So Much for That

  Shep’s use of the present tense was an anachronism, but Jackson lets and Jackson thinks came readily enough; the verbs weren’t merely for concealment. It had taken his father years to remember to say that Shep’s mother was a good cook, that she worked tirelessly for his congregation. For the living, with no conception of any other state, the use of the past tense in relation to the bewilderingly disappeared was a discipline, a learned grammar and an unnatural one.

  “My father would say it’s only money, of course,” Shep continued. “Maybe you think the same thing, when the only currency in your life right now is your health. But I can’t keep this roof over your head without money, or heat this place to ninety degrees in February, or drive you to the hospital in a car. Besides, I don’t want to be ‘cynical,’ but—whatever happens to you? I have to survive afterward, if only to take care of our son. I’ve tried to take care of you, too, the best I could, but now I’m asking something in return.”

  “You want me to go back to making molds for chocolate bunny rabbits?”

  He smiled. They gave Pulitzers for lesser achievements than a sense of humor at times like these. “In a way,” he said. “Back when you took that part-time job to spite me, I’d dared to suggest that it was too bad you hadn’t made at least a small contribution to our income. But right now you can make a big contribution. In fact, you can save the day. You can lay a chocolate egg. A big chocolate nest egg.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “I understand what you just told me. That in fact you’d been forewarned about those products in art school, which were withdrawn from use before you ever started your coursework. That you knew perfectly well that they contained asbestos. That you knew perfectly well that asbestos was supposed to be deadly. That you stole those supplies in defiance of warnings from your teacher, who was alerted to an upcoming recall by Forge Craft’s own salespeople. I think you’re right, that if you were to testify to all that, our case would be compromised, and our chances of a big payoff would go way down.

  “But Saguaro closed years ago. Even if she went on to teach somewhere else, Frieda Luten has probably retired, and who knows where. None of your former classmates has cropped up in this case. Petra may remember something, but she’s your friend and she’ll keep her mouth shut. No one knows what really happened but you and me. So I want you to give that deposition tomorrow and really put your heart into it. And I want you to lie.”

  Starting promptly at 9:00 a.m., the deposition in a sterile conference room in Lower Manhattan the next morning took four hours. Shep assumed one of the chairs along the wall, while Glynis took the hot seat at the head of the oval table; other than be present and occasionally insist on a break, he couldn’t help her. The camera to her left stared her down on its tripod, destined to record every hesitation, every broken eye contact, every nose-scratching tell. Forge Craft brought a team of four lawyers, all men, all studiedly supercilious. Once Glynis was finished describing the products she remembered, giving a detailed account of how they were used in which processes, their lawyer conducted his Q&A.

  Located with a lackluster Web search, Rick Mystic was only in his thirties, and Shep had learned to discount his own alarm that this was just a kid; if he kept mistrusting anyone younger than himself, he’d soon trust no one. Mystic had the well-proportioned, square-cut good looks that would have come across well on TV; a leading lady in flats would have helped disguise the fact that he was short. Belying the classic ambulance-chaser tag, the lawyer claimed to have had a favorite uncle die from asbestosis, which gave his specialty a sense of personal mission. Although with that flash suit and designer haircut the young man couldn’t have been motivated by philanthropy alone, Shep figured that they could harness Rick Mystic’s avarice to their own purposes, just as they had co-opted Philip Goldman’s ego. After all, altruism trailed near the bottom of the list of effective human drivers.

  Thus aside from generational prejudice, Shep’s primary misgiving about their lawyer was ridiculously decorative: Mystic’s insertion of “sort of” or “kind of” two or three times a sentence. Sure, the verbal tic was commonplace. But this modern proclivity for incessant qualification leant all assertions an exasperating vagueness, an evasion, a suspicious shilly-shallying uneasiness with being pinned down. That table would never be “brown;” it would be “sort of brown,” and what color was that? In a lawyer, too, the tic provided discourse an imprecision at odds with the profession, and in the case of Glynis’s deposition a surreal understatement: since her illness, hadn’t she been “sort of unable to work?” With these qualifying types, Shep wondered what terrible thing they thought would happen if they landed on a noun or adjective and stuck, committing to a quality or an object that was exactly this or exactly that, and not slightly something else.

