So Much for That (15 page)

His son sullenly closed out his computer. “She’ll know you told me to.”

She would know. And he could force his pliable son to sit vigil at his mother’s side, but he could not make him want to. In general, Zach had inherited the worst from both his parents: his father’s obedience, and his mother’s resentment. The combination was deadly. At least rebellious resentment led somewhere—to defiance, to a sometimes flamboyant overthrow of the existing order. The obedient kind fostered only disgruntled inertia.

Shep put a hand on his son’s arm. “The next few months are going to be difficult for all of us. Your mother won’t be able to give you a ride to school; you’ll have to take your bike. I may need you to chip in and do some cleaning, or make up beds for guests. You just have to remember that however hard it is for us, it’s going to be a whole lot harder for your mother.”

The speech was gratuitous. He was playing at being a good father rather than being one. Zach had sometimes been petulant about possessions, nagging for things that “everyone else” got—to Shep, costly gimmickry that would only fill the gap between the last and the next must-have. Zach found his father’s constant budgeting for an “Afterlife” baffling if not deranged, and his campaign for that iPod had been so persistent that Shep had relented out of boredom. But in all other respects the boy asked for too little. So the one aspect of his mother’s illness that he would have registered from the very start was that the importance of whatever he wanted or needed or was had just been demoted from slight to zero.

T
hat night in bed, Glynis curled on her side away from him, assuming the same position that she had when she was pregnant. Shep drew up closely behind her, aware that he had become leery of touching her abdomen, yet sensing that this instinctive avoidance should be resisted. He felt distant from her. It wasn’t Pemba; it wasn’t Forge Craft. It was that what was about to happen to her was not about to happen to him. He pressed harder, since she would sense their distance. But when he laid a hand gently on her stomach, she moved it with equal gentleness away.

His experience of the night was of insomnia, though to remember the dream the next morning he must have slept. He was reroofing a closed-in porch, and the owners had wanted the original roofs removed before the shingles were replaced. It was an attractive house that seemed to have what they call “good bones.” There were many layers of previous roofing jobs, and as he pulled them off each revealed patterns that he recognized as the sequence of wallpapers that he used to peel back from a tear beside the bed of his boyhood. When he pulled up the roof’s last thin covering, expecting the blond timbers of this sturdy house, the cavity underneath the final tar paper was black and corrupt. The timbers were infected with mold. Beetles and grubs scuttled from the light. The wood of the frame was moist, and crumbled at his touch. Though seemingly sound from the outside, the roof had been leaking for years. As he stood to call down for his workmen, the beams would no longer support his weight, and the structure gave way.

S
ince Glynis couldn’t have any, he skipped his own morning coffee, so mobilizing for their departure took too little time. He wondered if all along he had made coffee every morning not for the beverage itself, but for something to do.

It was still so early that the traffic toward northern Manhattan was light. The sun had not yet risen. Shep associated driving in morning darkness with excitement, a flight to India with a three-hour advance
check-in. He was excited now as well, but it was the excitement of fire alarms, of blizzards, of 9/11.

“This is going to sound crazy,” Glynis volunteered; he was grateful that she was talking. “But what frightens me most is the needles.”

Glynis had a life-long aversion to shots. Like so many aversions, in the absence of her overcoming it this one had grown only worse. When they watched movies in which heroin addicts injected themselves, she turned her head away, and he had to tell her when it was safe to look back at the screen. During news reports about new drug discoveries or vaccination programs, she left the room. She was ashamed of it, but she could never bring herself to donate during blood drives, and traveling to countries that required inoculations for cholera or boosters for typhus had always been an issue. It had taken him years to appreciate the enormity of the gesture, the scale of her earlier determination to cooperate with her husband’s aspiration, in her submission to hypodermics for his sake.

“I thought of that,” he said. “The contrast medium for the scans…How did you do it?”

“With great difficulty. Before the MRI, I almost fainted.”

“But you’ve also needed blood tests—”

“I know.” She shuddered. “And there will be more. The chemo…You sit there with an IV in your arm for hours. When I think about it, I get woozy.”

“But in relation to other stuff, you’re such a stoic! Remember when you sliced your middle finger in the studio?”

