Before Glynis had become something of a mystery to After Glynis—like the kind of faintly exasperating relative with whom you have little in common and about whom you have opinions to begin with only because you happen to be related by blood. (Were they? Related by blood? Arguably, not anymore. The blood in her veins had been replaced several times. She was no longer related “by blood” to herself.) This Before Glynis was a woman, she gathered, who had enjoyed the luxury of vast tracts of time unfettered not only by the need to make money, as Shepherd was forever harping on about, but—all that really matters, it turned out—by the impositions of the body. This was a woman who was “well.” (Perhaps more than any other quality, this theoretical state eluded the After-Glynis grasp. But only as an experience. As a concept, she understood being “well” better than anyone on the planet. For After Glynis had discovered a terrible secret: There is only the body. There never was anything but the body. “Wellness” is the illusion of not having one. Wellness is escape from the body. But there is no escape. So wellness is delay.) What had Before Glynis—Well Glynis, Pre-Inexorably-Going-to-Be-Sick-Any-Minute-Now Glynis, done with her free ride, her gift of the soon-to-be-revoked illusion that she was not, after all, a body—a body and only a body?
She had baked pneumatic lemon meringue pies that rose almost as tall as they were wide. Flecked with brown-crested wavelets, the white domes now loomed in her mind’s eye as purely architectural achievements, like the models of … Daniel Libeskind. (She remembered. The new World Trade Center architect was named Daniel Libeskind. A triumph. One such moment of victorious mental lucidity differentiated a “good” day from the rest.) Fleeting, corruptible, fragile, and destined to be eaten alive, such culinary projects were now baffling, as if this grown woman had spent her time making Play-Doh horsies or building pyramids with alphabet blocks that she would knock down at the end of the afternoon. She had been working in the wrong material.
She had raised children, but After Glynis had surprisingly mild feelings about this, too. They were not like pies. She had not made them. It was the parents who thought that they had made their children of whom, in the days that she had opinions, she disapproved. Zach and Amelia were fine, she didn’t have a problem with them, but in the nicest way they really had nothing to do with her.
She had cleaned things that only got dirty again. No one ever put on a gravestone “Here Lies, etc., She Swiffered the Kitchen Floor.”
But beyond pies, children, and floors, it was difficult to come up with how exactly Before Glynis had filled her time. What had specifically not filled the average Before-Glynis day was metalsmithing.
This was the focus of the perplexity.
Before Glynis had gone to art school. Before Glynis was very skillful, and it had taken many years of precious wellness to become skillful.
Pushing the newspaper away—she had not even skimmed the front page—she lurched to the kitchen drawer reserved for her own flatware. Back at the table, she slowly unwrapped the implements from their protective felt. As she gazed dully at the pieces she wondered if it was possible to gaze “dully” at objects so shiny. The sensation they provided her you could not call pride, since that was one more commodity that was out of stock, as if she lived in one of those old Eastern Bloc countries where you queued for hours because a single shop was rumored to have light bulbs. Nevertheless, as she gazed on her bewilderingly sparse handiwork, something stirred. Perhaps you could call it wistfulness. She had loved her husband, or at least she was willing to accept having loved her husband as a capital-of-Illinois fact. But these gleaming silver artifacts were the center. They had always been the center. They were, she thought anemically, what I cared about. The caring was gone, but the results of the caring still glinted in the finish of the metal.
Before Glynis had cared most of all about metal. So After Glynis would have cared about metal if After Glynis could care about anything. She was not sure, but maybe that meant that she could still care, that she was at least still capable of caring about not caring.
