After the Plague

by T. C. Boyle

  I’d set the alarm for four-thirty, to give myself time to run the electric razor over my face, change my shirt and get back to work, and that would have been fine, but for the computer. I checked the walnut clock on the mantel as I was knotting my tie—I had ten minutes to spare—and sat down at my desk to have a quick look at Peep Hall. For some reason—variety’s sake, I guess—I clicked on “Living Room Cam 1,” and saw that two of the girls, Mandy and Traci, were exercising to a program on TV. In the nude. They were doing jumping jacks when the image first appeared on the screen, hands clapping over their heads, breasts flouncing, and then they switched, in perfect unison, to squat thrusts, their faces staring into the camera, their arms flexed, legs kicking out behind. It was a riveting performance. I watched, in awe, as they went on to aerobics, some light lifting with three-pound dumbbells and what looked to be a lead-weighted cane, and finally concluded by toweling each other off. I was twenty minutes late for work.

  This time it wasn’t all right. Jason, the manager, was behind the bar when I came in, and the look on his face told me he wasn’t especially thrilled at having this unlooked-for opportunity to dole out cocktail onions and bar mix to a roomful of sunburned hotel guests, enchanted tourists and golfers warming up for dinner. He didn’t say a word. Just dropped what he was doing (frothing a mango margarita in the blender), brushed past me and hurried down the corridor to his office as if the work of the world awaited him there. He was six years younger than I, he had a Ph.D. in history from a university far more prestigious than the one that ruled our little burg, and he wielded a first-rate vocabulary. I could have lived without him. At any rate, I went around to each customer with a smile on my face—even the lunatic in tam-o’-shanter and plus fours drinking rum and Red Bull at the far end of the bar—and refreshed drinks, bar napkins and the bowls of pretzels and bar mix. I poured with a heavy hand.

  Around seven, the dining room began to fill up. This was my favorite hour of the day, the air fragrant and still, the sun picking out individual palms and banks of flowers to illuminate as it sank into the ocean, people bending to their hors d’oeuvres with a kind of quiet reverence, as if for once they really were thankful for the bounty spread out before them. Muted snatches of conversation drifted in from the patio. Canned piano music—something very familiar—seeped out of the speakers. All was well, and I poured myself a little Irish whiskey to take some of the tightness out of my neck and shoulders.

  That was when Samantha walked in.

  She was with two other girls—Gina, I recognized; the other one, tall, athletic, with a nervous, rapid-blinking gaze that seemed to reduce the whole place and everything in it to a series of snapshots, was unfamiliar. All three were wearing sleek ankle-length dresses that left their shoulders bare, and as they leaned into the hostess’ stand there was the glint of jewelry at their ears and throats. My mouth went dry. I felt as if I’d been caught out at something desperate, something furtive and humiliating, though they were all the way across the room and Samantha hadn’t even so much as glanced in my direction. I fidgeted with the wine key and tried not to stare, and then Frankie, the hostess, was leading them to a table out on the patio.

  I realized I was breathing hard, and my pulse must have shot up like a rocket, and for what? She probably wouldn’t even recognize me. We’d shared a beer for twenty minutes. I was old enough to be her—her what? Her uncle. I needed to get a grip. She wasn’t the one watching me through a hidden lens. “Hart? Hart, are you there?” a voice was saying, and I looked up to see Megan, the cocktail waitress, hovering over her station with a drink order on her lips.

  “Yeah, sure,” I said, and I took the order and started in on the drinks. “By the way,” I said as casually as I could, “you know that table of three—the girls who just came in? Tell me when you take their order, okay? Their drinks are on me.”

  As it turned out, they weren’t having any of the sweet rum drinks garnished with fruit and a single orange nasturtium flower or one of our half dozen margaritas or even the house chardonnay by the glass. “I carded them,” Megan said, “and they’re all legal, but what they want is three sloe gin fizzes. Do we even have sloe gin?”

