“It hasn’t let up so far. But it’s so irrational, Shepherd. I’m about to be gutted like a fish, and all I can think about is a pinprick.”
“Maybe,” he proposed tentatively, “you focus on the irrational fear to distract you from the rational ones.”
She slipped a hand on his thigh, the touch so welcome it gave him chills. “You may not have a college education, my dear. But sometimes you’re very smart.”
Merging onto the Saw Mill River Parkway, Shep wondered at how yesterday there seemed nothing to say, and now there seemed too much and too little time to say it. With foreboding, he could see how this vacant, wasted leisure followed by a desperate, too-late cramming-in could easily prove a paradigm for their future.
“I don’t think I ever told you this,” he said. “I can’t remember what I was watching—maybe one of those forensic shows, like CSI. A medical team was doing an autopsy. The coroner said he could tell from her corpse that the victim had done a lot of sit-ups. I’ve no idea if the scene was realistic, but it’s stuck in my mind ever since. This idea that even after you’re dead they can tell if you went to the gym. Sometimes when I’m working out, I have a vision of having been in an accident, and the doctors are admiring my abdominal muscles in the morgue. I want credit for doing my crunches, even as a stiff.”
Glynis laughed. “That’s hilarious. Most people worry about clean underwear.”
“I guess that’s all by way of saying—well, these surgeons must have to operate on all kinds of people who look like shit. Old saggy people, fat people, patients who are totally out of shape. I’ve no idea if it bothers them, or repulses them, or if it’s all the same to them. But your body is so slender. Perfectly proportioned and well toned.”
“Lately I’ve missed a few step aerobics classes at the Y,” she said dryly.
“No, a lifetime of self-respect—it doesn’t go away. The point is, I’m a little jealous, someone touching you like that. Looking at you, even looking at parts of you that I’ll never see. But I’m proud, too. If it does matter to them, those surgeons are operating on a beautiful woman, and they’ll feel privileged.”
While keeping his eyes on the road, he could feel her smiling beside him, and she took his hand. “I don’t think they look at bodies the way we do. And I don’t know if internal organs are ever ‘beautiful.’ But that’s really sweet of you to say.”
He parked, and saw her to Reception, touched and relieved that Glynis seemed to want him with her for as long as possible. She wasn’t a woman who easily admitted to need. He filled out the forms, pleased to have finally memorized her Social Security number. She signed the release. They waited together. Their silence was no longer empty, impotent. It was thick silence, deep and velvety silence, the air between them like warm water.
He rose with her in the elevator, introduced himself to the nurses, folded her clothes as she changed, and helped to tie the gown. He wasn’t very useful in tugging up the beige elastic stockings, but he tried. Then they waited, again. He was glad for the waiting; he could have waited forever. At last Dr. Hartness arrived. He was a wiry, efficient man who could easily have been mistaken for an accountant; even his hair was dry. Shep sat at her bedside while the surgeon explained the procedure again, employing the droning, unemotional tone of voice in which one might read aloud the complicated instructions for assembling flat-pack furniture. Now accustomed to the surgeon’s slide-part-A-into-slot-B approach, Shep didn’t take offense, since none was meant. In fact, despite all the disparaging things that people said about doctors, this one seemed personable and decent.
“Please?” Glynis pleaded once Dr. Hartness had left. “See me through the sedative?”
“Of course,” he said, and turned her head. “Don’t look over there. Don’t think about it. Just look at me. Just look into my eyes really, really hard.”
Shep kept a hand on her cheek, holding her gaze, careful to keep his own eyes from darting even briefly to the anesthetist as she filled the syringe. And then he told his wife that he loved her. The effect of the injection was almost immediate, and these would be the last words she heard.
He had infused the ritual with as much feeling as three words could bear. Yet he wished that by convention their invocation was rare. Between spouses, the declaration was too often tossed off in hasty, distracted partings, or parlayed lightly to round up banter on the phone. He might have preferred a custom that restricted such a radical avowal to perhaps thrice in a lifetime. Rationing would protect the claim from cheapening and keep it holy. For were he to have been doled out three I-love-yous like wishes, he would have spent one of them this morning.
