So Much for That (24 page)

“All I can say is, if this is tolerating A Lift into Manhattan ‘incredibly well,’ I’d hate to learn what it felt like to tolerate it badly.”

A Lift into Manhattan
meant, of course, Alimta and cisplatin. Seditious rechristening provided his wife not only a running source of entertainment, but ownership, a fragile feeling of control. Pharmaceutical companies would not tyrannize her with their perky nonsense trade names, whose subliminal positivism about the corruptions of the body
she mercilessly mocked: Emend (
Amen
), Ativan (
Attaboy
), Maxidex (
Maxipad
). Yet Glynis herself had a knack for hijacking the heavy, forbiddingly multisyllabic generics into deviations that were harmless or even pleasant: lorazepam sweetened to
marzipan
, domperidone fizzed into
Dom Pérignon
, and lansoprazole lilted into
lamzy divey
, from the chipper gibberish ditty of the 1940s. The abundance of these drugs were to counteract the
special effects
of the chemo; these drugs, too, had
special effects
, counteracted with still more drugs, with perhaps still more
special effects
, so that the number of pills and potions she downed was potentially infinite. Thus none of her lighthearted nicknames compensated for the fact that her body had become, as Glynis would say, “a toxic waste dump.”

“At least the nausea in your case doesn’t seem to last more than a couple of days,” Shep pointed out. “A lot of folks puke their guts out for weeks.”

“Yeah, lucky me.”

Shep held the cardigan up to the light. There were still pale purple shadows. He would take it to the dry cleaner on his lunch hour tomorrow. He had to get “up” in three hours, although the preposition implied getting to bed first, which looked dubious. “Did you talk to your mother today, or abandon her to voice mail again?”

“No, I didn’t talk to her. Why should I? What’s there to say? Yes, I took my folic acid and pterodactyl?” (Even for Shep, it was now taking work to remember that the real supplement was called pyridoxine.)

“Nothing ever happens to me anymore. I never do anything but watch TV. We can’t even talk about the weather. If I never leave the house, there is no weather. We end up talking for half an hour about what I ate.”

“I.e., not enough.”

“Don’t start.”

“I never stopped.” Shep left to search out a hanger, and draped the sweater carefully so that it wouldn’t dry with extrusions poked in the sleeves. While upstairs, he rinsed out the washcloth and went at the drips on the carpet. He managed only to turn the discrete droplets into large pink patches. It was the kind of damage that in times past he would have
tried to ameliorate with obsessive scrubbing and violent cleaning products. He’d have been anxious that their security deposit was at issue, that the landlord might dock them for the cost of the carpet. Now he thought, fuck it, I’ll throw a little salt on it later. There was something to be wrested from this mortality business, something more illuminating than mere perspective: apathy. He did not care about his landlord’s carpet. He did not care about their security deposit. Ergo, he did not care about the stains in the hallway, and he tossed the wet washcloth in the sink. He could see how this liberating condition could grow progressive. How in the face of an end game there was virtually no limit to what did not matter.

Returned to the kitchen, he resumed the subject they’d left dangling. “I know it’s tedious to fill the time on the phone. But your mother just wants to check up on how you’re feeling.”

“I have cancer! I feel like shit! What’s to feel?” Glynis’s breathing had gone raspy. The anemia gave her trouble catching her breath.

“She’s trying to be a good mother,” said Shep.

“She’s trying to
seem
like a good mother. It’s theater, so she can tell all those biddies she hangs out with how attentive she’s being, so they’ll feel sorry for her. Not for me! For
her.
She calls every day to make herself feel better.”

Shep almost said, well, what is wrong with that, but held his tongue. Glynis didn’t want other people to feel better. “Jackson’s been a little weird lately,” he brought up, propping her feet on some pillows; elevation kept the swelling, if not down, under control.

“How so?”

“Hard to say. Distant?” He massaged her instep. The bloated toes stuck out individually, like tiny tied-off balloons. “Some days he makes himself scarce at lunch, and we’ve always spent the lunch ‘hour’ together. He seems distracted. Like when we do walk to Prospect Park, he runs out of stuff to say.”

“That’s a new one.”

“Maybe he’s having a hard time knowing how to be consoling, about you.” Her ankles had been so slender! He wanted her to gain weight,
but not in her feet. “He seemed to handle the situation okay when you were still in the hospital, but you said mostly with those set-piece diatribes—”

“They were merciful. They got me out of having a conversation—Shepherd, I don’t want to seem ungrateful, but I can’t feel that.”