It did not necessarily reflect well on her: to have become one with a material so hard and cold to the touch. You were supposed to care about people. That’s right, you were supposed to watch your house burn down and grip the hands of your loved ones out on the sidewalk, perhaps feeling a twinge about the books and the clothes and the china, yet flushing with the realization that you had got the really important possessions out, that you still had your family. But Glynis would have braved the burning building to rescue the fish slice, while thinking twice about risking her life for a baby. That made her appalling. She was at peace with that. Glynis—both Before and After—was indifferent to looking well or badly. She had cared about form. She had never given two hoots about virtue. She had never been especially keen on other people, come to think of it, and now she didn’t have to pretend otherwise. That was one good thing: the liberation. She could be any way she liked now. She could be a woman who would save a fish slice and leave a baby.
The metal was all she had to show.
Why was there not more of it? The odd thing, this was the odd thing: for years she had privately thought of herself as a dilettante. The others, the hacks like Petra, her own family that she wouldn’t rescue from a burning building, they thought she didn’t know that’s what they called her behind her back: a hobbyist; at their most flattering, a has-been. Of course she knew. But what they didn’t realize? This was also the way she’d thought of herself. With contempt. Yet here at this stark end place was the useless discovery that she had been serious—that she had been serious all along. That she didn’t treasure the pies or the floor or the kids, or not like this. The writhing fish slice, the knurling sterling chopsticks, the slender forged ice tongs with their beguiling copper and titanium inlay, the matching salad servers with crimson glass set inside the handles, their gleaming red flame-work streaming down the silver as if you had cut your hand … These objects were, and always had been, the point of her existence.
Everyone wondered what got Glynis through the day, and she wasn’t telling. She was crossing a desert without water, but on the other side lay the oasis of After-After Glynis, the woman she had always been and would be again, only better. What got her through was the vision of her final chemo, Goldman announcing triumphantly that she was done, that the vileness would wash from her veins just the way Shepherd yearly sluiced out the debris and sludge from his stupid outdoor fountains. Day by day her pee would lose that dead gray smell of wet concrete, its alarming wrong colors of whatever chemical was most recently destroying her, like cherry red, or periwinkle. No, finally her pee would return to sunny uric yellow and exude that loamy, stinging smell that others foolishly found offensive and she had never before realized was rich and beautiful. She would sleep the night through and dream well and rise early, earlier than Shepherd even, padding immediately to the attic studio. Where she would remain all day. The silver would obey. Her output would be staggering. Shepherd would worry that she was working too hard. Shepherd would want to take his “research trips,” but she would say no, I have to work; go alone if you have to …
He’d been planning to go alone! The traitor, to Pemba, pin-in-a-map Pemba, some squalid island in flip-flops besting twenty-six years with his wife …
Stop. He is paying. He is paying his price for that. He will keep paying, and he should pay. Rest assured, too, that he will never finish paying, like those credit card debtors on the hook for so much principal that they can never do better than fork over the interest and the debt remains, unyielding, irreducible … Some sandpit, imagine. No one but Glynis understood that her husband was insane, and where did all that dissatisfaction hail from anyway? What was so wrong with his life that he had to flee it, to flee Glynis herself, to betray her? Really, he shambled around here these days so hangdog, so humble, but he could get outside, couldn’t he, just drive away, go to the movies if he liked, or to the A&P, which he did not understand was a privilege—yes, the A&P of all things was one mor
e privilege! She had caught him doing push-ups … Push-ups! He could still do push-ups! And he was complaining? Implicitly complaining, pretending not to complain, but she could hear it, the underground mumble of self-pity, of noble sacrifice, of prostrating subjugation and sneaky self-admiration and plotting. Plotting! He was plotting! He had a thoroughly different picture of After-After, as if she didn’t know. When it would all be “over” but she knew what he meant by “over,” she knew what, or rather who, he expected to be “over,” and his plotting, his plans, did not include her, did not have her in the attic returned to her torch, her polisher, her powers …
Stop. Think After-After. There were six more chemos to go. It wasn’t fair, of course. They had said nine months, nine months of chemo. The nine months had passed. She should have been finished by now, and out the other side. But all the transfusions, the low blood counts, the you’re-not-strong-enough-to-do-it-this weeks, had dragged the grueling business out. It was February, she should have been finished! Calm down. I should have been finished! No. Quiet. Calming now. Stay the course. Get through the course. Six. Six more. Concentrate on the other side. Concentrate. On the other side—
For After-After Glynis would be “New and Improved!” like a repackaged cleanser. Because she understood now. She would keep her understanding out the other side. They had all clamored for enlightenment and she had denied being privy to any enlightenment but there had been illumination of a kind and they could not have it because it was private. Because she had paid for it so dearly and it was hers.
