So Much for That

  This was as close as she’d come to discussing her conversation with Petra. “I can see how it might seem like an imposition,” he said. “But I can also see how people might think you could tell them something. About what it’s like to face down … something they never have.”

  “Well, they’ll have to get their fucking salvation somewhere else. The Church of Glynis Knacker is closed for refurbishment.” Finally she took a bite. “What did you do to the rice?” she asked irritably, as a chirpy girl on TV cracked a raw egg onto a steak tartare and made a joke about salmonella.

  “I cooked it in chicken broth,” he said. “I thought that would make it more nutritious.” Substituting broth for water was an idea he’d picked up from the Food Channel.

  “Tastes awful. I don’t like it.” She pushed the plate to the edge of the tray. “I’d rather have plain.”

  “All right,” he said patiently, picking up the tray. “I’ll make some plain, then.”

  He left his own meal to get cold. Downstairs, he scraped the offending rice back into the pot. He boiled more rice. When the rice finished steaming, he allowed it to rest, the way it said to in The Joy of Cooking. He placed pats of butter over the top—half a stick or more—then fluffed the grains with a fork. He microwaved her plate, again at 20 percent power to keep from overcooking the beef, and returned to the bedroom.

  She took one bite of the new rice and chewed for a long time. That would be all she ate of the rice. This was par for the course. Lately she was prone to make very specific and sometimes obscure requests for a dish that she was craving, and nothing else would do. He always fulfilled her wishes. The last request was for Chinese sesame noodles, which absolutely had to be from Empire Szechuan in Manhattan. Fetching the take-out on the way home from work had cost him two hours in rush-hour traffic. She’d eaten one bite of the noodles, too. He thought he understood. The idea of food grew ever more enticing as the reality of food grew ever more vile.

  “You don’t think I’m doing this right, do you?” said Glynis, once she’d shoved the barely touched plate to the far edge of the tray a second time.

  “Doing what?”

  “You know,” she croaked. “I’m supposed to be gracious. Philosophical. Kind. Loving and magnanimous and brave. Think I don’t know the drill? I’m supposed to be like that little girl in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. What’s her name. Nell. Selfless … schlock.”

  “Nobody’s asking you to do anything or to be any particular way.”

  “Bullshit. You think I don’t know, but I know. What you think. What Petra thinks. What everyone thinks, when they think about me at all, which is,” she coughed, “hardly ever. On top of everything else, I’m supposed to have cancer well.”

  “Just getting through the day is having cancer well.”

  “Oh, what a load of crap. That’s one of those—soft—blah—lines. I can’t stand it. I feel as if I’m trapped in a Top Forty by the Carpenters. Look at Petra. She used to fight her corner. Now she comes over and it’s like having a visit from a vanilla pudding. I can say anything. Your work stinks. You’re a hack. She just takes it. What do you people think I’ve become?”

  “Sick, that’s all. That means it’s not you but everyone else who’s supposed to be kind. Gracious. Like you said.”

  “Kind? It’s not ‘kind’ to treat me like some—evil queen who’ll cut off your head if you don’t always tell her she’s the fairest in the land. And you’re the worst. You never get mad at me anymore! You don’t call me on anything! I can hurl any abuse I want, like Linda Blair spewing green pus. All I hear back is that’s lovely green pus Glynis, now why don’t you wait while I wipe this off and then I’ll plump your pillows. You’re so endlessly fucking nice. It makes me sick. All the niceness, it makes me even sicker. You’ve always been a pushover. But now you’re well on your way from worm to grub.”

  In sloshing her hand across the tray on “grub,” she upset the vase with the ivy. Its neck shattered against the plate. The water spilled into the food and over the sheet. Shep put his own plate aside. He nimbly picked the shards of glass from the bed and then from the carpet. “I’ll get you some fresh sheets,” he promised.

