So Much for That: A Novel Read online

  It was still a sore point with Shep’s father that his son never went to college, which was ludicrous; Knack of All Trades had expanded and flourished without any benedictory piece of paper. The real problem was that Gabriel Knacker had little regard for manual labor—unless it involved digging wells for impoverished villagers in Mali with the Peace Corps, or patching a pensioner’s shingles out of the kindness of your heart. He had no use for commerce. Any activity that could not trace its lineage directly to virtue was destitute. The fact that if everyone devoted himself solely to goodness for its own sake the whole world would come to a skidding halt didn’t faze the guy a whit.

  Up until a little over eight years ago, Life A had had its merits, and Shep hadn’t regarded himself as sacrificing his prime for pie in the sky. He’d always liked physical toil, relishing a distinctive kind of tired you got not from the gym but from building bookshelves. He liked running his own show, answering to no one. Glynis may have turned out to be a handful, and might not have described herself as happy in the big picture, but it was probably safe to say that she was happy with him—or as happy as she was going to get with anybody, which wasn’t very. He was glad when she got pregnant with Amelia right away. He was in a hurry, anxious to rush through a whole life in half the time, and he’d have far preferred that Zach had been born pronto and not ten years later.

  As for The Afterlife, Glynis had seemed onboard when they met. His status as a man with a mission surely attracted her to him in the first place. Without his vision, without the ever more concrete edifice of Life B rising in his head, Shep Knacker was one more small businessman who’d found a niche market: nothing special. As it was, picking a new target country for every summer’s research trip had been an invigorating ritual of their marriage. They were, or so he’d thought until this last year’s dawning apprehension, a team.

  So when he got the offer to sell up in November 1996, it was irresistible. A million dollars. Rationally he recognized that a mil wasn’t what it once was, and that he’d have to pay capital gains. Still, the sum had never lost the awesome roundness of childhood; no matter how many other ordinary folks also became “millionaires,” the word retained a ring. Combined with the fruits of lifelong scrimping, the proceeds from selling Knack would furnish the capital to cash out and never look back. So never mind that the purchaser—an employee so lazy and sloppy that they’d been on the verge of firing the guy before, surprise, he comes into his trust fund—was a callow, loudmouthed, ignorant twit.

  Who was now Shep’s boss. Oh sure, it had seemed to make sense at the time to sign on as an employee of what had been his own company—renamed overnight “Handy Randy,” a moniker not only tacky but inaccurate, since Randy Pogatchnik was anything but handy. The initial idea had been to hang on for a month or two while they packed, sold off their motley possessions, and located at least a temporary house in Goa. Meantime, they wouldn’t spend down their capital, which Shep sank into can’t-lose mutual funds to fatten before slaughter; the Dow was effervescent.

  “A month or two” had now stretched into over eight years of submission to the sadistic whims of an overweight, freckle-faced brat, who must have got wind of his imminent sacking and had probably bought Knack—you had to give the guy this much—as fiendishly effective revenge. After the sale, standards of workmanship plummeted, so that Shep’s “Customer Relations” position for handling complaints, never a post at all during his own tenure as CEO, had burgeoned into a demanding and decidedly unpleasant fulltime job.

  In retrospect, of course, it had been imbecilic to sell their place in Carroll Gardens a few years earlier—barely out of a recession, and on the heels of a housing crash—then move up to Westchester and rent. Shep would gladly have stayed in Brooklyn, but Glynis had concluded that the only way she could finally focus on “her work” was to remove herself from the “distractions” of the city. (Sure of his weakness, she had made a sly financial case as well: Westchester’s high-quality public schools would save them the pricey tuition of private education in New York. All very well, for Amelia. But later, when Glynis thought that Zach needed help—which he did—finding a “better school” was the easiest way to seem to be doing something, and now they were out $26,000 a year for private tuition anyway.) Jackson and Carol had stayed put in Windsor Terrace, and even that ramshackle dive of theirs had soared to a value of $550,000. At least having benefited from the real estate boom himself made Jackson more patient than Shep with Homeowner Smugness; these days, a handyman wasn’t in the door five seconds before the wife was crowing about how much the dump was worth now, so watch the wainscoting with that toolbox. It was like that in most big cities now: LA, Miami—a communal hysteria, as if the entire citizenry were on Dialing for Dollars and had won the car. Shep was probably just envious. Still, there was something unsavory about that gleefulness, a mania he associated with slot machines. A preacher’s son, he failed to see the satisfaction in a jackpot that bore no relation to something good or hard that you had done.

