash of a vagina. It’s like having to live in other people’s dreamscapes.”

“With Jackson—I mean, Michael Jackson,” said Carol. “What breaks my heart is the shame. How somehow he’s been made to feel that being black is humiliating, something to be effaced.”

“At this point in time,” said Glynis, “I have no understanding of going in for surgery, for anything, if you don’t have to.”

“The guy’s got money,” said Jackson. “If what he wants to buy is looking like Elizabeth Taylor, that’s his business.”

They all looked over at him as if he’d just grown three heads. He held up his hands. “I’m just saying, what’s wrong with trying to make something you dream about real?”

“Because it doesn’t work,” said Shep.

“That’s not how you felt about The Afterlife,” said Jackson. “You wanted to make that real.”

“We’re talking about hacking up your body, not moving to a new house,” said Carol. “It’s obvious, for example, that every surgery and skin-blanching process that ‘Wacko Jacko’ has subjected himself to has only made the man more unhappy. Every disappointing nose job is one
more reminder that he doesn’t only hate his race, and his gender, but himself.”

“It’s like sexual fantasy,” said Glynis. “I don’t want to get into particulars—”

“Damn!” said Jackson.

“But have you ever tried acting them out? It’s flat. It’s messy or awkward and self-conscious. When you make it real, it doesn’t get you off. Fantasy works better if it stays in your mind. Let it into the world, and it comes out like some gory, misshapen afterbirth. And Shepherd,” Glynis paused, taking a forkful of green beans, “I
don’t
think The Afterlife was any different.”

Jackson worried they were getting into touchy territory, but Shep was used to taking gut punches with the smallest
hoof
. “Maybe,” was all she got out of him, and he asked how she liked the almonds on the beans. At least Glynis was making an effort to eat, which clearly made the guy so ecstatic that he couldn’t have cared less what she said.

It wasn’t until they’d pushed back their chairs from the groaning board that someone brought up Terri Schiavo, the brain-damaged patient on life support in Florida whose bloated face had lolled on the lead story of virtually every TV newscast for weeks. Her husband wanted to withdraw her feeding tube, while her parents were determined to keep alive what was no longer a daughter, or even the family goldfish, but closer to an azalea bush.

“Man, am I sick of watching that same footage,” said Jackson. He did an imitation, slackening his jaw and letting drool drizzle his chin, emitting a thin nasal bleat.

“Stop it,” said Carol. “That’s disrespectful.”

He realized too late that the impersonation was a little too close for comfort to Flicka.

“What makes me mad is that this has nothing to do with Terri Schiavo anymore,” said Glynis. “The husband and the in-laws hate each other, it’s all about who wins, and that poor girl gets lost in the shuffle. They could as well be fighting over a scrap of meat.”

“It’s no longer all in the family,” said Shep. “Whole country’s at
each other’s throats over this one. But honestly, if you saw a movie in which some private medical face-off ended up involving the governor of Florida—the president’s brother—the state legislature, the state Supreme Court, the federal Supreme Court,
and
the Congress of the United States, you’d think the plot was totally overdone and unbelievable.”

“When you look at those video clips of Terri,” said Carol, “it seems pretty clear that someone’s home. Withdrawing the feeding tube would be murder.”

“Oh, Christ,” said Jackson. “Those are involuntary movements. Like when you poke at a sea anemone. Except that a sea anemone has more brains.”

“What fascinates me,” said Shep, “what with all the publicity, going on for months? I haven’t heard a single shock jock speculate about how much keeping that woman plugged in for fifteen years has
cost
.”

“Yeah,” said Jackson, “and if you add in the lawyers’ fees, court costs, and the time squandered in legislatures and the statehouse? at one human house plant in Florida must have cost millions, tens of millions—maybe even hundreds of millions.”

“So?” said Glynis, looking back and forth at her husband and his best friend in horror. “What does that matter? What it costs?”

“We’re talking about human life, Jim!”
Jackson supplied, but Glynis didn’t smile.

“Is that all that matters to you two? What someone’s life
costs
?”

“It’s not all that matters,” said Shep. Jackson figured his friend was about to back down again, but surprisingly he held the line. “But it matters. It takes about five dollars a head to save the life of a kid in Africa with diarrhea. Something like two million kids on that continent basically shit themselves to death every year. If you took all the money spent on keeping Terri Schiavo alive—if you can call her alive—and spent it in Africa instead, I bet you could save every single one of those kids this year.”

