“Don’t be.”
Though Handy Randy had expanded into other boroughs, the main office and supply warehouse were still on Seventh Avenue in Park Slope, less than a mile from Windsor Terrace. Since he could walk to work, it wasn’t hard for Jackson to arrive early the following Monday, hoping to ensure that when Shep walked in the wisecracks would keep to a minimum. He deliberately projected a protective air of pent-up explosiveness and impending violence, which under the circumstances came naturally enough. Still, the atmosphere in the office was of barely suppressed hilarity; the accountant, the Web page designer, the dispatcher—everyone down to the receptionist wore expressions as if they were stuffing fists in their mouths to keep from busting out laughing. When Shep did walk in, he didn’t appear to make anything of the fact that the rest of the staff suddenly fell silent, and he glided toward his cubicle with a robotic passivity that seemed familiar; maybe Shep and Carol had something temperamental in common. No matter what life threw at him—”life” was a gentle way of putting it; other people, more like it—Shep absorbed it, like that blithe, look-the-other way shit his family pulled when he paid for his mother’s funeral, from casket to pâté, as if covering all those expenses was like farting and you didn’t mention it in polite company. When Mark, the website guy whom Jackson had put in his place on Friday, asked archly, “What, no suntan?” Shep returned mildly that the weekend had been overcast. He sat at his terminal and checked his email for complaints; Jackson could tell at a glance from across the room that there were plenty.
It was hot. Jackson had learned to wear short sleeves in the winter months, or he’d have come home drenched. Pogatchnik kept the heat cranked up full blast, if only to irritate Shep, who deplored the waste. According to their dickhead boss, waste was the point: a business that kept its premises tropical in January and arctic in August encouraged customers to feel confident that the enterprise was thriving. It was a sign of prosperity, just as fat used to be a badge of affluence: once you could afford to overeat; now you could afford to overheat. Shep had countered that he couldn’t understand why any red-blooded creature would be comfortable at eighty-five degrees in one season and fifty-five in another, but every position Shep ever took with Pogatchnik backfired, and the last time Shep had politely requested that they lower the thermostat the setting went up another two degrees. For that matter, just about every innovation Pogatchnik had installed was specifically tailored to goad Shep Knacker, down to the special seminar on “Getting Along with Difficult Co-Workers,” when Pogatchnik himself was the difficult coworker.
Their boss finally deigned to shamble in at 11:00 a.m. He headed straight to Shep’s cubicle. “Seems like you owe me an apology, Knacker.”
“Yes, I do,” Shep said stonily.
“So?”
“I apologize.”
Pogatchnik continued to loom over Shep’s desk, as if wanting something more.
“I humbly apologize,” Shep provided. “I may have had a bad day.”
“Just because you used to own this outfit when it was an itty-bitty local operation doesn’t give you special rights. I’ll cut you slack this time, but any other employee I’d have shown the door. In fact, since you are any other employee—”
“I appreciate the second chance. I never expect special consideration. It won’t happen again.”
Listening to this grotesque public shit-eating from twenty feet, Jackson had a good grasp of why employees were arriving at work with canvas bags full of automatics all across the nation. The “itty-bitty local operation” was particularly hard to take. Shep had sold Knack of All Trades right around the time that the World Wide Web was just taking off big time, and how was he to know that the handyman biz would burgeon online? After Pogatchnik registered the domain name www.handiman.com (www.handyman.com had already been taken, but they got all the clients who couldn’t spell; this being America, that hadn’t curtailed their business in the slightest), their customer base exploded. Pogatchnik took all the credit, as if he’d invented the Internet itself, like Al Gore. Now the company was probably worth four times what that pond scum had paid for it, and Pogatchnik had started running television ads of himself tunelessly belting an excruciating variation on Sammy Davis, Jr., “The handyman, oh, the handyman can!” that drove Jackson to change the channel with an urgency bordering on hysteria. It had seemed so cool at the time, that check for a million smackers, and now it turned out that selling Knack was the dopiest thing Shep had ever done.
When the two grabbed their customary sandwiches at a café up the street—Jackson could have lived without all the buffalo mozzarella and prosciutto nonsense, aka ham and cheese—he had to ask: “What was all that mea culpa ass-lick with Pogatchnik?”
