“I’ll show you melodramatic,” said Shep, and stalked back out to his car.
He 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?”
“Glynis gets cold. How about a beer, then?”
“That’s the ticket, thanks. But Jesus, keeping the whole house this warm must cost you a fortune!”
“Yes, it does.” He was always impressed when anyone acknowledged the side of this nightmare that was supposed to be incidental.
He fetched them each a Brooklyn Brown Ale. Petra wasn’t a bad-looking woman for over fifty, even wearing a button-down burned with acid holes and baggy jeans splashed with flux: studio togs. Like so many metalsmiths who fashioned adornments, she never wore jewelry. Her hair was frazzled, her nails jagged and black. Her palms were creased in crimson, from the polishing compound called rouge—the closest thing she wore to makeup. Petra was one of those people who didn’t seem to care about her appearance, or beyond that; who didn’t seem aware of being seen. A rare quality, and refreshing.
“So—can she hear me down here?” Petra asked quietly.
“No. The chemo has done a number on her hearing.”
“She’s not looking good, Shep.”
“It’s getting pretty grim,” he admitted.
“I guess I want to apologize. I should really apologize to Glynis, but I don’t think she’d let me. She won’t let me talk about anything, really, and when I try, she gets mad.”
“It’s not only you. And if you think that’s mad, try mentioning Forge Craft.”
“What’s up with that asbestos suit, anyway?”
“We’ve had lots of foot-dragging delay tactics from Forge Craft; only to be expected. But what’s keeping the case from going forward right now is Glynis. She has to give a deposition, and then be subject to cross-examination from the company’s lawyers. A couple of times the deposition has had to be rescheduled because it was too close to chemo and Glynis felt too sick. But a couple of other times she seemed well enough—or as well as she was going to get—and she still insisted on putting it off.”
“I can understand procrastinating. It doesn’t sound like a lot of fun. All that pressure on her to remember everything just so, to not get mixed up, when she’s talking about thirty years ago. Funny, though, how clearly she seems to recall those products we worked with. I mean, we were in the same metal classes. To me, the tools, the supplies, and the materials are all a blur. I sure as hell don’t remember any tiny printed purple flowers with green stems on the heat-proof mitts, that’s for sure.”
“I don’t want to ruin your day, but theoretically you could have been exposed to asbestos at Saguaro, too.”
“Yeah, that’s occurred to me. Except that I have this weird memory …”
“Of what?”
“Oh, never mind. It can’t be right. I must be confused. Glynis obviously has keener powers of recall than I do.” Petra took a long slug of her beer, and slid the bottle in front of the Wedding Fountain. For a long, awkward beat only the trickle of its sluices filled the stifling, overheated
air.
“Listen,” she began. “I—I said I wanted to apologize. I meant for not coming up here more often. For not being in better touch.”
He braced himself for the usual slew of justifications: it’s been a terribly busy time for her, she had these demanding commissions that had to be produced on deadline …
“I have no excuse,” she said instead. “This has been a slack year. I make my own schedule. I could come up any time, and all the time. And it would obviously be no skin off my nose to call all the time, too. I just don’t.”
“You’ve been in better touch than most of her friends.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. I’m surprised to hear that. She’s always inspired powerful loyalty. She’s a weird one, your wife, but that ferocity she’s got, that wickedness, that slashing fuck-you defiance—which she still has, even if lately it’s making her a pain in the butt—well, a lot of people adore it. Feed off it, even.”
“For a while,” said Shep, “when the visits were subsiding, she still got a fair amount of email. You know, how are you holding up, we’re thinking of you. Personally, I think it’s a medium for cowards. But at least those two-liners were better than nothing. Now I retrieve her email for her, and it’s all spam. Except for the daily call from her mother, the phone can go quiet for days.”
Petra put a hand to her forehead. “I have a Post-it note on the lid of my computer. It says, ‘CALL GLYNIS,’ in caps. I pasted it there back in February. A couple of months later I added some exclamation marks. They didn’t make any difference. I’m used to that note now. It was chartreuse, but it’s faded now, and a little dirty. Part of the landscape. I know what it says, I know why it’s there, and I think about calling Glynis all the time, but I don’t. Instead of calling I feel terrible about not calling, as if my stupid feeling terrible is doing Glynis any favors.
