She nibbled a few fluffs off of the tips of the tines, and put down the fork. “It is ironic. I guess I’ve put a fair bit of effort into staying slim. And now I’m punished for it. There’s a lesson in there somewhere, though I’m not sure what it is.”
“You’ve got to stop eating only as much as you feel like.”
“I don’t really feel like any.”
“That’s the point. It’s a job. Now, you can do better than that.” There was a hint of menace in his voice, a surprising undercurrent of pending physical violence. He could see it coming to that, too. Unfortunately, Petra and Ruby’s perseverance had never been Glynis’s strong suit, but defiance was. The harder he pressed her to choke down those potatoes, the more forcefully she’d push them away. But he was getting desperate. Most of the time, he didn’t notice what she looked like; he was used to it, much as through his childhood he was largely unaware of the pong of paper mills that fugged his hometown. Yet once in a while he would catch a glimpse of her out of the corner of his eye, apprehending his wife as he might a stranger. Her cadaverousness—the sunken sockets, the striated breastplate, the wrists he could loop with his thumb and forefinger—would suddenly hit him like the piercing reek of Berlin, New Hampshire, after his family had been on vacation in the mountains.
Glynis took one more smear of potato, and set the fork down with resolution. Displaying a childlike deviousness, she had mounded the remainder, reducing its perimeter to make it look as depleted as possible. She had tucked the shred of chicken breast under the rim of the plate. He gave up, and cleared their settings; while enticing her to eat more of hers, he had somehow dispatched his own portion. As for putting on twenty pounds as insurance against disease, he was well on his way to taking his own advice. He ate the same butter-fortified meals that she did, and had always that Presbyterian aversion to throwing anything away. Glynis would eat two tablespoons of couscous soaked in half a cup of olive oil, and he’d polish off the bowl. The time he once spent at the gym he now spent at the A&P. Despite his own lauding of “leeway,” he’d worked out one way or another his whole life, and the soft, slackening spread of his midsection was the one personal sacrifice he felt most keenly. Still, Shep had decided not to worry about it. There was plenty of time to take the weight off—plenty of time after. Given his natural pragmatism, it took effort to keep from forming in his mind too clearly after what.
Shep had lured her back to bed, but Glynis was still wakeful. He lay beside her, and left the light on. She trailed a finger pensively over the chain-saw scar at the base of his neck. Following on a long silence that suggested an uncertainty over how to bring the subject up, at last she announced, “The Afterlife.”
The topic hadn’t arisen in weeks. So she had seen the beach on his screen.
“I know we’ve talked about this ad nauseam,” she continued, “but after all these years I still don’t quite get it. What it was you needed so badly to get away from. What it was you hoped to find.”
To his surprise, Shep reacted badly to her use of the past tense. Since they had talked about this ad nauseam, he fought an irritation that she could conceivably still not “get it.” But expressing irritation to Glynis—or anger, exasperation, even a mild negative like dismay—was now against the rules. Battling to remain serene, he tried one more time to put it into words.
“What would I like to get away from? Complexity. Anxiety. A feeling I’ve had my whole life that at any given time there’s something I’m forgetting, some detail or chore, something that I’m supposed to be doing or should have already done. That nagging sensation—I get up with it, I go through the day with it, I go to sleep with it. When I was a kid, I had a habit of coming home from school on Friday afternoons and immediately doing my homework. So I’d wake up on Saturday morning with this wonderful sensation, a clean, open feeling of relief and possibility and calm. There’d be nothing I had to do. Those Saturday mornings, they were a taste of real freedom that I’ve hardly ever experienced as an adult. I never wake up in Elmsford with the feeling that I’ve done my homework.”
“But you’re accustomed to homework. With nothing to do you’d be climbing the walls. How would you have filled your day, making fountains?”
“I would make fountains,” he said temperately, closing his eyes, “if I wanted to make fountains.”
“But coming to any understanding of what you ‘want’ is the hardest job in the world. It seems to me that what you were always designing for yourself was a massive existential crisis.”
