Читать книгу So Much for That - Lionel Shriver - Страница 11

Shepherd Armstrong Knacker

Merrill Lynch Account Number 934-23F917

January 01, 2005 – January 31, 2005

Net Portfolio Value: $697,352.41

After work, Shep had to swing by and pick up Beryl, who’d called earlier in the week hoping to come up to Elmsford and “hang,” meaning invite herself to dinner. The timing was bad in one way – that is, as the timing of anything was bound to be bad for the indefinite future – and good in another. Since Zach was spending the night in another boy’s rank, cable-strewn bedroom again, Shep could practice delivering the news in person to Beryl. They’d resolved to tell the kids tomorrow, and he wanted to work on the wording. He was still unsure whether to share the prognosis when he hadn’t discussed it with Glynis herself.

“Swing by” was an inaptly carefree expression, since picking up his sister in Chelsea meant crawling from Brooklyn into Manhattan during rush hour. It would never occur to her to take the train. (Were the situation reversed, of course, Beryl would never have offered him a lift, nor would Shep have expected one. But he was resigned to the fact that he gave and his sister took, as if they simply had different jobs. It was Jackson who railed about how his friend was constantly doing favors for people that Shep himself would never demand of others in a million years. But he’d rather the double standard work that way than the other way around.) For that matter, Beryl’s volunteering to take time away from her busy creative schedule to slum with her boring brother meant that she wanted something. Something more than dinner.

Mesothelioma kept frustration with his sister at bay, likewise whatever sense of mourning he might otherwise have felt about Pemba. He had not been lying to Jackson. He didn’t think about it. He thought about one thing and put all his energies into one thing only. Glynis’s cancer facilitated the same laser-like focus that Zach found in computer games, perfectly replacing the driving single-mindedness previously provided by The Afterlife. Merely relinquishing Pemba with nothing to put in its place would have left him lost, fractured, at sea, and for once in his life maybe angry. As it was, he still hewed to a prime directive. He would do anything to make Glynis more comfortable, or to keep her from going to any trouble. He would do anything to save her.

With Beryl coming over, he’d stayed up until 3:00 a.m. the night before assembling a pan of lasagna and washing salad greens. He had never cooked very much or been interested in cooking, but now his interest didn’t matter. He looked up recipes. They suited a man who was constitutionally obedient, and he followed them to the letter.

Because for now there was nothing left to contemplate that served the prime directive – he’d already read a dozen Web pages on how best to prepare Glynis for surgery in two weeks’ time – while eking over the Brooklyn Bridge Shep allowed his mind to slide to Jackson and his goofball book. Even Jackson didn’t believe he’d ever write it. After all, he was one of these guys who were remarkably lucid in conversation, but who seized up at keyboards. It was weird how some people could be so garrulous and articulate when blah-blah-blahing down the street, yet couldn’t write a meaningful sentence to save their lives. Their reasoning went spastic, their vocabularies shrank to “cat” and “go,” and they couldn’t tell a coherent story of a trip to the mailbox. That was Jackson. This afternoon, he’d liked that idea of a title on a pile of blank pages because titles were all he was good at. Still, CHUMPS: How Behind Our Backs a Bunch of Bums and Bamboozlers Turned America into a Country Where We Can’t Do Anything or Earn Anything or Say Anything When It Used to Be a Damned Nice Place to Live – well, at titles he was very good indeed.

As for his friend’s half-baked theories, Shep had never been sure whether he himself bought into them even slightly. (It was difficult to attach these views to a political party, since Jackson thought not voting was a political party.) They went something like this: Americans were divided between folks who played by the rules and folks who simply played the rules (or ignored them altogether). Jackson spoke of one “half” leeching off the other for ease of reference, but allowed that the proportions were likely far more dire; the fraction of the population that was being soaked by the savvier sorts who knew the ropes may have been closer to a third, or a quarter. Over the years, Jackson had christened these two classes with a series of homespun shorthands whose children’s-book alliteration Shep remembered with affection: Patsies and Parasites. Freeloaders and Fall Guys. Saps and Spongers. Slaves and Skivers. Jackals and Jackasses. Lackeys and Loafers. He’d used Mugs and Mooches for three or four years now; maybe the tags were going to stick.

