So Much for That (33 page)

“It’s because they’re black,” said Carol. “They’re Democrats, if they vote at all.”

“Yeah, I know you think that, and everybody thinks that,” said Jackson. He dunked a celery stick in the dubious dip, took one bite, and slipped the remainder of the celery onto the table. “But I think it’s simpler than that, and creepier than that. You’ve got a government that’s really just a giant corporation, whose driving purpose is its own self-perpetuation and infinite enlargement. So it never occurs to them to help people. That’s not their business, helping people. Their business is helping themselves and their little contractor friends, period. In fact, mark my words, the clean-up will end up lining more crony contractor pockets, and when it’s over the contractors will be rich and the place will still look like a mud flat. Millions if not billions of dollars later, those poor bastards will still be living with shorted-out freezers reeking from rotting shrimp. Thomas Jefferson is rolling over in his grave, man. This country is a parody of what it was meant to be. A travesty.”

“Is there any place you think is better?” asked Shep.

“No,” Jackson said readily. “Of course not. They’re all the same. It’s human nature, man. You give anybody the power to take other people’s money, as much as they want, you think over time they’ll start taking
less
? Or work
more
for it, when they can get away with doing practically nothing? Governments are all the same, man. They eat their own countries until there’s nothing left. They’re cannibals.”

Carol rolled her eyes. “Right. So we shouldn’t have one. And we’d have no army to protect us, no one to defend our borders.”

You would think, being married to the man, Carol would have known better.

“A million Mexicans and Central Americans a year wading across the Rio Grande, and you think our borders are
protected?
” Jackson cried.

“And that army of ours, this whole superpower shtick, makes us
targets
. Two guys walking down the street in Riyadh, one from the States and one from Lithuania. Who’s going to get kidnapped? The American! Which hotel in the Philippines is going to get suicide-bombed, the one that puts up locals, the one that caters to the Chinese, or the one renowned for drawing Americans? You think the towelheads are hot to blow up the Finns, or the Argentines, or the natives of New Guinea?
The Japanese haven’t had an army since World War Two, and they’re snug as bugs.”

Shep was about to point out, “That’s because they’ve had the U.S. to back them up,” or to object that he’d seen somewhere that the Japanese had reversed all that and now maintained the fifth largest army in the world. But he stopped himself. He didn’t want to fuel this conversation, which didn’t seem headed anywhere he wanted to go. Kissing his wife on the forehead as an opportunity to straighten her hastily donned turban—she shot him a look of gratitude—he slipped off to turn the potatoes, and to lay the steaks on the grill.

The solitude of the backyard was a relief, the fountains’ trickle lending the plain crabgrass landscape the tranquility of a rock garden. It didn’t make much sense to invite folks over only to seize on an excuse to escape them. Still, Jackson’s railing at the heavens had changed. The words were the same, but the spirit was no longer jubilant, or playfully seditious; it was plain angry. None of that badinage altered the way the world worked an iota, so if it didn’t amount to genuine entertainment there wasn’t much point.

When Shep filtered back up to the porch, intending to poke his head in to ask how everyone wanted their steaks, Jackson had routed some printout from his pocket, which was always ominous. “A hundred years ago, we were the most prosperous country on earth, right? We had the largest middle class on earth, right?
And
we had no national debt. We
also
had none of the following taxes.”

Jackson smoothed out his sheaf, which was crumpled and creased, as if he’d given this performance more than once. Each time he reached the word
tax
he hit the table, turning the recitation into something between a poetry reading and a hip-hop concert. “Accounts receivable
tax
, building permit
tax
, commercial driver’s license
tax
, cigarette
tax
, corporate income
tax
, dog license
tax
, not to mention the big daddy of them all: federal income
tax—
”

As Jackson paused briefly to draw a breath, Shep registered that the list was alphabetical, and they’d barely made it through
F
.

