So Much for That (16 page)

He worked through lunch and called at two. She was still in surgery. He called at three. She was still in surgery. At four as well. He told himself it was good that the doctors were being thorough. Yet that was too long to lie with parts of you gaping open, the parts that you didn’t think about, that you didn’t want to think about, that you took blissfully for granted. By now customer complaints were failing to divert his attention, and more than once he had to ask a householder to repeat the problem, the address, the date of the job.

The fact that Glynis was in surgery for nearly twice as long as scheduled enabled Shep to put in a full workday—which, with his thin life-line to insurance, was important even if it shouldn’t have been. By the time he got Dr. Hartness on the phone it was close to six. Jackson had hung about, and was obviously listening in.

“Well, there’s at least that…I see. And what’s that exactly?…What does that mean?…No, with me I’d rather you were frank…. Tonight, would there be any point in my—?…No, I’ll do it. Better it come from me…. Dr. Hartness? You’ve worked very hard, and very long. You must be exhausted. Thank you for trying so hard to save my wife.”

When Shep hung up, he could tell from Jackson’s stricken expression that his last sentence lent itself to misinterpretation. “Her vital signs are good, and she’s resting well,” Shep assured his friend. “But, ah.” He remembered Glynis coming down the stairs with that hand wrapped in red, the starkness of her message. This was another time to be factual.
“It was worse than they expected. They found what’s called a ‘biphasic’ patch. Epithelioid cells, but with sarcomatoid mixed in. Like fudge marble ice cream, he said. The biopsy didn’t detect it. These sarcomatoid cells are evil fuckers, and—I guess the direct application of chemo doesn’t work with them. They didn’t install the ports. They got everything they could, which isn’t the same as everything, I’m afraid, and sewed her back up.”

“This is—bad,” Jackson surmised.

“This is bad.”

S
hep would get plenty of practice repeating the same summation that evening. He went home and told his son. Zach had only one question. His father dodged it: “That depends on how she responds to the chemo.” Zach was having none of that. He demanded a number. So if the boy wanted to know, he should know. He took in the information like a pool swallowing a stone: after a little
bloop
, Shep watched it sink from view, and felt it settle on the bottom with a muffled clunk. It seemed to make sense. The boy did not seem shocked. His father anguished about what kind of a dreadful world Zach must have routinely inhabited where this sort of thing could seem normal, or even expected.

At least from now on the two of them would be occupying the same universe. It was a universe that was falling apart. This was a purpose children serve that Shep hadn’t appreciated before: when something terrible is happening to your wife, then something terrible is happening to them also. You share the same terribleness, which for outsiders is mere misfortune. This mere-ness that he sometimes sensed in others had grown intolerable, which was why until today he’d avoided any discussion of Glynis’s condition at work.

They ate together, which was unheard of. Zach offered to watch TV with his father, which was really unheard of. Shep apologized that he had to make phone calls. As they rinsed the dishes, he was pleased that, despite his good-natured permission, his son declined to disconnect the fountain over the sink.

He retired to his study. He compiled a list on the computer. He would need the list again, for other turning points, other news, and he did not want to admit but he did admit what news the list would finally be useful for delivering. He noted cell numbers as well as landlines, copying from his wife’s address book. He separated the contacts into “Family,” “Close Friends,” and “Not So Close,” thinking as he dropped this and that listing into the latter category how mortified some of these people would be by the designation. He was more inclined to put into the “Close Friends” list the few of her companions who had remembered to call on Sunday and wish her good luck.

He dialed methodically. The hardest, Amelia, he forced himself to call first. He was halting, unclear, and she kept interrupting: “But she’s okay, right? She came through okay, right?” He remained on the line longer than he could quite afford to, making sure that she understood, and realizing at last that she had understood all too well to begin with and was waiting to be told something else. Getting his daughter off the phone was as painful as bedtimes of yore, when she’d wrap herself around his calf, and he’d have to prize his little girl’s fingers from his trouser leg.