“Yeah, sure,” she went on after chugging half the beer. “I come up once in a while, and call once in a while, but when I do I have to put a gun to my head, and I don’t understand that. I know she’s sometimes been prickly with me … You know, she just hasn’t produced very much, which I can’t explain, either, since she’s really talented. I guess I should have told her so to her face at some point, but she’s a highly original designer, and her execution is actually better than mine—that is, even better, since I’m no slouch—because she’s such a perfectionist. I know she resents how much I sell, and I know she thinks it’s crap, too. Well, I don’t think it’s crap, so that’s okay. I know my stuff is mainstream, and that’s why it sells, too. So that’s caused a little friction. But, hey, I’ve always enjoyed our friction. We’ve had an energy together. I’ve loved getting into it with her, over the whole craft-versus-art thing, or even, I don’t know, whether roasted radicchio is disgusting (which it is; it turns a hideous shade of purple-brown). I’ve never avoided her company before. Why am I not a better friend? Now, when she needs me more than ever? I should be up here every week, or practically every day! She’s dying, isn’t she?”
Shep sat back with a jolt. He wasn’t used to having that question put so squarely. “Probably. Don’t tell Glynis.”
“She has to know. She has to know better than anybody.”
“‘Knowing’ is a funny thing. She refuses to know it. When you refuse to know something do you have to know it first? Or can you unknow things? She never talks about it.”
“Not even to you? I find that incredible.”
“Maybe there’s nothing to say.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Doesn’t she ask how you’ll manage without her? Whether you’ll stay in Westchester once Zach’s out of the house? I know you hate it here. Or how you feel about getting married again? How she feels about that? Does she want a funeral, and what would she like it to be like? Does she want to be buried or cremated? Is there any paperwork to take care of while she’s got the chance to leave things in order? Is there anyone she’d like to leave one of her pieces, or would she like me to try to get her body of work—such as it is—into a gallery or museum?”
“Glynis doesn’t regard any of that as her problem. As for leaving things neat and tidy, I think she’d rather leave everything a big mess. As retaliation. She’s spiteful, you know that. It’s charming, actually. Besides, maybe she understands death better than we think. That is, if she’s not here, I’m not here. Westchester isn’t here. If Glynis dies, everything dies. Why should she care if I move or remarry when I no longer exist?”
“But she loves you.”
“The love dies, too. Sometimes I think she’s not being evasive, or lying to herself, or living in a fantasy world. Sometimes I think she’s a spiritual genius.”
Petra laughed. “You’re a very generous man.”
“Yeah, well. That’s one more thing that Glynis could never stand about me.”
“What’s the prognosis, then?”
“Her doctor claims not to believe in prognoses. But according to my Web research … Well, I suspect she’s right on schedule.”
“Which means?”
“That you’re right. That you should probably try to visit more often.”
The next evening, while making Glynis another fat-max-out dinner in the usual optimistic quantities and taking care to keep washing his hands, Shep considered Amelia. Of the long list of neglectful characters in this drama, their own daughter may have been the most disappointing. It was a rare business for Glynis to be more forgiving than Shep, but he himself could not readily overlook Amelia’s behavior, which Glynis called understandable and Shep called appalling.
Granted, Amelia had finally returned home again in August, with the backseat of her compact piled with groceries. She was technically present in the house for the better part of a day, but spent most of that time preparing an elaborate meal of cannelloni (she even made the pasta), a fancy Italian bread salad that demanded plenty of chopping, and chilled parfait glasses of zabaglione. Making the family a complicated dinner from scratch seemed like a generous gesture. But Glynis had recently started the Adriamycin, and her anti-nausea drugs were only so effective. So she couldn’t manage much of the meal. The timing was bad; she’d been up most of the night before, and the preparations took so long that once they finally sat down to eat Glynis had trouble keeping her eyes open. Worse, something about the lavish exercise had seemed diversionary. Amelia intently stirred and diced and whisked the hours away, while Glynis faded in and out on the love seat, apologizing that she couldn’t be much help. Surely his wife would have been far more pleased had Amelia instead shown up with a frozen creamed chicken from Swanson and spent the whole day propped on the other end of that love seat, talking with her mother.