“Federal unemployment
tax
, fishing license
tax
, food license
tax
, fuel
permit
tax
, gasoline
tax
, hunting license
tax
, inheritance
tax
, inventory
tax
, IRS interest charges
tax
(that’s
tax
on
tax
), IRS penalties
tax
(more
tax
on
tax
), liquor
tax
, luxury
tax
—”

“Honey, that’s enough,” said Carol.

“Marriage license
tax
, Medicare
tax
, property
tax
—”

“Sweetie, we get the picture. Would you please give it a rest?”

“Road usage
tax
, recreational vehicle
tax
, sales
tax
,
state
income
tax
—”

“If you don’t shut up right now—!”

“School
tax
, service charge
tax
, Social Security
tax
—”

“—I swear I will drive right out of here without you!”

“Look, pumpkin, hang on one minute, would you? State unemployment
tax
, telephone federal excise
tax
—”

This time it was Carol who hit the table, with the full flat of her hand, and it was loud. “
What
are you so mad about, Jackson? Really?
What
is so terrible about your life?”

“Telephone federal, state, and local surcharge tax,” Jackson muttered quickly, absent the percussive theatrics.

“That’s it!” Carol stood up.

“Whoa, sit back down. We can skip the rest, then. I’m finished.”

“You bet you are,” she said, and remained standing, towering over her round-shouldered spouse. “So you can answer my question. You have a decent house. Your daughter has a genetic condition, but she’s at least still alive, isn’t she? You eat well,” she nodded at her husband’s gut, “a little too well. What do you want that you don’t have? Why do you feel so put-upon, so taken advantage of, so weak and sniveling and resentful? Who are all these other people you think are controlling your life, and why are they always winning? Why
don’t
you ever feel in control, why
do
you always feel defeated and impotent, and as your wife, do you expect me to find that attractive? Why don’t you feel like a man, Jackson? Why do you feel so—
small
?”

Jackson glared. Sloshing another margarita into his tumbler, he washed most of the remaining salt into the glass. Glynis and Shep looked away, embarrassed. Carol might sometimes plunge into the political fray, but she was usually the voice of reason, not to mention of
kindness, and her tone erred merely on the side of the firm. For her to air dirty emotional laundry in front of friends was unprecedented.

The other three may have imagined that Shep streaked out the screen door because he refused to participate in hanging his best friend out to dry. But the truth was he’d been dying to read the same riot act to Jackson himself for years, and Carol’s what’s-your-problem was overdue. He’d never understood what fired Jackson from the inside, where the heat was from.

No, he’d just remembered the abandoned grill. When he reached the steaks, now less worthy for their table than for resurfacing a patio, he flooded with guilty remorse. The New York strips had trusted him. When he brought the platter of shrunken meat and charred potatoes back to the porch, Jackson was grumbling, “Nobody likes to be had. To be taken. It’s universal. You remember when that kid came to the door, offering to wash the windows for twenty bucks? You gave it to him, and he ran off on his bike. Never saw him again. You were hacked off. It wasn’t the twenty bucks, you admitted it yourself. It was being swindled.”

“I was angry at myself,” said Carol, who’d at least sat back down.

“I’d been foolish.”

“Right, well that’s the way I feel. Made a fool of.”

“No, I didn’t feel
made a fool of
. I had been foolish. I deserved it.”

“Maybe I feel that way, too.” The couple shared a look.

After Shep fetched the salad from the fridge and opened the wine, Carol announced, “Jackson would like to apologize.”

“For what?” her husband protested.

“It’s okay, Carol,” said Glynis, pulling herself up in the caned armchair. “If he weren’t going on about taxes, he’d just be going on about something else.”

“But this is supposed to be a celebration,” Carol insisted. “Jackson seems to have forgotten why we’re here. But I haven’t. Both of us are so, so relieved you’re getting better, Glynis. I swear, when Shep told me about that CAT scan, I cried. So I’d like to propose a toast.” Carol raised her glass. “To recovery. To the miracle of modern medicine. To getting together like this for steaks and margaritas when Glynis is totally well again, and then
maybe
I’ll let Jackson bitch about taxes!”

