So Much for That

Beryl kissed his cheek and cried, “Shepardo!” the neo-Renaissance nickname from childhood still imbued with a measure of affection. “God, I hope no one sees me in this SUV. You remember I did that film on SUV-IT, the activist group that smashes these things up as a political statement about global warming.”

Were Beryl truly concerned with carbon emissions she’d have volunteered to take the train. “This one’s a Mini Cooper,” he said mildly, “compared to the new ones.”

She asked perfunctorily how he was. He was relieved that she didn’t notice when he declined to say.

“So what are you working on now?” he asked. It was safest to return to the subject of Beryl. She never inquired about what was up at Handy Randy; the assumption ran that nothing was ever up. It was a business, a prejudice against which she had unquestioningly inherited from their father.

“A film on couples who decided not to have kids. Particularly homing in on people in, you know, their mid-forties, right on the cusp of not having any choice. Whether they’re content with their lives, whether they think they’re missing anything, what put them off about having a family. It’s really interesting.”

Shep made a ritual effort to care, but it was harder than usual. “Are most of them resigned, or regretful?”

“Neither, for the most part. They’re perfectly happy!”

As she went into the particulars, Shep reflected that his sister’s body of work might seem incoherent from the outside. The one documentary that she was known for, insofar as she was known at all, was a paean to Berlin, New Hampshire – pronounced Ber-lun, a provincial mangling of its European roots that he’d always found strangely sweet, and hailing from a patriotic disassociation from Germany during World War I. Using interviews with residents of its dwindling population, many of whom used to work for the paper mills that were now nearly all shut down, Beryl’s film Reducing Paperwork had captured something archetypal about New England’s declining postindustrial towns that was reminiscent of Michael Moore without the smirk. It was warm, and he’d liked it. He was truly pleased for her when the hour-long elegy made it into the New York Film Festival. She’d done a quirky documentary on people who don’t have a sense of smell, and a more serious one on graduates saddled with crushing debt from higher education.

But her subject matter only seemed all over the map until you realized that Beryl’s lunatic then-boyfriend was a member of that group that shattered the windshields of SUVs, and that Beryl herself resented cars of any description because she couldn’t afford one. Beryl was in her mid-forties, and Beryl didn’t have children. Like Shep, Beryl grew up in Berlin, New Hampshire. Beryl was born without a sense of smell – rather impairing a full grasp of her signature material, since throughout his boyhood Berlin reeked – and Beryl still hadn’t paid off her student loans. The self-referential nature of his sister’s work reached its apogee when last year she made an independent documentary about independent documentary makers, a project tainted with a whiff of self-pity that involved most of her friends.

In general, the feisty, spunky determination that was driven by inspiration when she was younger had aged into a grimmer, glummer resolve that was driven by spite. She would “show them,” whoever they were, and churning out yet another film project on a shoestring now seemed as much habit as calling. Too old now to be an aspirant, Beryl hadn’t established herself sufficiently to qualify as anything but. Oh, she did get the smell doc on PBS, and she’d won the odd grant from this or that arts council. But the New York Film Festival coup was years ago. The technological advances in compact cameras that enabled her to keep going with minimal funding also meant that plenty of other wannabes could buy the same cameras, and she faced more competition than ever. Maybe he was too conventional, but her hand-to-mouthing it in middle age was starting to look less like a gifted woman sacrificing for her work, and more like failure.

“You give any more thought to participating in a documentary about people who dream about quitting the rat race?” she asked as they sat, stationary, on the West Side Highway. “I was even thinking about calling it something like Belief in the Afterlife.”

He rued having shared the private argot. “Not really.”

“You’d be surprised. It’s a pretty common fantasy.”

“Thanks.”

“I just mean you’ve got company. Like, it’s kind of a club. Though I’ve had a hard time finding anybody who’s actually done it. With the two cases I’ve stumbled across, they both came back. One couple went to South America and the woman practically died; another guy sold everything he had and moved to a Greek island, where he got lonely and bored and didn’t speak the language. None of them lasted more than a year.”

Shep was determined to avoid any entanglement with her projects, which had already cannibalized most of her life and would hungrily move on to her kin. Thank God he’d kept his mouth shut with Beryl about Pemba.