After leaving his cell phone number at the nurses’ station, Shep emerged from the lobby onto Broadway, blinking in the sharp, white winter sunlight. He’d given no thought to how he might occupy the rest of the day, aside from a vague ambition to get some coffee. Glynis wouldn’t be wheeled in right away; after the sedative, she still had to be put under general anesthesia, and then for at least four hours she’d be in surgery. Thereafter, she’d be conked out on morphine for more than a day. Again he yearned for protocol. He couldn’t see the utility of a civilization that had an etiquette for sending greeting cards in December or placing the fork to the left of a plate, but as for what to do while your wife was sliced open you were on your own.
Yet it took only one café con leche in Washington Heights to realize that there was a protocol. It was blessedly specific, and so iron-clad that it might have been chiseled into the Constitution: In America, if you had a job that provided even the most miserable health insurance and your wife was very ill. If you had been frequently absent from that employment, and were likely to miss more days still. If your employer was a dickhead. Then when your wife went under the knife, and at every other opportunity as well?
You went to work.
Jackson seemed surprised to see him, but only for a moment; Jackson was well versed in the unwritten Constitution, too. Within minutes of Shep’s arrival, Mark, the Web designer who’d been especially caustic about Pemba, came up to his desk and squeezed his shoulder. “Be thinking of you today, bro,” he said. Other co-workers smiled encouragingly, particularly those who’d worked under the old Knack regime—what few were left. Even Pogatchnik showed, for him, unusual sensitivity by at least making himself scarce. So: Jackson had told the staff. Shep might have been affronted—the guy had overstepped the mark, and for all Jackson knew his friend was experiencing a violent sense of privacy—but found himself grateful instead. For he felt anything but guarded: raw, unprotected, his very insides exposed to the air, as if he had no skin. Jackson would have meant the announcement as a kindness. Shep would receive it as a kindness.
Phoning disgruntled customers, Shep might have expected to be irascible, to chafe at the inconsequence of every grievance. To the contrary, each feebly glued tile of linoleum seemed to matter, because everything mattered. He’d been so thankful for the smallest act of consideration from total strangers this morning: a nurse’s application of an ice chip to his wife’s cracked lips. Consideration for other strangers seemed fitting repayment. He let the complainants go on at length, expressing his dismay that their workmen had failed to give satisfaction, and promising to redress the problem without delay. When a woman in Jackson Heights objected to Handy Randy’s employment of Mexicans, insinuating that they were all illegals—which, let’s face it, they probably were—he didn’t impugn her illiberality, but explained patiently that while their Hispanic handymen were hardworking and competent, their English was often poor. They didn’t always grasp what was required. He would ensure that a fluent native speaker was sent to fix her doorframe, until the screen door swung to with a graceful click.
Lonely, he was glad of the clients’ companionship, glad for the contact, for the sound of the human voice. Customer relations as video game: focus, on anything but Columbia-Presbyterian. He was unusually aware of his control over the quality of a few moments in these customers’ lives—lives
, after all, comprised of moments, and only of moments. Single-handedly, he might redeem five minutes of their day. It was no small matter. The redemption carried forward into the future, too, by providing a remembered encounter with a helpful, receptive man who had sympathized with their troubles, and endeavored to resolve them. He could make jokes that were glorious for the very fact that he need not have made them. How odd that at every point of contact with other people, meaning dozens if not hundreds of times a day, he had always wielded this power—to elevate the quotidian to the playful, the humorous, the compassionate—and so rarely made use of it.
He worked through lunch and called at two. She was still in surgery. He called at three. She was still in surgery. At four as well. He told himself it was good that the doctors were being thorough. Yet that was too long to lie with parts of you gaping open, the parts that you didn’t think about, that you didn’t want to think about, that you took blissfully for granted. By now customer complaints were failing to divert his attention, and more than once he had to ask a householder to repeat the problem, the address, the date of the job.