According to Jackson, the Mooches comprised first and foremost anyone in government, and anyone who lived off government: contractors, “advisors,” think-tankers, and lobbyists. He reserved special contempt for accountants and lawyers, both of whom slyly implied that they were on your side, when this bloated, parasitic caste of interlocutors effectively constituted a penumbral extension of the State, their extortionate fees amounting to more taxes. Other Mooches: welfare recipients, obviously, though Jackson claimed they were the least of the problem, and as much victims as perps. Marathon runners with sprained thumbs on disability. Bankers, who manufactured nothing of value, and whose money-from-money deployed the suspect science of spontaneous generation. On the opposite end of the spectrum: any mastermind who refused to earn any appreciable income – why bother, only to be robbed of fifty cents on the dollar? (Jackson was indignant at having been raised on anti-communist propaganda. When for half the fucking year, he said, you were working full time for the government, your country was communist.) The recipients of inherited wealth, which covered Pogatchnik. Illegal immigrants, who would remain “undocumented” in perpetuity if they knew what was good for them; synonymous with becoming a card-carrying Mug, citizenship as an aspiration was pathetic.

Criminals were Mooches, too, of course. Yet while Jackson scorned establishment Mooches, who concealed their rapacity behind a façade of rectitude, or even, gallingly, of self-sacrifice (the expression “public servant” drove him wild), ordinary decent criminals won only his admiration. Drug dealing, Jackson claimed, was an intelligent, well-considered career path for the average young person, enterprising self-employment sans the Schedule C. He esteemed anyone who worked off the books or serviced a black market. He had a soft spot for Mafia movies, and had seen Goodfellas five times. To Jackson, criminals embodied the seminal American spirit.

As for the Mugs, Jacks cheerfully confessed to his own lifetime membership. They comprised all the remaining schmucks who got with the program, but mostly because they had no guts, and lacked imagination. Mugs exhibited neither resourcefulness nor innovation, ostensibly core traits of the national character. Having never undergone proper adolescent rebellion, Mugs were developmentally retarded, and as grown-ups were still figuratively setting the table and taking out the trash. They may have learned to say “fuck” in front of their fathers, but they could never bring themselves to use the word with the IRS. Even on the five-point scale of moral reasoning (where Jackson had dug that up Shep had no idea, but its exposition had consumed one of their ritual foursome get-togethers last summer), Mugs were stuck at the bottom. For Mugs weren’t motivated by virtue, but by fear. They sweated bullets over their taxes, adding up tattered receipts for $3.49 and $2.67 and getting flustered when the calculator didn’t produce the same result to the penny on a second tally – despite the fact that the recipients of their fervid bookkeeping would blithely drop $349 million through the cracks in the GAO floorboards or fritter $267 billion on a dead-end war in a sandpit, a dizzying shuttle of decimal points that never struck Mugs as unfair or bitterly hilarious. They got their car insurance payments in on time; able to afford only collision, these were the same suckers who’d be T-boned by an uninsured Guatemalan running a solid red light and get stuck with the bill. They didn’t put extensions on their houses without getting a building permit, belying that they really owned their houses to begin with. To the degree that these poor flunkies were not tippy-toeing through their lives abdicating everything they ever worked for out of terror, they were stupid.

But it wasn’t meant to be this way, Jackson insisted. Sneakily, little by little, the Mooches had hijacked a system that hadn’t started out half bad into a situation that would have mortified the founding fathers, who’d never intended to create a monster. Nor did they design democracy as an evangelical religion or a self-destructive export business, whereby it actually cost you money to sell your product abroad. What Thomas Jefferson’s crowd had in mind was a country that left you alone and let you do whatever you fucking well wanted so long as you didn’t hurt anybody – in short, “a cool place to hang out,” and not “this big drag.”

For government was now, in Jackson’s view, a for-profit corporation, although a sort of which the average industrial magnate could only dream: a natural monopoly that could charge whatever it wanted, yet with no obligation to hand over a product of any description in return. A business whose millions of customers had no choice but to buy this mythical product, lest they be locked in a small room with bad food. Since all politicians were by definition “on the tit,” none of them had any motivation to constrain the size of this marvelous corporation that didn’t actually have to make anything. Occasional conservative lip service notwithstanding, sure enough, over the decades USA Inc. had done nothing but expand. Jackson predicted that at some point in the near future the last remaining Mugs would get wise and sign on. Once the entire American populace was either working for or living off the government, the country would shudder to a halt. It was happening in Europe, he said, already. With a ratio of all-Mooch to no-Mug, there’d be no one left to squeeze dry, and presumably they’d all sit around waiting to die, or kill each other.