Again that past tense, pricking his neck like a sharp-cornered care label, and Shep had never quite got his head around that word, existential. “Maybe it would turn out that I don’t especially want anything.”
“So, what, you’d lie around and nap? Take it from me, that’s nothing to get excited about.”
To the contrary, it sounded fantastic. The alarm would ring in an hour and twenty minutes.
“You can’t take pleasure in your leisure, because it’s been forced on you,” he said. “And because you feel like shit. So it’s the time we have while feeling well that’s precious. I’m not just squandering my ‘life’ on botched Sheetrock jobs in Queens. I’m squandering my healthy life. You of all people should appreciate how raw the deal is. We slave away during the few years that we’re capable of enjoyment. Then what’s left are the years we’re old and sick. We get sick on our own time. We only get leisure when it weighs on us. When it’s useless to us. When it’s no longer an opportunity but a burden.”
In truth, he had given this matter of how to fill The Afterlife more thought than she realized. He did not venerate lassitude, or lassitude alone. He might learn to dive; the marine life around Pemba was spectacular, and several outfits rented gear. Snorkeling presented an appealingly low-tech alternative. They played a game on the island called bao, involving the distribution of sixty-four seed pods over thirty-two carved-out bowls, an agreeably unfathomable pastime that put much emphasis on grace and finesse. Or keram, which looked to be a hilarious cross between checkers, hockey, and pool; shuttling pucks against each other on an uneven homemade wooden table would surely prove a diversion one was in little danger of taking too seriously. Otherwise, he had always found his greatest satisfactions—which is to say, the feeling you got from doing something rather than having already done it—undertaking discrete, utterly elective physical projects: painting a porch that would easily make it another season, knocking together a spice cabinet whose shelves were tailor-spaced to fit the stainless-steel canisters from Zabar’s, and—yes, Glynis, even if you find it comical—building fountains. So he might learn to carve a canoe. There were plenty of these crude boats called mtumbwis on the island, and chipping a trough from a log with dull hand-tools might take a fabulously long time.
“But Shepherd,” Glynis interrupted his reverie. “It seems obvious that what you were really trying to get away from all those years was yourself.”
Oh God, that old saw. The amount of effort it took to keep from getting annoyed was stupendous. “I have no problem with myself. What I would like to get away from is other people.”
“Like me.”
“Gnu?” He propped himself up on an elbow and turned her toward him. “I have never in all my life considered you other people.”
He slipped his hand around her neck, noting mournfully how pronounced its tendons had grown, how prominent the veins. Nevertheless, it was still Glynis’s neck. The breasts at the gape of her nightgown were smaller, though they’d never been large; the nipples had darkened and the skin was starting to crenulate, but they were still Glynis’s breasts. He kissed her. She returned his kiss with all the hunger so little in evidence during their impromptu supper.
Shep had always felt a little guilty about the intensity with which he was attracted to his wife. Physically attracted—he did not confuse the desire with anything more ethereal or romantic. He loved the way she looked, not just well turned out but especially naked, and he worried that he loved the w
ay she looked too much. He was addicted to the rim of her hipbone, to sliding his hand into its hollow, and down into the darkening crease. Because he’d begged her not to, she didn’t shave her bikini line, allowing for the subtle shading and alluring gradation of lighter scrub thickening to a shadowy woods, into whose mysteries he had always ventured with the thrilled trepidation of a boy in a magic forest. She had long legs and sharp, shapely kneecaps. This attraction went back to the first time they met, and was excruciatingly specific to Glynis. It probably qualified as unhealthily obsessive. He would have been embarrassed to admit to his gruff, lewd co-workers at Knack that for the whole of his marriage he’d not been drawn to any woman other than his wife. They would never believe him, or if they did believe him they would pity him as somehow a lesser man with no imagination and no drive.
Perhaps this was true. Perhaps there was something wrong with him, something missing. Yet the fixation was exclusive, and not within his gift to relax. Its strength seemed to wax and wane somewhat, but within a narrow range. At any given time, he might be attracted to Glynis, incredibly attracted to Glynis, or overpoweringly attracted to Glynis.