  In the eight years I’d been at the El Encanto, I doubt if I’d mixed more than three or four sloe gin fizzes, and those were for people whose recollections of the Eisenhower administration were still vivid. But we did have a vestigial bottle of sloe gin in the back room, wedged between the peppermint schnapps and the Benedictine, and I made them their drinks. Frankie had seated them around the corner on the patio, so I couldn’t see how the fizzes went over, and then a series of orders came leapfrogging in, and I started pouring and mixing and forgot all about it. The next time I looked up, Samantha was coming across the room to me, her eyebrows dancing over an incipient smile. I could see she was having trouble with her heels and the constriction of the dress—or gown, I suppose you’d call it—and I couldn’t help thinking how young she looked, almost like a little girl playing dress-up. “Hart,” she said, resting her hands on the bar so that I could admire her sculpted fingers and her collection of rings—rings even on her thumbs—“I didn’t know you worked here. This place is really nice.”

  “Yeah,” I said, grinning back at her while holding the picture of her in my head, asleep, with her hair splayed out over the pillow. “It’s first-rate. Top-notch. Really fantastic. It’s a great place to work.”

  “You know, that was really sweet of you,” she said.

  I wanted to say something like “Aw, shucks” or “No problem,” but instead I heard myself say, “The gesture or the drink?”

  She looked at me quizzically a moment, and then let out a single soft flutter of a laugh. “Oh, you mean the gin fizzes?” And she laughed again—or giggled, actually. “I’m legal today, did you know that? And my gramma made me promise to have a sloe gin fizz so she could be here tonight in spirit—she passed last winter?—but I think we’re having like a bottle of white wine or something with dinner. That’s my sister I’m with—she’s taking me out for my birthday, along with Gina—she’s one of my roommates? But you probably already know that, right?”

  I shot my eyes left, then right, up and down the bar. All the drinks were fresh, and no one was paying us the least attention. “What do you mean?”

  Her eyebrows lifted, the silky thick eyebrows that were like two strips of mink pasted to her forehead, and her hair was like some exotic fur too, rich and shining and dark. “You didn’t check out the Web site?”

  “No,” I lied.

  “Well, you ought to,” she said. The air was a stew of smells—a couple at the end of the bar were sharing the warm spinach and scallop salad, there was the sweet burnt odor of the Irish whiskey I was sipping from a mug, Samantha’s perfume (or was it Megan’s?) and a medley of mesquite-grilled chops and braised fish and Peter Oxendine’s famous sauces wafting in from the kitchen. “Okay,” she said, shaking out her hair with a flick of her head and running a quick look around the place before bringing her eyes back to me. “Okay, well—I just wanted to say thanks.” She shrugged. “I guess I better be getting back to the girls.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Nice seeing you again. And hey, happy birthday.”

  She’d already turned away from the bar, earrings swaying, face composed, but she stopped to give me a smile over her shoulder, and then she made her way across the room and out onto the darkened patio.

  And that would have been it, at least until I could get home and watch her shimmy out of that gown and paint her toenails or gorge on cake or whatever it was she was going to do in the semi-privacy of her own room, but I couldn’t let it go and I sent over dessert too, a truly superior raspberry-kiwi tart Stefania had whipped up that afternoon. That really put them in my debt, and after dessert the three of them came to the bar to beam at me and settle in for coffee and an after-dinner drink. “You’re really just twenty-one today?” I said, grinning at Samantha till the roots of my teeth must have showed. “You’re sure I don�
��t have to card you, now, right?”

  I watched the hair swirl round her shoulders as she braced herself against the bar and reached down to ease off her heels, and then she was fishing through her purse till she came up with her driver’s license and laid it out proudly on the bar. I picked it up and held it to the light—there she was, grinning wide out of the bottom right-hand corner, date of birth clearly delineated, and her name, Jennifer B. Knickish, spelled out in bold block letters. “Jennifer?” I said.

  She took the card back with a frown, her eyebrows closing ranks. “Everybody calls me Samantha,” she said. “Really.” And to her companions: “Right, guys?” I watched them nod their glossy heads. The older one, the sister, giggled. “And besides, I don’t want any of the creeps to know my real name—even my first name—you know what I mean?”

