So Much for That (52 page)

Her appetite picked up a degree, and at dinner she would nibble at a crayfish quiche, spear a ring of calamari, fork a flake of Shep’s grilled kingfish. They reminisced about earlier research trips; Glynis said Pemba recalled the cove of Puerto Escondido on the Mexican coast. (“Remind me,” said Shep. “What was wrong with Puerto again?” “Too many Americans,” said Glynis.) Finally she asked about his plans—what kind of house he might build and where. On their third evening, she even raised mischievously, “You’re not a monk by nature. I should know. Assuming she stays…Do you by any chance find Carol attractive?”

Shep was not so stupid as to imagine that his wife was genuinely playing matchmaker. Virulently possessive and naturally jealous, she hadn’t even acknowledged that her husband would survive her until a little over a week ago. So he’d the good sense to aver without hesitation, “Not in the slightest.”

“Are you sure?” Glynis teased. “She has the best knockers in the northern—and now the southern—hemisphere.”

“I like little ones.”

“You’ve had to.”

“Besides, she’s too nice,” he dismissed. “Not enough of a dark side.” Privately he considered that after Carol’s last entrance into her Windsor Terrace kitchen, any budding “dark side” must have blossomed apace.

“You don’t have much of a dark side yourself,” said Glynis.

“Exactly. That’s why I need one.”

Shep’s gratitude for permission to talk about his future without her was boundless. He couldn’t help but have thought about it, but always with guilt, and no little superstition, as if he were wishing her gone, hexing her chances. Now that the subject was no longer off-limits, it gave rise to a surprising humor. “You know I plan to bury you in the backyard, don’t you,” he said lightly over dessert, “like a dog.”

Once they bedded down for the night, the squabbling between Flicka and her sister in the adjacent tent was blotted out by the
scree
of cicadas and the wild cackle of bush babies in overhanging branches. He read his wife paragraphs from Hemingway. He sang her the songs he remembered from his childhood, when his mother would tuck him and his sister into bed; his mother’s voice had been well pitched and clear, and her version of Taps instilled the tent with the welcome illusion that they were protected:
Day is done. Gone the sun. From the hills, from the lake, from the skies…All is well. Safely rest. God is nigh.

Their fourth night in candlelight, he massaged her feet with lemongrass oil, their soles pumiced smooth from walking on sand. He worked the oil up the shrivel of her atrophied calves. He traced the sharp, classical slope of her tibias, their exquisite line uncompromised even by cancer. He smoothed to her inside thighs, where the skin had loosened with so little flesh to cover. He paused to pool another tablespoon of oil into his palm. But when he reached for her abdomen, she held his wrist. He imagined that she was sensitive about the surgical scar and didn’t want him to touch it. But then she pushed his hand further down, pressing the palmful of lemongrass oil into the one part of her body that he had been truly heartbroken to watch go bald. He arched his eye brows in inquiry.

“This mosquito netting,” she said. “It’s a lot like a bridal canopy, isn’t it?”

Indeed it was.

T
he remission was precious, and the handful of days when the setting African sun returned the color to his wife’s cheeks alone justified the
suffering of the journey here. Shep couldn’t vouch for their value to the rest of the world, but these few days in Pemba together were worth two million dollars to him. Yet the respite was brief. There came a morning when he woke to find the sheets red. Glynis’s menstrual cycle had shut down months before. The bleeding was from her ass.

That was the end of strolls on the beach, for she could no longer walk farther than the bathroom, and then with assistance. She was in pain, and for the first time Shep broke out the liquid morphine.

Shep had been in Morocco with Glynis when his mother suffered the stroke from which she never recovered. Jackson had exited as abruptly as one can, and Shep’s other contemporaries were hale. To his mortification, then, his experience of death at close hand had been constrained to cinema and television. On-screen, characters with terminal illnesses lay quietly in hospital beds, mumbled something touching, and dropped their heads. It didn’t take very long, and the death itself was as tidy as turning off a light switch.

For filmmakers, death was a moment; for Glynis, death was a job.

