Shep distracted himself by considering Dr. Goldman. Vigorous and aggressive, the internist was a roughly handsome man; at six-feet-who-knows, he was large. While you couldn’t call him fat, a fleshy midsection did betray him as a man of appetites. Likely no stranger to a rack of ribs or a double Scotch, he displayed the very failure to take his own advice that Shep had missed in Dr. Knox—who, fit, trim, and younger by fifteen years, was by conventional measures far better looking. So why was Philip Goldman the more attractive man? Objectively his handsomeness was very “rough” indeed—which was to say that he wasn’t handsome at all. His broad face was smashed flat, and his eyes were set too close together—small and almost piggy. Yet he moved with energy and self-conviction, swallowing hallways in the same hungry lunges with which he doubtless downed a meal. He moved like a man who was killingly handsome, and thus he swept you up in the illusion that he was. His appeal was kinetic, and would never translate to static photographs. A smitten girlfriend would proudly show his snapshot to a confidante, and the friend would privately shake her head, flummoxed by what on earth the poor woman saw in this homely lug.
Frankly, Shep was a little jealous. It wasn’t only that the doctor was better educated, more successful, and rich. There was an intimacy between the doctor and his patient that Shep couldn’t equal with twenty-six years of marriage. He didn’t know what you called his wife’s unquestioning devotion to her doctor if it wasn’t love. She had merely trusted Dr. Knox, which was atypical enough; she believed in Dr. Goldman, and with a passion that felt erotic. When her husband admonished her to eat, she dug in her heels. But when toward the end of May Dr. Goldman urged her to eat, Glynis had made a proper project of gaining weight, cheerfully requesting her every favorite dish. Whatever had inspired her fuller cheeks shouldn’t matter, but Shep was still bugged.
Shep’s absenteeism was already teetering into the danger zone with Pogatchnik; at least Goldman’s obliging this early evening appointment had enabled him to put in a full day at work.
In silence, Shep held hands with Glynis from the parking garage to the office on the seventh floor, using his free hand to hit the car’s key fob and punch elevator buttons. Before knocking timidly on the door, he paused to lock eyes with his wife. It was the kind of glance that defendants and their spouses might share while the jury files in. Glynis was innocent, but this judiciary was capricious.
The door swept open. “Mr. and Mrs. Knacker, please come in!”
Shep took one look at Goldman’s beaming face and thought: Not guilty.
“You’re looking well!” Goldman cried, shaking Shep’s hand and laying a second palm on the forearm for added warmth. (Shep was not looking well. After months of mopping up his wife’s high-calorie leftovers, he looked more like Goldman every day, but several inches shorter and absent the poetry-in-motion magic trick.) When he shook hands with Glynis—”And you’re looking very well!”—her wiry metacarpus was every bit a match for the big doctor’s clasp. She may have under-served her talent, but even intermittent filing, sawing, and polishing had produced the fiercest grip of any woman Shep knew.
They sat before the desk. Shep was glad for the chair. He felt shaky. Asterisks were spinning in his visual field, as if the office swarmed with flies. He prayed that Goldman wasn’t the round-up type, who would cast a merely middling outcome in glowing terms.
The doctor bombed to his seat, clasped his hands behind his head, and tipped rearward in his spring-backed chair with one cordovan on the edge of the desk. His lab coat was open, his shirt crumpled, his hair in disarray; he was a bit of a slouch. But then, any specialist with patients flying in from New Zealand and Korea could afford to look unkempt. “Well, boys and girls, I have fabulous news!”
Shep dropped his shoulders in relief. The internist was a man of science, not a car salesman, and by code of practice couldn’t turn back the odometer on a last-legs clunker.
“The evil shrinketh before the mighty hand of righteousness,” Goldman proceeded gleefully. “I know that Alimta is a bastard, Mrs. Knacker, and you’ve been a real trouper.” (This much beloved term real trouper was apparently medical shorthand for does not wake doctor in middle of night when suffering side effects hospital staff have already prepared her for.) “But it’s been worth it. I’ll be honest: that one biphasic patch is being stubborn. But it hasn’t got any larger either, so we’ve arrested its progress. The other two are significantly reduced in size. We’re not seeing any metastasis, either.”
