So Much for That (23 page)

The experiment had failed. He may never have quite fathomed why women would find a
penis
attractive—with its shriveled, too-thin skin, the blobby, drooping testicles with straggles of hair, the little mushroom cap at the end somehow not a form that human flesh should assume. At rest it looked frightened and depressed; when alert, impertinent yet insecure, waving about and trying to attract attention like a loudmouth acting out. He’d never entirely trusted Carol’s enthusiasm for the thing; her natural kindness made her unreliable. Yet there were limits to Carol’s altruism, since she was currently making no effort to disguise her revulsion, as there were also limits to his own disaffection with the phallus of conventional proportions. The unimproved version had still been preferable to this.

The lumpy tuber between his legs now looked like one of those balloon animals that children’s entertainers twisted hastily together at birthday parties. Where before the shaft was thicker at the base, now it was narrowest there, for the collagen used for thickening had slurped downward, bulging over the rim to partially bury the head. His dick had love handles. The filler tissue had migrated asymmetrically, too, and the bulge was larger on the right. Overwhelmed by what now hung more like a third testicle, the head appeared smaller and pokier, no better than a gumdrop. And the shaft emerged from too low down. The snipping of the suspensory ligaments was supposed to have released a full inch of length otherwise wastefully tucked inside his pelvis; now his prick seemed to be growing out of the balls themselves. The descended derivation jarred the eye, like a dirty scrawl on a men’s room wall by a kid who couldn’t
draw. Inflamed, bloated, and seeping, this was the kind of fatally festering extremity that battlefield medics in the Civil War sawed off on the spot.

“What have you done?” Carol said when she had caught her breath.

“Mom?” peeped from behind the bedroom door. “What’s wrong?”

“Heather, sweetie, go back to bed. Mom—saw something that scared her, that’s all. A mouse.”

“But I’m afraid of mouses! It’ll come and get me in my bed!”

“No, honey, this mouse isn’t getting anybody, not you, and
definitely
not your mother. It wasn’t even a mouse, it turns out. A sock. A balled-up, smelly sock that can’t do anything, not anything at all. I’m sorry I frightened you. Go back to sleep.”

The boxers around his knees had intensified his humiliation, so Jackson had taken advantage of Heather’s knock to kick them off. He sat slump-shouldered on the side of the bed, hands folded across his crotch.

“I don’t want to wake the kids again,” Carol said in a strained whisper. “But I want you to understand that no matter how softly I say anything else tonight, I am still screaming.”

When she grabbed her robe and belted it with a double knot, Jackson realized that he should have pulled the boxers back on when he had the chance. Now he was stuck with the disadvantage. He was fated to have this conversation stark naked, because she had found him out, and putting his clothes on would seem like hiding the evidence—like putting the candy bar back in your pocket when you’d already been caught red-handed for shoplifting. He couldn’t remember the last time he felt this intensely like a little boy.

“I am correctly surmising that you did this to yourself? Had this done? That you did not have your penis caught in a mangle at work and fail to mention the accident.”

Her word choice was icy:
surmising.
She would never in the past have called it a
penis
. She wasn’t a prude, and liked the sound of
cock
and
dick
, their hard consonants, their monosyllabic thrust. But that’s what he now had between his legs, a
penis
—with its peevish whine, its soft, low-lying
n
, its cringing, retracted hiss. “I thought—”

“You had one of those stupid surgeries, didn’t you?”

“We get all this email spam, and…”

“Penis enlargement ads are why God invented the Delete key. You’re not telling me you found some hack on the Internet?”

“No! I got a referral. Still, I figured they wouldn’t send out so many ads if there weren’t…Well, obviously lots of people do it.”

“Lots of people get addicted to heroin. Lots of people commit suicide. Lots of people drive over the speed limit and run headlong into cement barriers. That doesn’t mean you have to, too.”

“Carol, if we’re going to talk about this, it really doesn’t help for you to go all Mommy on me. Obviously the surgery didn’t go very well.”

“That’s the understatement of the century. How could you possibly have done such a thing without discussing it with me first?”

“I wanted to surprise you,” he said miserably.

