Back in the World: Stories

by Tobias Wolff

  “Oho,” Truman said. “The plot thickens. Enter Miles Standish.”

  “I knew you would say that,” Audrey said. She finished her drink and looked around, but the waitress was sitting at the bar with her back to the room, smoking a cigarette.

  George took his glasses off, held them up to the light, and put them on again. “So,” he said, “George sallies forth to meet Senga. Senga—doesn’t it make you think of a jungle queen, that name? Flashing eyes, dagger at the hip, breasts bulging over a leopard-skin halter? Such was not the case. This Senga was still an Agnes. Thin. Businesslike. And very grouchy. No sooner did I mention Miguel’s name than I was shown the door, with a message for Miguel: if he bothered her again she would set the police on him.

  “ ‘Set the police on him.’ Those were her words, and she meant them. A week or so later Miguel followed her home from work and she forthwith got a lawyer on the case. The upshot of it was that Miguel had to sign a paper saying that he understood he would be arrested if he wrote, called, or followed Senga again. He signed, but with his fingers crossed, as it were. He told me, ‘Horhay, I sign—but I do not accept.’ ‘Nobly spoken,’ I told him, ‘but you’d damn well better accept or that woman will have you locked up.’ Miguel said that prison did not frighten him, that in his country all the best people were in prison. Sure enough, a few days later he followed Senga home again and she did it—she had him locked up.”

  “Poor kid,” Audrey said.

  Truman had been trying to get the attention of the waitress, who wouldn’t look at him. He turned to Audrey. “What do you mean, ‘Poor kid’? What about the girl? Senga? She’s trying to hold down a job and feed her daughter and meanwhile she has this Filipino stalking her all over the city. If you want to feel sorry for someone, feel sorry for her.”

  “I do,” Audrey said.

  “All right then.” Truman looked back toward the waitress again, and as he did so Audrey picked up George’s snifter and took a drink from it. George smiled at her. “What’s wrong with that woman?” Truman said. He shook his head. “I give up.”

  “George, go on,” Audrey said.

  George nodded. “In brief,” he said, “it was a serious mess. Très sérieux. Senga’s lawyer was out for blood, and he got Immigration into the act. They were threatening to revoke Miguel’s visa and throw him out of the country. Monsignor Strauss finally got him off, but it was a damn close-run thing. It turned out that Senga was going to be transferred to Portland in a month or so, and the monsignor persuaded her to drop charges with the understanding that Miguel would not come within ten miles of the city limits as long as she lived there. Until she left, Miguel would stay with Monsignor Strauss at the rectory, under his personal supervision. The monsignor also agreed to pay Senga for her lawyer’s fees, which were outrageous. Absolutely outrageous.”

  “So what was the bottom line?” Truman asked.

  “Simplicity itself,” George said. “If Miguel messed up, they’d throw him on the first plane to Manila.”

  “Sounds illegal,” Truman said.

  “Perhaps. But that was the arrangement.”

  A new song began playing on the jukebox. The men by the door stopped arguing, and each of them seemed all at once to draw into himself.

  “Listen,” Audrey said. “It’s him. Caruso.”

  The record was worn and gave the effect of static behind Caruso’s voice. The music coming through the static made Charlie think of the cultural broadcasts from Europe his parents had listened to so gravely when he was a boy. At times Caruso’s voice was almost lost, and then it would swell again. The old men were still. One of them began to weep. The tears fell freely from his open eyes, down his shining cheeks.

  “So that was Caruso,” Truman said when it ended. “I always wondered what all the fuss was about. Now I know. That’s what I call singing.” Truman took out his wallet and put some money on the table. He examined the money left in the wallet before putting it away. “Ready?” he said to Audrey.

  “No,” Audrey said. “Finish the story, George.”