  “Look at you! Now you’re literally on your knees! What’s wrong with you? Why don’t you say, ‘Glynis you stupid cunt’? Why don’t you say, ‘Glynis clean it up yourself’? I just called you a grub! What do I get in response? I’ll get you some fresh sheets. You’re not even a grub! A grub has more guts! You’ve turned into some kind of—amoeba!”

  He stood and picked up the tray. “Glynis, you’re tired, that’s all.”

  “Tired, I’m always tired! So what?”

  There was rice on the sheets. Though they were fresh from two days ago, drying them would not suffice. He would have to wash them. “I don’t know what you want from me.”

  “That’s what I mean! It’s always what I want. Don’t you want anything anymore? You’ve—disappeared! You’re not even there. You’re a service provider. You could be replaced with a good Japanese robot.”

  “Glynis. Why are you trying to hurt me.”

  “God, that was a relief. Just a tiny glimmer of self-defense. Just a smidgeon. A soupçon. A pinch.” She flicked a grain of rice on the sheet with her thumb and forefinger but couldn’t marshal any propulsive strength, and the grain stuck to her finger. “But to answer your question? I’ll hurt you because you’re the only person I can get my hands on. And maybe to check if you’ve got any feelings to hurt.”

  “I have lots of feelings, Glynis.” Yet his delivery was stoic. With the many subjects she avoided—her future, not to mention her lack of future—he’d often felt deprived of all that she didn’t tell him. So perhaps she might also sense and resent all that he didn’t tell her.

  “You ask me what I want?” she snarled. “I want someone who wants. You never even fuck me anymore.”

  He was surprised. “I’ve assumed you weren’t up for it.”

  “Screw what you think I’m up for! Want something for yourself!”

  “All right,” he said. “I’ll try.”

  “More of the same. Compliance. So you will ‘try’ to ravish me. You will ‘try’ to rape me, in the same spirit you will ‘try’ to get me more cranberry juice. Compliance, nothing but compliance! Do you think that’s sexy? All this nauseating goodness. It’s no sexier to me than Jackson’s sniveling defeatism is to Carol.”

  He was not sure how to manage this. She was in a very volatile humor. He did not want to make everything worse. But if he tried too hard not to make everything worse he’d put his foot in it with his very carefulness and make everything worse. “I’m supposed to feel bad for being too good?”

  Though the very tentativeness of his tone might have inflamed her further, she shook her turbaned head in what looked like pity. “Look, you’re amazing. The tirelessness. The patience. The unflagging devotion. Never a harsh word. Never a complaint. Working at that shitty job and caring for me morning to night—or more like night to morning. Any day now I expect to see your photograph on the cover of Time. But I don’t want a paragon, I want a husband. I miss you. I don’t know where you went. I think you’re the same man who announced a little less than a year ago that he was moving to East Africa with or without me. Where did that guy go, Shepherd? I want a human being! I want a man who has limits! Who’s sometimes cranky, who sometimes feels resentful, if not homicidal. A real man who at least occasionally gets pissed off!”

  He thought hard. “I got pissed off with Beryl.”

  “Twenty years too late, too. But I mean me. I want you to get pissed off with me! I refuse to believe that all this schlepping and fetching and schmoing is not driving you crazy!”

  “All right.” He was still standing, holding the tray—regrettably, a pose of servitude. “I didn’t like it very much—” He would have to start again. Glynis was right. The very vocabulary of such discourse was vanishing from his head. “I was annoyed when you asked for different rice.”

  ??
?Bravo,” Glynis taunted.

  It was hard to remember how people talked to each other, well people, spouses. How he used to talk to Glynis. “I was annoyed because I knew that if I went to the trouble of making another pot you wouldn’t eat more than a mouthful.”

  “That’s right.” She did seem strangely gratified, and all he’d had to say was that he’d been put out. “And that’s all I did eat, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes. And the rice made with broth—I’d noticed the preparation on TV. I’d remembered to buy the broth at the A-and-P. I was only trying to make the rice a little more interesting, and better for you. Instead of thanking me, you punished me. You said the chicken-broth rice tasted bad. That annoyed me, too. Because the real story is that everything tastes bad. The real story is that instead of making rice at all I could have mixed up a fresh batch of cement. It’s all cement to you, and that isn’t my fault. It would make a big difference to me if you were sometimes a little more appreciative of how hard I work to make you comfortable and to … to keep you alive.”