  Property in Westchester had appreciated by three times over ten years as well, so, yeah, in hindsight they should have bought—thereby making about as much profit from sitting on his ass as he had from selling a whole company, fruit of twenty-two years’ sweat. That was the way people made money in this country now, according to Jackson: asssitting. You couldn’t get rich on earned income, he railed. Taxes on wages made sure of that. Jackson claimed that only inheritance and investment—asssitting—paid. Shep wasn’t so sure. Certainly he himself had worked hard, but he’d been compensated for his trouble. Limuru lay ever in the back of his mind, and he’d earned far more than a dollar per day.

  Shep had opted to rent for the same reason that drove every big decision he’d ever made. He wanted to be able to pick up stakes—easily, quickly, cleanly, without waiting for a house to sell in a market whose climate he couldn’t foresee. That’s what irked him a bit about Homeowner Smugness: all these schmoes with keys to a front door acted as if they’d seen the boom coming, as if they were financial geniuses and not the beneficiaries of dumb luck. He may have regretted missing out on the property windfall; he didn’t regret the reason he’d missed out. He was proud of the reason, proud of planning to leave. He was only ashamed of having stayed.

  He tried not to blame Glynis. If that meant blaming himself instead, that seemed fair. The Afterlife was his aspiration—the word he preferred to fantasy—and any dream was dilute secondhand. He tried not to be angry at her for a lot of things, and to a great extent succeeded.

  When they met, Glynis had been running her own small business from home, making jewelry of a strikingly stark, streamlined nature during an era of clunk, slapdash, and feathers. She had contacted Knack of All Trades to build a worktable bolted to the floor, and later, because she liked the proprietor—his broad veined forearms, his wide-open face like a field of wheat—a set of racks for hammers, pliers, and files. Shep appreciated her meticulous requirements, as she appreciated his meticulous execution. The second time he showed up to finish the table, she’d left numerous samples of her work lying casually around the studio (deliberately, she confessed with a laugh once they started going out; she’d dangled the glittering baubles before her handsome handyman “like fishing lures”). Though he’d never considered himself the artistic type, Shep was transfixed. Delicate and morbid, a whole series of elongated stickpins looked like assemblages of bird bones; when she modeled the bracelets for him, they wrapped all the way up her arm, slithering like serpents to the elbow. Sinewy, elusive, and severe, Glynis’s creations were an uncanny manifestation of the woman who made them. It was touch and go whether he fell in love with Glynis or her metalwork first, because as far as Shep was concerned they were one and the same.

  During their courtship, Glynis was teaching at summer camps and doing piecework in the Jewelry District to pay the rent. Meantime, she was placing single necklaces in second-tier galleries, and her silversmithing barely broke even. Yet she fevered long hours, and paid
her own phone bill. Surely any man would have assumed that for a self-starter like Glynis—disciplined, ascetic, and fiery—pulling her financial weight in a marriage would be a point of pride. (On reflection, it probably was.) So he’d never expected to have to save for The Afterlife all by himself.

