by T. C. Boyle
“Good evening,” Charlie offered. He was wearing a blue serge suit himself—a bit linty, maybe, but his pink-and-white-striped shirt had been worn only three or four times, and his cuffs and collar were new from the shop that morning.
The woman smiled—nice teeth, too. And lips. “Evening,” the man murmured, handing the wine list back to the waiter as if it were a bit of offal and turning the menu face down without even glancing at it. He fixed Charlie with an ever-so-slightly cross-eyed gaze, held it perhaps a beat too long, and then broke into a grin. Suddenly, a fleshless hand, chased by a bony wrist, shot out across the table, and Charlie, startled, took it in his own. “Will Lightbody,” the man said, his voice booming out now in an excess of enthusiasm.
Charlie spoke his own name, disengaged his hand, and turned to the woman.
“Mr. Ossining,” Will pronounced, and there was an odd hollowness to his voice, as if he were speaking from the bottom of a well, “I’d like you to meet my wife, Eleanor.”
The towering hat trembled beneath its excrescences, a pair of sharp mocking eyes took hold of Charlie’s like pincers, and Eleanor Lightbody was murmuring a standard greeting. A moment of silence followed, Eleanor glancing down at her menu, Will grinning inappropriately, nakedly, a thirty-year-old schoolboy with a new plaything. Charlie began to wonder if he wasn’t a bit unbalanced.
“Oysters,” Will said suddenly. Eleanor lifted her eyes from the menu.
Charlie glanced at the half-dozen shellfish remaining on his plate and then looked up into Will’s horse-toothed grin. “Yes. Bluepoints. And they’re delicious, really sweet … would you care to try one?”
The grin vanished. Will’s lower lip seemed to tremble. He glanced out the window. It was Eleanor who broke the silence this time. “It’s his stomach,” she said.
His stomach. Charlie hesitated, wondering at the appropriate response. Sympathy? Surprise? A spirited defense of the digestive properties of oysters? He gazed wistfully on the plate of shellfish—the air had to be cleared before he communed with another, that much was apparent. “Dyspepsia?” he wondered aloud.
“I haven’t slept in three weeks,” Will announced. He was fidgeting with the corners of the menu, and his leg had begun to thump nervously beneath the table. Without benefit of the grin, his face had grown longer and narrower, his eyes had retreated into his skull, and there were two pronounced caverns beneath his cheekbones. He looked ready for the grave.
“Really? You don’t say?” Charlie glanced from husband to wife and back again. She had stunning eyes, she did, but the mocking gleam was gone from them now, vanished like her husband’s grin. “Three weeks?”
Will shook his head sadly. “Afraid so. I lie there in bed staring at the ceiling and my stomach is like a steam engine, like a boiler, and pretty soon I start seeing all these visions in the dark….” He leaned forward. “Pies, oranges, beefsteaks—and every one of them with legs and arms, dancing round the room and mocking me. Do you know what I mean?”
The waiter reappeared at that moment, hovering over the table with his order pad and sparing Charlie the awkwardness of a reply. “May I take your order, sir? Madame?”
Night was settling in beyond the windows, a descent of the dead gray sky over the dead gray landscape, shadows deepening, trees falling away into oblivion, the river running black. Charlie was suddenly aware of his reflection staring back at him—he saw a hungry man in a linty blue suit hunkered over a plate of oysters. Taking advantage of the momentary distraction, he hastily slid an oyster down his throat, emptied his glass and filled it again, the cold neck of the bottle as satisfying to the hand as anything he’d ever held.
“The potage,” Eleanor was saying, “it is leek, isn’t it?”
“Yes, madame.”
“No beef or chicken stock—” Her voice took on an admonitory tone the waiter was quick to recognize.
“Oh, no, ma’am—veggeble stock only.”
“Yes. All right. And none of the entrées is acceptable—would you bring me some vegetables, please? I don’t suppose you have crudités?”
The waiter looked uncomfortable. He shifted from one foot to the other. His white jacket was so bright it seemed to glow. “We have all the very finest here, ma’am, I can assure you of that….” He faltered. “I will inquire of the chef.” And then, after gazing searchingly at the floor a moment, he added, “We do have a fine cucumber salad tonight.”