It was a brave stab at reversing the fractious tone of this gathering, but neither Glynis nor Shep lifted a glass.

“Sorry, Carol,” said Shep. “We may have to drink to something a little more modest. To hopes for a raised white blood cell count or something.”

Carol looked from Shep to Glynis, and put her glass back down. “What’s wrong?”

“We got the results of another scan yesterday,” said Shep. “Last time, Goldman invited us to his office. So I guess I should have known that the news was…” He reconsidered
terrible
, then
pretty terrible
, as well as
lousy
and
unsatisfactory
, and finally discarded even
bad
. “That the news was
less encouraging
than last time when he preferred to tell us over the phone. I guess we’re lucky we didn’t get an email.”

“Which would have said?” asked Carol.

“That…” From the beginning, Shep had shunned euphemisms by policy, but under the circumstances he didn’t have the heart to use the word
cancer
one more time. “That the situation has advanced. In retrospect, I regret that we didn’t get to toast the last scan when we had the chance. This one—well, the results just aren’t so great.”

“It’s only a setback,” said Glynis staunchly.

“Yes,” said Shep. “That’s what I meant. We’ve had a setback.”

“It simply means that I may be on chemo a little bit longer,” said Glynis.

“Yes,” Shep recited. “It may mean that Glynis is on chemo a little bit longer.”

“Shit, that’s a drag,” said Jackson.

“I’m so sorry, that’s…” Carol seemed to be rifling her own mental thesaurus. “That’s disappointing. How dis—how much
less encouraging
is it?”

Shep tried to catch Carol’s eye, but she had directed the question to Glynis.

“It’s not as good as we’d hoped, that’s all,” Glynis said irritably. “But my tolerance of the An Aging—Adriamycin seems to be holding”—the cough, for illustrative purposes, was inopportune—“and there’s a whole
slew of other drugs we haven’t tried yet, too.” She met Carol’s eyes with a challenge, until Carol lowered her gaze.

“Yes, the therapies available these days are amazing,” Carol conceded, eyes darting to her plate. “Everything I read says that cancer of every kind gets more survivable by the day. That more and more it’s just a disease that you have to manage, like lots of other chronic conditions that people live with: herpes, bad backs. I—I’m sure they can turn this thing around. Sometimes they have to find just the right drug, right? Experiment until they hit it.” Looking back up, she managed a smile. Carol was a great deal more astute than she seemed at first meeting. Within a minute or two, she’d got with the program.

Yet whenever there’s something you’re not talking about—Shep was damned if he understood how this worked—it became mysteriously impossible to talk about anything else, either. In no time as they chewed laboriously through their overcooked beef—Glynis didn’t touch hers—the foursome was at a loss for conversation.

“Glynis, can you not eat something?” Carol said tentatively after a maw of silverware clink. “It must be important to keep your strength up. And the beef may be on the well-done side, but it’s obviously of very high quality.”

Glynis poked at her steak. “I don’t want to get into the particulars at dinner. But I can’t look at anything like this without imagining how difficult it’ll be to…to get it out the other end.”

“Ah,” said Carol.

The steak knives made an unpleasant screeching sound when they sawed down to china. By now Shep wished that Jackson would bring up something usefully enraging, like the Alternative Minimum Tax. After another ten minutes during which, in a single desperate interjection, Carol admired the bottled salad dressing, he was tempted to bring up the AMT himself.

Shepherd Armstrong Knacker
Merrill Lynch Account Number 934-23F917
October 01, 2005–October 31, 2005
Net Portfolio Value: $152,093.29

T
hroughout his adulthood, Shep had tried very hard not to sour on people. People he knew; people in general. But he was running out of excuses—for their network of friends who he’d hitherto blithely assumed were decent, generous, and thoughtful; for the halfhearted human race. Though it might not have been a great night, at least Jackson and Carol had finally shown up. That was more than Shep could say for most of the others. In fact, the people in Glynis’s life were proving so consistently disappointing that a choking misanthropy sometimes overcame him late at night, like a miasma from a broken sewer.

