So Much for That (45 page)

“This!” she spat, sweeping a hand over her concave midsection. “All of it!”

“All of what?”

“The cancer, the chemo!” she got out through her weeping. “I asked for it! I did this to myself!”

“You’re talking crazy. You’re just exhausted—”

“Shut up!” she cried, slamming her hands to her thighs.
“Shut up, shut up, shut up!”

She waited for him to demonstrate his obedience. As he sat mutely apart from her, she seemed to regain a measure of self-control.

“At Saguaro,” she said. “The millboard blocks, the mitts, the lining for the crucibles—sure, in the mid-seventies putting asbestos in products like that wasn’t against the law. But it had become an issue, okay? I knew about it, and my teachers did, too. In fact, my metalsmithing professor was really concerned about it, right? I mean, how did you think I knew these things contained asbestos to begin with?”

He wanted to say that just because she knew didn’t make it her fault, but he could tell the edict to “shut up” was still in force, and her question was rhetorical.

“Anyway, that professor, I still remember her name, Frieda Luten. She’d read up on all this stuff. So at the beginning of my first term she’d collected all the blocks and mitts, absolutely anything that might be a ‘health and safety’ issue, and put them in the storage closet. The shelves were marked ‘Do Not Use and Do Not Touch.’ She’d ordered replacement supplies, but didn’t want to throw the old stuff out. Forge Craft’s salespeople had told her that the company was probably going to announce a recall, when the school could trade the old supplies in for their new, safer products. The company did issue a recall, too, though not until the next year. That’s the recall that Rick Mystic said would help to hang them in our suit.”

He couldn’t contain himself. “So are you telling me that you never used those products after all? In that case, how would you—”

“
I’m not finished
.”

Shep contained himself.

“You have to understand,” she said, training her gaze dully forward toward the Wedding Fountain; defunct and tarnished, it now looked disturbingly junky, like a gaudy thrift-store knickknack. “Or remember. What it was like to be young. That feeling that older people’s neurotic little worries don’t apply to you. The asbestos thing, it was abstract. I thought everyone was making a big deal over nothing, the same way they made a big deal over red dye number two when I’d eaten all the maraschino cherries off my Dairy Queen hot fudge sundaes as a kid and lived to tell the tale. And you know, they’re always changing their minds about what’s good for you and what’s going to kill you—like all that hoo-ha over saccharine, and then they bring in aspartame, which is probably just as bad…Well, who can take any of the toxic this and toxic that seriously after a while? And there wasn’t any Internet in those days; I couldn’t Google
asbestos
and get fifteen million hits. So I didn’t know anything about the cover-up that had been going on for over a hundred years, or about all those miners dying back in the 1930s. And I was pretty fucking broke.”

She turned and glared. He felt he was meant to say something. “So…?”

“Oh don’t be an idiot!
I stole that stuff, Shepherd!
I knew I was going to need to set up my own studio once I was out of school, and you should know—metalsmithing materials cost a fortune! I figured if those supplies were out of commission, nobody would miss them. For God’s sake, why do you think I remember the exact label on the bottom of the soldering blocks, or the exact little purple flower pattern on the heat-proof mitts? Because I stole a whole boxful of stuff from those ‘Do Not Use and Do Not Touch’ shelves, because I packed it all with me when I moved to New York, and because I worked with it in Brooklyn
for years
! It’s no different than if I’d smoked two packs a day for decades and then act all surprised when I get lung cancer, since I
knew that stuff was contaminated and I used it anyway, because I was too—fucking—cheap!”

Ah
. On his own account, Shep was relieved. The original alert having come from Forge Craft’s own sales force, they would have to withdraw the suit. Even if there was no record of the upstanding heads-up, to pursue their claim for opportunistic financial gain wouldn’t be right. To protect her, perhaps he could explain to Mystic that she no longer had the strength to make it through a deposition. Now he would escape a tedious legal process that had made him queasy from the start.