Eleanor heaved a sigh. “All right, then—the cucumber salad. And a glass of water.” As she leaned forward to hand the waiter the menu, she seemed to think of something else. “Oh,” she said, “and a bowl of bran. To sprinkle over the salad.”
“Bran?” The waiter looked confused. “I’ll be sure to inquire of the chef, ma’am.”
She made a little puffing noise with her lips. “Oh, never mind,” she said. “Just the soup and the salad.”
Looking relieved, the waiter accepted the menu and bent forward, attentively gazing into Will Lightbody’s upturned face. “And for the gentleman?”
As Charlie took up another oyster, he couldn’t help noticing the look of panic settling into his fellow diner’s ever-so-faintly crossed eyes. Will waved his hand carelessly, as if he hadn’t come to eat at all, as if this weren’t the dining car of the Twentieth Century Limited, the world’s premier train, boasting the finest cuisine and finest service known to man. “Oh, nothing for me. A bit of toast, maybe.”
“Toast, sir?”
“Toast.”
There was a silence as the waiter contemplated this request. This was an era of vigorous and accomplished eating, of twelve-course meals, of soups, sauces and gravies, of three meats and a fish course, not to mention a cascade of wines—sherries, clarets, ports, Zinfandel and Niersteiner—and a succession of oleaginous desserts. The kitchen was groaning with rib roasts, broiled geese and slabs of venison, the cooks were furiously shucking oysters and poaching sturgeon, waiters staggered up and down the aisle beneath the burden of their laden trays, and here was Will Lightbody ordering toast. The silence held and Charlie was aware in that moment of the distant ticking of the rails. At the next table a woman swathed in furs gave a silvery little laugh in response to something her companion—an old man with gargantuan mustaches—was saying in a muted rumble.
“And, uh, how would the gentleman like that?”
Charlie’s new acquaintance seemed distracted. “Like what?”
“The gentleman’s toast, sir.”
“Oh, yes. Toasted, please.” Will glanced uneasily at his wife. “And with a bowl of broth,” he added in a single breath, as if afraid the tongue would be snatched from his mouth before he could get the words out.
“No broth,” Eleanor countered just as quickly, and there was no arguing with the tone of that voice: the waiter penciled out “broth” as expeditiously as he’d penciled it in. “Full of creatine,” she added, giving Charlie a look he couldn’t quite fathom.
“Will that be all?” the waiter asked, clasping his hands before him as if in prayer and giving an obsequious little nod of his head.
Will glanced up sharply. “Yes, yes. That’s all.”
The waiter retreated, the woman at the next table laughed again, and the night deepened a further degree, so that the diners could no longer see the countryside rushing past them. Charlie ducked his head to receive another oyster.
“Scavengers of the sea,” Will said suddenly.
Eleanor smiled, a faint compressing of the lips. Her eyes were keen again.
“Beg pardon?” Charlie returned, lifting the wine glass to his lips even as the soft pulp of the oyster met his teeth and found its way down his throat to join its companions.
“Oysters,” Will said, turning to his wife. “Right, darling? Isn’t that what your Dr. Kellogg calls them?”
There was a joke here somewhere—Charlie could see it in her eyes—and he seemed to be the brunt of it. She tilted her head slightly, so that the glassy dumbstruck eyes of the bird atop her hat flashed lu
ridly in the light. “Yes, Will darling,” she said, all the while staring at Charlie, “but he’s only speaking the truth. Oysters are unclean, after all. They live in muck and filth and they feed on it. And oyster juice, he insists, is nothing more or less than urine.”
Charlie glanced down at the three sorry bivalves remaining on his plate. “Urine?”
Her smile was widening. “Piss,” she said, “to use the vernacular. As in ‘making water’?”
Will was grinning at him again, too, his eyes swallowed up in a filigree of wrinkles and laugh lines; he looked like a gargoyle leering from its perch. “I wouldn’t want to eat a scavenger, would you?”
Charlie could feel his hackles rising. “Actually—” he began, but Eleanor cut him off.
“Dr. Kellogg took a sample from this very train, did you know that?” she said, wagging a gloved finger for emphasis. “Had it shipped on to Battle Creek from the terminus at Chicago and analyzed it in the laboratories at the San….” She paused for emphasis. “And he found the juice of each of those oysters to be almost identical to a teaspoon of, well, human urine.”