  “No, I can’t work,” Glynis replied. Though her sentences were cogent, every other phrase was punctuated with a cough and a raspy pause to catch her breath. “And I’ve tried, too. I can’t concentrate enough to follow the plot of Everybody Loves Raymond. So I tune into the Food Channel. My attention span is about as long as a recipe for goat-cheese brochettes.”

  “And would you describe yourself,” said Mystic, “as kind of in pain?”

  “I often feel nauseated,” she said, “and have trouble breathing. Honestly, it’s harder to go get my own glass of water than it used to be to complete an hour of step aerobics at the Y. And in the deepest sense, I have no privacy. Other people are constantly poking needles in my arms. Shoving tubes down my throat and capsules up my colon. My life is one big violation. I used to love my body. Only a year ago at fifty, I was still beautiful. Now I hate my body. It is wholly a house of horrors. I should have a life expectancy of over eighty. Now I believe that number is … greatly reduced.”

  Of those gathered, only Shep recognized what a concession she’d made.

  Thereafter, the defending lawyers took turns trying to poke holes in her testimony. They cited a host of other suspect materials in everyday life with which she might have come in contact since art school, but she batted the queries away like a pinch hitter: did she look like the kind of woman who would install her own insulation?

  Citing the same theory about clinging fibers that their first oncologist had floated, one lawyer brought up her husband’s handyman business, in which he must also have worked with, say, asbestos-enhanced cement. In addition to observing that during most of their married life Shep’s duties were managerial, Glynis asserted archly that she was never given to embracing her grubby husband in the days he still made house calls “before he’d had a shower.” Moreover, she said, that route to contamination was too complicated. “Remember Occam’s Razor? The simplest explanation is usually the best one. In fact, I looked up the definition on the Web.” Glynis read from her notes, “‘When multiple competing theories are equal in other respects, the principle recommends selecting the theory that introduces the fewest assumptions.’ So there’s no need to construct an elaborate scenario of my husband—who has not come down with an asbestos-related cancer—working with asbestos, getting it on his clothes, embracing me, and leaving fibers on my own clothes that I inadvertently ingest, when I flat out worked with asbestos myself.”

  Surely, another lawyer sneered, her schooling was so long ago that she could not possibly remember the individual products with which she had worked, including the brand of the manufacturer.

  “To the contrary,” said Glynis, affecting the same imperious manner that had always both infuriated and beguiled her husband. “I was just learning my craft, getting my first inspirations. That was a vivid time in my life”—she stopped to cough again—”as opposed, I’m afraid, to this one. So my recollection is quite sharp, just as you might remember with unusual clarity when you first fell in love. And I had fallen in love. Those were the years when I first fell in love with metal.”

  Shep had more than once encountered the glib aphorism that “you always kill the thing you love;” he had never come across its in
verse: that the thing you love would kill you.

  “Also,” Glynis continued, “the studio kept catalogues from Forge Craft along with other reference books and trade magazines on the shelves beside the drill press. I used to flip through those catalogues, since I was hoping to set up my own studio once out of school. I remember being horrified by how much everything cost. Being worried whether I’d ever be able to afford my own polishing machine, my own set of hammers, my own centrifugal casting apparatus. Because at that time, Forge Craft had a virtual monopoly on metalsmithing supplies nationwide. That’s why the company was able to get away with pricing its products sky-high. So Saguaro wouldn’t have stocked tools and materials from anywhere but Forge Craft, which had knocked out the commercial competition. So maybe right now you’re a victim of your own success.”