“It’s not the sort of thing you forget. I was using that flex-shaft burr shaped like a miniature buzz saw. It grabbed the silver and kicked. I was lucky I didn’t lop off half the finger. I still don’t have any feeling in the tip.”

“Yeah, but you came downstairs all matter-of-fact, and announced quietly, like,
It is my clinical opinion that I may need a few stitches, Shepherd, and I’m a little concerned that I shouldn’t drive with only one hand.
In the same tone of voice that you’d have asked me to run to the A-and-P because unfortunately we were out of chives. Which is why it took me too long to notice that the rag around your left hand had turned crimson and was starting to drip. What a hard-ass!”

She chuckled. “I bet if you looked closely I was a tad pale. And I’ve never used that buzz-saw burr again. It’s still in my kit, with the grooves stained brown.”

“But this needle phobia. Won’t it probably ease up? With having to keep getting past it?”

“It hasn’t let up so far. But it’s so irrational, Shepherd. I’m about to be gutted like a fish, and all I can think about is a pinprick.”

“Maybe,” he proposed tentatively, “you focus on the irrational fear to distract you from the rational ones.”

She slipped a hand on his thigh, the touch so welcome it gave him chills. “You may not have a college education, my dear. But sometimes you’re very smart.”

Merging onto the Saw Mill River Parkway, Shep wondered at how yesterday there seemed nothing to say, and now there seemed too much and too little time to say it. With foreboding, he could see how this vacant, wasted leisure followed by a desperate, too-late cramming-in could easily prove a paradigm for their future.

“I don’t think I ever told you this,” he said. “I can’t remember what I was watching—maybe one of those forensic shows, like
CSI
. A medical team was doing an autopsy. The coroner said he could tell from her corpse that the victim had done a lot of sit-ups. I’ve no idea if the scene was realistic, but it’s stuck in my mind ever since. This idea that even after you’re dead they can tell if you went to the gym. Sometimes when I’m working out, I have a vision of having been in an accident, and the doctors are admiring my abdominal muscles in the morgue. I want credit for doing my crunches, even as a stiff.”

Glynis laughed. “That’s hilarious. Most people worry about clean underwear.”

“I guess that’s all by way of saying—well, these surgeons must have to operate on all kinds of people who look like shit. Old saggy people, fat people, patients who are totally out of shape. I’ve no idea if it bothers them, or repulses them, or if it’s all the same to them. But your body is so slender. Perfectly proportioned and well toned.”

“Lately I’ve missed a few step aerobics classes at the Y,” she said dryly.

“No, a lifetime of self-respect—it doesn’t go away. The point is, I’m a little jealous, someone touching you like that. Looking at you, even looking at parts of you that I’ll never see. But I’m proud, too. If it does matter to them, those surgeons are operating on a beautiful woman, and they’ll feel privileged.”

While keeping his eyes on the road, he could feel her smiling beside him, and she took his hand. “I don’t think they look at bodies the way we do. And I don’t know if internal organs are ever ‘beautiful.’ But that’s really sweet of you to say.”

He parked, and saw her to Reception, touched and relieved that Glynis seemed to want him with her for as long as possible. She wasn’t a woman who easily admitted to need. He filled out the forms, pleased to have finally memorized her Social Security number. She signed the release. They waited together. Their silence was no longer empty, impotent. It was thick silence, deep and velvety silence, the air between them like warm water.

He rose with her in the elevator, introduced himself to the nurses, folded her clothes as she changed, and helped to tie the gown. He wasn’t very useful in tugging up the beige elastic stockings, but he tried. Then they waited, again. He was glad for the waiting; he could have waited forever. At last Dr. Hartness arrived. He was a wiry, efficient man who could easily have been mistaken for an accountant; even his hair was dry. Shep sat at her bedside while the surgeon explained the procedure again, employing the droning, unemotional tone of voice in which one might read aloud the complicated instructions for assembling flat-pack furniture. Now accustomed to the surgeon’s slide-part-A-into-slot-B approach, Shep didn’t take offense, since none was meant. In fact, despite all the disparaging things that people said about doctors, this one seemed personable and decent.

“Please?” Glynis pleaded once Dr. Hartness had left. “See me through the sedative?”

“Of course,” he said, and turned her head. “Don’t look over there. Don’t think about it. Just look at me. Just look into my eyes really, really hard.”