Early on they’d experimented with the sort of improvisations that in those days had seemed obligatory. But not long into this variety-pack approach to sex, Glynis had arrested the slide of his head down her long, flat stomach and announced with a wicked glint in her eyes, “You know, I really like fucking.” It was the most erotic declaration he’d ever heard, and on recollection it still made him hard. So that was what they did. They fucked. Sometimes often, sometimes less so, but he could honestly say that it had never bored him, never grown tired. Not that it was anyone else’s business, but she liked it a little rough.
Which was giving him some problems these last few months. First there was the incision from the surgery, which he had to take care not to touch. Although she hadn’t wanted him right after; too many hands and instruments had pried inside her, and she couldn’t bear even so kindly a violation, sleeping in a tight, private ball. The scar wasn’t as tender now, and she had gradually grown less protective of it; he was sure that at first she’d felt ashamed—fearful, that she was spoiled. True, he wouldn’t call the red, now browning ridge exactly a turn-on, but it did something else to him, which did feel manly: it broke his heart. It drove him to shelter her, to press her torso against his own and thus place the whole of his mass between his wife and the knifing world.
Eventually it was Glynis who’d had to importune that he stop handling her like china. She had indeed come to seem breakable to him, and under the influence of Alimta she was literally bruisable, so that when he did as she requested she woke the next morning with thumb-shaped purple blotches down her thighs.
The thing was, he knew that he loved her in that finer way. But as much as he relished the mingling of the two, he knew also that this physical desire was separate—a distinct wanting that had to do with line and shape and color, with breasts and hair and smell. It did not have to do with her dry sense of humor, her slyness, the beguiling barbarity of her character. It did not have to do with her willfulness, her infuriating self-destructiveness, or her spiritual alliance with metal. It didn’t even have to do with her sorely underexploited aesthetic talent. It had to do with the proportions of her legs, her long waist, her tiny, hard-muscled ass. It had to do with her dark, secret, forested cunt. For years he had privately anguished about her pending old age—the prospect of which was now a luxury. Inevitably, then, since January he had privately anguished about cancer. He was too attracted to his wife, but he was used to being too attracted, and if all that was left was the nice love, the warm appreciative admiring love without the gutter love, the unseemly, sordid animal love, he would feel lesser, and the love would feel lesser, in its very purity and high-mindedness and mere goodness smaller and less interesting and less addictive. He did not want to stop being attracted to his wife. It was not easy to face, but for twenty-six years he had not only loved a woman. He had loved a body.
Like the house of his dreams the night before her surgery, that body had good bones. But just as you want to be able to walk across a floor and feel a comforting solidity without necessarily envisioning the very joists that prop your feet, you did not especially want to bear witness to the good bones of your wife. As he ran his hand down the ladder of her rib cage, he could feel the underlying structure, the beams with which Glynis was built. He may have always savored the sharpness of her hipbones, but now they were too sharp, the skin stretched across them like the very cheapest of carpets, so skimpy that you could discern not only cracks between the floorboards but the nails. These days he bedded a sketch of a body, a gesture toward it, a few strokes from which to infer the woman he had gleefully ravished for a quarter century. He fought a shiver. He did not want to find Glynis repellant, and he filled out her form from memory, as he might study an architectural drawing and mentally walk rooms that were mere lines on paper.
“Are you sure you’re up for this?” he whispered.
In response, she reached for where his reluctance was most palpable; he arced in a shying sag. But a metalsmith has powerful hands, and the clasp of her fingers stirred him to remember that his wife was not a corpse. He needn’t shrink from her body as if he might defile her, commit an indecency. Her grip brought a sharp, needy sensation to life, one he had forgotten altogether in the constant, more pressing needs for potatoes, fleece blankets, liquids spiked with cranberry cordial, soft, slow rides to chemo. Men were supposed to think about sex all the time, but he didn’t anymore, and now the remembering was so keen that it hurt.
