If the River Was Whiskey

by T. C. Boyle

  “Squid rings in aioli sauce,” he whispered. “Try one.”

  Gently, never taking his eyes from her, he set the pan down on the table, plucked a ring from the sauce, and held it up before her face. Her lips—full, sensuous lips, he saw now, not at all the thin stingy flaps of skin he’d imagined—began to tremble. Then she tilted her chin ever so slightly, and her mouth dropped open. He fed her like a nestling.

  First the squid: one, two, three pieces. Then a pan of lobster tortellini in a thick, buttery saffron sauce. She practically licked the sauce from his fingers. This time, when he asked her to sit, when he put his big hand on her elbow and guided her forward, she obeyed.

  He glanced through the porthole and out into the dining room as he removed from the oven the little toast rounds with sun-dried tomatoes and baked Atascadero goat cheese. Jock’s head was down over his plate, the beer half gone, a great wedge of incinerated meat impaled on the tines of his fork. His massive jaw was working, his cheek distended as if with a plug of tobacco. “Here,” Albert murmured, turning to Willa Frank and laying his warm, redolent hand over her eyes, “a surprise.”

  It was after she’d finished the taglierini alla pizzaiola, with its homemade fennel sausage and chopped tomatoes, and was experiencing the first rush of his glacé of grapefruit and Meyer lemon, that he asked about Jock. “Why him?” he said.

  She scooped ice with a tiny silver spoon, licked a dollop of it from the corner of her mouth. “I don’t know,” she said, shrugging. “I guess I don’t trust my own taste, that’s all.”

  He lifted his eyebrows. He was leaning over her, solicitous, warm, the pan of Russian coulibiac of salmon, en brioche, with its rich sturgeon marrow and egg, held out in offering.

  She watched his hands as he whisked the ice away and replaced it with the gleaming coulibiac. “I mean,” she said, pausing as he broke off a morsel and fed it into her mouth, “half the time I just can’t seem to taste anything, really,” chewing now, her lovely throat dipping and rising as she swallowed, “and Jock—well, he hates everything. At least I know he’ll be consistent.” She took another bite, paused, considered. “Besides, to like something, to really like it and come out and say so, is taking a terrible risk. I mean, what if I’m wrong? What if it’s really no good?”

  Albert hovered over her. Outside it had begun to rain. He could hear it sizzling like grease in the alley. “Try this,” he said, setting a plate of spiedino before her.

  She was warm. He was warm. The oven glowed, the grill hissed, the scents of his creations rose about them, ambrosia and manna. “Um, good,” she said, unconsciously nibbling at prosciutto and mozzarella. “I don’t know,” she said after a moment, her fingers dark with anchovy sauce, “I guess that’s why I like fugu.”

  “Fugu?” Albert had heard of it somewhere. “Japanese, isn’t it?”

  She nodded. “It’s a blowfish. They do it sushi or in little fried strips. But it’s the liver you want. It’s illegal here, did you know that?”

  Albert didn’t know.

  “It can kill you. Paralyze you. But if you just nibble, just a little bit, it numbs your lips, your teeth, your whole mouth.”

  “What do you mean—like at the dentist’s?” Albert was horrified. Numbs your lips, your mouth? It was sacrilege. “That’s awful,” he said.

  She looked sheepish, looked chastised.

  He swung to the stove and then back again, yet another pan in his hand. “Just a bite more,” he coaxed.

  She patted her stomach and gave him a great, wide, blooming smile. “Oh, no, no, Albert—can I call you Albert?—no, no, I couldn’t.”

  “Here,” he said, “here,” his voice soft as a lover’s. “Open up.”

  M O D E R N L O V E

  THERE WAS NO EXCHANGE of body fluids on the first date, and that suited both of us just fine. I picked her up at seven, took her to Mee Grop, where she meticulously separated each sliver of meat from her Phat Thai, watched her down four bottles of Singha at three dollars per, and then gently stroked her balsam-smelling hair while she snoozed through The Terminator at the Circle Shopping Center theater. We had a late-night drink at Rigoletto’s Pizza Bar (and two slices, plain cheese), and I dropped her off. The moment we pulled up in front of her apartment she had the door open. She turned to me with the long, elegant, mournful face of her Puritan ancestors and held out her hand.

