Back in the World: Stories

by Tobias Wolff

  “Bliss, it isn’t that bad,” Ted went on. “It’s just one of those things.” He turned to Helen. “Bliss’s little girl came down with tonsillitis last month and Bliss never got it together to go see her in the hospital.”

  “I can’t deal with hospitals,” Bliss said. “The minute I set foot inside of one my stomach starts doing flips. But still. When I think of her all alone in there.”

  Mitch took Bliss’s hands in his and looked right at her until she met his gaze. “It’s over,” he said. “The operation’s over and Lisa’s out of the hospital and she’s all right. Say it, Bliss. She’s all right.”

  “She’s all right,” Bliss said.

  “Again.”

  “She’s all right,” Bliss repeated.

  “Okay. Now believe it.” Mitch put her hands together and rubbed them gently between his palms. “We’ve built up this big myth about kids being helpless and vulnerable and so on because it makes us feel important. We think we’re playing some heavy role just because we’re parents. We don’t give kids any credit at all. Kids are tough little monkeys. Kids are survivors.”

  Bliss smiled.

  “But I don’t know,” Mitch said. He let go of Bliss’s hands and leaned back. “What I said just then is probably complete bullshit. Everything I say these days sounds like bullshit.”

  “We’ve all done worse things,” Ted told Bliss. He looked over at Helen. When Helen saw that he was waiting for her to agree with him she tried to think of something to say. Ted kept looking at her. “What have you got those things on for?” he said.

  “The light hurts my eyes.”

  “Then close the curtains.” He reached across to Helen and lifted the sunglasses away from her face. “There,” he said. He cupped her chin in one hand and with the other brushed her hair back from her forehead. “Isn’t she something?”

  “She’ll do,” Mitch said.

  Ted stroked Helen’s cheek with the back of his hand. “I’d kill for that face.”

  Bliss was studying Helen. “So lovely,” she said in a solemn, wistful voice.

  Helen laughed. She got up and drew the curtains shut. Spangles of light glittered in the fabric. She moved across the dim room to the dining nook and brought back a candle from the table there. Ted lit the candle and for a few moments they silently watched the flame. Then, in a thoughtful tone that seemed part of the silence, Mitch began to speak.

  “It’s true that we’ve all done things we’re ashamed of. I just wish I’d done more of them. I’m serious,” he said when Ted laughed. “I wish I’d raised more hell and made more mistakes, real mistakes, where you actually do something wrong instead of just let yourself drift into things you don’t like. Sometimes I look around and I think, Hey—what happened? No reflection on you,” he said to Bliss.

  She seemed puzzled.

  “Forget it,” Mitch told her. “All I’m saying is that looking out for the other fellow and being nice all the time is a bunch of crap.”

  “But you are nice,” Bliss said.

  Mitch nodded. “I know,” he said. “I’m working on it. It gets you exactly nowhere.”

  “Amen,” Ted said.

  “Case in point,” Mitch went on. “I used to paralegal with this guy in the city and he decided that he couldn’t live without some girl he was seeing. So he told his wife and of course she threw him out. Then the girl changed her mind. She didn’t even tell him why. We used to eat lunch together and he would give me the latest installment and I swear to God it was enough to break your heart. He wanted to get back together with his family but his wife couldn’t make up her mind whether to take him. One minute she’d say yes, the next minute she’d say no. Meanwhile he was living in this ratbag on Post Street. All he had in there was lawn furniture. I don’t know, I just felt sorry for him. So I told him he could move in with us until things got straightened out.”

  “I can feel this one coming,” Helen said.

  Mitch stared at the candle. “His name was Raphael. Like the angel. He was creative and good-looking and there was a nice aura around him. I guess I wanted to be his friend. But he turned out to be completely bad news. In the nine months he stayed with us he never once washed a glass or emptied an ashtray. He ran up hundreds of dollars worth of calls on our phone bill and didn’t pay for them. He wrecked my car. He stole things from me. He even put the moves on my wife.”

  “Classic,” Helen said.

  “You know what I did about it?” Mitch asked. “I’ll tell you. Nothing. I never said a word to him about any of it. By the time he left, my wife couldn’t stand the sight of me. Beginning of the end.”