  Oh, yes, yes I did. And I smiled and bantered and called up reserves of charm I hadn’t used in years, and the drinks were on me all night long. It was Samantha’s birthday, wasn’t it? And her twenty-first, no less—a rite of passage if ever there was one. I poured Grand Marnier and Rémy till the customers disappeared and the waiters and busboys slipped out the back and the lights drew down to nothing.

  I woke with a headache. I’d matched them, round for round, and, as I say, I’d started in on the Irish whiskey earlier in the night—and yes, I’m all too well aware that the concrete liver and stumbling tongue are hazards of the profession, but I’m pretty good at keeping all that in check. I do get bored, though, and wind up over-doing it from time to time, especially when the novel isn’t going well, and it hadn’t been going well in a long while. The problem was, I couldn’t get past the initial idea—the setup—which was a story I’d come across in the newspaper two or three years ago. It had to do with an old woman’s encounter with the mysterious forces of nature (I don’t recall her real name, not that it would matter, but I called her Grandma Rivers, to underscore the irony that here was a woman with eight children, thirty-two grandchildren and six great-grandchildren and she was living alone in a trailer park in a part of the country so bleak no one who wasn’t condemned to it would ever even deign to glance down on it from the silvered window of a jetliner at thirty-five thousand feet). One night, when the wind was sweeping up out of the south with the smell of paradise on it and all her neighbors were mewed up in their aluminum boxes lulled by booze, prescription drugs and the somnolent drone of the tube, she stepped outside to take in the scent of the night and indulge in a cigarette (she always smoked outside so as not to pollute the interior of her own little aluminum box set there on the edge of the scoured prairie). No sooner had she lit up than a fox—a red fox, Vulpes fulva—shot out of the shadows and latched onto her ankle. In the shock and confusion of that moment, she lurched back, lost her balance and fell heavily on her right side, dislocating her hip. But the fox, which later proved to be rabid, came right back at her, at her face this time, and the only thing she could think to do in her panic was to seize hold of it with her trembling old arms and pin it beneath her to keep the snapping jaws away from her.

  Twelve hours. That’s how long she lay there, unable to move, the fox snarling and writhing beneath her, its heartbeat joined to hers, its breathing, the eloquent movement of its fluids and juices and the workings of its demented little vulpine brain, until somebody—a neighbor—happened to glance beyond the hedge and the hump of the blistered old Jeep Wagoneer her late husband had left behind to see her there, stretched out in the gravel drive like a strip of discarded carpet. Yes. But what then? That was what had me stumped. I thought of going back and tracing her life up to that point, her girlhood in the Depression, her husband’s overseas adventures in the war, the son killed in Vietnam … or maybe just to let her sink into the background while I focused on the story of the community, the benighted neighbors and their rat-faced children, so that the trailer park itself became a character....

  But, as I say, I woke with a headache, and when I did sit down at the computer, it wasn’t to call up Grandma Rivers and the imperfect dream of her life, but to click onto peephall.com and watch another sort of novel unfold before my eyes, one in which the plot was out of control and the details were selected and shaped only by the anonymous subscriber with his anonymous mouse. I went straight to Samantha’s bedroom, but her bed was empty save for the jumbled topography of pillows and bedclothes, and I stared numbly at the shadows thickening round the walls, at the limp form of the gown tossed over a chair, and checked my watch. It was ten-thirty. Breakfast, I thought. I clicked on “Kitchen,” but that wasn’t her staring into the newspaper with a cup of coffee clenched in one hand and a Power Bar in the other, nor was that her bent at the waist and peering into the refrigerator as if for enlightenment. I went to the living room, but it was empty, a dully flickering static space caught in the baleful gaze of my screen. Had she gone out already? To an early class maybe?

