Lifting his wife, father, and afflicted seventeen-year-old ward from the plane to the three waiting wheelchairs that Fundu Lagoon had thoughtfully organized in advance—they were all so exhausted that even Flicka did not resist—Shep was niggled by his first trace of disappointment. Sniffing the thick, otherwise pungent air as it baked back from the tarmac, he could detect a vague floral sweetness mixing with the reek of airline fumes, but—no cloves. Even as their party was loaded by a jovial, muscular driver and the minivan got under way, Shep kept inhaling, sticking his nose out the crack of the van’s window with a petulance he could not repress. It was just an idea he’d latched onto, from a snippet he’d read online, but for some reason it had become terribly important to him that the entire island of Pemba would smell like pumpkin pie.
The drive was still enchanting. Between the airport in Chake Chake and the port of Mkoani they traveled one of Pemba’s few paved roads, so that if anything the vistas went by too quickly: trees drooping with papayas whose contour reminded Shep with chagrin of his father’s aged testicles, immature mangos shaped like lima beans, bulbs of breadfruit spiked like maritime mines. Traffic must have been rare, since as their vehicle passed local women in harlequin kangas rose from the shade of their porches to stare. Surveying the housing stock, Shep considered whether to build Chez Knacker with the less attractive cinderblocks of which the newer houses were made, or to go native and learn to construct the more traditional architecture of thatched coconut-palm roofing and mud walls dried on a frame of sticks. The latter, claimed their driver, lasted a good forty years, and their rooms were cool.
Yet as they drew toward the port where Fundu’s speedboat would meet them, the roadside was soon lined with straw mats, nubbled with a thin crumble in hues from green to brown. As the mats grew in density—by the edge of town the nubble was spread on the road’s meridian, and out onto the tarmac itself—the van gradually infused with the aroma of pumpkin pie. Cloves, spread to dry in sun. Inhaling deeply, Shep sat back in satisfaction. The Afterlife had begun.
At $1,250 per night, the “superior suite” at Fundu Lagoon—the very last and most expensive set of tents a ten-minute walk from the main resort, providing maximum privacy—was hardly where Shep planned to hunker down for keeps. At that rate, the Forge Craft settlement would last no more than a couple of years. Yet the resort’s comically palatial luxury was perfect for this recuperative pause: catered meals, towels the size of bedsheets in high thread-count Egyptian cotton, and their encampment’s generous provision of everything that Shep might have forgotten: floppy straw sun hats, sandalwood shampoo, organic hibiscus teabags, bug spray, mosquito coils, straw carrier bags for beachcombing, and a copy of Africa Birds and Birding, not to mention the iced bottle of champagne and chilled glasses that greeted them on arrival.
Indeed, it was the champagne that inspired his immediate solution to what to do about Flicka, whose blood pressure was soaring in the heat. Since the little round plunge pool on their deck was essentially a champagne bucket writ large, it was the perfect place to stick Flicka, who could dangle in the cool blue water through the heat of the day. Snorkeling expeditions to the reef, diving lessons, and dawn speedboat trips to careen through cavorting pods of spinner dolphins would keep Zach from grumbling that there was nothing to do; as soon as he’d ditched his bag at their encampment, the kid made a beeline for the computer with broadband in the entertainment tent, having perhaps interpreted the sweat along his hairline as an early sign of Internet cold turkey. Shep’s father may have been going through newspaper withdrawal himself, but immediately set up shop in a deck chair in the shade of a wide umbrella, stripped down to his boxers. Sipping champagne and gazing out to the deserted beach while daos and mtumbwis sailed lazily across the horizon, he seemed sufficiently to savor his miraculous rescue from the lifeless four walls of Twilight Glens to live without The New York Times. Instead he drew out the first of the stack of Ruth Rendell and Walter Mosley novels that his son had stashed in his luggage—the very variety of fiction that had been Gabriel Knacker’s undoing on the staircase on Mt. Forist Street. After exploring the big main tent and indoor bathroom, playing with the outdoor shower, clambering up to the second floor of the adjoining tent to play with the beaded curtains of mangrove seeds, Heather squeezed into her swimming suit and tumbled to the water. Carol kept an eye on her, but at low tide the girl walked for ten minutes straight out and never submerged deeper than her knees. In her first hour at Fundu, Heather had already got more exercise than Shep had seen the girl take for the last ten days.
