Riven Rock

by T. C. Boyle

  “You don’t look terribly enthusiastic, Edward,” Hamilton observed, the beardless jaw paler than the rest of his face, like the etiolated flesh beneath a bandage. His eyes did a quick flip.

  “No, it’s not that—I was wondering if you can get more, uh, hominoids like this orange one. It must be pretty rare. I have to admit I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “Oh, it is, it is. But apes are what we want, Edward. The Macacus rhesus is a splendid experimental subject, and we’re fortunate to have them, the baboons too, but the apes are our nearest cousins and the more of them we can get, the more thorough—and relevant—my studies will be. Don’t you see that?”

  O‘Kane was working the toe of his shoe in the friable yellow dirt, creating a pattern of concentric circles, each one swallowing up the next. He wanted a drink. He wanted a woman. He wanted to be downtown, with Mart and Roscoe LaSource, his elbows propped up on a polished mahogany bar and a dish of salt peanuts within easy reach. “Listen, Dr. Hamilton,” head down, still working his shoe in the dirt, “there’s something I’ve been wondering about, and I don’t mean to sound disrespectful or to question your methods in any way, but I can’t really see how all this is supposed to help Mr. McCormick. What I mean is, the monkeys are out here going through their paces and he’s in there twisted up like a strand of wire, and I may be wrong, but I don’t see him getting any better.”

  The doctor let his eyes flip once, twice, and O‘Kane was reminded of a bullfrog trying to swallow something stuck in its craw. There was a long silence, the monkeys chittering softly in anticipation of their release into the larger pen, the breeze shifting ever so subtly to concentrate their odor. O’Kane wondered if he’d gone too far.

  “First of all, Edward.” Hamilton said finally, his eyes looming up amphibiously from beneath the gleaming surface of his spectacles, “I want to say how pleased I am to see that you’re taking an active interest in Mr. McCormick’s condition. As I’ve said, he is the key to everything we do here, and we can never lose sight of that fact. Dr. Kraepelin may have pronounced him incurable, but both Dr. Meyer and I disagree with that diagnosis—there’s no reason why he shouldn’t experience if not a complete cure then at least an amelioration of his symptoms and a gradual reintegration into society.”

  There was a sudden crash from the direction of the big cage, followed by a duet of Mexican and Italian curses—puta/ puttana, puta/ puttana—and O‘Kane glanced up to see the keepers fumbling with a gaily painted wooden structure the size of a piano. He recognized it as the clapboard chute the doctor had designed to test his monkeys’ mental adroitness: there were four exit panels, and the monkeys had to remember which one was unlocked and led to the reward of a banana. In the same instant Hamilton jerked his head angrily round, his voice igniting with fury: “Be careful with that, you incompetent idiots! If you so much as chip the paint I’ll dock your wages, believe me, I will!” and then he broke into Italian—or maybe it was Mexican. The veins stood out in his throat and his face took on the color of the plum tomatoes the wops were growing out back of the cottages. O’Kane was impressed.

  He must have raved at them in their own language for a good minute or more, and then he turned back to O‘Kane as if nothing had happened, the coolest man in the world, his voice reduced to its habitual mesmeric whisper. “Certainly Mr. McCormick’s case is a difficult one, Edward, and I can assure you it disturbs me no end to see him as thoroughly blocked as he is now, but that’s all the more reason to take extraordinary measures, to go where no man has gone before in an attempt to uncover the psychological underpinnings of infrahuman behavior—sexual behavior, that is—so that we can apply them to our own species, and, specifically, to Mr. McCormick, whose generosity has made all this possible to begin with.”

  But how long was it going to take? That’s what O‘Kane wanted to know. Six months? A year? Two years? Three? “But just last fall I was playing golf with him,” he heard himself saying, “and now he can’t even talk. And you’re telling me a bunch of monkeys or hominoids or whatever you want to call them mounting each other six times a day is going to get him up out of that bed?”