  “It’s been fun,” she said.

  “Yes,” I said, taking her hand.

  She was wearing gloves.

  “I’ll call you,” she said.

  “Good,” I said, giving her my richest smile. “And I’ll call you.”

  On the second date we got acquainted.

  “I can’t tell you what a strain it was for me the other night,” she said, staring down into her chocolate-mocha-fudge sundae. It was early afternoon, we were in Helmut’s Olde Tyme Ice Cream Parlor in Mamaroneck, and the sun streamed through the thick frosted windows and lit the place like a convalescent home. The fixtures glowed behind the counter, the brass rail was buffed to a reflective sheen, and everything smelled of disinfectant. We were the only people in the place.

  “What do you mean?” I said, my mouth glutinous with melted marshmallow and caramel.

  “I mean Thai food, the seats in the movie theater, the ladies’ room in that place for god’s sake…”

  “Thai food?” I wasn’t following her. I recalled the maneuver with the strips of pork and the fastidious dissection of the glass noodles. “You’re a vegetarian?”

  She looked away in exasperation, and then gave me the full, wide-eyed shock of her ice-blue eyes. “Have you seen the Health Department statistics on sanitary conditions in ethnic restaurants?”

  I hadn’t.

  Her eyebrows leapt up. She was earnest. She was lecturing. “These people are refugees. They have—well, different standards. They haven’t even been inoculated.” I watched her dig the tiny spoon into the recesses of the dish and part her lips for a neat, foursquare morsel of ice cream and fudge.

  “The illegals, anyway. And that’s half of them.” She swallowed with an almost imperceptible movement, a shudder, her throat dipping and rising like a gazelle’s. “I got drunk from fear,” she said. “Blind panic. I couldn’t help thinking I’d wind up with hepatitis or dysentery or dengue fever or something.”

  “Dengue fever?”

  “I usually bring a disposable sanitary sheet for public theaters—just think of who might have been in that seat before you, and how many times, and what sort of nasty festering little cultures of this and that there must be in all those ancient dribbles of taffy and Coke and extra-butter popcorn—but I didn’t want you to think I was too extreme or anything on the first date, so I didn’t. And then the ladies’ room… You don’t think I’m overreacting, do you?”

  As a matter of fact, I did. Of course I did. I liked Thai food—and sushi and ginger crab and greasy souvlaki at the corner stand too. There was the look of the mad saint in her eye, the obsessive, the mortifier of the flesh, but I didn’t care. She was lovely, wilting, clear-eyed, and pure, as cool and matchless as if she’d stepped out of a Pre-Raphaelite painting, and I was in love. Besides, I tended a little that way myself. Hypochondria. Anal retentiveness. The ordered environment and alphabetized books. I was a thirty-three-year-old bachelor, I carried some scars and I read the newspapers—herpes, AIDS, the Asian clap that foiled every antibiotic in the book. I was willing to take it slow. “No,” I said, “I don’t think you’re overreacting at all.”

  I paused to draw in a breath so deep it might have been a sigh. “I’m sorry,” I whispered, giving her a doglike look of contrition. “I didn’t know.”

  She reached out then and touched my hand—touched it, skin to skin—and murmured that it was all right, she’d been through worse. “If you want to know,” she breathed, “I like places like this.”

  I glanced around. The place was still empty, but for Helmut, in a blinding white jumpsuit and toque, studiously polishing t
he tile walls. “I know what you mean,” I said.

  We dated for a month—museums, drives in the country, French and German restaurants, ice-cream emporia, fern bars—before we kissed. And when we kissed, after a showing of David and Lisa at a revival house all the way up in Rhinebeck and on a night so cold no run-of-the-mill bacterium or commonplace virus could have survived it, it was the merest brushing of the lips. She was wearing a big-shouldered coat of synthetic fur and a knit hat pulled down over her brow and she hugged my arm as we stepped out of the theater and into the blast of the night. “God,” she said, “did you see him when he screamed ‘You touched me!’? Wasn’t that priceless?” Her eyes were big and she seemed weirdly excited. “Sure,” I said, “yeah, it was great,” and then she pulled me close and kissed me. I felt the soft flicker of her lips against mine. “I love you,” she said, “I think.”

