Riven Rock

by T. C. Boyle

  Mr. McCormick had hopped himself across the room to the window, where he stood holding a spoon up to the light, periodically breathing on it and then buffing it on his shirttail. He gave O‘Kane a blank look.

  “Your properties. Your ranch in New Mexico. All those buildings in Chicago. Your house in Massachusetts.”

  This was a real stumper, and it seemed to take Mr. McCormick back a ways. O‘Kane wasn’t really expecting an answer at this point, and he didn’t know what he was after anyway—sure Mr. McCormick was rich and grand, but he’d inherited his money and he was mad as a loon, and what did that make O’Kane for seeking advice of him?

  Mr. McCormick hopped back to the table, left foot, right foot, left, left, right, and replaced the spoon. He stood fretting over the arrangement a moment and then turned a bloodless face to O‘Kane. “My, my wife m-manages all my p-property. I don’t, I don‘t”—long pause—“I don’t concern myself with that anymore.”

  What had he expected? The voice of the oracle? Sound financial advice ? A loan? O‘Kane sank deeper into his chair. Everything in the room seemed to be in motion, every atom bucking up against the next till the furniture and walls were frantic with activity, and he knew he needed a drink. He lurched to his feet, shook Mart awake and ducked into the toilet, where he lifted the ceramic lid of the reservoir and fished out a pint bottle of whatever it was Charley Waterhouse had sold him a case of the night before. O’Kane had decanted a quart of the stuff into two pint bottles for ease of transport and concealment, and now, visions of orange groves dying in his head, he raised the cool glass aperture to his puckered lips and kissed it long and hard, letting the fever flare up again till he didn’t know whether he was going to vomit or pass out—or both.

  When he came back into the room, Mr. McCormick was remonstrating with somebody in the high querulous tone that meant he was about to have an episode, but it wasn’t Mart he was addressing. Mart was out again, slumped in a chair and snoring softly. No, Mr. McCormick was pleading with his judges—“I didn’t mean It—I didn’t want to—I never—Im ashamed, I am!”—and O‘Kane prepared himself for the worst. But this time, the worst was far worse than he could ever have imagined, because just before the walls started moving and the ceiling came alive with flickering eyes and snouts and a scramble of fur, the judges appeared in stiff congress over their plates, bearded and stern, three of them, three bearded scowling merciless men, and all their six merciless eyes fastened on him, smiling Eddie O’Kane, only he didn’t have any smile for this occasion, because he was in uncharted waters now and going down fast.

  All right. Sure. So he laid off for a while. He wouldn’t go near the stuff, not if you stabbed him with a sharp stick and drove him into a cage and forced it down his throat. Of course, it was just that swill, that was the problem, the impurities and such—he was lucky he wasn’t blinded or rendered impotent or insane. He hadn’t really seen the Judges—it was just the booze, the bad stuff, a bad batch. But he laid off all the same and he got to work every day, and though his guts were full of hot magma and he couldn’t shit to save his life and his head was like an eggshell in a vise and his legs so heavy he could hardly stand up, he began, very gradually, to experience the world as it really was, without a crutch, without a filter.

  The first thing he noticed, shivering and sweating at the same time as he vomited in the toilet at the end of the hall and fucking Maloney who he was going to kill and dismember and maybe boil and eat banging on the door in his boorish inconsideration and impatience, was that he’d begun to get his sense of smell back. It was amazing: he lived in a world of odors. Piss suddenly reeked under his shoes. His socks were vaporous, his underwear yeasty. The hallway outside his door smelled as if somebody had died in it just prior to being immured in the walls. He could smell Mrs. Fitzmaurice’s facial unguent from where he lay in bed, all the way down the stairs and around the corner and through the door to her sad and solitary widow’s room. And he could smell her sadness too, the smell of disuse, old flesh, a body mewed up and wasted. There was a car parked out front and it had gasoline in the tank and he could smell the gasoline. And food: onions, lard, beef, canned beans, some sort of spice—what was it? Basil? Yes, basil. He hadn’t smelled basil in years—hadn’t smelled anything for that matter—and it brought tears to his eyes.

  Next thing he knew, he had an appetite.