“He wasn’t dealing with what was happening,” said Shep, leaving off the foot massage with a pat that tried to disguise that he was hurt. It made no sense to feel hurt. “Emotionally.”

“Jackson is the most cut-off person I know. I’ve no idea how Carol stands it. He’s the kind of person who’s highly entertaining in groups. One-on-one, with me at least, he can’t communicate ‘please pass the salt.’ But for you two it must be different.”

Shep could feel the weariness in her observations. Glynis was an astute analyst of character. No artistic hermit, she had an extensive network of friends, and one of their favorite marital pastimes had long been the luxurious, sometimes cruelly accurate parsing of, say, the way Eileen Vinzano overcompensated for feeling overshadowed by her husband’s prominence as a roving foreign correspondent for
ABC News
by praising Paul in company to the skies. “Rings a little hollow, doesn’t it?” Glynis would discern slyly once their dinner guests had left. But nowadays Glynis had to put so much energy into expressing any given view that there was little left for the opinion itself. Throughout the average day now she doubtless thought a host of things that she simply couldn’t marshal the wherewithal to articulate—to go through the arduous process of selecting words and putting them in the right order; to open her mouth, force air through her throat, and vibrate her vocal cords. Shep was sympathetic, but also felt cheated. Within fearfully short order, his wife’s musings might no longer be infinitely on offer, but could instead constitute a finite and rather paltry collection of quotes, like one of those slight, undersized volumes of wit sold at bookstore checkouts around Christmas.

“It used to be different, with Jackson and me,” said Shep. “But lately, even the diatribes—”

“He’s so angry, but I’m not sure about what.”

“I don’t know if it’s called ‘anger’ when you’re enjoying yourself so much.” He poured her a glass of soda water she’d not asked for, spritzing it with a wedge of lime. He could not bear empty time, when he did nothing for her. “But these days there’s an edge on him. He’s not having fun.”

“It’s a barrage, a”—the words were hard to find and heavy to lift—

“broadcast. A force field, to keep other people at bay.”

“I keep going back to when I visited him in New York Methodist, when he had that ‘infection’ and had to be put on an antibiotic drip. ‘An infection’—he never said of what. I thought that was weird. You usually have an ‘infected something,’ right?”

“I don’t know; I’ve been in the hospital three times now with ‘an infection.’”

“But that’s because you’re susceptible to every passing bug. Besides, don’t you spend a lot of time with visitors talking about the details of your treatment? We didn’t. I mean, we didn’t talk about what was wrong with him
at all
. And he missed a day of work last week, then never explained why.”

“I forgot to tell you, Petra came by today,” Glynis grumbled. She had finished with Jackson.

“Oh? How’d that go?”

Emptying the dishwasher, Shep braced himself. Now living on the Upper West Side, Petra Carson had been Glynis’s classmate at Saguaro Art, and was his wife’s oldest friend. The relationship of the two metalsmiths was delicate at the best of times. Like his sister-in-law Ruby, whose sheer industry he had always admired although never to Glynis’s face, Petra was a hard worker, and her output was prodigious. Diligence more than gift had probably explained her rise in the ranks: her frequent admission to touring national craft shows, her supportive New York gallery. That the make-or-break attribute in lofty creative fields might be no different than the single most vital ingredient that had lifted his own pedestrian small business off the ground—humdrum perseverance—was a tactless intuition he had kept to himself.

Glynis disparaged Petra’s work as safe and cookie-cutter. Unlike Glynis, Petra did not press against the limits of “craft” and yearn to join
the art world proper. She made jewelry, period, for people to wear. Another tactless observation? Shep liked that. He liked functionality. He was a handyman. He had always cherished the fact that his wife made objects not only attractive but utile, which should have made them
more
valuable, not less. Thus he’d no patience for the loopy distinction between
art
and
craft
that put the latter at a commercial disadvantage. If you made a clay pitcher that held water, it was virtually worthless. Bang a hole in the bottom and it was “art” you could charge an arm and a leg. How fucked up was that?

