So Much for That (32 page)

“I am who I am.” Shep’s delivery was so robotic that it was impossible to tell if he was joking.

They about-faced, and marched back in silence. Jackson didn’t know if he was supposed to apologize, but he was disinclined to. He realized that he was being irrational, but it kept sneaking back all the same: this conviction that the “whimsical” notion that had vaporized his sex life and still made it hard to take a leak was in some measure Shep Knacker’s fault. Hey, that explanation he’d delivered Carol was genuine enough. He had almost walked in on her, and he had found the exhibition simultaneously exciting and disturbing. But there was a little more to it than that, not that he would ever let on to Carol, because, to add insult to injury, the additional explanation was clichéd. If she knew, she’d have contempt for him—that is, even more contempt for him, assuming that was possible. The whole nightmare would never have gone down in the first place if it hadn’t been for Shep.

Moreover, despite the guy’s earlier assertion that the scale of their respective travails “wasn’t a contest,” Jackson wondered if, all kidding aside, there wasn’t a subtle element of competition in Shep’s catalogue of woes after all. Shep always had to cast himself as the hero, the stoic who could bear up under all manner of impositions, the Atlas on whose shoulders the fates of nations rested. Jackson tired of his friend’s infeasible virtue—the empathy, the bending over backward to see the other side, that numb-sucker-taking-it thing—and maybe he’d let fly just now to show this patsy how it was done: See? You don’t sigh and take out the checkbook again; you get mad.

Besides, Flicka was more of a handful than Shep had any idea, and now Jackson was supposed to bow down and defer to Shep’s terrible situation with Glynis’s terrible illness. Well, Shep wasn’t the only one
dealing with the fact that someone he loved was probably going to die. In fact, Jackson sometimes wanted to grab and shake the guy.
Now
do you understand what’s it’s been like for me, ever since Flicka was diagnosed in her crib because she couldn’t, of all things, cry? Never knowing when the one person you count on to make life seem worth living will suddenly make a rude, unannounced exit and then it turns out, gosh, you were right—actually, now life really isn’t worth living? Shep did realize, didn’t he, that even though Flicka now set an alarm to pour in her own cans of Compleat, her father still got up at his old shift of 4:00 a.m. most nights, pretending to get a glass of water, but really just to glide by Flicka’s room and make sure she was still alive? Because that’s how most of these kids disappeared on you: just went to sleep and never woke up. Nuts, according to that last CAT scan, Glynis seemed to have a hope in hell. But no test result was ever going to come in for Flicka that would suddenly open up a future with a career and a family of her own. Busy playing the supportive friend this afternoon, Jackson had yet to mention that Flick had been readmitted to New York Methodist the day before. The chest infections were recurring with greater frequency, and they were getting worse. The antibiotics were growing less effective, and a host of predatory microscopic crud was thriving out there that was immune to the drugs altogether. Simple family hangs like the one this spring, when he gave his kids that eighth-grade test from 1895, well, he couldn’t remember having engaged in the same rambunctious after-dinner teasing since. Carol had to piss all over it, but they’d been having a good time.

There was even something showily turn-the-other-cheek about Shep’s bringing up graciously as they neared Handy Randy, “I wondered if you’d found a hole in your schedule yet,” after having been berated as a moron and a sap.

“Yeah, right,” said Jackson. “That celebration, about Glynis’s CAT scan. Sure thing, I’ll check my diary soon as we get back.”

In having repeatedly shied from the invitation, Jackson had no idea whether he was envious of their good news about the upbeat CAT scan, or if he just didn’t trust it.

Shepherd Armstrong Knacker
Merrill Lynch Account Number 934-23F917
August 01, 2005–August 31, 2005
Net Portfolio Value: $274,530.68

S
hep had bustled down his to-do list all day. Lay in groceries. Buy charcoal. Cut up raw vegetables—which no one ever ended up eating. Whip up dip—to which he had, despite his own revulsion, added Nancy’s canned pineapple because he couldn’t think of anything else. Wrap potatoes in tin foil. Set table—with a sense of dismay that the menu could not plausibly sponsor Glynis’s fish slice.

