Nevertheless, he was moved by the fact that they were all admitted for treatment, the Laundromat attendant and the Philharmonic conductor alike. He had faith that the Laundromat attendant, no matter how dim or surly or shiftless or readily replaced by another high-school dropout, did not receive appreciably less diligent care than the maestro. It must have been fifteen years ago when Shep was trimming a tree in Sheepshead Bay, and the chain saw had kicked to the base of his neck—much as that buzz-saw shaped burr had kicked to Glynis’s finger, but on a larger scale, and close to his jugular. The blood had been copious. He still had the scar. What he remembered most of all was amazement. Rapidly sinking into the early stages of shock, he could no longer trim this customer’s tree. He could not entertain the paramedics with interesting snippets from NPR. A man who had always measured his utility in the most tangible terms, he had rendered himself incapable of fastening the bracket for aluminum blinds or installing a double-glazed skylight. Yet total strangers had still hastened to press their clean towels against his wound, and other strangers had tenderly loaded his leaking body onto their stretcher. Some pragmatic side of him would have seen it as perfectly reasonable that at the average hospital admissions desk they would ask not only what drugs you were taking and were you allergic to penicillin, but what was your IQ and could you build a ten-story condominium; how many languages do you speak and when was the last time you did something nice: what good are you. Instead, astonishingly, they pulled out all the stops to stanch your bleeding, even if you were of no earthly use to anyone.
With multiple tubes extruding from under the sheet, Glynis took up a childlike amount of space under her bedclothes. She looked like a sack, like something discarded. According to Dr. Hartness, the night before they had gradually reduced the morphine drip, and removed the tube from her nose. The surgeon had warned that once she woke she would still be groggy and disoriented. Ashen, she seemed to be dozing. For once he gazed at his wife and failed to marvel that she was all of fifty years old.
Shep pulled up a chair, careful to keep the legs from shrieking. He sat on its edge. A mere elevator ride from the bustle of Broadway and its oversized crullers on carts, this was an alien world of stasis, where minimal pleasures were nearly always more appealing in anticipation than in receipt—a sip of pineapple juice, the Tuesday blancmange with strawberry sauce, a visitor with flowers whose sweet, penetrating reek would end up unsettling a delicate stomach. A world where oblivion was nirvana, where one was never allowed the hope of no pain but only of less. He did not want to be here so badly that it was as if he were not here. He yearned to sever those tubes with a mighty sword as he would have hacked her chains in a dungeon, to scoop his beloved into his arms with her gown trailing, to sweep her back to the bright, clanging, frenetic world of taxis, of hotdogs, of crack addicts and Dominican pawnbrokers, where he would rest his damsel’s pink bare feet to the cold concrete and she would once again become a person.
As he took the hand without the IV and warmed it with his own, her head lolled from the opposite side of the pillow to face him. Her eyelids fluttered. She licked her lips sluggishly, and swallowed. “Shepheeerd.”
Through the croak in a throat raw from intubation, she instilled his name with the deep erotic purr that had always stirred him, even when her intention was chiding. The eyes opened fully now and he recognized his wife.
It was she, though Glynis was not quite here. She had been on a long journey and had not, entirely, returned.
“How are you feeling?”
“Heavy … and light at the same time.” She sounded a little drunk, and seemed to be having trouble moving her mouth. He wanted badly to give her a drink of water, but she was forbidden. Nothing by mouth until her bowels were functioning again. “Wondering,” he thought she said, letting her eyes sweep the ceiling. “Everything amazing.”
Well, she certainly didn’t see the room as he did. “Don’t try to talk too much.”
“Dreams … So real. So long and complicated. Something about a silver tiara. It was stolen, and you helped me avenge—”
“Shh. You can tell me later.” She wouldn’t remember later. “Do you know where you are? Do you remember what just happened, and why you’re here?”