  First the smell, and then the hunger. He started getting up for breakfast, sitting around the table at Mrs. Fitzmaurice’s with his fellow boarders, flapjacks like stones, porridge like stones before they petrify, syrup like squeezed stones, but he ate it, ate it all and cleaned his plate with a sop of bread. At ten-thirty every morning, instead of taking a booze break, he ambled down to the kitchen and sweet-talked Sam Wah into frying him a beefsteak or a piece of liver with onions, and at lunchtime he sat there across from Mr. McCormick in the very lap of one of the judges and buttered up his bread and dug into his soup as if he hadn’t eaten in a week. He took dinner at Menhoff’s because he was too late getting home for Mrs. Fitzmaurice, and she’d never charged him, except for Saturdays and Sundays, and when he drank a bottle of ginger ale he studied the label with a wistful smile: “Reminding you of the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act, the contents of this bottle is sold to you on the understanding that it will not be used or mixed with alcoholic liquor.”

  His suits, which had hung slack on him, began to fit again. He took pains with his hair and his teeth and made sure he washed under the arms every morning, and a month later, after swearing off Charley Waterhouse, Bill McCandless, and even Cody Menhoff, who was now selling a finer class of homemade gin under the table and the county sheriff looking the other way, O‘Kane found he’d recovered something else too: his libido. He woke each morning with a tire iron between his legs, and when he strolled down the block to wait for Roscoe to pick him up he leered at every female between the ages of twelve and sixty and tipped his hat so many times he wore out the brim. He needed a woman. And he thought of little else through the rest of that week and into the next, the terrible quandary of where to find one burning in his brain every time he dropped the needle on his Sousa record, unlocked the barred door to the upstairs parlor or set off cross-country with Mart and Mr. McCormick on one of their mad runs. Listening to those faint trumpets, tubas and sousaphones, jogging along behind Mr. McCormick, he turned the problem over in his mind: women, the sort of women he was seeking, were gathered thick as pigeons over cocktails in the speakeasies that had sprung up around town, but to get to them he’d have to drink a cocktail too, and one cocktail would lead to another till he was past caring and lost his appetite and his sense of smell and began to see Mr. McCormick’s judges sitting there before him in all their undeniable corporeality.

  It was in this state, goatish and disgruntled but alive to every sensory current of the world, that O‘Kane came up the stairs at Riven Rock one morning to find Mr. McCormick extended as far as he could reach through the bars of the upper parlor door with both his hands locked round the throat of Sam Wah, the cook. Sam’s face was an ugly color, bloated and dark as a bruise, and though his hands were in turn clamped to Mr. McCormick’s wrists, he was barely struggling, his feet half-lifted from the floor, his eyes beginning to film over. And Mart? Where was he? Unconscious on the floor behind Mr. McCormick, a glistening bright carnation of blood blooming out of the comer of his mouth.

  O‘Kane lost no time—he was up the stairs in a trice, methodically attacking Mr. McCormick’s forearms, not a word exchanged between them, nothing but grunts and curses and the fierce hissing insuck of breath, until Mr. McCormick released the cook and the cook fell to the floor like a sack of old clothes. But Mr. McCormick wasn’t done yet, not by any means. As soon as O’Kane forced his hands away, Mr. McCormick seized O‘Kane by both arms and drew him violently up against the rack of the bars, and while that struggle went on, Sam Wah rose shakily to his feet, massaged his throat with an angry trembling hand and launched into a high-pitched litany
of Chinese complaint. O’Kane finally got a purchase on Mr. McCormick and they paused, locked in a stalemate, each gripping the other’s arms through the inflexible iron bars.

  “You no like, I no cook!” Sam Wah shouted, dancing round the landing and shaking his fist. “Mistah Cormah, you got no right!”

  O‘Kane, casting a quick glance beyond his employer’s seething face, saw the breakfast things scattered across the room behind him, and gathered that Mr. McCormick had objected to the way the cook had prepared his eggs.

  “You got no right take my neck like this, Mistah Cormah!” Sam Wah was livid. He stripped the apron from his chest, balled it up and flung it on the floor beside the toque that had fallen there at some earlier stage of the altercation. “Mistah Cormah, I got tell you, after fo‘teen year, I quit!”