  A month of dating and one dry fluttering kiss. At this point you might begin to wonder about me, but really, I didn’t mind. As I say, I was willing to wait—I had the patience of Sisyphus—and it was enough just to be with her. Why rush things? I thought. This is good, this is charming, like the slow sweet unfolding of the romance in a Frank Capra movie, where sweetness and light always prevail. Sure, she had her idiosyncrasies, but who didn’t? Frankly, I’d never been comfortable with the three-drinks-dinner-and-bed sort of thing, the girls who come on like they’ve been in prison for six years and just got out in time to put on their makeup and jump into the passenger seat of your car. Breda—that was her name, Breda Drumhill, and the very sound and syllabification of it made me melt—was different.

  Finally, two weeks after the trek to Rhinebeck, she invited me to her apartment. Cocktails, she said. Dinner. A quiet evening in front of the tube.

  She lived in Croton, on the ground floor of a restored Victorian, half a mile from the Harmon station, where she caught the train each morning for Manhattan and her job as an editor of Anthropology Today. She’d held the job since graduating from Barnard six years earlier (with a double major in Rhetoric and Alien Cultures), and it suited her temperament perfectly. Field anthropologists living among the River Dayak of Borneo or the Kurds of Kurdistan would send her rough and grammatically tortured accounts of their observations and she would whip them into shape for popular consumption. Naturally, filth and exotic disease, as well as outlandish customs and revolting habits, played a leading role in her rewrites. Every other day or so she’d call me from work and in a voice that could barely contain its joy give me the details of some new and horrific disease she’d discovered.

  She met me at the door in a silk kimono that featured a plunging neckline and a pair of dragons with intertwined tails. Her hair was pinned up as if she’d just stepped out of the bath and she smelled of Noxzema and pHisoHex. She pecked my cheek, took the bottle of Vouvray I held out in offering, and led me into the front room. “Chagas’ disease,” she said, grinning wide to show off her perfect, outsized teeth.

  “Chagas’ disease?” I echoed, not quite knowing what to do with myself. The room was as spare as a monk’s cell. Two chairs, a loveseat, and a coffee table, in glass, chrome, and hard black plastic. No plants (“God knows what sort of insects might live on them—and the dirt, the dirt has got to be crawling with bacteria, not to mention spiders and worms and things”) and no rug (“A breeding ground for fleas and ticks and chiggers”).

  Still grinning, she steered me to the hard black plastic loveseat and sat down beside me, the Vouvray cradled in her lap. “South America,” she whispered, her eyes leaping with excitement. “In the jungle. These bugs—assassin bugs, they’re called—isn’t that wild? These bugs bite you and then, after they’ve sucked on you awhile, they go potty next to the wound. When you scratch, it gets into your bloodstream, and anywhere from one to twenty years later you get a disease that’s like a cross between malaria and AIDS.”

  “And then you die,” I said.

  “And then you die.”

  Her voice had turned somber. She wasn’t grinning any longer. What could I say? I patted her hand and flashed a smile. “Yum,” I said, mugging for her. “What’s for dinner?”

  She served a cold cream-of-tofu-carrot soup and little lentil-paste sandwiches for an appetizer and a garlic soufflé with biologically controlled vegetables for the entrée. Then it was snifters of cognac, the big-screen TV, and a movie called The Boy in the Bubble, about a kid raised in a totally antiseptic environment because he was born without an immune system. No one could touch him. Even the slightest sneeze would have killed him. Breda sniffled through the first half-hour, then pressed my hand and sobbed openly as the boy finally crawled out of the bubble, caught about thirty-seven different diseases, and died before the commercial break. “I’ve seen this movie six times now,” she said, fighting to control her voice, “and it gets to me every time. What a life,” she said, waving her snifter at the screen, “what a perfect life. Don’t you envy him?”

  I didn’t envy him. I envied the jade pendant that dangled between her breasts and I told her so.

  She might have giggled or gasped or lowered her eyes, but she didn’t. She gave me a long slow look, as if she were deciding something, and then she allowed herself to blush, the color suffusing her throat in a delicious mottle of pink and white. “Give me a minute,” she said mysteriously, and disappeared into the bathroom.

