So Much for That (44 page)

The sensation of being perfectly untroubled was a reminder of how contrastingly tortured he’d felt over the last year or so, if not for most of his life. In retrospect, he should have promised himself this island respite long ago. Shep was a psychological genius, really. Everyone should have a Pemba.

The mild, balming insouciance soothed him most of the way home. He felt tired, of course, but it was a nice weariness, like after weight training. Experimentally, he called up a host of topics over which he’d got exercised in the past: the Alternative Minimum Tax, lax education standards, and the public-servant parking fix in Lower Manhattan aroused nothing but amiable indifference. He didn’t care about excessive building regulations, and he didn’t care about Iraq. He didn’t care if one of his crews let wet cement drizzle down a customer’s patio drain, and he didn’t care if they left gouges in drywall from a recoiling hydraulic nail gun. If he were totally honest, at this very moment he didn’t care if someday soon Flicka just didn’t wake up, since that was a good way to go and she was going to die anyway. He didn’t care about leaving Carol in the financial lurch, because she was an attractive, resourceful woman who would find another husband in no time.

As for cheating the feds out of another twenty years’ worth of pilfering his income, the sly little opt-out he had in mind was spitefully ingenious, the ultimate tax deduction. He would deduct himself. In fact, it would serve those assholes right if in an act of spontaneous civil defiance the entire working population of this country followed his lead overnight. Where would that leave the Mooches? High and fucking dry.
Oh shit, where did all the slaves go, where is my breakfast?

Yet this brief sense of gratification immediately gave way to a deeper, sleepier weariness far more encompassing—like being a boy surrounded by toys he’d outgrown, when all the other kids were still enthralled with them. The sensation was probably commonplace for a man of ninety; if so, arriving there in half the time was at least efficient. It started on
Windsor Place, whose solid, palatial dwellings from the 1920s he had always envied. Suddenly the amount of work it must have taken to jigsaw the fiddly wooden filigree that trimmed the big, indolent brick porches seemed incomprehensible; it seemed more incomprehensible still that anyone would bother to repaint, repair, or replace this vain architectural detail, and rather than admire the geometric lacing one more time Jackson thought:
they can have it
. Then the same painless generosity spread to everything in a giddy hurtling rush, like that little threshold you cross when cleaning out closets, and suddenly, instead of agonizing over every heel-worn but still wearable pair of boots, parting with all the junk you’ll never use anyway is no longer a sacrifice but a joy.
They can have it
: not just Sunday lunches in Bay Ridge trying fruitlessly to impress his parents with how their son wasn’t some lowly slob—he was Shep Knacker’s
right-hand man
, or later he was
in management
—but the very tradition of Sunday lunches, and the day of the week itself. Thank-you notes and surreptitious spongings of gravy stains; heat-crimped packaging that only opened with pruning shears, and incompatible software. Ramadan, Columbus Day, and picnics. National self-determination, recipes for banana bread, and Amazon.com. Bungee-cord jumping, suicide bombing, and falling in love. Space stations, purdah, and male pattern baldness. Right-to-life protests, self-defrosting refrigerators, and hemlines; Christmas-tree air-fresheners, presidential assassinations, and ten-year retrospectives on the fall of apartheid. Micro-lending, woodworm treatments, and anti-vivisection leagues. West Bank settlements and genetically modified corn; nuclear antiproliferation treaties, National Salt Awareness Week, and fluoridated water. Narco states, dust ruffles, and bus shelter vandalism; lucky numbers, favorite colors, and button collections. Tribal scarring and Polka Album of the Year awards; tea ceremonies, buzz cuts, and alternative energy. Feature films, the Fifth Amendment, and weather forecasts; Arctic exploration, affirmative action, and cell phone contracts. The South Beach Diet, elder abuse, and the Battle of Waterloo; burkhas, bedsteads, and the designated hitter rule; heirlooms, insoles, and the European Union. From IEDs, GDPs, and MP3s to Gore-Tex
^®
, gas shortages, and gardening tips: he was just sick of it, man. Of people and their shit.