Back in March, Deb had been determined that Glynis should find salvation before it was too late. Ruby was committed to getting beyond old rivalries and advancing her relationship with her older sister to a “state of grace.” So Shep had anticipated at the time that his tolerance for his sisters-in-law might, over many months of repeated visits, be put to the test. He’d been prepared for Deb’s piety to wear thin, not to mention
her latest fad diet. He knew she’d never stop trying to enlist his secular family in prayer for God’s mercy, or cease badgering his private, inward son to join her in thanksgiving for every extra day that God had granted the boy’s ailing mother. On frequent returns to Elmsford, Ruby’s rigidity might wear as well. He had envisioned getting a shade irked with the way she had to go for a run every single evening, when everyone else was ready to sit down to supper, and he’d sacrificed his own workout yet one more night to prepare it.

Should their visits coincide, he’d foreseen growing weary of watching the sisters vie with each other over who ate less. He was bound to grow impatient with Ruby’s always showing up her plump younger sister by taking only one scrawny drumstick if Deb took two. With Deb’s persistent wistfulness in regard to his wife’s poor appetite, Shep could see himself finally losing his temper—snapping that Glynis’s miserable portions weren’t any mark of superiority, but entailed an inadequate intake of calories, aka starvation, that could eventually kill her if the cancer didn’t. Broadly, he’d been a little worried that, after stays of increasing duration, his sisters-in-law would get on his nerves.

Never in a million years had he expected to be contending with quite the opposite problem: that following that initial rush to his wife’s bedside after her surgery, neither of her sisters would visit again.

All right, both siblings still phoned, but less and less often, and the frequency of these occasional calls had taken an especially sharp nosedive at precisely the point that their sister’s short-lived “recovery” gave way to a resumed deterioration. Meanwhile, at least Hetty continued to call every day, and so reliably at the same witching hour of 10:00 a.m. that you could set your watch by the phone.

In late September, after one call had limped through its fifteen-minute paces with Glynis even more cryptic and sullen than usual, she handed the phone to Shep. “My mother wants to talk to you. Be my guest.”

“Sheppy?” said Hetty, and he cringed. His mother-in-law’s voice had that injured, pouty inflection that Glynis despised, since it sounded more like one of Hetty’s own first-graders unjustly deprived of her lollypop
than a retired teacher of seventy-two. In person she was prone to clutch his arm or drape his shoulders, and this puling intonation was the audio equivalent. The fact that she adored “Sheppy” the ideal son-in-law (i.e., that wonderful man who paid for everything) had long driven a wedge between him and Glynis.

“I try
so
hard to let Glynis know that throughout this time of tribulation I’m there for her. But she can be so—snippy! I know she’s very ill, and I try to take that into account, but…” Hetty began to sniffle. “Just now, she was terribly cruel!”

“You know she doesn’t mean it, Hetty.” Of course Glynis meant it. Whatever she’d said, she meant it and more.

“I’m sorry to have to ask…” He could hear her blowing her nose, could picture one of the ragged reused tissues that populated her house-coats. “But does Glynis
want
me to call? Does she want to talk to me at all? Because she certainly doesn’t act like it! I don’t want to intrude if my reaching out isn’t welcome.”

Once he’d got his mother-in-law off the phone, Glynis had flown into a fit whose script he knew by heart. “This constant tugging on my sleeve…She’s always trying to get something from me, and I don’t have it! I’ve never had it, and now of all times I really don’t have it! She doesn’t call for me; she calls for herself! I’m supposed to reassure her what a wonderful mother she was, over and over, but she wasn’t, and I won’t and I can’t! I’m supposed to entertain her and comfort her and come up with something to fill all that dead air time day after day after day, and the imposition is outrageous! For pity’s sake, she’s a black hole! Now that for one of the first times in my life, I could actually use a mother! Not another dependent, another problem, another demand, another drain, but a real mother!”

