So Much for That. Lionel Shriver
house felt like his. That used to bug him but now just made it easier to leave the salad spinner, the StairMaster, and the sofas behind.) Worse, he and Glynis shared the same recharger. He didn’t want to leave her with a toothbrush that would last five or six days (he didn’t want to leave her at all, but that was another matter), its weakening, terminal shudder providing a soundtrack for his wife’s lapse into another of her periodic depressions.
So having unscrewed the wall mount only a turn or two, he tightened it back down. Restoring his own handle reassuringly to the recharger, he scrounged a manual brush from the medicine cabinet. He would have to grow accustomed to technological regression, which in a manner he couldn’t quite put his finger on was surely good for the soul. Something about backtracking to a stage of development that you could understand.
He wasn’t planning simply to cut and run, to disappear himself from his family absent announcement or explanation. That would be cruel, or crueler. He wasn’t presenting her with a total fait accompli either, a wave goodbye at the door. Officially he would confront her with a choice, one for which, in the service of credibility, he had paid through the nose. Odds were that he had purchased nothing but an illusion, but an illusion could be priceless. So he’d bought not one ticket, but three. They were nonrefundable. If his instincts were all out of whack and Glynis surprised him, Zach still wouldn’t like it. But the boy was fifteen years old, and how was this for developmental regression: for once an American teenager would do what he was told.
Anxious about being caught in the act, in the end he had too much time. Glynis wouldn’t be home for another couple of hours, and the Samsonite was replete. Given the confusion over plugs and current, he’d thrown in a few manual hand tools and a Swiss Army knife; in the average crisis, you were still better off with a pair of needle-nose Vise-Grips than a BlackBerry. Only a couple of shirts, because he wanted to wear different shirts. Or no shirt. A few bits and pieces that a man with Shep’s occupation knew could make the difference between satisfied self-sufficiency and disaster: duct tape; a selection of screws, bolts, and washers; silicon lubricant; plastic sealant; rubber bands (elastics, for N’ Hampshire old-timers like his father); and a small roll of binding wire. A flashlight, for power cuts, and a stock of AAs. A novel he should have selected more carefully if he was taking only one. An English – Swahili phrasebook, malaria pills, deet. Prescription cortisone cream for persistent eczema on his ankle, a tube that would soon run out.
Obviating any further inclusions, his Merrill Lynch checkbook. He didn’t like to think of himself as calculating, but it turned out to be fortunate that he’d always kept this account in his name alone. He could – he would, of course, offer to leave her half; she hadn’t earned a dime of it, but they were married, and that was the law. Yet he would have to warn her that even hundreds of thousands of dollars wouldn’t last her long in Westchester, and sooner or later she’d have to do not “her work” but someone else’s.
He’d had to stuff the Samsonite with newspaper to keep the paltry chattel from rattling in the British Airways hold. He stashed it in his closet, covering it with a bathrobe for good measure. A packed bag on the bedspread would alarm Glynis far more than a missing toothbrush.
Shep settled in the living room with a bourbon bracer. It wasn’t his habit to begin an evening with anything stronger than beer, but habit would have delayed this evening indefinitely. He put his feet up, casting his eyes around the pleasant but cheaply furnished room, unable to mourn leaving behind any aspect of the familiar surround, save the fountain. As for parting with the throw pillows or the nondescript glass coffee table on which it trickled, he felt positively cheerful. By contrast, the fountain had always filled him with that distinctive middle-class covetousness, desire for what you already own. He wondered whimsically if, wrapped in the wadded newspaper that padded his scant booty, it would fit in the Samsonite.
