So Much for That

He wondered if Edward Knox had any idea how anguishing was his suggestion that Glynis would have come by her cancer as the result of an embrace.

Yet if it helped her, if she hungered to tell herself a story, acquiescing to the part of villain was a service Shep could perform. Maybe it was a modest service, although it didn’t feel modest.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I had no idea asbestos was so deadly. Or that it was in all those materials your doctor mentioned. But you’re right, I should have read those articles. Before working with any product, I should have made certain what it contained. I was irresponsible.” He choked a little on that last adjective, never in his life one applied to him, by himself or anyone else. “And now you’re the one who has to pay for that. It’s not fair. I should be the one who’s sick. I wish it was me. I wish I could shoulder it for you.”

He was not sure that this was true. But he suspected that in due course it would become true, which made it true enough.

When they returned home, Glynis allowed that she wasn’t very hungry, but Shep pressed that she had to keep up her strength. Though he knew that the suggestion was a life-long anathema to her, he even hazarded that before the surgery she should probably try to put on weight. After the violence of the Ft. Washington parking garage – no one had raised a hand, but that’s what it had been, violence – they were quiet, moving around each other with exaggerated deference. Shep volunteered to make dinner, not his usual duty. He wasn’t trying to imply that this was penance; he meant instead to imply that preparation of one meal was merely the beginning of a very long penance, more gestures and sacrifices and many more meals. She was not up for fighting, as she was not, really, up for cooking either, and she let him.

“Dad’s making dinner?” said Zach, shuffling into the kitchen. Whether from his age or nature, their fifteen-year-old was at a stage where he strove for invisibility. He turned to his father, who was peeling potatoes. “What’d you do wrong?”

Kids’ unerring intuition always impressed Shep, and made him nervous. “Where do you want to start?”

They had resolved not to tell the children about their mother’s illness until they were better able to prepare them for what to expect, and they’d confirmed her diagnosis with a second opinion. Or that was the excuse; doubtless they were simply putting off a painful scene. But Zach knew something was up. Since he almost never ate with his parents anymore, this sidle into the kitchen was a spy mission, the nosing through the fridge mere pretext.

Yet Shep was grateful for a third party to cut the tension, and to help manifest the appearance of a normal family – hungry foraging teenager, parents begging in return for some morsel from the well-guarded larder of his private life. A hackneyed tableau soon consigned to the past. In the months to come, Zach would have to learn to be a “good son,” and therefore an artificial one.

“You going out?” asked Shep.

“Nah,” said Zach – “Z” to his friends. His parents had christened him Zachary Knacker before they knew the boy. They’d liked the assonance, the clackety-clack steam-train cadence, which to its bearer sounded “like a character in Dr Seuss” (The Cat in the Hat probably being the last book Zach had read cover to cover). The name was too high profile for a kid desperate to keep his head down, so now he huddled at the end of the alphabet in a cryptic single letter.

“But it’s Friday night!” said Shep, who knew better. He was merely trying to keep his son in the kitchen. Zach never went out. He stayed in his room. His rare forays were to other boys’ rooms. They all lived online, and spent hours at computer games, a diversion of which Shep had initially despaired, until he got it. The attraction wasn’t blood and gore, or aggression. In the days he’d had spare time – whenever was that? – Shep himself had enjoyed solving crossword puzzles. He wasn’t very good at them, but so much the better; they only served their purpose incomplete. Comically low-tech in comparison, but the draw was the same. The reward of all these games was concentration, focus for its own sake; it didn’t matter on what. You couldn’t object to that, and he didn’t.

“Just another night of the week to me,” said Zach, throwing a pizza pocket into the toaster. Lanky, he could afford the grease. Shep peeled his last potato slowly, appraising his son. The features of the boy’s face were growing at wildly different rates, his brow too broad, his lips too full, his chin too small; it was all out of proportion, like a jalopy cobbled together from different cars. Shep yearned to reassure the kid that in two or three years these elements would settle into the same strong, square symmetry of his own countenance. But he didn’t know how to say this without seeming to flatter himself, and promising Zach that he would be handsome soon would only mean to his son that he was ugly now.

“Hey, Mom.” Zach side-eyed his mother, who sat at the breakfast table at an angle more acute than usual. “You tired? It’s only seven o’clock.”

