“I’d like to sue.”
“Whom for what?” asked Shep.
“That guy has been scheming to reach the seventy-five-percent threshold for years, and practically none of that ‘renovation’ was necessary.”
“It is his building.”
“It’s my apartment!”
“Only if you can afford the rent. Listen,” Shep forked a black rippled edge from a noodle, “maybe you should think ‘glass half full’ here. About how lucky you’ve been. What a great situation you’ve had all these years. Okay, it’s over—” His voice caught. How lucky you’ve been; what a great situation you’ve had; okay, it’s over. He could’ve given the same speech to himself.
“Nobody feels lucky,” said Beryl, “when their luck has just run out.”
“You can say that again,” said Glynis. Rare accord.
Shep served second helpings. He’d broken out Glynis’s famous sterling fish slice for the meal, a little unwieldy for lasagna, and admittedly incongruous with the beaten-up aluminum baking pan. But he wanted his wife to feel accomplished, to take advantage of a rare opportunity to show off on her behalf. When they’d first sat down to dinner, the lithe line of the silver, the oceanic Bakelite inlay of sea green and aquamarine, had obliged his sister to admire the very metalcraft that she was loath to concede Glynis ever got around to fashioning. The transparent insincerity of Beryl’s compliments provided his wife a backhanded pleasure.
Glynis declined another serving. Please, he whispered. Please. He placed a small square on her plate anyway, mumbling, You don’t understand. It’s not about food anymore, about whether you want it. Beryl was too caught up in the loss of her rent stabilization to infer what the exchange might mean. With no idea how to bend the evening’s subject matter around to the real issue, he tried to shift it by degrees.
“You know, speaking of bum luck,” Shep raised offhandedly, “do you carry any health insurance?”
“I’d hock my firstborn child, but I don’t have one.”
“So what would happen if you were in an accident, or got sick?”
“Beats me.” Beryl’s manner was defiant. “Don’t emergency rooms have to take you in?”
“Only for immediate care. And they still stick you with a bill.”
“Which they could shove where the sun don’t shine.”
“That could ruin your credit rating,” he said, cringing inside; the likes of credit ratings were exactly what he had yearned to flee in Pemba.
“That’s your world, big brother. Out here in mine, I could give a shit.” Apparently Beryl’s furious resentment had leached from her pending eviction to encompass her staid brother, his conventional house in Westchester, his gas-guzzling SUV, and his spoiled dilettante of a wife.
“But if something terrible happened to you …” Shep ventured. “Well, the person who would really end up paying for it is me, right? Who else, with Dad on a pension? In fact, that’s why I pay for Amelia’s insurance.”
“I’m not stopping you, if you want to buy me health insurance, too. Since from the sound of it you’re not really worried about me, but about yourself.”
“An individual policy at your age could run to a grand a month.”
“QED,” said Beryl. “Some months I don’t net more than a grand. So, what, I’m living on the street out of garbage cans, but, boy, do I have the best health insurance that my entire annual income can buy!”
“When you’re not covered,” said Glynis, “hospitals charge twice as much.”
“Which makes a lot of sense,” Beryl fumed. “Double charge the folks who can least afford it.”
“I didn’t make the system,” Shep said quietly. “But you’re getting older, things happen, and this is something you should start considering.”
“Look! Fortunately right now I’m not about to keel over, because I’ve got a problem a lot more pressing, okay? If you’re really worried about me, then, yes, you can help. Assuming I’m not going to fight this thing—which I also can’t afford—I’m going to have to move. I thought for the time being I could haul my crap up to Berlin; Dad says that’d be okay. Maybe even hole up there a while, to save on expenses. But to get another lease in New York I’d still need help on a security deposit. That’s three months’ rent up front. And you know what’s happened in Manhattan—a studio the size of a Porta Potti goes for three thousand a month! So, look, I hate having to do this, but … Well, doesn’t it make more sense for me to buy something? Instead of pouring all that rent down a rat hole? If you could just cover, I don’t know, maybe a hundred grand or so for a down payment … Think of it as an investment.”
“You want me to give you a hundred thousand dollars. Or so.”
“I never want to be in the position again where some prick landlord can kick me out of my own home. I mean, this is an emergency, Shepardo. I’m begging here.”
