Returned to the kitchen, he resumed the subject they’d left dangling. “I know it’s tedious to fill the time on the phone. But your mother just wants to check up on how you’re feeling.”
“I have cancer! I feel like shit! What’s to feel?” Glynis’s breathing had gone raspy. The anemia gave her trouble catching her breath.
“She’s trying to be a good mother,” said Shep.
“She’s trying to seem like a good mother. It’s theater, so she can tell all those biddies she hangs out with how attentive she’s being, so they’ll feel sorry for her. Not for me! For her. She calls every day to make herself feel better.”
Shep almost said, well, what is wrong with that, but held his tongue. Glynis didn’t want other people to feel better. “Jackson’s been a little weird lately,” he brought up, propping her feet on some pillows; elevation kept the swelling, if not down, under control.
“How so?”
“Hard to say. Distant?” He massaged her instep. The bloated toes stuck out individually, like tiny tied-off balloons. “Some days he makes himself scarce at lunch, and we’ve always spent the lunch ‘hour’ together. He seems distracted. Like when we do walk to Prospect Park, he runs out of stuff to say.”
“That’s a new one.”
“Maybe he’s having a hard time knowing how to be consoling, about you.” Her ankles had been so slender! He wanted her to gain weight, but not in her feet. “He seemed to handle the situation okay when you were still in the hospital, but you said mostly with those set-piece diatribes—”
“They were merciful. They got me out of having a conversation—Shepherd, I don’t want to seem ungrateful, but I can’t feel that.”
“He wasn’t dealing with what was happening,” said Shep, leaving off the foot massage with a pat that tried to disguise that he was hurt. It made no sense to feel hurt. “Emotionally.”
“Jackson is the most cut-off person I know. I’ve no idea how Carol stands it. He’s the kind of person who’s highly entertaining in groups. One-on-one, with me at least, he can’t communicate ‘please pass the salt.’ But for you two it must be different.”
Shep could feel the weariness in her observations. Glynis was an astute analyst of character. No artistic hermit, she had an extensive network of friends, and one of their favorite marital pastimes had long been the luxurious, sometimes cruelly accurate parsing of, say, the way Eileen Vinzano overcompensated for feeling overshadowed by her husband’s prominence as a roving foreign correspondent for ABC News by praising Paul in company to the skies. “Rings a little hollow, doesn’t it?” Glynis would discern slyly once their dinner guests had left. But nowadays Glynis had to put so much energy into expressing any given view that there was little left for the opinion itself. Throughout the average day now she doubtless thought a host of things that she simply couldn’t marshal the wherewithal to articulate—to go through the arduous process of selecting words and putting them in the right order; to open her mouth, force air through her throat, and vibrate her vocal cords. Shep was sympathetic, but also felt cheated. Within fearfully short order, his wife’s musings might no longer be infinitely on offer, but could instead constitute a finite and rather paltry collection of quotes, like one of those slight, undersized volumes of wit sold at bookstore checkouts around Christmas.
“It used to be different, with Jackson and me,” said Shep. “But lately, even the diatribes—”
“He’s so angry, but I’m not sure about what.”
“I don’t know if it’s called ‘anger’ when you’re enjoying yourself so much.” He poured her a glass of soda water she’d not asked for, spritzing it with a wedge of lime. He could not bear empty time, when he did nothing for her. “But these days there’s an edge on him. He’s not having fun.”
“It’s a barrage, a”—the words were hard to find and heavy to lift—”broadcast. A force field, to keep other people at bay.”
“I keep going back to when I visited him in New York Methodist, when he had that ‘infection’ and had to be put on an antibiotic drip. ‘An infection’—he never said of what. I thought that was weird. You usually have an ‘infected something,’ right?”
“I don’t know; I’ve been in the hospital three times now with ‘an infection.’ “
“But that’s because you’re susceptible to every passing bug. Besides, don’t you spend a lot of time with visitors talking about the details of your treatment? We didn’t. I mean, we didn’t talk about what was wrong with him at all. And he missed a day of work last week, then never explained why.”