“Congratulations, then. I’m surprised. In fact, I am dumbfounded. You cast yourself as such a maverick. Your own man, so outspoken, not duped by impositions like
government
that the rest of us ‘Mugs’ take for granted. How could you be so…
trite
?”

“I didn’t get this surgery because I thought it was original. Just because I have strong political views doesn’t mean that I don’t want to measure up as a man—literally.” Tonight, being one of the handful of Americans who used the adverb correctly failed to flush him with the usual self-congratulation.

“Doesn’t anything you do down there have implications for me?”

“Yeah, sure, I guess. But you’d have said no. You don’t call it a discussion when it’s just a veto. And you may say that my dick is ‘part yours,’ which is sort of sweet, but it isn’t yours. I lend it out, and I love lending it out. But it’s still fundamentally my dick.”

“Oh, it is now! One hundred percent. Welcome to it.”

“I thought you’d like it, even if you wouldn’t necessarily think you’d like it before you saw the results. And you know, we used to get it on all the time…until Flicka.”

“With my doing the one a.m. feeding, and you the four o’clock, every single night? It’s just been a matter of exhaustion, not lack of appetite.”

“Yeah, but when Flick started doing the feedings herself this last year, we didn’t…The frequency didn’t pick up, right? Not really.”

“Sex is a habit, like anything else. A habit you can get out of. And not that much has changed; if it’s not the feedings, it’s something else, and we’re still exhausted. But that’s not the point. If you wanted to have sex more often, all you had to do was say so.”

“I just figured I could give us a jump-start. I thought it would give you a kick—the way it looked. And it would feel better. For you.”

“You did this for me? I don’t believe that for a New York minute.”

“Okay, sure, I thought I’d feel better, too. It’s always seemed, you know—a little small, that’s all. In comparison. I don’t think women understand. It’s like me not being able to understand your feeling fat around your period, when I can’t see anything different.”

She forced him to meet her eyes. “Small in comparison to
whom
?”

He glared. “Just—other people!”

“Uh-huh.” She stared him down until he looked away, and by dropping his glance, he appeared to admit something. “Tell me,” she hounded, “have I ever complained?”

“No, but you wouldn’t. You’re terminally nice.”

“I wouldn’t complain because I didn’t have a problem. But we have one now.”

“I’ll get it fixed,” he said staunchly, although the assertion had a familiar ring of improbability; like so many of the handymen at Knack, he got around to repairing jammed pull switches and dangling towel racks in his own home last of all, if ever.

“You know that’s going to require plastic surgery, which isn’t covered by our insurance. When we have a hard enough time covering deductibles and co-pays already, and we’re out a thousand a month for Flicka’s Compleat alone!”

“I’ll find the money somewhere,” he said morosely. “I can always grab jobs that come in at Knack and moonlight on the side.”

“That’s cheating Shep.”

“No, it would be cheating Pogatchnik. I never skimmed jobs from Shep. Eating into Pogatchnik’s bottom line would be a pleasure.”

“But come to think of it, our insurance doesn’t cover self-mutilation, either. How much did this cost?”

He shrugged. “A few grand.”

“
How much?
”

Carol could always track down the going rate online, and if he lied that’s exactly what she’d do, too. If she started nosing about, she’d also find out that you weren’t really supposed to do length and girth at the same time; determined to have the surgeries done quickly in secret, he’d insisted on the whole schmear at once. Maybe he should have been suspicious when the doctor relented for a price. “Mmm…seven or eight.”

“Eight thousand dollars! My God, where did you get the money?”

Normal men, real men, controlled their families’ purse strings—which they didn’t call
purse strings
—but in the Burdina household, Carol controlled every dime. Was it any wonder that he’d wanted a bigger dick? “The dogs,” he said meekly.

“You
promised
me you’d stop gambling!”

“Look, the odds against that stinking gene making it through both our families’
distal long arm of chromosome nine
for every generation to Flicka must have been ten thousand to one! Might as well cash in on a natural talent for winning long shots.”

“I can’t believe I owe this calamity to some sorry greyhound feeling frisky. If I could turn back the clock, I’d brain the stupid animal with a two-by-four.”