But their guests were late. Every item on the list was crossed off. Shep had nothing to do. Lending his wife’s skepticism about his idyllically idle Afterlife some credence, the absence of an agenda was the one thing these days that Shep couldn’t bear. In some comically microcosmic manner, this chasm of post-dinner-prep inactivity foreshadowed a more frightening abyss. As of yesterday afternoon, Shep had resumed residence on a world that was flat. He would soldier across the map only to plummet vertiginously off its hard edge. Thus, big picture, the evening’s pattern of frenzy to freefall would repeat itself. Shep would
feverishly meet every need—fill every prescription, arrange transport and company for every appointment, fetch liquids, plump pillows, and elevate feet. Then suddenly, there would be nothing—there would be nothing—there would be nothing to do.

He double-checked that Glynis was situated comfortably on the screened-in back porch. Too comfortably; she was slumped and asleep. Dressing for the evening had worn her out. He shouldn’t be forcing her to socialize. The timing was terrible. But it had taken two and a half months to get their best friends to dinner. He wasn’t about to withdraw the invitation and go through the same diary-shuffling folderol with Jackson again. He stirred the coals on the barbecue. He’d started the fire too early, and it would be too hot for the steaks. They’d been eighteen dollars a pound. It didn’t matter. But if overcooking them didn’t matter, then he shouldn’t have sprung for New York strips in the first place. He was beginning to lose a grip on why they were having those two for dinner. He was losing a grip on why anyone had anyone to dinner. Why anyone talked to anyone. Or maybe he was mostly uncertain about why he himself would talk to Jackson.

Finally Shep grabbed the hose and went around the backyard topping up his whacky fountains: the festive, kinetic one with the pinwheels, paddles, and overflowing plastic Snoopy lunchbox that hadn’t especially delighted Zach for his birthday even when the kid was nine; the more industrial structure with a handyman theme that sluiced the water around shovel blades, trowels, and spare lengths of drainage pipe. The fountains’ sheer gratuitousness used to cheer him, but lately the contraptions seemed silly, and he’d taken to disparaging the lot, with sour sarcasm, as “water features.” In a life ruled by grim necessity, gratuitousness itself was one more thing that he could live without.

Nearly an hour after the agreed time, Jackson hustled in from their car with an armload of booze—not only wine and beer, but all the makings for margaritas, as if the game plan for the evening were for everyone to get plastered. Maybe Shep should have phoned to forewarn them that the nature of the occasion had changed.

“You know, it slays me,” Jackson started up right away, and that was
assuming he’d ever stopped, “That all these major intersections in Brooklyn? They put traffic cops in the middle, and all they do—
all they do
—is wave through cars perfectly in sync with the traffic lights. Like, they are just human traffic lights. Do we really need some self-important fuck to point left when the Left Turn Only signal turns green? Do we need to
pay
this asshole to stand there like an urban scarecrow, when the lights are working for once, and easier to see? You know the only time you
don’t
see some officious
public servant
out there is when the signal fails. The lights go black and it’s pandemonium? Not a cop in sight.”

It was going to be a long night.

“Oh, and guess what’s the latest on the Net,” he continued, slicing limes.

There was no purpose to interrupting. Jackson was like the topped-up fountains in the backyard, which would burble through the evening and tirelessly recycle the same few gallons of bilge.

“Know how, like, downtown,” Jackson carried on, “around City Hall, it’s totally impossible to find a place to park? Turns out there’s a reason, and it’s not just that it’s New York and you got to share. It’s the Mooches in government. The city’s issued
142,000
permits that say the rules don’t apply to them. These parasitic pricks put this little card on the dashboard, and bingo, they can park their butts in Authorized Vehicles Only zones and even where it says outright No Parking. In Lower Manhattan, they got over 11,000 spaces to choose from for free. Know how many parking spots the sad-ass general public’s got to choose from down there? Six hundred and sixty-five. That’s not democracy, friend. That’s tyranny. We pay for the paving, the curbing, the pothole repair, the very signs that tell us to fuck off, and they park wherever they want, for no money, and for as long as they damn well please.”