“I forgot to tell you, Petra came by today,” Glynis grumbled. She had finished with Jackson.
“Oh? How’d that go?”
Emptying the dishwasher, Shep braced himself. Now living on the Upper West Side, Petra Carson had been Glynis’s classmate at Saguaro Art, and was his wife’s oldest friend. The relationship of the two metalsmiths was delicate at the best of times. Like his sister-in-law Ruby, whose sheer industry he had always admired although never to Glynis’s face, Petra was a hard worker, and her output was prodigious. Diligence more than gift had probably explained her rise in the ranks: her frequent admission to touring national craft shows, her supportive New York gallery. That the make-or-break attribute in lofty creative fields might be no different than the single most vital ingredient that had lifted his own pedestrian small business off the ground—humdrum perseverance—was a tactless intuition he had kept to himself.
Glynis disparaged Petra’s work as safe and cookie-cutter. Unlike Glynis, Petra did not press against the limits of “craft” and yearn to join the art world proper. She made jewelry, period, for people to wear. Another tactless observation? Shep liked that. He liked functionality. He was a handyman. He had always cherished the fact that his wife made objects not only attractive but utile, which should have made them more valuable, not less. Thus he’d no patience for the loopy distinction between art and craft that put the latter at a commercial disadvantage. If you made a clay pitcher that held water, it was virtually worthless. Bang a hole in the bottom and it was “art;” you could charge an arm and a leg. How fucked up was that?
One would think that life-threatening illness would have finally neutralized this friendship’s ongoing tension over which metalsmith was the more talented. (Glynis thought the answer was obvious.) While neither contested who was more successful, they’d been engaged in a tacit running feud for decades over whether a certain someone deserved her acclaim. Surely in the face of cancer Glynis should have called a truce, or even, in a burst of enlightened generosity, at long last given her colleague a little credit. (Okay, Shep caught himself, don’t be fanciful.) Yet as far as Glynis was concerned, the rivalry was as ferocious as ever. She was loath to demote her oldest-friend-cum-nemesis to one more bland benevolent who tended the sick.
“Would you please stop fiddling about?”
Mystified, Shep froze with a spatula poised in midair. “I’m only—”
“I spend all day doing nothing. It would comfort me to be with someone else doing nothing, too.”
He shrugged, dropped the spatula in the drawer, and pulled a chair up to her love seat. It was strangely difficult to do as she requested. He never stopped these last few months, what with all the errands on top of work, as well as trying and usually failing to find time to look in on Zach, whose withdrawal made it all too easy to ignore him. Simply sitting made Shep restless, claustrophobic. Relentless occupation was a therapy of sorts. Aggressive helpfulness disguised the fact that in any important sense he was helpless.
“Petra did nothing but moan, if you can believe it.” Glynis struggled up on the pillows, which sent her into a coughing fit. Obviously her friend had offended her, since rare was the visitor who didn’t. Umbrage was her drug of choice. “Oh gosh,” Glynis rasped, “she has to fly to LA this week to go to the opening of her show. Isn’t flying just awful these days; she used to look forward to flights, and now she dreads them—the security and the lines. And show
openings are so dreary, all the brown-nosing compliments and then nobody buys anything, so it’s obviously empty flattery. That was just the beginning, too. No matter what she talked about, everything she had to do, the endless polishing, the shipping and insurance, the dinners with gallery owners—it was all terrible, terrible, one big burden of the put-upon, when I can’t even cross the street! I mean, the nerve! By the end of it I could have punched her in the nose.”
“But … don’t you think it’s hard for people to tell you about the good things in their lives, when your life is so difficult?”
“She has no idea how lucky she is! Everyone around me seems to be feeling sorry for themselves, over nothing!”