  Less compassionate men might have felt they’d been sold a bill of goods. Pregnancy had seemed a reasonable excuse for letting her metalsmithing tools languish, but that accounted for only eighteen months of the last twenty-six years. Motherhood wasn’t the real problem, though it took him a long time to figure out what was. She needed resistance, the very quality that metal most demonstrably offered up. Suddenly Glynis had no difficulty to overcome, no hard artisan’s life with galleries filching half the too-small price of a mokume brooch that had taken three weeks to forge. No, her husband made a good living, and if she slept late and dawdled the afternoon away reading Lustre, American Craft Magazine, and Lapidary Journal, the phone bill would still get paid. For that matter, she needed need itself. She could overcome her anguish about embarking on an object that, once completed, might not meet her exacting standards only if she had no choice. In this sense, his helping had hurt her. By providing the financial cushion that should have facilitated making all the metal whathaveyou she liked, he had ruined her life. Wrapped with a slackening bow, ease was a poisonous present.

  Yet it wasn’t as if she were lazy. Since Glynis still maintained the fiction (even in his head, the word pained him) that she was a professional metalsmith, all other domestic activities therefore qualified as procrastination, and thus were seen to with vigor and dispatch. It wasn’t as if she’d made nothing, either—metalwork, that is. Spurning jewelry as intrinsically rinky-dink, she’d moved entirely to flatware, and through the years had crafted a handful of dazzling implements: memorably, the Bakelite inlaid fish slice; that exquisite set of hand-forged, perfectly ergonomic sterling chopsticks, whose heavier ends bent slightly, achingly, as if they were melting. Yet each finished project was the product of so much agony and time that in the end she couldn’t bring herself to sell it.

  So what she hadn’t made was money. Were he ever to have observed aloud once Zach and Amelia both entered school that she was still not bringing in a dime, Glynis would have iced over in cold rage (so he hadn’t). But her income of zero dollars wasn’t an objection. It was a fact. That when they married Shep hadn’t imagined he would carry the whole household in perpetuity was also a fact. But he could carry the household, and he had.

  Besides, he understood her. Or he understood how much he couldn’t understand, which was a start. Making his own geographical inertia all the more perplexing, by and large Shep decided to do something, and then he did it. For Glynis to get from the deciding to the doing was like leaping the stumps of a washed-out bridge. To put it another way, she had the engine, but a faulty ignition switch. Glynis could decide to do something and then nothing would happen. It was an interior thing, a design flaw, and probably not one she could fix.

  Having kept his mouth shut for decades, he should never have let it slip out tentatively over breakfast a couple of years ago (during a particularly galling week at Handy Randy) that it was a shame they hadn’t been socking away the remnants of two incomes all this time, with which they could have left for The Afterlife long ago … Before he had finished the sentence, she’d stood from the table without a word and marched out the door. When he came home that night, she had a job. Apparently all this time he’d have had better luck lighting a fire under the woman not by cajoling but by giving offense. Ever since, she’d been fashioning models for Living in Sin, an upmarket chocolatier whose factory was located in nearby Mount Kisco. This month, the company was already gearing up for Easter. So rather than polish off avant-garde flatware of museum-piece quality, his wife was carving wax bunny rabbits to be cast—aptly—in bitter chocolate, and stuffed with orange cream. The work was part time, without benefits. Her salary made a farcical contribution to their coffers. She kept the job out of spite.

  In return, he may have let her keep it out of spite. Besides, she couldn’t help herself. They were very good bunny rabbits.

  It was disconcerting to be systematically punished for what might have engendered a modicum of gratitude. He did not require the gratitude, but he could have skipped the resentment, an emotion distinctive for being disagreeable on both its generating and receiving ends. Glynis resented her dependency; she found it humiliating. She resented not being a celebrated metalsmith, and she resented the fact that her status as professional nonentity appeared to everyone, including Glynis, to be all her fault. She resented her two children for diverting her energies when they were young; once they were no longer young, she resented them for failing to divert her energies. She resented that her husband and now her thoughtlessly undemanding children had thieved her most cherished keepsakes: her excuses. As resentment produces the psychic equivalent of acid reflux, she resented the resentment itself. Never having had much of substance to complain about was yet one more reason to feel aggrieved.