  Yet what most impressed Shep was her coolness during a line of questioning intended to achieve, in the popular imagination, the impossible: putting a dollar value on human life. To this end, they grilled her on exactly how much money her metalsmithing work had netted per annum, and Glynis managed to quote the meager figure without apparent embarrassment. More insultingly, they wanted to know whether before falling ill she did the shopping, what proportion of childcare responsibilities she’d assumed with Zach, how many meals she’d prepared in the average week, and even how often she’d done the laundry. They were measuring the value of his wife’s life in wash loads of lights and darks. Glynis’s blithely factual answers to these degrading questions were the product of far greater self-control than Shep could ever have marshaled in her place. From the reflex of decades, Shep thought, I can’t wait to tell Jackson about this circus, before he caught himself.

  Glynis was magnificent. She never faltered or let them trip her up, meeting the gaze of her tormentors straight on. On Mystic’s advice she’d worn no makeup, and the accusatory specter of her sunken cheeks, her glaucous lips, the sheen of her bald hairline when her turban slipped, was a more piercing indictment of their company’s products from the 1970s than anything she said.

  Only when the procedure had drawn formally to a close and the opposition’s lawyers had cleared off did Glynis’s posture collapse, and she slid onto the slick polished table like a pool of spilled tea. She was so depleted that Shep half-carried her to the car.

  “You were a star,” he whispered, wishing that bearing nearly all of her weight were harder than it was.

  “I did it for you,” she slurred. “And the lying? I enjoyed it.”

  Yet once they got home, the dignity she’d assumed for hours had left a residue, and she refused to let him carry her upstairs. Instead she crawled the flight on all fours. With a recuperative sag on both landings, the fifteen steps took her half an hour.

  Shep had left multiple messages on Carol’s cell on breaks during the deposition; she wasn’t picking up. Once Glynis had dropped to sleep upstairs, he tried again, and finally Carol answered. While during her initial call the night before Carol had been hysterical, now she was catatonic. At least the dead monotone allowed for the exchange of information. She had walked into the kitchen with Flicka. “I will never forgive him for that,” Carol added flatly. “It was child abuse. I don’t use the term lightly.” Unsurprisingly, the girl had immediately plunged into a dysautonomic crisis; “that surly, offhand thing she’s got going,” said Carol, “it’s all an act. Compensation. She can’t take stress. Taking any old test in school, she falls apart. So you can imagine … I hate to admit it, but dealing with Flicka yesterday, the blood pressure, the retching—and I almost joined her—well, it was a relief. Concentrating on my daughter’s immediate medical needs, whose urgency trumped even what Jackson had done. I guess we’ve always used her like that … At the beginning, as a point of unity, a mutual project, but later as a distraction … We’d focus on Flicka to avoid each other.”

  Bundling Flicka off to New York Methodist, Carol had called Heather, still at school, from the car. She’d insisted the younger girl come straight to the hospital, where they’d all three spent the night. Flicka had stabilized, and by this evening would probably be discharged; Carol was planning to decamp with the girls to a neighbor’s. Meanwhile, according to the neighbor, the police had come, an ambulance. It came as no surprise that Carol did not, under any circumstances, wish to re-enter that house. Shep promised at his first opportunity to go there for her, to retrieve any clothes they might need, Flicka’s medications, perhaps Carol’s computer. Of the many favors he had offered to do his friends over the years, this one seemed costlier than most.

  When she conceded that the neighbor was good-hearted enough but that they were not very close—it was a relationship of pie exchanges and kindly reminders to move your car for alternate-side parking—he begged her to bring the remains of her family to Elmsford instead. There was Amelia’s room, and the couch downstairs. He admitted that he had not yet told Glynis. He said they would deal with that, though he was not sure how.

  “You will deal with it,” said Carol, her voice the color of ash, “by telling her. She’s ill, but she’s still with us. Being sick isn’t the same thing as being stupid or a small child. Ask Flicka. Glynis was Jackson’s friend, too, and she deserves to know. If I can tell a twelve-year-old,” the pause was heavy, “you can tell your wife.”

  “I guess telling her,” he said, “makes it … more real.”

  “It was real,” Carol said wearily. “It was very, very real.”