  “There now,” said Glynis. “Was that so hard?”

  Shep surprised himself. He started to cry. He had not cried since the night he read his wife’s prognosis online.

  He probably hadn’t contracted c-diff, and sometimes the risk of doing something is exceeded by the risk of not doing it. So he put the tray on the floor. He crawled onto the bed, lying on the wet part of the sheet. He rested his head on his wife’s shrunken chest. She stroked his hair. She was probably not feeling very well—and that would be, as ever, a gross understatement. But for the first time since their delusional dinner at City Crab, he had the impression that she was happy. It had never occurred to him: that one of the things a woman “made comfortable” day in and day out might most have missed was doing the comforting.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The New York Times sat once more crisp and unopened on the kitchen table. They had a prescription—subscription, Glynis corrected herself, as if it mattered. But no one read the paper these days, least of all Glynis herself. It sat every morning in front of the same chair, where Shep ritually placed it when he brought it in from the front porch. So its content was an emblem of change, “news,” but the object itself was an emblem of nothing happening.

  Blue. The plastic bag the paper came in was bright cobalt blue. The fact that The New York Times plastic bag was blue shared the same level of importance as the stories on its front page. That had been one revelation, insofar as there were any: everything was equal. There were no big things and little things anymore. Aside from pain, which had assumed an elevated position of awesome sanctity, all matters were of the same importance. So there was no longer any such thing as importance.

  An experiment. Sitting in front of the paper. Like in the old days, when she’d also have sipped a cup of coffee. (Ugh—how possible, ever? Ugh.) Cannot retrieve old days. Thinking of step aerobics at the Y: Worse than coffee. How possible, ever? Ugh.

  Hard to sit up. Hard to see print. Keeps sliding. Not problem with vision, really. Eyes still work—one of only parts of body that work. Eyes focus, she commanded. For a moment the blurred print stood still. “Study Finds No Link Between Low-Fat Diet and Cancer or Heart Disease.” Huh, she thought weakly. There would have been a time she’d have been annoyed; all that watery cottage cheese, the bluish skim milk that turned her coffee gray: a waste. “Curfew Quells Three Days of Sectarian Rioting …” Iraq. Or it could be somewhere else and who gave a shit. She might once have made distinctions, but now all wars were the same. Background noise. There were always wars and you couldn’t stop them so you shouldn’t bother to try. If one stopped another would start up somewhere else, so they might as well keep fighting where they were. It was a little mystifying to Glynis how people ever got so exercised about anything that it would actually merit leaving the house.

  Incredibly, she had once sat in this chair without fail every morning and turned each page of the A section. Always looked at the Arts section, too, looking for reviews of shows by people she knew (in the hopes the reviews would be nasty—which presumably she should feel bad about, but she didn’t). Clipped recipes from the Dining section on—Tuesdays? Wednesdays. By contrast, her husband had rarely given the paper more than a cursory flip. So over dinner (Before Dinners, food-as-pleasure: data no longer available; pleasure: data no longer available), she would regale Shepherd with the outrageous details from an article about …

  What? What had Before Glynis once decried? Impressed with herself, she thought: the plans to rebuild the World Trade Center. How some committee was ruining the design by that guy … Cannot remember architect’s name. Rather, cannot care enough to remember architect’s name. (Another revelation: it had never been clear to her before that thinking was an effort. That thoughts required energy. It turned out that very few thoughts, once laboriously formulated, proved worthy of that energy. Even this one: she could have lived without it. And that was the standard for everything now: mere living, aliveness. Yet it was beginning to slip through her mental fingers what being alive was exactly. It was entirely possible, for example, that aliveness was primarily defined by the capacity to experience pain, in which case it was befuddling why the state was so highly prized.)