Shep kept a hand on her cheek, holding her gaze, careful to keep his own eyes from darting even briefly to the anesthetist as she filled the syringe. And then he told his wife that he loved her. The effect of the injection was almost immediate, and these would be the last words she heard.

He had infused the ritual with as much feeling as three words could bear. Yet he wished that by convention their invocation was rare. Between spouses, the declaration was too often tossed off in hasty, distracted partings, or parlayed lightly to round up banter on the phone. He might have preferred a custom that restricted such a radical avowal to perhaps thrice in a lifetime. Rationing would protect the claim from cheapening and keep it holy. For were he to have been doled out three I-love-yous like wishes, he would have spent one of them this morning.

After leaving his cell phone number at the nurses’ station, Shep emerged from the lobby onto Broadway, blinking in the sharp, white winter sunlight. He’d given no thought to how he might occupy the rest of the day, aside from a vague ambition to get some coffee. Glynis wouldn’t be wheeled in right away; after the sedative, she still had to be put under general anesthesia, and then for at least four hours she’d be in surgery. Thereafter, she’d be conked out on morphine for more than a day. Again he yearned for protocol. He couldn’t see the utility of a civilization that had an etiquette for sending greeting cards in December or placing the fork to the left of a plate, but as for what to do while your wife was sliced open you were on your own.

Yet it took only one
café con leche
in Washington Heights to realize that there was a protocol. It was blessedly specific, and so iron-clad that it might have been chiseled into the Constitution: In America, if you had a job that provided even the most miserable health insurance and your wife was very ill. If you had been frequently absent from that employment, and were likely to miss more days still. If your employer was a dickhead. Then when your wife went under the knife, and at every other opportunity as well?

You went to work.

J
ackson seemed surprised to see him, but only for a moment; Jackson was well versed in the unwritten Constitution, too. Within minutes of Shep’s arrival, Mark, the Web designer who’d been especially caustic about Pemba, came up to his desk and squeezed his shoulder. “Be thinking of you today, bro,” he said. Other co-workers smiled encouragingly, particularly those who’d worked under the old Knack regime—what few were left. Even Pogatchnik showed, for him, unusual sensitivity by at least making himself scarce. So: Jackson had told the staff. Shep might have been affronted—the guy had overstepped the mark, and for all Jackson knew his friend was experiencing a violent sense of privacy—but found himself grateful instead. For he felt anything but guarded: raw, unprotected, his very insides exposed to the air, as if he had no skin. Jackson would have meant the announcement as a kindness. Shep would receive it as a kindness.

Phoning disgruntled customers, Shep might have expected to be irascible, to chafe at the inconsequence of every grievance. To the contrary, each feebly glued tile of linoleum seemed to matter, because everything mattered. He’d been so thankful for the smallest act of consideration from total strangers this morning: a nurse’s application of an ice chip to his wife’s cracked lips. Consideration for other strangers seemed fitting repayment. He let the complainants go on at length, expressing his dismay that their workmen had failed to give satisfaction, and promising to redress the problem without delay. When a woman in Jackson Heights objected to Handy Randy’s employment of Mexicans, insinuating that they were all illegals—which, let’s face it, they probably were—he didn’t impugn her illiberality, but explained patiently that while their Hispanic handymen were hardworking and competent, their English was often poor. They didn’t always grasp what was required. He would ensure that a fluent native speaker was sent to fix her doorframe, until the screen door swung to with a graceful click.

Lonely, he was glad of the clients’ companionship, glad for the contact, for the sound of the human voice. Customer relations as video game: focus, on anything but Columbia-Presbyterian. He was unusually
aware of his control over the quality of a few moments in these customers’ lives—lives, after all, comprised of moments, and only of moments. Single-handedly, he might redeem five minutes of their day. It was no small matter. The redemption carried forward into the future, too, by providing a remembered encounter with a helpful, receptive man who had sympathized with their troubles, and endeavored to resolve them. He could make jokes that were glorious for the very fact that he need not have made them. How odd that at every point of contact with other people, meaning dozens if not hundreds of times a day, he had always wielded this power—to elevate the quotidian to the playful, the humorous, the compassionate—and so rarely made use of it.