After the Plague

by T. C. Boyle

  THE ROOF

  The roof, made of a composite material guaranteed for life, leaks. My widow is in the bedroom, in bed, crocheting neat four-inch granny squares against some larger need while listening to the murmur of the TV across the room and the crashing impact of yet another storm above her, when the dripping begins. The cats are the first to notice it. One of them, a huge, bloated, square-headed tom with fur like roadkill, shifts position to avoid the cold stinging drops, inadvertently knocking two lesser cats off the west slope of the bed. A jockeying for space ensues, the cats crowding my widow’s crocheting wrists and elbows and leaving a vacant spot at the foot of the bed. Even then, she thinks nothing of it. A voice emanating from the TV cries out, They’re coming—they’re coming through the walls!, followed by the usual cacophony of screams, disjointed music and masticatory sounds. The rain beats at the windows.

  A long slow hour hisses by. Her feet are cold. When she rubs them together, she discovers that they are also wet. Her first thought is for the cats—have they been up to their tricks again? But no, there is a distinct patter now, as of water falling from a height, and she reaches out her hand to confront the mystery. There follows a determined shuffle through the darkened arena of the house, the close but random inspection of the ceilings with a flashlight (which itself takes half an hour to find), and then the all-night vigil over the stewpot gradually filling itself at the foot of the bed. For a while, she resumes her crocheting, but the steady mesmeric drip of the intruding rain idles her fingers and sweeps her off into a reverie of the past. She’s revisiting other roofs—the attic nook of her girlhood room, the splootching nightmare of her student apartment with the dirty sit-water drooling down the wall into the pan as she heated brown rice and vegetables over the stove, the collapse of the ceiling in our first house after a pipe burst when we were away in Europe—and then she’s in Europe herself, in the rain on the Grand Canal, with me, her first and most significant husband, and before long the stewpot is overflowing and she’s so far away she might as well exist in another dimension.

  The roofer, whose name emerged from the morass of the Yellow Pages, arrives some days later during a period of tumultuous weather and stands banging on the front door while rain drools from the corroded copper gutters (which, incidentally, are also guaranteed for life). My widow is ready for him. She’s been up early each day for the past week, exchanging her flannel nightgown for a pair of jeans and a print blouse, over which she wears an old black cardigan decorated with prancing blue reindeer she once gave me for Christmas. She’s combed out her hair and put on a dab of lipstick. Like Megan Capaldi before him, the roofer pounds at the redwood frame of the front door until my widow appears in the vestibule. She fumbles a moment with the glasses that hang from a cord around her neck, and then her face assumes a look of bewilderment: Who is this infant banging at the door?

  “Hello!” calls the roofer, rattling the doorknob impatiently as my widow stands there before him on the inside of the glass panel, looking confused. “It’s me—the roofer?” He’s shouting now: “You said you had a leak?”

  The roofer’s name is Vargas D’Onofrio, and the minute he pronounces it, it’s already slipped her mind. He has quick, nervous eyes, and his face is sunk into a full beard of tightly wound black hairs threaded with gray. He’s in his early forties, actually, but anyone under seventy looks like a newborn to my widow, and understandably so.

  “You’re all wet,” she observes, leading him into the house and up the slow heaving stairs to reveal the location of the leak. She wonders if she should offer to bake him cookies and maybe fix a pouch of that hot chocolate that only needs microwaved water to complete it, and she sees the two of them sitting down at the kitchen table for a nice chat after he’s fixed the roof—but does she have any hot chocolate? Or nuts, shortening, brown sugar? How long has it been since she remembered to buy flour, even? She had a five-pound sack of it in the pantry—she distinctly remembers that—but then wasn’t that the flour the weevils got into? She’s seeing little black bugs, barely the size of three grains of pepper cobbled together, and then she understands that she doesn’t want to chat with this man—or with anybody else, for that matter. She just wants the roof repaired so she can go back to the quiet seep of her old lady’s life.