Fortunately flying into a rage had so worn Glynis out that she collapsed on the kitchen love seat and got some sleep. He was glad that she hadn’t pressed him about what Hetty had asked, since he’d not have enjoyed taking the heat for his reply.

Walking with the phone to the back porch, he’d urged Hetty to keep calling. Every day. To not get discouraged, to attribute her daughter’s
frequent lashings out to the illness, to absorb all manner of insults and cross remarks and to decline to react. Implicitly, to rise to a level of maturity that she hadn’t a hope in hell of attaining if she was still this far shy at seventy-two. Just who needed whom in that embattled relationship was forever a bone of contention. But the simplest answer was that they needed each other. Glynis hated those phone calls, and actively dreaded them. But if 10:00 a.m. ever came and went without a call from her mother, she would be devastated.

That said? Hetty may have been “there for” her daughter, but she wasn’t
here
for her daughter. Since that first trip in March,
even Glynis’s own mother
hadn’t returned to Elmsford. Not once. Shep was incredulous. Moreover, a systematic withdrawal from his wife and her icky might-give-me-cooties cancer was hardly exclusive to her immediate family. It was universal.

Glynis’s cousins, nieces and nephews, neighbors (save the indefatigable Nancy), and most shockingly of all her friends had rung up less and less frequently, speaking more and more briefly. They had all spaced their visits more and more widely, and withstood his wife’s company a steadily shorter period of time.

Shep knew all the standard lines. About not wanting to tax her, or bother her, or interrupt her sleep. About never knowing whether she might be in the hospital, or undergoing chemo, or knocked out from a recent dose. Warned that Glynis was not to be exposed to infections, some friends broke multiple appointments in succession with nagging colds. They were only being
considerate
. Other excuses were so impressively creative that it would have taken far less effort to skip the arcane explanations to her husband after months of silence than to give the poor woman a buzz.

According to Zach, the Eigers—parents of one of Zach’s regular “hangs,” and Fourth of July barbeque/Christmas Party friends for many years—were so caught up in coaching their older son for the SATs that the exhausting trip from Irvington six miles away was out of the question, though that was a distance Zach regularly traversed on his bike. It went without saying—or at least nobody said it—that these rigorous
tutoring sessions by both parents during every available hour of the day must also have precluded so time-consuming and debilitating a gesture as a phone call.

Marion Lott, the owner of Living in Sin with whom Glynis had grown quite chummy while gossiping through her ridiculous employment, had been attentive for a while. Apologizing that Glynis probably wasn’t up for chocolate herself, at first Marion had shown up at the door with a bag of misshapen truffles for Zach and Shep, along with a fruit basket for the patient. But the care packages, and the visits that delivered them, had entirely dribbled off by May. So when in early October Shep ran into Marion at CVS—he was looking for more enema capsules for Glynis—the chocolatier launched into a nervous burble about how busy the shop had become and how they were getting orders now from as far away as Chicago, and then one of her employees got pregnant and had terrible morning sickness, and you know how unpleasant it would be in that case to be around the smell of chocolate, so now she was shorthanded…Oh, and Shep should know the replacement mold-maker had not proven nearly as skillful as Glynis, nor did she have the same sense of line or sense of humor, so he should please tell his marvelous wife how much she was missed…He might have taken pity on the woman and tried to stop her, but pity toward these people didn’t come easily now. With conscious sadism, he let her go on for what must have been a good five minutes. It was a certain style of excuse, the kitchen-sink style, a messy and exhausting approach generally taken by people who weren’t very good at lying. The verbal incontinence was at least a giveaway that she felt guilty.

By contrast, the Vinzanos opted for the big, clean, sweeping excuse that was at least efficient. Glynis had met Eileen Vinzano back when they were both teaching courses in the Fine Arts Department at Parsons, which dated their friendship with Eileen and her husband Paul back more than twenty years. But Shep couldn’t remember having heard from either of them since he’d phoned to deliver the lowdown on the surgery. Not long after he ran into Marion, Eileen finally placed a hasty call, claiming that she and Paul had been out of the country since June.