  Again, a silence. The doctor patted down his pockets till he produced his pipe, tobacco and a match. He took his time lighting the pipe, watching O‘Kane all the while. He was in control here and he wouldn’t be rushed. Or provoked. “I’m telling you, Edward,” he said, emphasizing the name in that irritating way he had, “that as Charcot, Breuer and Chrobak all observed, and Dr. Freud’s brilliant Drei Abhandlungen sur Sexualtheorie reaffirms, all nervous disorders have a genital component at root. Do you doubt for a moment that Mr. McCormick’s problem is sexual? You saw how he attacked that woman on the train and that female nurse at McLean, what was her name?”

  “Arabella Doane,” O‘Kane said mechanically.

  “Sex is the root and cause of every human activity, Edward, from getting up in the morning and going to work to conquering nations, inventing the lightbulb, buying a new coat, putting meat on the table and looking at every woman that passes by as a potential mate. Sex is the be-all and end-all, our raison d‘être, the life force that will not be denied.” The doctor had moved a step closer. O’Kane could see the dark bristles like flecks of pepper on his chin. “We are animals, Edward, never forget it—and animals, these hominoids that don’t seem to impress you all that much, will one day reveal our deepest secrets to us.” As if on cue, one of the monkeys began to howl in orgasmic ecstasy. The doctor’s eyes were blazing. “Our sexual secrets,” he added with a failing hiss of breath.

  It was just then, just as the very words passed the doctor’s lips, that O‘Kane happened to glance up and see Giovannella Dimucci crossing the path behind them in a brilliant swath of sunlight. She was wearing a pair of clogs and he could see her bare ankles thrusting out from beneath the hem of her skirt, the bright trailing flag of her hair, her breasts shuddering against the fabric of her blouse and her hands moving at her sides with rhythmic grace as she disappeared round the bend. O’Kane looked back at the doctor, at the monkeys clinging to their cages in lust and hope and at the big orange lump in the crotch of the tree. He wiped a hand across his face, as if to erase it all. He was sweating, and he was conscious of a corresponding dryness in his throat, the parched ache of the saint in the desert.

  “Well,” he said with a sigh, as if he could barely tear himself away, “it’s a fine ape you’ve got there, doctor, and I thank you for taking the time to show it to me and explain everything—I feel better now, I do—but I’ve got to be getting back ... Mart’ll be wondering where I am. So. Well. Good-bye.”

  Giovannella Dimucci was the daughter of Baldessare Dimucci, who hauled manure from Crawford’s Dairy Farm in a creaking horse cart for sale to orange growers and wealthy widows with flower beds and half-acre lawns. She was seventeen, strong in the shoulders, eager and quick to please, and she’d been working in the kitchen for the past week while the regular maid, a hunched little wart of a woman by the name of Mrs. Fioccola, recuperated from the birth of the latest of twelve children, all of them girls. O‘Kane caught up to her as she was ascending the back steps, an empty slops bucket in her hand. “Giovannella,” he called, and he watched her turn and recognize him with a smile that spread from her lips to her eyes.

  “Eddie,” she said, and it was his turn to smile now. “What a surprise to see you this time of day.” She set down the bucket and let her smile bloom. There was movement behind the screen door—Sam Wah at the stove, his back to them, and one of the other maids, O‘Kane couldn’t tell which, at the sink with a pile of dishes. From around the corner, by the garage, came the sounds of Roscoe tinkering with the cars, an engine alternately roaring and wheezing, and the faint, sweet smell of gasoline. Still smiling, a busy finger between her lips, Giovannella let her voice drop: “Aren’t you supposed to be with Mr. McCormick now? Or did you change shifts?”

  O‘Kane moved toward her, as if in a trance, and sat right down at her feet on the lower step.
He could smell the perfume of her body, soap on her hands, the sour vinegary odor of the slops bucket. “Yes, yes, I am—a wink, squinting up the length of her and into the sun framing her head and shoulders and the dark cameo of her face—”you really know my schedule, don’t you?“

  No blush, but the smile faltering for just an instant before it came back again. She glanced over her shoulder at the silhouette of Sam Wah, then tugged at her skirts and sat lightly beside him. “Sure I do. I know everybody’s schedule—even Mr. McCormick’s.”

  “Smart girl,” he said.