  “Rotten weather,” the roofer breathes, thumping up the stairs in his work boots and trundling on down the upper hallway to the master bedroom, scattering cats as he goes.

  My widow has given up on the stewpot and has been sleeping downstairs, in what was once our son’s room. As a result, the antique bed is now soaked through to the springs and oozing water the color of tobacco juice.

  “I can patch it,” the roofer says, after stepping out onto the sleeping porch and assaying the roof from the outside, “but you really should have the whole thing replaced once summer comes—and I can do that for you too, and give you a good price. Best price in town, in fact.” The roofer produces a wide bearded closer’s grin that is utterly lost on my widow.

  “But that roof,” she says, “was guaranteed for life.”

  The roofer just shrugs. “Aren’t they all?” he sighs, and disappears through the door to the sleeping porch. As she pulls the door shut, my widow can smell the keen working scent of the rain loosening the earth around the overgrown flowerbeds and the vaguely fishy odor of wet pavement. The air is alive. She can see her breath in it. She watches the roofer’s legs ride up past the window as he hoists himself up the ladder and into the pall of the rain. And then, as she settles into the armchair in the bedroom, she hears him up there, aloft, his heavy tread, the pounding of nails, and through it all a smell of hot burning tar.

  SHOPPING

  In her day my widow was a champion shopper. She’d been a student of anthropology in her undergraduate years, and she always maintained that a woman’s job—her need, calling and compulsion—was to accumulate things against the hard times to come. Never mind that we didn’t experience any hard times—aside from maybe having to pinch a bit in grad school or maxing out our credit cards when we were traveling in Japan back in the eighties—my widow was ready for anything. She shopped with a passion matched by few women of her generation. Her collections of antique jewelry, glassware, china figurines and the like would, I think, be truly valuable if she could ever find them in the cluttered caverns and dark byways of the house and basement, and the fine old Craftsman-era couches and chairs strewn through the main rooms are museum pieces, or would be, if the cats hadn’t gotten to them. Even now, despite the fact that she’s become increasingly withdrawn and more than a bit impatient with the fuss and hurry of the world, my widow can still get out and shop with the best of them.

  On a day freshened by a hard cold breeze off the ocean, she awakens in my son’s narrow bed to a welter of cats and a firm sense of purpose. Her sister, Inge, ten years her junior and unmarried, is driving up from Ventura to take her shopping at the mall for the pre-Christmas sales, and she is galvanized into action. Up and out of bed at first light, cats mewling at her feet, the crusted pot set atop the crusted burner, coffee brewing, and she slips into a nice skirt and blouse (after a prolonged search through the closet in the master bedroom, where the mattress, unfortunately, continues to ooze a brownish fluid), pulls her hair back in a bun and sits down to a breakfast of defrosted wheat bread, rancid cream cheese and jam so old it’s become a culture medium. In my time, there were two newspapers to chew through and the morning news on the radio, but my widow never bothered herself much with the mechanism of receiving and paying bills (the envelope, the check, the stamp), and the newspapers have been discontinued. As for the radio, my widow prefers silence. She is thinking nothing, staring into space and slowly rotating the coffee cup in her hands, when there is a sharp rap at the kitchen door and Inge’s face appears framed there in the glass panel.

  Later, hours later, after lunch at the Thai Palace, after Pic ’n Save, Costco, Ruby’s Thrift Shoppe and the Bargain Basement, my widow finds herself in the mid
st of a crush of shoppers at Macy’s. She doesn’t like department stores, never has—no bargains to be had, or not usually—but her sister was looking at some tableware for one of their grandnieces, and she finds herself, unaccountably, in the linen department, surrounded by women poking through sheets and pillowcases and little things for the bathroom. There will be a white sale in January, she knows that as well as she knows there will be valentines for Valentine’s Day and lilies for Easter, and since the maid died ten years back she really hasn’t had much need of linens—nobody to change the beds, really—but she can’t help herself. The patterns are so unique, the fabric so fresh and appealing in its neat plastic packaging. Voices leap out around her. Christmas music settles on the air. My widow looks round for a salesperson.