“But anyone you run into,” he observed, “has obviously come back. The people who’ve left for good aren’t here.” It was theoretical for him now, but stuck in this agonizing creep of cars he still wanted The Afterlife to be possible for somebody.

“Hey,” she asked. “You made any new fountains lately?”

A safer subject. Unlike his own family, Beryl thought his fountains were charming.

When he turned onto Crescent Drive, Shep realized that he could have told his sister on the trip up, and that might have been nicer. Yet he understood what Glynis had meant by “I haven’t been feeling nice.” For some reason he was inclined to make this as difficult for Beryl as possible.

His wife and sister greeted each other coolly in the kitchen. In the absence of a theatrically commiserating embrace, Glynis could tell that he’d kept quiet about her diagnosis in the car; a shared glance confirmed that she approved. They had a secret, and when they decided to impart it was their business. In fact, as the uncomfortable evening got under way – uncomfortable for Beryl – he began to understand what his wife might have got out of keeping all those tests and appointments to herself. There was something powerful in the withholding. Like walking around the house with a loaded gun.

Glynis had been fussing with the foil on the lasagna. Shep chided that he would take care of the food. Beryl was too unobservant to find this odd, since in times past dinner would always have been her sister-in-law’s province. She didn’t seem to note, either, the care with which he led his wife gently to a chair in the living room and settled her with a drink. Glynis wouldn’t be having wine in two weeks’ time, and he hoped that she remembered to enjoy it. Beryl hadn’t brought a bottle. She never did.

As they waited for the main course to warm, Beryl helped herself to a top-up glug and began noshing through olives in the living room, ignoring the bowl provided and laying the pits on the glass coffee table beside the Wedding Fountain, where they left a smear. She seemed nervous, which put Shep at a contrasting ease.

“So, Glynis,” she said. “Done any new work lately? I’d love to see it.” To the degree that the inquiry was not knee-jerk conversation filler, Beryl was betting on the high likelihood that her sister-in-law hadn’t visited her studio in months. Glynis and Beryl hated each other.

Ordinarily Glynis would have bristled, but she had a smug feline purring about her this evening. “Not since you asked me that last time,” she said. “I’ve been distracted.”

“The house and shit?”

“A house of sorts,” said Glynis. “And shit. Lots of shit.”

“You still making molds for that chocolate shop?”

“Actually, I recently retired. But if you mean do we still have the usual box of rejects on hand, yes. A little deformed, but they’re fresh. You’re welcome to take home as many truffles as you like.”

“Well, that’s not what I meant …” It was. “But if you’re offering, sure. That’d be great.”

Shep put the box from Living in Sin by the door as a reminder. Glynis had admitted to missing her ridiculous part-time job more than she’d expected. Because even Glynis could see that the quality of chickshaped molds for raspberry creams was inconsequential, the work had been her first experience in decades of creation without fear. Sadly, had she embraced the same liberated playfulness in her attic studio, she might now be a metalsmith of some renown.

He refilled his sister’s glass. Keeping the evening’s main agenda under wraps may have been cruelly gratifying, but it might soon seem impossible to raise the subject at all.

“Hey, you know I took the bus up to see Dad last week?” said Beryl, who rarely headed to New Hampshire without getting a lift from her brother. “I’m a little worried about him. I don’t think he’s going to be able to live on his own much longer.”

“He’s managed pretty well so far. And his mind is – almost horribly – sharp as ever.”

“He’s almost eighty! Most nights he sleeps in that chair in the den to keep from tackling the stairs. He eats nothing but grilled cheese sandwiches. His former parishioners help with the shopping, but most of them are pretty old by now, too. And I think he’s lonely.”

Routinely visiting Berlin three times more often than his sister, Shep knew about the chair, more a matter of lassitude than incapacity. Dad fell asleep reading detective fiction – thankfully not the Bible – and he liked grilled cheese sandwiches. Still, Shep should be glad for his sister’s concern. “What did you have in mind?”

“We should probably consider putting him up in one of those assisted-living places.” His sister had a funny way with pronouns.