He settled Glynis onto the wide white canopied mattress to rest. A staff member arrived promptly with a tall glass of fresh passion-fruit juice and a straw at his request, although he also fed his wife a christening sip or two from his champagne. He eased off the remainder of her velour lounge suit—all that she could stand against her skin these last few months—and tenderly clad her in a soft, thin muslin dress he had snagged from Fundu’s gift shop on the way in. Glynis smoothed her hand across the starched and ironed white sheets and glanced overhead at the gathered mosquito netting.
“So this is my death bed,” she said simply.
“It’s better than that snarl of blankets on Crescent Drive, isn’t it? And at least here we don’t have to pay any extra to heat the room to ninety.”
She smiled. “But whatever am I going to do without the Food Channel?”
“From the sample menus I read online? Grilled wahoo, Thai beef salad, baked lemon soufflé? You’re living in the Food Channel.”
“Well, it’s pretty amazing, Shepherd. Though getting here was horrible.”
“I know. I knew it would be horrible.”
“I couldn’t do that again. I guess not having to is one merit of the one-way trip.”
“It’s one-way for me, too.”
“You’re sure you’ll stay here?” This was her first tentative inquiry about Shep’s real pending Afterlife: life after Glynis. “It’s only been a few hours.”
“I was sure before the props on the plane stopped spinning. And then on the drive to Mkoani … You can tell, they work hard here. They may have cell phones now, but everything is still pretty primitive. More bikes and oxcarts than cars. You want fish, you catch it. You want a banana, you pick it. Suits me. And did you notice all the men by the side of the road—resoling shoes, fiddling with upended bikes, taking fridges apart? I’m so sick of being told in the States, oh, that would cost more to fix than it’s worth, just buy another one. In Pemba, imports are expensive, labor’s cheap, and people are poor. So they repair things, keep old appliances running. That’s more my nature. I mean, this is a handyman’s paradise. I think I could come to understand this life. I don’t think I did, the other.”
“Maybe I didn’t, either,” she said sadly. “I got so caught up in … You’re not an artist, but in my field things can start to seem so—adversarial. Not only with the rest of the world, but with yourself. Wrestling over whether your stuff is any good. But Ruby is probably right. You just make something and then make something else. It’s ordinary. Not so different from being a handyman after all. I wish I’d got that from the beginning.”
“Worrying about what flatware you did or didn’t produce—you can let that go now, too. Look around you. Does it seem to matter?”
The mangrove seed curtains rattled gently in the breeze. A vervet monkey ventured brazenly to the deck and snatched half of Gabe’s grilled cheese sandwich. The sun notched closer to the horizon, bathing the encampment in the syrup of a late-harvest Riesling.
“Not especially,” said Glynis. “Something about the air, the languor here. It’s hard to imagine anything mattering especially.”
“I’ll tell you what matters,” Shep said wistfully. “We should have moved here in 1997.”
For the following few days—seemingly an infinity at the time, but less than a week—Glynis miraculously rallied, and Shep allowed himself to hope that Philip Goldman’s prognosis had been too pessimistic.
They went for dawdling rambles along the beach, bending down for conch shells. They watched crabs skitter to their holes, birds swoop over the banyan trees, schools of tiny silver fish flash into the air beside the pier and patter back to the surface with a rippling plash. Late afternoons when the ruthless sun had softened, he took his wife’s hand and led her into the shallow sea, where the sand was fine and clean, the water almost hot from the day’s equatorial bask. In the vast, wooden-slatted shower stall, he soaped the salt from her skin and rinsed the grains from between her toes. Making free with the gift shop, he clad her for dinner in filmy cotton shifts, wrapping soft Indian scarves around her scalp. To fend off mosquitoes, he dabbed deet behind her ears like fine perfume. At sunset, they idled at the bar at the base of the pier, where Glynis ordered complicated papaya-and-vodka cocktails for the hell of it. She may not have made it through most of them, but mortality is the ultimate liberator, and one of the many things that didn’t matter anymore was her alcohol intake.