W
hen Jackson reached his front door, its bolted top lock confirmed that no one was home. Heather had a Diversity Awareness Workshop after school, and Carol was taking Flicka to her food therapist.

He ambled down to the basement in no particular hurry. He dislodged the metal box concealed inside the pyramid of the three cartons of prefinished oak, the ample leftovers from reflooring Heather’s room that the manufacturer hadn’t allowed him to return. He’d wildly mis-multiplied the small bedroom’s square footage and ordered too much wood. Though the company really should have taken the unopened boxes back, he could no longer fathom why taking the fall for five hundred dollars’ worth of excess tongue-and-groove had driven him to such a rage at the time; the arithmetic mistake was his own, after all. He’d wasted a lot of energy in his life, and if he’d only had the wit to plug his temper into the mains he might have lit the whole house for free.

Turning a key whose gentle jingle on his chain had buoyed him for a month or more, he released the metal box’s padlock and removed the contents. Even Jackson had to admire any nation that so gamely enabled the procurement of this particular item—not to mention a nation perfectly happy to let him charge yet another $639.95 when he already owed more than the value of his house. What the hell, maybe the U.S. of A. was a free country after all.

Upstairs in the kitchen, he stirred the utensils drawer. The spike of fury when he couldn’t find what he was looking for was a chemical surprise; in his frustration, he yanked the drawer from its track, and its contents spilled on the floor. The crash of spatulas, slotted spoons, and whisks jangled his nerves, although the inane dribble of the garlic press, egg cups, tea balls, and julienne slicer at his feet was a useful reminder of his new motto:
They can have it
. He was grateful for the return of his tranquil methodicalness when he located the implement in the next drawer down. There he also found the steel. Most people had no idea how to use one, and so ruined their knives. Executing a few uniformly angled sweeps, he remembered how many bevels he had shorn off altogether before he got the hang of this thing. But he was good at it now,
and it was nice to have developed the expertise by the time the facility mattered.

Steel
: what
Burdina
meant in Basque. A metal to test his own. When applied to the tool, a name he had always liked. Funny, while he couldn’t conjure anything else under the sun that he could possibly miss, he thought he might miss a few words—
confiscatory.
Maybe it was a shame he’d never written that book. Though the titles! For his titles alone, Jackson Burdina would be legendary.

The logistics were a little awkward, and at length he achieved the best purchase (another word he liked, when it didn’t mean another worthless acquisition) by placing the cutting board down on the breakfast table. Unbuckling his belt, Jackson considered dragging his trousers off altogether, to avoid the undignified rumpled-about the-ankles effect. But he wasn’t much concerned with presentation. When he cooked, for example, his fare was manly, rough and ready, and he wasn’t wont to serve a steak with a chilled melon ball of herb butter, to frond the fish with chives.

Pulling with one hand and raising the cleaver high with the other, he brought the blade down in a clean whack, long practiced on chicken legs to separate the drumsticks from the thighs. He hadn’t meant to be melodramatic; the gesture was meant as insurance, a guarantee that there was no going back. Nevertheless, the vision of that gristly shrivel on the cutting board was strangely satisfying.
Vengeance
, he thought, then put the pistol in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

Shepherd Armstrong Knacker
Merrill Lynch Account Number 934-23F917
January 01, 2006–January 31, 2006
Net Portfolio Value: $3,492.57

A
s he headed north on the West Side Highway, Shep reflected that he should get fired more often. Traffic was so much lighter in the middle of the day.

Calling their next-door neighbor on his cell while driving was technically against the law. But something inside had started to slide. Every other New Yorker ignored the ban, and Shep was no longer inclined to embrace his role as the sole exception to thinking one’s self an exception.