“You know they’re not covered by Medicare.”

“Why not?”

“It doesn’t matter why not,” Glynis said with exasperation. Beryl imagined that if you established why something should be otherwise then you changed the way it was.

“Technically, they’re not medical facilities,” Shep said patiently. “I’ve looked into it. These places run to seventy-five, even a hundred grand a year. Dad has no savings, since he gave away anything he ever had to spare, and his pension is peanuts.”

“Shepardo! Typically, I bring up something like our father’s increasing infirmity, and you immediately start talking about money.”

“That’s because what you’re suggesting involves a good whack of it.”

“A good whack of our money, more to the point,” said Glynis. The fact that Shep had “loaned” his sister tens of thousands of dollars had always outraged his wife, whose minimal income made her only more proprietary about his. “Or were you planning to make a contribution? He’s your father, too.”

Beryl raised her hands and cried, “Blood from a stone! You think the day I won the lottery you just forgot to read the paper? I’ve already run through the grant for this childlessness documentary, and I’m finishing it with my own money – what little there is of that. It’s not that I’m some kind of asshole. I’m completely strapped.”

Poverty had its stresses, but for a moment Shep envied his sister its relaxing side. Penury reprieved Beryl from responsibility for a host of matters, from maintenance of the Williamsburg Bridge to his father’s care. But then, if in legalese Beryl was “judgment-proof,” that did not necessarily reprieve her from judgment of other sorts, and it seemed important right now to side decisively with his wife. “It’s your idea to put Dad in a retirement community, but you expect us to pick up the bill.”

“Didn’t you sell Knack of All Trades for, like, a million dollars? Jesus, Shep!”

In his next life, he would keep his mouth shut. “My resources aren’t infinite. I have – other commitments. And if Dad stayed in decent health for another five to ten years, what you’re suggesting could leave us completely strapped.”

Beryl’s eyes smoldered; she obviously pictured his other commitments along the lines of an iPod for Zach. “Well … what if Dad moved in here? There’s Amelia’s old bedroom.”

“No,” Shep said flatly, irked with himself, since breaking the news in the car would have obviated much of this discussion. “Not now.”

“What about your place?” said Glynis. “It’s palatial, in Manhattan terms. And if you can’t do your part financially …”

“True,” said Shep, playing along. “And then I could help you out with incidentals.”

Of course his sister’s newly forged filial concern would never extend to her personal inconvenience, but he thought they’d cornered her sufficiently to at least make her squirm. Instead, her eyes lit from sullenness to rage.

“Sorry, won’t fly,” said Beryl, her tone clipped, victorious. “That’s one of the things I wanted to talk to you about.”

It was, Shep intuited, the thing she wanted to talk about. They moved to the kitchen, where the lasagna was starting to burn.

For many years Beryl had lived in a vast, high-ceilinged apartment with all the original fixtures on West Nineteenth Street for which she paid a pittance. Possession of the three-bedroom walk-up had delivered her disproportionate power in her many volatile romances. She could always threaten her partners with exile from a residence whose pantry was larger than the apartment they could afford outside her door. Shep wouldn’t claim that her swains loved her for her lease, but even if they did fall in love with Beryl, they fell in love with her apartment first.

For hers was one of the diminishing number of buildings still covered by an anachronistic regime of rent control brought in after World War II. So desperate were owners of these protected buildings to dislodge sitting tenants, thus restoring the apartments to “fair market” rents, that whole codes in the statutes addressed the rules of vacancy and re-inhabitation when landlords set their own buildings on fire.

“Every time a tenant has died,” Beryl regaled them, stabbing her salad, “and I mean, while the body is still warm – whoosh, in sweep the workmen to ‘renovate,’ and never mind ruining those glorious old cornices and chandeliers! They rip the guts out. The landlord’s completely redone the lobby, though it was in mint condition, and converted the basement to disgusting little studios, so we don’t have laundry facilities anymore. Anyway, he finally got his hands on my neighbor’s place down the hall – AIDS – and that did it. Seventy-five percent of the building is now officially ruined, which qualifies as ‘substantial renovation.’ That takes it out of rent stabilization, totally. I don’t know what I’m going to do!”