  “What a depressing story,” Helen said.

  “I should have killed him,” Mitch said. “I might have regretted it later on but at least I could say I did something.”

  “You’re too sweet,” Bliss told him.

  “I know,” Mitch said. “But I wish I had, anyway. Sometimes it’s better to do something really horrendous than to let things slide.”

  Ted clapped his hands. “Hear, hear. You’re on the right track, Mitch. All you need is a few good pointers, and old Ted is just the man to give them to you. Because where horrendous is concerned, I’m the expert. You might say that I’m the king of horrendous.”

  Helen held up her empty glass. “Anybody want anything?”

  “Put on your crash helmets,” Ted went on. “You are about to hear my absolute bottom-line confession. The Worst Story Ever Told.”

  “No thanks,” said Helen.

  He peered at her. “What do you mean, ‘No thanks.’ Who’s asking permission?”

  “I wouldn’t mind hearing it,” Mitch said.

  “Well I would.” Helen stood and looked down at Ted. “It’s my birthday party, remember? I just don’t feel like sitting around and listening to you talk about what a crud you are. It’s a downer.”

  “That’s right,” Bliss said. “Helen’s the birthday girl. She gets to choose. Right, Ted?”

  “I know what,” Helen said. “Why don’t you tell us something good you did? The thing you’re most proud of.”

  Mitch burst out laughing. Ted grinned and punched him in the arm.

  “I mean it,” Helen said.

  “Helen gets to choose,” Bliss repeated. She patted the floor beside her and Helen sat down again. “All right,” Bliss said. “We’re listening.”

  Ted looked from Bliss to Helen. “I’ll do it if you will,” he said. “But you have to go first.”

  “That’s not fair,” Helen said.

  “Sounds fair to me,” said Mitch. “It was your idea.”

  Bliss smiled at Helen. “This is fun.”

  Before Helen began, she sent Ted out to the kitchen for more wine. Mitch did some sit-ups to get his blood moving again. Bliss sat behind Helen and let down Helen’s hair. “I could show you something for this dryness,” she said. She combed Helen’s hair with her fingers, then started to brush it, counting off the strokes in a breathy whisper until Ted came back with the jug.

  They all had a drink.

  “Ready and waiting,” Ted told Helen. He lay back on the sofa and clasped his hands behind his head.

  “One of my mother’s friends had a boy with Down’s syndrome,” Helen began. “Actually, three or four of her friends had kids with problems like that. One of my aunts, too. They were all good Catholics and they didn’t think anything about having babies right into their forties. This was before Vatican Two and the pill and all that—before everything got watered down.

  “Anyway, Tom wasn’t really a boy. He was older than me by a couple of years, and a lot bigger. But he seemed like a boy—very sweet, very gentle, very happy.”

  Bliss stopped the brush in midstroke and said, “You’re going to make me cry again.”

  “I used to take care of Tom sometimes when I was in high school. I was into a serious good-works routine back then. I wanted to be a saint. Honestly, I really did. At night, before I went to sleep, I used to put my fingers under
my chin like I was praying and smile in this really holy way that I practiced all the time in front of the mirror. Then if they found me dead in the morning they would think that I’d gone straight to heaven—that I was smiling at the angels coming to get me. At one point I even thought of becoming a nun.”

  Bliss laughed. “I can just see you in a habit—Sister Morphine. You’d have lasted about two hours.”

  Helen turned and looked at Bliss in a speculative way. “It’s not something I expect you to understand,” she said, “but if I had gone in I would have stayed in. To me, a vow is a vow,” She turned away again. “Like I said, I started out taking care of Tom as a kind of beatitude number, but after a while I got to look forward to it. Tom was fun to be with. And he really loved me. He even named one of his hamsters after me. We were both crazy about animals, and we would usually go to the zoo or I would take him to this stable out in Marin that had free riding lessons for special kids. That was what they called them, instead of handicapped or retarded—special.”

  “Beautiful,” Mitch said.

