So Much for That. Lionel Shriver
from government. Roads, he’d point out. Bridges. Streetlamps and public parks. Admittedly, this is what Jackson meant by the umbrella term “sidewalks.” The nominal infrastructure required to conduct ordinary life was largely provided by municipal authorities, which commanded such a tiny sliver of the pie that on a plate it would fall over. As Jackson frequently observed, if every citizen threw the same ante into the pot, they could cover all their primitive communal needs with “chump change” – and that was what George Washington had in mind, as opposed to “this obeisance to the king bullshit.”
While Shep enjoyed the game of coming up with another vital service from on high that was worth the price of admission – drug testing, air traffic control – he conceded that citing the palpable benefits that his taxes accrued to him personally was surprisingly difficult. Yet he also felt that the totality of the many agencies that controlled his life still approximated an order. Even a rough, inequitable order, as opposed to the gory havoc of animals running in packs, was priceless.
Besides, even if he accepted Jackson’s cartoonish categories, he’d still rather be a Mug than a Mooch. Someone on whom others depended, a man as he understood the word. Although he believed in an implicit social contract – that you agreed to take care of other people so that when the time came they would take care of you – he didn’t keep up his end of things in order to incur a debt he’d any intention of calling in. He would remain a resource rather than a drain to the end of his days if he could help it, if only because being reliable, self-sufficient, and capable felt good. This big, round, grounded solidity surely beat the thin, tittering tee-hee of putting one over on people. It beat the sneering self-congratulation of a confidence trickster and the huddling sneakiness of a cheat. There was nothing enviable, either, about the resentful gratitude of the beholden. Curiously, although forever ridiculing the gullible stalwart who was responsible, dependable, and steadfast, Jackson had long admired Shep Knacker for embodying these very qualities.
More perplexing still was why Shep’s best friend would lavish so much effort on a paradigm that cast himself as weak, powerless, and craven. It was thanks to Shep’s stipulations on selling Knack – an assurance in writing from Randy Pogatchnik that the workforce manager would get a six-figure salary, replete with an elevator clause – that Jackson made enough money to begrudge the taxes he paid on it, and sometimes Shep wondered if he’d done the man any favors. What was it about his life that made him feel so taken advantage of, so diminished?
Miraculously, Beryl was peering through the window of her lobby, so he wouldn’t have to do circuits of Sixth and Seventh Avenues waiting for her to come down. She bundled into the front seat in nubbled layers of cape, sweaters, and scarves, clunking in jewelry of the rocks-and-feathers school that Glynis detested. Though no thrift-shop confabulation – he suspected that she paid through the nose to look that casually rumpled – Beryl’s faux bohemian dress was typical of a generation that just missed out on the sixties. Although her older brother had almost missed the era himself, Shep encountered enough of its tail end not to be nostalgic about the hippy thing. Now, those guys were Mooches. Always borrowing money, or stealing it, promoting free this and free that, parroting a lot of anticapitalist twaddle only made possible by the hardworking parents they lived off. He was sorry about the boys who died in Vietnam. The rest of it was a crock.
Beryl kissed his cheek and cried, “Shepardo!” the neo-Renaissance nickname from childhood still imbued with a measure of affection. “God, I hope no one sees me in this SUV. You remember I did that film on SUV-IT, the activist group that smashes these things up as a political statement about global warming.”
Were Beryl truly concerned with carbon emissions she’d have volunteered to take the train. “This one’s a Mini Cooper,” he said mildly, “compared to the new ones.”
She asked perfunctorily how he was. He was relieved that she didn’t notice when he declined to say.
“So what are you working on now?” he asked. It was safest to return to the subject of Beryl. She never inquired about what was up at Handy Randy; the assumption ran that nothing was ever up. It was a business, a prejudice against which she had unquestioningly inherited from their father.
“A film on couples who decided not to have kids. Particularly homing in on people in, you know, their mid-forties, right on the cusp of not having any choice. Whether they’re content with their lives, whether they think they’re missing anything, what put them off about having a family. It’s really interesting.”
Shep made a ritual effort to care, but it was harder than usual. “Are most of them resigned, or regretful?”
“Neither, for the most part. They’re perfectly happy!”
As she went into the particulars, Shep reflected that his sister’s body of work might seem incoherent from the outside. The one documentary that she was known for, insofar as she was known at all, was a paean to Berlin, New Hampshire – pronounced Ber-lun, a provincial mangling of its European roots that he’d always found strangely sweet, and hailing from a patriotic disassociation from Germany during World War I. Using interviews with residents of its dwindling population, many of whom used to work for the paper mills that were now nearly all shut down, Beryl’s film Reducing Paperwork had captured something archetypal about New England’s declining postindustrial towns that was reminiscent of Michael Moore without the smirk. It was warm, and he’d liked it. He was truly pleased for her when the hour-long elegy made it into the New York Film Festival. She’d done a quirky documentary on people who don’t have a sense of smell, and a more serious one on graduates saddled with crushing debt from higher education.
But her subject matter only seemed all over the map until you realized that Beryl’s lunatic then-boyfriend was a member of that group that shattered the windshields of SUVs, and that Beryl herself resented cars of any description because she couldn’t afford one. Beryl was in her mid-forties, and Beryl didn’t have children. Like Shep, Beryl grew up in Berlin, New Hampshire. Beryl was born without a sense of smell – rather impairing a full grasp of her signature material, since throughout his boyhood Berlin reeked – and Beryl still hadn’t paid off her student loans. The self-referential nature of his sister’s work reached its apogee when last year she made an independent documentary about independent documentary makers, a project tainted with a whiff of self-pity that involved most of her friends.
In general, the feisty, spunky determination that was driven by inspiration when she was younger had aged into a grimmer, glummer resolve that was driven by spite. She would “show them,” whoever they were, and churning out yet another film project on a shoestring now seemed as much habit as calling. Too old now to be an aspirant, Beryl hadn’t established herself sufficiently to qualify as anything but. Oh, she did get the smell doc on PBS, and she’d won the odd grant from this or that arts council. But the New York Film Festival coup was years ago. The technological advances in compact cameras that enabled her to keep going with minimal funding also meant that plenty of other wannabes could buy the same cameras, and she faced more competition than ever. Maybe he was too conventional, but her hand-to-mouthing it in middle age was starting to look less like a gifted woman sacrificing for her work, and more like failure.
“You give any more thought to participating in a documentary about people who dream about quitting the rat race?” she asked as they sat, stationary, on the West Side Highway. “I was even thinking about calling it something like Belief in the Afterlife.”
He rued having shared the private argot. “Not really.”
“You’d be surprised. It’s a pretty common fantasy.”
“Thanks.”
“I just mean you’ve got company. Like, it’s kind of a club. Though I’ve had a hard time finding anybody who’s actually done it. With the two cases I’ve stumbled across, they both came back. One couple went to South America and the woman practically died; another guy sold everything he had and moved to a Greek island, where he got lonely and bored and didn’t speak the language. None of them lasted more than a year.”
Shep was determined to avoid any entanglement with her projects, which had already cannibalized most of her life