The fact that Glynis was in surgery for nearly twice as long as scheduled enabled Shep to put in a full workday—which, with his thin lifeline to insurance, was important even if it shouldn’t have been. By the time he got Dr. Hartness on the phone it was close to six. Jackson had hung about, and was obviously listening in.
“Well, there’s at least that … I see. And what’s that exactly? … What does that mean? … No, with me I’d rather you were frank.… Tonight, would there be any point in my—? … No, I’ll do it. Better it come from me.… Dr. Hartness? You’ve worked very hard, and very long. You must be exhausted. Thank you for trying so hard to save my wife.”
When Shep hung up, he could tell from Jackson’s stricken expression that his last sentence lent itself to misinterpretation. “Her vital signs are good, and she’s resting well,” Shep assured his friend. “But, ah.” He remembered Glynis coming down the stairs with that hand wrapped in red, the starkness of her message. This was another time to be factual. “It was worse than they expected. They found what’s called a ‘biphasic’ patch. Epithelioid cells, but with sarcomatoid mixed in. Like fudge marble ice cream, he said. The biopsy didn’t detect it. These sarcomatoid cells are evil fuckers, and—I guess the direct application of chemo doesn’t work with them. They didn’t install the ports. They got everything they could, which isn’t the same as everything, I’m afraid, and sewed her back up.”
“This is—bad,” Jackson surmised.
“This is bad.”
Shep would get plenty of practice repeating the same summation that evening. He went home and told his son. Zach had only one question. His father dodged it: “That depends on how she responds to the chemo.” Zach was having none of that. He demanded a number. So if the boy wanted to know, he should know. He took in the information like a pool swallowing a stone: after a little bloop, Shep watched it sink from view, and felt it settle on the bottom with a muffled clunk. It seemed to make sense. The boy did not seem shocked. His father anguished about what kind of a dreadful world Zach must have routinely inhabited where this sort of thing could seem normal, or even expected.
At least from now on the two of them would be occupying the same universe. It was a universe that was falling apart. This was a purpose children serve that Shep hadn’t appreciated before: when something terrible is happening to your wife, then something terrible is happening to them also. You share the same terribleness, which for outsiders is mere misfortune. This mere-ness that he sometimes sensed in others had grown intolerable, which was why until today he’d avoided any discussion of Glynis’s condition at work.
They ate together, which was unheard of. Zach offered to watch TV with his father, which was really unheard of. Shep apologized that he had to make phone calls. As they rinsed the dishes, he was pleased that, despite his good-natured permission, his son declined to disconnect the fountain over the sink.
He retired to his study. He compiled a list on the computer. He would need the list again, for other turning points, other news, and he did not want to admit but he did admit what news the list would finally be useful for delivering. He noted cell numbers as well as landlines, copying from his wife’s address book. He separated the contacts into “Family,” “Close Friends,” and “Not So Close,” thinking as he dropped this and that listing into the latter category how mortified some of these people would be by the designation. He was more inclined to put into the “Close Friends” list the few of her companions who had remembered to call on Sunday and wish her good luck.
He dialed methodically. The hardest, Amelia, he forced himself to call first. He was halting, unclear, and she kept interrupting: “But she’s okay, right? She came through okay, right?” He remained on the line longer than he could quite afford to, making sure that she understood, and realizing at last that she had understood all too well to begin with and was waiting to be told something else. Getting his daughter off the phone was as painful as bedtimes of yore, when she’d wrap herself around his calf, and he’d have to prize his little girl’s fingers from his trouser leg.
Yet soon his delivery of the details grew fluid: “‘biphasic,’ which means less aggressive epithelioid cells are mixed with the more …” His voice was calm. If the measured tone was misinterpreted as lack of proper feeling, he didn’t care. When pressed for prognosis, he settled on the expression “a less optimistic outcome,” which still had the word optimistic in it. They all had access to the Internet, if they really wanted to know.