She smiled weakly. “Your mother’s getting old.”

Shep could feel it, that for Zach suddenly the whole happy-family playacting was too much. The boy didn’t know that until a week ago his father was about to abscond to the east coast of Africa, and he didn’t know that his mother had just been diagnosed with a rare and deadly cancer, much less did he know that as far as his mother was concerned the disease was his father’s fault. But these hardly incidental unsaids emitted the equivalent of the high-frequency sound waves that convenience stores now broadcast outside their shop fronts to keep loitering gangs from the door. What dulled adult ears could no longer detect was unbearable to adolescents, and the same might be said of emotional fraud. Zach popped his pizza pocket early from the toaster and took his half-frozen dinner in a paper towel upstairs without even bothering with “See ya.”

Roast chicken, boiled potatoes, and steamed green beans. Glynis commended his preparation, but only picked. “I feel fat,” she admitted.

“You’re underweight. It’s only fluid. You have to stop thinking like that.”

“Suddenly I’m supposed to become a different person?”

“You can be the same person who eats more.”

“Your chicken,” she said, “is probably not what I feel so little appetite for.” This was surely true. Given the purpose of food, an appetite at meals implied an appetite for the future.

Just then Shep was filled with the useless but overpowering sensation that he did not want this to be happening. It was almost as if, should he refuse to allow it staunchly enough, much as he had sometimes to stand up to Zach and forbid any more computer games until his grades improved, it would go away. It did not go away, and the feeling passed. He stood behind her chair and slid his hands down her shoulders, leaning to nuzzle her temple with the butt of his head like an affectionate horse.

“This is not why,” she said, “any self-respecting woman would want her husband to stay.”

“Oh, I don’t think I’d have been able to go, up against it. Even without this.” Another small sacrifice – of his opinion of himself. But then, maybe he really wouldn’t have gone to Pemba, in the end. As the Wedding Fountain purling in the next room reminded, he was made of water.

“What if I’d found out a week or two later?” It was understood that they would keep their discourse allusive – never specifying this what is not why any woman wants her husband to stay, go where up against it, found out what a week or two later – in case Zach came back downstairs. Elliptical dialogue that most parents would recognize, it reliably backfired; eavesdropping children filled in the blanks with their worst fears. Little matter. From this conversation, Zach would be hard pressed to infer anything worse than the facts.

“Then you’d have told me,” he said, “and I’d have come back.”

“You just said that you’d never have gone in any event.”

“You were being hypothetical. I was, too. Please, don’t hold onto it.”

The request was ludicrous. Ten years ago her sister Ruby sent a present of a desktop pen set, and a logo on the base betrayed that it was a freebie from Citibank; Glynis had unfailingly recalled the insult on every subsequent birthday. More recently, Petra Carson, her best friend-cum-nemesis from art school, had foolishly taken at face value Glynis’s urging to be critical, and tentatively ventured that her Bakelite-inlaid fish slice was “maybe a little chunky”; the poor woman had been trying to make up for the gaffe with over-the-top compliments on Glynis’s flatware ever since, but to little avail. If Glynis couldn’t relinquish grievances over re-gifting or underappreciative comments about her metalwork, the likelihood that she’d forgive and forget attempted marital desertion was on the low side.

Depleted, Glynis decided to turn in early, and Shep promised to join her soon. Once she went upstairs, he walked onto the front porch. The golf course across the road lost its prissiness in the dark, and could almost pass for wilderness. It was cold and clear. Coatless, he braved the chill, following the course of an airplane accelerating across the stars, waiting until the distant whine subsided and he could see the red taillights no more. Then he went inside, locked up for the night, and padded upstairs to his study. A line of light still shone from Zach’s bedroom, so he closed the door. He unfolded the e-ticket printouts from the bottom desk drawer. They bore today’s date. Sheet by sheet he fed them to the shredder. The maw ground the pages with an intestinal growl; in the basket below, The Afterlife curled to crushed confetti. He’d bought the shredder to guard against identity theft; queer that the machine itself was now stealing who he had been.