Shep knew better than to ever try parking in Lower Manhattan, and he didn’t care. He shared a glance with Carol, who looked embarrassed. “That’s just Jackson’s ham-handed way of apologizing for being late,” she said. “He insisted on stopping at Astor Liquors on Lafayette, where the tequila would be cheaper, and we spent forty-five minutes looking for a place to park. But since that’s not quite ‘Lower Manhattan,’ I’m afraid we can’t pin our rudeness on City Hall.”

Naturally Carol asked if she could help, while Jackson proceeded to squirt lime juice all over the counters that Shep had just wiped down. And naturally she wanted to go say hello to Glynis. Shep hurried ahead to the back porch to wake her, although their guests finding his wife in a state of catatonic collapse would have been a more edifying introduction to life in Elmsford these days than any bear-hugging glad-to-see-you. Unfortunately, he didn’t arrive in time to restore her turban, which had fallen to the floor. She had always been prideful about her appearance, if Shep shied from the word
vain
, and she was still prideful.

Carol had been up to her neck in nursing Flicka, whose pneumonia from August had proven tenacious, so Shep couldn’t blame her for not having visited Westchester for six weeks or more. She did a good job of disguising it, but he could read the shock in her face. As far as Carol was concerned, they were still “celebrating” the wonderful news from Glynis’s early July CAT scan that her cancer was in retreat. So she’d have every reason to expect her friend to look, if not robust, at least human-colored and three-dimensional.

But Jackson’s multiple poor excuses and reschedulings had pushed this gathering to mid-September. Its ambiance had grown autumnal in more than a seasonal respect. Shep didn’t usually notice himself. But seeing Glynis through Carol’s eyes, he recognized that his wife’s lush summer foliage had turned. The brown tinge to her skin had grayed, the way a beach vacation tan wanes to a dingy inland mottle that just looks dirty; its off-orange undertone was reminiscent of rancid tea. With the new chemo, Adriamycin (or, in Glynis-speak, “An Aging Mike Tyson,” which lent the drug a pugilistic punch), she’d finally lost most of her hair; when she’d kept a good bit of it with Alimta, they’d hoped that she’d be one of those lucky chemo patients whose locks were spared. There was something horribly naked about the scalp showing through, especially noticeable with the darkness of the few remaining strands. More than the cleavage of a gaping blouse, those bald patches were unnervingly intimate, like something others truly weren’t meant to see. She’d grown thin again, of course, but damned if she didn’t also seem shorter.

Carol’s forced exclamation, “Glynis, that dress is gorgeous!” at least beat
Glynis, you look like shit!

Groggy, Glynis looked confused why other people were in the house. The bowl of corn chips on the table seemed to clue her in. “Oh, Carol, thanks. I hope you don’t mind if I don’t get up. You look lovely, too. You work so hard, but no one would ever know it. Always so fresh and—vital.”

It may not have been politic for Shep to notice, but Carol did indeed look lovely. Perhaps uneasy about outshining the hostess—Carol was like that; she would have considered the matter—she had clearly dressed down for the evening. Yet the just-threw-any-old-thing-on gambit had backfired. You could hardly blame the poor woman for looking her best at her simplest. The solid aqua shift only emphasized her willowy figure, and bound a bit across the breasts in a way that called attention to them. That was surely an accident, of course. The flimsy little sundress may have been a back-of-the-closet thing—it draped in those anatomically incorrect pleats distinctive to having wilted for months if not years on a hanger—and didn’t fit that well. But as a consequence the nipples poked noticeably behind the material, and it was hard not to stare. Glynis didn’t really have breasts anymore. The implicit contrast might have made any once equally handsome woman feel a little bitter. If so, his wife seemed to get the better of that bitterness with some success. In fact, no one but Shep could appreciate what an effort Glynis was making, though her voice was frail.

Jackson roistered in with a tray, the pitcher of margaritas brimming, the tumblers encrusted with too much salt. He had a careless side that had sometimes brought the friends to loggerheads when Jackson was still a jobbing handyman in Shep’s employ, and it was probably best for everyone, customers included, that he’d moved up to a managerial post. Everything Jackson did ran to excess.

