“These tickets are one-way.”
He would have expected that when she got it, when she registered the true nature of the gauntlet he’d thrown on the coffee table, her face would cloud, sink into solemnity, or constrict with the wary rigidity of preparing for combat. Instead she looked mildly amused. He was accustomed to ridicule at Handy Randy (“Yeah, sure you’re moving to Africa, any day now, you and Meryl Streep”), and sometimes, though it filled him with self-hatred, he’d joined in the fun himself. But from Glynis any suggestion of the same blithe, pitying cynicism slew him. He knew she wasn’t into it anymore, but he hadn’t thought her attitude had got as bad as that.
“Wasteful,” she said calmly, with a thin smile. “Not like you.”
She’d correctly intuited that the one-ways had cost more than round-trips. “A gesture,” he said. “This isn’t about money.”
“I can’t imagine your doing anything unrelated to money. Your whole life, Shepherd,” she announced, “has been about money.”
“Not for its own sake. I’ve never been greedy like that, as you know—wanting money to be rich. I want to buy something with it.”
“I used to believe that,” she said sadly. “Now I wonder if you’ve any idea what it is that you really want to purchase. You don’t even know what you want out of, much less what you want in on.”
“I do,” he countered. “I want to buy myself. I’m sorry to sound like Jackson, but he’s right, in a way. I’m an indentured servant. This isn’t a free country, in any sense of the word. If you want your own liberty, you have to buy it.”
“But liberty isn’t any different from money, is it? It’s meaningless unless you know what you want to spend it on.” The observation sounded hollow, even bored.
“We’ve talked about what I want to spend it on.”
“Yes,” she said wearily. “Endlessly.”
He swallowed the insult. “Part of going is finding out.”
Shep could not have contrived a conversation that should have riveted his wife more than this one, but he could swear that her attention had wandered.
“Gnu,” he appealed, pronouncing the G; the endearment went back to their very first research trip to Kenya, where she had done cracking impressions of wildebeests, hooking her hands over her head for horns and wrenching her long face into a pleading expression that was sad and dumb. The antic had been girlish and beguiling. He used to call her Gnu all the time, and lately—well, lately, he realized with a shock, he hadn’t been calling her anything at all. “These are real tickets. For a real airplane, that takes off in one week. I would like you to come with me. I would like Zach to come with us, and if we leave as a family I will drag him down the Jetway by the hair. But I am going, with or without you.”
Damned if she didn’t seem to find his declaration hilarious. “An ultimatum, then?” She drained her glass, as if to stifle laughter. “An invitation,” he countered.
“A week from now you’re getting on a plane to fly to an island you’ve never been to, where you’ll spend the rest of your life. Whatever were all those ‘research trips’ for?”
In her use of you as opposed to we he read her answer, and he wasn’t prepared for the sudden falling sensation in his chest. Although he had tried to be realistic with himself, apparently he had held out hope that she and Zack might come with him to Pemba after all. Still, this face-off was young, so he held out further hope that—for the first time in the history of the universe—he might change her mind.
“I picked Pemba precisely because we haven’t been there. That means you can’t have already come up with a zillion reasons why yet another option is off the table.”
When she said nothing in response, he was able to remember some of what he had recited over the steering wheel earlier this afternoon on the Henry Hudson Parkway. “Goa got the all-clear until you read about that expat Briton who was murdered by a local acquaintance in her house, and then it was too dangerous. One murder. As if people never kill each other in New York. Bulgaria would have been a steal when we first lit on it, and in the Western world, too, if barely, with broadband and a postal service and clean water. But the food was too bland. The food. As if we couldn’t rustle up a little garlic and rosemary. Meantime, the property prices have already started to escalate, and now it’s too late. Ditto Eritrea, which piqued your imagination: proud new country, warm people, espresso on every corner, and the fifties architecture was a kick. Now, lucky for you, the government’s gone to hell. You loved Morocco, remember? Cinnamon and terra cotta; neither the food nor the landscape was bland. It seemed so promising that I agreed to stay on when my mother had her stroke, and we got back half a day too late to say goodbye.”