Shep was always a contained character, but even for Shep his affect all morning had been inhumanly flat, cooperative to the point of nonexistence. As if you could run him through the paces of a DUI stop and he’d touch his nose for you and stand on one leg and count back from a hundred by sevens and it wouldn’t matter that you weren’t a cop and he hadn’t even been driving.
“Oh, that,” said Shep in a monotone. “When I left Handy Randy on Friday”—the guy never called the company Handy Randy, he always called it Knack; Christ, the poor chump sounded like Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke after he’s been in that tiny sweat box for days and he says, Yah sir, yah sir, because his will is broken—”I think I said something like, ‘So long, asshole.’ It was an indulgence. I didn’t think I was coming back.”
“Okay, I can see saying sorry, but did you have to crawl?”
“Yes, I did.”
Jackson thought about it. “Health insurance.”
“That’s right.” Shep took one bite of his sandwich and put it down again. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but I got the impression that my colleagues were aware that I’d originally planned on an excursion. The fact that I came to work today seemed to be the source of some amusement.”
“Look, I’m sorry. Last week Mark was being sarcastic again, and—I guess I should have kept my trap shut. But I was so sure you were really going to go this time … I’m not making any excuses, but it would have been easier on both of us if you’d kept your grand plan to yourself years ago until you were good and ready to press the Eject button.”
“Years ago there was no reason for me to keep it quiet. It was just what I was going to do.”
“Still, I wish you’d let me tell the staff at Knack, about Glynis. Not let them think you didn’t go to Pemba because you’re chicken, or some loony fantasist. They’d give you a lot less grief.”
“Glynis doesn’t want it out. I got permission to tell you and Carol. But otherwise, it’s her business. I’m not going to use her to make my work life more agreeable. It isn’t agreeable anyway and it never will be, so really it doesn’t make any difference.”
“Why do you suppose she wants to keep it a secret?”
Shep shrugged. “She’s private. And letting it be common knowledge makes it real.”
“But it is real.”
“All too,” said Shep.
“Listen,” said Jackson as they headed back. “You want to swing by the house for a beer before you drive back to Elmsford?”
It was obvious that the prospect of doing anything for fun or for comfort or for any reason that had to do with himself and what he might “want” had become foreign to Shepherd Knacker overnight, but Jackson had asked him to do something, so he would do it. “Sure,” he said.
“I can’t stay long,” Shep warned as he drove them to Windsor Terrace. “That’s all right. We have to meet with that FD support group at nine anyway. Which I dread. Oh, it would be okay if it were only sharing info on the side effects of medication and stuff. It’s the whole Jewish thing that gets a bit much. I mean, don’t take me wrong, I’m not one of those ‘self-hating Jews.’ I’m just not especially, well, Jewish.” Jackson was babbling, but with a zombie at the wheel someone had to say something. “My mother isn’t observant, and my fathe
r has this Basque thing going, which is kind of cool—not that I’d blow up any Spanish politicians over it or anything. And then Carol, well, she was raised Catholic. She had one grandfather on her father’s side who was Ashkenazi. So we get all this pressure at the support group to stuff Flicka full of gefilte fish, and technically Flicka’s not even Jewish.
“And these Orthodox loons … When they get married, the couples refuse to get the DNA test. Even after they’ve had an FD kid, they won’t get amnio. There’s a family in Crown Heights has three of them. Perfect punishment for being that stupid. Because, sure, Jews are down on abortion. But despite that, the rabbis in every form of Judaism—reform to ultra-orthodox? They all tell you that if the fetus has FD, get rid of it. Like, God doesn’t want them to suffer. It’s that bad.
“It just slays me, you know? Supposedly it’s the Jewish faith, and you’d think you could choose, right, what you believe in? But no. These fucking genes have been stalking me, man, one generation after another. It’s like being mugged by a rabbi.” Considering, Jackson shouldn’t be complaining about anything on his own account, and he shut up.