Yet soon his delivery of the details grew fluid: “‘biphasic,’ which means less aggressive epithelioid cells are mixed with the more…” His voice was calm. If the measured tone was misinterpreted as lack of proper feeling, he didn’t care. When pressed for prognosis, he settled on the expression “a less optimistic outcome,” which still had the word
optimistic
in it. They all had access to the Internet, if they really wanted to know.

This was part of his job now: disseminating information, orchestrating visits, protecting her from visits. He would be moonlighting from now on as a cross between an events planner and an executive secretary. He found himself instinctively distrusting the people he contacted who were the most lavish in their outpourings of sorrow, making nonspecific offerings to help “in any way they could.” In his experience, the folks who were the most articulate about their feelings were the least apt to express them in any form other than more words. Beryl, for example, waxed especially eloquent, launching into reminiscence about marvelous times with the two of them that were either exaggerated or apocryphal,
and extolling the character of a woman whom she did not like. In embarrassment, he’d cut her off, explaining that he had other calls to make. By contrast, his father said simply that he “would be praying for the whole family.” While Shep might sometimes feel impatient with hackneyed Christian catchphrases, this time he was admiring of a religion that provided an idiom of well-wishing both sincere-sounding and succinct.

For more and more he was appreciating the limits of the verbal. The worse Glynis felt, the more what mattered wasn’t solicitous conversation, but a hand on her shoulder, a plumped pillow, the television remote from the table, or a cup of chamomile. So he was far more moved on the phone by silence, by sighs, by palpable awkwardness. By people like their next-door neighbor Nancy, an Amway zealot with whom Glynis had almost nothing in common, or so you’d have thought. As for the dismal discovery in surgery, Nancy had honestly nothing to say and so didn’t try to say it. Moreover, Nancy did not make a hazy offer of “help” that he could never call in. She asked when Glynis would be receiving visitors, when she would start taking solid food, and whether Glynis liked homemade buttermilk biscuits. She had brought over a cheese-and-broccoli casserole on the weekend, which is what he and Zach had polished off between them for supper. Shep was already getting the feeling that, in a crunch, the people you thought of as your “close friends” were not necessarily concomitant with the ones you could count on.

To his surprise, Shep slept deeply. To his shame, being in bed on his own was a relief. The simplicity of it, the undemanding expanse of empty sheet. He hadn’t realized the strain of another body beside him, rotting a little more every minute from the inside out. The energy it sapped from him, not being able to protect her. You wouldn’t think that something you couldn’t do and were not doing would take any energy at all, but it did.

T
wo mornings later, Shep’s trepidation about seeing his wife mirrored in some respects his dread of her return home the Night of Pemba, that distinctive horror of telling someone something that they did not
want to hear. Nuttier was his nervousness that they might have changed her or exchanged her for someone else, removed something or inserted something in their knifing about that would make her unrecognizable to him.

But then, the anxiety was not entirely out of order. He did not know what character was, or under what degree of duress it broke down and adapted to a new form that bore no resemblance to the person “Family,” “Close Friends,” and even those “Not So Close” imagined they had known. It was even possible that “character” and its more superficial cousin “personality” were niceties, decorative indulgences of good health, elective amusements like bowling that the sick could not afford. Given his own robust constitution, he was forced to reference farcically minor ailments like colds or flu. He conjured the dullness of color, the irritating tinniness of birds and music, the unsettling pointlessness of all endeavor whenever he felt ill, as if he himself had remained the same and it was the world around him that had sickened. His spirits sagged, his appetites flagged, his jokes evaporated. Thus, by introducing a minimally toxic virus like adding a squeeze of lemon juice to a cup of milk, a lusty, upbeat, good-humored man was soured into a glum, indifferent pill. So much for the durability of “character.” Multiply that effect by a thousand times, and it was little wonder that he feared for who, or what, lay in intensive care at Columbia-Presbyterian.

