by T. C. Boyle
Giovannella looked startled. Not hopeful, not angry, just startled. “You can’t come here today, Eddie. Guido, he only went out for a walk—he could be back any minute.”
“To hell with Guido,” he said, and he was in the apartment, pulling the door closed behind him. And what was the first thing he saw, nailed to the wall in the vestibule in all His crucified agony? Sure: Christ, staring him in the face.
“Eddie. You got to go. You can‘t—”
“I brought you this,” he said, holding the slip of paper out to her.
There was nothing in her face. He watched her eyes drop, her lips part, and there, just the tip of her tongue. She was no reader. “Cy ... rose? ... Brown,” piecing it out, “one-two, one-two Cha ... pala. M, period, D, period.” She looked up. “M.D.? What does that mean?”
“Doctor,” he said, and he shifted on the balls of his feet, feeling sick and evil, “M.D. means doctor. Don’t you know anything?”
Comprehension started at the corners of her mouth and worked its way up through the clamped muscles of her jaw to her eyes, and they weren’t loving and kind eyes, not this morning, not any more. She let out a curse, something in Italian, and though he couldn’t appreciate the nuances, he got the gist of it. “You son of a bitch.” she said. “You big cocky son of a bitch. What makes you sure it’s your baby, huh?”
“Because you told me. Because you came to me. Guido can’t make you feel a thing, isn’t that what you told me? That he’s only this big?”
“He’s a better man than you.”
“The hell he is.”
“He is. And didn’t you ever think I might have just said that for you, to make you feel like a big man, huh? Because I did, I did, you son of a bitch. I lied. I lied to you, Eddie. Guido’s hung like a horse—how do you like that? And you’ll never hurt my baby—my baby, not yours. Never!” “
It was Rosaleen all over again, and he had half a moment to wonder about the shifting magnetic poles of love, from Venus to Mars and no middle ground, no place to regroup and sound the retreat, and when she came at him with the ice pick that had been lying so quietly atop the icebox all this time he was only trying to protect himself, and both of them watched with the kind of astonishment reserved for the magician in the cape as the shining steel rivet passed right on through his open palm and out the other side as if there was no such thing as flesh and no such thing as blood.
“You’ll have to forgive me if I don’t shake,” O‘Kane said, nodding a greeting to Dr. Brush at the door and holding up his bandaged right hand in extenuation, Mart right behind him, the string orchestra already playing something light as air and the big new room beyond all lit up and festive. “Ah, and this must be Mrs. Brush,” he said, feeling convivial, ready to break into song, tell jokes, quaff a beer or a cup or two of punch laced with gin. He was about to say he’d heard a lot about her, but then he realized he’d heard nothing, not a word. She could have been a Fiji Island cannibal with a bone through her nose for all he’d heard about her, but here she was, standing right beside her husband at the door, a pinched, rawboned woman with a squared-off beak of a nose and two staring black eyes no bigger than a crow’s.
She reached for his bandaged hand and then drew back as if she’d burned herself on a hot stove, but immediately reached for it again, and then once more, before O‘Kane finally offered his left hand and tucked the bandaged one discreetly behind his back. But the sequel was even stranger, because she went through the same routine all over again, reaching out for his good hand and then drawing back once, twice, three times, and when he looked into her face for an answer she greeted him with a whole battery of facial tics and distortions—enough to make the gone-but-not-forgotten Hamilton look like an amateur. She said something in a loud squawk of a voice, twitching and shaking and jerking her head up and down all the while, before Dr. Brush intervened.
“Gladys, yes,” he boomed, swinging tumultuously round in the entrance hall and slamming the door behind them. “These are the two men I told you about, Edward O‘Kane—we call him Eddie—and Martin Tompkins, er, Thompson. That’s it, dear, yes, go ahead and say hello—”
Mart, thick-headed and slow to grapple toward judgment or even awareness, gave Mrs. Brush a bewildered look and reached for her hand, which she immediately snatched away and hid behind her back. Mart looked to O‘Kane, and O’Kane’s eyes told him everything he needed to know: the psychiatrist’s wife was a nutcase.