Shep reached for Glynis’s hand under the table. They’d had some dreadful rows over Beryl’s loans; a glance reassured her that this time he wouldn’t slip his sister a check when Glynis wasn’t looking.
“Beryl,” he said evenly. “We are not buying you an apartment.”
Beryl looked at her brother as if confronting a hitherto reliable appliance that suddenly wouldn’t turn on. She tried the switch again. “Maybe you’d like to think about it.”
“I don’t need to think. We can’t do it.”
“Why not?” As usual, presumably an unsatisfactory justification would effect a reversal of policy.
Nevertheless, this was the opening that Shep had been waiting for. He took a deep preparatory breath, one just long enough for Beryl’s temper to rev. She seemed to register that, unlike the intrinsically ambiguous matter of sexual consent, with money “no” really does mean “no,” consternation at which drove her recklessly to burn her bridges.
“Don’t tell me,” she said blackly. “You have to keep my down payment salted away for The Afterlife. You have to keep stashing away millions and millions of dollars for some fantasy Valhalla, and meantime your own sister is thrown out on the street. You have to go on expensive vacations year after year, on the pretense that you’re doing ‘research.’ But get real! If you were ever going to decamp to a Third World beach sipping piña coladas, wouldn’t you have gone already? You could make a huge difference to my life right now, but no! We all have to pay for your delusion, for this hubristic idea of yourself as special and above the common ruck, when the truth is you’re an ordinary corporate salary-man like practically every other drudge in the country. I’ve tried to do something interesting with my life, and make challenging, imaginative films that make a difference to people’s experience of the world, and it’s not my fault that doesn’t pay much. I work just as hard as you do, and maybe harder, a lot harder. But I’ve got nothing to show for it, and now I don’t even have a place to live—thanks to rich capitalists just like you who have to get even richer. Meanwhile, you drive around in a fat car and live in a fat suburban house with a bank account that’s busting at the seams—for what? You’re only going to see one afterlife, my brother, and it’s going to be a pretty scorching experience if while you were alive you weren’t a little more charitable toward your own family!”
Assessing that Beryl appeared to have finished, he gave his wife’s hand a gentle squeeze before interlacing his fingers on the table squarely opposite his sister.
“You’re right,” Shep said calmly. “Despite how long I may have hoped to, we are not likely at this point to start a new, fascinating, relaxing life in a more affordable country. I’m sorry about that. I’m far sorrier for the reason.”
“And what’s that?” Beryl sneered.
“We just found out that Glynis has cancer. It’s a rare and virulent disease called mesothelioma. I may have given it to her myself from working with products that contained asbestos. I will need to conserve both my energies and my funds. Between Glynis’s health and buying my sister property in the most inflated real estate market in the country, I
have to opt for saving my wife’s life.”
It wouldn’t have been appropriate to smile, but he did have to suppress one corner of his mouth from rising in a curl of recognition. He’d told Jackson in the park this afternoon that he wanted to “do the honors” and inform his in-laws about his wife’s condition, since Glynis was sure to bait her relatives into saying something nasty and then to cut them to the quick with her zinger bad news. Maybe the two of them weren’t such different people as Shep had often feared.
“I know this is perverse,” said Glynis, languishing in a chair while he washed up. “But I had a wonderful time tonight. I never realized that having cancer could be so much fun.”
“She’s always thought that, you know. That The Afterlife was a ‘delusion.’”
“Beryl’s the creative one, and you’re the dullard. People get very attached to these designations. She wouldn’t want you to be capable of doing anything brave or strange.”
He turned to her from the sink. “Would you?”
“Maybe,” she considered. “But not without me.”
“Be honest,” he said. “Without—this. Would you seriously have considered dropping everything and coming along?”
“According to you, you never would have gone.”
“Moot point.” He went back to scrubbing the blackened crust from the lasagna pan.
“It isn’t moot,” she said, “whether you love me.”
He stopped. He rinsed his hands, and dried them on a towel. He knelt by her chair, and took her face in both hands. “Gnu. In the next few months, you will discover,” he promised, “how much I love you.” He kissed her, and let his lips linger until he could feel her spirit still.