  “Yes, I’m a smart girl.” The trace of an accent. She was nine years old when her father emigrated from Marsala and she was as American as anybody, as Rosaleen even, but darker, a whole lot darker, darker than any Irishman ever dreamed possible. Rosaleen’s skin was china-white, chalky, lunar, so pale the blue veins stood out in her ankles and wrists and between her breasts; Giovannella’s was like Darjeeling tea steeped in the pot and dipped into a cup of scalded milk, one drop at a time. He was in love with that skin. He wanted to lick her fingers, her hands, her feet.

  “He’s a very dangerous man,” O‘Kane said to distract himself.

  “Who?”

  “Mr. McCormick.”

  The sun, the flowers, the soft gabble of the chickens, the roar of the motor. Giovannella lifted her eyebrows.

  “He’s what they call a sex maniac—you know what that is?”

  She didn’t. Or at least she pretended she didn’t.

  “He needs—well, he has physical needs all the time, for women, you understand? He gets violent. And if he’s not satisfied, he’ll lash out if he has the opportunity and attack a woman, any woman—even his wife.”

  Her face had turned somber and he wondered if he’d gone too far, if he’d shocked her, but then the mask dissolved and she leaned in close, her hand on his elbow. “Sounds like the average man to me.”

  Suddenly O‘Kane was on fire. It was as if an incendiary bomb had gone off inside him, three alarms and call out the village companies too. “Listen,” he said, “you know I really like you, you’re a real kidder, but it’s such a grinding bore here, isn’t it? What I mean is, I think I can get Roscoe to take us into town tonight in one of the Packards, that is, if you want to come ... with me, I mean ... together.”

  She looked over her shoulder again, as if someone might be listening. Her head bobbed low and her eyes took on a sly secretive look. Her father would never let her go, O‘Kane knew that, though Baldy never suspected O’Kane was a married man. It was just the way the Italians were when it came to their women—especially their daughters. They were wary of every male between the ages of eleven and eighty, unless he was a priest, and no matter how drunk they were on their Bardolino and grappa they always had one eye open, watching, waiting, ready to pounce. He was sure she was going to say no, sure she was going to plead her father’s prohibition and her mother’s lumbago and the crying need to look after her ragged shoeless little brothers and sisters and keep the fire going under the big pot of pasta e fagioli, but she surprised him. Compressing her lips and sucking in her breath, her eyes leaping round the yard to fasten finally on his, she whispered, “What time?”

  O‘Kane was drunk when he got in the car, drunk when he instructed Roscoe to pull over on a dark lane by the olive mill while Mart fidgeted in the front seat and Giovannella, dressed all in white, darted barefoot out of a gap in the oleanders and climbed into the leather seat beside him with her shoes in her hand and smelling of garlic and basil and melted butter till it made his mouth water, and he was drunk as Roscoe fought the gears and Mart looked straight ahead and Giovannella fit herself in under his arm and nuzzled the side of his face.

  They had a high time of it in town, all four of them going into a lunchroom and having fried potatoes and egg sandwiches with ketchup, which sobered O‘Kane enough to allow him to concentrate on the way Giovannella sipped sarsaparilla from a straw, and then they went on to Cody Menhoff’s restaurant and saloon, where O’Kane restoked his fires with whiskey and beer till he practically attacked her on a bench out front of the Potter Hotel. And the thing was, she didn’t seem to mind, giving as good as she got, and by the time she hopped down from the car again and disappeared in the gap in the oleanders like a sweet apparition, it was past midnight and O‘Kane was in love.

  By the end of the week she’d let him do everything, out under the stars by Hot Springs Creek where they lay naked for hours on a quilt his grandmother had pieced together by candlelight back in Killarney. He was careful to withdraw before he came, but she was reckless and passionate, thrashing beneath him and clinging to his shoulders and groin with a ferocity that made it almost impossible to tear himself away, and in that moment when he felt the uncontainable rush coming up in him it was like a wrestling match, like war, like the birth and death and resurrection of something as terrible as it was beautiful. But he was stronger, and he prevailed. He’d got one girl knocked up already and he was damned if he was going to knock up another one.