  I was electrified. This was it. Finally. After all the avowals, the pressed hands, the little jokes and routines, after all the miles driven, meals consumed, museums paced, and movies watched, we were finally, naturally, gracefully going to come together in the ultimate act of intimacy and love.

  I felt hot. There were beads of sweat on my forehead. I didn’t know whether to stand or sit. And then the lights dimmed, and there she was at the rheostat.

  She was still in her kimono, but her hair was pinned up more severely, wound in a tight coil to the crown of her head, as if she’d girded herself for battle. And she held something in her hand—a slim package, wrapped in plastic. It rustled as she crossed the room.

  “When you’re in love, you make love,” she said, easing down beside me on the rocklike settee, “—it’s only natural.” She handed me the package. “I don’t want to give you the wrong impression,” she said, her voice throaty and raw, “just because I’m careful and modest and because there’s so much, well, filth in the world, but I have my passionate side too. I do. And I love you. I think.”

  “Yes,” I said, groping for her, the package all but forgotten.

  We kissed. I rubbed the back of her neck, felt something strange, an odd sag and ripple, as if her skin had suddenly turned to Saran Wrap, and then she had her hand on my chest. “Wait,” she breathed, “the, the thing.”

  I sat up. “Thing?”

  The light was dim but I could see the blush invade her face now. She was sweet. Oh, she was sweet, my Little Em’ly, my Victorian princess. “It’s Swedish,” she said.

  I looked down at the package in my lap. It was a clear, skinlike sheet of plastic, folded up in its transparent package like a heavy-duty garbage bag. I held it up to her huge, trembling eyes. A crazy idea darted in and out of my head. No, I thought.

  “It’s the newest thing,” she said, the words coming in a rush, “the safest…I mean, nothing could possibly—”

  My face was hot. “No,” I said.

  “It’s a condom,” she said, tears starting up in her eyes, “my doctor got them for me they’re…they’re Swedish.” Her face wrinkled up and she began to cry. “It’s a condom,” she sobbed, crying so hard the kimono fell open and I could see the outline of the thing against the swell of her nipples, “a full-body condom.”

  I was offended. I admit it. It wasn’t so much her obsession with germs and contagion, but that she didn’t trust me after all that time. I was clean. Quintessentially clean. I was a man of moderate habits and good health, I changed my underwear and socks daily—sometimes twice a day—and I worked in an office, with clean, crisp, unequivocal numbe
rs, managing my late father’s chain of shoe stores (and he died cleanly himself, of a myocardial infarction, at seventy-five). “But Breda,” I said, reaching out to console her and brushing her soft, plastic-clad breast in the process, “don’t you trust me? Don’t you believe in me? Don’t you, don’t you love me?” I took her by the shoulders, lifted her head, forced her to look me in the eye. “I’m clean,” I said. “Trust me.”

  She looked away. “Do it for me,” she said in her smallest voice, “if you really love me.”

  In the end, I did it. I looked at her, crying, crying for me, and I looked at the thin sheet of plastic clinging to her, and I did it. She helped me into the thing, poked two holes for my nostrils, zipped the plastic zipper up the back, and pulled it tight over my head. It fit like a wetsuit. And the whole thing—the stroking and the tenderness and the gentle yielding—was everything I’d hoped it would be.

  Almost.

  She called me from work the next day. I was playing with sales figures and thinking of her. “Hello,” I said, practically cooing into the receiver.

  “You’ve got to hear this.” Her voice was giddy with excitement.

  “Hey,” I said, cutting her off in a passionate whisper, “last night was really special.”

  “Oh, yes,” she said, “yes, last night. It was. And I love you, I do…” She paused to draw in her breath. “But listen to this: I just got a piece from a man and his wife living among the Tuareg of Nigeria—these are the people who follow cattle around, picking up the dung for their cooking fires?”

  I made a small noise of awareness.

  “Well, they make their huts of dung too—isn’t that wild? And guess what—when times are hard, when the crops fail and the cattle can barely stand up, you know what they eat?”

  “Let me guess,” I said. “Dung?”

  She let out a whoop. “Yes! Yes! Isn’t it too much? They eat dung!”

  I’d been saving one for her, a disease a doctor friend had told me about. “Onchocerciasis,” I said. “You know it?”