Charlie had been about to defend his oysters—urine or no, they were about as perfect a way to begin an evening, or end one, as he could imagine—but a new note had entered the conversation and he jumped on it. “Battle Creek? Did you say ‘Battle Creek’?”
Eleanor nodded. Will bobbed his head.
“But that’s my destination—Battle Creek. I’m on my way there now. Once we get to Chicago, I connect with the Michigan Central Line.” He loved the sound of that, Michigan Central Line—it made him feel worldly, well-traveled, an important man doing important things. Never mind that he’d never been west of the Jersey Palisades or ever before had anything to do with an overnight train other than to watch it roar out of the station, packed to the windows with its rich cargo.
He wanted to elaborate, the whole business of timetables and porters and connections wonderfully exotic to him, but he couldn’t go on. The Lightbodys had burst out in a simultaneous peal of laughter, Eleanor actually clapping her hands together like a girl at a party. “But that’s marvelous,” she gasped. “What a wonderful coincidence.”
“You too?” Charlie surmised.
“Yes,” Will said, and his grin faded a degree or two, “we’re on our way to the Sanitarium—for the cure.” He hesitated, and the bleakness returned to his face: he was hunted, he was starved, he was condemned before his time. “I’ve—I’ve never been,” he confessed, “but Eleanor—”
“This will be my third visit,” she announced, reaching up prettily to adjust her hat. “I’m afraid I’ve become one of those ‘Battle Freaks’ you read of in the papers.”
Charlie couldn’t help giving her a quick once-over: the slim arms and dainty hands, the white arch of her throat above the choke collar set with a studded pin, the swell of her chest. And what was wrong with her? She seemed fine—a bit drawn and pale, maybe, but nothing a week in the country wouldn’t cure. The husband was a man of sticks—he looked as if he could use all the help he could get—but the wife, the wife intrigued him. He was framing the question in his mind, wondering just how to put it, when the waiter materialized with two glasses of water and set them down with a flourish in front of the Lightbodys. “Is the gentleman finish?” the waiter murmured, making a feint toward the remaining oysters.
Charlie looked into Eleanor’s mocking eyes and then at Will, who gave him a doleful sidelong glance. He waved his hand and the oysters vanished.
“Tell me, Mr. Ossining,” Will said, “if I may inquire—what brings you to Battle Creek? Convalescence? Business? Pleasure?”
Charlie had been a bit off his mark since the Lightbodys had joined him—these people were odd, there was no doubt about it—but he understood only too well that oddness was the prerogative of the rich and that it was his job and mission to exploit it as best he could. He felt a sudden surge of the old confidence. “Business,” he announced. “The breakfast-food business. I’ve got a card right here”—and he was digging in his vest pocket—“ah, here it is.” He handed the card to Will, who even as he took it was rooting around in his dinner jacket for a card of his own.
“Which one is it, Mr. Ossining?” Eleanor was leaning forward to peer at the card clutched in her husband’s hand. “Cero-Fruto? Tryabita? Force? Vim?”
Charlie obliged her with a second card—he was inordinately proud of his cards—which he laid out on the table before her:
THE PER-FO CO., INC., OF BATTLE CREEK
The “Perfect Food,” Predigested, Peptonized and Celery Impregnated. Perks Up Tired Blood and Exonerates the Bowels.
Charles P. Ossining, Esq.
President-in-Chief
“How impressive,” Eleanor murmured, and Charlie couldn’t tell if she meant it or not.
“Very,” Will agreed.
“I—and you’ll forgive my saying so, I hope—I wouldn’t have thought you’d be an advocate of scientific eating, Mr. Ossining,” Eleanor said. “And this phrase—’exonerates the bowels’—this is one of Dr. Kellogg’s obiter dicta. Though he uses it in the reflexive, insisting that the bowels must exonerate themselves.”
Charlie felt the blood in his face. He took a sip of wine to mask his agitation. “Yes,” he said finally, “or, actually, I don’t know. I read it in a magazine.”