  SECOND HUSBAND

  His name is—was—Roland Secourt. He was one of those types who never really strain themselves with such trivialities as earning a living during their younger years, and he wound up being a pretty impressive old man, replete with teeth, hair and the ability to walk unaided from the car to the house. I remember him only slightly—he used to give piano lessons to our son a thousand years ago, and I think he managed a parking lot or something like that. At any rate, five years after I bowed out, he began showing up at the front door with one excuse or another—he was driving past and saw the gate was open; he’d picked up six cases of cranberry juice at a sale and didn’t know what to do with it all; he was just wondering if my widow might want to go down to the village for maybe a cocktail and dinner—and before long, my widow, who’d succumbed to the emptiness that afflicts us all, took him in.

  She never loved him, though. He was a man, a presence in a deteriorating house full of cats, my shadowy simulacrum. What did he bring with him? Three cardboard boxes full of out-of-date shoes, belt buckles, underwear, a trophy he’d once won in a piano competition. Nine months into the marriage he sucked up his afflatus to crack the holy living hell out of a golf ball on the fourth tee at La Cumbre Country Club (he was golf-fixated, another strike against him), felt a stab under his arm as if someone had inserted one of those gleaming biopsy needles between his ribs, and fell face forward into the turf, dead, without displacing the ball from the tee.

  That was a long time ago. My widow didn’t have him around long enough to really get used to him in the way she was used to the walls and the furniture and the cats, so his death, though a painful reminder of what awaits us all, wasn’t the major sort of dislocation it might have been. He was there, and then he was gone. I have no problem with that.

  HER PURSE

  Her purse was always a bone of contention between us—or her purses, actually. She seemed to have a limitless number of them, one at least for every imaginable occasion, from dining at the White House to hunting boar in Kentucky, and all of them stuffed full of ticket stubs, charge card receipts, wadded-up tissues, cat collars, gum wrappers, glasses with broken frames, makeup in various states of desiccation, crushed fortune cookies, fragments of our son’s elementary school report cards, dice, baby teeth, empty Tic Tac cases, keychains, cans of Mace and a fine detritus of crumbs, dandruff, sloughed skin and chipped nail polish. Only one of these, however, contained her checkbook and wallet. That was the magical one, the essential one, the one she spent a minimum of half an hour looking for every time we left the house, especially when we were on our way to the airport or the theater or a dinner date with A-type personalities like myself who’d specified eight P.M., sharp.

  Not that I’m complaining. My widow lived a placid, unhurried existence, no slave to mere schedules, as so many of us were. She radiated calm in a crisis. When things went especially bad—during the ’05 earthquake, for instance—she would fix herself a nice meal, some stir-fry or chicken-vegetable soup, and take a nap in order to put things in their proper perspective. And so what if the movie started at 7:45 and we arrived at 8:30? It was all the more interesting for having to piece together what must have transpired with this particular set of characters while we were looking for purses, parking the car and sprinting hand in hand down the crowded street. The world could wait. What was the hurry?

  At any rate, it is that very same totemic purse that turns up missing after her shopping trip. She and her sister arrive at home in a blizzard of packages, and after sorting them out in the driveway and making three trips from car to house, they part just as dusk is pushing the birds into the trees and thickening the shadows in the fronds of the tree ferns I planted thirty years ago. Inge won’t be staying for dinner, nor will she be spending the night. She is eager to get home to her own house, where a pot of chicken-vegetable soup and her own contingent of cats await her. “Well,” she says, casting a quick eye over the welter of packages on the table, “I’m off,” and the door closes on silence.

  Days pass. My widow goes through her daily routine without a thought to her purse, until, with the cat food running low, she prepares for a trip to the market in the ancient, battered, hennarot BMW M3 that used to be my pride and joy, and discovers that none of the purses she is able to locate contains her wallet, her keys, her glasses (without which she can’t even see the car, let alone drive it). While the cats gather round her, voicing their complaint, she attempts to retrace her steps of the past few days and concludes finally that she must have left the purse in her sister’s car. Certainly, that’s where it is. Of course it is. Unless she left it on the counter at Ruby’s or the Bargain Basement or even Macy’s. But if she had, they would have called, wouldn’t they?