Usually, he dreaded calling Nancy. All his life the man other people had asked for help, he was uneasy as a supplicant. Although she was always cheerful about doing favors, it was a relief to contact the poor woman for once to let her off the hook. Now pumped full of antibiotics—again—Glynis was free to go home, and he could pick her up on the way back to Elmsford. So grateful to be of service, when relieved of the need to drive down to Columbia-Presbyterian Nancy
sounded disappointed. They didn’t make people like that anymore. Christ, in return he’d never even ordered anything from Amway.

He had already resolved not to tell Glynis that he’d been sacked. Nancy had remarked on his sudden freedom in the middle of a workday. But Glynis had grown so oblivious to the fact that he still had a job that he might not have to fake a thing.

For Glynis had given over to such a perfect selfishness that she made Beryl seem like a full-time volunteer for Save the Children. She ordered him around, and he allowed himself to be ordered. Odd how illness conveyed an awesome power, of which Glynis availed herself with not only imperial self-righteousness, but a hint of vitriol. It was payback for something, his stillborn declaration of independence over Pemba merely a single line item on her long list of grievances. Times past, Shep had conceived of himself as a tad henpecked. Glynis had always ruled the roost, getting her way on everything from drapes to where Zach went to school. But that may not have been how she saw matters. He strained to see his wife’s side of things: a brilliant but underappreciated artisan trapped in a conventionally paternalistic marriage, she’d slaved away at raising kids and preparing stylish suppers when she should have been crafting museum pieces. (Never mind that nothing had ever stopped her from doing so; never mind that her husband had himself slaved away at repairing other people’s generally rather depressing and tastelessly decorated houses in order to ensure her freedom to create whatever and whenever she liked. Indulging his own perspective was not what this mental exercise was for.) So her husband having become the menial who vacuumed, shopped, cooked, and ran to the pharmacy must have seemed only just.

The grievance was larger than that, of course. Glynis was only fifty-one, this shouldn’t be happening, she had been wronged, and she was owed. Exactly who paid down the astronomical debt was probably immaterial.

He took the Ninety-sixth Street exit onto Riverside. Weak winter sunlight strobed through the bare branches of the park, flickering off and then stabbing again like an unwanted memory. The scene he’d walked in on two nights before was still with him.

That evening when he’d got back from work, all the lights were on. He ambled upstairs, but Glynis wasn’t nesting in her usual swirl of coverlets in the bedroom. He rapped on his son’s door and asked Zach if he knew where his mother was. The boy shouted over the sound of rapid gunfire that he had no idea, but that she must be somewhere in the house. Shep searched the first and second floors again before heading to the basement. She wasn’t messing with laundry, either, or rummaging in his workshop. He even hit the front and back yards with a flashlight. Before calling the police he decided to be perfectly thorough, and ducked up to the attic. There was nothing up there besides Glynis’s studio, and as far as he knew no one had been up there in months.

He found her slumped over her workbench, the desk lamp providing the tableaux the golden glow of a Rembrandt:
Still Life with Illness and Silver
. She had managed to insert a blade into her jewelry saw. Strung with the requisite tautness, the slender blades broke easily; this one had broken. It was stuck in a square sheet of thick-gauge sterling that lay across her bench pin. A single saw line wobbled into the sheet from its perimeter perhaps an inch or so. There the snapped saw blade remained, the saw itself dangling from the cut, which held the blade captive. Beside his wife’s limp hand lay a piece of paper scrawled with uncertain shapes and slashed with irritated arrows. He couldn’t tell if she was asleep or unconscious, and for a moment he feared—worse than unconscious. So when he touched her brow, he was relieved to find it instead burning with fever. Before carrying her downstairs, he eased her arm aside and worked the broken saw blade from the metal. This square sheet with its minimalist incision was, he suspected, her last creation.

