Lionel Shriver - So Much for That

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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