“You made up for it.” Ah, the funeral expenses. If Shep did not resent his family’s impositions on his finances, Glynis resented them for him.
“But after 9/11,” he plowed on, “suddenly all Muslim countries—including Turkey, to my own disappointment—got knocked off the list. We had a terrific opportunity when the currency collapsed in Argentina. Before that, we could have bought just about anything in Southeast Asia during that financial crisis. But now all those currencies have recovered, and our resources would never stretch for thirty or forty years in any of those countries today. In Cuba, you couldn’t live without shampoo and toilet paper. Croatia’s residency requirements entailed too much red tape. The slums in Kenya were too depressing; South Africa made you feel too guilty for being white. Laos, Portugal, Tonga, and Bhutan—I can’t even remember what was wrong with all of them anymore, though”—he indulged a bitterness—”I’m sure you do.”
Glynis exuded an aggressive mildness, and seemed to be enjoying herself. “You’re the one who ruled out France,” she said sweetly.
“That’s right. The taxes would have killed us.”
“Always money, Shepherd,” she chided.
It struck him then how people who acted above money—arty types like his sister, or his Old-Testament father—were the same folks who never earned any to speak of. Glynis knew perfectly well that The Afterlife had to add up financially or it would solely constitute a long, ruinous vacation.
“But you’ve paralyzed us at both ends, haven’t you?” he proceeded. “Not only is no destination good enough, but it’s never the right time to go. We have to wait until Amelia is out of high school. We have to wait until Amelia is out of college. We have to wait until Zach is out of primary school. Middle school. Now it’s high school, and then why not college? We have to wait for our investments to recover from the techstock crash, and then from 9/11. Well, they have.”
Shep wasn’t used to talking so much, and babbling made him feel foolish. He may have been as dependent on resistance as Glynis, which is to say: hers. “You think I’m being selfish. Maybe I am. For once. This isn’t about money, it’s about”—he paused in embarrassment—”my soul. You’ll say, you have said, that it won’t be what I expect. I accept that. It’s not as if I nurse a misguided idea about parking myself on the beach. I know sun gets boring, that there are flies. Still, I can tell you this much: I plan to get eight hours of sleep. That sounds small, but it’s not small. I love sleeping, Glynis, and”—he didn’t want to choke up now, not until he got it all out—”I especially love sleeping with you. But when I say I crave eight hours of sleep, at a Westchester dinner party? They laugh. For commuters around here, that’s such a preposterous ambition that it’s actually funny.
“So I don’t care what else I’ll do in Pemba or whether the power keeps cutting off. Because if I back down this time? I’d know in my heart of hearts that we’re never really going to go. And with no promised land to look forward to, I can’t keep it up, Gnu. I can’t keep cleaning up the messes that the untrained klutzes at Hardly Handy Randy leave behind. I can’t keep sitting in traffic for hours listening to NPR on the West Side Highway. I can’t keep running to the A-and-P for milk and getting ‘bonus points’ on our store card so that after spending several thousand dollars we qual
ify for a free turkey on Thanksgiving.”
“There are worse fates.”
“No,” he said. “I’m not sure there are. I know we’ve seen plenty of poverty—raw sewage running in gutters and mothers scavenging for mango peels. But they know what’s wrong with their lives, and they have a notion that with a few shillings or pesos or rupees in their pockets things could be better. There’s something especially terrible about being told over and over that you have the most wonderful life on earth and it doesn’t get any better and it’s still shit. This is supposed to be the greatest country in the world, but Jackson is right: it’s a sell, Glynis. I must have forty different ‘passwords’ for banking and telephone and credit card and Internet accounts, and forty different account numbers, and you add them all up and that’s our lives. And it’s all ugly, physically ugly. The strip malls in Elmsford, the Kmarts and Wal-Marts and Home Depots … all plastic and chrome with blaring, clashing colors, and everyone in a hurry, to do what?”