Over the course of two long days and nights, his wife’s organs slowly shut down. Far from suffering the constipation of chemotherapy, she could no longer keep any substance in, and from every orifice began to leak. Her vomit had blood in it. Her diarrhea had blood in it. Her urine had blood in it. Perhaps it helped that he’d warned the resort in advance, for the staff was kind about the sheets, which they changed twice a day after Shep had carried his wife to a deck chair. The Africans seemed unfazed. He sensed they’d seen this before—and that their own versions of death bore little resemblance to a light switch.

“You want that we bring doctor?” one of the older porters asked, drawing Shep aside. When Shep shook his head, the porter explained, “No, not doctor from hospital in Mkoani.
Uganga
. Very strong in Pemba. A powerful energy line run right under your tent.”

“
Uganga
?” Shep had learned the word. “Thank you, but no. We turned our backs on our own black magic. We’re not about to throw ourselves on witch doctors of just a slightly different stripe.”

Shep and the other five sat vigil. When she was wakeful, churning,
crying out, he held her on the bed, or drew her head to his lap. He kept her favorite CDs cycling through his portable player: Jeff Buckley, Keith Jarrett, Pat Metheny. According to his father, what Glynis needed most was simple, animal contact: touch. The steady purr of a human voice, and it didn’t matter in the slightest what he said. So to soothe her, he told her about Pemba, all that he had learned from the porters, maids, and waitresses here, who were glad of his interest in their island.

“Cloves,” he intoned, keeping his voice even and low. “This island used to be the biggest source of the spice in the world. We don’t think about cloves much, except for peaches or pie. But they used to be incredibly important, as a preservative, and as an anesthetic. Did you know that cloves were once worth more than their weight in gold? The government here keeps a tight rein on the crop, and the farmers all have to sell their cloves to the government—at a very poor price, I’m told. So there are clove smugglers, can you believe it? Who run contraband bags in those boats called
jihazzis
to Mambasa, where they can get a better price. It’s very dangerous, and you go to prison if you’re caught. But the shame is, the market for cloves has imploded. It’s not used medicinally much anymore. With refrigeration, it’s not needed for a preservative, either. The biggest market is for scenting cigarettes in the Middle East.”

She stirred. “If there’s no market…” she mumbled. “Why risk prison?”

He had not expected her to listen, and he was proud of her for listening; proud of her for trying so hard to still be present, to humor his enthusiasm, to care about conducting a conversation. She had always liked talking—one of those many pleasures that one doesn’t consider until they’re on the cusp of being withdrawn. Talking, he reflected, was one of life’s great delights. He would miss very much talking to her.

“I assume because small money to us, even that fraction of a difference per kilo for a crop that nobody much wants, is large money here. That was always the very basis of The Afterlife, right? Anyway, the funny thing is, the Wapemba don’t use cloves in cooking at all. They think it’s an aphrodisiac. Or as our driver told me, ‘good for home affairs.’”

She chuckled, but that made her cough. He held a handkerchief to
her mouth and wiped the pinkened phlegm. “Able was I,” she said on recovery, with a sly little smile, “’ere I saw Pemba.”

Whatever the allusion, it pleased her with herself, but Shep didn’t get it. He felt a rare flash of regret that he’d never gone to college.

A
las, by the second day there was no more talking. Not in the sense of the word that anyone might miss.

“Hurts,” she would say, and he would put two more drops of morphine on her tongue. “No,” she would say, not in answer to any question. “Fuck,” she would say. “Oh, God,” she would say, squeezing the sheet so tightly that it retained the clench of wrinkles on release. “Hot,” she would say, or “cold.” Feeding her ice chips, speeding the revolutions of the ceiling fan, or pulling blankets up or down had to suffice for that farcical ideal of
keeping her comfortable
.

Carol had wondered if they should keep the kids at bay. But Gabe urged her otherwise. Bearing witness to death, he said, should be part of, was perhaps finally the beginning of, their education. It might help Heather to come to terms with her father’s fate instead of torturously repeating the theme song to a television ad for his obnoxious employer and stockpiling
pain au chocolat
at breakfast. It might further discourage Flicka from making abusively cavalier references to her own death, and as for Zach—Glynis was his mother. So they involved the children, who took turns sponging her forehead with a cool damp cloth, fanning her with copies of
Africa Geographic
, and plumping her pillows.