  George took his glasses off and laid them next to his snifter. He rubbed his eyes. “All right.” he said. “Back to Miguel. As per the agreement, he lived in the rectory until Senga moved to Portland. Behaved himself, too. No letters, no calls, no following her around. In his pajamas every night by ten. Then Senga left town and Miguel went back to his room at the Overland. For a while there he looked pretty desperate, but after a few weeks he seemed to come out of it.

  “I say ‘seemed.’ There was, in fact, more going on than met the eye. My eye, anyway. One night I am sitting at home and listening, believe it or not, to Tristan, when the telephone rings. At first no one says anything; then this voice comes on the line whispering, ‘Help me, Horhay, help me,’ and of course I know who it is. He says he needs to see me right away. No explanation. He doesn’t even tell me where he is. I just have to assume he’s at the Overland, and that’s where I find him, in the lobby.”

  George gave a little laugh. “Actually,” he said, “I almost missed him. His face was all bandaged up, from his nose to the top of his forehead. If I hadn’t been looking for him I never would have recognized him. Never. He was sitting there with his suitcases all around him and a white cane across his knees. When I made my presence known to him he said, “Horhay, I am blind.” How, I asked him, had this come to pass? He would not say. Instead he gave me a piece of paper with a telephone number on it and asked me to call Senga and tell her that he had gone blind, and that he would be arriving in Portland by Trailways at eleven o’clock the next morning.”

  “Great Scott,” Truman said. “He was faking it, wasn’t he? I mean he wasn’t really blind, was he?”

  “Now that is an interesting question,” George said. “Because, while I would have to say that Miguel was not really blind, I would also have to say that he was not really faking it, either. But to go on. Senga was unmoved. She instructed me to tell Miguel that not she but the police would be waiting to meet his bus. Miguel didn’t believe her. ‘Horhay,’ he said, ‘she will be there,’ and that was that. End of discussion.”

  “Did he go?” Truman asked.

  “Of course he went,” Audrey said. “He loved her.”

  George nodded. “I put him on the bus myself. Led him to his seat, in fact.”

  “So he still had the bandages on,” Truman said.

  “Oh yes. Yes, he still had them on.”

  “But that’s a twelve-, thirteen-hour ride. If there wasn’t anything wrong with his eyes, why didn’t he just take the bandages off and put them on again when the bus reached Portland?”

  Audrey put her hand on Truman’s. “Truman,” she said. “We have to talk about something.”

  “I don’t get it,” Truman went on. “Why would he travel blind like that? Why would he go all the way in the dark?”

  “Truman, listen,” Audrey said. But when Truman turned to look at her she took her hand away from his and looked across the table at George. George’s eyes were closed. His fingers were folded together as if in prayer.

  “George,” Audrey said. “Please. I can’t.”

  George opened his eyes.

  “Tell him,” Audrey said.

  Truman looked back and forth between them. “Now just wait a minute,” he said.

  “I’m sorry,” George said. “This is not easy for me.”

  Truman was staring at Audrey. “Hey,” he said.

  She pushed her empty glass back and forth. “We have to talk,” she said.

  He brought his face close to hers. “Do you think that just because I make a lot of money I don’t have feelings?”

  “We have to talk,” she repeated.

  “Indeed,” George said.

  The three of them sat there for a while. Then Truman said, “This takes the cake,” and put his hat on. A few minutes later they all got up and left the coffeehouse.

  The waitress sat by herself at the bar, motionless except when she raised her head to
blow smoke at the ceiling. Over by the door the Italians were throwing dice for toothpicks. “The Anvil Chorus” was playing on the jukebox. It was the first piece of classical music Charlie had heard often enough to get sick of, and he was sick of it now. He closed the magazine he’d been pretending to read, dropped it on the table, and went outside.

  It was still foggy, and colder than before. Charlie’s father had warned him about moving here in the middle of the summer. He had even quoted Mark Twain at Charlie, to the effect that the coldest winter Mark Twain had ever endured was the summer he spent in San Francisco. This had been a particularly bad one; even the natives said so. In truth it was beginning to get to Charlie. But he had not admitted this to his father, any more than he had admitted that his job was wearing him out and paying him barely enough to keep alive on, or that the friends he wrote home about did not exist, or that the editors to whom he’d submitted his novel had sent it back without comment—all but one, who had scrawled in pencil across the title page, “Are you kidding?”