Shep was reluctant to believe that he got nothing from government. Roads, he’d point out. Bridges. Streetlamps and public parks. Admittedly, this is what Jackson meant by the umbrella term “sidewalks.” The nominal infrastructure required to conduct ordinary life was largely provided by municipal authorities, which commanded such a tiny sliver of the pie that on a plate it would fall over. As Jackson frequently observed, if every citizen threw the same ante into the pot, they could cover all their primitive communal needs with “chump change” – and that was what George Washington had in mind, as opposed to “this obeisance to the king bullshit.”

While Shep enjoyed the game of coming up with another vital service from on high that was worth the price of admission – drug testing, air traffic control – he conceded that citing the palpable benefits that his taxes accrued to him personally was surprisingly difficult. Yet he also felt that the totality of the many agencies that controlled his life still approximated an order. Even a rough, inequitable order, as opposed to the gory havoc of animals running in packs, was priceless.

Besides, even if he accepted Jackson’s cartoonish categories, he’d still rather be a Mug than a Mooch. Someone on whom others depended, a man as he understood the word. Although he believed in an implicit social contract – that you agreed to take care of other people so that when the time came they would take care of you – he didn’t keep up his end of things in order to incur a debt he’d any intention of calling in. He would remain a resource rather than a drain to the end of his days if he could help it, if only because being reliable, self-sufficient, and capable felt good. This big, round, grounded solidity surely beat the thin, tittering tee-hee of putting one over on people. It beat the sneering self-congratulation of a confidence trickster and the huddling sneakiness of a cheat. There was nothing enviable, either, about the resentful gratitude of the beholden. Curiously, although forever ridiculing the gullible stalwart who was responsible, dependable, and steadfast, Jackson had long admired Shep Knacker for embodying these very qualities.

More perplexing still was why Shep’s best friend would lavish so much effort on a paradigm that cast himself as weak, powerless, and craven. It was thanks to Shep’s stipulations on selling Knack – an assurance in writing from Randy Pogatchnik that the workforce manager would get a six-figure salary, replete with an elevator clause – that Jackson made enough money to begrudge the taxes he paid on it, and sometimes Shep wondered if he’d done the man any favors. What was it about his life that made him feel so taken advantage of, so diminished?

Miraculously, Beryl was peering through the window of her lobby, so he wouldn’t have to do circuits of Sixth and Seventh Avenues waiting for her to come down. She bundled into the front seat in nubbled layers of cape, sweaters, and scarves, clunking in jewelry of the rocks-and-feathers school that Glynis detested. Though no thrift-shop confabulation – he suspected that she paid through the nose to look that casually rumpled – Beryl’s faux bohemian dress was typical of a generation that just missed out on the sixties. Although her older brother had almost missed the era himself, Shep encountered enough of its tail end not to be nostalgic about the hippy thing. Now, those guys were Mooches. Always borrowing money, or stealing it, promoting free this and free that, parroting a lot of anticapitalist twaddle only made possible by the hardworking parents they lived off. He was sorry about the boys who died in Vietnam. The rest of it was a crock.

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.”

It wouldn’t have been appropriate to smile, but he did have to suppress one corner of his mouth from rising in a curl of recognition. He’d told Jackson in the park this afternoon that he wanted to “do the honors” and inform his in-laws about his wife’s condition, since Glynis was sure to bait her relatives into saying something nasty and then to cut them to the quick with her zinger bad news. Maybe the two of them weren’t such different people as Shep had often feared.

I know this is perverse,” said Glynis, languishing in a chair while he washed up. “But I had a wonderful time tonight. I never realized that having cancer could be so much fun.”

“She’s always thought that, you know. That The Afterlife was a ‘delusion.’”

“Beryl’s the creative one, and you’re the dullard. People get very attached to these designations. She wouldn’t want you to be capable of doing anything brave or strange.”

He turned to her from the sink. “Would you?”

“Maybe,” she considered. “But not without me.”

“Be honest,” he said. “Without – this. Would you seriously have considered dropping everything and coming along?”

“According to you, you never would have gone.”

“Moot point.” He went back to scrubbing the blackened crust from the lasagna pan.

“It isn’t moot,” she said, “whether you love me.”

He stopped. He rinsed his hands, and dried them on a towel. He knelt by her chair, and took her face in both hands. “Gnu. In the next few months, you will discover,” he promised, “how much I love you.” He kissed her, and let his lips linger until he could feel her spirit still.