  But then I remembered she was taking only one class—“Intermediate Sketching,” paid for by the Web site operators, who were encouraging the Sexy Teen College Coeds actually to enroll so that all the voyeurs out there could live the fantasy of seeing them hitting the books in their thong bikinis and lacy push-up bras—and that the class met in the afternoon. She was getting paid too, incidentally—five hundred dollars a month, plus the rent-free accommodations at Peep Hall and a food allowance—and all for allowing the world to watch her live hot sexy young life through each scintillating minute of the over-inflated day, the orotund month and the full, round year. I thought of the girls who posed naked for the art classes back when I was an undergraduate (specifically, I thought of Nancy Beckers, short, black hair, balls of muscle in her calves and upper arms and a look in her eyes that made me want to strip to my socks and join her on the dais), and then I clicked on “Downstairs Bath,” and there she was.

  This wasn’t a hot sexy moment. Anything but. Samantha—my Samantha—was crouched over the toilet on her knees, the soles of her feet like single quotes around the swell of her buttocks, her hair spilling over the bright rim of the porcelain bowl. I couldn’t see her face, but I watched the back of her head jerk forward as each spasm racked her, and I couldn’t help playing the sound track in my mind, feeling sorrowful and guilty at the same time. Her feet—I felt sorry for her feet—and the long sudden shiver of her spine and even the dangling wet ends of her hair. I couldn’t watch this. I couldn’t. My finger was on the mouse—I took one more look, watched one last shudder ascend her spine and fan out across her shoulder blades, watched her head snap forward and her hair slide loose, and then I clicked off and left her to suffer in private.

  A week rolled by, and I hardly noticed. I wasn’t sleeping well, wasn’t exercising, wasn’t sitting on the porch with a book in my hand and the world opening up around me like a bigger book. I was living the life of the screen, my bones gone hollow, my brain dead. I ate at my desk, microwave pizza and chili-cheese burritos, nachos, whiskey in a glass like a slow, sweet promise that was never fulfilled. My scalp itched. My eyes ached. But I don’t think I spent a waking moment outside work when I wasn’t stalking the rooms of Peep Hall, clicking from camera to camera in search of a new angle, a better one, the view that would reveal all. I watched Gina floss her teeth and Candi pluck fine translucent hairs from the mole at the corner of her mouth, sat there in the upstairs bath with Traci as she bleached her roots and shaved her legs, hung electrified over the deck as Cyndi perched naked on the railing with a bottle of vodka and a cigarette lighter, breathing fire into the gloom of the gathering night. Mainly, though, I watched Samantha. When she was home, I followed her from room to room, and when she picked up her purse and went out the door, I felt as if Peep Hall had lost its focus. It hurt me, and it was almost like a physical hurt, as if I’d been dealt an invisible blow.

  I was pulling into the drive one afternoon—it must have been a Monday or Wednesday, because I’d just worked lunch—when a rangy, tall woman in a pair of wraparound sunglasses came out of nowhere to block my way. She
was wearing running shorts and a T-shirt that advertised some fund-raising event at the local elementary school, and she seemed to be out of breath or out of patience, as if she’d been chasing after me for miles. I was trying to place her as the gate slowly cranked open on its long balky chain to reveal the green depths of the yard beyond—she was someone I knew, or was expected to know. But before I could resolve the issue, she’d looped around the hood of the car and thrust her face in the open window, so close to me now I could see the fine hairs catching the light along the parabola of her jawbone and her shadowy eyes leaping at the lenses of her sunglasses. “I need you to sign this,” she said, shoving a clipboard at me.

  The gate hit the end of the chain with a clank that made the posts shudder. I just stared at her. “It’s me,” she said, removing the sunglasses to reveal two angry red welts on the bridge of her nose and a pair of impatient eyes, “Sarah. Sarah Schuster—your next-door neighbor?”

  I could smell the fumes of the car as it rumbled beneath me, quietly misfiring. “Oh, yeah,” I said, “sure,” and I attempted a smile.

  “You need to sign this,” she repeated.

  “What is it?”

  “A petition. To get rid of them. Because this is a residential neighborhood—this is a family neighborhood—and frankly Steve and I are outraged, just outraged, I mean, as if there isn’t enough of this sort of thing going on in town already—”