He was nervous of resting on top of her. Though she had always enjoyed the full weight of him, he didn’t want to crush her, and propped his arms on either side. Easing onto an elbow, he reached for the lubricant on the bedside table, opening the cap with one hand and squeezing a dab of clear jelly onto a forefinger. When they’d first resorted to this small assistance she’d been wounded, as if her enthusiasm had been found wanting. But he had importuned that her body was under assault, and its failure to grease the skids was in no way a failure of heart. Indeed, when he slipped the finger between her legs the lips were dry; only the smear from the tube made her feel like his wife.
They could still do this. He kissed her, the taste with that metallic tang like sucking on a coin, as if she were no longer merely allied with metal, but were turning into metal from the inside. He looked into her eyes, saddened by their yellow tinge but still he found her there. The pupils were small and permanently frightened. It wasn’t desire he read in them so much as desire for desire, which would have to do. Looking down, he felt sheepishly enormous, spreading and flabby in comparison. She gripped the barrel of his chest, the nails biting. He was sliding in with that diffident tenderness she hated. She took a buttock in each hand and shoved.
So he allowed himself to forget. He allowed himself to fuck her, as hard and as deeply as she had always liked, with that edge of abuse. Coming, he allowed himself to believe that this was the injection that would cure her, for once a mainline that wasn’t full of poison but was full of life. The poison was forty thousand dollars. The elixir was free.
That should have been it. But before she drifted off in his arms, Glynis mumbled distinctly, “So. Do you think you’ll have enough left?”
Shep felt his face burn. He stroked her hair silently (several strands came off in his hand), on the pretext that he didn’t know what she was talking about. But it was nefarious, after you’d lived with a woman for this long, how well she knew you. How she could tell what you were thinking, even if you tried mightily not to think it, to hide the thinking from yourself. Enough of what left? Money, of course. Only money, Dad—on what else did the firstborn Knacker so famously dwell?
Should being capable of calculations like the one he’d made earlier this evening mark him as a sinful and selfish man, that was a truth about himself he would have to live with. An Afterlife for one would cost little more than half as much as a
n Afterlife for two. He would retain the funds for a solo escape, but only if Glynis died soon.
Chapter Eleven
Shepherd Armstrong Knacker
Merrill Lynch Account Number 934-23F917
June 01, 2005 – June 30, 2005
Net Portfolio Value: $452,198.43
Driving Glynis once more to Columbia-Presbyterian, Shep was hard pressed to contrive an analogy for his emotions that was anything short of ridiculous. Like opening the envelope that contained his SAT scores? He hadn’t cared fractionally this much about going to college even in the days when he’d cared about going to college. Like opening the door to Dave’s office the April after he’d sold Knack for a million bucks, and was about to find out how much he owed the feds? Sure, he’d felt a bit sick to his stomach then; The Afterlife was at stake. But he’d been familiar with capital gains rates, and had been prepared for the ballpark. For that matter, Shep’s reputed concern for money was highly exaggerated. So he had never cared this much about any tax bill, even about the check he wrote to the U.S. Treasury in 1997 for close to three hundred thou.
No, for driving to get the results of Glynis’s first CAT scan since beginning chemotherapy there was no parallel. They didn’t talk. They had already talked. No amount of talk would affect the shrinking or expanding shadows on her slides. She was the same, she was better, or she was worse. The verdict was not on their efforts. That was one problem with a frivolous comparison to test results of the educational sort, whose scores rated having performed well or badly; they were outcomes you had ordained. However much Shep’s father may have regarded his son as an alien philistine, the man had successfully inculcated in his firstborn a drive to be good, to do good, and to do well. Yet whether Glynis was doing well would not issue from either of them having done well. Having always strived for excellence even in humble endeavors like installing a new bathroom vanity, Shep was confounded by consequences at once so vital, yet determined solely by the heedless decree of fate. His anxiety was therefore akin to the way Jackson must feel when the greyhounds were off and running and he’d placed a sizeable bet on a dog.