Yet there were lulls after a generous dose of morphine during which Glynis sank into a shallow sleep, and two days and two sleepless nights was a long vigil. Too long to remain stricken, to maintain a pitch of grief. So when Carol first scolded her children for giggling, Shep told them, no, it was all right; in fact, it was fine to laugh. In truth, for portions of their deathwatch they had a wonderful time. Carol, Shep, and his father shared a bottle of bourbon the first night, and from then on they kept up a steady stream of cabernet, Kilimanjaro lagers, and more champagne. Fundu’s kitchen delivered a groaning board to the tent at
every meal—mounds of mangos, pineapple, and papaya; grilled lobster tails, prawn curries, and boiled cassava; whole buffets of chocolate rolls, cream éclairs, and coconut cakes. He encouraged the kids to go swimming, or to join Flicka in the plunge pool during the heat of the afternoon. He admired their beach-combed booty, unusual shells that they arranged as offerings around the bed.

His own offerings were of Glynis herself. Once the sun had set the second day, he lit the dozen tapers that lined the tent. He unrolled the flatware that he’d bundled into his bag on Crescent Drive. He arranged the pieces along the shelves, propping the salad servers with Heather’s shells until their inset crimson glass caught the candlelight. He inserted the series of sterling chopsticks in coral from the shore, until they rose in the dynamic attitudes they might have assumed if encased under lock and key in the Cooper-Hewitt. He balanced her forged ice tongs against the champagne bucket, beaded from chilling yet another bottle; he oriented the tongs so that the copper-and-titanium inlay shone from the perspective of the middle pillow. He angled the fish slice so that it writhed in the flicker of a nearby flame, flashing silver like the schools that leapt from the water around Fundu’s pier.

He had assured Glynis that her sedulous production of metalwork in middle life was of no consequence, but on his own account he wished there were more of it. She had cannily reincarnated herself in a material far more durable than flesh, and not as fickle. The flatware would outlive her by generations.

Yellowed by candlelight, the gauze of the mosquito netting draped in mellow folds about the bed. The lapping sea lulled not a hundred yards from the tent, and the evening had mercifully cooled. Cicadas surged in and out of the same frequency as the ceiling fan. Appraising the scene, he thought,
I’ve done the best I can
. Though he was doubtful that Fundu would banner as much on their website, it was a beautiful place to die.

Yet the night was long, a second with no sleep. Carol and his father spelled him holding Glynis’s hand while she twisted, but he was fearful of missing the moment, and didn’t let them take the helm for more than a few minutes at a time.

Around 2:00 a.m., she slurred drunkenly, “I can’t take it anymore,” and began to cry. “I can’t…”

“You don’t have to take it anymore, Gnu,” he said, turning her head to administer more morphine to her tongue.

Shep couldn’t take it anymore, either, though of course he would. To his own embarrassment, he sometimes grew bored, and impatient to get this over. For their lives together as they had understood them had really been over the instant that Glynis announced she had cancer.

Previously convinced that the declaration should be rationed, he had repeated “I love you, Gnu” so many times these last two days that the refrain was in danger of melting into more mumble about cloves. But he was reminded of that cigar box full of foreign currency on his bedside table in Elmsford, in which he’d stashed about a hundred dollars’ worth of Portuguese notes. Now that the European Union had converted to the euro, that scrip was no longer legal tender, but a mere souvenir. So just as he should have used up those leftover escudos at Lisbon’s duty-free, he spent his passion with abandon while he still had the chance.

“Why is Glynis snoring?” asked Heather at around 5:00 a.m., having crawled from her bed in the adjacent tent.

“Because she’s very, very tired,” Carol whispered. “Now, go back to sleep.”

It would have been difficult for the children to do so. The rattle racked the encampment, and menaced the bush babies away. Shep held his wife and crooned once more about there being nothing to be afraid of, though of course he had no idea. As the sun’s first red rim shone over the sea, she seemed to be trying to speak.

“Shuh…shuh…”

He put his ear to her lips. She exhaled a warmth into the drum that she did not suck back.

There was no final message, no parting avowal, no earth-moving revelation before her head went limp. That seemed fair. Likely most mourners were obliged to forgo a last thing said. You had to make do with the years of their lives that the dead left you instead.