It was not his imagination. She really wasn’t paying attention.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “You’ve heard this before. Maybe I’m wrong, and maybe I really will skulk back home a few weeks later all hangdog and sheepish. But I’d rather the humiliation of trying and failing than give it up. Giving it up would be like dying.”
“I think you’ll find”—her voice was so measured, piped full of some great new wisdom he did not care for—”that it would not in the least be like dying. There is nothing like dying. We use it as a metaphor for something else. Something smaller and silly and much more bearable.”
“If this is your idea of getting me to change my mind, it’s not working.”
“When is this you’re planning to depart our shores?”
“Next Friday. BA-179 out of JFK, the 22:30 for London. Then on to Nairobi, to Zanzibar, to Pemba. You and Zach can come with me up until the minute the flight closes. In the meantime, I thought I’d clear off and give you a chance to think.” A chance to miss me is what he meant. To miss me while you can still un-miss me. And in all honesty he was afraid of her. If he remained here, she would be able to talk him out of it. She was that good. “I’ll be staying with Carol and Jackson. They’re expecting me, and you can reach me there at any time before I go.”
“I do wish you wouldn’t,” she said idly. Having picked up her glass from the table, Glynis rose and smoothed her slacks in a gesture that he recognized as marshaling herself to prepare another ordinary dinner. “Randy is for once entirely handy, and I’m afraid I will need your health insurance.”
Later that evening, while Glynis was still tidying the kitchen, Shep slipped upstairs and pulled the bathrobe off his suitcase. He put the two shirts back in the third drawer of his dresser, smoothing them so they’d be in respectable condition for work. He removed the needle-nose Vise-Grips, the screwdrivers, and the hacksaw, then fit them back into the tiers of his battered red metal toolbox. When he was down to the comb, before laying it in its accustomed place beside the cigar box of leftover foreign currency, he ran it through his hair.
Chapter Two
He’ll never go,” said Carol, rinsing arugula. “Bullshit,” said Jackson, as he stole a piece of Italian sausage from the sautéed peppers. “He’s bought the ticket. I’ve seen it. Or them. I told him not to waste the money on the other two. She’ll never go, that’s for sure. I figured it out way before Shep did. Glynis thought it was a game, all those trips. A game she got tired of.”
“You always think I mean he’s too much of a coward. That’s not it. He’s too responsible. He’ll never leave his family high and dry; it’s not in him. Pick up his carry-on and never look over his shoulder? Start a whole new life from scratch, when he’s almost fifty? Have you ever known anyone to do that really, and why would they anyway? Even if he does go, to make a point or something, he’ll come right back home—Flicka, it’s been at least half an hour. Have you put in your tears?”
Their elder daughter emitted a nasal sigh, halfway between a groan and a bleat. Its tonalities were refined, managing to convey both no and yes. She rustled begrudgingly into her sweater pocket for the Ziploc, then dosed both eyes from one of several dozen tiny plastic squeeze tubes of Artificial Tears, whose shape always reminded Jackson of Fat Man dropped on Nagasaki. As usual, Flicka’s eyes were aflame, the lashes caked with petroleum jelly.
“What, tail between legs?” said Jackson. “You got no appreciation of male pride.”
“Oh, don’t I?” Carol shot him a look. “Where is this ‘Pemba’ anyway?”
“Off the coast of Zanzibar,” said Jackson. “It’s famous for growing cloves. Whole island stinks of them, or that’s what Shep tells me. I picture my man leaning back in his hammock, breathing in the smell of hot whisky and pumpkin pie.”
“I bet he’ll go,” said Flicka. “If he says he’s going to. Shep’s not a liar.” Though often mistaken for her eleven-year-old sibling’s younger sister, she was sixteen; just as one calculated the relative age of pets, her true age in terms of human suffering was closer to 103. The here and now having proved an eternal trial, Flicka was naturally captivated by the idea of somewhere else.
Jackson ruffled his daughter’s fine blond hair. They’d kept it close-cropped in her childhood to prevent it from becoming constantly contaminated with vomit, but since the fundoplication surgery she could only dry-heave, and Flicka had been letting it grow out. “There’s a girl with a little faith!”