“Shep tells me you’ve been prescribed a new
cocktail
,” he said, pouring Glynis a large measure. “Thought I’d oblige.”

Glynis did not appear to get the allusion. (Shep had been disappointed to discover that on a Darwinian level Nature regards a sense of humor as dispensable.) As Jackson poured the rest of the round, she looked at her glass as if at a photograph from better times. Glynis wasn’t
supposed to drink much on An Aging Mike Tyson, which Jackson could have known had he asked. The glass did make a cheerful prop, though the fact that it was just that helped to underscore the theatrical quality of this whole event. They would execute the stage directions of
Another Boisterous Dinner with Jackson and Carol
, because no one had scripted whatever this was instead.

“You folks been following the schemozzle with Katrina?” Jackson introduced.

For once Shep was glad for current events, a formal Topic that would get them through the corn chips.

“Yeah, we’ve been keeping CNN on pretty much all day,” said Glynis.

She might have added that she was relishing Katrina. Glynis had always harbored a mischievous, dark aspect, but now it was no longer a mere
aspect
. She loved watching destruction—the big bountiful houses of the sort she and her husband had never bought for themselves filled with acrid, oily water to the second floor. The stranded black matriarchs waving fruitlessly on rooftops for rescue that would never come, who now knew they were alone in the world and no one cared.
Well
, he could sense Glynis responding coolly,
welcome to the club
. Other people’s suffering did not disquiet her. Glynis did nothing but suffer, and if others suffered too that was only fair. She seemed gratified by the prospect of one whole city that would not survive her. Had she her way, she might have clutched at others too, New York signally among them, to drag down with her to the bowels of the earth, like the end of
Carrie
. In a fell swoop of self-liberation, Glynis had relinquished her empathy for other people, defiantly reflecting back the very apathy about her own fate that she increasingly perceived in would-be well-wishers. She could tell, you know, however dutifully a few friends still attended her bedside, that they were relieved to leave.

“It’s been so awful, seeing all those people in New Orleans lose everything,” said Carol, her sympathy laudable but boring. “It pinched the budget a little, but I absolutely had to send a check to the Red Cross.”

“You’re kidding,” Jackson said sharply.

“Think of it as from my earnings if you have to,” said Carol. “I wouldn’t have been able to live with myself if I didn’t do something.”

“But we’ve already
paid
to ‘do something’!” her husband exclaimed.

“How do you figure that? It’s the whole point of having a country, isn’t it? To rally around, to lend each other a hand in hard times.”

“The whole point of having a
government
is to lend people a hand in hard times!” said Jackson, who had already powered through his first margarita. “That’s what taxes
ought
to be for. Sidewalks. And hurricanes!”

“And health insurance,” said Shep. “For a guy who claims he doesn’t believe in big government, you sure expect them to take care of a lot of shit.”

“No, I don’t. Like, I don’t expect to pour
three billion dollars a week
into a sandbox in the Middle East, or to carry half the fucking loafers in my own country on my back. But, yeah, if my pocket’s gonna be picked through legalized larceny, I want some pittance of a service in return. I don’t want my wife working a job she hates just so my kid can go to the hospital. And I expect if a whole city drowns because of
more
incompetent civic management of its levees, somebody from D.C. will give the poor fuckers a bottle of water, a fistful of crackers, and a lift to dry ground! It’s just one more example of the
tiny handful
of tasks that this monster of a government might be good for, and here they can’t even be bothered to hand those guys a towel.”

Shep might have been heartened by Jackson’s compassion for their hapless compatriots in Louisiana, save for the little gladness that palpably energized the tirade. The poorly concealed delight reminded him of Glynis. Their friend was all too grateful for any turn of events, no matter how dire, that serviced his beloved construct: those wily, rapacious Mooches leeching off the pea-brained, pushover Mugs. Whenever someone else’s misfortune validated your personal view of the world, maybe it was commonplace to feel more satisfaction than sorrow. But if Jackson’s was a standard weakness, it was a weakness still: a glorying in having been right all along, regardless of how many other people’s happiness had been sacrificed to prove it.