A
s anticipated, when she looked up from the hospital bed Glynis didn’t act surprised to see him. Nor was Shep surprised to encounter a wife so frail, the tendons extruding from her neck like jewelry saw blades she had swallowed. Accustomed to her decline, lately he was in danger of believing that this was what his wife looked like. Only photographs shocked him into recollection of the woman he had desired for
twenty-seven years, so he understood why she might now forbid the taking of pictures. With no visual record, this sunken image would fade, having been rapidly eclipsed by the regal woman he had wed, with her fierce hands, her languid legs, that enchanted forest between them.

He helped her to dress. When he had trouble fitting her arms into the sleeves of the cherry-red fleece from Carol, she snapped at him. “Get away from me. This is harder than doing it myself!” The nurse delivered another prescription, which he could fill on the way home.

“Goldman wants to try something new,” Glynis said in the car, propping her turban on the headrest with her eyes closed. “An experimental drug for colon cancer is getting great results in trials. It might give this gunk in my guts a last knockout punch.” She coughed; she always coughed. “Though I’m sure it comes with another goody bag of
special effects
.”

He would have liked to ask whether it was worth going through yet another drug, but he knew better. Glynis had not learned the results of her CAT scans since September. “That’s pretty exciting”—it was an effort, pushing an exuberance of air through his throat—“if this stuff is getting such promising results in other patients.”

“Oh, and Goldman told me a wonderful story! Some colleague told his mesothelioma patient after the guy was diagnosed, ‘Don’t make plans for Christmas.’ I mean, talk about callous! So the patient bet this asshole doc a hundred dollars that he’d be alive and kicking two years later. The doc scoffed, and gave him odds of fifty-to-one. Well, that oncologist just had to pay up five grand! I loved it. Thank God I don’t have one of those cynical doctors who take pride in their ‘realism’—who all but hand you the spade to dig your own grave.”

“Too bad Goldman
isn’t
more cynical,” said Shep, trying to sound hearty, but privately a little exasperated that her internist didn’t keep his
wonderful stories
to himself. “At fifty-to-one, we might have made some serious money.”

The sun over the Hudson was anemic, as pale and unconvincing as this conversation.

“Shepherd,” she sighed, “to say I’m really looking forward to this
being over doesn’t begin to…Now I know what it’s like for a marathoner, on the twenty-sixth mile. You’d think with the finish line in sight it would get easier. I thought the last few treatments would be practically cheerful—you know, almost through. Instead, it’s harder, it’s worse. Being over and being
almost
over seem nearly the same. But they’re not. They’re opposites.
Almost
over means it’s still going on. You want to round up, to say basically that’s it. But that’s not it. Like having one more mile to run, but you’re still running. You realize that however many miles you’ve come already doesn’t make any difference, because a mile is still a long way. Sometimes I think even one more day is more than I can bear. A whole day. You have no idea how long it can seem, a whole day.”

“I know it seems like forever, like it will never end. But it will end,” he said firmly, and this time with feeling.

Glynis waited in the car while he ran into their local CVS. Presumably it was gratifying to have a bartender pour your usual without asking, but it was disheartening to have got on a chummy, first-name basis with your pharmacist. Once he’d pulled in their drive, Shep held his arm out for her to lean on, and they took each porch stair slowly, one at a time. Even the walk from the car had winded her, so he settled her in the living room to recuperate before tackling the flight to the bedroom. Besides, there was something he needed to raise with her, and the more formal nature of a living room seemed fitting.

He left to fetch her some cranberry juice, which he poured into a wine glass, though the bendable straw undercut the stemware’s pretense of adulthood. She was weak enough that leaving her to lift the glass and sip and put it down again invited spilling. The couch was white, and there was always the possibility that she would care.

He set the glass on the side table at her elbow, turned the straw toward her, and shook two tablets from the vial of antibiotics, placing one, then the other, on her tongue. All the while he was nagged by something wrong. Something missing. It was the silence. He looked to the Wedding Fountain on the glass coffee table. He was distressed to note that the silver of those sluicing, intertwining swans’ necks had jaundiced,
now turned the same off-yellow of the afternoon’s sickly sun. Hitherto in the worst of all this he had still managed to find a moment to polish the sterling. Worse, the steady, lilting trickle that had formed the aural backdrop to many a happier pre-dinner drink had ceased. He must have forgotten to top up the water for at least a week.

