Sure enough, he could hear the girl’s nasal screech from the back of the house while he was still out on the stoop. (“No, I didn’t wear the Vest, I hate it, I hate everything, all this stuff about how great it is at least to be alive, I don’t know what you see in it!” Brief lulls were doubtless filled in with Carol’s ritual assurance that she shouldn’t talk like that, that “life was a precious gift,” sentimental homilies guaranteed only to further their daughter’s rage.) He was still feeling afloat and unfocused himself; he’d been warned not to drive, and had ignored the injunction. The sedative seemed to have brought on an after-high, for when he’d filled the tank over on Fourth Avenue his chatter with the attendant had been manic even by his own standards.
“Why don’t you just let me cut out? It’s not worth it!” Flicka wailed from the kitchen.
Walking in on this foofaraw confirmed his conviction that, Christ, he’d earned doing one thing for himself, hadn’t he? Just one?
“I don’t want your stupid scrambled eggs!” Flicka was wheezing when her father entered the room. “I don’t want to spend all Saturday afternoon with my speech therapist, and occupational therapist, and physical therapist. I’m going to die anyway, so just let me watch TV! What does it matter?”
Carol had grabbed the girl’s hair and was squeezing more Artificial Tears in her eyes. (One of the first signs of FD, that the baby couldn’t cry, was something of a sick joke; any infant with a future like this had every reason to weep.) As Flicka was rasping, “Just leave me alone! Let me fall apart in peace!” she started to hyperventilate.
Granted, it wasn’t always easy to distinguish the symptoms of FD from the side effects of the meds; nausea, dizziness, tinnitus, canker sores, backaches, headaches, fatigue, flatulence, rashes, and shortness of breath came with both territories. But the nature of this episode grew clearer when in the midst of her gasping Flicka started to retch. The dry heaving was excruciating to watch, somehow more so than before the fundoplication, when she’d have spewed what little she’d ingested of Carol’s unwanted plate of scrambled eggs in a six-foot projectile plume. At least proper vomiting had seemed to offer relief. The retching was ceaseless and unavailing, as if an alien embryo in her guts were clawing its way out.
“It’s a crisis,” Carol told her husband grimly. Most wives would make such a statement in the spirit of hyperbolic melodrama; for Carol, the verdict was coolly clinical. “Thank God you’re back. Hold her.”
Jackson clutched his tiny writhing daughter to his chest. After wrestling with the button and zipper with some difficulty from behind, Carol pulled Flicka’s jeans down, hastily coated her own middle finger with Vaseline, and slipped a tiny tablet the color of marshmallow peanuts as far as she could up her daughter’s ass. Without taking a reading that they didn’t have time for, it was always tricky to discern whether Flicka’s blood pressure was soaring or plummeting, but Carol made an educated guess at low—the girl’s skin was clammy, pale, and cold—and administered a pink tablet of ProAmatine in the same rude fashion. Flicka’s whole digestive system would already have shut down, and even meds administered through her g-tube wouldn’t absorb.
“Now, remember—” said Carol.
“Yeah, yeah, I know,” Jackson interrupted. “We gotta keep her up-right for the next three hours.” Carol never gave him any credit. He knew perfectly well that lying down after ProAmatine could send Flicka’s blood pressure from knee-high to through the roof.
All this time, Heather had been mooning on the sidelines looking envious, and envy in these circumstances made Jackson worry that she was far dumber than she tested.
For good measure, Carol inserted yet another tablet of diazepam, and within a few minutes the convulsive retches in his arms spasmed farther apart. Fortunately, Carol had crammed Flicka full of Valium fast enough to avert a full-blown crisis—the human equivalent of a hard-drive crash—which would have sent them straight to New York Methodist. However, the rescue did cost the cake, which was now filling the room with the sharp, not altogether unpleasant smell of charred chocolate.
“I apologize for the store-bought cake,” Carol said at the door. “We had a mishap with the home-baked one.”
Carol never used Flicka as an excuse, a discipline Jackson admired. Nor would either of them mention how much they’d be out of pocket for the sitter. Flicka having been volatile, they’d called Wendy Porter, their usual registered nurse, who was FD au courant. Hell, they’d have cancelled altogether if it weren’t for Flicka. “I like Glynis,” she’d stressed while they hovered, making sure that she didn’t lie down. “She never treats me like an idiot. She asks me about my cell phone collection, and not only about my stupid FD. She can be, like, sort of wicked, too, which I like tons better than all that goo-goo sweetness I get from those fawning therapists. And now she’s sick. Sicker than I am, even if that seems totally impossible. She’ll be looking forward to tonight, and if you suddenly don’t show up she’ll be crushed. So if you stay home on my account, I swear I’ll swallow some milk the wrong way and give myself pneumonia.” Blackmail, but it had worked; Flick didn’t make empty threats.
Jackson bustled into the kitchen with an overkill of booze—two bottles of wine, two more of decent champagne—meant to impose festivity on an occasion that didn’t easily pass for celebration. Marking the end of an era, this was the last gathering of their traditionally garrulous, fractious foursome that wouldn’t be undermined by dietary restrictions, fatigue, pain, or disappointing blood test results, and the very end of any era was really the beginning of the next one.
