So Much for That (41 page)

The sensation was identical now, a recurrent one that had visited ever since her diagnosis. There was a dark patch, a shadow, that she wouldn’t look at directly, and in training her mental gaze resolutely elsewhere, anywhere but at this particular seething corner, most of the time she was able to dismiss it as a trick of the light. But much like the roaches, the longer she ignored it the bigger and blacker it became, and the wider a berth she was obliged to give it in her head. Some nights like this one it would make that same rustling sound, like thousands of tiny legs against brown paper.

C
ircumstances might rightly have taught that sex wasn’t everything. On the loss of sight, for example, all one’s other senses were meant to grow more acute, so that the blind developed superhuman hearing and spine-tingling tactile sensitivity in compensation. By analogy, then, subtracting sex from the equation should have made the whole phantasmagoric cornucopia of life’s many other pleasures only the more intense.

Yet sourly contriving the overwrought expression
phantasmagoric cornucopia of life’s many other pleasures
, Jackson couldn’t think of any. What pleasures? He hated his job. His alleged “best friend” was now the one man on earth whom he was driven most to avoid. His elder daughter’s sense of balance had so drastically deteriorated that they would soon have to demote her to a wheelchair. He could hardly get at the younger kid through the defensive barrage of fat and fast food, though penetrating the vacuous bloat of his twelve-year-old’s face would entail confronting her rage at having been implicitly ridiculed for years with “cortomalaphrine” and her staunch refusal to learn the word
placebo
. And his wife…So near at hand but glassed off, she might have been living in a parallel universe; he imagined that this sense he had of waving and shouting and jumping up and down while being obliviously unseen and unheard must be what it was
like to be dead. He no longer lived with a wife; he merely haunted her. She seemed occasionally to discover that a sandwich had been gnawed or a pair of socks had been worn with the same unnerved quality of a confirmed rationalist forced to confront the invisible intrusions of the paranormal.

Furthermore, every subway poster for hair coloring, every television ad for chocolate, every steamy late-night movie and every snatch of bawdy banter at work bannered the fact that to the contrary sex
was
everything. With his vista abruptly switched to black and white, Jackson had never realized just how very important sex was until he lived without it. He wasn’t forgoing only the literal activity of round-peg-round-hole, but the whole penumbral range of glances and brushes and touches, whispers and laughters and smiles, the girlish tuckings of a stray auburn wisp behind an ear or the two tender fingers on his forearm that had once electrified his day. So he missed not so much the thing itself but the energy, which powered every other purpose; sex wasn’t the goal but the fuel. Flat out of juice, Jackson found no joy in food, which ensured that he ate more of it. Booze no longer induced elation but made him bilious; always hopeful that one more beer would tip him over into the ebullient loud-mouthery of yesteryear, he drank ever more alcohol, too. Indeed, it was only when Carol shot him a sharp, disapproving glance when he reached for another bottle in the fridge that he was persuaded that this sensible, unsuperstitious woman had come to believe in ghosts. Yet so harrowed and hollowed on his own account, Jackson considered too rarely that Carol’s own vista had gone colorless, that Carol was running on empty, that through a fatal combination of his own foolishness and her obdurate refusal to forgive it, Carol was living without sex herself.

Meanwhile, the looming debts on his credit cards instilled the curious impression that he was being followed. Walking down the street, Jackson would catch a figure in the corner of his eye, or detect a rustle in the bushes behind him, feeling trailed by an elusive presence that when stared straight down would reveal itself as a wafting tree branch or the neighbor’s dog. Yet the presence was always with him. The debts were much worse than Carol had any idea. In an ostensibly generous bid to pull his weight in paperwork, he’d taken over management of the household bills,
since Carol handled all the claims for health insurance. To head off her alarm at the sheer profusion of his plastic, he had a couple of cards whose bills were sent to the office; another three were paperless, and he paid their minimums online. He wondered if the subsequent sense of corruption, of unwholesomeness and impending catastrophe, might mirror in some way Glynis’s experience of having cancer. He didn’t want to diminish what Glynis was going through, but there did seem to be a connection; Jackson had fiscal cancer. Thus even when he was thinking about other matters entirely, a wrongness-and-badness was eating away at him, in the same way that, while Glynis might occasionally be able to concentrate on one of the recipes she would never prepare on that confounded Food Channel of hers, a wrongness-and-badness was eating away at her, too. Terminal illness was insolvency of the body. Glynis and Jackson both lived in dread of that unnamed day around the corner when debt collectors would thump on the door to demand their pound of flesh.

