So Much for That (35 page)

“What’s the article about?” asked Shep, pulling up a chair. The bedside table was layered with clippings, just as he’d imagined.

“About how much these blasted CEOs are getting paid. Millions, tens of millions a year! It’s obscene. While the rest of the world is starving.”
Stahving
. Unlike his son, Gabe Knacker had clung gladly to his Hampster accent.

“Yeah, well, in case you’re wondering, I didn’t pay myself tens of millions of dollars a year when I ran Knack.” This was as close as he would come to alluding to Twilight’s price tag, about which his father had never inquired. The Reverend seemed under the convenient illusion that the government was still picking up the tab.

“In my view,” his father growled, “no single human being can be so gosh-darned important” (
impahtent
) “that he’s worth ten million a year. Not one soul, not even the president. Well—especially
this
president.”

“But if you think there’s a limit to how much you should pay any
one person as a salary,” Shep speculated, “is there also a limit to how much you should pay to keep any one person alive?”

His father grunted, the rivulets in his furrowed forehead deeper and more numerous than in July.

Shep laughed. “I’m sorry. I meant that abstractly. It’s not like Beryl and I are trying to decide whether your existence is cost-effective.”

“I didn’t take it personally. It’s a good question is all. What a life is worth, in dollars. When resources aren’t infinite, which they never are. When money spent on one person isn’t spent on another.”

(
Pahsonally…
what a life was
wahth
…
resahses aunt
infinite…isn’t spent on
anuthuh—
music to Shep’s ears, in which a
N’ Hampshah
accent was the very soundtrack of earthiness and probity.)

“It’s not as neat as that,” said Shep. “Like, if Twilight Glens saves five bucks by giving you generic ibuprofen instead of Advil, the money doesn’t end up in Nairobi Hospital. But…the question still bothers me.”

“Glynis.”

“Yes.”

“You don’t have any choice. You have to do everything in your power to help your wife.”

“That is the…expectation.”

“But theoretically,” said his father, sitting up straighter and putting on a display of vigor that Shep hoped was not an act, “how would you arrive at a number? You’re allowed to spend a hundred thousand dollars on a single life, but not a hundred thousand and one?” (The Reverend’s citation of this laughably small figure elicited a wan smile from his son.) “And the wealthy will always be able to circumvent any limits. You cap expenditure on health care, you really only cap it for poor people.”

His father was still sharp, and Shep thought, this is the kind of conversation that I’ll miss when he’s gone.

“More importantly,” Gabriel added, “how is Glynis?”

“The chemo is wearing her down. She’s always angry, and at this point that’s a good sign. It’s when she stops being angry that I’m afraid of.”

“There’s nothing to fear.”
Feeyuh.
“She’ll have to make her peace:
with herself, with you, and with all her friends and family. I know it’s hard to see it this way, but grave illness is an opportunity of sorts. An opportunity you don’t get when you’re run over by a bus. She has a chance to reflect. A chance to turn to God, though I’m not holding my breath for that. Certainly a chance to say all the things that she wouldn’t want to go unsaid before she’s gone. In the strangest way, she’s fortunate. I hope for both your sakes that this is a time you’re very close.”

“I doubt Glynis thinks of cancer as ‘an opportunity.’ Although I’m damned if I know what she does think. She doesn’t talk about it, Dad. As far as I can tell, she still believes she’s undergoing chemo to get better. There’s none of this—saying of last things. Is that normal?”

“In this area, there is no normal.”
Nahmal.
“And what would it matter if she were abnormal, when that’s the way she is? People hold onto life with more ferocity than you have any idea. Or maybe you do have an idea now.”

“She’s always been so honest. Scathingly so. Frighteningly so. And now, with the biggest thing she’s ever had to be honest about…”

“Remember: you don’t know what it’s like. I may have broken my leg and had a scare,”
scayuh
, “but I still don’t know what it’s like, either. Neither of us will until it happens to us. You have no idea how you might react. Maybe in the very same way. Withhold thy judgment.” Gabriel’s tone wryly mocked his own sermons, and Shep was glad of any inclination toward the withholding of judgment, with which his father had always cudgeled him in the past.