Shep reached around Glynis’s neck and kissed her forehead in blessing. They squeezed each other’s hands while tumbling over one another to exclaim, “That’s wonderful! That’s terrific! We’re so grateful!”
Goldman loaded a CD into his computer, showing them cross-sections of Glynis’s organs, which looked like slices of a fancy game terrine in an upscale restaurant. Shep castigated himself for ever thinking critically about Philip Goldman. Maybe the guy really was handsome. Shep wasn’t a female, so who was he to judge? And if Glynis “believed” in her doctor, the faith had been well placed.
By contrast, Shep felt traitorous, cynical, and shallow for having been a doubter, a religious skeptic. His sudden groundswell realignment in relation to his wife’s disease was none too subtle, leaving him to wonder if all along he’d suffered from an attitude problem. He didn’t buy into this New Age business of sending out “negative energy”—or he didn’t think he bought it. Nonetheless, any atmospheric contribution he might have made to his wife’s convalescence (might they dare now to call it “recovery”?) had been to her detriment. Since the internist produced more tangible redemption than either Gabe Knacker’s traditional Presbyterianism or Deb’s barmy born-again sect in Tucson, it was time to convert. To become a loyal, tithing parishioner of Philip Goldman’s church.
Exercising his newfound faith, Shep regarded the doctor with fresh appreciation. You could tell from the assurance of his gestures that this was a man used to giving speeches to large audiences of rapt medical professionals. To having his articles published in The Lancet, and being sent lesser authors’ research for review. To having dying people beg him to take their cases, perhaps in tears. Yet he did not seem self-important; that is, he didn’t broadcast a compensatory bluster that would camouflage a private sensation of fraudulence. No, Goldman just seemed important.
The doctor pointed out the contrast between Glynis’s last CAT scan and the latest. To the naked eye, the differences looked depressingly slight; it would take work, this conversion, spurning a natural agnosticism and getting with the program. Throughout, Goldman employed the inclusive first-person plural: we’ve shrunk this, we’ve shrunk that. But the pronoun was over-generous. We had done nothing, as Goldman knew very well.
The doctor’s most conspicuous appetite was for accomplishment, and his drive for excellence put in the shade Shep’s sorry aim to match roofing patches with original slates. Maybe Goldman liked Glynis; he liked being liked, so it was hard to tell. But his primary relationship was with her cancer. She was therefore a vehicle for his own beatification. In taming her malignancy, he was probably pleased on her behalf; he was unquestionably pleased on his own. More project than person, Glynis was an instrument for the furtherance of this doctor’s galloping ambition, and not only to do good but to do well.
Her surrogacy was obscurely unsettling. Yet Shep couldn’t identify what was wrong with it. He was ordinarily an advocate of healthy self-interest. For Goldman to have conflated his patient’s survival and his personal conquest was in Glynis’s interest, too. She didn’t need another well-wisher, Shep told himself, another friend. She needed a competent, skillful technician who did the best job he knew how, and why the man made that maximum effort was his business. For that matter, maybe Shep should reverse who was using whom. He and Glynis were hijacking Goldman’s ego to serve their own purposes, and looked at this way the scenario seemed perfectly cheerful.
“Since it’s working,” the doctor wrapped up, “and you seem to tolerate the dr
ugs better than the average bear, for now we should keep hitting the cancer with Alimta and—with ‘A Lift into Manhattan.’” As the doctor shot Glynis a conspiratorial smile, Shep tried valiantly not to feel wounded that she’d let Goldman in on their private joke. “I’m a little concerned about your blood count. But we have plenty of other options at our disposal if your tolerance slips, or your progress with Alimta flags.” He rattled off a list of alternative drugs, and then asked about the current side effects. Glynis played them down.
It was summer. For the first time that season, it felt like summer, and the luscious weather was not a mockery. In the long light of early July, the sun was only now setting behind Hackensack, flashing tangerine sheets across the Hudson. Driving with thrust, Shep recalibrated the future. Maybe she’d pull through after all. Maybe he wouldn’t have to go to Pemba by himself. Maybe there would still be sufficient funds in the Merrill Lynch, if not for the relaxed, luxurious second life he’d planned, enough to get by, to pick up a small house for a song and eat papayas. Maybe he would still have to prevail upon her to go, but maybe this experience will have changed her, given her a glimpse of how little time was left even for people who didn’t have cancer. Maybe he would order up that kingfish, by candlelight, for two.