At last she did not resist when he slipped to her side of the sofa and slid his arm around her shoulders. “That’s ironic,” he murmured. “One of the things I took a shine to when we met was how frugal you were. You sure drove a hard bargain for that worktable I built you in Brooklyn.” He chuckled. “What you were willing to part with barely covered the materials. Accepting peanuts, well—that’s how I first knew I must have had it bad for this woman. I’d never have worked for next to nothing for anyone else. But I wanted to fuck you,” he said softly into her ear, and even saying that he started to get hard. “I really, really, really wanted to fuck you.”

“I don’t know how you can bring yourself to still speak to me,” said Glynis, her voice muffled in his shirt. She’d noticed his erection, and reached for it, held it lightly through his slacks. Stroked it in sync with his stroking of her shoulder, as if caressing a beloved albeit increasingly elderly family pet. “After I blamed you. I can’t quite understand what drove me to that. Except that it was so hard to take…the diagnosis…what was going to happen to me, the surgery, the treatments…I just couldn’t handle the blame, too. It was too much. It wasn’t as if I didn’t remember about swiping those supplies from that closet at Saguaro, exactly. I just didn’t….
turn to it
. But turning against you instead, putting it on you instead—because you were there—because you were strong and I thought you could bear what I couldn’t—because it made a better, a plausible story that I could stand to tell to other people…Well, it wasn’t fair, and I don’t know how you can ever forgive me.”

“I’m more than still speaking to you,” he whispered, kissing the
smooth top of her head. “Eventually you pointed the finger elsewhere, and that was nice. It was easier for me after that, not thinking I’d made you sick, just from…” indeed, it was hard to say it aloud without his throat catching, “hugging you hello when I got home.”

Shep was debating doing something with this hard-on versus simply enjoying the state, those insistent, pumping twinges that made him feel young again, and married again, when the phone rang. He might have let it go, but it sometimes behooved him to remember that he had a son, now late coming home from school. The poor kid’s parents having been inaccessible in every other sense for over a year, they might at least deign to answer the phone.

It wasn’t Zach. Recognizing the voice on the other end, he raised a forefinger to Glynis with an apologetic arch of his eyebrows. She looked suddenly so spent that a few minutes to rest might be welcome. He slipped off to the foyer. As the voice carried on, he feared its penetrating wail was audibly escaping the receiver, and he slid out to the front porch. It was cold outside, but he had gone so cold inside that he might as well match the temperature of the air and his blood, like a reptile.

I
t would be fair to say that Shepherd Armstrong Knacker re-entered the living room a changed man. For the benefit of what little remained to him of his married life, he would have wished that his immediate resolution to shelter his shattered wife from a certain piece of news was central to his transformation. But ever since he had read her prognosis on the Web and kept it to himself like his own private cancer, ever since he had concealed from her the results of her CAT scans at her own perplexing behest, shielding Glynis from vital information had become habitual. If by only dint of omission, he was, and had now long been, dishonest at home.

Yet until that phone call, he had never been dishonest in public. He had always filed painstakingly accurate tax returns, declaring remits from jobs paid, with a wink, in cash. Unlike his tragically light-fingered wife, he had never stolen a single screwdriver from Pogatchnik. He had
signed a contract with Twilight Glens; bound by his word, he had never seriously entertained that notion of cancelling the monthly payments, and leaving the institution or the government to sort out the messy business of selling the house in Berlin out from under his sister to cover the outstanding bill.

For decades now, he had listened to his best friend regale him with what a “Mug” he was—alternatively, what a Patsy, Fall Guy, Sap, Slave, Jackass, or Lackey he was, depending on the man’s cockeyed terminological vogue. While Shep might sometimes have conceded that his taxes were not always devoted to purposes that he personally might have endorsed, for the most part Jackson’s purple rants about the real class divide being between the takers and the taken had fallen on deaf ears. Shep had found the man’s tirades merely entertaining, an amusing diversion for passing the time while circling Prospect Park.

But now they were his best friend’s legacy. Aside from one sick kid and one fat one, and a wife whose preternatural composure had finally cracked in half, the memory of those diatribes was all that he had left behind. To honor them was to act on them. For once in Shep Knacker’s life, he’d make Jackson proud.

