David Wallace - Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

The father-in-law’s agonizing inoperable degenerative neoplastic lingering goes on and on for so long, however — either because it’s an unusually slow form of brain cancer or because the father-in-law is the sort of tough old nasty bird who clings grimly to life for just as long as possible, one of those cases X privately believes euthanasia was probably originally designed with in mind, viz. one where the patient keeps lingering and degenerating and suffering horribly but refuses to submit to the inevitable and give up the freaking ghost already and doesn’t seem to give any thought to the coincident suffering that his hideous degenerative lingering inflicts on those who, for whatever inscrutable reasons, love him, or both — and X’s secret conflict and corrosive shame finally wear him down so utterly and make him so miserable at work and catatonic at home that he finally swallows all pride and goes hat in hand to his trusted friend and colleague Y and lays the whole situation ab initio ad mala out before him, confiding to Y the icy selfishness of his (X’s) very deepest feelings during his family’s crisis and detailing his indwelling shame over the antipathy he feels as he stands behind his wife’s chair at the $6500 fully adjustable steel-alloy bedside of his now grotesquely wasted and incontinent father-in-law and the old man’s tongue lolls and face contorts in gruesome clonic spasms and a yellowish froth collects steadily at the corners of his (the father-in-law’s) writhing mouth in an attempt to speak and his 1now obscenely oversized and asymmetrically bulging head rotates on the 300-thread-count Italian pillowcase and the old man’s clouded but still cruelly ferrous eyes behind the steel trifocals travel up past the anguished face of Mrs. X and fall on the tight hearty expression of sympathy and support X always struggles in the car to form and wear for these excruciating visits and roll instantly away in opposite directions — the father-in-law’s eyes do — accompanied always by a ragged exhalation of disgust, as if reading the mendacious hypocrisy of X’s expression and discerning the antipathy and selfishness beneath it and questioning all over again his daughter’s judgment in remaining bound to this marginal and reprobative CPA; and X confesses to Y the fact that he has begun, on these visits to the incontinent old h/t/t prick’s sickbed, rooting silently for the tumor itself, mentally toasting its health and wishing it continued metastatic growth, and has begun secretly regarding these visits as rituals of sympathy and support for the malignancy in the old man’s pons, X has, while allowing his poor wife to believe that X is there by her side out of shared commiserative concern for the old man himself… X now vomiting up every last dram of the prior months’ internal conflict and alienation and self-castigation, and beseeching Y to please understand the difficulty for X of telling any living soul of his secret shame and to feel both honored and bound by X’s confidence in him and to find in his heart the compassion to forgo any h/t/t judgments of X and to for God’s sweet sake tell no one of the cryovelate and malignantly selfish heart X fears his innermost secret feelings during the whole hellish ordeal have maybe revealed.

Whether this cathartic interchange takes place before Y did whatever he did to make X so furious with him, 2or whether the interchange took place afterward and thus signifies that Y’s stoic passivity in bearing up under X’s vituperations paid off and their friendship was restored — or whether even maybe this present interchange itself is what somehow engendered X’s rage at Y’s supposed ‘betrayal,’ i.e. whether X later got the idea that Y had maybe spilled some of the beans to Mrs. X w/r/t her husband’s secret self-absorption during what was probably the single most emotionally cataclysmic period of her life so far — none of this is clear, but that is all right this time because it is not centrally important because what is centrally important is that X, out of a combination of pain and sheer fatigue, finally humbles himself and bares his necrotic heart to Y and asks Y what Y thinks he (X) ought maybe to do to resolve the inner conflict and extinguish the secret shame and sincerely be able to forgive his dying father-in-law for being such a titanic prick in life and to just put history aside and somehow ignore the smug old prick’s self-righteous judgments and obvious dislike and X’s own feelings of peripheral nongrata zation and just somehow hang in there and try to support the old man and feel empathy for the entire teeming hysterical mass of his wife’s family and to truly be there and support and stand by Mrs. X and the little Xes in their time of crisis and truly think of them for a change instead of remaining all bent in on his own secret feelings of exclusion and resentment and viva cancrosum and self-loathing and — urtication and burning shame.

As was probably made clear in abortive PQ6, Y’s nature is to be laconic and self-effacing to the point where you nearly have to get him in a half-nelson to get him to do anything as presumptuous as actually giving advice. But X, by finally resorting to having Y conduct a thought-experiment in which Y pretends to be X and ruminates aloud on what he (meaning Y, as X) might do if faced with this malignant and horripilative pons asinorum, gets Y finally to aver that the best he (i.e., Y as X, and thus by extension X himself) can probably do in the situation is simply to passively hang in there, i.e. just Show Up, continue to Be There — as in just physically, if nothing else — on the margins of the family councils and at Mrs. X’s side in her father’s sickroom. In other words, Y says, to make it his secret penance and gift to the old man to just hang in there and silently to suffer the feelings of loathing and hypocrisy and selfishness and discountenance, but not to stop accompanying his wife or going to visit the old man or lurking tangentially at the family councils, in other words for X simply to reduce himself to bare physical actions and processes, to get off his heart’s back and stop worrying about his makeup and simply Show Up 3… which, when X rejoins that for Christ’s sweet sake this is what he’s already been doing all along, Y tentatively pats his (i.e., X’s) shoulder and ventures to say that X has always struck him (=Y) as a good deal stronger and wiser and more compassionate than he, X, is willing to give himself credit for.

All of which makes X feel somewhat better — either because Y’s counsel is profound and uplifting or else just because X got some relief from finally vomiting up the malignant secrets he feels have been corroding him — and things continue pretty much as before with the odious father-in-law’s slow decline and X’s wife’s grief and her family’s endless histrionics and councils, and with X still, behind his tight hearty smile, feeling hateful and confused and self-urticative but now struggling to try to regard this whole septic emotional maelstrom as a heartfelt gift to his dear wife and — wince — father-in-law, and with the only other significant developments over the next six months being that X’s hollow-eyed wife and one of her sisters go on the antidepressant Paxil and that two of X’s nephews-in-law are detained for the alleged molestation of a developmentally disabled girl in their junior high school’s Special Education wing.

And things proceed this way — with X now periodically coming hat in hand to Y for a sympathetic ear and the occasional thought-experiment, and being such a passive but overwhelmingly constant presence at the patriarchal bedside and the involved family councils that the most waggish of X’s wife’s family’s great-uncles begins making quips about having to dust him — until, finally, early one morning nearly a year after the initial diagnosis, the inoperably ravaged and agonized and illucid old father-in-law gives up the ghost at last, expiring with the mighty shudder of a clubbed tarpon, 4and is embalmed and rouged and dressed (as per codicil) in his juridical robes and memorialized at a service throughout which a stilted bier holds the casket high above all those assembled, and at which service X’s poor wife’s eyes resemble two enormous raw cigar-burns in an acrylic blanket, and at which by her side X — to the first suspicious but eventually touched surprise of his massed and black-clad in-laws — weeps longer and louder than anyone there, his distress so extreme and sincere that, on the way out of the Episcopal vestry, it’s the weedy mother-in-law herself who presses her own hand-kerchief into X’s hand and consoles him with brief pressure on his left forearm as she’s helped to her limo, and X is then later that afternoon invited by personal telephone call from the father-in-law’s oldest and most iron-eyed son to attend, along with Mrs. X, a very private and exclusive inner-circle-of-the-bereaved-family post-interment Get-Together in the library of the deceased judge’s opulent home, an inclusive gesture which moves Mrs. X to her first tears of joy since long before going on Paxil.