Carol and Shep hugged, and Carol said she was so, so sorry. Settling in the kitchen, Shep explained that he’d spent most of the weekend on the Internet, and told them what he knew. He said he was taking a personal day at the end of the week, to go in with Glynis and meet with an oncologist, after which they’d be better informed. Carol asked how he thought Glynis was taking it, and Shep said that she was pissed off but that she was always pissed off, so it was hard to tell. Then Carol asked how Shep was taking it, and he seemed to find the question irrelevant. Obviously I’m scared, he said, but I can’t afford to be scared, or to be anything else, either. I’m the one who has to keep it together. So it doesn’t matter how I am. I don’t matter anymore. It was the first thing he’d said all day with real passion.
Carol commiserated over Pemba, though Shep knew perfectly well that she’d thought the whole idea was nuts. He said that deep-sixing his “Afterlife” already seemed like small potatoes, like something that happened a long time ago. He said that the only good aspect of this awful turn of the wheel was realizing what was important. Now he didn’t have to decide whether to leave or not, because as soon as Glynis told him there was no decision. There was no Pemba. It was as if the whole island had sunk into the sea. You wouldn’t think it, he said, but I’ve never experienced any other moment in my life in which everything suddenly got so simple. Shep wondered aloud whether this thing happening out of the blue amounted to a sick sort of divine intervention. He hadn’t wanted to go to Pemba without Glynis and Zach. He shouldn’t have gone without them and now he couldn’t. It was neat and clear. So in this sense the game changer was a relief. The lack of hesitation. The great, glaring obviousness of what he had to do. And wanted to do, Shep added emphatically. Glynis needs me. Maybe she did before, too, but it wasn’t as apparent. When Shep said that your wife needing you, it’s a good feeling, Jackson felt a stab of envy that he didn’t understand.
Shep wasn’t commonly this confiding. He wasn’t a heartless person, far from it, but he was like a lot of guys. It was a perfectly decent way of being, in Jackson’s view, a dignified way of being: he tended to let other people take his deepest feelings for granted. He didn’t name them or wear them on his sleeve. So when he spelled out that he loved Glynis and had not realized until now how much, that now he was remorseful about what he had planned to do when only last week he had cast it as last-ditch self-salvation, Jackson was both offended, and moved. Jackson thought about how much Flicka had changed him and Carol, and how some of that change was bad, like getting so under-slept from the late-night feeding regime that they rarely had sex, but how some of the change was good, too. They had an imperative. They were doing something together that was more vital than sex, and even more intimate, it turned out, which had surprised him. So maybe your wife announcing that she could be about to die would have a similar effect of rearranging everything, focusing everything, and bringing you together in a way that wasn’t totally, hopelessly, and unremittingly terrible.
Still, when Shep went on about how glad he was that he no longer had to take responsibility for “abandoning Glynis” and “abandoning his son,” Jackson was taken aback; he had never before heard his friend use that harsh and unforgiving word when describing his intentions: abandon. Shep said that the diagnosis “took this cup from him,” as his father would have said, and Jackson thought, but kept to himself, that the one transformation he was not up for was Shep suddenly going all Christian on him. Instead Jackson said that’s funny, you get out of responsibility by having it dumped in your lap wholesale. Shep said yes, but I feel more like myself now. More normal. Doing the right thing. Taking care of my wife. I did think, Carol hazarded, that walking off into the sunset wasn’t like you. No, said Shep, with a tinge of sorrow. It certainly wasn’t like me. Anyway, said Carol. You know what they say about life and making other plans. Yes, Shep agreed, it’s surprising that we bother to make them. In sounding so philosophical he also sounded older, and there was a boyishness in his best friend that Jackson noticed only now that it was gone.