Shep had taken the same obfuscating approach to the food. Enough appetizers crowded the table on their enclosed back porch to feed a party of twenty-five: hummus, grilled chili-shrimp on skewers, out-of-season asparagus, and scallops wrapped in bacon; the dim sum, which didn’t quite fit in, had clearly been provided in order to employ Glynis’s forged silver chopsticks. The windows were lined with tea lights. Glynis came downstairs draped in a floor-length black velvet number, which matched Carol’s glittery jet cocktail dress; between the candlelight and the women’s attire, the atmosphere on the porch was that of a séance or satanic ritual. When Jackson wrapped their hostess in a fervent embrace, his fingers sank alarmingly into the velvet; that was a lot of fabric and very little Glynis underneath. Her shoulder blades were sharp as chicken wings. That was no size in which to undergo major surgery, and now he got it about all that food.
“You look fantastic!” Jackson cried. She said thanks with girlish shyness, but he had lied. It was the first of many lies to come, thus another reminder that tonight marked more beginning than finale. Glynis had applied more makeup than usual; the blush and rich red lipstick were unconvincing. Aging anxiety was already etched into her face. Nevertheless, she was a tall, striking woman, and this was the best she was liable to look for a while. That it could well be the best she would look again, ever, was a thought he tried to block.
They settled into caned armchairs while Shep fetched champagne flutes. In the olden days, meaning six weeks ago, Glynis would have hung back on the sidelines conversationally. Wised up to the fact that sparse comment carried greater weight than garrulity, she was the sort who let everyone else argue forever over details, and then made the one sweeping pronouncement that brought the fracas to a close. But now her bearing was regal, as if she were holding court, Queen for a Day. In turn, he and Carol were solicitous, careful to stop talking as soon as she opened her mouth. They let her lay out the procedure scheduled for Monday morning step by step, though they’d already got the whole lowdown from Shep. If Glynis was the center of attention tonight, it was the kind of attention that anyone of sound mind might gladly have skipped.
“At least I got contacting Glynis’s family over with,” said Shep. “Telling her mother was a trip.”
“She’s such a prima donna,” said Glynis. “I could hear her bawling through the receiver from the other side of the kitchen. I knew she’d hijack my drama into her drama. You’
d think she was the one who had cancer. She even managed to make me feel bad that I was making her feel bad, if you can believe that.”
“Isn’t it at least a relief,” Carol said tentatively, “that she cares?”
“She cares about herself,” said Glynis. “She’ll milk this for all it’s worth with her book club—you know, the terrible wrongness of a child falling ill before the parent, et cetera, et cetera. Meanwhile, my sisters are saying all the right things, vowing to visit, but they’re mostly glad it’s not them. Maybe I’ll luck out and Ruth will send me some scented candle she got on a free offer from MasterCard.”
There was a harshness about Glynis in the best of times, and Jackson wondered what reaction her family might have had that would have pleased her more.
“And how was telling your kids?” asked Carol.
Glynis visibly flinched.
“More difficult,” Shep intervened gently. “Amelia cried. Zach didn’t, and I wish he had. I think he took it harder. I hadn’t imagined it was possible for that kid to get more closed up, more burrowed into his room. I’m afraid it’s possible. He just—shut down. Didn’t even ask any questions.”
“He already knew,” said Glynis. “At least that something awful was afoot. That I slept too much and my eyes were often red. That we whispered too much, and stopped talking when he walked in.”
“I bet he thought you were getting a divorce,” said Carol.
“No, I doubt that,” said Glynis, taking her husband’s hand and meeting his eyes. “Shepherd has been very tender. Very, obviously tender.”
“Well, I hope a little affection isn’t so rare that it’s what set off Zach’s alarm bells!” said Shep, looking grateful but abashed. “You know, this room thing the kid’s got going … Nanako, our new receptionist, told me about these Japanese kids who never leave their rooms at all. What are they called, something like haikumori? The parents leave meals outside the door, collect the laundry, sometimes empty bedpans. The kids won’t talk, and never cross their thresholds. Mostly hole up with their computers. It’s a big phenom there. You should check it out, Jacks, right up your alley. A whole subculture of kids who say, fuck you, I’m not interested in your shit, leave me alone. We’re not talking dysfunctional eight-year-olds, either; lot of these opt-outs are in their twenties. Nanako thought it was a reaction to Japan’s hothouse competition. Rather than risk losing, they refuse to play. The indoor version of The Afterlife—without the airfare.”
In widening the discussion to Japan, Shep implied that it was now all right to talk about something else besides disease. Even Glynis seemed relieved.
“Those hiki-kimchi, or whatever,” said Jackson. “Precocious moochery is what that is. You gotta give these guys credit for figuring out so young that when you refuse to take care of yourself, someone else will come along and roll your sushi for you.”
“But it’s hardly an enviable life,” said Carol. “Not what any of us would want for Zach.”