“I haven’t placed a bet since. On my life.”

Of course, this version of events was crap, but the dogs story was also admission against interest, which is why she believed it. The truth was that he’d finally set up his own checking account—was that so outrageous, that a forty-four-year-old man would have his own bank account?—where Jackson deposited cash tips and the proceeds from the far-better-than-hypothetical jobs he’d been skimming from Pogatchnik for years. He hadn’t amassed enough funds on the side to pay more than the monthly minimums on the credit cards that Carol also didn’t know about, like the Visa to which he’d actually charged that $8,700 bill for ruining his life. But she was a worrier, already uneasy about the
negative balance on the cards she did know about, and anxious to pay off the home equity loan they’d taken out to pay for the extras around Flicka’s scoliosis surgery. He took no pleasure in the fiscal secrecy, but regarded himself as nobly sacrificing to protect what little peace of mind his wife had left.

Eyes closed, Carol rubbed her face and breathed into her hands. As she collected herself, he wondered if he could now infer that she was no longer screaming.

“Does it hurt?” she asked at last. “It looks like it hurts.”

“Yeah, it hurts.”

“A lot?”

“A lot.”

“You’d better let me look at it.” She touched his thigh, and in the gentler cast of her face he concluded it was safe. He withdrew his hands and canted his knees. She crouched before his dick and reached cautiously for the shaft, as if trying to befriend a skittish stray in the pound whose previous owner had beaten the shit out of it. As she moved it to one side and then the other, he winced. “What kind of butcher did this?”

“I got his name from my cousin Larry when we had beers last summer. Larry said the doc was ‘a real artist’ and his girlfriend went wild for the results. Made him a lot bigger—or ‘even bigger,’ as he put it. Hell, Larry wasn’t even sheepish about it, like it wasn’t even a hush-hush secret. Said you ‘owe it to yourself.’ He was so keen on the guy that he was planning to go back, get the next size up.”

She rolled her eyes. “As if you can order a penis like a pair of shoes. Did you ever see what his surgery looked like?”

“Of course not! You don’t ask a guy to whip out his dick in a bar. It wasn’t that sort of bar.”

Carol placed her palm gingerly over the sutures. “It feels hot. Does it still work?”

“Sort of. I haven’t—experimented much. It’s too painful.”

“It’s so puffed up it’s hard to tell what it’ll look like when the swelling goes down. But this is badly infected. You could get sepsis. Have you been taking antibiotics?”

“One course, but it’s finished. I’ve applied Bacitracin.”

She touched his cheek, and he could smell the infection on her fingers. “We’ve got to get you to a hospital.”

Jackson looked away. “I’m too embarrassed.”

“Better embarrassment than blood poisoning. And if you let that get any worse, it’s going to fall off. Honestly, I’d go to New York Methodist right this minute if it weren’t for the kids. Once they’re off to school tomorrow, you’re taking a day off and we’re heading straight to the emergency room. I’ll go with you. Even if you don’t deserve it.”

“Carol, it’s really important that this doesn’t get out, okay? Don’t tell anyone, please. If they find out at Knack, I’ll never live it down.”

“Does Shep know about this? What you did?”

“No! Especially don’t tell Shep.”

“Men’s version of what it means to have a ‘best friend’ totally bewilders me. What’s the point of having one?”

“Just promise me.”

“The last thing I’m about to advertise is that I married a fool. Besides, you’re the one who can’t keep your mouth shut. You’re the one who told everyone in the office about Glynis, when Shep told you not to.”

“It was for his own good. They kept making fun of him about Pemba, and for a little while Pogatchnik’s pretending to be sympathetic got the asshole off his back.” He didn’t care if she was castigating him; talking about anything else besides his
penis
was a relief. After they’d brushed their teeth, Carol removed her robe and slipped under the sheets naked.

“At least now that you know,” he said, thinking that a bright side was hard to find, “I don’t have to sleep with you wearing boxers.”

Carol turned on her side, facing away, and switched off the light. “Actually, my dear, I’d really rather you put them back on.”