“How’d you like to eat out tonight?” he proposed. “I could give you a real ‘Lift into Manhattan.’”
“It’s a little risky, with other people’s germs …” said Glynis. “But what the hell. Let’s celebrate. I’d love to go to Japonica, but sushi is probably pushing it.”
No matter how many restaurants he sampled, up against it like this Shep often drew a blank, and they’d end up at some heavily advertised tourist joint like Fiorello’s because it was the only name he could dredge up. But this evening was charmed. “City Crab?”
“Perfect!”
Bejeweled like a tiara, the George Washington Bridge had just switched on its lights. Undergoing maintenance, the span on the Manhattan side had been unlit for years now, leaving a single lit peak on the New Jersey end to dangle to darkness mid-river; the lopsided effect had been visually vexing. Tonight at long last the whole bridge was lit shore to shore. The renewed symmetry seemed to mean something. A rhythm and balance had been restored.
Being out in public was a novelty now. The evening got off to a rocky start when they noticed a patron coughing nearby, and insisted on being reseated. When the waitress acted miffed, Glynis played her trump card: “My immune system is compromised. I have cancer.” After moving them swiftly upstairs, the waitress brought a complimentary amuse-bouche with the establishment’s apologies. Once the girl left, Glynis muttered, “At least mesothelioma is good for something.”
Glynis hadn’t been strictly forbidden alcohol, and Shep scanned the wine list. He didn’t much care about champagne, interchangeable with Mountain Dew in his view, and Glynis would likely sip a single flute. Still he chose a pricey Veuve Cliquot. He wasn’t buying champagne. Like most people, he suspected, he was buying the idea of champagne.
“To your health,” he toasted, pleased to note that in low lighting his wife’s chemo-tinged skin color could pass for a tan. She looked fetching in her cream satin turban, which so suited her long, sharp face that onlookers might easily assume that she’d opted for the swaddling as a style statement.
“I’ve been meaning to tell you,” said Glynis, tucking into her crab cakes. “I’ve been getting loads of ideas for new flatware projects. Like in the car just now. I got an image of a salad serving set, two nested spoons—one larger and thicker, the other thinner and more sinewy, both different but perfectly cupped. Forged, not cast, all on a slight curve … It’s hard to explain.”
The picture was romantic. “If you get back to work,” he proposed shyly, “I wonder if you’d consider doing another fountain. With me. Not like the goofy ones I knock up, but classy, like the Wedding Fountain. We haven’t collaborated since.”
“Mmm … Maybe for the dining table? That could be fun. That’s a great idea. Because I’m aching to make up for lost time.”
In truth, her “lost time” in metalsmithing comprised not only the last six months, but most of her married life. The only sign Shep gave of this indiscreet observation was to rue, “I wish you’d never wasted whole afternoons making chocolate bunny rabbits.”
“That was the point.”
“You wasted your time on chocolate bunny rabbits to prove to me that you shouldn’t be wasting your time on chocolate bunny rabbits.”
“That’s about the sum of it. Or to put it another way, I wanted you to see that your resentment over the fact that I didn’t bring in much money was nothing in comparison to my resentment if you forced me to earn it.”
“I never forced you to earn it, or resented that you didn’t.”
“Bullshit.”
“Tell me some more. About your ideas for flatware.”
“You’re changing the subject.”
“Yes.” Dipping his jumbo shrimp into cocktail sauce, Shep hazarded the kind of thought from which he had protected her for months. Her delicacy was physical. Maybe he needn’t treat her with kid gloves in every other regard. “If the situation were reversed, would you have worked to support me, and the whole family, while I stayed home pursuing my passion? Fountains, for example? Willingly. Without a word of protest.”
“You’d never have been able to stand that.”
“Dodge. The question was, could you?”
“Honestly? No. I wouldn’t support you while you made fountains. Women … Well, we’re not raised to expect that.”
“Is that fair?”