But by now Eleanor’s cucumber salad had arrived, and Will’s toast—two slices of dry white bread, cut neatly on the diagonal and with the crust removed. Expertly rotating his tray, the waiter set Charlie’s second course before him—a covered white china dish exuding steam. With a with a waiterly flourish, he removed the lid to reveal the creamy hot liquid within: oyster stew.
Will regarded his toast morosely. He seemed to have forgotten his own card, which he’d finally managed to fish out of his pocket and held now between thumb and forefinger as he gazed down at the crisp brown butterless toast on the plate before him. Suddenly his eyes lit and he glanced up quickly at Charlie. “And how long have you been in business, Mr. Ossining?”
Charlie had been probing the chowder with a spoon, hoping to disguise the rippled anatomy of the scavengers of the deep as they poked here and there through the creamy chop of potato, onion and carrot. (All right—so what if he liked oysters? Was that a crime? How was he to know that eating an oyster was like drinking a teaspoon of his own urine?) Eleanor was busy with her salad, studiously inundating it with flakes of something or other she’d produced from a brown paper bag. “Oh,” Charlie said, surprised by the question, “well, uh, in fact, I mean, the fact is, we’ve just founded the company.”
Will raised his eyebrows.
“That is”—poking at the oysters as if they were his sworn enemies—“we are founding it, uh, tomorrow afternoon.”
“I see,” Will said. His lips were pinched, two stingy flaps of flesh in a fleshless face. “You say ‘we’—you have partners in this enterprise?”
The image of Goodloe Bender, in his flashy suit and buffed shoes, rose briefly before Charlie’s eyes. Bender would be waiting for him in Battle Creek, the equipment purchased, work force hired, orders taken. In six months they’d be millionaires. “Yes.” He smiled.
Eleanor fork-cut a morsel of cucumber and looked up. “Have you been fully capitalized as yet, if I may ask?”
“Yes, oh yes. Of course.” At that moment, Charlie couldn’t have been any more conscious of the billfold lying flat against his breast if it had swollen to the size of a suitcase. In it was eight hundred forty-nine dollars cash—more than he’d ever seen at one time before in his life—and a check drawn on the account of Mrs. Amelia Hookstratten, of Peterskill, New York, in the amount of three thousand dollars. “Our biggest investor is a very prominent socialite from Westchester County—”
“Westchester?” Again Will’s voice leapt out at him and the transmogrifying grin illuminated his face. “But that’s where we’re from—certainly you know Peterskill?”
And now it was Charlie’s t
urn. “Now this is a coincidence. It is. It really is. Our investor—I mean, our principal investor—is a Peterskillian herself. Do you know a Mrs. Hookstratten?”
The heavens opened; trumpets blew; cries of wonder and astonishment silenced the dialogue at the next table over, and half the others in the car as well. “Amelia Hookstratten?” Will exclaimed. “Do we know her?” He exchanged a complicitous look with his wife, who’d paused over her salad, her eyes suddenly bright.
Charlie grinned crazily. The elderly man with the mustaches stared unabashedly at them. The rails clicked faintly below.
“Why,” Will boomed in his hollow voice, “she’s my parents’ closest—my mother’s very best friend in all the world. Do we know her?” And his laugh turned to a high choking whinny.
Charlie was feeling good all of a sudden, very good, capital. On the other side of his card, the side the Lightbodys had yet to examine, was a modest announcement and a post-box address in Manhattan: “A small block of stock can be had by the right sort of investor.” It wasn’t a thing to pursue just then, but, of course, the start-up costs of Per-Fo were going to be substantial—or so Bender kept insisting—and they needed all the investors they could get.
He finished the bottle of wine, all the while smiling on his new acquaintances, these wonderful and wealthy people—he could smell the money on them the way a weasel smells out a hen, oh yes indeed—these wonderful people, the Lightbodys, of Peterskill, New York. Peterskill. The place was a gold mine—maybe they should start a cereal factory there. There was one in Buffalo, wasn’t there? He was about to toast their health—the dregs of his champagne against their plain abstemious water—when the waiter approached again, tray balanced nimbly over one shoulder, and set down the first of Charlie’s meat dishes as if it were a gift from the Sultan of Morocco: porterhouse steak, medium rare and awash in a sea of its own rich and bloody juices.