Please. He placed a small square on her plate anyway, mumbling, You don’t understand. It’s not about food anymore, about whether you want it. Beryl was too caught up in the loss of her rent stabilization to infer what the exchange might mean. With no idea how to bend the evening’s subject matter around to the real issue, he tried to shift it by degrees.
“You know, speaking of bum luck,” Shep raised offhandedly, “do you carry any health insurance?”
“I’d hock my firstborn child, but I don’t have one.”
“So what would happen if you were in an accident, or got sick?”
“Beats me.” Beryl’s manner was defiant. “Don’t emergency rooms have to take you in?”
“Only for immediate care. And they still stick you with a bill.”
“Which they could shove where the sun don’t shine.”
“That could ruin your credit rating,” he said, cringing inside; the likes of credit ratings were exactly what he had yearned to flee in Pemba.
“That’s your world, big brother. Out here in mine, I could give a shit.” Apparently Beryl’s furious resentment had leached from her pending eviction to encompass her staid brother, his conventional house in Westchester, his gas-guzzling SUV, and his spoiled dilettante of a wife.
“But if something terrible happened to you …” Shep ventured. “Well, the person who would really end up paying for it is me, right? Who else, with Dad on a pension? In fact, that’s why I pay for Amelia’s insurance.”
“I’m not stopping you, if you want to buy me health insurance, too. Since from the sound of it you’re not really worried about me, but about yourself.”
“An individual policy at your age could run to a grand a month.”
“QED,” said Beryl. “Some months I don’t net more than a grand. So, what, I’m living on the street out of garbage cans, but, boy, do I have the best health insurance that my entire annual income can buy!”
“When you’re not covered,” said Glynis, “hospitals charge twice as much.”
“Which makes a lot of sense,” Beryl fumed. “Double charge the folks who can least afford it.”
“I didn’t make the system,” Shep said quietly. “But you’re getting older, things happen, and this is something you should start considering.”
“Look! Fortunately right now I’m not about to keel over, because I’ve got a problem a lot more pressing, okay? If you’re really worried about me, then, yes, you can help. Assuming I’m not going to fight this thing – which I also can’t afford – I’m going to have to move. I thought for the time being I could haul my crap up to Berlin; Dad says that’d be okay. Maybe even hole up there a while, to save on expenses. But to get another lease in New York I’d still need help on a security deposit. That’s three months’ rent up front. And you know what’s happened in Manhattan – a studio the size of a Porta Pott goes for three thousand a month! So, look, I hate having to do this, but … Well, doesn’t it make more sense for me to buy something? Instead of pouring all that rent down a rat hole? If you could just cover, I don’t know, maybe a hundred grand or so for a down payment … Think of it as an investment.”
“You want me to give you a hundred thousand dollars. Or so.”
“I never want to be in the position again where some prick landlord can kick me out of my own home. I mean, this is an emergency, Shepardo. I’m begging here.”
Shep reached for Glynis’s hand under the table. They’d had some dreadful rows over Beryl’s loans; a glance reassured her that this time he wouldn’t slip his sister a check when Glynis wasn’t looking.
“Beryl,” he said evenly. “We are not buying you an apartment.”
Beryl looked at her brother as if confronting a hitherto reliable appliance that suddenly wouldn’t turn on. She tried the switch again. “Maybe you’d like to think about it.”
“I don’t need to think. We can’t do it.”
“Why not?” As usual, presumably an unsatisfactory justification would effect a reversal of policy.
Nevertheless, this was the opening that Shep had been waiting for. He took a deep preparatory breath, one just long enough for Beryl’s temper to rev. She seemed to register that, unlike the intrinsically ambiguous matter of sexual consent, with money “no” really does mean “no,” consternation at which drove her recklessly to burn her bridges.
“Don’t tell me,” she said blackly. “You have to keep my down payment salted away for The Afterlife. You have to keep stashing away millions and millions of dollars for some fantasy Valhalla, and meantime your own sister is thrown out on the street. You have to go on expensive vacations year after year, on the pretense that you’re doing ‘research.’ But get real! If you were ever going to decamp to a Third World beach sipping piña coladas, wouldn’t you have gone already? You could make a huge difference to my life right now, but no! We all have to pay for your delusion, for this hubristic idea of yourself as special and above the common ruck, when the truth is you’re an ordinary corporate salary-man like practically every other drudge in the country. I’ve tried to do something interesting with my life, and make challenging, imaginative films that make a difference to people’s experience of the world, and it’s not my fault that doesn’t pay much. I work just as hard as you do, and maybe harder, a lot harder. But I’ve got nothing to show for it, and now I don’t even have a place to live – thanks to rich capitalists just like you who have to get even richer. Meanwhile, you drive around in a fat car and live in a fat suburban house with a bank account that’s busting at the seams – for what? You’re only going to see one afterlife, my brother, and it’s going to be a pretty scorching experience if while you were alive you weren’t a little more charitable toward your own family!”
Assessing that Beryl appeared to have finished, he gave his wife’s hand a gentle squeeze before interlacing his fingers on the table squarely opposite his sister.
“You’re right,” Shep said calmly. “Despite how long I may have hoped to, we are not likely at this point to start a new, fascinating, relaxing life in a more affordable country. I’m sorry about that. I’m far sorrier for the reason.”
“And what’s that?” Beryl sneered.
“We just found out that Glynis has cancer. It’s a rare and virulent disease called mesothelioma. I may have given it to her myself from working with products that contained asbestos. I will need to conserve both my energies and my funds. Between Glynis’s health and buying my sister property in the most inflated real estate market in the country, I have to opt for saving my wife’s life.”
It wouldn’t have been appropriate to smile, but he did have to suppress one corner of his mouth from rising in a curl of recognition. He’d told Jackson in the park this afternoon that he wanted to “do the honors” and inform his in-laws about his wife’s condition, since Glynis was sure to bait her relatives into saying something nasty and then to cut them to the quick with her zinger bad news. Maybe the two of them weren’t such different people as Shep had often feared.
I know this is perverse,” said Glynis, languishing in a chair while he washed up. “But I had a wonderful time
