So Much for That (38 page)

Everyone wondered what got Glynis through the day, and she wasn’t telling. She was crossing a desert without water, but on the other side lay the oasis of After-After Glynis, the woman she had always been and would be again, only better. What got her through was the vision of
her final chemo, Goldman announcing triumphantly that she was done, that the vileness would wash from her veins just the way Shepherd yearly sluiced out the debris and sludge from his stupid outdoor fountains. Day by day her pee would lose that dead gray smell of wet concrete, its alarming wrong colors of whatever chemical was most recently destroying her, like cherry red, or periwinkle. No, finally her pee would return to sunny uric yellow and exude that loamy, stinging smell that others foolishly found offensive and she had never before realized was rich and beautiful. She would sleep the night through and dream well and rise early, earlier than Shepherd even, padding immediately to the attic studio. Where she would remain all day. The silver would obey. Her output would be staggering. Shepherd would worry that she was working too hard. Shepherd would want to take his “research trips,” but she would say no, I have to work; go alone if you have to…

He’d been planning to go alone! The traitor, to Pemba, pin-in-a-map Pemba, some squalid island in flip-flops besting twenty-six years with his wife…

Stop. He is paying. He is paying his price for that. He will keep paying, and he should pay. Rest assured, too, that he will never finish paying, like those credit card debtors on the hook for so much principal that they can never do better than fork over the interest and the debt remains, unyielding, irreducible…Some sandpit, imagine. No one but Glynis understood that her husband was insane, and where did all that dissatisfaction hail from anyway? What was so wrong with his life that he had to flee it, to flee Glynis herself, to betray her? Really, he shambled around here these days so hangdog, so humble, but he could get outside, couldn’t he, just drive away, go to the movies if he liked, or to the A&P, which he did not understand was a privilege—yes, the A&P of all things was one more privilege! She had caught him doing push-ups…Push-ups! He could still do push-ups! And he was complaining? Implicitly complaining, pretending not to complain, but she could hear it, the underground mumble of self-pity, of noble sacrifice, of prostrating subjugation and sneaky self-admiration and plotting. Plotting! He was plotting! He had a thoroughly different picture of After-After,
as if she
didn’t know.
When it would all be “over” but she knew what he meant by “over,” she knew what, or rather who, he expected to be “over,” and his plotting, his plans, did not include her, did not have her in the attic returned to her torch, her polisher, her powers…

Stop. Think After-After. There were six more chemos to go. It wasn’t fair, of course. They had said nine months, nine months of chemo. The nine months had passed. She should have been finished by now, and out the other side. But all the transfusions, the low blood counts, the you’re-not-strong-enough-to-do-it-this weeks, had dragged the grueling business out. It was February, she should have been finished! Calm down.
I should have been finished!
No. Quiet. Calming now. Stay the course. Get through the course. Six. Six more. Concentrate on the other side. Concentrate. On the other side—

For After-After Glynis would be “New and Improved!” like a repackaged cleanser. Because she understood now. She would keep her understanding out the other side. They had all clamored for enlightenment and she had denied being privy to any enlightenment but there had been illumination of a kind and they could not have it because it was private. Because she had paid for it so dearly and it was hers.

See, there had never been anything to be afraid of. Making things, starting that initial saw cut by notching the triangular needle file into the edge of a fresh sheet of silver, had always been terrifying in the past. She had feared disappointing herself, fashioning a monument only to her own limitations, as she had also assessed her finished pieces as stunted, only as good as they were. Well, yes. Of course. But now she realized that their limitations were part of their beauty. That is, her tendency to design flatware subtly the same way every time, that little rut she had resisted, that despair at the end in recognizing that the salad servers still looked a bit too profoundly akin to the ice tongs despite the innovative inclusion of flame-worked glass, and even her tendency to make the same mistakes—it was all part and parcel of what made the work specific to Glynis Pike Knacker. The unlimited craftsman had no identity. Could make anything and therefore nothing. So your limitations were also your strengths. Besides, now she also realized that if she made
a thing and it wasn’t right, she could make it right. There was no risk, and never had been. Rather, there was only one risk: making nothing. Giving into the seduction of the unformed, the airy mental construct that was therefore infinitely perfectible and, in theory, infinitely fine. At last she got it: concept is incidental; execution is all. And she had the eye.
She was a master of metal
. In comparison, the materials that others commanded—messy, pliant clay, nothing more than wet dirt, really; or wood, corpse parts from the slaughter of plants—it was all lesser, sad, timid, easy, and small. She had some respect for glass. But it was the rulers of metal who ruled the world.