“Fair?” She laughed. “Who said anything about fair? Of course it’s not fair!”
Glynis was in such fine form that Shep could have wept. She finished the crab cakes; she finished her lemon sole. She ate the parsleyed potatoes and two slices of bread. She was kind enough not to mention that the chic seafood was lost on her dulled palate. Instead she quietly drowned both courses in Tabasco to get them to taste of anything but that tongue-curling taint of nickel, which contaminated everything from crab to kisses. Conversational strictures seeming to have loosened, they finally talked about the fact that Amelia had made herself so scarce. Their daughter had driven up to Elmsford only once this spring, excusing herself after a single hour lest her mother grow “too tired.”
“I’m too close,” Glynis speculated. “She looks at me and sees herself with cancer, and she can’t bear it.”
“But she isn’t the one with cancer,” said Shep.
“She’s afraid.”
“I don’t mind her being afraid for you. I do mind her being afraid of you.”
“She’s young,” countered Glynis, who’d not made such an effort to project herself into someone else’s head since this whole awfulness began. “She’s not in control of herself. I bet she’s not even aware of what she’s doing.”
“Which is?”
“Avoiding me, of course. If you pointed out that she’s only visited once, I bet she’d be shocked. I bet she imagines she’s been up loads of times. I bet that when she finally makes herself call me on the phone? And she’s thought time and again about phoning and then something mysteriously always comes up and she puts it off til tomorrow? I bet that happens so often, if not almost every day, that she thinks she’s been calling all the time.”
“I worry that Amelia could feel bad, later—” Shep stopped himself. That was the old thinking, based on the old assumptions. The ones from previous to seven o’clock this evening.
“About what?”
He curved the thought. “Once you’re well again. She could look back and realize how inconsiderate she was. How uninvolved in such a big crisis in your life. She could feel guilty; you could justifiably bear her a grudge. I’d like her to get her act together, in the interests of your relationship out the other end. Maybe I should say something.”
“Don’t you dare. She should see me because she wants to, not because Dad gave her a hard time. Anywa
y,” Glynis continued with a sip of champagne, “at least Amelia’s shown up more often than Beryl. By threatening your sister with the specter of one person she has to feel more sorry for than herself, I may have single-handedly driven her to New Hampshire.”
“You don’t want to see Beryl anyway. And now, out of sheer cheapness, she’s cornered herself into taking some responsibility for my father. Couldn’t have worked out better. Might even build her character.”
“With her raw materials, your sister building character is like you constructing a bookcase out of cardboard.”
With disingenuous idleness, Shep raised over their cheesecake: “Now that the prognosis is looking bright, do you still want to go ahead with this asbestos suit?”
“Absolutely! I may be pulling through this, but I’ll still have endured agony in the process. The people who did this to me should have to pay.”
“Well, they’ll not be the same people …” he said dubiously. “In the thirty years since you were in art school, the corporate higher-ups at Forge Craft would have turned over two or three generations.”
“They’re still drawing salaries from a company that’s profited from evil. Best of all, now that I’m getting better I’ll have the energy to give that deposition, and to stand up under cross-examination, too. I’ll be able to take the heat if the suit goes to trial.”
Shep’s heart sank. He was desperate to escape the litigation. “Okay.” He shrugged. “If you say so. I have another appointment with that attorney Rick Mystic next week.”
He was careful to curl the conversation back to her metalwork over coffee and mint tea, thus ending the night on a high note. In the car, he suggested they schedule a dinner with Carol and Jackson to celebrate the scan. “A themed evening,” she agreed. “We could serve CAT food.”
Shep was pleased to catch Zach in the kitchen, whether or not his son was pleased to be caught. The boy was so intent on disappearing himself that for a moment he froze with no acknowledgment of his parents’ entrance, as if they might walk right through him. His posture had further deteriorated. But Shep was relieved to come home and for once not start abjuring the boy that if he couldn’t chip in by doing his laundry he could at least match his own socks, or chiding the kid to please turn down the music because his mother wasn’t feeling well. (“What else is new?”) Shep couldn’t remember the last time he’d been able to deliver glad tidings, and the overpriced Mountain Dew at dinner had juiced his mood.
So Much for That: A Novel Page 25