  “Don’t get too choked up,” Helen told him. “The story isn’t over yet.” She took a sip of her wine. “So. After I started college I didn’t get home all that much, but whenever I did I’d stop by and get Tom and we’d go somewhere. Over to the Cliff House to look at the sea lions, something like that. Then this one day I got a real brainstorm. I thought, Hey, why not go whale-watching? Tom had whale posters all over his bedroom but he’d never seen a real one, and neither had I. So I called up this outfit in Half Moon Bay and they said that it was getting toward the end of the season, but still worth a try. They were pretty sure we’d see something.

  “Tom’s mother wasn’t too hot about the idea. She kept going on about the fact that he couldn’t swim. But I brought her around, and the next morning Tom and I drove down and got on board the boat. It wasn’t all that big. In fact, it was a lot smaller than I thought it would be, and that made me a little nervous at first, but after we got under way I figured hell with it—they must know what they’re doing. The boat rocked a little, but not dangerously. Tom loved it.

  “We cruised around all morning and didn’t see a thing. They would take us to different places and cut the engine and we would sit there, waiting for a whale to come along. I stopped caring. It was nice out on the water. We were with a good bunch of people and one of them fixed up a sort of fishing line for Tom to hang over the side while we waited. I just leaned back and got some sun. Smelled the good smells. Watched the seagulls. After an hour or so they would start the engine up again and go somewhere else and do the same thing. This happened three or four times. Everybody was kidding the guide about it, threatening to make him walk the plank and so on. Then, right out of nowhere, this whale came up beside us.

  “He was just suddenly there. All this water running off his back. This unbelievably rancid smell all around him. Covered with barnacles and shells and long strings of seaweed trailing off him. Big. Maybe half again as long as the boat we were in.” Helen shook her head. “You just can’t imagine how big he was. He started making passes at the boat, and every time he did it we’d pitch and roll and take on about five hundred gallons of water. We were falling all over each other. At first everyone laughed and whooped it up, but after a while it started to get heavy.”

  “He was probably playing with you,” Mitch said.

  “That’s what the guide told us the first couple of times it happened. Then he got scared too. I mean he went white as a sheet. You could tell he didn’t know what was happening any better than the rest of us did. We have this idea that whales are supposed to be more civilized than people, smarter and friendlier and more together. Cute, even. But it wasn’t like that. It was hostile.”

  “You probably got a bad one,” Mitch said. “It sounds like he was bent out of shape about something. Maybe the Russians harpooned his mate.”

  “He was a monster,” Helen said. “I mean that. He was hostile and huge and stank. He was hideous, too. There were so many shells and barnacles on him that you could hardly see his skin. It looked as if he had armor on. He scraped the boat a couple of times and it made the most terrible sound, like people moaning under water. He’d swim ahead a ways and go under and you’d think Please God don’t let him come back, and then the water would start to churn alongside the boat and there he’d be again. It was just terrifying. I’ve never been so afraid in my life. And then Tom started to lose it.”

  Bliss put the brush on the floor. Helen could feel her stillness and hear the sound of her breathing.

  “He started to make these little noises,” Helen said. “I’d never heard him do that before. Little mewing noises. The strange thing was, I hadn’t even thought of Tom up to then. I’d completely forgotten about him. So it gave me a shock when I realized that he was sitting right next to me, scared half to death. At first I thought, Oh no, what if he goes berserk! He was so much bigger than me I wouldn’t have been able to control him. Neither would anyone else. He was incredibly strong. If anyone had tried to hold him down he’d have thrown them off like a dog shakes off water. And then what?

  “But the thing that worried me most was that Tom would get so confused and panicky that he’d jump overboard. In my mind I had a completely clear picture of him doing it.”

  “Me too,” Mitch said. “I have the same picture. He did it, didn’t he? He jumped in and you went after him and pulled him out.”

  Bliss said, “Ssshhh. Just listen, okay?”

  “He didn’t jump,” Helen said. “He didn’t go berserk, either. Here we come to the point of the story—Helen’s Finest Hour. How did I get started on this, anyway? It’s disgusting.”

  The candle hissed and flared. The flame was burning in a pool of wax. Helen watched it flare up twice more, and then it died. The room went gray.

