So Much for That. Lionel Shriver

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СКАЧАТЬ aspect of this awful turn of the wheel was realizing what was important. Now he didn’t have to decide whether to leave or not, because as soon as Glynis told him there was no decision. There was no Pemba. It was as if the whole island had sunk into the sea. You wouldn’t think it, he said, but I’ve never experienced any other moment in my life in which everything suddenly got so simple. Shep wondered aloud whether this thing happening out of the blue amounted to a sick sort of divine intervention. He hadn’t wanted to go to Pemba without Glynis and Zach. He shouldn’t have gone without them and now he couldn’t. It was neat and clear. So in this sense the game changer was a relief. The lack of hesitation. The great, glaring obviousness of what he had to do. And wanted to do, Shep added emphatically. Glynis needs me. Maybe she did before, too, but it wasn’t as apparent. When Shep said that your wife needing you, it’s a good feeling, Jackson felt a stab of envy that he didn’t understand.

      Shep wasn’t commonly this confiding. He wasn’t a heartless person, far from it, but he was like a lot of guys. It was a perfectly decent way of being, in Jackson’s view, a dignified way of being: he tended to let other people take his deepest feelings for granted. He didn’t name them or wear them on his sleeve. So when he spelled out that he loved Glynis and had not realized until now how much, that now he was remorseful about what he had planned to do when only last week he had cast it as last-ditch self-salvation, Jackson was both offended, and moved. Jackson thought about how much Flicka had changed him and Carol, and how some of that change was bad, like getting so under-slept from the late-night feeding regime that they rarely had sex, but how some of the change was good, too. They had an imperative. They were doing something together that was more vital than sex, and even more intimate, it turned out, which had surprised him. So maybe your wife announcing that she could be about to die would have a similar effect of rearranging everything, focusing everything, and bringing you together in a way that wasn’t totally, hopelessly, and unremittingly terrible.

      Still, when Shep went on about how glad he was that he no longer had to take responsibility for “abandoning Glynis” and “abandoning his son,” Jackson was taken aback; he had never before heard his friend use that harsh and unforgiving word when describing his intentions: abandon. Shep said that the diagnosis “took this cup from him,” as his father would have said, and Jackson thought, but kept to himself, that the one transformation he was not up for was Shep suddenly going all Christian on him. Instead Jackson said that’s funny, you get out of responsibility by having it dumped in your lap wholesale. Shep said yes, but I feel more like myself now. More normal. Doing the right thing. Taking care of my wife. I did think, Carol hazarded, that walking off into the sunset wasn’t like you. No, said Shep, with a tinge of sorrow. It certainly wasn’t like me. Anyway, said Carol. You know what they say about life and making other plans. Yes, Shep agreed, it’s surprising that we bother to make them. In sounding so philosophical he also sounded older, and there was a boyishness in his best friend that Jackson noticed only now that it was gone.

      But with your better cut of people, trouble reminded them that everyone had troubles, that there was an everyone. So Shep didn’t stay on Glynis and Pemba, but asked after Flicka – the girls were upstairs doing their homework – and had the decency to ask after Heather, too. He even asked about Carol’s work, which hardly anyone did because it was so dull, and he wondered whether Carol missed landscape gardening. Yes, she did miss it, she said, doing something physical, involved with the earth. Shep said that he felt the same way, that he missed fixing things, making people’s lives palpably better and seeing the results of his labor, instead of arranging to clean up someone else’s botched job over the phone. He apologized, but he couldn’t remember; he knew that Carol went to work for sales at IBM partly because they let her operate from any computer terminal she liked, be that at home or in Tahiti; she could put in whichever and however many hours she wanted, so long as she did the work – a policy that they all agreed with a laugh shouldn’t be revolutionary but was, that the criterion for performing a job was getting it done. Still, the landscaping had been freelance, with flexible hours, too, and she’d not had a problem, as Shep remembered, being home by the time the girls returned from school, ferrying Flicka to therapists, even rushing her to the ER. Had it really been worth the sacrifice, he asked, for a bigger paycheck? Jackson suppressed an irritation; it bothered him that Carol made more money than he did, as it bothered him that she’d had to give up work that she loved for the reason she had, but everything between men and women was meant to have changed, and this stuff wasn’t supposed to bother him.

      “Oh, it wasn’t really for a better salary that I took the job with IBM,” Carol explained. “When Randy took over Knack – you know what a corner-cutter he is, what a bottom-liner – he switched to a cheaper health plan. With all our expenses with Flicka, the therapies and surgeries and bouts in the hospital, we couldn’t depend on Jackson’s coverage anymore.

      “See,” she went on, “this World Wellness Group outfit is the health insurance company from hell. They levy co-pays on everything, including the meds, and we have to fill dozens of prescriptions every month. With their whopping deductible, you’re out five grand before you’re reimbursed a dime. Their idea of a ‘reasonable and customary’ fee is what a doctor’s visit cost in 1959, and then they stick you with the shortfall. They’re way too restrictive about going out of network, and Flicka requires very specialized care. Then there’s co-insurance on top of the co-pays: twenty percent of the total bill, and that’s in network. And here’s the killer: there’s no cap on out-of-pocket expenses. Add to that that their lifetime payment cap – you know, how much they’ll fork out in total, ever – is also pretty low, only two or three million, when someone like Flicka could easily exceed numbers like that before she’s twenty … Well, we had to find other coverage.”

      “Gosh, I had no idea.”

      “But you should know, Shep,” said Carol. “It’s your insurance, too.”

       chapter three

      Shepherd Armstrong Knacker

      Merrill Lynch Account Number 934-23F917

      December 01, 2004 – December 31, 2004

      Net Portfolio Value: $731,778.56

      While they drove to Phelps Memorial in Sleepy Hollow, Shep kept one hand on the wheel, the other in his wife’s. Their clasp was relaxed; her palm was dry. They both stared straight ahead.

      “It wasn’t necessary,” he said, “for you to go through the diagnostics on your own.”

      “You were off in your own little world,” she said. “So I went off in mine.”

      “You must have felt lonely.”

      “Yes,” she said. “But I had been feeling that way for some time.”

      By the next exit, she added, “You’re a planner, Shepherd. You always look before you leap. Really, you leap before you leap. In your head, you took that plane to Tanzania months ago.”

      He was relieved that she was talking to him at all. He was willing to be castigated, glad for it.

      To his horror, Glynis had already been subjected to abdominal X rays, a CAT scan, and an MRI. Memories fell into place. On two mornings in December she had declined not only breakfast but even coffee, which for Glynis was unheard of. He couldn’t recall the excuse, but it mustn’t have been persuasive, because the refusal of coffee in particular had injured him; she had spurned one of the sacred rituals of their day. On two evenings, she had kept rising for another drink of water, and yet another. So she’d not been quenching a powerful thirst, but rinsing contrast medium from her veins. Likewise one odd, floating memory finally lodged into an orderly narrative: of walking into the bathroom СКАЧАТЬ