She had long contemplated a knife handle, which could be riveted onto a good Sabatier blade with its dreary black grip removed—or perhaps she could have a narrow blade of high-grade steel commissioned, its edge dangerous, illegally sharp. For the handle, something delicious, voluptuous, a sensuous fabrication from heavy-gauge sterling with heft and undulation, perfectly weighted and subtly, infinitesimally not quite straight…A line trailed through her head, in and out like a basting thread.

After all, implements of violence appealed. She could see After-After Glynis designing nothing but scabbards, meat carving sets, maces, brass knuckles inlaid with fine glinting diamonds to do yet more damage, or even instruments of torture—not only finely wrought, filigreed flaying knives, but the instruments of her own torture. A brilliant silver replication of the bags of poison that had for months wafted overhead, hooked on a drip stand; its mirror-finished pleats of sterling would catch the light. Perhaps she could face down the very worst of her horrors, since for Glynis the route to control and possession of anything was to Midas it, to turn all that she touched to metal, what she was made of, what she had loved, and what she knew. So she could also fabricate a perfect, gleaming replica of a syringe, replete with working plunger, whose slick, sweet mechanics would wow the galleries, the terrifyingly attenuated needle rendered for the luxury market in white gold. Because there was a market. She had met the market, at Columbia-Presbyterian, all those “fellow” sufferers mainlining death in sinisterly comfortable recliners.
The ones who never shut up, who blathered on their cell phones for hours and were lucky that Glynis didn’t own a gun. They were all eager for trinkets, distracting treats, and the illusion of meaning. She could fashion a whole line of metalware for cancer patients.

Like Shepherd she had plans, but they were respectable plans. Not the plans of a coward who was tired, or thought he was tired yet had no comprehension of tired. Not the plans of a weakling who just wanted out from under, who was just waiting, waiting it out, waiting for his release, plotting his release, digging silently at night when he thought no one was watching, like an Alcatraz con with a spoon.

No spoons; they were too warm and cupping, too round and breasty and safe. Still, Glynis’s head was crowded again, with all that After-After Glynis would make. Sharp things, aggressive things, uncompromising things. She would start with the knife. She could start with the design of the knife right now, getting a head start on After-After. Because there was not a minute to lose. Her poor husband had misguidedly hoarded his pennies, when the only currency they spent that had ever counted was time.

Making what was really a spectacular effort that would have read to outsiders as an unremarkable getting-out-of-chair, Glynis retrieved the pencil and notepad from beside the telephone. Shuffled back to the kitchen table. Tried to turn to a clean page. It took ages to turn the page. She could not get the corner raised with her finger, and at last resorted to prizing it up with the eraser. The hands…(
The
hands, not
her
hands; if anything, they owned her. That was it, referring to “her” body was all wrong now, since the body had its Glynis, really; the body possessed you, not the other way around.) Well, the hands were so numb that she could have slammed them with the phone book without flinching. The nails were lifting off, too, popping, they felt as if they were popping off her fingers like tiddlywinks—striated, deformed, so dark they were almost purple. These looked like the fingers of a heavy smoker who was into home improvement, and prone to bringing down a hammer on the wrong kind of nail. (She picked at them when Shepherd wasn’t looking. They bled. She shouldn’t. But fiddling with the raised nails, peeking sick
eningly underneath, could absorb her for hours.) Her toenails were even worse, because there weren’t any; the nail beds stared soullessly up at her in bed, blindly, ten gouged sockets—
wee wee wee wee
, all the way home.

The pencil felt like a shovel. When she dragged its point across the paper, the wobbly graphite trail bore no relation to the clean line in her head—her undulating knife handle, like kitchenware by Henry Moore. So she abandoned drafting the handle to first portray the blade, but that came out wobbly, too—slight, trembling, and drooped, the beveled side concave.