Tempting Glynis to put herself in anyone else’s shoes these days was nigh impossible. To be fair, compassion took energy. Then again, so did rage. “She’s embarrassed, Gnu,” he pressed quietly. “She’s going to instinctively cast everything she has to do as disagreeable, so it seems like something you wouldn’t want to do, since you can’t do it. That’s not because she feels sorry for herself, but because she feels sorry for you.”
“Oh, fuck you and all your understandingness. You could use a little understandingness on me!”
Glynis cried easily. He stooped by her blanket and wiped the tears with his forefinger. While he was at it, he dabbed a tissue around her nose, to remove the last crusts of blood. “Your friends love you and don’t always know how to show it.”
“I’m sick of it.” She pushed his handkerchief away, and fought again to sit more upright. “This parade of visitors. The cousins, the aunts, the neighbors we hardly know. The friends from fifteen years ago crawling out of the woodwork—as if there weren’t a reason we haven’t got together in all that time: we don’t like each other much. But no, they all want their audience. They’ve all prepared it ahead of time, their little presentation. The things they wanted to be sure to remember to say. Honestly, they clasp their hands as if they’re in church, or giving a book report. I’ve heard how much other people luuuuuuuv me until it’s coming out of my ears! To tell you the truth, at this point I might actually appreciate somebody walking through that door and saying, ‘You know, Glynis? Honestly, I’ve never really cared for your company. Honestly, we’ve never got on. I’ve never seen the point of you,’ or even, ‘I hate your guts.’ That would be refreshing. Anything but these nauseating speeches. Glynis, you’re so talented. Glynis, you’ve done such beautiful work. Glynis, you’ve raised two wonderful children. I don’t even know what they’re talking about. Yes, maybe they’re wonderful children to me, but to other people Zach and Amelia aren’t wonderful, they’re just my kids. And the upchucking reminiscences. Glynis, do you remember when we went on that skiing trip to Aspen and you got lost. Glynis, do you remember when we were kids and you dressed up like a gold prospector from the Wild West. Half the time I have no recollection of this supposedly precious memory whatsoever. What am I supposed to say? What do these people want from me? Yeah, of course I remember, that sure was funny, or scary, or dumb? Ha-ha-ha? And I luuuuuuv you, too? I don’t love most of the people who come by here. Half the time I don’t love anybody, not anything or anybody, not even you!”
Shep knew better than to feel wounded, and he stroked her thinning hair. Glynis had an aversion to gushiness, which she associated with Hetty. But something else was exercising her tonight that he didn’t quite understand. Whatever it was, she needed to get it out of her. Like the first couple of days after chemo, he would hold her over the toilet until the last dribble stringed to the bowl.
“All this—sentimentality!” she went on, waving her hands. “It’s just like my mother. They’re trying to make themselves feel better. They’re just making sure. They’re just making sure, so that later, they don’t have to feel guilty. They did their duty. They said their little piece. They can go back to their happy dinners and happy holidays and happy kiddies and happy biking around Tucson’s cycle paths. Back to their tennis and wine and movies with a clear conscience.”
“You don’t … want them to have a clear conscience?”
“I’m trying to get well. I’m not shooting up that poison every two weeks from sheer perversity, but to get well. And these people—they’re reading me my own obituary, Shepherd! Some afternoons I don’t even feel I’m still in the room. It’s like they’ve come to view the body, like I’m lying in an open casket. Here I’m throwing up, and breaking out in these disgusting rashes, and last week I could hardly swallow because of those sores at the back of my mouth. It’s true I look like a cadaver, but I’m still here and I’m going through all this shit to try and stay here. It doesn’t help to have a line of assholes trailing through my bedroom throwing dirt on my grave!”
“Okay,” he said, taking her head to his shoulder. “Now I see.” In all these months, this was as close as she’d ever come to saying the D-word.