“You mean he can now charge you what your apartment is actually worth?” asked Glynis.

“Yes!” Beryl fumed. “Bingo, my rent could go from a few hundred bucks to thousands! Thousands and thousands!”

“I’m surprised,” said Shep. “Sitting tenants under that regime are usually protected like endangered species.”

“We are an endangered species. I might have been okay, except the moment my landlord hit that seventy-five percent mark he hired some goons to go on a witch hunt for illegal subletters. The guy who’s purely as a technicality on my lease and lived there, like, five tenancies ago, back in the Stone Age, moved to New Jersey. I paid him a fortune in key money, too. But the idiot changed his voter registration, so they found out.”

“You mean it’s not even your lease?” said Shep.

“Morally, of course it is! I’ve been there for seventeen years!”

Despite Shep’s intuition that Beryl’s headache was about to become his as well – her problems often exhibited a transitive property – his sister’s real estate welfare coming to an end was insidiously satisfying. “On the open market,” he observed, “that place might go for five or six grand a month.”

Glynis didn’t look insidiously satisfied; she looked delighted. Ever since her diagnosis, she’d seemed to relish anyone else’s misfortune; so much the better if it was Beryl’s. “So what’s the game plan? Don’t tell me you want Amelia’s room.”

“I’d like to sue.”

“Whom for what?” asked Shep.

“That guy has been scheming to reach the seventy-five-percent threshold for years, and practically none of that ‘renovation’ was necessary.”

“It is his building.”

“It’s my apartment!”

“Only if you can afford the rent. Listen,” Shep forked a black rippled edge from a noodle, “maybe you should think ‘glass half full’ here. About how lucky you’ve been. What a great situation you’ve had all these years. Okay, it’s over—” His voice caught. How lucky you’ve been; what a great situation you’ve had; okay, it’s over. He could’ve given the same speech to himself.

“Nobody feels lucky,” said Beryl, “when their luck has just run out.”

“You can say that again,” said Glynis. Rare accord.

Shep served second helpings. He’d broken out Glynis’s famous sterling fish slice for the meal, a little unwieldy for lasagna, and admittedly incongruous with the beaten-up aluminum baking pan. But he wanted his wife to feel accomplished, to take advantage of a rare opportunity to show off on her behalf. When they’d first sat down to dinner, the lithe line of the silver, the oceanic Bakelite inlay of sea green and aquamarine, had obliged his sister to admire the very metalcraft that she was loath to concede Glynis ever got around to fashioning. The transparent insincerity of Beryl’s compliments provided his wife a backhanded pleasure.

Glynis declined another serving. Please, he whispered. Please. He placed a small square on her plate anyway, mumbling, You don’t understand. It’s not about food anymore, about whether you want it. Beryl was too caught up in the loss of her rent stabilization to infer what the exchange might mean. With no idea how to bend the evening’s subject matter around to the real issue, he tried to shift it by degrees.

“You know, speaking of bum luck,” Shep raised offhandedly, “do you carry any health insurance?”

“I’d hock my firstborn child, but I don’t have one.”

“So what would happen if you were in an accident, or got sick?”

“Beats me.” Beryl’s manner was defiant. “Don’t emergency rooms have to take you in?”

“Only for immediate care. And they still stick you with a bill.”

“Which they could shove where the sun don’t shine.”

“That could ruin your credit rating,” he said, cringing inside; the likes of credit ratings were exactly what he had yearned to flee in Pemba.

“That’s your world, big brother. Out here in mine, I could give a shit.” Apparently Beryl’s furious resentment had leached from her pending eviction to encompass her staid brother, his conventional house in Westchester, his gas-guzzling SUV, and his spoiled dilettante of a wife.

“But if something terrible happened to you …” Shep ventured. “Well, the person who would really end up paying for it is me, right? Who else, with Dad on a pension? In fact, that’s why I pay for Amelia’s insurance.”

“I’m not stopping you, if you want to buy me health insurance, too. Since from the sound of it you’re not really worried about me, but about yourself.”

“An individual policy at your age could run to a grand a month.”