Shepherd Armstrong Knacker
Merrill Lynch Account Number 934-23F917
April 01, 2005–April 30, 2005
Net Portfolio Value: $571,264.91

H
e knew it was wrong. But all his life he’d kept an eye on the future—naïvely, on the assumption that there would always be one. So as stringently as he tried to forbid himself, to draw a line in the sand, his mind shuffled forward and past a certain advent, crossing blithely into no-go territory that should have been intolerable to contemplate. That sand metaphor was peculiar anyway; whatever dire consequences you may have been warned will follow, crossing a line in the sand is a cinch. Moreover, the sand he compulsively pictured was white, knotted intermittently with mangroves, dotted with beached hand-carved canoes, scored from the wheels of ox-drawn carts, and bright with variegated
kangas
. If Shep Knacker was drawing any line in the sand, it was on the coast of Pemba.

He was upstairs in his office writing checks. Though the room was really, really a home office and nothing but, his accountant had warned him off claiming it as a tax deduction. It was a red flag, said
Dave, and sent your chances of being audited sky high. Every April—last month being no exception—Jackson railed about the fact that the feds put that box “Did you deduct for a home office?” high up on the front page of the 1040, virtually the first thing they wanted to know after your name and address. “Do they ask specially on page one if you deducted for rubber bands?” he fumed. “Do they ask right after your fucking Social Security number whether you deducted for donating your old winter coat to the Salvation Army? No! With that
we-dare-you, just-try-it
tick box, they’re bullying you into omitting the one legitimate deduction that might keep more than the cost of a jelly donut out of their hot, thieving little hands.” Well, if it was intimidation, it worked.

Given the monies flying out of this room the last few months, a few grand more or less on his taxes had hardly mattered: dinners with that Arizona crowd on the nights he hadn’t been able to concoct yet another meal without carbohydrates; astronomical fuel bills, because Glynis got cold easily and during an unusually frosty spring he’d been heating the house to seventy-eight, even higher when she got chills; lab bills for the blood tests whose needles still made her lightheaded; and of course, dwarfing the rest to spare change, the surgery, gouging a meaty chunk from Merrill Lynch as if to fiscally mirror the violence inflicted on his wife’s abdomen, and then chemo, each administration of which was over forty thousand dollars a throw. Once such a niggler about buying store-brand mustard, these days Shep was growing careless about money, almost indifferent to it. Something in him would walk out on the street tomorrow and foist a wad into the hands of the first stranger he encountered.
Take it, take the works. Spare me the agony of parting with it drib by drab.
This was a kind of torture, really, a death by a thousand cuts, and he would rather a dagger in the gut—an overnight worldwide economic collapse that turned his dollars into neat rectangular sheets for wiping his ass.

He’d left the door ajar to keep an ear out for Glynis, and sure enough he could hear her beginning to prowl. It was after 1:00 a.m., but the insomnia that had plagued her in the hospital was also one of Alimta’s
side effects (or what Glynis had taken to calling
special effects
, a term that lent the fallout from chemo an element of the spectacular). Which seemed so unfair, given that another of the drug’s
special effects
was fatigue. Soon he’d go keep her company, but not just yet. He first had to get a hold of himself, to rein in the awful recognition that though it had barely begun, he was already waiting for all this to be over.

One whole shelf over his desk was lined with notebooks, hard-back Black n’ Reds that for years he’d special-ordered from a stationer in London—a rare indulgence. The spines were neatly labeled in fine felt-tip: Goa, Laos, Puerto Escondido, Morocco…Each was full of handwritten notes: the price of staples—butter, bread, milk. Average prices for two-and three-bedroom homes. Laws on foreign acquisition of property, and in more restrictive countries the susceptibility of officials to persuasion. Reliability of telephone service, electricity, and the mail. For the reconnaissance missions of the last ten years, Internet access. Target towns and neighborhoods. Crime rates. Weather. Especially meticulous in the older notebooks, detailed checklists on the availability of metalsmithing supplies—silver, solder, rouge, flux—and on how far they’d need to travel to refill Glynis’s acetylene tank for her torch. As her productivity back home had dwindled, these latter notes had grown less thorough, for they serviced an increasingly tenuous myth: that his wife would get only more serious about her craft in a foreign outpost, where her materials had to be imported and prized from the hands of corrupt customs officials, when she would rarely venture upstairs to her attic studio with all that she needed at her fingertips in the Jewelry District of Midtown Manhattan.