“But the money wouldn’t be spent in Africa, would it?” Glynis glared. “Who else would you like to kill off, to save money?”

“No one, Glynis.” To Shep’s credit, he met his wife’s eyes. “Like you said, the money wouldn’t go to Africa anyway.”

Jackson decided to come to the rescue. “Thing is, these gonzo evangelicals, who are so fired up to save Schiavo—who’s reverted, at best, to a hundred-and-seventy-pound baby? They’re the same folks who support capital punishment. They’re gung ho on any military adventure abroad. If they had their say, they’d roll back the clock and you couldn’t get birth control out of wedlock. They oppose stem-cell research because it uses a few microscopic specks from an embryo that’s otherwise going to be tossed into medical waste. They may back national health insurance for children, but couldn’t care less about health insurance for the kids’ parents. They get hysterical about pedophiles like Michael Jackson, but they don’t get excited about women being raped, who are supposed to bear the babies of their attackers. Add it all up? This type? They don’t give a shit about
grown-ups
.”

The diversion came at a price. Carol wasn’t born-again, but he had still derogated a host of his wife’s opinions. Her voice was frosty. “That’s because adults can stick up for themselves.”

“Not against these people!”

“
These people
stick up for the weak.”

“Prefer the weak,” Jackson countered. “No competition. And they
use
the weak to boss other grown-ups around.”

Carol rolled her eyes. “The point is, we have no idea what kind of rich interior life Terri Schiavo might be enjoying. The dreams, the memories, how much she knows her family is there and feels them caring for her even if she can’t communicate. Her husband has no right to make the high-handed decision that since he’s tired of visiting and he’s in love with someone else he’s going to snuff her out.”

“I have to agree with Carol,” said Glynis. “You never know what kind of a life someone might still value even if you don’t think you’d put up with it yourself. In fact, you might be wrong. You might put up with it. You never know what you’ll put up with if the alternative is nothing.”

Helping to clear the dishes, Jackson marveled at the last discussion’s curious alignments. This foursome conventionally divided on issues of the day along the same axes. Shep and Carol were sentimental (they would say
compassionate
). Glynis was customarily on Jackson’s side.

They were both practical (the other two would say
callous
). For
Glynis
to be arguing to continue artificial life support for a woman who, according to earlier photographs, used to be quite a looker, and who—were she to realize that the pics of her face running on front pages all over the nation were of a fat, vapid, floppy imbecile—would turn in her grave, if only she were allowed to have one…Well, Shep must have been wrong. Cancer did change people.

B
y the time they were picking at the bakery layer cake, the mood had sobered. They all seemed to remember the reason for this occasion; past midnight, Glynis’s surgery was only a day and a half away. They shouldn’t keep her up any later. She looked tired, and Jackson was rounding on an exit line when she rounded on him.

“Jackson, have you had a chance to think about what products you and Shep might have worked with in the early eighties that could have contained asbestos?”

“Well, I’ve really put my mind to it, but—”

“Jackson and I have already talked about this, and I told you we talked about it,” said Shep, his tone uncharacteristically testy. “Maybe you should drop it.”

“Hey, I don’t mind—” said Jackson.

“I mind,” said Shep.

“If some company had done this to you,” Glynis charged her guests, “would you honestly be inclined to
drop it
?”

“Had this happened to any of us,” said Shep, his voice flattened in a hyper-evenness that was obviously a substitute for shouting, “and if you’re right about where the fibers might have come from, everyone at this table could have been exposed—I would hope we’d all concentrate first and foremost on getting well.”

“It would be one thing if I fell and hit my head,” said Glynis. “Or smoked my whole life when I knew it was bad for me and then got cancer. But this was done
to
me. By people who deliberately buried medical evidence. Who kept deadly products on the market because they wanted to make more money. Those people should pay the price.”

Shep glanced at his guests with chagrin. They were close friends and went back decades, but he didn’t commonly conduct marital spats in their presence. “I know it isn’t fair,” he said softly. “But you’ll be the one who pays the price, Gnu, even if you do win a lawsuit.”

“People who care that much about money can only be punished by losing it,” said Glynis. For someone who was sick and at the waning end of a long evening, she marshaled a surprising vehemence, allowing Jackson to glimpse one appeal of her fixation: it gave her energy. “There’s a whole specialty practice of ‘mesothelioma lawyers’ who advertise on the Internet. Asbestos is their entire practice, and they represent cases on a contingency basis. So it wouldn’t cost us a dime, if
that’s
what you’re worried about.”