So Much for That (3 page)

Besides, he understood her. Or he understood how much he couldn’t understand, which was a start. Making his own geographical inertia all the more perplexing, by and large Shep decided to do something, and then he did it. For Glynis to get from the deciding to the doing was like leaping the stumps of a washed-out bridge. To put it another way, she had the engine, but a faulty ignition switch. Glynis could decide to do something and then nothing would happen. It was an interior thing, a design flaw, and probably not one she could fix.

Having kept his mouth shut for decades, he should never have let it slip out tentatively over breakfast a couple of years ago (during a particularly galling week at Handy Randy) that it was a shame they hadn’t been socking away the remnants of two incomes all this time, with which they could have left for The Afterlife long ago…Before he had finished the sentence, she’d stood from the table without a word and marched out the door. When he came home that night, she had a job. Apparently all this time he’d have had better luck lighting a fire under the woman not by cajoling but by giving offense. Ever since, she’d been fashioning models for Living in Sin, an upmarket chocolatier whose factory was located in nearby Mount Kisco. This month, the company was already gearing up for Easter. So rather than polish off avant-garde flatware of museum-piece quality, his wife was carving wax bunny rabbits to be cast—aptly—in bitter chocolate, and stuffed with orange cream. The work was part time, without benefits. Her salary made a farcical contribution to their coffers. She kept the job out of spite.

In return, he may have let her keep it out of spite. Besides, she couldn’t help herself. They were very good bunny rabbits.

It was disconcerting to be systematically punished for what might have engendered a modicum of gratitude. He did not require the gratitude, but he could have skipped the resentment, an emotion distinctive
for being disagreeable on both its generating and receiving ends. Glynis resented her dependency; she found it humiliating. She resented not being a celebrated metalsmith, and she resented the fact that her status as professional nonentity appeared to everyone, including Glynis, to be all her fault. She resented her two children for diverting her energies when they were young; once they were no longer young, she resented them for failing to divert her energies. She resented that her husband and now her thoughtlessly undemanding children had thieved her most cherished keepsakes: her excuses. As resentment produces the psychic equivalent of acid reflux, she resented the resentment itself. Never having had much of substance to complain about was yet one more reason to feel aggrieved.

Shep was temperamentally predisposed to feel fortunate, although he himself had plenty of substance to resent, had he been so inclined. He supported his wife and son. He subsidized his daughter Amelia, though she was three years out of college. He subsidized his elderly father, and made sure that the prideful retired reverend didn’t know it. He’d made several “loans” to his sister Beryl that she would never pay back, and had probably not made the last; yet they were officially loans and not gifts, so Beryl would never thank him or feel abashed. He’d picked up the entire tab for his mother’s funeral, and since no one else noticed Shep didn’t notice either. Every member of a family has a role, and Shep was the one who paid for things. Because every other party took this state of affairs for granted, Shep took it for granted, too.

He rarely bought anything for himself, but he didn’t want anything. Or he wanted only one thing. Still, why now? Why, if it had already been over eight years since the sale of Knack, could it not be nine? Why, if it could be this evening, could it not be tomorrow night?

Because it was early January in New York State, and it was cold. Because he was already forty-eight years old, and the closer he got to fifty the more The Afterlife, even if he did finally get around to it, looked like routine early retirement. Because his “can’t-lose” mutual funds had only last month recovered the value of his original investment. Because in his idiotic innocence he had broadcast for decades to anyone who seemed interested his intentions to leave behind altogether the world of
tax planning, car inspections, traffic jams, and telemarketing. (As his audience had aged, other people’s youthful admiration had long ago soured to mockery behind his back. Or not always behind his back, for at Handy Randy Shep’s “escape fantasy,” as Pogatchnik flippantly tagged it, was a regular source of merciless entertainment.) Because he himself had started dangerously to doubt the reality of The Afterlife, and without the promise of reprieve he could not—he could not—continue. Because he’d tied a carrot in front of his own nose like a goddamned donkey’s, soothed by the seduction of infinite delay, never sorting out that if he could always leave tomorrow then he could also leave today. Indeed, it was the sheer arbitrariness of this Friday evening that made it so perfect.