See, there had never been anything to be afraid of. Making things, starting that initial saw cut by notching the triangular needle file into the edge of a fresh sheet of silver, had always been terrifying in the past. She had feared disappointing herself, fashioning a monument only to her own limitations, as she had also assessed her finished pieces as stunted, only as good as they were. Well, yes. Of course. But now she realized that their limitations were part of their beauty. That is, her tendency to design flatware subtly the same way every time, that little rut she had resisted, that despair at the end in recognizing that the salad servers still looked a bit too profoundly akin to the ice tongs despite the innovative inclusion of flame-worked glass, and even her tendency to make the same mistakes—it was all part and parcel of what made the work specific to Glynis Pike Knacker. The unlimited craftsman had no identity. Could make anything and therefore nothing. So your limitations were also your strengths. Besides, now she also realized that if she made a thing and it wasn’t right, she could make it right. There was no risk, and never had been. Rather, there was only one risk: making nothing. Giving into the seduction of the unformed, the airy mental construct that was therefore infinitely perfectible and, in theory, infinitely fine. At last she got it: concept is incidental; execution is all. And she had the eye. She was a master of metal. In comparison, the materials that others commanded—messy, pliant clay, nothing more than wet dirt, really; or wood, corpse parts from the slaughter of plants—it was all lesser, sad, timid, easy, and small. She had some respect for glass. But it was the rulers of metal who ruled the world.
She had long contemplated a knife handle, which could be riveted onto a good Sabatier blade with its dreary black grip removed—or perhaps she could have a narrow blade of high-grade steel commissioned, its edge dangerous, illegally sharp. For the handle, something delicious, voluptuous, a sensuous fabrication from heavy-gauge sterling with heft and undulation, perfectly weighted and subtly, infinitesimally not quite straight … A line trailed through her head, in and out like a basting thread.
After all, implements of violence appealed. She could see After-After Glynis designing nothing but scabbards, meat carving sets, maces, brass knuckles inlaid with fine glinting diamonds to do yet more damage, or even instruments of torture—not only finely wrought, filigreed flaying knives, but the instruments of her own torture. A brilliant silver replication of the bags of poison that had for months wafted overhead, hooked on a drip stand; its mirror-finished pleats of sterling would catch the light. Perhaps she could face down the very worst of her horrors, since for Glynis the route to control and possession of anything was to Midas it, to turn all that she touched to metal, what she was made of, what she had loved, and what she knew. So she could also fabricate a perfect, gleaming replica of a syringe, replete with working plunger, whose slick, sweet mechanics would wow the galleries, the terrifyingly attenuated needle rendered for the luxury market in white gold. Because there was a market. She had met the market, at Columbia-Presbyterian, all those “fellow” sufferers mainlining death in sinisterly comfortable recliners. The ones who never shut up, who blathered on their cell phones for hours and were lucky that Glynis didn’t own a gun. They were all eager for trinkets, distracting treats, and the illusion of meaning. She could fashion a whole line of metalware for cancer patients.
Like Shepherd she had plans, but they were respectable plans. Not the plans of a coward who was tired, or thought he was tired yet had no comprehension of tired. Not the plans of a weakling who just wanted out from under, who was just waiting, waiting it out, waiting for his release, plotting his release, digging silently at night when he thought no one was watching, like an Alcatraz con with a spoon.