She could draw better than this when she was three. In a last effort for the morning she pulled at the page, failed to tear it from the rubber binding, and settled for scratching out the embarrassing blob with a squiggle whose faintness scarcely captured her rage.

G
lynis woke with her face smashed on the kitchen table. The scribbling on the pad did not make a lot of sense to her. Funny, the bit of mental flotsam that remained from the morning’s cyclone of elusive reflections was one distinct thought: “stupid outdoor fountains.” She took it back. That had been mean. In truth, she treasured Shepherd’s fountains. They were a little crazy, but derived from the crazy side of her husband that she liked.

Beside the notepad sat a plate of pasta salad, brightened with bits of red sweet pepper and parsley, alongside half a tuna sandwich with too much mayonnaise. Nancy, who had a key. How merciful, to have missed the kindness. To skip being thankful for the kindness. Most of all, to have missed being forced to eat this crap.

It must be afternoon. Friday. She was to have a visitor today. Ordinarily an odious prospect, but this was a rare visitor whom she did not much mind. Flicka. They were alike. How odd that she should now have more in common with a seventeen-year-old than with the girl’s vigorous, bounteous-breasted mother.

Glynis groped upstairs, hand-over-handing the banister; no one would ever know how much energy she put into wearing a fresh velour
lounge suit. She was winded by mid-flight, and paused, leaning on the railing, to catch her breath. Breathing—somehow whenever she inhaled these days it was too late. The breath was too late; she had needed the air in this breath in the breath before. Her feet hurt; bulging in their pink fluffy slippers, the skin was stretched from the edema and starting to crack. She shouldn’t have fallen asleep in that hard kitchen chair; the pressure on her backside had aggravated the sores on either side of her anus—for on the rare occasions that she eliminated feces in the normal fashion it burned holes in her ass. Toxic Poo. Sounded like a rock band, or some awful contemporary eco-sequel to A. A. Milne.

Socks, to hide ugly swollen ankles. Woolen watch cap. Mustn’t upset visitors with bald head.

Back on the landing, she nudged the thermostat upward another two degrees, not looking at the numbers, not caring about the numbers. She was always cold.

Three thirty. Carol had said four. With nothing better to do, Glynis peeked out the foyer windows, looking for the car. What she saw instead flushed her with a familiar, helpless, Pavlovian loathing.

One of the neighbors, running. In his fancy sweat pants with their little stripes, in his fancy shoes with more little stripes. A jaunty head-band. Looking so proud of himself. Exuding the same covert self-pity layered up with self-congratulation that she detested in her husband. In his fancy matching sweatshirt and special sporty gloves, he was running around the golf course. Aglow with manly discipline. Not to be deterred by a whipping February wind with a hint of snow. Yeah, sure, run your heart out, you sanctimonious prick. Think I didn’t used to run? Just you wait. You’ll see. One day you’ll get some, ha-ha,
routine
checkup and the doctor will bombast you with a lot of long-winded Latinate claptrap and there you go, you won’t be running around any golf course; you’ll thank your lucky stars if you can still get out of bed. So run, run, run. For now. Because don’t kid yourself. It just hasn’t happened
yet
.

Sometimes Glynis rued the fact that mesothelioma wasn’t contagious.

Granted, Glynis herself had gone to fitness classes and installed a variety of exercise regimes to keep what she had now been robbed of
through no flagging of discipline, no indulgence or sloth, no laziness, no lack of resolve. During those workouts, she, too, would have imagined that she was exerting her willpower, at times to its maximum strength.
Wrong
. And that was the central source of the scorn that her neighbor inspired as he rounded the hill at the top and loped down the far side. He thought he was “pushing himself,” when this very afternoon she had required
fifty times that much strength of will just to walk up the stairs
. He thought he was “braving the elements,” yet had no appreciation for how kind was a mere February gale in comparison to an ill wind ripping through your own body. He thought he was forcing himself to do something he didn’t especially want to do, and didn’t realize that he did want to run, that running, like the A&P, was a privilege. He thought that he was building endurance, but was in for a big surprise when his own plague ship came in, at which point he’d discover that he had not built one scrap of the kind of endurance that newly unpleasant circumstances demanded. He thought, hilariously, that he was overcoming pain.