And what was she wearing? Something plain and old-fashioned, drab as a horse blanket, and hanging right down to the floor, as if this were the nineteen-oughts still. But she was smiling, or at least that seemed to be a smile flashing through the frenetic semaphore of tics, twitches and grimaces, and that was enough for O‘Kane. He smiled back, offered her his arm, which she took after another whole rigama-role of back and forth and back and forth again, and led her up the six steps and into the big room full of familiar and not-so-familiar faces.
The celebration was both in honor of Dr. Brush’s taking over the reins and to christen the new theater building, built so that Mr. McCormick could have a comfortable place in which to view moving pictures, concerts and plays. It was a grand building, the size of any three houses a normal family would occupy, dominated by the vast two-story-high theater, with offices for Dr. Brush and the estate manager to either side and a bedroom for Mr. McCormick tucked in back in the event he should tire while watching a picture. Everyone felt he needed more stimulation—Drs. Meyer, Hamilton and Brush, Katherine, even the Chicago McCormicks—and the theater house was designed to serve the purpose. It was a short walk from the main house—no more than four or five hundred feet—and the landscape architects had put sprinklers high up in the trees along the path so that Mr. McCormick could hear the soothing murmur of a gentle rainfall as he strolled to and from the building in fair weather, and there was stimulation for you: rain on command. Nor had they overlooked security: all the windows were protected, inside the double panes of glass, with a graceful cast-iron filigree in a handsome diamond pattern, and the doors to each of the rooms were fitted with triple locks, and for each lock a separate key.
It was amazing, it really was, and yet O‘Kane couldn’t help thinking of the poor simple lunatics at the Boston Asylum, all herded into a cage to have the crusted shit blasted off them with high-pressure hoses. But then they weren’t Mr. McCormick, were they? And Mr. McCormick, being a gentleman, was used to gentle things, and O’Kane, being his nurse, applauded anything they could do for him, especially when money was no object. Stimulation? Give him all the stimulation he could stand, just so long as it didn’t overexcite him and push him all the way back down the long tunnel of tube-feeding and diapers.
But everybody in the neighborhood was gathered here now, for drinks and frivolity and the showing of a new Bronco Billy picture from Santa Barbara’s own Flying A Studios, and as O‘Kane stepped into the room with the frantically grinning Mrs. Brush beside him, he felt as pleased as he had on Christmas Day as a boy. Nick’s wife had put up decorations, streamers and such, there was a big spread on a table in the corner and a bar set up and a guy in a tuxedo standing behind it. And balloons, balloons all over the place. The orchestra had been playing an air when he first came to the door, cheerful and fluty, but now they shifted into something you could feel in the soles of your feet and a couple of people got up to dance. He handed Mrs. Brush over to a big glowing bald man who suddenly loomed up on his right—Dr. Ogilvie, Mr. McCormick’s nominal dentist—and headed for the bar.
He ordered a highball and while the bartender was fixing it he glanced over his shoulder to see Katherine standing there not ten feet away, and she laughing at something the woman next to her was saying. She looked good, damned good, all in green and with a little green hat perched up on top of her hair like a bird’s nest. He wasn’t going to talk to her, of course, unless it was strictly necessary, and he turned back to the bar before she could catch him looking. That was when Dr. Brush and Mart elbowed their
way in, the doctor flushed and hearty and lecturing Mart about the main and simple reason of something or other. “Eddie!” he cried, and a big arm looped itself over O‘Kane’s shoulder, an arm heavy as a python, and O’Kane could smell liquor on the doctor’s breath. “They treating you all right?”
“Sure. Yeah.” O‘Kane lifted the glass to his lips, whiskey fumes probing at his nostrils, and made believe he was diving for pearls.
“You fellows are all right,” Brush boomed, and he was squeezing Mart under his other arm, squeezing the two of them as if they were prize hams. “But listen. Eddie. I really want to tell you, for the main and simple reason, well, Gladys thinks you’re a prince. And so do I.”
O‘Kane looked at Mart. Mart was clutching a drink, looking big-headed and dazed. It must have been something for him, going from his monk’s cell in the back of the big house to all this.
“Listen. Between us. Because we’re friends and, er, fellow employees of Mr. McCormick, you may have noticed that my wife’s a little, what should we say—excitable? Not to worry. She was a patient once. Of mine, that is. Brilliant woman, one of the sharpest minds I’ve ever known—”
O‘Kane, uncomfortable under the doctor’s grip, gazed out across the room to where Mrs. Brush stood with the dentist, putting her face through all its permutations and showing her teeth like a rabbit at the end of every sequence. She didn’t look all that brilliant. In fact, she looked suspiciously like some of the loonies he’d known at McLean.