But with your better cut of people, trouble reminded them that everyone had troubles, that there was an everyone. So Shep didn’t stay on Glynis and Pemba, but asked after Flicka—the girls were upstairs doing their homework—and had the decency to ask after Heather, too. He even asked about Carol’s work, which hardly anyone did because it was so dull, and he wondered whether Carol missed landscape gardening. Yes, she did miss it, she said, doing something physical, involved with the earth. Shep said that he felt the same way, that he missed fixing things, making people’s lives palpably better and seeing the results of his labor, instead of arranging to clean up someone else’s botched job over the phone. He apologized, but he couldn’t remember; he knew that Carol went to work for sales at IBM partly because they let her operate from any computer terminal she liked, be that at home or in Tahiti; she could put in whichever and however many hours she wanted, so long she did the work—a policy that they all agreed with a laugh shouldn’t be revolutionary but was, that the criterion for performing a job was getting it done. Still, the landscaping had been freelance, with flexible hours, too, and she’d not had a problem, as Shep remembered, being home by the time the girls returned from school, ferrying Flicka to therapists, even rushing her to the ER. Had it really been worth the sacrifice, he asked, for a bigger paycheck? Jackson suppressed an irritation; it bothered him that Carol made more money than he did, as it bothered him that she’d had to give up work that she loved for the reason she had, but everything between men and women was meant to have changed, and this stuff wasn’t supposed to bother him.
“Oh, it wasn’t really for a better salary that I took the job with IBM,” Carol explained. “When Randy took over Knack—you know what a corner-cutter he is, what a bottom-liner—he switched to a cheaper health plan. With all our expenses with Flicka, the therapies and surgeries and bouts in the hospital, we couldn’t depend on Jackson’s coverage anymore.
“See,” she went on, “this World Wellness Group outfit is the health insurance company from hell. They levy co-pays on everything, including the meds, and we have to fill dozens of prescriptions every month. With their whopping deductible, you’re out five grand before you’re reimbursed a dime. Their idea of a ‘reasonable and customary’ fee is what a doctor’s visit cost in 1959, and then they stick you with the shortfall. They’re way too restrictive about going out of network, and Flicka requires very specialized care. Then there’s co-insurance on top of the co-pays: twenty percent of the total bill, and that’s in network. And here’s the killer: there’s no cap on out-of-pocket expenses. Add to that that their lifetime payment cap—you know, how much they’ll fork out in total, ever—is also pretty low, only two or three million, when someone like Flicka could easily exceed numbers like that before she’s twenty … Well, we had to find other coverage.”
“Gos
h, I had no idea.”
“But you should know, Shep,” said Carol. “It’s your insurance, too.”
Chapter Three
Shepherd Armstrong Knacker
Merrill Lynch Account Number 934-23F917
December 01, 2004 – December 31, 2004
Net Portfolio Value: $731,778.56
While they drove to Phelps Memorial in Sleepy Hollow, Shep kept one hand on the wheel, the other in his wife’s. Their clasp was relaxed; her palm was dry. They both stared straight ahead.
“It wasn’t necessary,” he said, “for you to go through the diagnostics on your own.”
“You were off in your own little world,” she said. “So I went off in mine.”
“You must have felt lonely.”
“Yes,” she said. “But I had been feeling that way for some time.”
By the next exit, she added, “You’re a planner, Shepherd. You always look before you leap. Really, you leap before you leap. In your head, you took that plane to Tanzania months ago.”
He was relieved that she was talking to him at all. He was willing to be castigated, glad for it.
To his horror, Glynis had already been subjected to abdominal X rays, a CAT scan, and an MRI. Memories fell into place. On two mornings in December she had declined not only breakfast but even coffee, which for Glynis was unheard of. He couldn’t recall the excuse, but it mustn’t have been persuasive, because the refusal of coffee in particular had injured him; she had spurned one of the sacred rituals of their day. On two evenings, she had kept rising for another drink of water, and yet another. So she’d not been quenching a powerful thirst, but rinsing contrast medium from her veins. Likewise one odd, floating memory finally lodged into an orderly narrative: of walking into the bathroom before she had a chance to flush, and noticing that the bowl was red. It had been awfully early in her cycle, but she was fifty, perhaps getting irregular; aware that she was touchy about the approach of menopause, he hadn’t passed comment. Now he realized: that was not her period. He also realized that she had started to wear a nightgown to bed not, as she had claimed, because she was cold; it was to hide the laparoscopy scar on her belly, which he had now seen. Though only an inch long, it alarmed him: a first violation, and not the last. The nightgown had injured him, too. They had slept for twenty-six years skin to skin.