Glynis took a deep breath, and in her exhalation was a collapsing. A sag into the mattress. “I didn’t for the longest time.” Now her voice was all croak and no purr. “It was lovely, like running time backward. But it came to me. You wouldn’t think you could forget that you have cancer. You can, and that part is soft. But then there’s the remembering, and that part is awful. Like having to go through it all over again.”
“And by yourself, a second time,” he said. “You should never have had to hear the diagnosis alone, Gnu. I should have been with you.”
“No difference. Alone anyway.”
“No, you’re not.” She was.
“Surgery. Don’t worry, I understand, I’m not that out of it. That was the one consolation, when I remembered.” Another hard swallow. “Since I also remembered that they scraped it out.”
Not all of it, not by a long shot would not have made a therapeutic riposte. Still, she was more compos mentis than he had expected, just a little slurred, and he had promised the doctor that he would tell her. The surgeon was meant to stop by and speak to her later this morning. If Shep was going to break the news—gently, that was the conventional adverb, but there was nothing gentle about this news—he would have to do so during this visit.
“Gnu, the surgery was very successful. You’re stabilized and recovering well. There were no complications. Or, rather, there’s only one complication. That is, they—found something.” He went through his patter, so practiced from the phone. Less optimistic outcome. The same phrase.
“No ports” was all she said when he finished. “Thank God. I didn’t like the idea of them. I’d never say so to Flicka, but that plastic spout on her stomach has always given me the creeps. Like being half human and half … coffee creamer.”
He blinked. It was as if she hadn’t heard him. “Did you understand everything I just told you?”
“I heard you.” She sounded annoyed. “Different cells, no ports, chemo. We were going to do chemo anyway.”
Something had completely failed to register. Maybe the problem was the morphine.
Shep had taken the morning off, and stuck around to wait for the surgeon. Hartness was late, and Shep tried not to be angry at the man who had toiled so valiantly on his wife’s behalf. Still, the extra two hours would cost him part of his afternoon’s work. He could not afford many full days of absence. It was hard to keep up conversation, and as Glynis lapsed into a doze he got terrible coffee he did not want. Finally the surgeon strolled in, and Shep was able to watch the same drama from the outside, the same recitation about biphasic presentation, the same perfect absence of uptake from Glynis—no disappointment, no questions, no tears.
Dr. Hartness moved swiftly on to the bugle call. “But don’t imagine we’re throwing in the towel. We’ll put you right on Alimta. It’s a powerful drug. We’ll give it everything we’ve got. We’re planning to be very aggressive with this thing.” Aggressive was a word that the medical profession often imputed to the cancer itself, and the cooptation of the same adjective for its adversary once again invoked battle—with weather. With a snowstorm, a gale wind.
Chapter Eight
Popping Tylenol like Tic Tacs, Jackson was growing concerned that the antibiotics weren’t working. But this wasn’t the time to focus on his comparatively petty medical concerns, and he was grateful for the sense of proportion. It was Glynis’s second week in the hospital; out of intensive care and installed in a private room, she was now accepting visitors.
He’d racked his brains deciding what to bring. Shep said that her colon had finally kicked in again, and she was eating small amounts of solid food. Still, what did you bring someone recovering from major surgery, vanilla pudding? To protect her from infection, flowers were verboten. When Ca
rol had run up earlier in the day, she’d brought a warm zippered fleece that Glynis could wear in bed, in a rich red that favored her coloring—an inspired gift of which he was envious. At last he’d hit on a quart of fresh passion fruit juice. If nothing else, it sounded life-giving, and for once he was glad Park Slope had gone all snooty, chichi, and ridiculous; the stuff was available in the first Seventh Avenue deli he checked. Hell, there was no telling how many more visits he would make before this nightmare was through, and he was already running dry on ideas for presents. The pattern was sure to develop that the more she deserved them the less she’d be able to find the food, the books, the clothing, or the music any use.