  Shep was temperamentally predisposed to feel fortunate, although he himself had plenty of substance to resent, had he been so inclined. He supported his wife and son. He subsidized his daughter Amelia, though she was three years out of college. He subsidized his elderly father, and made sure that the prideful retired reverend didn’t know it. He’d made several “loans” to his sister Beryl that she would never pay back, and had probably not made the last; yet they were officially loans and not gifts, so Beryl would never thank him or feel abashed. He’d picked up the entire tab for his mother’s funeral, and since no one else noticed Shep didn’t notice either. Every member of a family has a role, and Shep was the one who paid for things. Because every other party took this state of affairs for granted, Shep took it for granted, too.

  He rarely bought anything for himself, but he didn’t want anything. Or he wanted only one thing. Still, why now? Why, if it had already been over eight years since the sale of Knack, could it not be nine? Why, if it could be this evening, could it not be tomorrow night?

  Because it was early January in New York State, and it was cold. Because he was already forty-eight years old, and the closer he got to fifty the more The Afterlife, even if he did finally get around to it, looked like routine early retirement. Because his “can’t-lose” mutual funds had only last month recovered the value of his original investment. Because in his idiotic innocence he had broadcast for decades to anyone who seemed interested his intentions to leave behind altogether the world of tax planning, car inspections, traffic jams, and telemarketing. (As his audience had aged, other people’s youthful admiration had long ago soured to mockery behind his back. Or not always behind his back, for at Handy Randy Shep’s “escape fantasy,” as Pogatchnik flippantly tagged it, was a regular source of merciless entertainment.) Because he himself had started dangerously to doubt the reality of The Afterlife, and without the promise of reprieve he could not—he could not—continue. Because he’d tied a carrot in front of his own nose like a goddamned donkey’s, soothed by the seduction of infinite delay, never sorting out that if he could always leave tomorrow then he could also leave today. Indeed, it was the sheer arbitrariness of this Friday evening that made it so perfect.

  When Glynis opened the front door, he started guiltily. He had rehearsed his opening lines so many times, and now the script had fled.

  “Bourbon,” she said. “What’s the special occasion?”

  Still clinging to his last thought, he wanted to explain that the occasion was not special, which was why it was special. “Habits are made to be broken.”

  “Some of them,” she reproached, taking off her coat.

  “Would you like one?”

  She surprised him. “Yes.”

  Glynis was still slender, and no one ever pegged her at fifty, though there was a fatigue in her bearing tonight that made it suddenly possible to envision her at seventy-five. She’d been tired since September at least, claiming to
run a low-grade fever that he privately failed to detect. Although she’d lately developed a subtle paunch, the rest of her body was if anything thinner; such reapportionment of weight was normal in middle age, and he was too much of a gentleman to pass comment on it.

  Their both indulging in hard liquor at barely past seven fostered a warm collusion that he was reluctant to undermine. Yet his innocuous “Where have you been?” came out like an accusation.

  She could be evasive, but it was rare for her not to answer at all. He let it go.

  Curling protectively around the highball in her usual armchair, Glynis pulled her knees up and tucked her heels. She always seemed enclosed, balled up in another sense, but tonight she seemed uncommonly so. Maybe she intuited his purpose, so long in coming. When he reached into his inside pocket and laid three sheaves of e-ticket printouts silently on the glass table beside the Wedding Fountain, she arched her eyebrows. “Show and tell?”

  Glynis was an elegant woman, and he was interested in her—in that way that simple people were so often captivated by the fucked-up. He paused to consider whether, without Glynis, as partner or opponent, The Afterlife might prove desolate.

  “Three tickets to Pemba,” he said. “Me, you, and Zach.”

  “Another ‘research trip’? You might have thought of that before the Christmas holidays. Zach’s back in school.”