They still referred to it as “the Wedding Fountain.” The sterling silver apparatus had substituted for a floral centerpiece at their modest gathering of friends twenty-six years before, twining the bride and groom’s labors, talents, and very natures. To this day, the Wedding Fountain constituted the only project on which he and Glynis had collaborated fifty-fifty. Shep had taken responsibility for the technical aspects of the gizmo. The pump was carefully hidden by a sweep of mirror-finish metal around the basin; since the mechanism ran continually, over the years he’d replaced it several times. Wise in the ways of water, he’d advised on the width and depth of sluices, the length of drops from one level to the next. Glynis had dictated the flow of the metal itself, its artistic line, forging and soldering the parts in her old studio in Brooklyn.
For Shep’s tastes, the fountain was austere; for Glynis’s, ornate; so that even stylistically the construction embodied a meeting of minds halfway. And it was romantic. Melded together at the top, two undulating silver sluices split and intermingled like swans’ necks, one supporting while the other broke to spill its liquid into the waiting pan of its mate. Narrow at their apex, the two central lines of their creation splayed and swooped in wider, ever more playful variations toward the basin. There the contributions of the fountain’s two tributaries formed a shallow indoor lake, thus pooling their resources in the most literal sense. Glynis’s workmanship was top-drawer. However busy, Shep had always honored her virtuosity by keeping the water topped up, and by periodically draining the contraption to polish the silver. Absent his conservation, the sterling’s accelerating yellow taint might suggest a tarnish on more than metal. Once he was gone, chances were that she’d turn the thing off, and shove it out of sight.
As allegory, the two streams feeding a common pool represented an ideal they had failed. Nevertheless, the fountain successfully integrated their elements. Glynis not only worked with metal (or used to); she was metal. Stiff, uncooperative, and inflexible. Hard, refractive, and shiny with defiance. Her body long, attenuated, and angular like the jewelry and flatware she once crafted, in art school Glynis had not chosen her medium by accident. She naturally identified with any material that so fiercely refused to do what you wanted it to, whose form was resistant to change and responded only to violent manhandling. Metal was obstreperous. Were it ever mistreated, its dents and scratches caught the light like kept grudges.
Like it or not, Shep’s element was water. Adaptive, easily manipulated, and prone to taking the path of least resistance, he went with the flow, as they said in his youth. Water was yielding, biddable, and readily trapped. He wasn’t proud of these qualities; pliancy didn’t seem manly. On the other hand, the apparent passivity of liquid was misleading. Water was resourceful. As any homeowner with an aging roof or corroded plumbing knew well, water was insidious, and in its own quiet way would find its route. Water had a devious willfulness of its own, a sneaky, seeping insistence, an instinct for finding the single seam or joint you’ve left unsealed. Sooner or later, water will get in if it wants to, or – more vitally, in Shep’s case – it will get out.
His first boyhood fountains, knocked together with inappropriate materials like wood, leaked badly, and his frugal father had chastised him for these “bubblers,” as Dad called them, that wasted water. But Shep became more ingenious with found objects: chipped serving bowls, the limbs of his sister’s discarded dolls; later creations lost water only to evaporation. The whimsies grew kinetic, using paddle wheels, cups that would fill and flop, jets that kept a suspended object bobbing at bay, sprays that tinkled chimes of seashells or shards of stained glass. He’d kept up the hobby to this day. As a counterweight to the relentless functionality of his vocation, fountains were fabulously frivolous.
This off beat pastime almost certainly hailed not from some highfalutin metaphor for his character, but from the commonplace associations of childhood. Every July, the Knackers had rented a cabin in the White Mountains, beside which ran a wide, rushing stream. Back then, kids were privileged with real summers, expanses of unscheduled time receding to the hazy horizon. Time whose seeming endlessness was a lie, but the lie was still beguiling. Ripe for improvisation, time you could play like a saxophone. So he’d always linked the lilt of running water to peace, lassitude, and a languid lack of urgency – which, between math camps, get-ahead tutoring, fencing classes, and organized playdates, kids these days never seemed to sample. That’s what The Afterlife was all about, he recognized, not for the first time, and poured another finger of bourbon. He wanted his summer back. All year round.
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