W
hen Glynis opened the front door, he started guiltily. He had rehearsed his opening lines so many times, and now the script had fled.

“Bourbon,” she said. “What’s the special occasion?”

Still clinging to his last thought, he wanted to explain that the occasion was not special, which was why it was special. “Habits are made to be broken.”

“Some of them,” she reproached, taking off her coat.

“Would you like one?”

She surprised him. “Yes.”

Glynis was still slender, and no one ever pegged her at fifty, though there was a fatigue in her bearing tonight that made it suddenly possible to envision her at seventy-five. She’d been tired since September at least, claiming to run a low-grade fever that he privately failed to detect. Although she’d lately developed a subtle paunch, the rest of her body was if anything thinner; such reapportionment of weight was normal in middle age, and he was too much of a gentleman to pass comment on it.

Their both indulging in hard liquor at barely past seven fostered a warm collusion that he was reluctant to undermine. Yet his innocuous “Where have you been?” came out like an accusation.

She could be evasive, but it was rare for her not to answer at all. He let it go.

Curling protectively around the highball in her usual armchair, Glynis pulled her knees up and tucked her heels. She always seemed enclosed, balled up in another sense, but tonight she seemed uncommonly so. Maybe she intuited his purpose, so long in coming. When he reached into his inside pocket and laid three sheaves of e-ticket printouts silently on the glass table beside the Wedding Fountain, she arched her eyebrows. “Show and tell?”

Glynis was an elegant woman, and he was interested in her—in that way that simple people were so often captivated by the fucked-up. He paused to consider whether, without Glynis, as partner or opponent, The Afterlife might prove desolate.

“Three tickets to Pemba,” he said. “Me, you, and Zach.”

“Another ‘research trip’? You might have thought of that before the Christmas holidays. Zach’s back in school.”

Though she never used to couch the term in quotes, the sour twist she now gave to “research trip” recalled Pogatchnik’s sneering pronunciation of “escape fantasy.” He noted how readily she concocted a reason that his caprice was impossible, nimbly dismissing even the brief getaway she mistook it for. In his work, Shep applied his intelligence to solving problems; Glynis applied hers to inventing them, to constructing obstacles to throw in her own path. He wouldn’t mind the eccentricity if her path weren’t his own as well.

“These tickets are one-way.”

He would have expected that when she got it, when she registered the true nature of the gauntlet he’d thrown on the coffee table, her face would cloud, sink into solemnity, or constrict with the wary rigidity of preparing for combat. Instead she looked mildly amused. He was accustomed to ridicule at Handy Randy (“Yeah, sure you’re moving to Africa, any day now, you and Meryl Streep”), and sometimes, though it filled him with self-hatred, he’d joined in the fun himself. But from Glynis any suggestion of the same blithe, pitying cynicism slew him. He knew she wasn’t into it anymore, but he hadn’t thought her attitude had got as bad as that.

“Wasteful,” she said calmly, with a thin smile. “Not like you.”

She’d correctly intuited that the one-ways had cost more than round-trips. “A gesture,” he said. “is isn’t about money.”

“I can’t imagine your doing anything unrelated to money. Your whole life, Shepherd,” she announced, “has been about money.”

“Not for its own sake. I’ve never been greedy like that, as you know—wanting money to be rich. I want to buy something with it.”

“I used to believe that,” she said sadly. “Now I wonder if you’ve any idea what it is that you really want to purchase. You don’t even know what you want out of, much less what you want in on.”

“I do,” he countered. “I want to buy myself. I’m sorry to sound like Jackson, but he’s right, in a way. I’m an indentured servant. This isn’t a free country, in any sense of the word. If you want your own liberty, you have to buy it.”

“But liberty isn’t any different from money, is it? It’s meaningless unless you know what you want to spend it on.” The observation sounded hollow, even bored.

“We’ve talked about what I want to spend it on.”

“Yes,” she said wearily. “Endlessly.”

He swallowed the insult. “Part of going is finding out.”