He coaxed her into eating something—mashed potatoes, he proposed, you can eat a little mashed potato, surely. Soothing, smooth. She acceded only because she knew he would keep badgering, and after getting all that bile out of her system she didn’t have the energy to resist him. He peeled and boiled two large bakers, and then mashed them with half a cup of heavy cream and so much butter that it nearly broke the emulsion. He slipped out some leftover roast chicken that was optimistic, but there was no harm in trying. Not hungry himself, he still took out two plates, serving himself a generous helping in a simulation of a hearty appetite. She wouldn’t eat on her own. He took care to add a sprig of parsley and wedge of tomato for inviting color. With his first forkful he made mmm-ing noises, just as he had when getting their kids to eat something new and suspicious when they were small. Alas, Glynis looked at her plate as if presented with a freshly swirled patty of bathtub caulking when she wasn’t in the mood for home repair.
“Try a few mouthfuls,” he encouraged. “Maybe a little piece of chicken.”
The amount of potato she skimmed onto her fork would not have fed a hamster.
Shep himself used to have one of those garbage-can metabolisms, shoveling in two-inch stacks of pastrami for lunch with nary a care. But that was in the days he was out on the job, pounding nails, climbing ladders, and hefting fifty-pound bags of cement. Once he assumed a largely managerial role at Knack, he’d started laying on the pounds, and discovered his vanity. Since then, he had joined Glynis in watching the waistline, and in so doing managed to mollify her long-standing resentment that he could eat like a horse while to maintain her figure she had to eat like a sparrow. Thus they’d stocked one-percent milk and those nondairy spreads that tasted like motor oil. Like most of their set in middle age, for years they had both regarded the food in their refrigerator with the wary hostility of grudging hosts forced to billet enemy troops. Since he always felt he could stand to drop a pound or two, his every mouthful had long been subtly tainted with self-reproach, and as for Glynis—well, in this department women were worse. So he felt he could speak for the both of them in having more or less forgotten that food was not purely a temptation to defy. Yet overnight his fears had perfectly inverted. He was watching his wife evaporate before his eyes.
These days when he went shopping, he checked the calorie count on the label, and if it wasn’t high enough he put the product back. He spurned “Healthy Choice” soups for chowders he could spike with half-and-half. The fridge was stuffed with sour cream, cheese (soft ones like brie, as greasy as possible), pâté, and happy discoveries from the bakery section like pecan or mud pie, which ran to six hundred calories a slice. The freezer was stuffed with ice cream—never frozen yogurt but the real thing: rocky road or banana split. The pantry was packed with shortbread and bottles of fudge sauce; it hadn’t seen a rice cake or water biscuit in months. There was, in retrospect, an animal rationality to maximizing fuel per dollar, as through all the years previous their lavishing just as much money on bags of air—puffed corn, pillows of baked chips—had been contrastingly insane. Yet if the new permissiveness had a dreamlike q
uality of fantasy come true—behold, you may now eat the richest, sweetest dishes that you please, and the more the better—the caloric carte blanche was tragically mistimed. Finally his wife could eat all the foods she had denied herself for decades, and they all repulsed her. Hell, if he were really a loyal husband, he’d be forcing these mashed potatoes through a hose into her mouth, as if plumping a duck for foie gras.
“You remember how on research trips we’d go on ten-mile walkabouts all day, taking notes and photographs, all on two cups of coffee?” Shep recalled. “Resisting the pad Thai or the samosas from street vendors, turning a blind eye to all those pastries in Portugal? Man, what a waste. If I have a single regret, it’s ever having let you skip lunch. You’d have had a few more weeks’ leeway this spring, and at least in those days you might have enjoyed the stuff going down.”
“You wouldn’t have wanted a fat wife, would you?”
“Yes. Right now? I would love a fat wife. I wish you were a blubber ball. I wish you were enormous. In fact, from what I know now, I don’t understand why doctors don’t advise everybody to lay on twenty extra pounds while they’ve got the chance. I might not advocate outright obesity. But there’s a reason for fat. It’s a resource.”