He returned to the task at hand. It took a minute for the water to make it to the sink again. When it first became apparent that they had moved into their Elmsford rental “temporarily” in the adult sense of the word – i.e., as a synonym for forever – he had consoled himself by constructing a fountain at the kitchen sink. It was a whimsical contraption, with a culinary theme: the water ran from the faucet up a rubber hose that ended in a turkey baster, whose jet spray spun a round metal whisk, then cascaded down a chipped delft teacup, a bent soup ladle, an old-fashioned glass lemon juicer, a cow-shaped coffee creamer, and a wooden-handled ice-cream scoop he’d picked up at a stoop sale that must have been a hundred years old, finally landing in a tin funnel that directed the water back into the sink. Pleasingly, the water maintained roughly the same flow and pressure provided without the journey he imposed upon it, even if the hot water did drop a few degrees along the way. The mechanism was a kooky, childlike affair reminiscent of the game of Mouse Trap he’d grown up playing with Beryl. Yet his fondness for this homemade toy had taken a blow when he and Glynis came back from Puerto Escondido several years ago. In their parents’ absence, the kids had disconnected the hose. Presumably they dispensed with the nonsense over the kitchen sink whenever they had the house to themselves, and reconnected the hose when their father was due back; for the first time they’d forgotten. He didn’t tell the kids they’d hurt his feelings. Naturally he would have liked them to cherish the product of his playful side. But he couldn’t force his children to treasure in their father what he treasured about himself.

“I wonder, did you put it all together, that business about Berlin?” Glynis asked, once he had resumed battle with the pan. “While you were busy buying her a new apartment, she was planning to move all her stuff into your father’s house. Meantime, you were supposed to put him in an assisted-living facility so she could live there without the bother of his company.”

“Losing the rent-stabilized place – she’s not thinking straight, and she’s panicking.”

“You’re too kind.”

“Lucky for you.”

“God, the indignation! As if rent stabilization were a human right. And what was all that about how hard she works and how it’s ‘not her fault’ she makes no money? She made her choices. It’s called making your bed. So you lie in it.”

“We’re better off than she is,” he said, adding, “monetarily anyway. She’s jealous.”

“But she holds you in contempt.”

“It makes her feel better. Let her.”

“I mean, the nerve! A hundred grand! Which would just be the beginning, since she wouldn’t have made the mortgage payments, either. I warned you a long time ago that if you kept giving in on the smaller amounts, it would only get worse.”

“I didn’t mind helping her out now and again.” A doubt crossed his mind over whether in different circumstances he might have been amenable to his sister’s proposition after all.

“Did you get a load of that ‘millions and millions’ crack? Where’d she get that idea?”

“Beryl’s like a lot of people who’ve always been hard up. They think there are people like them, and then everyone else is unimaginably wealthy. Some money is the same as infinite money. She doesn’t have kids, and she doesn’t know what things cost. Zach’s tuition. Car insurance in New York. Taxes—”

“You can bet she doesn’t pay any. And it’s people like your sister who think people like us should pay even more.”

“Well, I hate to sound like Jackson. But Beryl is completely unaware that her life is subsidized. That her trash is collected, that she can go for a walk in a park, that emergency rooms really will treat her without insurance if she’s bleeding – it’s all paid for by someone else. I’m dead certain that thought never enters her head.”

“To the contrary,” Glynis agreed. “She doesn’t feel like a beneficiary, but like a victim. She has a chip on her shoulder the size of a redwood.”

That the same might be said of Glynis Shep kept to himself.

“My favorite part of the evening wasn’t even your announcement,” she continued. “It was the crocodile tears afterward. All that histrionic solicitation and despair. So fake! Just like all that overdone fawning over the fish slice. She’s a terrible actress. She was mostly aggrieved that from now on she can’t put her hand in your cookie jar.”

“Well, I guess the expectation is that in the face of serious illness, all the – friction – between people, like you and Beryl—”

“Friction?” Glynis laughed, and the sound was wonderful. “She detests me!”

“Okay, but even that – it’s supposed to go away. She can’t feel that way about you anymore, and then she still does and it’s awkward.”

“There’s something delicious about it. I can’t explain it, but I loved watching her so obviously play pretend. I get the feeling there are just a few bits and pieces of this mesothelioma thing that I’m going to enjoy.”

As he lovingly dried the fish slice, the fact that Glynis roused herself to get up and wrap her arms around him from behind was strangely moving. She was so depleted that small gestures of affection must have cost her an extraordinary outlay of energy.

“Oh, and did you notice?” Glynis mumbled into his shirt, laughing again. “She still remembered to take the chocolates.”