Glynis was curled in a ball at the end of the couch. Shep knelt before her and gently prized her open, like spreading a tight bloom without snapping the petals. “Gnu,” he said levelly, taking her hands. “Sit up, would you? That’s right. Now, I want you to listen to me. Look me in the eye, okay? It’s all right, I’m not angry with you. I understand how hard it’s been, carrying this secret for so long. But I’ve been carrying secrets, too. They’re not much easier.”

He waited until she met his gaze squarely.

“You know that with the sale of Knack of All Trades, and our investments finally recovering after the tech-stock crash and then 9/11, we were pretty well off, right? That’s what made it possible for me to announce I was going to Pemba, with or without you. We had the money. Fine, my timing was bad, and that’s an understatement. But Glynis, your treatments have been very expensive. Those two specialists at Columbia-Presbyterian are out of network. I’ve tried to spare you this
side of things, so you could concentrate on getting better. But I think it’s time I put you in the picture.

“We’re going broke, Glynis. From the age of eighteen, I—Jackson and I—worked sixty-plus hours a week, building up that company from scratch. Ever since its sale, I—Jackson and I—have been step-and-fetching for some fat, feckless former employee with a chip on his shoulder who hates our guts. Meanwhile, you and I have never lived high on the hog, and now I’m sorry that I hardly ever took you out to dinner while you still had an appetite. But everything I earned and everything we saved—it’s gone, Glynis. My account at Merrill Lynch has been savaged. It’s touch and go whether I can make next month’s rent, much less another bill for chemo.

“And here’s another thing I didn’t tell you: I was fired today, Glynis. I don’t have a job. I don’t have a salary anymore, but more to the point we have no more health insurance. I could buy into COBRA, but we can’t afford that, either. So the next bill for chemo is one hundred percent mine, and once you’re out of the system they double the price. We’re headed for bankruptcy. You may think you have some idea of how I feel about that. You probably assume that I feel embarrassed. But I’m not embarrassed.
I’m angry
.”

Their financial plight didn’t seem to be making much of an impression, but his fury did. “My, my,” she marveled. “Well, it’s about time.”

“Jackson”—Shep stopped to collect himself. He did not want to cry, or he did, but he did not want to have to explain why. He was having a hard time saying the name, though it seemed important to say it. “Jackson lets the unfairness of it all get him down. It eats him up. And that’s a shame. But the way he thinks about the world isn’t completely crazy. When you play by the rules and other people don’t, you’re a fool. When you hold up your end of things, other people figure that while you’re at it you might as well hold up
their
end of things, too. Jackson’s been explaining till he’s blue in the face that people like him and me, we’re taken advantage of. We’re punished. For the sale of Knack alone I paid two hundred and eighty thousand dollars to the federal government in capital gains. Add up all I’ve shoveled those sons of bitches since high
school, and it has to be somewhere between one and two million bucks. And that’s the same government, when my wife has cancer, won’t buy her a single Tylenol. They won’t take care of my elderly father, either, though he’s paid into the system his whole life, too—just because he’s led his life responsibly, like I have, and he isn’t destitute. Jackson’s right. It’s not fair. And I don’t think he’d want us to roll over and take it. Maybe the best tribute to a really good friend is to listen to the guy for once, to—to take him seriously for once, in a way, I’m ashamed to say, I may never have done before.”

Shep’s use of the present tense was an anachronism, but
Jackson lets
and
Jackson thinks
came readily enough; the verbs weren’t merely for concealment. It had taken his father years to remember to say that Shep’s mother
was
a good cook, that she
worked
tirelessly for his congregation. For the living, with no conception of any other state, the use of the past tense in relation to the bewilderingly disappeared was a discipline, a learned grammar and an unnatural one.

“My father would say it’s
only
money, of course,” Shep continued.

“Maybe you think the same thing, when the only currency in your life right now is your health. But I can’t keep this roof over your head without money, or heat this place to ninety degrees in February, or drive you to the hospital in a car. Besides, I don’t want to be ‘cynical,’ but—whatever happens to you? I have to survive afterward, if only to take care of our son. I’ve tried to take care of you, too, the best I could, but now I’m asking something in return.”