“There’s one other thing I wanted to ask you,” said Shep. “When you were a minister. You’d have had plenty of dealings with folks who were ill. In your day, were people…good about that? Attentive? Did they stick by each other? And I mean, to the end. The whole ugly, bitter end.”

“Some did, some didn’t. For me, it was my job to stick by them. One of the things the ministry is good for—even if you don’t give it much credence yourself.” The admonishment was almost welcome. It
issued from the father he remembered, and in Twilight that was a relief. “Why do you ask?”

“People…her friends, even immediate family. They’ve—lots of them have deserted her. I’m embarrassed for them. And this disappearing act so many folks have pulled, well, it hurts her feelings, even if she pretends that she’s glad to be left alone. I’m very discouraged. I wonder if people have always been so—weak. Disloyal. Spineless.”

“Christians accept a duty to care for the sick. Most of my parishioners took that commitment seriously. Your secular friends only have their own consciences to prod them, and that’s not always enough. There’s no substitute for deeply held beliefs, son. They call you to your finest self. Tending the sick is hard work, and it’s not always pretty; I don’t need to tell you that now. When you’re relying on some flimsy notion that coming by with a casserole would be
thoughtful
”—an odd spasm of concern crossed the old man’s face, and he briefly closed his eyes—“that tuna bake may not…may not make it to the oven.”

“Dad, are you okay?”

Reaching for a buzzer, his father said, “I’m sorry, son, I know you just got here. But you’re going to have to leave me alone for a minute with the aide.”

A few awkward minutes passed, while his father curled in acute concentration and couldn’t talk. Bedpan in tow, a Filipino bustled in, wearing whites ill-suited to her purpose. Shep waited in the hall. She came out a while later with a ball of sheets. A watery brown stain betrayed that she hadn’t arrived in time.

“Fifteen times a day if it’s once,” Gabriel grumbled in fresh pajamas when Shep returned. “You imagine a body gets used to this, think again. It’s humiliating.”

Shep stirred uneasily, and moved his chair a few extra inches from the bed. “You pick up some sort of bug?”

“You could say that. A bug the size of a small dog.
Clostridium difficile.
Or
c-diff
, as it’s affectionately known around here.”

“What’s that?”

“One of those infections that take hold of whole hospitals. Half the patients in this institution have it. Nurses wash their hands here like Macbeth, which far as I can tell doesn’t make a darned bit of difference. Notice, even in the hallway? It smells. They’re pumping me full of antibiotics, but so far that’s like trying to shoot an elephant with a pop gun. Gotta lick this thing, too, since it’s the biggest obstacle to my going
home
.”

The even bigger obstacle was Beryl, but Shep had other matters on his mind. He stood up, hands held from his side, fingers extended, trying to remember every surface he’d touched since he came in. “I can’t apologize enough, Dad. But I have to go.”

In the hallway men’s room, Shep sudsed his hands for minutes, and on up the arm, turning the taps on and off with a paper towel whose dispenser he had cranked with the tail of his shirt. He used the same shirttail to open the restroom door.

Y
ou asked—I should say demanded—that I come up here to visit Dad,” he charged Beryl after his twenty-minute shower back at the house. “Before I obliged, why didn’t you
tell
me he had one of those hospital infections?”

“What does it matter?”

“These superbug strains are
antibiotic-resistant
. I can’t be exposed to something like that!”

Beryl looked perplexed. “You’re pretty healthy. It’s mostly old people who are at risk. I can see being worried about Dad, but I don’t understand why you’re so worried on your own account. It’s a small risk to take for the sake of your own father.”

“Even if I didn’t come down with it, I could become a carrier!”

“Well, that’s not great I guess, but so…?”

“Glynis. Remember her?
My wife
. Glynis’s immune system is shattered. Something like
c-diff
could kill her.”

“Christ, you’re being awfully melodramatic.”

“I’ll show you melodramatic,” said Shep, and stalked back out to his car.