Her appetite picked up a degree, and at dinner she would nibble at a crayfish quiche, spear a ring of calamari, fork a flake of Shep’s grilled kingfish. They reminisced about earlier research trips; Glynis said Pemba recalled the cove of Puerto Escondido on the Mexican coast. (“Remind me,” said Shep. “What was wrong with Puerto again?” “Too many Americans,” said Glynis.) Finally she asked about his plans—what kind of house he might build and where. On their third evening, she even raised mischievously, “You’re not a monk by nature. I should know. Assuming she stays … Do you by any chance find Carol attractive?”
Shep was not so stupid as to imagine that his wife was genuinely playing matchmaker. Virulently possessive and naturally jealous, she hadn’t even acknowledged that her husband would survive her until a little over a week ago. So he’d the good sense to aver without hesitation, “Not in the slightest.”
“Are you sure?” Glynis teased. “She has the best knockers in the northern—and now the southern—hemisphere.”
“I like little ones.”
“You’ve had to.”
“Besides, she’s too nice,” he dismissed. “Not enough of a dark side.” Privately he considered that after Carol’s last entrance into her Windsor Terrace kitchen, any budding “dark side” must have blossomed apace.
“You don’t have much of a dark side yourself,” said Glynis.
“Exactly. That’s why I need one.”
Shep’s gratitude for permission to talk about his future without her was boundless. He couldn’t help but have thought about it, but always with guilt, and no little superstition, as if he were wishing her gone, hexing her chances. Now that the subject was no longer off-limits, it gave rise to a surprising humor. “You know I plan to bury you in the backyard, don’t you,” he said lightly over dessert, “like a dog.”
Once they bedded down for the night, the squabbling between Flicka and her sister in the adjacent tent was blotted out by the scree of cicadas and the wild cackle of bush babies in overhanging branches. He read his wife paragraphs from Hemingway. He sang her the songs he remembered from his childhood, when his mother would tuck him and his sister into bed; his mother’s voice had been well pitched and clear, and her version of Taps instilled the tent with the welcome illusion that they were protected: Day is done. Gone the sun. From the hills, from the lake, from the skies … All is well. Safely rest. God is nigh.
Their fourth night in candlelight, he massaged her feet with lemongrass oil, their soles pumiced smooth from walking on sand. He worked the oil up the shrivel of her atrophied calves. He traced the sharp, classical slope of her tibias, their exquisite line uncompromised even by cancer. He smoothed to her inside thighs, where the skin had loosened with so little flesh to cover. He paused to pool another tablespoon of oil into his palm. But when he reached for her abdomen, she held his wrist. He imagined that she was sensitive about the surgical scar and didn’t want him to touch it. But then she pushed his hand further down, pressing the palmful of lemongrass oil into the one part of her body that he had been truly heartbroken to watch go bald. He arched his eyebrows in inquiry.
“This mosquito netting,” she said. “It’s a lot like a bridal canopy, isn’t it?”
Indeed it was.
The remission was precious, and the handful of days when the setting African sun returned the color to his wife’s cheeks alone justified the suffering of the journey here. Shep couldn’t vouch for their value to the rest of the world, but these few days in Pemba together were worth two million dollars to him. Yet the respite was brief. There came a morning when he woke to find the sheets red. Glynis’s menstrual cycle had shut down months before. The bleeding was from her ass.
That was the end of strolls on the beach, for she could no longer walk farther than the bathroom, and then with assistance. She was in pain, and for the first time Shep broke out the liquid morphine.
Shep had been in Morocco with Glynis when his mother suffered the stroke from which she never recovered. Jackson had exited as abruptly as one can, and Shep’s other contemporaries were hale. To his mortification, then, his experience of death at close hand had been constrained to cinema and television. On-screen, characters with terminal illnesses lay quietly in hospital beds, mumbled something touching, and dropped their heads. It didn’t take very long, and the death itself was as tidy as turning off a light switch.
For filmmakers, death was a moment; for Glynis, death was a job.
