So Much for That (2 page)

In high school, Shep had already been hungry for direction. Much like Zach, alas, in his studies he was competent at every subject, but distinguished at none. In an age that increasingly valued mastery of the abstract—the befuddling world of “information technology” was only a decade away—Shep preferred tasks whose results he could grasp in both his
head and his hands: replacing a rickety banister. But his father was an educated man, and didn’t expect his son to work construction. With that heart of water, Shep was never a rebellious kid. Given his penchant for making and fixing things, a degree in engineering had seemed apt. As he’d assured his father many times since, he’d really, really intended to go to college.

Yet meanwhile that whimsy first conceived in Limuru had consolidated to firm resolve. Saving may have gone out of fashion, but surely a middle-class American income still allowed for salting something away. Thus with the application of industry, thrift, and self-denial—once the country’s moral mainstays—it should be possible to inflate a robin-sized nest egg to the dimensions of an ostrich ovum merely by hopping a plane. The Third World was running a sale: two lives for the price of one. Ever since coming of age, Shep had dedicated himself to the realization of the second. He was not even sure you called it industry, when you were working so hard only that you might stop working.

So with an eye to his true purpose—money—Shep had instinctively gravitated to where America kept most of it, and applied to the City College of Technology in New York. For while Gabe Knacker faulted the character of his son “the philistine” for his worship of the false god Mammon, Shep believed fervently that money—the web of your fiscal relationships to individuals and to the world at large—
was
character; that the surest test of any man’s mettle was how he wielded his wallet. Thus a decent, capable kid didn’t tap a father’s measly salary as a small-town minister (an injunction to which Beryl would prove oblivious when blithely expecting their dad to pay for her film degree at NYU four years later). Ever since earning his first five dollars from shoveling snow at the age of nine, Shep had always paid up front, be it for an Almond Joy or an education.

Thus determined to work beforehand and finance his own degree, he’d delayed his acceptance at City Tech in downtown Brooklyn and found a one-bedroom nearby in Park Slope, which—hard as it was to remember now—was a dodgy area in those days, and dirt cheap. The area’s housing stock was run down, and full of families in need of small repairs but unable to afford the larcenous rates of unionized tradesmen. Having mastered a variety of rudimentary wiring and carpentry skills
while helping to maintain his own family’s eternally crumbling late-Victorian in New Hampshire, Shep posted flyers in convenience stores, advertising his services as an old-fashioned handyman. Word of mouth spread quickly about a young white kid who could replace washers and rotten floorboards for a modest fee, and in short order he had more work than he could handle. By the time he’d delayed entry into City Tech for a second year he’d incorporated, and “Knack of All Trades” was already contracting out for part-time help. Two years after that, Shep took on his first full-time employee. A harried entrepreneur enjoyed little free time, and besides, Shep had just got married. So in the service of sheer efficiency, Jackson Burdina doubled, then as now, as his best friend.

It was still a sore point with Shep’s father that his son never went to college, which was ludicrous; Knack of All Trades had expanded and flourished without any benedictory piece of paper. The real problem was that Gabriel Knacker had little regard for manual labor—unless it involved digging wells for impoverished villagers in Mali with the Peace Corps, or patching a pensioner’s shingles out of the kindness of your heart. He had no use for commerce. Any activity that could not trace its lineage directly to virtue was destitute. The fact that if everyone devoted himself solely to goodness for its own sake the whole world would come to a skidding halt didn’t faze the guy a whit.

Up until a little over eight years ago, Life A had had its merits, and Shep hadn’t regarded himself as sacrificing his prime for pie in the sky. He’d always liked physical toil, relishing a distinctive kind of tired you got not from the gym but from building bookshelves. He liked running his own show, answering to no one. Glynis may have turned out to be a handful, and might not have described herself as happy in the big picture, but it was probably safe to say that she was happy with him—or as happy as she was going to get with anybody, which wasn’t very. He was glad when she got pregnant with Amelia right away. He was in a hurry, anxious to rush through a whole life in half the time, and he’d have far preferred that Zach had been born pronto and not ten years later.