Yet just as already having come down with the worst disease imaginable might drive you to take up smoking…Just as teenage girls might throw contraceptive caution to the winds because they were already pregnant…Just as the morbidly obese must so often say fuck it, I already weigh six hundred pounds that I’ll never lose, so why not have another piece of coconut cake if I feel like it…Jackson was sunk so deeply in a financial hole that it didn’t seem to matter at any given point if he dug the hole a teaspoon deeper still. Too, he seemed to be caught in a feedback loop: The debts made him feel bad. Larger debts would make him feel worse. In endangering his own future and his wife’s future and his children’s future he
should
feel worse, so to flagellate himself he made them larger. Some days it was dogs, others a magazine subscription or shirt from LLBean that he could have lived without; in fact, Jackson was fascinated to learn just how much money you could run through without appreciably improving your life or acquiring anything of value. This spending-in-place had become a game he played, a little entertainment in self-torture, and he took a freakish delight in the discovery that you could fritter all your money on utter trivia and nothingness and
nobody would stop you.
In a hallucinogenic fit of misguided piety, he could
actually tap his account number and security code into a website to buy ten gross of deformed plastic menorahs for fourteen thousand dollars, and the charge would go right through.

Granted, he did not want to lose the house. Not only was the home equity loan outstanding; they’d still not paid off the original mortgage. But foreclosure was an abstraction. They lived in the house. He went home every day to the house. He had a key. His clothes hung in its closets; the food for their breakfast was stashed in its kitchen; his mail arrived daily at this address. Something about the sheer three-dimensionality of the place, the great big reach-out-and-touch-it, having-slept-here-most-of-his-married-lifeness of the place, made the prospect of repossession utterly incomprehensible, and if he did not understand it, it could not happen.

The habit wasn’t charitable, but Jackson sometimes thought back bitterly to the early days at Knack, when he and Shep went out on jobs side by side—when the company was basically a two-man operation that occasionally had to contract with licensed plumbers or electricians but was otherwise a de facto partnership. So when he sold up, Shep should really have cut him in for half. Shep should have made him on paper what he was in practice. Then the company would have gone for that cool mil and he’d have five hundred K to float him painlessly through this ocean of bills. Better still, maybe he’d have put his foot down and refused to sign a rash deal drafted merely so that Shep could run off on a fool’s errand to some Third World dung heap. Why, he could have pressed the guy to admit—and in those more credulous days pressed himself to admit—that Pemba, along with its many arbitrary antecedents, was a crackpot fantasy on which Shep would never act in real life. In that case they’d now still co-own a thriving Internet enterprise worth four times the 1996 sticker price, and Jackson Burdina, not Randy Fucking Pogatchnik, would be rich.

Slumped in his cubicle in February, Jackson registered rancorously that it was, of all things, Valentine’s Day. It did occur to him briefly that he could go all out and make one more bid for Carol’s clemency, like the many bids that had failed so spectacularly in the past. But he could see it: A dozen roses crammed perfunctorily into a pickle jar, with no effort made to arrange them in an attractive array. Chocolates slipped distract
edly on a high shelf with a remark about making sure to keep them away from Heather. Not so much as a peck on the cheek, but a formal, “Why, thank you, Jackson, that’s very sweet,” delivered with the same impersonal coolness with which his wife declined telephone solicitations that were in violation of their household’s listing on the Do Not Call Registry. Basically, his wife had put herself on a private Do Not Call Registry, a restraining order that applied explicitly to her own husband, which also knocked edible-crotch underwear totally out of the ballpark.

Did he not deserve a Valentine present himself? And in preference to another plaid flannel shirt, why not put himself further in hock to secure something that he genuinely needed?

Jackson had never done such a thing, but with Pogatchnik out, Shep AWOL on another personal day, and his workforce dispersed to the leaky faucets of three New York boroughs, he entered “escort service” and “brooklyn ny” into his search engine.