No spoons; they were too warm and cupping, too round and breasty and safe. Still, Glynis’s head was crowded again, with all that After-After Glynis would make. Sharp things, aggressive things, uncompromising things. She would start with the knife. She could start with the design of the knife right now, getting a head start on After-After. Because there was not a minute to lose. Her poor husband had misguidedly hoarded his pennies, when the only currency they spent that had ever counted was time.
Making what was really a spectacular effort that would have read to outsiders as an unremarkable getting-out-of-chair, Glynis retrieved the pencil and notepad from beside the telephone. Shuffled back to the kitchen table. Tried to turn to a clean page. It took ages to turn the page. She could not get the corner raised with her finger, and at last resorted to prizing it up with the eraser. The hands … (The hands, not her hands; if anything, they owned her. That was it, referring to “her” body was all wrong now, since the body had its Glynis, really; the body possessed you, not the other way around.) Well, the hands were so numb that she could have slammed them with the phone book without flinching. The nails were lifting off, too, popping, they felt as if they were popping off her fingers like tiddlywinks—striated, deformed, so dark they were almost purple. These looked like the fingers of a heavy smoker who was into home improvement, and prone to bringing down a hammer on the wrong kind of nail. (She picked at them when Shepherd wasn’t looking. They bled. She shouldn’t. But fiddling with the raised nails, peeking sickeningly underneath, could absorb her for hours.) Her toenails were even worse, because there weren’t any; the nail beds stared soullessly up at her in bed, blindly, ten gouged sockets—wee wee wee wee, all the way home.
The pencil felt like a shovel. When she dragged its point across the paper, the wobbly graphite trail bore no relation to the clean line in her head—her undulating knife handle, like kitchenware by Henry Moore. So she abandoned drafting the handle to first portray the blade, but that came out wobbly, too—slight, trembling, and drooped, the beveled side concave.
She could draw better than this when she was three. In a last effort for the morning she pulled at the page, failed to tear it from the rubber binding, and settled for scratching out the embarrassing blob with a squiggle whose faintness scarcely captured her rage.
Glynis woke with her face smashed on the kitchen table. The scribbling on the pad did not make a lot of sense to her. Funny, the bit of mental flotsam that remained from the morning’s cyclone of elusive reflections was one distinct thought: “stupid outdoor fountains.” She took it back. That had been mean. In truth, she treasured Shepherd’s fountains. They were a little crazy, but derived from the crazy side of her husband that she liked.
Beside the notepad sat a plate of pa
sta salad, brightened with bits of red sweet pepper and parsley, alongside half a tuna sandwich with too much mayonnaise. Nancy, who had a key. How merciful, to have missed the kindness. To skip being thankful for the kindness. Most of all, to have missed being forced to eat this crap.
It must be afternoon. Friday. She was to have a visitor today. Ordinarily an odious prospect, but this was a rare visitor whom she did not much mind. Flicka. They were alike. How odd that she should now have more in common with a seventeen-year-old than with the girl’s vigorous, bounteous-breasted mother.
Glynis groped upstairs, hand-over-handing the banister; no one would ever know how much energy she put into wearing a fresh velour lounge suit. She was winded by mid-flight, and paused, leaning on the railing, to catch her breath. Breathing—somehow whenever she inhaled these days it was too late. The breath was too late; she had needed the air in this breath in the breath before. Her feet hurt; bulging in their pink fluffy slippers, the skin was stretched from the edema and starting to crack. She shouldn’t have fallen asleep in that hard kitchen chair; the pressure on her backside had aggravated the sores on either side of her anus—for on the rare occasions that she eliminated feces in the normal fashion it burned holes in her ass. Toxic Poo. Sounded like a rock band, or some awful contemporary eco-sequel to A. A. Milne.
Socks, to hide ugly swollen ankles. Woolen watch cap. Mustn’t upset visitors with bald head.
Back on the landing, she nudged the thermostat upward another two degrees, not looking at the numbers, not caring about the numbers. She was always cold.
So Much for That: A Novel Page 36