He returned to the task at hand. It took a minute for the water to make it to the sink again. When it first became apparent that they had moved into their Elmsford rental “temporarily” in the adult sense of the word—i.e., as a synonym for forever—he had consoled himself by constructing a fountain at the kitchen sink. It was a whimsical contraption, with a culinary theme: the water ran from the faucet up a rubber hose that ended in a turkey baster, whose jet spray spun a round metal whisk, then cascaded down a chipped delft teacup, a bent soup ladle, an old-fashioned glass lemon juicer, a cow-shaped coffee creamer, and a wooden-handled ice-cream scoop he’d picked up at a stoop sale that must have been a hundred years old, finally landing in a tin funnel that directed the water back into the sink. Pleasingly, the water maintained roughly the same flow and pressure provided without the journey he imposed upon it, even if the hot water did drop a few degrees along the way. The mechanism was a kooky, childlike affair reminiscent of the game of Mouse Trap he’d grown up playing with Beryl. Yet his fondness for this homemade toy had taken a blow when he and Glynis came back from Puerto Escondido several years ago. In their parents’ absence, the kids had disconnected the hose. Presumably they dispensed with the nonsense over the kitchen sink whenever they had the house to themselves, and reconnected the hose when their father was due back; for the first time they’d forgotten. He didn’t tell the kids they’d hurt his feelings. Naturally he would have liked them to cherish the product of his playful side. But he couldn’t force his children to treasure in their father what he treasured about himself.
“I wonder, did you put it all together, that business about Berlin?” Glynis asked, once he had resumed battle with the pan. “While you were busy buying her a new apartment, she was planning to move all her stuff into your father’s house. Meantime, you were supposed to put him in an assisted-living facility so she could live there without the bother of his company.”
“Losing the rent-stabilized place—she’s not thinking straight, and she’s panicking.”
“You’re too kind.”
“Lucky for you.”
“God, the indignation! As if rent stabilization were a human right. And what was all that about how hard she works and how it’s ‘not her fault’ she makes no money? She made her choices. It’s called making your bed. So you lie in it.”
“We’re better off than she is,” he said, adding, “monetarily anyway. She’s jealous.”
“But she holds you in contempt.”
“It makes her feel better. Let her.”
“I mean, the nerve! A hundred grand! Which would just be the beginning, since she wouldn’t have made the mortgage payments, either. I warned you a long time ago that if you kept giving in on the smaller amounts, it would only get worse.”
“I didn’t mind helping her out now and again.” A doubt crossed his mind over whether in different circumstances he might have been amenable to his sister’s proposition after all.
“Did you get a load of that ‘millions and millions’ crack? Where’d she get that idea?”
“Beryl’s like a lot of people who’ve always been hard up. They think there are people like them, and then everyone else is unimaginably wealthy. Some money is the same as infinite money. She doesn’t have kids, and she doesn’t know what things cost. Zach’s tuition. Car insurance in New York. Taxes—”
“You can bet she doesn’t pay any. And it’s people like your sister who think people like us should pay even more.”
“Well, I hate to sound like Jackson. But Beryl is completely unaware that her life is subsidized. That her trash is collected, that she can go for a walk in a park, that emergency rooms really will treat her without insurance if she’s bleeding—it’s all paid for by someone else. I’m dead certain that thought never enters her head.”
“To the contrary,” Glynis agreed. “She doesn’t feel like a beneficiary, but like a victim. She has a chip on her shoulder the size of a redwood.”
That the same might be said of Glynis Shep kept to himself.
“My favorite part of the evening wasn’t even your announcement,” she continued. “It was the crocodile tears afterward. All that histrionic solicitation and despair. So fake! Just like all that overdone fawning over the fish slice. She’s a terrible actress. She was mostly aggrieved that from now on she can’t put her hand in your cookie jar.”
“Well, I guess the expectation is that in the face of serious illness, all the—friction—between people, like you and Beryl—”
“Friction?” Glynis laughed, and the sound was wonderful. “She detests me!”
“Okay, but even that—it’s supposed to go away. She can’t feel that way about you anymore, and then she still does and it’s awkward.”
“There’s something delicious about it. I can’t explain it, but I loved watching her so obviously play pretend. I get the feeling there are just a few bits and pieces of this mesothelioma thing that I’m going to enjoy.”