  His grip rigid in O‘Kane’s, Mr. McCormick just stood there on the other side of the bars, and he never even blinked, never said a word, but his jaw was set and there was something in his eyes that said he would never let go, the bruised defiance of a very spoiled little rich boy who would die before he would admit he was wrong.

  The upshot of all this was a revolution in the culinary life of Riven Rock. Brush, who really didn’t want to be bothered, consulted with Butters and the nurses and whoever else would listen to him, and discovered that male cooks were few and far between—not to mention the male kitchen help Sam Wah took with him when he departed. As a stopgap, they promoted a Mexican gardener who claimed to have been a cook at a restaurant in Veracruz before the revolution. He lasted three days, during which the house was filled with strange and disquieting odors. Every meal he prepared seemed to consist of some sort of glutinous bean and rice paste wrapped in a thin bread-like substance no one could identify, and all of it so everlastingly and excoriatingly hot it was like pouring flaming kerosene down your throat. Mr. McCormick became very disturbed and spent the whole of every morning shut away in-his toilet, trousers down around his ankles, folding and refolding his toilet paper while he awaited the next intestinal emergency.

  Next they tried a fleshless sun-blasted old man who used to run a chuckwagon for sheepherders in the Goleta foothills, but all he knew how to cook was mutton, and after a week of that—boiled, fried, fricasseed, roasted and baked in a clay pit till it was mummified—they took to calling in orders at Diehl’s Grocery, three meals a day. Finally, deeply frustrated and in high dudgeon, Dr. Brush took O‘Kane aside one afternoon and asked him what he thought of hiring a woman—just to do the cooking and the kitchen work.

  “A woman?” O‘Kane repeated, as if they were speaking of some alien species, and he was thinking of Elsie Reardon and the other female maids they’d had in the early days. It seemed so long ago. So long it was as if the prohibition against women had been written in stone and brought down from the mountaintop.

  “Yes,” Brush shouted, and he was impatient with all this, resentful of having to act as estate manager and majordomo of the house as well, when it was clearly his duty as a trained psychiatrist to devote himself to higher things, for the main and simple reason that that was what he’d been trained and hired to do. He gave O‘Kane an exasperated look. “Mr. McCormick has been, well, calmer lately,” he said, “aside of course from the unfortunate incident with the cook, that is, and if we give strict orders that the woman is not to leave the kitchen under any circumstances and keep a sharp and vigilant eye on the patient, well, I don’t see any reason why we can’t, well, employ a female here. It’s clear we can’t go on like this.”

  O‘Kane watched him a moment, trying to gauge the extent of the doctor’s agitation, and then he shrugged. “Sure,” he said. “Why not?”

  And so it was that he came into the house the next morning to a smell of sauces and spices and fresh baked bread so intoxicating he thought he would faint with the anticipation of it, real food—Italian, it smelled like—and not the unvarying and nameless crud Mrs. Fitzmaurice served up at the boardinghouse. He let himself in upstairs and carefully locked the door behind him, a woman in the house again and this no time to be lax or forgetful, and found Mart reading to Mr. McCormick out of a book of Shakespeare’s plays. They both looked tranquil and they both turned their heads to smile at him as he swung away from the door and came into the room. “Good morning, Mart, Mr. McCormick,” he said, and he could feel it himself, a change come over them, a charm, the benediction of food.

  “M-morning, Eddie,” Mr. McCormick said in a high cheery voice. Mart, whose busted lip had healed nicely by this time, looked up from the book and grunted out a greeting.

  “Smells good,” O‘Kane said, and the odor, redolent of sausage, garlic and pomodoros, had risen from the kitchen to invest the upper floor.

  “Yeah,” Mart said, wagging his big head and grinning. They all three of them involuntarily swallowed.

  “So who’s the new cook?” O‘Kane asked, sliding in beside Mart on the sofa.

  Mart glanced at Mr. McCormick; Mr. McCormick’s eyes glistened. He had a look on his face, something new—nobody had to tell him there was a woman downstairs. “I don’t know,” Mart said. “Some widow, I think. A wop.