Shep filled a pitcher in the kitchen. When he returned to pour the water into the basin, it sat stagnant. Predictably, once the fountain ran dry, the pump had burnt out. Not for the first time, and there was no reason to be alarmed by the small impending repair. Nevertheless, the omen unsettled him.

This clearly wasn’t the moment, but it took discipline not to fix the fountain then and there; he had some spare pumps in the basement. That was what he did, he fixed things. He fixed things, or had until this morning, for a living. As he stared down at the still water, the strain of not remedying this minor mechanical malfunction right away reflected back at him the greater strain of more than a year: he couldn’t fix things.

Abandoning the pitcher on the floor, he eased beside his wife on the sofa and took her hand. “I’m not sure if you’re keeping track of the date. Are you remembering that tomorrow morning you’re supposed to give your deposition about Forge Craft?”

She took a ragged breath and coughed. “I remember.”

“I’m concerned that you may not be up to it.”

“Well, the timing isn’t great. I’m over the fever, but the infection isn’t…So I guess we could always…”

“I know we could reschedule, but I’m concerned about that, too. We’ve moved this appointment several times now. It’s become embarrassing, and too many delays may count against us in the suit. You know that I’ve never been that big on the whole business. But there’s no point in pursuing it at all if we lose. I wish you’d got this over with when you were stronger. It’s not only delivering a statement on video. Forge Craft’s lawyers will be there. Rick has warned me that it takes hours, and the cross-examination can be grueling. But I’m not going to ask for another delay. You either go through with it tomorrow, or we withdraw the suit.”

“I don’t want to withdraw it,” she said sulkily. “Someone has to pay.”

“Then you have to testify tomorrow.”

“I feel terrible, Shepherd! Why can’t you reschedule? Even by next week, I’m sure to—”

“No.” The sensation of laying down the law was strangely exhilarating. She would not have heard a refusal from her husband for many months. “If you feel so strongly about ‘making someone pay,’ then I don’t understand why you keep putting it off. Get the deposition over with. Tomorrow. Or we’re calling the whole thing quits.”

Glynis was sitting upright, palms flat on her thighs, eyes closed, the turban lending her figure a droll hint of the swami. In such a composed position she would have radiated a meditative repose, save that she had begun to shake. When he touched her hand, it was trembling like one of their electric toothbrushes.

“Glynis?” he said gently. “What is it you’re afraid of? I’ll be with you, and we can take lots of breaks.”

Deep in her diaphragm came a lurch, rising to her throat, where she tried to keep it swallowed. Successive shudders shook her body as if someone were pounding on her chest with a sledgehammer, trying to knock down a door.

“Gnu, what’s wrong? If it’s too stressful, we can just withdraw the suit—”

Though the shudders that rocked her were seismic, the lone vowel that emitted from her mouth was timorous, something like
ih
.

“Sh-sh.” He stroked her hand. “Take it easy, we can hash this out later.”

“It’s,” she said more clearly now, fighting with the words, wrestling with them in her throat as if they were trying to take over.

“Take some deep breaths, and don’t try to talk.”

Yet when he made a bid to embrace her, with strength he’d not have imagined she still possessed she shoved him away. Although Shep had become adept at not taking anything that Glynis did these days personally, the violent physical rejection was unexpectedly wounding. He withdrew to the opposite arm of the sofa and folded his arms.

“It’s,” she squeezed out again, and then finally threw the words at him, getting them out of her with the twinned revulsion and relief of vomit: “
It’s—all—my—fault
.”

“What’s all your fault, Glynis.” The coldness in his voice was an indulgence. “I can’t think of anything that’s your fault.”