The handwriting was his own: the neat, rounded script of a diligent student, the tails of
g
’s and
y
’s looping loyally back to the line, the tops of
a
’s and
o
’s painstakingly closed. His cursive had never lost a schoolboy’s desire to please, a nervous determination to copy correctly from the blackboard. In addition to logistical notes, those pages were pasted with photos: once modestly priced coastline bungalows in Cape Town, Glynis posing before a pile of fiery rambutans in an outdoor market in Vietnam. Cards from guesthouses, restaurant menus. The addresses
of newly made friends, usually members of the small English-speaking communities of British and American expats whose existence they had agreed at the outset was a requirement. He and Glynis were, so the catechism had run, adventurous but realistic; they would crave the company of their own kind. Yet no matter how well met the acquaintance, they had lost touch with virtually all these local contacts, who no longer enticed with dinner invites, the shared smugness of having built a world apart, the inevitable shared wistfulness of having lost a world as well. Indeed, once Glynis had put the kibosh on the country, thus dooming the exercise to mere reminiscence, he hadn’t opened its Black n’ Red again. The tops of the volumes on the left had grown dusty.

Since they had never been there, the final notebook on the right marked “Pemba Island” was nearly blank. Against it leaned a folder of printouts. In the absence of his own notes and snapshots, the Pemba file on his hard drive was full of hyperlinks to travel sites and other people’s holiday photos posted online. With little patience for research that wasn’t three-dimensional, Shep had mastered just enough background to fill out a third-grade presentation to the class. Pemba was fifty miles north of Zanzibar. The island having been colonized by Portugal, locals still staged a bullfight every year. Plantations grew not only cloves, but rice, palms, coconut, and mangos. Local wildlife included flying foxes, the marsh mongoose, coconut crabs, and the red colobus monkey. Naturally, the cuisine was heavy on seafood: octopus, kingfish, prawns.

He had never eaten kingfish, and would like to try it.

The population was 300,000, though that census was dated. Mostly hoteliers, the number of resident expats numbered only a handful. Yet the longer The Afterlife had stewed in his mind, the fewer of his “own kind” Shep imagined he’d require; perhaps one crusty neighbor up the beach would do to help him remember the English word
carousel
without wracking his brain. Keeping the tourists to a mere smattering at any one time, the fact that the island was hard to get to had suited his purposes. If the island was hard to get to, it was hard to be got at there, and equally hard to leave.

He’d transcribed the names of towns, that he might try out the feel
of them in his mouth:
Kigomasha, Kinyasini, Kisiwani
.
Chiwali
and
Chapaka
.
Piki, Tumbi, Wingi, Nyali, Mtambili
, and
Msuka
. Or
Bagamoyo
, a village whose name meant “keep your heart cool.” He loved the notion of living in a place that his spellchecker didn’t recognize—that leapt from the screen underscored by alarmed red squiggles. He loved the merry prospect of flying into an airport in
Chaka Chaka.
He had memorized a few phrases while getting up the nerve to announce his intentions to Glynis, and had already come to relish the bouncy jubilation of Swahili. He’d always been intimidated by foreign languages in the past. Of all the tasks that The Afterlife might present him, he’d been leeriest of having to learn Bulgarian, or worse, one of those subtle tonal tongues like Thai. Yet Swahili was a toy language, full of silly repetitions of the sort that toddlers invent:
polepole, hivi hivi, asante kushukuru.
The language didn’t frighten him. It seemed like play.