  Bliss began to rub Helen’s back. “Go on,” she said.

  “I just talked him down,” Helen said. “You know, I put my arm around his shoulder and said, Hey, Tom, isn’t this something! Look at that big old whale! Wow! Here he comes again, Tom, hold on! And then I’d laugh like crazy. I made like I was having the time of my life, and Tom fell for it. He calmed right down. Pretty soon after that the whale took off and we went back to shore. I don’t know why I brought it up. It was just that even though I felt really afraid, I went ahead and acted as if I was flying high. I guess that’s the thing I’m most proud of.”

  “Thank you, Helen,” Mitch said. “Thank you for sharing that with us. I know I sound phony but I mean it.”

  “You don’t talk about yourself enough,” Bliss said. Then she called, “Okay, Ted—it’s your turn.”

  Ted did not answer.

  Bliss called his name again.

  “I think he’s asleep,” Mitch said. He moved closer to the sofa and looked at Ted. He nodded. “Dead to the world.”

  “Asleep,” Helen said. “Oh, God.”

  Bliss hugged Helen from behind. “Mitch, come here,” she said. “Love circle.”

  Helen pulled away. “No,” she said.

  “Why don’t we wake him up?” Mitch suggested.

  “Forget it,” Helen told him. “Once Ted goes under he stays under. Nothing can bring him up. Watch.” She went to the sofa, raised her hand, and slapped Ted across the face.

  He groaned softly and turned over.

  “See?” Helen said.

  “What a slug,” Bliss said.

  “Don’t you dare call him names,” Helen told her. “Not in front of me anyway. Ted is my husband. Forever and ever. I only did that to make a point.”

  Mitch said, “Helen, do you want to talk about this?”

  “There’s nothing to talk about,” Helen answered. “I made my own bed.” She hefted the jug of wine. “Who needs a refill?”

  Mitch and Bliss looked at each other. “My energy level isn’t too high,” Bliss said.

  Mitch nodded. “Mine’s pretty low, too.”

  “Then we’ll just have to bring it up,�
� Helen said. She left the room and came back with three candles and a mirror. She screwed one of the candles into the holder and held a match to the wick. It sputtered, then caught. Helen felt the heat of the flame on her cheek. “There,” she said, “that’s more like it.” Mitch and Bliss drew closer as Helen took a glass vial from her pocket and spilled the contents onto the mirror. She looked up at them and grinned.

  “I don’t believe this,” Bliss said. “Where did you get it?”

  Helen shrugged.

  “That’s a lot of toot,” Mitch said.

  “We’ll just have to do our best,” Helen said. “We’ve got all day.”

  Bliss looked at the mirror. “I really should go to work.”

  “Me too,” Mitch said. He laughed, and Bliss laughed with him. They watched over Helen’s shoulder as Helen bent down to sift the gleaming crystal. First she chopped it with a razor. Then she began to spread it out. Mitch and Bliss smiled up at her from the mirror, and Helen smiled back between them. Their faces were rosy with candlelight. They were the faces of three well-wishers, carolers, looking in at Helen though a window filling up with snow.

  The Rich Brother

  There were two brothers, Pete and Donald.

  Pete, the older brother, was in real estate. He and his wife had a Century 21 franchise in Santa Cruz. Pete worked hard and made a lot of money, but not any more than he thought he deserved. He had two daughters, a sailboat, a house from which he could see a thin slice of the ocean, and friends doing well enough in their own lives not to wish bad luck on him. Donald, the younger brother, was still single. He lived alone, painted houses when he found the work, and got deeper in debt to Pete when he didn’t.

  No one would have taken them for brothers. Where Pete was stout and hearty and at home in the world, Donald was bony, grave, and obsessed with the fate of his soul. Over the years Donald had worn the images of two different Perfect Masters around his neck. Out of devotion to the second of these he entered an ashram in Berkeley, where he nearly died of undiagnosed hepatitis. By the time Pete finished paying the medical bills Donald had become a Christian. He drifted from church to church, then joined a pentecostal community that met somewhere in the Mission District to sing in tongues and swap prophecies.