One would think that life-threatening illness would have finally neutralized this friendship’s ongoing tension over which metalsmith was the more talented. (Glynis thought the answer was obvious.) While neither contested who was more successful, they’d been engaged in a tacit running feud for decades over whether a certain someone deserved her acclaim. Surely in the face of cancer Glynis should have called a truce, or even, in a burst of enlightened generosity, at long last given her colleague a little credit. (Okay, Shep caught himself, don’t be fanciful.) Yet as far as Glynis was concerned, the rivalry was as ferocious as ever. She was loath to demote her oldest-friend-cum-nemesis to one more bland benevolent who tended the sick.

“Would you please stop fiddling about?”

Mystified, Shep froze with a spatula poised in midair. “I’m only—”

“I spend all day doing nothing. It would comfort me to be with someone else doing nothing, too.”

He shrugged, dropped the spatula in the drawer, and pulled a chair up to her love seat. It was strangely difficult to do as she requested. He never stopped these last few months, what with all the errands on top of work, as well as trying and usually failing to find time to look in on Zach, whose withdrawal made it all too easy to ignore him. Simply sitting made Shep restless, claustrophobic. Relentless occupation was a therapy of sorts. Aggressive helpfulness disguised the fact that in any important sense he was helpless.

“Petra did nothing but moan, if you can believe it.” Glynis struggled up on the pillows, which sent her into a coughing fit. Obviously her friend
had offended her, since rare was the visitor who didn’t. Umbrage was her drug of choice. “Oh gosh,” Glynis rasped, “she has to fly to LA this week to go to the opening of her show. Isn’t flying just awful these days; she used to look forward to flights, and now she dreads them—the security and the lines. And show openings are so dreary, all the brown-nosing compliments and then nobody buys anything, so it’s obviously empty flattery. That was just the beginning, too. No matter what she talked about, everything she had to do, the endless polishing, the shipping and insurance, the dinners with gallery owners—it was all terrible, terrible, one big burden of the put-upon, when I can’t even cross the street! I mean, the nerve! By the end of it I could have punched her in the nose.”

“But…don’t you think it’s hard for people to tell you about the good things in their lives, when your life is so difficult?”

“She has no idea how lucky she is! Everyone around me seems to be feeling sorry for themselves, over nothing!”

Tempting Glynis to put herself in anyone else’s shoes these days was nigh impossible. To be fair, compassion took energy. Then again, so did rage. “She’s embarrassed, Gnu,” he pressed quietly. “She’s going to instinctively cast everything she has to do as disagreeable, so it seems like something you wouldn’t want to do, since you can’t do it. That’s not because she feels sorry for herself, but because she feels sorry for you.”

“Oh, fuck you and all your understandingness. You could use a little understandingness on me!”

Glynis cried easily. He stooped by her blanket and wiped the tears with his forefinger. While he was at it, he dabbed a tissue around her nose, to remove the last crusts of blood. “Your friends love you and don’t always know how to show it.”

“I’m sick of it.” She pushed his handkerchief away, and fought again to sit more upright. “This parade of visitors. The cousins, the aunts, the neighbors we hardly know. The friends from fifteen years ago crawling out of the woodwork—as if there weren’t a reason we haven’t got together in all that time:
we don’t like each other much.
But no, they all want their audience. They’ve all prepared it ahead of time, their little presentation. The things they wanted to
be sure to remember to say
. Honestly, they clasp
their hands as if they’re in church, or giving a book report. I’ve heard how much other people
luuuuuuuv
me until it’s coming out of my ears! To tell you the truth, at this point I might actually appreciate somebody walking through that door and saying, ‘You know, Glynis? Honestly, I’ve never really cared for your company. Honestly, we’ve never got on. I’ve never seen the point of you,’ or even, ‘I hate your guts.’ That would be refreshing. Anything but these nauseating speeches. Glynis, you’re so talented. Glynis, you’ve done such beautiful work. Glynis, you’ve raised two wonderful children. I don’t even know what they’re talking about. Yes, maybe they’re wonderful children to me, but to other people Zach and Amelia aren’t wonderful, they’re just my kids. And the upchucking reminiscences. Glynis, do you remember when we went on that skiing trip to Aspen and you got lost. Glynis, do you remember when we were kids and you dressed up like a gold prospector from the Wild West. Half the time I have no recollection of this supposedly precious memory whatsoever. What am I supposed to say? What do these people want from me? Yeah, of course I remember, that sure was funny, or scary, or dumb? Ha-ha-ha? And I
luuuuuuv
you, too? I don’t
love
most of the people who come by here. Half the time I don’t love anybody, not anything or anybody, not even you!”