  That’s right; there had been a particular evening. She had grown animated. Previously, she and Shepherd had attended the public exhibit of competing designs for the twin towers’ replacement. Of the seven models on display downtown, Shepherd had, typically, preferred a squared, conventional skyscraper affair. Glynis had adored this other one, by what’s-his-name, some foreigner. She could almost conjure the image: a dynamic fractal assemblage—complex, crystalline, like exploding quartz. No minor civic miracle, at length her own favorite model had been selected as the one to be built.

  That was why that night she’d got so upset. An article in the morning paper had reported that this daring, inspired creation had been steadily subjected to death by committee. One by one every element in the design that had made the model distinctive, uplifting, unusual, had been chipped away and blunted, made earth-bound, commonplace. The acute angles went perpendicular. All the style had been sapped from the winning design’s original plans just as all the style had now been sapped from Glynis herself, until it was clunky, chunky—yes, what Petra had called the fish slice: chunky. With no joy, no exaltation, no playfulness, the new World Trade Center would be a monument to After Glynis.

  The memory floated in and out again: of having been offended, indignant, about a building. Because in those days she had cared about the look of things, all things. The line of things, all things. Perhaps it had been marvelous to have such passions. But Glynis could not be sure. She could not remember having passions. She could not remember reading the newspaper and having feelings about the stories. She could not fathom, now, ever having sat down and read from beginning to end a story about Bulgaria. Bulgaria. It was astonishing that she could still call up the word.

  Was it possible to truly remember anything that you could no longer experience in the present? The question itself started to slide, like the print on the front page, the moment she posed it. She forced herself to think clearly, no. Not possible. Before the tiny mental entertainment had skittered off the table and onto the floor, Glynis thought wanly, that means that everything stored in my head has rotted. It was as if she had kept her treasured heirlooms in a leaky attic, where they’d been nibbled by mice, softened by damp, corrupted by mold. Falling in love with Shepherd—his first visit as a handyman to her apartment, to build the anchored worktable—had gone mottled, blotchy, wet. She could not summon the sensation of desire. She could technically recall having been transfixed by his broad, veined forearms, but only as an inert fact, like the capital of Illinois. Her one-woman show in SoHo in 1983—the satisfaction of it, the hopefulness for the future it engendered, the driving ambition it betokened, the hilarious, drunken celebration in Little Italy after the opening … all turned to a monochromatic mush, like books stashed und
er the eaves in sagging cartons and no longer legible, the ink bleeding, the pages sticking together, the covers warped. Remembering was a more active experience than she had … remembered. You could reconstruct the past only with the building blocks of the present. To remember joy, you required joy at hand. Thus to resurrect the celebration in Little Italy after her show, she would need at her immediate disposal: satisfaction, hopefulness, ambition, hilarity, drunkenness. The warehouse was out of these commodities. All she had left were the words, like labels under empty shelves. The warehouse stored only malaise, dread, and—saved for special occasions—the odd box of unopened fury. Only one unopened box contained not fury but self-recrimination, sticky black self-accusation, and it was leaking, steadily spreading like hot, unset tar.

  Maybe this was merciful, the inability to remember, really, anything. Because if she could remember, she suspected that the one loss she would most lament would be the caring. Before Glynis had been deeply invested in everything from the spiral layout of shrimp on a platter to the single persistent scratch in a would-be mirror finish. Discovering such a scratch, Before Glynis had taken an otherwise flawless, fix-your-makeup-in-the-reflection surface all the way from rouge back down to 100-grit sandpaper to expunge it, proceeding once again arduously through the sandpapers, 200, 300, 400, careful to sand each grade perpendicular to the one before, onto polishing compound, again to rouge, then a final blazing burnish with the rouge cloth. It would take hours and her hands would ache, the joints in her fingers swelling—just to eliminate one scratch. So she must have cared very much. She did not know what caring felt like anymore, and you cannot miss what you can’t conceive. So the not-caring was okay, in its way. It was all she knew.