H
e arrived back home at 5:00 a.m. on Sunday, and took another shower. He threw his clothes in the washer and turned both wash and rinse temperatures to the maximum. He felt badly about trying to expunge any remnant of his own father’s person, but this was no time to be sentimental. He helped himself to a backup prescription for antibiotics that Glynis kept on hand for emergency infections, and popped two pills before curling on the couch downstairs for a couple of restless hours’ sleep. He was at war with himself. His stool wasn’t loose; in fact, he was constipated, and the bready fast food on the drive to New Hampshire should make matters worse. The idea of keeping a physical distance from Glynis was intolerable. But if there was any risk…

He couldn’t afford for his wife to be afraid of him; he was her primary nurse. Thus once Glynis woke, surprised to find him home so soon, he explained that after a long, fruitful but, for his father, tiring visit, he’d headed back last night to avoid holiday traffic. When he neither kissed nor touched her she didn’t seem to notice, though his standoffishness may have registered on an unconscious level. So he was especially pleased on her behalf that for once that afternoon she was expecting a visitor.

Petra Carson had stopped by more doggedly than most of his wife’s friends, in spite of the fact that Glynis’s old rival from Saguaro Art didn’t have a car, and had to take the train from Grand Central. She always insisted on a taxi to and from the station, too, mortified by putting Shep to extra trouble.

He didn’t mean to eavesdrop, but because of Thanksgiving Isabel hadn’t given the house its regular Thursday once-over last week. So once he led Petra up to the bedroom where Glynis was resting, he went back to cleaning the bathroom down the hall. (Glynis’s last enema had been messy.) Petra must have left the bedroom door ajar, since their conversation was audible even over the TV that Glynis kept on low now all day.

Shep had always liked Petra. Glynis might have found her colleague’s work glib and conventional, but the woman herself had a seriousness and social rebelliousness that he admired. (Her second marriage at forty-seven was to a boy of twenty-five.) Thus it wouldn’t come naturally to
Petra to observe her friend’s implicit Do Not Enter signs; they were, she would shrug, only signs. She put him in mind of Jed, Shep’s tear-away next-door neighbor in boyhood. They’d been exploring one afternoon, and came across a fenced field—what Hampsters called puckerbrush—with “No Trespassing” plastered all over it. “We can’t go in there,” Shep had said, and Jed said, “Why not?” Shep said, “It says, ‘No Trespassing,’” and Jed said, “So?” And lifted the wire. That little moment had been a revelation: when he ducked under the wire and nothing happened. Apparently rules have only as much power as you accord them. Well, Petra was a lift-the-wire type. Having advanced to the perimeter of her friend’s no-go area, she ducked right in.

“So what’s it like?” he heard Petra ask. “How does it feel? What do you find yourself thinking?”

“What’s
what
like?” Glynis was not going to help.

“I don’t know…Facing the inevitable, I guess.”

“The
inevitable
,” Glynis repeated sourly. “Are you not facing it, too?”

“Abstractly.”

“It’s anything but abstract.”

“Well, of course. And of course, yes, we’re all in the same leaky boat, I suppose.”

“Then you tell me
what it’s like
.”

“You sure don’t make it any easier, do you?”

“It’s not easy for me,” Glynis snapped. “Why should I make it easy for you?”

“I just don’t think we should spend this time—this limited time—talking about rivets.”

“That’s the way we spent the other time: on rivets. It was the same time—our time, our ‘limited time,’ all there is. If it’s wasteful now, it was wasteful then. So according to you, we should have been getting together all those afternoons to talk about death.”

“That might have been a different kind of waste.”

“Well, go ahead then. If that’s what you want. Talk about death. I’m all ears.”

“I…Sorry, I don’t know what to say.” Petra sounded embarrassed.

“I didn’t think so. Why should I know, then?”

When Glynis raised the volume of the TV Shep could no longer make out their conversation. He suspected that this pervasive belligerence, aggression, and at times overt hostility greeted many of his wife’s remaining visitors, which would obviously run some of them off for good.

When Petra emerged twenty minutes later, he invited her downstairs for coffee. She declined the coffee, but said she could definitely use a “debrief,” and collapsed onto the living room couch. He was glad she wasn’t calling for a taxi right away. Jackson had become so dark and intermittently silent and then explosive that Shep had cut a wide berth since that dinner. He didn’t have many people to talk to.

“God, it’s hot in here,” she said, flapping her shirt. “That’s why coffee is the last thing I need. What is it, eighty, eighty-five?”