Over the course of two long days and nights, his wife’s organs slowly shut down. Far from suffering the constipation of chemotherapy, she could no longer keep any substance in, and from every orifice began to leak. Her vomit had blood in it. Her diarrhea had blood in it. Her urine had blood in it. Perhaps it helped that he’d warned the resort in advance, for the staff was kind about the sheets, which they changed twice a day after Shep had carried his wife to a deck chair. The Africans seemed unfazed. He sensed they’d seen this before—and that their own versions of death bore little resemblance to a light switch.
“You want that we bring doctor?” one of the older porters asked, drawing Shep aside. When Shep shook his head, the porter explained, “No, not doctor from hospital in Mkoani. Uganga. Very strong in Pemba. A powerful energy line run right under your tent.”
“Uganga?” Shep had learned the word. “Thank you, but no. We turned our backs on our own black magic. We’re not about to throw ourselves on witch doctors of just a slightly different stripe.”
Shep and the other five sat vigil. When she was wakeful, churning, crying out, he held her on the bed, or drew her head to his lap. He kept her favorite CDs cycling through his portable player: Jeff Buckley, Keith Jarrett, Pat Metheny. According to his father, what Glynis needed most was simple, animal contact: touch. The steady purr of a human voice, and it didn’t matter in the slightest what he said. So to soothe her, he told her about Pemba, all that he had learned from the porters, maids, and waitresses here, who were glad of his interest in their island.
“Cloves,” he intoned, keeping his voice even and low. “This island used to be the biggest source of the spice in the world. We don’t think about cloves much, except for peaches or pie. But they used to be incredibly important, as a preservative, and as an anesthetic. Did you know that cloves were once worth more than their weight in gold? The government here keeps a tight rein on the crop, and the farmers all have to sell their cloves to the government—at a very poor price, I’m told. So there are clove smugglers, can you believe it? Who run contraband bags in those boats called jihazzis to Mambasa, where they can get a better price. It’s very dangerous, and you go to prison if you’re caught. But the shame is, the market for cloves has imploded. It’s not used medicinally much anymore. With refrigeration, it’s not needed for a preservative, either. The biggest market is for scenting cigarettes in the Middle East.”
She stirred. “If there’s no market …” she mumbled. “Why risk prison?”
He had not expected her to listen, and he was proud of her for list
ening; proud of her for trying so hard to still be present, to humor his enthusiasm, to care about conducting a conversation. She had always liked talking—one of those many pleasures that one doesn’t consider until they’re on the cusp of being withdrawn. Talking, he reflected, was one of life’s great delights. He would miss very much talking to her.
“I assume because small money to us, even that fraction of a difference per kilo for a crop that nobody much wants, is large money here. That was always the very basis of The Afterlife, right? Anyway, the funny thing is, the Wapemba don’t use cloves in cooking at all. They think it’s an aphrodisiac. Or as our driver told me, ‘good for home affairs.’”
She chuckled, but that made her cough. He held a handkerchief to her mouth and wiped the pinkened phlegm. “Able was I,” she said on recovery, with a sly little smile, “‘ere I saw Pemba.”
Whatever the allusion, it pleased her with herself, but Shep didn’t get it. He felt a rare flash of regret that he’d never gone to college.
Alas, by the second day there was no more talking. Not in the sense of the word that anyone might miss.
“Hurts,” she would say, and he would put two more drops of morphine on her tongue. “No,” she would say, not in answer to any question. “Fuck,” she would say. “Oh, God,” she would say, squeezing the sheet so tightly that it retained the clench of wrinkles on release. “Hot,” she would say, or “cold.” Feeding her ice chips, speeding the revolutions of the ceiling fan, or pulling blankets up or down had to suffice for that farcical ideal of keeping her comfortable.
Carol had wondered if they should keep the kids at bay. But Gabe urged her otherwise. Bearing witness to death, he said, should be part of, was perhaps finally the beginning of, their education. It might help Heather to come to terms with her father’s fate instead of torturously repeating the theme song to a television ad for his obnoxious employer and stockpiling pain au chocolat at breakfast. It might further discourage Flicka from making abusively cavalier references to her own death, and as for Zach—Glynis was his mother. So they involved the children, who took turns sponging her forehead with a cool damp cloth, fanning her with copies of Africa Geographic, and plumping her pillows.
So Much for That: A Novel Page 48