The tone in which she asked after his wife’s health was uneasy. She was afraid that she’d called too late. Clearly she was braced for something delicately put like, “I’m so sorry to have to tell you this, Eileen, but Glynis passed in September.” (
Passed
, that’s the idiom she’d expect. As if his wife hadn’t died in agony but had simply walked in front of the house.) He told her instead that Glynis was hanging in there, and explained that they were now on their third cocktail of chemo. But when he offered to put Glynis herself on the phone, Eileen panicked. “No, no, do let her rest!” she’d urged with something close to terror—and what were these people afraid of? “Just please give her my best.”

If one transitive five-minute call since March amounted to Eileen’s “best,” he would hate to see her worst. After all, even for a roving foreign correspondent, five months was a long time to be “out of the country” Paul was based at ABC in New York. This wasn’t the only dubiously vague explanation Shep was repeatedly offered by “good” friends who had virtually disappeared. Flatly, late on Halloween night he booted his computer solely to copy his medical-update notification list of “Close Friends” and paste it into “Not So Close.” The “Close Friends” file he deleted.

In his more charitable daytime incarnation, Shep conceded that any number of these people had already given emotive testimonies to how important Glynis had been to them. How enormously they admired her work. How much her whole life had been characterized by an elegance and sense of flair. How fondly they remembered this and that event…By delivering impassioned, grandiloquent orations that, as Glynis had noted with such outrage, could have doubled as eulogies, previous visitors had painted themselves into a dramatic corner. It was theatrically unnatural to go from grand proclamations of love and admiration to chitchat about how it looks as if they’re finally going to repave Walnut Street. Multiplied by a factor of ten, the subsequent awkwardness resembled the poor stagecraft of having said florid farewells after a dinner party—flashy, stylish farewells of the kind on which you rather congratulate yourself in the car—only to realize that you’ve left a sweater behind. You have to sheepishly ring the doorbell while your hosts are loading the dishwasher. Voilà, all the stylishness and waggishness and
lavish gratitude of your original parting is replaced with a hangdog shuffle in the foyer while they wipe greasy hands on a dish towel and search for your wrap. It was, he supposed, always difficult with the mortally ill to arrange to leave the relationship on a high note. The only gambit that guaranteed a movingly climactic parting was to deliver your tender, tearful, well-rehearsed little speech and then never come back.

Besides, what
did
you say to Glynis, once medical inquiries were exhausted? She didn’t want to hear about how great your life was, and she was wildly intolerant of complaint. The events of her own life had contracted to the events of the body: inflammations on her arms where the chemo leaked from the cannula and burned her skin; chest drains to suck up the pleural fluid that made it hard for her to breathe; fatigue that got slightly better or paralyzingly worse but never lifted altogether; rashes and swellings and the curious striations in her darkened nails. These were the stories she had to tell, and they were depressing and monotonous to Glynis herself.

Visitors seemed to sense accurately as well that mooting current events—the president’s dubious nomination of his own lawyer to the Supreme Court, the haughty, long-winded speeches that Saddam Hussein was allowed to deliver at his war crimes trial in Iraq—was like bringing up the fascinating configurations of rocks on the moon. Aside from casual schadenfreude in relation to folks who’d also been rained on by a cloud of doom, like the dispossessed in New Orleans, Glynis did not evidence any awareness of the world beyond the confines of their modest house. After all, the average Issue of the Day derived its urgency from the fact that it was really an Issue of Tomorrow: climate change, the degradation of American infrastructure, a rising deficit. You only cared about any of this stuff if you also cared that someday San Francisco could slide into the Pacific, that dozens of cars might before long plummet off a collapsing bridge on I-95, or that your country might soon be owned entirely by China. But Glynis wasn’t troubled by any of these advents. The first two struck her as cheerful. As for the latter stoop sale for the entire United States, well, as far as she was concerned the Chinese could have it.