Finally, he settled before his computer and went to the Web page whose address the search engine brought up after three keystrokes. When he reached “Survival Rates,” he refused to pause even briefly; taking the plunge without hesitation had always been the best approach to diving into the icy White Mountains swimming hole of his boyhood. He scrolled down. He read carefully to the end of the section, and then read it a second time. Once he shut down the computer, he tried to cry softly, that he not wake his wife.

chapter four

At Randy Handy – a salacious staff sobriquet so obvious that you’d think Pogatchnik would have headed it off with a company name less vulnerable to perversion – Jackson had adopted a new perspective. He’d let his co-workers make all the sarcastic remarks about Shep and his pathetic “escape fantasy” they liked. Eventually they were bound to find out why the former owner was still yes-massahing Pogatchnik, and then they’d feel bad. Really fucking bad. Jackson was looking forward to it.

He’d concede that in the friendship he’d long played something of a sidekick, but starting with the god-awfully stupid sale of Knack, which demoted Shep from boss to fellow schmo, and now with the plain godawful business of Glynis and the Fall of Pemba, that dynamic had subtly flipped. These days he was Shep’s protector. The role came at a price. He couldn’t ask for anything. When Shep had been the stoic stalwart, he could lean on the guy. No, he hadn’t ever put his hand out (like everybody else in the schmuck’s life). Still, what with Flicka, an on-again-off-again predilection for gambling, and a not-unrelated little difficulty with credit card debt, he’d always been the one with the problems who needed advice. Now he had to keep his mouth shut, and for Jackson keeping his mouth shut, ever, about anything, was unnatural.

That said, there was one subject he’d been tempted to raise for some time, and at least on this point he was relieved to have a better reason to put it off than the usual cowardice. It wasn’t the sort of thing you talked about with other men, even if it should have been, since you sure weren’t going to talk about it with women. Besides, there was something to be said for the restoration of the concept of privacy in a country where at the average bus stop you were as likely to be regaled with the story of some stranger’s abortion as asked for a light. He’d set the date anyway, so there was nothing, really, to discuss.

When they left at 1:00 p.m. for their stingy forty-minute lunch break, Shep asked if maybe they could walk instead of eat; intent on getting straight home to Glynis after work, he could no longer make time for their tri-weekly weight-lifting sessions at the Fifth Avenue Gym. (Jackson was a little relieved to get out of the team workouts; Shep always showed him up.) Though forgoing his sandwich made him petulant, Jackson had to say no problem. Basically in the face of cancer, even of cancer once removed, you had no rights.

“You know, Glynis would never have been able to keep her secret much longer even if she’d tried,” said Shep as they hustled down Seventh Avenue; it was too damned cold for a casual stroll. “The bills have started to arrive.”

“Yeah, tell me about it,” said Jackson. “Let me guess: it’s not one bill, it’s dozens, right? Going on for fifteen pages, from every little radiologist and every little lab. And that ‘EOB’ thing!”

“Explanation of Benefits – or lack of benefits, more like it. It’s byzantine.”

“Carol does the paperwork for Flicka, and I’m so grateful I could cry.”

“What kills me is how near-impossible it is to figure out what you owe. Before I brought in an accountant, I used to do the books at Knack myself, and I’m no slouch in that department. But it took me hours to sort out what to send in and where.”

“Fucking hell, you’d think they’d make it easy to give them money,” said Jackson. “Still, I think it’s deliberate. The blizzard of paper, all the numbers and codes. It’s a smoke screen. Behind which you get charged three hundred dollars for a Band-Aid and you don’t notice.”

Jackson shot a ritually despairing glance down the avenue. He missed the old Park Slope – a few failing pizza joints, coffee shops that didn’t charge four bucks a pop, hardware stores with barrels of screws instead of little packets of four all wrapped in plastic. “Gentrified” – though he was hard pressed to see how an army of whiny Barnard grads plowing them into the gutter with strollers the size of troop transporters qualified as “gentry” – it was all yoga parlors, organic smoothie bars, and pet therapists.

“And, you know, what Carol mentioned?” said Shep. “But I didn’t understand at the time. This World Wellness Group. They cover procedures according to prices that are ‘reasonable and customary’ in your area. In other words, what the fee should be, and not what it actually is.”

“This stuff is news to you, pal?” Jackson felt a surge of pitying condescension.