“QED,” said Beryl. “Some months I don’t net more than a grand. So, what, I’m living on the street out of garbage cans, but, boy, do I have the best health insurance that my entire annual income can buy!”

“When you’re not covered,” said Glynis, “hospitals charge twice as much.”

“Which makes a lot of sense,” Beryl fumed. “Double charge the folks who can least afford it.”

“I didn’t make the system,” Shep said quietly. “But you’re getting older, things happen, and this is something you should start considering.”

“Look! Fortunately right now I’m not about to keel over, because I’ve got a problem a lot more pressing, okay? If you’re really worried about me, then, yes, you can help. Assuming I’m not going to fight this thing – which I also can’t afford – I’m going to have to move. I thought for the time being I could haul my crap up to Berlin; Dad says that’d be okay. Maybe even hole up there a while, to save on expenses. But to get another lease in New York I’d still need help on a security deposit. That’s three months’ rent up front. And you know what’s happened in Manhattan – a studio the size of a Porta Pott goes for three thousand a month! So, look, I hate having to do this, but … Well, doesn’t it make more sense for me to buy something? Instead of pouring all that rent down a rat hole? If you could just cover, I don’t know, maybe a hundred grand or so for a down payment … Think of it as an investment.”

“You want me to give you a hundred thousand dollars. Or so.”

“I never want to be in the position again where some prick landlord can kick me out of my own home. I mean, this is an emergency, Shepardo. I’m begging here.”

Shep reached for Glynis’s hand under the table. They’d had some dreadful rows over Beryl’s loans; a glance reassured her that this time he wouldn’t slip his sister a check when Glynis wasn’t looking.

“Beryl,” he said evenly. “We are not buying you an apartment.”

Beryl looked at her brother as if confronting a hitherto reliable appliance that suddenly wouldn’t turn on. She tried the switch again. “Maybe you’d like to think about it.”

“I don’t need to think. We can’t do it.”

“Why not?” As usual, presumably an unsatisfactory justification would effect a reversal of policy.

Nevertheless, this was the opening that Shep had been waiting for. He took a deep preparatory breath, one just long enough for Beryl’s temper to rev. She seemed to register that, unlike the intrinsically ambiguous matter of sexual consent, with money “no” really does mean “no,” consternation at which drove her recklessly to burn her bridges.

“Don’t tell me,” she said blackly. “You have to keep my down payment salted away for The Afterlife. You have to keep stashing away millions and millions of dollars for some fantasy Valhalla, and meantime your own sister is thrown out on the street. You have to go on expensive vacations year after year, on the pretense that you’re doing ‘research.’ But get real! If you were ever going to decamp to a Third World beach sipping piña coladas, wouldn’t you have gone already? You could make a huge difference to my life right now, but no! We all have to pay for your delusion, for this hubristic idea of yourself as special and above the common ruck, when the truth is you’re an ordinary corporate salary-man like practically every other drudge in the country. I’ve tried to do something interesting with my life, and make challenging, imaginative films that make a difference to people’s experience of the world, and it’s not my fault that doesn’t pay much. I work just as hard as you do, and maybe harder, a lot harder. But I’ve got nothing to show for it, and now I don’t even have a place to live – thanks to rich capitalists just like you who have to get even richer. Meanwhile, you drive around in a fat car and live in a fat suburban house with a bank account that’s busting at the seams – for what? You’re only going to see one afterlife, my brother, and it’s going to be a pretty scorching experience if while you were alive you weren’t a little more charitable toward your own family!”

Assessing that Beryl appeared to have finished, he gave his wife’s hand a gentle squeeze before interlacing his fingers on the table squarely opposite his sister.

“You’re right,” Shep said calmly. “Despite how long I may have hoped to, we are not likely at this point to start a new, fascinating, relaxing life in a more affordable country. I’m sorry about that. I’m far sorrier for the reason.”

“And what’s that?” Beryl sneered.

“We just found out that Glynis has cancer. It’s a rare and virulent disease called mesothelioma. I may have given it to her myself from working with products that contained asbestos. I will need to conserve both my energies and my funds. Between Glynis’s health and buying my sister property in the most inflated real estate market in the country, I have to opt for saving my wife’s life.”