  “Jackson and I took a long walk yesterday. I should have noticed something. But I was too wrapped up in my own problems. Actually, all I noticed was he seemed unusually at peace. Philosophical. In fact, it’s the only time in recent memory that he didn’t seem pissed off. Maybe that was the giveaway, if I’d been paying attention.”

  “This is what people do,” said Carol. “Comb back through the past, take it on themselves. But Jackson himself was always going on about ‘personal responsibility.’ So if it’s anyone’s fault, it’s Jackson’s. His, and …” She sighed. “I don’t want to get into it now, but mine, too.”

  “Now you’re doing the same thing.”

  “I told you. It’s compulsive.”

  He implored her to come up to Elmsford once more, and she relented. They arranged that she would arrive with the girls around nine o’clock that night. Meanwhile, for later this afternoon Shep had made an appointment with Philip Goldman, to whom it was about time he spoke without the encumbrance of his magnificent but delusional wife.

  “So what’s this,” said Shep in Goldman’s office, “about an experimental drug?”

  The internist usually communicated a rambunctious quality; a small room had trouble containing him, and he was wont to prop his foot on the edge of his desk and spring his chair back, to bounce up to draw illustrations of some medical procedure on scraps of paper, to punctuate his points with generous sweeps of his large hands. But now that boundless energy was more cramped, his restiveness reduced to fidget. In the tinier, more circumscribed tap of a pencil and jiggle of a knee, the doctor was deprived of the grand kinetic theater on which his illusion of attractiveness depended. The fact that his eyes were too close together, or that his middle was paunchy, became more pronounced. Losing, Philip Goldman was not as handsome.

  “It’s called peritoxamil,” said Goldman, “also known as—”

  “Cortomalaphrine,” Shep said sourly.

  “Come again?”

  “Never mind. In-joke.”

  “It’s in phase-three trials, and is showing a lot of promise. Not for mesothelioma, but there could be some crossover effect from therapy for colon cancer. Now, I’m afraid that your wife is—isn’t qualified right now to participate in the clinical trials themselves, but—”

  “You mean she’s too sick,” Shep interrupted again. “Since she’s a goner anyway, she’d drag down the cheerful statistics.”

  “That’s a harsh way of putting it, but—”

  “I like a harsh way of putting it. Let’s put it that way, then.”
br />   Goldman eyed his patient’s husband with a nervous side glance. Shep Knacker had always been so docile, so cooperative. But the doctor would have seen all manner of reactions to extreme medical circumstances, and maybe belligerence was a standard variation.

  “The point is,” said Goldman, “we can appeal for the drug’s release for compassionate use. Explain that we’ve depleted the traditional arsenal at our disposal. I grant it’s a long shot, but it’s all we’ve got. Frankly, at this juncture there’s not much to lose. One small downside, however.”

  “It makes your head fall off.”

  Goldman’s half smile was unamused. “Not a side effect—except for you. Since peritoxamil isn’t FDA-approved, it’s not going to be covered by your insurer.”

  “Uh-huh. And how much does this new snake oil cost?”

  “For a course? In the area of a hundred thousand dollars. Fortunately, it’s in capsule form, so Mrs. Knacker wouldn’t have to come in for treatments.”

  “A hundred grand. There’s ‘not much to lose’? I guess I’m not in your income bracket. Since that strikes me as losing a whole lot.”

  Goldman seemed taken aback. “We’re talking about your wife’s life here—”

  “Jim!”

  The doctor shot him a worried look. “I have to assume that money is a secondary issue at best, if it’s an issue at all.”

  “So if I say it is an issue, I’m an animal, right? But even if I fall in line and say, by all means, doctor, do anything you can, throw the kitchen sink at that cancer—a gold-plated kitchen sink—because I love my wife and money is no object. Why do you assume I’ve got a hundred grand?”

  “It’s often possible to take out a personal loan in such cases. Mr. Knacker, I know you’re under stress, but I’m concerned about your combative tone. You don’t seem to appreciate that we’re on the same side here. You, Mrs. Knacker, and everyone in this hospital are united in a common cause.”