It was easy to identify Glynis’s room; a hen party huddled outside the door. Bad timing. He hung back to collect himself, and to rearrange the drape of his trousers by sticking his hands in his pockets. These were the roomiest slacks he owned, from back when he’d weighed ten more pounds. He’d learned to walk while subtly poking the pockets forward from inside so that the fabric didn’t touch anything.
He recognized the lady prattling to the two younger women. Surely over seventy by now but wearing a heavily accessorized floral getup that announced loudly, I may be getting older but I still have my self-respect: that was Hetty, the mother. He’d met her once before, up at Shep’s, where Hetty had chattered at dinner with an exhausting vivacity. What had most impressed him in Elmsford was how she always had to be a-doing. Her host of involvements in Tucson ran from a campaign to keep illegals from getting driver’s licenses to more neutral fare like an antique-finishing class and yoga for the over-sixty-five. She put him in mind of that perplexing variety of high-school classmate who had packed out his leisure time with “after-school activities” every weekday; Hetty might as well have been attending band practice and running for vice-president of the Debate Club. He’d been unable to discern whether this frantic bustle of hers was what it claimed to be—an ardent determination to live every remaining day to the fullest—or quite the opposite: an evasion. An equally ardent determination to distract herself, from what only she could know, and thus a complete failure to inhabit her life in the scarcest respect. In any event, she was the kind of lady who’d be learning Hindu on her death bed, and the fact that now she’d never make it to Delhi to try out “Where is the train station?” would never enter her head.
However long ago, that evening was easy to recall, since Glynis had got so mad. Hetty had made some, to Jackson, pretty harmless remark that Glynis construed as putting this basket-weaving-class nonsense of her mother’s on a par with her own metalwork. Glynis had risen up and announced icily that she had a degree, thank you, citing the two museums that had added her pieces to their permanent collections and listing all the galleries that had shown her work, in New York City to boot—and not, by implication, in the no-account hinterlands of the Southwest. He remembered feeling uncomfortable. Glynis had been old enough to let the odd careless remark slide. Listing all those galleries one by one had turned her back into a little girl.
While he could see that over time that compulsive gushiness could grow wearing, Hetty Pike was nevertheless to the cold eye a rather ordinary person. Jackson was always amazed at the level of emotion that the commonplace shortcomings and piddling eccentricities of the most unremarkable character could rouse when that Jane Doe or Joe Sixpack just happened to be your parent. Granted Glynis and her mother were poles apart. A perfectionist, Glynis was reserved, hypercritical, and totally dark; Hetty was sunny, emotive, and not in the least concerned that the vase she pinched together in her pottery workshop came out misshapen and leaked. They didn’t look anything alike; Hetty was short, with a round, beaming face and fluffy, permed gray hair, while Glynis’s sharp, elongated features echoed the photos of her gaunt, lanky father. (Glynis had adored him. If nothing else, she may have held against her mother the fact that he, not Hetty, had tumbled off a mountain face in a rock-climbing accident some twenty years ago.)
Yet rather than shrug off the incongruity, Glynis let the fact that she and her mother were not the same, that she would never be known or understood or given the Good Housekeeping seal of approval, drive her insane. In middle age, she still wanted something from the dame, and he’d fought an urge at that dinner party to pull her aside and whisper in her ear to forget it. Hetty was a normal, limited woman who had probably been as good a mother as she knew how—meaning, your basic crummy one. So what? It was too late to be looking for something more. Besides, whatever Glynis craved—a host of trite abstractions like validation, recognition, and acceptance somehow failed to capture the nature of the lack—wasn’t ultimately within the power of any parent to bestow.
After all, Jackson’s own mom and pop were unpretentious folks who’d long run a secondhand furniture business from their garage. With his father’s bad back, he might implore them to let him load the van when they’d finally sold one of the heavier white elephants, but he sure wouldn’t head to Bay Ridge and eat reheated Marmitako—which sounded flashily ethnic, but was indistinguishable from tuna casserole when you made it with the canned shit—to feel better about himself. His sense of authority, of manliness, of forcefulness and surety was his responsibility, and that was why he’d taken action on his own account ten days ago. You didn’t wait around for anyone else to give you what you wanted; you went out and got it for yourself. That was self-empowerment, and that conveyed self-respect.