  Giovannella sat up quaking in the rinsed-out light of the moon and sobbed over his spilled seed, touching her fingers to the glistening puddle on the taut brown drum of her abdomen and then sucking the tips of them till her lips glistened too. “Eddie,” she sobbed, over and over, “don’t you love me? Don’t you want to give me a baby? Eddie, it’s a sin, a mortal sin, and you don’t love me, I know it, you don’t.” He’d whisper nonsense to her, promise her anything, then she’d quiet down for a minute and he’d take a long drink from the jug of wine and hand the jug to her and she’d take a drink, her breasts trembling and swinging free with the movement of her arms and he’d put his hands out to steady them and press his mouth to hers to kiss away the sobs and before long they were at it again, locked together like adversaries, like lovers.

  He couldn’t get enough of her. All day, every day, he felt her touch, the whole world gone tactile, electricity surging through him, his clothes chafing, the blankets on his bed itching and binding like so many hair shirts. He wanted to be naked. He wanted to be with her, wanted to touch her, taste her, run his fingers through her hair, over her breasts, into the wet silk of her cleft. He didn’t write to Rosaleen. He didn’t open her letters. She was dead and buried and so was Eddie Junior, a mistake, a mysterious excrescence that had grown up out of nothing, a mound of yeast, a toadstool, a cancer, this thing that emerged from a quick hot struggle with heavy clothes on a cold night in a cold barn. “Giovannella,” he said to himself, whispering her name even as he lowered Mr. McCormick into the shower bath or listened to the doctor go on about his monkeys or sat at breakfast with poor simple Mart and discussed the weather. “Giovannella,” he breathed, “Giovanella Dimucci. ”

  A month went by. And then there came a night when he went into town with Mart and Roscoe and no thought for her. He was drunk, very drunk, and he went swimming off West Beach in his clothes and ruined his shoes and a good pair of trousers. He woke at four A.M. with a spike driven through his head, as parched as a desert nomad, and somehow she was there, in his room, perched atop him with her legs splayed and her hands balled up, muttering to herself. “You son of a bitch!” she cried the minute he opened his eyes in the gloom, the hard little nuggets of her fists raining down on his chin, his ears, his mouth, in a buffeting fury that was like a storm at sea. He tried to shush her, afraid Mart would hear from the adjoining room, or worse, Hamilton from the far side of the house, and he held up his forearms to deflect her blows, but he was too weak and too sick and her fists hit home again and again. He writhed, bucked his hips, tried to roll out from under her, cursing now, outraged and violated, the taste of his own blood on his lips, but she made a vise of her thighs and the drink sapped him until finally he could only cradle his head in his arms and wait her out.

  How long it went on he couldn’t tell, but when she was done sobbing and punching and flaying his forearms with her teeth and nails, she leaned forward till her face was in his and he could feel the harsh fury of h
er breathing on the naked surface of his eyes, his lips, his cheekbones. Her breath was metallic. Acidic. It wilted him where he lay. “I would kill myself for you,” she hissed, “kill my parents, my sisters and brothers, kill the whole world.” And then she was gone. Through the window, out into the night, and back to the shuck mattress she shared with her sisters Marta and Marietta in the dark seething fastness of the Dimucci household.

  They made it up the next day and he loved her over and over again, in every way he could dream or devise, and she clawed at his back and begged him to be a man, a husband, and stay inside her till he gave her a baby, but he wouldn’t and they fought over that. Sated, panting, slick with sweat, they lay side by side on the quilt beneath the trees, silent as enemies, until she sat up and dressed herself and left without a word. Then he made himself scarce for a couple of days and he didn’t see her. He took the precaution of putting a lock on the window, and he felt bad about it, but he couldn’t have Dr. Hamilton catch her climbing into his room. Or Katherine—what if she found out? He went into town to Nick’s place to celebrate Ernestine’s birthday and drank enough beer to float a ship and never once whispered Giovannella’s name to himself. She wasn’t around in the daytime anymore—Mrs. Fioccola was back in the kitchen now and Giovannella had no business at Riven Rock—and her only recourse was to come lurking round at night and throw pebbles at the windowpanes. The pebbles came like hail. The window rattled furiously in its iron frame. Dogs barked in the night, and twice the servants came frothing out of their cottages and chased phantoms round the courtyard. And how did O‘Kane feel? He felt irritated. He didn’t need this. She was like a madwoman, like a harpy, and all he’d wanted was a girl, all he’d wanted was innocence, softness, the gentle yielding of love.