“Tourette’s syndrome,” the doctor was saying. “It’s not a form of insanity, not at all, just a weakness. A moral weakness, really. And we’re working on it, we are. You see, her mind races ahead of her body just like an automobile stuck in neutral and the accelerator to the floor, causes her all sorts of embarrassment for the main and simple reason that she refuses to control it ... but really, she’s no crazier than you or I, not underneath, and I, er, I appreciate the way you gave her your arm there, Eddie, it was white of you,”
It was then that Dolores Isringhausen walked in with her friend of the vacuous smile and two men with penciled-in mustaches and their hair all slicked down with grease. Or she didn’t walk exactly—she sashayed, rolling her corsetless hips from side to side like a belly dancer, and she managed to make every woman in the place, even Katherine, look like yesterday’s news. In three years, every woman in America would look like her—or try to—all natural lines, legs and boyish figure, with the peeled-acorn hat and eye makeup, but for now she had the stage all to herself, she and her friend, that is. O‘Kane was electrified—he hadn’t expected this—and two emotions simultaneously flooded his system with glandular secretions that made him feel as twitchy as Mrs. Brush: lust and jealousy. Who were those men, and one of them with his hand on her elbow?
In the next moment he was crossing the crowded room, all of Montecito there in their jewels and furs and cravats and nobody worried about the presumptive host of the party locked away in his room in the big house with the iron bars on the windows, not in the least, and it was no small wonder that he himself had been invited. Of course, he’d already seen the picture that afternoon with Mart and Mr. McCormick, but still he had to admit it was decent of Katherine—and Brush, he supposed—to include the nurses in a gathering like this. There were millionaires and tycoons here tonight and he was brushing shoulders with them, and not as somebody’s bootlick or bottle washer either—he was off-duty, a guest like anybody else. That was something, and he knew it and savored it, and he promised himself he’d be on his best behavior, smiling Eddie O‘Kane, quick with a handshake and a witty aside.
He caught up to Dolores at the buffet table, which was all piled up with good things from Diehl’s Grocery and two of Diehl’s best men in monkey suits back there to serve it up. She already had a Jack Rose cocktail in her hand with the long black velvet glove clinging to it like a second skin, and she was laughing at something one of the mustachioed little weasels was saying, her head thrown back, her pulsing white kiss-able throat exposed for anyone to see. It had been three days since he’d gotten to know her in the way that counted most, the way you could keep score by, and he hadn’t seen or heard from her since—he didn’t know her phone number and he didn’t have a car to drive out to her place and nose around. But that was all right. It wasn’t love or anything like that he was feeling, but just a good healthy appetite for second helpings, and he didn’t want to seem overeager. Casual, that was the way he was, smooth as silk.
Still, when he saw the way she was laughing and the guy’s hand touching hers to drive home the joke—and what was so funny?—he couldn’t help bristling, though he knew he shouldn’t and that this wasn’t the place for it and that he had no more right to her than any half-dozen other men, and her husband not the least of them. “Dolores,” he said, in a throat-clearing sort of way, “I see you made it to our little gathering.”
She turned a face to him that was like a mask. His hand was throbbing. Was she going to cut him, was that it? The company too rich for him? Good enough for her in bed but not here amongst all these swells and capitalists? “Eddie,” she said, the voice caught low in her throat, no inflection at all, “how nice to see you again.”
He started in on a little speech about Mr. McCormick, how he was indisposed and what a shame it was he couldn’t attend his own party, playing off the status of being Mr. McCormick’s intimate and puffing himself up as if he were the host and all this his, when the mustachioed character cut him off. “You’re a friend of Stanley’s?” the man said. “I knew him at Princeton,”
“Well, I—” O‘Kane stammered, and he felt himself sinking fast, over his head, out of his depth, and what was he thinking?
Dolores saved him. “My God, Eddie,” she gasped into the breach, “what did you do to your hand?”