“Jackson Burdina!” Hetty waved and put her decorative tin on the floor, the better to clasp Jackson’s hand between both of hers, and she did not let go. A good memory for names probably came with the territory for a retired first-grade teacher, in which case his own had been added to a roster of thousands of six-year-olds. “It’s lovely to see you, but I’m so sorry for the occasion. You have children, too, so I’m sure you understand …” Her eyes welled. “This is the worst thing that can happen to a mother.”
“Yeah, it’s rough,” he concurred, wishing she’d let go of his hand.
Instead she pulled him over to the two women loitering on the sidelines. Presumably dragging them firmly by the hand was the way you introduced first-graders to their new little friends. “Now, I don’t think you’ve met my other two daughters. Ruby? Deb? Say hello to Jackson. He and his wife are very dear to your sister.”
He shook hands with both, marveling that Ruby, the middle sister, could so fantastically resemble Glynis and yet be so fantastically less pretty. Glynis was slim; Ruby was skinny. Glynis was stately; Ruby was gawky. The same set of virtually identical features were subtly repositioned in Ruby’s face to the younger’s disadvantage, and while you couldn’t call the eldest well endowed, at least Glynis did have breasts. Glynis dressed simple-but-elegant; Ruby’s straight-cut, overwashed black jeans and lank gray sweatshirt were simple-but-dingy. But the biggest difference may have been manner. Glynis had a sly aloofness that made her seem mysterious and almost regal. Ruby held herself at equal distance, but the effect was tight, stingy; she glanced too often at her watch, and tended to pace, as if this cancer thing had better get a move on because there was somewhere she had to be. Sure enough, they’d no sooner done the nice-to-meet-you when her cell phone rang. Frowning at the readout, she recited the credo of the contemporary busy bee: “I’m sorry, but I have to get this.”
The hospital didn’t allow cell phones, claiming that the signal interfered with equipment. (Total horseshit, according to Jackson’s Web searches on Flicka’s behalf. They just wanted to collect their whacking fees for bedside phones. But he’d never screwed up the wherewithal to thrust his research at a hospital authority. This manly-with-a-mouse but mousy-with-a-man habit was another thing that had to change.) So Ruby went down to return the call from the street, which left him with Deb, a plump, harmless-looking sort who radiated vacant good intentions. The clinging orange turtleneck and binding navy skirt of a matronly length weren’t doing her any favors. “I’ve been praying for Glynis ever since I heard,” she said. “Our whole church in Tucson is pr
aying for her. You know they’ve done studies. It works.”
Sure, it was unfair to discount all born-agains as automatons. But since when did he have to be fair?
“Now, we’ve discussed how to go about this, Jackson,” said Hetty, placing a hand on his arm. “Glynis is going to be very tired, and we don’t want to overwhelm her. I think we should go in one at a time, and try not to stay too long. Shep is visiting now, and if you can hold on, Jackson, we decided that Deb would go next, then Ruby, and then I can bring in her favorite cookies.” She might as well have been lining up the class for the water fountain.
Shep slipped out the door and met Jackson’s gaze with a private eye-roll. There’s nothing quite so foreign as other people’s families, and setting eyes on his old friend filled Jackson with that round, safe, grateful sensation of turning the corner and spotting his own house. “She’s all yours,” Shep told Deb and Hetty, and drew Jackson down the hall.
“Man, that wasn’t easy,” he mumbled. “Persuading Glynis to see family when they’ve flown all the way from Arizona. It was touch and go whether I’d just have to drive them back to Elmsford again. She feels like shit, and doesn’t see why she’s got to go out of her way to make other people feel better. This visiting thing … I mean, I’m sure she’ll be glad to see you. But to Glynis it’s an imposition. She gets pissed off.”
“Well, how would she feel if nobody came to see her?”