“I did some digging online. The outfit that generates this ‘reasonable and customary’ figure? It’s another unit of the same company. They’re under no legal obligation to tell you how they arrived at it. And it’s in both outfits’ interests for that figure to be as low as possible. As far as I can tell, they could be making it up.”

“Here’s how it works,” Jackson explained benevolently. “We’re going on a trip, and it’s your car, so I’ve agreed to pay for gas. We stop at a station, you fill up the tank, tell me the gas was fifty bucks, hold out your hand. With an expression on my face like I’m doing you a big favor, I hand you a twenty. You say, what’s this? I say, but that’s what a tank of gas should cost – since that’s what it cost when I was twelve. Basically, the insurers live in a fantasy world, and we Mugs are stuck in the real one.”

Shep shook his head. “Glynis and I have always kept to a tight budget. Trying to build that nest egg for The Afterlife. We’ve waited for the two-for-one offer on shampoo. Bought toilet paper in the economy size of twelve rolls, single ply. Got the special on turkey burgers even if we were more in the mood for steak. Now it’s five hundred for this, five thousand for that … And they never tell you in advance what it costs. It’s like going on a spree, piling all this shit on the counter, and none of it has any price tags. We only pick up twenty percent in co-insurance, but that’s after the five-K deductible. One single lab bill – that’s a hell of a lot of toilet paper.”

“Double-ply,” said Jackson.

“I’m thinking, why did we ever eat turkey burgers? And then I remember that I’m not supposed to care. Ultimately, I don’t care. All that matters is Glynis.”

“That’s what they’re counting on, bud. That’s the whole scam in a nutshell. Same with Flicka. It’s your kid, right? So what are you gonna say, no we’re not going to treat her pneumonia – again – cause we want the kind of DVD that records? And, friend … I hate to say it, but for you this is just the beginning.”

“I know,” said Shep quietly, as they hung a left on Ninth Street and headed for Prospect Park. “Even to cover the last stack of bills … Well, you know I’ve kept this other account, where I put the proceeds of the sale of Knack once I paid off the feds. It’s earmarked for The Afterlife, and I’ve never touched it. But there wasn’t enough in our joint checking, so I had to tap the Merrill Lynch. I’d never written a single check on it. Number 101 went for the CAT scan.”

“My guess is you’re already on 115. Take my advice, and order another checkbook pronto.”

“Signing that first one was strangely emotional. Even if it’s ‘only’ money, as my father would say.”

“Yeah, ‘only’ the proceeds from over twenty years building your own business. ‘Only’ eight years of humiliation with Randy Pogatchnik.”

“It doesn’t matter. I just didn’t realize at the time what I was really saving for.”

“You ever think about it? Pemba?”

“No,” said Shep, and changed the subject. “I guess we’re lucky, though. We live in the States. Hey, we get the best medical care in the world.”

“Think again, pal. In comparison to all the other rich countries like England, Australia … Canada … I don’t remember the rest. Look at all the statistics that matter – infant mortality, cancer survival, you name it? We come in last. And we pay twice as much.”

“Yeah, well. At least we don’t have socialized medicine.”

Jackson guffawed. Shep wasn’t stupid, but he could be painfully cooperative. That “socialized medicine” bogyman went all the way back to the 1940s, when Harry Truman had wanted to bring in a national health service, just like the Brits. Nervous that doctors wouldn’t keep raking it in, the American Medical Association concocted this inspired cold war buzz phrase, which had struck terror in the hearts of their countrymen ever since. A genius stroke of labeling. Like when supermarkets came out with that “no frills” line, packaging a perfectly standard, decent product in stark, ugly-ass black-and-white, thus ensuring that no one with any class would buy it, at half the brand-name price. It worked. Even Jackson’s cash-strapped mother hadn’t wanted to be caught dead with no-frills tissues in her cart.

“You realize fortysomething percent of this country is either on Medicaid or Medicare?” said Jackson; history lessons always put Shep to sleep. “All this ooh-ooh about how we don’t want ‘socialized medicine.’ Well, we got socialized medicine, for nearly half the population. So the other half is paying twice. Your Mugs are paying for your Mooches’ CAT scans with confiscatory taxes” – confiscatory was a wonderful word Jackson had learned only about a year ago, and he used it at every opportunity – “and a second time for their own damn scans.”