As for The Afterlife, Glynis had seemed onboard when they met. His status as a man with a mission surely attracted her to him in the first
place. Without his vision, without the ever more concrete edifice of Life B rising in his head, Shep Knacker was one more small businessman who’d found a niche market: nothing special. As it was, picking a new target country for every summer’s research trip had been an invigorating ritual of their marriage. They were, or so he’d thought until this last year’s dawning apprehension, a team.

So when he got the offer to sell up in November 1996, it was irresistible.
A million dollars
. Rationally he recognized that a mil wasn’t what it once was, and that he’d have to pay capital gains. Still, the sum had never lost the awesome roundness of childhood; no matter how many other ordinary folks also became “millionaires,” the word retained a ring. Combined with the fruits of lifelong scrimping, the proceeds from selling Knack would furnish the capital to cash out and never look back. So never mind that the purchaser—an employee so lazy and sloppy that they’d been on the verge of firing the guy before, surprise, he comes into his trust fund—was a callow, loudmouthed, ignorant twit.

Who was now Shep’s boss. Oh sure, it had seemed to make sense at the time to sign on as an employee of what had been his own company—renamed overnight “Handy Randy,” a moniker not only tacky but inaccurate, since Randy Pogatchnik was anything but handy. The initial idea had been to hang on for a month or two while they packed, sold off their motley possessions, and located at least a temporary house in Goa. Meantime, they wouldn’t spend down their capital, which Shep sank into can’t-lose mutual funds to fatten before slaughter; the Dow was effervescent.

“A month or two” had now stretched into over eight years of submission to the sadistic whims of an overweight, freckle-faced brat, who must have got wind of his imminent sacking and had probably bought Knack—you had to give the guy this much—as fiendishly effective revenge. After the sale, standards of workmanship plummeted, so that Shep’s “Customer Relations” position for handling complaints, never a post at all during his own tenure as CEO, had burgeoned into a demanding and decidedly unpleasant full-time job.

In retrospect, of course, it had been imbecilic to sell their place in Carroll Gardens a few years earlier—barely out of a recession, and on the
heels of a housing crash—then move up to Westchester and rent. Shep would gladly have stayed in Brooklyn, but Glynis had concluded that the only way she could finally focus on “her work” was to remove herself from the “distractions” of the city. (Sure of his weakness, she had made a sly financial case as well: Westchester’s high-quality public schools would save them the pricey tuition of private education in New York. All very well, for Amelia. But later, when Glynis thought that Zach needed help—which he did—finding a “better school” was the easiest way to seem to be doing something, and now they were out $26,000 a year for private tuition anyway.) Jackson and Carol had stayed put in Windsor Terrace, and even that ramshackle dive of theirs had soared to a value of $550,000. At least having benefited from the real estate boom himself made Jackson more patient than Shep with Homeowner Smugness; these days, a handyman wasn’t in the door five seconds before the wife was crowing about how much the dump was worth now, so watch the wainscoting with that toolbox. It was like that in most big cities now: LA, Miami—a communal hysteria, as if the entire citizenry were on
Dialing for Dollars
and had won the car. Shep was probably just envious. Still, there was something unsavory about that gleefulness, a mania he associated with slot machines. A preacher’s son, he failed to see the satisfaction in a jackpot that bore no relation to something good or hard that you had done.

Property in Westchester had appreciated by three times over ten years as well, so, yeah, in hindsight they should have bought—thereby making about as much profit from sitting on his ass as he had from selling a whole company, fruit of twenty-two years’ sweat. That was the way people made money in this country now, according to Jackson: ass-sitting. You couldn’t get rich on earned income, he railed. Taxes on wages made sure of that. Jackson claimed that only inheritance and investment—ass-sitting—paid. Shep wasn’t so sure. Certainly he himself had worked hard, but he’d been compensated for his trouble. Limuru lay ever in the back of his mind, and he’d earned far more than a dollar per day.

Shep had opted to rent for the same reason that drove every big decision he’d ever made. He wanted to be able to pick up stakes—easily, quickly, cleanly, without waiting for a house to sell in a market whose
climate he couldn’t foresee. That’s what irked him a bit about Homeowner Smugness: all these schmoes with keys to a front door acted as if they’d seen the boom coming, as if they were financial geniuses and not the beneficiaries of dumb luck. He may have regretted missing out on the property windfall; he didn’t regret the reason he’d missed out. He was proud of the reason, proud of planning to leave. He was only ashamed of having stayed.

