X’s sense of alienation from his wife’s family has now intensified, too, because the whole enormous roiling pack of them seem now to be unable to think or talk about anything except the iron-eyed old patriarch’s brain cancer and grim treatment options and steady decline and apparently slim chances for lasting more than a few more months at the very outside, and they seem to talk endlessly but only with one another about all this, such that whenever X is there alongside his wife during any of these lugubrious family councils he always feels peripheral and otiose and subtly excluded, as if his wife’s close-knit family has woven in even tighter around itself in this time of crisis, forcing X even further out onto the periphery, he feels. And X’s encounters with his father-in-law himself, whenever X now accompanies his wife on her ceaseless visits to the old man’s sickroom in his (i.e., the old man’s) and his wife’s opulent neoromanesque home across town (and in what feels like a whole different economic galaxy) from the Xes’ own rather modest house, are especially excruciating, for all the above reasons plus the fact that X’s wife’s father — who, even though by this time he’s confined to a special top-of-the-line adjustable hospital bed the family has had brought in, and every time X is there he’s lying stricken in this special high-tech bed being attended to by a Puerto Rican hospice technician, is nevertheless always still immaculately shaved and groomed and attired, with his club tie double-Windsored and his steel trifocals polished, as if ready at any moment to spring up and make the Puerto Rican fetch his Signor Pucci suit and juridical robes and return to 7th District Tax Court to hand down some more mercilessly well-reasoned decisions, a dress and demeanor which the distraught family all seem to regard as one more sign of the tough old bird’s heartbreaking dignity and dum spero joie de vivre and strength of will — that the father-in-law always seems conspicuously chilly and aloof in his manner toward X during these dutiful visits, whereas X in turn, standing there awkwardly behind his wife as she is drawn tearfully in to incline over the sickbed like some spoon or metal rod drawn in and bent forward by the hideous force of a mentalist’s will, usually feels overcome with first alienation and then distaste and resentment and then actual malevolence toward the iron-eyed old man who, if the truth be told, X has always secretly felt was a prick of the first rank, and now finds that even just the glint of the father-in-law’s trifocals afflicts him, and can’t help feeling that he hates him; and the father-in-law, in turn, seems to pick up on X’s hidden involuntary hatred and gives back the clear impression of not feeling at all gladdened or bucked up or supported by X’s presence and of wishing X weren’t even there in the sickroom with Mrs. X and the glossy hospice technician, a wish X finds himself concurring bitterly with inside even as he exerts an even wider and more supportive and compassionate smile out into the space of the room, so that X always feels confused and disgusted and enraged in the old man’s sickroom with his wife and always ends up wondering what he’s even doing there in the first place.
X, however, of course, also always feels rather ashamed about feeling such dislike and resentment in the presence of a fellow human being and legal relative who’s steadily and inoperably declining, and after each visit to the old man’s luculent bedside, as he drives his distraught wife home in silence, X secretly castigates himself and wonders where his basic decency and compassion are. He locates an even deeper source of shame in the fact that ever since the father-in-law’s terminal diagnosis came down, he (i.e., X) has spent so much time and energy thinking only of himself and of his own feelings of resentful exclusion from his wife’s clannish family’s Drang when, after all, his wife’s father is suffering and dying right before their eyes and X’s loving wife is nearly prostrate with agony and grief and the Xes’ sensitive innocent children are also grieving terribly. X secretly worries that the obvious selfishness of his inner feelings during this time of family crisis when his wife and children so clearly deserve his compassion and support might constitute evidence of some horrific defect in his human makeup, some kind of hideous central ice where his heart’s nodes of empathy and basic other-directedness ought to be, and is increasingly tormented by shame and self-doubt, and then is doubly ashamed and worried about the fact that the shame and self-doubt are themselves self-involving and thus further compromise his ability to be truly concerned and supportive toward his wife and kids; and he keeps all his secret feelings of alienation and distaste and resentment and of shame and self-urtication even about the shame itself completely to himself, and doesn’t feel like he can possibly go to his distraught wife and burden/horrify her even further with his own self-involved pons asinorum, and in fact is so disgusted and ashamed about what he fears he might have discovered about his heart’s makeup that he is unusually subdued and reserved and unforthcoming with everyone in his life for the first several months of his father-in-law’s illness and says nothing to anyone of the storms raging centripetally inside him.
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 1 now 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.