Shep could not have contrived a conversation that should have riveted his wife more than this one, but he could swear that her attention had wandered.

“Gnu,” he appealed, pronouncing the
G
; the endearment went back to their very first research trip to Kenya, where she had done cracking impressions of wildebeests, hooking her hands over her head for horns and wrenching her long face into a pleading expression that was sad and dumb. The antic had been girlish and beguiling. He used to call her Gnu all the time, and lately—well, lately, he realized with a shock, he hadn’t been calling her anything at all. These are real tickets. For a real airplane, that takes off in one week. I would like you to come with me. I would like Zach to come with us, and if we leave as a family I will drag him down the Jetway by the hair. But
I am going
, with or without you.”

Damned if she didn’t seem to find his declaration hilarious. “An ultimatum, then?” She drained her glass, as if to stifle laughter.

“An invitation,” he countered.

“A week from now you’re getting on a plane to fly to an island you’ve never been to, where you’ll spend the rest of your life. Whatever were all those ‘research trips’ for?”

In her use of
you
as opposed to
we
he read her answer, and he wasn’t prepared for the sudden falling sensation in his chest. Although he had tried to be realistic with himself, apparently he had held out hope that she and Zack might come with him to Pemba after all. Still, this face-off was young, so he held out further hope that—for the first time in the history of the universe—he might change her mind.

“I picked Pemba precisely because we haven’t been there. That means you can’t have already come up with a zillion reasons why yet another option is off the table.”

When she said nothing in response, he was able to remember some of what he had recited over the steering wheel earlier this afternoon on the Henry Hudson Parkway. “Goa got the all-clear until you read about that expat Briton who was murdered by a local acquaintance in her house, and then it was too dangerous. One murder. As if people never kill each other in New York. Bulgaria would have been a steal when we first lit on it, and in the Western world, too, if barely, with broadband and a postal service and clean water. But the food was too bland. The
food
. As if we couldn’t rustle up a little garlic and rosemary. Meantime, the property prices have already started to escalate, and now it’s too late. Ditto Eritrea, which piqued your imagination: proud new country, warm people, espresso on every corner, and the fifties architecture was a kick. Now, lucky for you, the government’s gone to hell. You loved Morocco, remember? Cinnamon and terra cotta; neither the food nor the landscape was
bland
. It seemed so promising that I agreed to stay on when my mother had her stroke, and we got back half a day too late to say goodbye.”

“You made up for it.” Ah, the funeral expenses. If Shep did not resent his family’s impositions on his finances, Glynis resented them for him.

“But after 9/11,” he plowed on, “suddenly all Muslim countries—including Turkey, to my own disappointment—got knocked off the list. We had a terrific opportunity when the currency collapsed in Argentina. Before that, we could have bought just about anything in Southeast Asia during that financial crisis. But now all those currencies have recovered, and our resources would never stretch for thirty or forty years in any of those countries today. In Cuba, you couldn’t live without shampoo and toilet paper. Croatia’s residency requirements entailed too much red tape. The slums in Kenya were too depressing; South Africa made you feel too guilty for being white. Laos, Portugal, Tonga, and Bhutan—I can’t even remember what was wrong with all of them anymore, though”—he indulged a bitterness—“I’m sure you do.”

Glynis exuded an aggressive mildness, and seemed to be enjoying herself. “You’re the one who ruled out France,” she said sweetly.

“That’s right. The taxes would have killed us.”

“Always money, Shepherd,” she chided.

It struck him then how people who acted above money—arty types like his sister, or his Old-Testament father—were the same folks who never earned any to speak of. Glynis knew perfectly well that The Afterlife had to add up financially or it would solely constitute a long, ruinous vacation.

“But you’ve paralyzed us at both ends, haven’t you?” he proceeded.

“Not only is no destination good enough, but it’s never the right time to go. We have to wait until Amelia is out of high school. We have to wait until Amelia is out of college. We have to wait until Zach is out of primary school. Middle school. Now it’s high school, and then why not college? We have to wait for our investments to recover from the tech-stock crash, and then from 9/11. Well, they have.”