H
is pulse may have been pounding, but meeting his latest credit card purchase in a Fifth Avenue Starbucks was weirdly mundane. The girl in the picture he’d picked on the Web had long auburn hair, full breasts, and a remote expression that you’d think would have been a turnoff, but he missed the cat-and-mouse games that had once kept his wife just teasingly out of reach, and maybe he still wanted to have to work for it. He took a minute surveying the other patrons hammering at their laptops beside flat cappuccinos, only recognizing his Valentine’s Day present to himself at last because she was bulging from the red leotard she’d described on the phone. In fact, giving a cheerful wave, she saw him first; doubtless the sudden-cold-feet look on his face—that darting glance at the door through which he might make a quick, skulking exit—was one that “Caprice” (or whatever her name was) confronted all the time.

“Sorry,” said Jackson, pulling out a chair and immediately regretting that, since he just wanted to head out and get this over with. “You’re not the girl in the picture.”

“Oh, we never are, honey,” she said with a laugh. “I don’t know where they get those photos. Say, do you want a coffee?”

A double bourbon would have been more like it. Still, Jackson let her order a coffee for him so he could check her out, taking a beat to realize as she stood beside him that the arched eyebrows were for cash; all he had was a ten. While she stood in line, he confirmed that her figure wasn’t bad, if a little heavy in the ass. He’d picked one of the pricier sites, so at least she wasn’t tricked out in feathers, but wore a classy, form-fitting black suit. He might have been peeved about the switcheroo, but “Caprice” was at least—well—white. She was nominally blond—maybe the girls were color-coded—though he would have liked to return to the days when dying your hair was a disgraceful secret, and women wouldn’t leave the house showing a millimeter of dark roots, of which his escort shamelessly sported a solid inch. The breasts, he noted on her return, were fake, too. Maybe in her late twenties, the woman was passably pretty, but the proportions of her face were askew. You got used to such anomalies in the likes of an actress like Julia Roberts, but on a hooker you couldn’t help but envision how her mouth might have got that wide.

Sipping his grande coffee of the day—only a couple of bucks, and she’d kept the change—Jackson realized that this meeting-in-public ritual was mostly so she could check
him
out. The surest route to seeming normal was to be reassuringly dull. “So, how long you been at this—job?”

“Don’t worry, I’m not a lifer,” she said breezily, and Jackson had the unexpected impression (how was it that you could tell, with everybody, after under a minute? What fleck in the eye gave them away?) that she was smart. “I’m supporting myself through a course in Human Resourcing at Brooklyn Community College. You know, what they used to call Personnel Management. I figured, what could be a better way to get an on-the-ground education in
personnel management
?”

She’d probably aired the quip before, but it at least broke the ice. By the time they left, he’d shared his (reassuringly dull) job, adding that on his own time he was also writing a book. What was such an encounter good for if not a little rounding up? It wouldn’t do to admit that he was still working on the title. He even tried out his latest on her:
The Myth of
the “Law-Abiding Citizen”: How We Gullible Goody-Goodies Are Brainwashed into Shit-Eating Compliance (or) You Have No Idea How Much You Could Get Away With If You Only Had Balls.

“It’s about how we’re all manipulated into getting with the program,” he explained with some of his old ebullience on their way out the door.

“You know those cheesy TV shows like
World’s Wildest Police Videos
? Some loser in a pickup streaks down the highway at a hundred miles per hour in the wrong direction, with our brave men in blue in hot pursuit. Does the villain ever successfully abscond into the sunset? Not on your life! The sucker’s always cuffed in the dirt by the end of the clip. It’s social engineering, and it ain’t subtle, neither.
Crime doesn’t pay. You can’t get away.
Same as all those straight-ass cop shows, from
Dragnet
to
Law and Order
. Nobody ever gets away with jack. Pure mind-fuck propaganda.”

He was standing out in the cold with a prostitute, and he was blathering about politics. She looked amused. “You know, there’s no reason to be nervous.”

“I’m not nervous,” he said. “I talk this way all the time.”

“No wonder you need an escort agency.”

She was being droll. He should like that. After all, he couldn’t do this impersonally; it wasn’t in his nature. He wanted her to like him. He wanted to impress her, which was pathetic. “Gonorrhea isn’t the problem,” he said, and then as what he’d actually said echoed in his ears he kicked himself. “I mean,
logorrhea
. See, my wife is—what you’d call cold to my advances.”