  Charlie’s room was on Broadway, at the crest of the hill. The hill was so steep they’d had to carve steps into the sidewalk and block the street with a cement wall because of the cars that had lost their brakes going down. Sometimes, at night, Charlie would sit on that wall and look out over the lights of North Beach and think of all the writers out there, bent over their desks, steadily filling pages with well-chosen words. He thought of these writers gathering together in the small hours to drink wine, and read each other’s work, and talk about the things that weighed on their hearts. These were the brilliant men and women, the deep conversations Charlie wrote home about.

  He was close to giving up. He didn’t even know how close to giving up he was until he walked out of the coffeehouse that night and felt himself deciding that he would go on after all. He stood there and listened to the foghorn blowing out upon the Bay. The sadness of that sound, the idea of himself stopping to hear it, the thickness of the fog all gave him pleasure.

  Charlie heard violins behind him as the coffeehouse door opened; then it banged shut and the violins were gone. A deep voice said something in Italian. A higher voice answered, and the two voices floated away together down the street.

  Charlie turned and started up the hill, picking his way past lampposts that glistened with running beads of water, past sweating walls and dim windows. A Chinese woman appeared beside him. She held before her a lobster that was waving its pincers back and forth as if conducting music. The woman hurried past and vanished. The hill had begun to steepen under Charlie’s feet. He stopped to catch his breath, and listened again to the foghorn. He knew that somewhere out there a boat was making its way home in spite of the solemn warning, and as he walked on Charlie imagined himself kneeling in the prow of that boat, lamp in hand, intent on the light shining just before him. All distraction gone. Too watchful to be afraid. Tongue wetting the lips and eyes wide open, ready to call out in this shifting fog where at any moment anything might be revealed.

  Leviathan

  On her thirtieth birthday Ted threw a surprise party for Helen. It was a small party—Mitch and Bliss were the only guests. They’d chipped in with Ted and bought Helen three grams of white-out blizzard that lasted the whole night and on into the next morning. When it got light enough everyone went for a swim in the courtyard pool. Then Ted took Mitch up to the sauna on the fifth floor while Helen and Bliss put together a monster omelet.

  “So how does it feel,” Bliss said, “being thirty?” The ash fell off her cigarette into the eggs. She stared at the ash for a moment, then stirred it in. “Mitch had his fortieth last month and totally freaked. He did so much Maalox he started to taste like chalk. I thought he was going to start freebasing or something.”

  “Mitch is forty?” Helen said.

  Bliss looked over at her. “That’s classified information, okay?”

  Helen shook her head. “Incredible. He looks about twenty-five, maybe twenty-seven at the absolute most.” She watched Bliss crumble bacon into the bowl. “Oh God,” she said, “I don’t believe it. He had a face lift.”

  Bliss closed her eyes and leaned against the counter. “I shouldn’t have told you. Please don’t say anything,” she murmured hopelessly.

  When Mitch and Ted came back from the sauna they all had another toot, and Ted gave Helen the mirror to lick. He said he’d never seen three grams disappear so fast. Afterwards Helen served up the omelet while Ted tried to find something on the TV. He kept flipping the dial until it drove everyone crazy, looking for Roadrunner cartoons, then he gave up and tuned in on the last part of a movie about the Bataan Death March. They didn’t watch it for very long though because Bliss started to cry. Ted switched over to an inspirational program but Bliss kept crying and began to hyperventilate. “Come on, everyone,” said Mitch. “Love circle.” Ted and Mitch went over to Bliss and put their arms around her while Helen watched them from the sofa, sipping espresso from a cup as blue and dainty as a robin’s egg—the last of a set her grandmother had brought from the old country. Helen would have hugged Bliss too but there wasn’t really any point; Bliss pulled this stunt almost every time she got herself a noseful, and it just had to run its course.