  She tries her sister, but Inge isn’t much for answering the phone these days, a quirk of her advancing years. Why bother?, that’s what she thinks. Who is there she wants to hear from? At her age, is there any news that can’t wait? Any news that could even vaguely be construed as good? My widow is nothing if not persistent, however, and on the twelfth ring Inge picks up the phone. “Hello?” she rasps in a voice that was never especially melodious but is now just a deflated ruin. My widow informs her of the problem, accepts a scolding that goes on for at least five minutes and incorporates a dozen ancient grievances, and then she waits on the line for another fifteen minutes while Inge hobbles out to the garage to check the car. Click, click, she’s back on the line and she has bad news for my widow: the purse is not there. Is she sure? Yes, yes, she’s sure. She’s no idiot. She still has two eyes in her head, doesn’t she?

  For the next two hours my widow searches for the phone book. Her intention is to look up the phone number of the stores they’d visited, and the Thai Palace too—she’s concerned, and the cats are hungry. But the phone book is elusive. After evicting a dozen cats from the furniture in the main room, digging through the pantry and the closet and discovering any number of things she’d misplaced years ago, she loses track of what she’s looking for, lost in a reverie over an old photo album that turns up in the cabinet under the stove, amidst the pots and pans. She sits at the table, a crescent of yellow lamplight illuminating her features, and studies the hard evidence of the way things were. There are pictures of the two of us, smiling into the camera against various exotic backdrops, against Christmas trees and birthday cakes, minarets and mountains, a succession of years flipping by, our son, his dog, the first cat. Her heart—my widow’s heart—is bursting. It’s gone, everything is gone, and what’s the sense of living, what’s it all about? The girlhood in Buffalo, the college years, romance and love and hope and the prospect of the future—what was the sense in it, where had it gone? The pictures cry out to her. They scream from the page. They poke her and prod her till she’s got no breath left in her body. And just then, when the whole world seems to be closing down, the phone rings.

  BOB SMITH, A.K.A. SMYTHE ROBERTS, ROBERT P. SMITHEE, CLAUDIO NORIEGA AND JACK FROUNCE

  “Hello?” my widow answers, her voice like the clicking of the tumblers in an old lock.

  “Mrs. B.?” a man’s voice inquires.

  My widow is cautious but polite, a woman who has given out her trust, time and again, and been rewarde
d, for the most part, with kindness and generosity in return. But she hates telephone solicitors, especially those boiler-room types that prey on the elderly—the TV news has been full of that sort of thing lately, and the A.A.R.P. newsletter too. She hesitates a moment, and then, in a barely audible voice, whispers, “Yes?”

  “My name is Bob Smith,” the caller returns, “and I’ve found your purse. Somebody apparently dumped it in a trash bin outside of Macy’s—no cash left, of course, but your credit cards are intact, and your license and whatnot. Listen, I was wondering if I might bring it to you—I mean, I could mail it, but who can trust the mail these days, right?”

  My widow makes a noise of assent. She doesn’t trust the mail, either. Or, actually, she’s never really thought about it one way or another. She shuts her eyes and sees the mailman in his gray-blue shorts with the black stripe up the side, his neatly parted hair cut in the old-fashioned way, his smile, and the way his eyes seem to register everything about everybody on his route as if he took it personally, as if he were policing the streets out front and back of her house and stuffing mailboxes at the same time. Maybe she does trust the mail. Maybe she does.

  Bob Smith says, “The mail’d take three days, and I’d have to find a box for the thing—”

  My widow says what Bob Smith has been hoping she’ll say: “Oh, you don’t have to go to all that bother. Honestly, I’d come to you, but without my driving glasses—they’re in the purse, you see, and I do have another pair, several pairs, but I can’t seem to, I can’t—”