As he lovingly dried the fish slice, the fact that Glynis roused herself to get up and wrap her arms around him from behind was strangely moving. She was so depleted that small gestures of affection must have cost her an extraordinary outlay of energy.
“Oh, and did you notice?” Glynis mumbled into his shirt, laughing again. “She still remembered to take the chocolates.”
Chapter Six
The timing of the Before Picture dinner up at Shep’s was even worse than Jackson had foreseen. The night before, the Saran Wrap that Flicka wrapped around her eyes to seal in the Vaseline had come off while she slept—he should never have bought that off-brand surgical tape—so that morning her eyes had been flaming. While he was out for a few hours, she apparently got—well, “irritable” was an understatement.
For while Carol was always urging him to avoid subjecting Flicka to “stress,” by far and away the biggest source of stress for their elder daughter was the very condition that made her so sensitive to it. She didn’t mind her father’s familiar mouthing off about isn’t it a coincidence how every sanctimonious new “green” law legislators proposed, like a tax on plastic bags, a tax on airline carbon emissions, just happened to make the State more money. She did mind waking up with puffy red eyes halfway to conjunctivitis before breakfast. She did mind not being able to talk right when she had
plenty to say. She did mind drooling all the time, and sweating all the time; even if the kids at school had been lectured on not making fun, she might have preferred a little regular-kid teasing to the outsized politeness and looking-the-other-way she put up with instead. She got sick of having to pour that water-sugar-and-salt solution into her g-tube every hour and a half, which produced none of the gasping satisfaction she witnessed in her sister after a deep, thirsty quaff of Coke. She got tired of wearing that big black “airway clearance system” vest for fifteen minutes every morning and night, as if bracketing her sleep with two rounds of boxing.
Flicka might have been grateful that the Vest now spared her parents’ uncomfortably intimate double-fisted pounding on her back while astraddle her buttocks. She might have been grateful, too, that they’d given up on the chest drainage sessions that had tyrannized her childhood: the tube worked unpleasantly down her nose, the pump’s sickening gurgle and slurp, the grotesque accumulation of mucus in the waste container; it had always amazed Jackson how much thick, viscous gunk could derive from those two tiny lungs, and though Carol had always dispensed with the effluent with her usual no-nonsense officiousness, he could not have been the only one to have found the gloppy, stringy substance nauseating. But if he himself was grateful that dislodging her congestion had grown less revolting, for Flicka gratitude was a foreign sensation. She suffered so many other annoyances that she simply transferred her vexation to something else: chronic constipation from all those meds, the humiliating enemas.
Moreover, the biggest trigger of a dysautonomic crisis was surely sheer dread that, for fuck’s sake, she was about to have another dysautonomic crisis.
The signs would have been falling into place in his absence, while Carol was making a German chocolate cake to bring to tonight’s feast at the Knackers’. He knew the drill. Flicka had endured more medical indignity by sixteen than most folks abided over a lifetime, and her true nature was stoic. Sure, she grumbled plenty, but if she ever got outright whiny, that was a red flag; “change in personality” and “emotional lability” were textbook indicators of a crisis. The thing was, most kids with Riley-Day—an older tag for familial dysautonomia that sounded like a pop duo who sang perky numbers on Christian radio—would “whine” that their sister was hogging the family computer. But Flicka had an existential streak a mile wide, and her personality never altered as much as all that. Her version of “lability” was a lot harder to take. She would “whine” about the fact that she hated her life and hated her body; about how she had nothing to look forward to besides submitting to more bouts in the hospital, ending up in a wheelchair, and having her whole cornucopia of symptoms—the wild blood pressure fluctuation, the chronic congestion, the lousy balance, the cornea infections, the seizures—get worse. Flopping and perspiring about the kitchen, she’d “whine” that she’d rather be dead. That was rough for any parent to listen to, since the declaration couldn’t be put down to regulation teenage histrionics. She meant it. This wasn’t a kid who “didn’t understand the concept of death,” either—the likes of whom Jackson had never met anyway. Like most children, Flicka understood perfectly well what death was, and on days like this she thought it sounded wonderful.
So Much for That: A Novel Page 11