“You sound so down on Medicare and Medicaid. But you’re not saying that you wish old and poor people didn’t have access to health care.”

Jackson sighed. That line was so predictable. Shep was a class-A Mug. For the ranks of complacent dupes to which, alas, Jackson also belonged, Shep Knacker could be the mascot. “No, I’m not saying that. My point is, guys with health benefits don’t think they’re paying their own medical bills. They cling to their precious employee health insurance as if it’s this great freebie. It’s not free! They don’t understand they’d be getting, like, fifteen grand more in salary if it weren’t for the damned health benefit! It’s fucking sad, man.”

“Money’s gotta come from somewhere, Jacks. Some big national thing would send taxes through the roof. There goes your fifteen grand. Worse, if you earn a decent living.”

“It seems like it’s all the same dough, but it’s not. Think about it. Every piece of paper that just landed in your mailbox cost money. Some officious twit was paid to fill in all those codes, and tick the boxes, and fire off copies to five other places. Thirty percent of the money spent on medical care in this country goes to so-called ‘administration.’ Fact is, there’s a wholly fatty layer of for-profit insurance companies larded between Glynis and her doctors, a bunch of bloodsucking greedy fucks making money off her being sick. And not one of them knows how to set a broken arm. Kick those assholes out of the picture, and for the same cost the whole country would be covered, without fifty different bills a week arriving in your mailbox.”

“You of all people want the government to take over health care?” said Shep, shaking his head with a lopsided smile. “Jacks, you hate government. You’re an anarchist.”

“These companies are so in bed with government that they might as well be the government,” Jackson charged back, irked by Shep’s superior bemusement; yeah, maybe he wasn’t totally consistent, but at least he read stuff, he thought about things, unlike some people, who took everything they were told as gospel. “Why else do you figure that no halfway credible presidential candidate, Democrats included, ever dares suggest eliminating the bloodsuckers altogether? Besides, if the feds wouldn’t do it much better, they couldn’t do it worse. And the whole concept of insurance is to spread the risk, right? To pool the healthy people and the likes of Flicka together so it all evens out in the end. Well, what could be a fairer ‘risk pool’ than the whole damned country? Health care is about the only thing the fucking government should be good for. And maybe, just maybe, if you could at least go to a doctor without having to take out a second mortgage, people would figure that, okay, they pay taxes but at least they get something back. Right now, you get dick. Oh, sorry” – Jackson kicked a rim of raised concrete – “you get sidewalks. I always forget.”

He’d promised himself to shut up, to focus on Shep’s problems for once. Still, none of this stuff was off-point. “Hey,” he said, as Shep stared dully into the blanched, glaucous vista of the park, which in winter looked like a drawing that had been erased. “This isn’t an off-in-the-clouds rant, bud. This is about you and Glynis, right now, what you’re going through, and you’re not even paying attention.”

“Sorry. It’s just … well, we got our second opinion. From this pair of hotshots at Columbia-Presbyterian. They work as a team, an internist and a surgeon. And don’t get me wrong; they were great. In a way.”

“In a way,” said Jackson, forcing himself to listen. It wasn’t his strong suit.

“I wanted them to say something different,” Shep said glumly. “This mesothelioma thing, it’s incredibly rare. Nobody gets this disease. I didn’t realize how much I was counting on their saying it was all a mistake. When they confirmed the diagnosis, I thought I was going to be sick. Honest, my vision went blurry and black around the edges, as if I was going to faint. Like a girl. Glynis was the one who took it like a man. She’d already resigned herself.”

“This is some hard shit, pal.”

“It’s mainly hard for Glynis. She’s weak, and exhausted, and scared. Alone most of the day, too, so when I come home all I want to do, and should do, is keep her company. No such luck. Like, you think other people will take care of at least the paper-shuffling side, but they don’t. Just to get the second opinion, I had to request the pathology slides. The radiology reports. The ‘tissue blocks.’ The results of every frigging test from each separate hospital department – all in writing. I had to fill out forms giving Glynis’s medical history a dozen separate times. I was up til two a.m. every night. Meanwhile I have to cook. Shop. Show up at work and at least look like I’m doing my job.”