This was part of his job now: disseminating information, orchestrating visits, protecting her from visits. He would be moonlighting from now on as a cross between an events planner and an executive secretary. He found himself instinctively distrusting the people he contacted who were the most lavish in their outpourings of sorrow, making nonspecific offerings to help “in any way they could.” In his experience, the folks who were the most articulate about their feelings were the least apt to express them in any form other than more words. Beryl, for example, waxed especially eloquent, launching into reminiscence about marvelous times with the two of them that were either exaggerated or apocryphal, and extolling the character of a woman whom she did not like. In embarrassment, he’d cut her off, explaining that he had other calls to make. By contrast, his father said simply that he “would be praying for the whole family.” While Shep might sometimes feel impatient with hackneyed Christian catchphrases, this time he was admiring of a religion that provided an idiom of well-wishing both sincere-sounding and succinct.
For more and more he was appreciating the limits of the verbal. The worse Glynis felt, the more what mattered wasn’t solicitous conversation, but a hand on her shoulder, a plumped pillow, the television remote from the table, or a cup of chamomile. So he was far more moved on the phone by silence, by sighs, by palpable awkwardness. By people like their next-door neighbor Nancy, an Amway zealot with whom Glynis had almost nothing in common, or so you’d have thought. As for the dismal discovery in surgery, Nancy had honestly nothing to say and so didn’t try to say it. Moreover, Nancy did not make a hazy offer of “help” that he could never call in. She asked when Glynis would be receiving visitors, when she would start taking solid food, and whether Glynis liked homemade buttermilk biscuits. She had brought over a cheese-and-broccoli casserole on the weekend, which is what he and Zach had polished off between them for supper. Shep was already getting the feeling that, in a crunch, the people you thought of as your “close friends” were not necessarily concomitant with the ones you could count on.
To his surprise, Shep slept deeply. To his shame, being in bed on his own was a relief. The simplicity of it, the undemanding expanse of empty sheet. He hadn’t realized the strain of another body beside him, rotting a little more every minute from the inside out. The energy it sapped from him, not being able to protect her. You wouldn’t think that something you couldn’t do and were not doing would t
ake any energy at all, but it did.
Two mornings later, Shep’s trepidation about seeing his wife mirrored in some respects his dread of her return home the Night of Pemba, that distinctive horror of telling someone something that they did not want to hear. Nuttier was his nervousness that they might have changed her or exchanged her for someone else, removed something or inserted something in their knifing about that would make her unrecognizable to him.
But then, the anxiety was not entirely out of order. He did not know what character was, or under what degree of duress it broke down and adapted to a new form that bore no resemblance to the person “Family,” “Close Friends,” and even those “Not So Close” imagined they had known. It was even possible that “character” and its more superficial cousin “personality” were niceties, decorative indulgences of good health, elective amusements like bowling that the sick could not afford. Given his own robust constitution, he was forced to reference farcically minor ailments like colds or flu. He conjured the dullness of color, the irritating tinniness of birds and music, the unsettling pointlessness of all endeavor whenever he felt ill, as if he himself had remained the same and it was the world around him that had sickened. His spirits sagged, his appetites flagged, his jokes evaporated. Thus, by introducing a minimally toxic virus like adding a squeeze of lemon juice to a cup of milk, a lusty, upbeat, good-humored man was soured into a glum, indifferent pill. So much for the durability of “character.” Multiply that effect by a thousand times, and it was little wonder that he feared for who, or what, lay in intensive care at Columbia-Presbyterian.
Shep was probably not alone in hating hospitals, in visiting someone he loved and still fighting an urge to flee. It wasn’t just the smells, or a biologically instinctive impulse to avoid disease. If illness was the great leveler, the problem was to which level. Dressed in identical flapping gowns that gaped humiliatingly at the back, patients along the hallway were deprived of all that made them distinctive on the outside—accomplished, interesting, or useful. Sucking up fluids, drugs, and nutrients, producing nothing but effluvia in return, they were uniformly burdensome. Glimpses into wards at the sleeping lumps, the blank gazes at televisions, induced the impression not that all of these people were equally important, but that they were equally unimportant.