By contrast, with no further prompting from his father, Zach had got into the habit after school of drifting into his parents’ bedroom and stretching out next to his mother. Shep didn’t think they talked much. She’d be watching the Food Channel, which bored Zach senseless. Nevertheless, that was once more how he’d found them when he came home from work tonight: Zach’s eyes calmly trained on a recipe for “Everything-Bagel Coleslaw” while he lightly held his mother’s hand. Shep was very proud of his son.
When Zach drifted into the kitchen for a sandwich, Shep asked, “So how was school?” ashamed of resorting to a question that he’d hated being asked as a kid himself.
“It sucked,” said Zach, avoiding eye contact. “It sucked yesterday, and it’ll suck tomorrow, so you can stop asking that.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t have any choice.”
“Yeah, you said that, too. So give it a rest.”
Reluctantly, Shep had slipped into his son’s room shortly before the fall term started to inform the boy that they would have to withdraw him from his private school. Sudden relocation for his junior year meant separation from his friends, more restrictive electives, larger classes, and less luxurious facilities. Getting it all over at once, Shep added that they wouldn’t be able to finance a fancy private college, either; the boy should consider a state
school, and even there he’d have to apply for financial aid and take out some student loans. At the time, Zach had allowed himself one outburst, never repeated. When his father explained that their remaining funds had to be reserved for his mother’s medical bills, the boy exploded, “What’s the point? She’s going to die anyway. So what are you buying? At least with an education you get your money’s worth.”
Their sixteen-year-old hadn’t meant to sound heartless. He was his father’s son. His reasoning had been eminently sensible.
“By the way,” said Zach, nodding at the rosemary chicken thighs that Shep had just pulled out of the toaster oven, “Mom says no chicken. She’s sick of it.”
Shep took a deep breath. He’d still not caught up on sleep, what with merely dozing yesterday morning, after fifteen hours of driving. He was tired. But among the many rights he had abdicated since January was the right to be tired.
He put the chicken aside to cool. What Glynis was and wasn’t sick of changed on a dime, and by tomorrow the chicken might appeal. He found some ground sirloin patties in the freezer and carefully defrosted them in the microwave on 20 percent power, turning them after every sixty seconds. He fried the meat. She liked it rare.
He arranged Glynis’s tray. Trying to make the spread more tantalizing, he picked some sprigs of ivy from the porch creeper and put them with some water in a hand-painted crystal vase from their trip to Bulgaria. He delivered the tray, then retrieved his own plate to eat in the chair beside her. He wondered idly if Petra was right, that he should be aggrieved that his wife didn’t ever ask about his plans after—and then he stopped. After what? How could they ever talk about “after” when they never got to the “what”?
Glynis was once more glued to the Food Channel. It was what she kept on most of the time now. He might have found her fixation on cooking shows more encouraging had the amount of food she watched not been inversely proportional to the amount she ate.
“You know what floors me,” she said, not yet touching the food, which would soon get cold, “is the way people expect me to have some kind of answer. As if I must have discovered the Big Secret, and I’m supposed to come across with a blinding vision, a cloud-parting revelation from on high. Shit, on top of chemo, and chest drains, and MRIs, I’m supposed to part the waters for everyone else. It’s fucking unreasonable. It’s outrageous, really. I mean, what a burden to dump on someone who already feels like cat puke: What’s the meaning of life. How have you changed. How does everything look from there. Now that you’ve seen the light, tell us what’s really important. Christ, I’m sick, I’m not running an ashram. Just like my mother, everybody wants something from me. And then when I don’t come across, I’m a big disappointment. I’m made to feel inadequate just because I can’t crawl to the bathroom for an enema, choke down fifty pills on the hour, and recite the Gutenberg Bible at the same time.”