  When Helen finished her espresso she gathered the plates and carried them out to the kitchen. She scattered leftover toast into the courtyard below, and watched the squirrels carry it away as she scoured the dishes and listened to the proceedings in the next room. This time it was Ted who talked Bliss down. “You’re beautiful,” he kept telling her. It was the same thing he always said to Helen when she felt depressed, and she was beginning to feel depressed right now.

  She needed more fuel, she decided. She ducked into the bedroom and did a couple of lines from Ted’s private stash, which she had discovered while searching for matches in the closet. Afterwards she looked at herself in the mirror. Her eyes were bright. They seemed lit from within and that was how Helen felt, as if there were a column of cool white light pouring from her head to her feet. She put on a pair of sunglasses so nobody would notice and went back to the kitchen.

  Mitch was standing at the counter, rolling a bone. “How’s the birthday girl?” he asked without looking up.

  “Ready for the next one,” Helen said. “How about you?”

  “Hey, bring it on,” Mitch answered.

  At that moment Helen came close to letting him know she knew, but she held back. Mitch was good people and so was Bliss. Helen didn’t want to make trouble between them. All the same, Helen knew that someday she wasn’t going to be able to stop herself from giving Mitch the business. It just had to happen. And Helen knew that Bliss knew. But she hadn’t done it this morning and she felt good about that.

  Mitch held up the joint. “Taste?”

  Helen shook her head. She glanced over her shoulder toward the living room. “What’s the story on Bliss?” she asked. “All bummed out over World War Two? Ted should have known that movie would set her off.”

  Mitch picked a sliver of weed from his lower lip. “Her ex is threatening to move back to Boston. Which means she won’t get to see her kids except during the summer, and that’s only if we can put together the scratch to fly them here and back. It’s tough. Really tough.”

  “I guess,” Helen said. She dried her hands and hung the towel on the refrigerator door. “Still, Bliss should have thought about that when she took a walk on them, right?”

  Mitch turned and started out of the kitchen.

  “Sorry,” Helen called after him. “I wasn’t thinking.”

  “Yes you were,” Mitch said, and left her there.

  Oh hell, she thought. She decided she needed another line but made no move to get it. Helen stood where she was, looking down at the pool through the window above the sink. The manager’s Afghan dog was lapping water from the shallow end, legs braced in the trough that ran around the pool. The two British Airways stewards from down the hall were bathing their white bodies in the morning sunshine, both wearing blue s
wimsuits. The redheaded girl from upstairs was floating on an air mattress. Helen could see the long shadow of the air mattress glide along the bottom of the pool like something stalking her.

  Helen heard Ted say, “Jesus, Bliss, I can understand that. Everyone has those feelings. You can’t always beat them down.” Bliss answered him in a voice so soft that Helen gave up trying to hear; it was hardly more than a sigh. She poured herself a glass of Chablis and joined the others in the living room. They were all sitting cross-legged on the floor. Helen caught Mitch’s eye and mouthed the word sorry. He looked at her, then nodded.

  “I’ve done some worse things than that,” Ted was saying. “I’ll bet Mitch has, too.”

  “Plenty worse,” Mitch said.

  “Worse than what?” Helen asked.

  “It’s awful.” Bliss looked down at her hands. “I’d be embarrassed to tell you.” She was all cried out now, Helen could see that. Her eyes were heavy-lidded and serene, her cheeks flushed, and a little smile played over her swollen lips.

  “It couldn’t be that bad,” Helen said.

  Ted leaned forward. He still had on the bathrobe he’d worn to the sauna and it fell open almost to his waist, as Helen knew he intended it to do. His chest was hard-looking from the Nautilus machine in the basement, and dark from their trip to Mazatlán. Helen had to admit it, he looked great. She didn’t understand why he had to be so obvious and crass, but he got what he wanted: she stared at him and so did Bliss.