He held it up gratefully, a white swath of bandage that was the sudden cynosure of the whole party, and invented an elaborate story about protecting Mr. McCormick from a deranged avocado rancher who objected to their crossing his property on one of their drives, brandishing it in the other man’s face as if challenging him to offer the slightest contradiction. And he felt good all of a sudden, not giving half a damn what the other guy thought or who he was or how much money he had: Dolores was on his side, which meant that she wanted her second helpings too. And from him, handsome Eddie O‘Kane, and not this penciled-in little twerp in the fancy-dress suit.
“What a shame,” she said, “about your hand, I mean.” And then she introduced the man in the mustache: “This is my brother-in-law, Jim—Tom’s brother. He’s visiting at the house for the week, and he’s just back from Italy, where he saw Tom—”
And then the talk veered off into news of the War in Europe and all the American volunteers over there and how the U.S. was sure to be drawn into it before long, and O‘Kane, bored with the whole subject, excused himself and went back to refresh his drink, figuring Dolores could come to him when she was ready. He found Mart still there, dissecting the Red Sox with an older gentleman whose jowls hung down on either side of his nose like hot water bags. “That Ruth’s a hell of a pitcher,” the old man was saying, lifting a glass to his lips, “and if Leonard and Mays hold up I don’t doubt for a minute we’ll be back in the World Series again this year.”
“But we’ve got no hitting,” Mart said. “It’s like a bunch of women out there, what I read anyway.”
“Well, you’re a bit off the beaten path out here, son, but you’re right there. We’ve got enough, though—and this fellow Gardner at third’s a good man, really capital....”
O‘Kane, fresh drink in hand, drifted away again, not even deigning to glance at Dolores now—he was as sure of her as he’d ever been of any girl or woman in his life—and hoping Katherine would leave early so he could loosen up a bit. But just a bit, he reminded himself, and he could hear his mother’s voice in his head: Use your manners, Eddie, and your nice smile, and that head God put on your shoulders, and you’ll go as far in life as you want to.
He thought maybe he’d circulate a little, meet some people. Who knows—maybe he could pick up some tips on growing oranges or finding a piece of property with one of these oil wells on it or oil under the ground anyway, and how did anybody know it was there in the first place?
That was when the orchestra went Hawaiian, stiff old Mr. Eldred putting down his violin and picking up a ukulele that was like a toy and strumming away as if he were born in Honolulu. It was a surprise, and everybody cried out and clapped their hands as “Song of the Islands” somehow arose from his rhythmically thrashing right hand and the rest of the orchestra came tiptoeing in behind him. O‘Kane had been standing amid a group of regular-looking fellows who were heatedly debating the merits of a business that dealt in millimeters and centimeters of something or other, thinking he would wait for the appropriate moment to butt in and ask their opinion of the land offerings in Goleta, but as one they turned to the orchestra and began clapping in time to the ukulele.
He couldn’t really understand this Hawaiian craze—the music, to his ears, was as bland as boiled rice, nothing like the syncopated jolt of ragtime or jazz, which is what they ought to have had here and why couldn’t Eldred pick up a trumpet if he was going to pick up anything? No, the only good thing about Hawaii was the hula as danced by a half-naked brown-skinned girl in a grass skirt, and he’d seen a pretty stimulating exhibition of that one night at a sideshow in Los Angeles with Mart and Roscoe, who’d happened to borrow one of the Pierce automobiles for the evening and no one the wiser. “See the gen-u-wine article straight from the Islands! the barker had shouted. ”The gen-u-wine Hawaiian hula danced without the aid of human feet!“ That had been something and well worth the dime it had cost him.
But this, this was a farce. Inevitably, a whole chain of half-stewed men and big-bottomed women would get up and start swaying obscenely across the floor, making fools of themselves and stopping the conversation—the useful and potentially useful conversation—dead in its tracks. And sure enough, there they were already, and Eldred launching into “On the Beach at Waikiki” now, O‘Kane ordering another drink and looking on skeptically from behind the screen of Mart’s head, the old Red Sox fan right up there in front of the orchestra wagging his jowls like one of those big-humped cows from India. O’Kane didn’t care. He was enjoying himself anyway, a break from the routine, and the Ice Queen would tire of all this and go on back to her hotel soon, he was sure of it, and then he could fend off the little guys in the mustaches and let Dolores Isringhausen take him home in her car and do anything she wanted with him.