  O‘Kane lifted his eyebrows. Something was wrong here, and he felt it all the way down in his gut where all of that spaghetti and ravioli and lasagna was destined to go. It couldn’t be. There were a thousand widows in the country, war widows, old ladies in black shuffling along the sidewalks, women whose husbands had died at sea, in auto wrecks and train derailments, of heart failure and cancer, and sure they had to support themselves, even if they were old and feeble. Still, he found himself getting to his feet and looking round the room in a daze. “Will you excuse me, Mr. McCormick?” he said. “I just need to go downstairs a minute—I forgot something.”

  And then he was on the staircase, the sweet rising odor of marinara sauce and fresh-baked bread stronger and stronger as he made his way down the steps, into the servants’ hall and through the swinging doors to the kitchen. Steam rose round him, parting in wisps and wraiths with the stimulus of the fanning doors, all the burners of the stove were on high and the hot liquid bubbling and hissing in the big cast-iron pots, and there was a figure there, a familiar figure, a figure he knew as well as any on earth, a bit fuller maybe, a shade older, but it was her and no denying it: Giovannella.

  “Hiya, Eddie,” she said, turning a cold unsmiling face to him, indifferent as the wind, “long time, no see.”

  2.

  LA LUNE DE MIEL

  The day after their wedding Stanley and Katherine went on to Paris along with their mothers and servants and six hundred pounds of luggage, and the honeymoon began in earnest. Unfortunately, Stanley seemed to experience some difficulty in putting his affairs in order and finding the ideal spot in his steamer trunk for his socks, handkerchiefs and underwear, and they missed their train and were late getting in. It was a disappointment for Katherine, who’d been looking forward to an evening on the town, not simply for her own sake, but for Stanley‘s—she was hoping the change of scene would distract him so he wouldn’t be so preoccupied when finally, inevitably, at the shining climax of the evening, they found themselves in bed together. But it wasn’t to be.

  Everyone had been packed and waiting, the servants solicitous, the bags stowed away, the carriage out front in the circular drive, and Stanley nowhere to be found. It was raining still, and the raw wet earth of the flower beds gave off a dank odor of the sifting and winowing of the centuries. Earthworms—Lumbricus terretris—sprawled across the walk, and how many of those blind blameless creatures had Katherine dissected under the direction of one bearded professor or another? She’d been out to the carriage twice already to see to things, stepping carefully round the pale bleached corpses of the worms, and now she stood in the vestibule with her mother, adjusting her hat in a rising storm of excitement, eager to be on her way, to begin the adventure, to leave the stone towers and the placid lake behind and get on with her life as Mrs. Stanley McCormick. Nettie was already settled in the carriage
and Jean Claude was stationed at the door with a black spreading umbrella, awaiting their pleasure. “Whatever can be keeping Stanley?” her mother wondered aloud, craning her neck to catch a glimpse of the clock in the hall behind them.

  Katherine smoothed her gloves, peered through the windows at the rain melting into the pavement and plucking relentlessly at the black canvas top of the carriage, and then laid a hand on her mother’s arm. “You go ahead, mother,” she said. “I’ll go up and see what’s keeping him—we won’t be a minute.”

  She found Stanley in his room, pacing back and forth between an open trunk and two eviscerated suitcases. He had something bundled in his arms, some sort of garment—longjohns—and there were notebooks, pens, sketch pads, socks, ties and shaving things arranged on the bed in neat little piles, a novel he’d left out to read on the train, his tennis racket and bathing costume. “Stanley, darling,” she said, standing there at the door in her hat and coat, “what are you doing? Don’t you know everyone’s waiting? We’ll miss the train.”

  His color was high and a lock of his hair had fallen loose. “I—well, it’s my underwear, you see, because I can’t just go off on a day with weather like this and not think about it, especially the temperature differential in Paris and what it’ll be like on the train, and so I just, well, I needed time to sort things out and decide—”

  “Your underwear?” She was stunned. “Stanley, the train is leaving in forty-five minutes. If we don’t go right this instant we’re going to miss it. This is no time to worry about underwear.”