He tried not to blame Glynis. If that meant blaming himself instead, that seemed fair. The Afterlife was his aspiration—the word he preferred to
fantasy
—and any dream was dilute secondhand. He tried not to be angry at her for a lot of things, and to a great extent succeeded.

When they met, Glynis had been running her own small business from home, making jewelry of a strikingly stark, streamlined nature during an era of clunk, slapdash, and feathers. She had contacted Knack of All Trades to build a worktable bolted to the floor, and later, because she liked the proprietor—his broad veined forearms, his wide-open face like a field of wheat—a set of racks for hammers, pliers, and files. Shep appreciated her meticulous requirements, as she appreciated his meticulous execution. The second time he showed up to finish the table, she’d left numerous samples of her work lying casually around the studio (deliberately, she confessed with a laugh once they started going out; she’d dangled the glittering baubles before her handsome handyman “like fishing lures”). Though he’d never considered himself the artistic type, Shep was transfixed. Delicate and morbid, a whole series of elongated stickpins looked like assemblages of bird bones; when she modeled the bracelets for him, they wrapped all the way up her arm, slithering like serpents to the elbow. Sinewy, elusive, and severe, Glynis’s creations were an uncanny manifestation of the woman who made them. It was touch and go whether he fell in love with Glynis or her metalwork first, because as far as Shep was concerned they were one and the same.

During their courtship, Glynis was teaching at summer camps and doing piecework in the Jewelry District to pay the rent. Meantime, she was placing single necklaces in second-tier galleries, and her silversmithing barely broke even. Yet she fevered long hours, and paid her own
phone bill. Surely any man would have assumed that for a self-starter like Glynis—disciplined, ascetic, and fiery—pulling her financial weight in a marriage would be a point of pride. (On reflection, it probably was.) So he’d never expected to have to save for The Afterlife all by himself.

Less compassionate men might have felt they’d been sold a bill of goods. Pregnancy had seemed a reasonable excuse for letting her metalsmithing tools languish, but that accounted for only eighteen months of the last twenty-six years. Motherhood wasn’t the real problem, though it took him a long time to figure out what was. She needed resistance, the very quality that metal most demonstrably offered up. Suddenly Glynis had no difficulty to overcome, no hard artisan’s life with galleries filching half the too-small price of a mokume brooch that had taken three weeks to forge. No, her husband made a good living, and if she slept late and dawdled the afternoon away reading
Lustre
,
American Craft Magazine
, and
Lapidary Journal
, the phone bill would still get paid. For that matter, she needed need itself. She could overcome her anguish about embarking on an object that, once completed, might not meet her exacting standards only if she had no choice. In this sense, his helping had hurt her. By providing the financial cushion that should have facilitated making all the metal whathaveyou she liked, he had ruined her life. Wrapped with a slackening bow, ease was a poisonous present.

Yet it wasn’t as if she were lazy. Since Glynis still maintained the fiction (even in his head, the word pained him) that she was a professional metalsmith, all other domestic activities therefore qualified as procrastination, and thus were seen to with vigor and dispatch. It wasn’t as if she’d made nothing, either—metalwork, that is. Spurning jewelry as intrinsically rinky-dink, she’d moved entirely to flatware, and through the years had crafted a handful of dazzling implements: memorably, the Bakelite inlaid fish slice; that exquisite set of hand-forged, perfectly ergonomic sterling chopsticks, whose heavier ends bent slightly, achingly, as if they were melting. Yet each finished project was the product of so much agony and time that in the end she couldn’t bring herself to sell it.

So what she hadn’t made was money. Were he ever to have observed aloud once Zach and Amelia both entered school that she was still not
bringing in a dime, Glynis would have iced over in cold rage (so he hadn’t). But her income of zero dollars wasn’t an objection. It was a fact. That when they married Shep hadn’t imagined he would carry the whole household in perpetuity was also a fact. But he could carry the household, and he had.