With the surreptitiousness of loading Internet porn, Shep shoved aside his checkbook and narrowed the crack of the study door. He booted his computer and sought out the hyperlinks. The screen blued with water that looked clean. The sand was not only bright and fine but more marvelously deserted. He was not naïve about beaches. He did not idolize beaches, their blaring, unrelenting white. He was well aware of how hot they got, how monotonous; of the unpleasant crinkle of skin once saltwater had dried; of how the sand buried in your scalp, creviced into the spines of paperbacks, and followed you inside. He was aware of the flies. But nothing about living near one obliged you to park on a blanket in stupefaction from morning to night. At sundown the heat would die, the colors deepen. And however inured you might get to the view, the birds, the coconut crabs scuttling at low tide, none of the vistas in these photos could possibly grow as wearing as the strip malls in Elmsford, New York.

“Shepherd?”

Glynis was slumped against the doorframe with a tissue pressed to her face. Blood was running down her arm. In his distress, Shep took a beat too long to minimize the beach. Though her head was tipped back, her yellowed eyes were open. He would indeed have been less embarrassed had she glimpsed bare breasts or an open beaver.

“Another nosebleed,” he said, stating the obvious to distract from what she might have seen. With a hand under her elbow, he hustled her to the bathroom down the hall. She had dripped down the beige carpet. He didn’t notice the trail in a remonstrative way; it was just that he was responsible for running the household now, and he would need to scrub the stains before they set. “Keep it tipped up.”

He grabbed a washcloth, moistened it, and drew it down her arm. Removing the streaks of blood, he revealed the pinprick red dots on her skin that would not rub off, like the halo around spray-painted graffiti. As if she’d been basking along that on-screen beach, her skin was dark for May, almost the color of a good tan but not quite—grayer, yellower, more sullen. The hue put him in mind of those wipe-on artificial tanning products that weren’t fooling anybody. And he was sorry to note that, despite the dexamethasone, patches of red, scaly rash had returned. They were inflamed: she’d been scratching again.

“I would have to be wearing this sweater.”

He helped her out of the floor-length cardigan of cream cashmere, a wrap of which she was inordinately fond. The luxurious sweater had the warmth and comfort of a bathrobe with none of the depressing I-can’t-be-bothered-to-get-dressed connotations, and now it was drizzled with blood down the front. So for now her bathrobe would have to do, and he fetched it while promising to rinse every drop from the cardigan. Anything that roused affection in her, that infinitesimally increased her attachment to the flotsam and jetsam of this earth, would have to take precedence over the carpet.

Bringing a box of tissues, he settled her downstairs on the pillowed love seat he’d moved permanently into the kitchen, that she might bundle there while he prepared their meals. Or meals loosely speaking. He’d had better luck with multiple snacks than imposing spreads. Because she often hadn’t the energy to get up and sit at the main table, beside the love seat he’d moved in a small coffee table, from which he also took his dinner, to keep her from feeling exiled. Shep arranged a fleece blanket around her shoulders. At least the nosebleed seemed to be subsiding.

“I’m sorry about the mess,” she said as he took the cardigan to the
sink. “I’d have caught it better, but this neurotic antipathy thing”—she meant, of course, peripheral neuropathy—“it’s made me a klutz. I can’t quite feel the Kleenex, so I think I’m holding it, but I’m not and I drop it. It’s so weird. Almost like not having hands. Like being an amputee.”

Rinsing and squeezing out and rinsing again, Shep tried both to be vigorous about removing the blood yet also to move casually, routinely, as if the task were no trouble. Of course it was no trouble, but there was an extra art to making it seem that way.

“They’d better be right about these symptoms going away after the course is through,” she added. “If I can’t feel my hands, I’m hardly going to be hacking away with a jewelry saw.”

“As I understand it, the only
special effect
they’re worried could be permanent is the hearing loss.”

“I’m sorry, what did you say?”

He raised his voice. “That as I understand it—”

“Shepherd. I was joking.”

Of course she was joking. He would usually have been able to tell. It took concentration to remember that Glynis was still Glynis—that tautology so beloved of Pogatchnik—and he shouldn’t treat her too gently or like a child. Yet what he said next was indeed parental, and fostered a familiar discomfort, the same sense of conniving complicity he’d first experienced with Dr. Knox.

“You have to focus on the fact that all this is temporary,” he said.

“I know it seems like the longest nine months of your life. But out the other side, the rashes, the sores, and the neuropathy will all clear up once you flush the drugs from your system. Try to keep your mind on the finish line.”