His wife’s persistent sincerity sometimes grew trying. “Hey, Shep, I been thinking about that problem of my titles not being sufficiently flattering to my would-be public.” Jackson plunged a triangle of pita bread into the hummus with the pretense of an appetite. “So check this out: Just Because You’re a Quailing, Lily-Livered Twit Who Folks Smarter and Gutsier Than You Are Bleeding White Doesn’t Mean You’re Not Still a Nice Person.”
It went over well.
“Speaking of being bled white,” said Glynis, “Beryl came over the other night. Can you believe she expected us to put up the entire down payment on a Manhattan apartment?”
“Why not throw in a yacht while you’re at it?” said Jackson. “Christ, that woman is Mega-Mooch. Ever notice how these arty bohemian types think we owe them a living? As if we’re all supposed to feel so grateful that they’re creating meaning and beauty for us poor uncultured Neanderthals. Meantime, they’re always shaking a tin can in our faces—for another government grant, or a Midtown penthouse courtesy of Meany Capitalist Older Brother.” He and Beryl had met once: oil and water. She thought he was a heartless right-wing kook, and he thought she was a soft-headed liberal pill. Whenever Shep’s sister came up in conversation, Jackson couldn’t contain himself.
“But, sweetheart,” said Carol, “I thought Mooches were supposed to be ‘smarter and gutsier.’ I thought you admired them. In which case, you look up to Beryl, right?”
“I prefer folks getting away with murder who know they’re getting away with murder. Instead Beryl has that attitude like she’s the victim of some terrible injustice. As if the world needed another documentary. She should turn on the box. They’re chockablock, and most of them bore the shit out of me, frankly.”
When Jackson trailed their host to offer a hand in the kitchen, Shep remarked, “Say, you all right? You’re walking funny.”
“Aw, just overdid it in the gym. Pulled something.” The line had worked on Carol.
Dinner was lavish, with a roast and a profusion of side dishes. Worried about interactions, Jackson made an initial effort to go easy on the wine, but it seemed that every time he reached for his glass it was empty again. At length he gave up and gave in. This was a special night, and not to enter into the spirit of the occasion would have been churlish. The evening had revved into high gear, albeit with a jittery underpinning, everyone laughing too readily, too hard, and too long. At least boisterousness beat moping.
“Been following the Michael Jackson trial?” Shep brought up.
The self-styled “King of Pop” was being charged one more time for messing with little boys at his sick-fuck fun-land ranch. “Yeah, the prosecution’s making a mess of it,” said Jackson. “He’ll get off.”
“I can’t follow the details,” said Carol. “I get too distracted by that face—all the plastic surgery. His face is always the real story for me. It exerts a warped, train-wreck fascination.”
“You know, it used to be that when you had mental problems, they stayed in your head,” said Shep. “Now we all have to look at them.”
“I know what you mean,” said Glynis. “It’s like now everyone wears their neuroses on their sleeves. We used to be surrounded by a bunch of passably normal-seeming people who went home and peered miserably in the mirror. Now you walk down the street and women have breasts the size of Hindenburgs. Men in dresses on hormones are wearing push-up bras, and you can tell from the fold in their Lycra tights that they’re all carved up with some grotesque gash of a vagina. It’s like having to live in other people’s dreamscapes.”
“With Jackson—I mean, Michael Jackson,” said Carol. “What breaks my heart is the shame. How somehow he’s been made to feel that being black is humiliating, something to be effaced.”
“At this point in time,” said Glynis, “I have no understanding of going in for surgery, for anything, if you don’t have to.”
“The guy’s got money,” said Jackson. “If what he wants to buy is looking like Elizabeth Taylor, that’s his business.”
They all looked over at him as if he’d just grown three heads. He held up his hands. “I’m just saying, what’s wrong with trying to make something you dream about real?”
“Because it doesn’t work,” said Shep.
“That’s not how you felt about The Afterlife,” said Jackson. “You wanted to make that real.”
“We’re talking about hacking up your body, not moving to a new house,” said Carol. “It’s obvious, for example, that every surgery and skin-blanching process that ‘Wacko Jacko’ has subjected himself to has only made the man more unhappy. Every disappointing nose job is one more reminder that he doesn’t only hate his race, and his gender, but himself.”
“It’s like sexual fantasy,” said Glynis. “I don’t want to get into particulars—”
“Damn!” said Jackson.
“But have you ever tried acting them out? It’s flat. It’s messy or awkward and self-conscious. When you make it real, it doesn’t get you off. Fantasy works better if it stays
in your mind. Let it into the world, and it comes out like some gory, misshapen afterbirth. And Shepherd,” Glynis paused, taking a forkful of green beans, “I don’t think The Afterlife was any different.”
Jackson worried they were getting into touchy territory, but Shep was used to taking gut punches with the smallest hoof. “Maybe,” was all she got out of him, and he asked how she liked the almonds on the beans. At least Glynis was making an effort to eat, which clearly made the guy so ecstatic that he couldn’t have cared less what she said.
It wasn’t until they’d pushed back their chairs from the groaning board that someone brought up Terri Schiavo, the brain-damaged patient on life support in Florida whose bloated face had lolled on the lead story of virtually every TV newscast for weeks. Her husband wanted to withdraw her feeding tube, while her parents were determined to keep alive what was no longer a daughter, or even the family goldfish, but closer to an azalea bush.