Shep was probably not alone in hating hospitals, in visiting someone he loved and still fighting an urge to flee. It wasn’t just the smells, or a biologically instinctive impulse to avoid disease. If illness was the great leveler, the problem was to which level. Dressed in identical flapping gowns that gaped humiliatingly at the back, patients along the hallway were deprived of all that made them distinctive on the outside—accomplished, interesting, or useful. Sucking up fluids, drugs, and nutrients, producing nothing but effluvia in return, they were uniformly burdensome. Glimpses into wards at the sleeping lumps, the blank gazes at televisions, induced the impression not that all of these people were equally important, but that they were equally unimportant.

Nevertheless, he was moved by the fact that they were all admitted
for treatment, the Laundromat attendant and the Philharmonic conductor alike. He had faith that the Laundromat attendant, no matter how dim or surly or shiftless or readily replaced by another high-school dropout, did not receive appreciably less diligent care than the maestro. It must have been fifteen years ago when Shep was trimming a tree in Sheepshead Bay, and the chain saw had kicked to the base of his neck—much as that buzz-saw shaped burr had kicked to Glynis’s finger, but on a larger scale, and close to his jugular. The blood had been copious. He still had the scar. What he remembered most of all was amazement. Rapidly sinking into the early stages of shock, he could no longer trim this customer’s tree. He could not entertain the paramedics with interesting snippets from NPR. A man who had always measured his utility in the most tangible terms, he had rendered himself incapable of fastening the bracket for aluminum blinds or installing a double-glazed skylight. Yet total strangers had still hastened to press their clean towels against his wound, and other strangers had tenderly loaded his leaking body onto their stretcher. Some pragmatic side of him would have seen it as perfectly reasonable that at the average hospital admissions desk they would ask not only what drugs you were taking and were you allergic to penicillin, but what was your IQ and could you build a ten-story condominium; how many languages do you speak and when was the last time you did something nice: what good are you. Instead, astonishingly, they pulled out all the stops to stanch your bleeding, even if you were of no earthly use to anyone.

With multiple tubes extruding from under the sheet, Glynis took up a childlike amount of space under her bedclothes. She looked like a sack, like something discarded. According to Dr. Hartness, the night before they had gradually reduced the morphine drip, and removed the tube from her nose. The surgeon had warned that once she woke she would still be groggy and disoriented. Ashen, she seemed to be dozing. For once he gazed at his wife and failed to marvel that she was all of fifty years old.

Shep pulled up a chair, careful to keep the legs from shrieking. He sat on its edge. A mere elevator ride from the bustle of Broadway and
its oversized crullers on carts, this was an alien world of stasis, where minimal pleasures were nearly always more appealing in anticipation than in receipt—a sip of pineapple juice, the Tuesday blancmange with strawberry sauce, a visitor with flowers whose sweet, penetrating reek would end up unsettling a delicate stomach. A world where oblivion was nirvana, where one was never allowed the hope of no pain but only of less. He did not want to be here so badly that it was as if he were not here. He yearned to sever those tubes with a mighty sword as he would have hacked her chains in a dungeon, to scoop his beloved into his arms with her gown trailing, to sweep her back to the bright, clanging, frenetic world of taxis, of hotdogs, of crack addicts and Dominican pawnbrokers, where he would rest his damsel’s pink bare feet to the cold concrete and she would once again become a person.

As he took the hand without the IV and warmed it with his own, her head lolled from the opposite side of the pillow to face him. Her eyelids fluttered. She licked her lips sluggishly, and swallowed. “
Shepheeerd.
”

Through the croak in a throat raw from intubation, she instilled his name with the deep erotic purr that had always stirred him, even when her intention was chiding. The eyes opened fully now and he recognized his wife.

It was she, though Glynis was not quite here. She had been on a long journey and had not, entirely, returned.

“How are you feeling?”

“Heavy…and light at the same time.” She sounded a little drunk, and seemed to be having trouble moving her mouth. He wanted badly to give her a drink of water, but she was forbidden. Nothing by mouth until her bowels were functioning again. “Wondering,” he thought she said, letting her eyes sweep the ceiling. “Everything amazing.”

Well, she certainly didn’t see the room as he did. “Don’t try to talk too much.”