“But what would he do?” Carol pressed. “Make clever water fountains for the Third World? Shep’s not the kind of man to be happy lying around in a hammock.”
“Maybe not fountains, but, hell, he could dig wells. Shep’s useful. He can’t help it. If I was living in a little mud hut, he’s the guy I’d want for a next-door neighbor.”
“Flicka, get away from the stove!”
“I’m nowhere near the damn stove,” said Flicka in her usual slurred deadpan. She always sounded not only adenoidal but slightly drunk, like Stephen Hawking after a bottle of Wild Turkey. She also sounded surly, and that part was real. It was one of the things that Jackson adored about her. She refused to play the sunny, chin-up disabled kid who lit up everybody’s day with her amazing pluck.
“Cut it out!” said Carol, removing the paring knife from Flicka’s hand and slamming it back on the counter.
Flicka lurched back to the table with a gait that most people considered awkward but that Jackson always found strangely graceful: her trunk slopping to one side and then the other, while her hands compensated with an elegant little flail, feet placed carefully heel to toe as if walking a tightrope. “Whadda ya think,” she said. “I’m gonna lop my fingers into the salad ‘cause I mistook them for little carrots?”
“That’s not funny,” said Carol.
It wasn’t funny. When Flicka was nine, she’d tried to help out by making coleslaw, and it was only due to the fact that the cabbage had changed varieties—from green to red—that Jackson had noticed the end of her left forefinger was missing. They’d sewn it back on in the ER, but he’d never been able to stomach coleslaw since. Maybe it seemed a mercy that your kid’s limbs were so insensitive to pain that stitches required no local anesthetic, but when he forced his co-workers to really think about it, they blanched. Some of these kids, he’d explain, can break a leg, drag it behind them for blocks, and only notice something’s wrong because it keeps getting in the way. For Flicka, of course, banging into things and bleeding everywhere was purely an annoyance, along the lines of tearing a hole in a bag of rice and having to sweep up the floor.
“I’ve never understood why you seem so eager for Shep to leave the country,” Carol resumed. “He’s your best friend. Wouldn’t you miss him?”
“Sure, babe. I’ll miss him like a son of a bitch.” Jackson grabbed himself a beer, reflecting that one thing he would not miss would be defending Shep to all the doubting Thomases at Knack. (The company was still Knack of All Trades to Jackson, whatever embarrassing, cheesy, goofba
ll name that fat prick wanted to call it.) Maybe he should have waited until Shep was on the plane, but he hadn’t been able to contain himself after lunch today when the website designer made another snide remark. So it was with enormous satisfaction that Jackson had announced, no, actually, Shep had already bought the ticket, loser, and would never see the inside of this overheated office as of this very afternoon. That had shut up the cretin pronto. Besides, he hadn’t introduced the idea to Carol yet, but he had a notion that they could visit when Shep had had a chance to establish himself. In fact, though it wasn’t a picture he was willing to confront yet, he’d a hazier notion of taking his family and joining the guy in Pemba for keeps. Obviously, Carol wouldn’t think about it now, but there was looming on the horizon a dark time when a change of scene could be therapeutic.
“Still, somebody’s gotta be able to get out of here, to do better than this, right?” he continued after a slug, putting his feet up. “Jesus, let the immigrants have it. I love the idea of the whole native population of this big scam of a country packing up, closing the door behind them, and throwing the teeming masses the keys. Moving to these hip, super-ethnic villages in Mozambique and Cancun, into all those houses standing vacant because the owners are cleaning toilets in Cleveland. They want to live here so damn much, let ‘em. They can work their butts off and pay half their wages to a government that paves the occasional sidewalk if they’re lucky, and invades other countries without asking at their personal expense. Where two-bedroom dumps cost more than they’ll earn in their entire lifetimes, and their kids are never taught to count but are masters of ‘self-esteem’—”
“Jackson, don’t start.”