by T. C. Boyle
There were no ghosts haunting Moscow that winter, no vengeful, overcoat-snatching wraiths driven from uneasy graves to settle the score among the living. Nor was there any slowdown in the influx of foreign-made overcoats pouring across the Finnish border, channeled through the maze of docks at Odessa, packed like herring in the trunks of diplomats’ wives and the baggage of party officials returning from abroad. No, life went on as usual. Zhigulis hummed along the streets, clerks clerked and writers wrote, old Studniuk unearthed an antediluvian crony to take over Akaky’s room and Irina Yeroshkin found herself pregnant again. Rodion Mishkin thought of Akaky from time to time, shaking his head over a tongue sandwich or pausing for a moment over his lunchtime chess match with Grigory Stravrogin, the spunky blond lad they’d moved up to Akaky’s desk, and Inspector Zharyenoye had a single nightmare in which he imagined the little clerk storming naked into the room and repossessing his overcoat. But that was about it. Rodion soon forgot his former colleague—Grigory’s gambits were so much more challenging—and Zharyenoye opened his closet the morning after his odd little dream to find the overcoat where he’d left it—hanging undisturbed between a pair of sports shirts and his dress uniform. The inspector never had another thought of Akaky Akakievich as long as he lived, and when he wore the overcoat in the street, proud and triumphant, people invariably mistook him for the First Secretary himself.
(1981)
MEXICO
He didn’t know much about Mexico, not really, if you discount the odd margarita and a determined crawl through the pages of Under the Volcano in an alcoholic haze twenty years ago, but here he was, emerging pale and heavy from the sleek envelope of the airliner and into the fecund embrace of Puerto Escondido. All this—the scorching blacktop, the distant arc of the beach, the heat, the scent of the flowers and jet fuel, and the faint lingering memory of yesterday’s fish—was an accident. A happy accident. A charity thing at work—give five bucks to benefit the Battered Women’s Shelter and win a free trip for two to the jewel of Oaxaca. Well, he’d won. And to save face and forestall questions he told everybody he was bringing his girlfriend along, for two weeks of R&R—Romance and Relaxation. He even invented a name for her—Yolanda—and yes, she was Mexican on her mother’s side, gray eyes from her father, skin like burnished copper, and was she ever something in bed …
There were no formalities at the airport—they’d taken care of all that in Mexico City with a series of impatient gestures and incomprehensible commands—and he went through the heavy glass doors with his carry-on bag and ducked into the first cab he saw. The driver greeted him in English, swiveling around to wipe an imaginary speck of dust from the seat with a faded pink handkerchief. He gave a little speech Lester couldn’t follow, tossing each word up in the air as if it were a tight-stitched ball that had to be driven high over the fence, then shrank back into himself and said “Where to?” in a diminished voice. Lester gave the name of his hotel—the best one in town—and sat back to let the ripe breeze wash over his face.
He was sweating. Sweating because he was in some steaming thick tropical place and because he was overweight, grossly overweight, carrying fifty pounds too many and all of it concentrated in his gut. He was going to do something about that when he got back to San Francisco—join a club, start jogging, whatever—but right now he was just a big sweating overweight man with big bare pale legs set like stanchions in the floor of the cab and a belly that soaked right through the front of his cotton-rayon open-necked shirt with the blue and yellow parrots cavorting all over it. But there was the beach, scalloped and white and chasing along beside the car, palm trees and a hint of maritime cool, and before ten minutes had ticked off his watch he was at the hotel, paying the driver from a wad of worn velvety bills that didn’t seem quite real. The driver had no problem with them—the bills, that is—and he accepted a fat velvety tip too, and seven and a half minutes after that Lester was sitting in the middle of a shady tiled dining room open to the sea on one side and the pool on the other, a room key in his pocket and his first Mexican cocktail clenched in his sweating fist.
He’d negotiated the cocktail with the faintest glimmer of half-remembered high-school Spanish—jooze naranja, soda cloob and vodka, tall, with ice, hielo, yes, hielo—and a whole repertoire of mimicry he didn’t know he possessed. What he’d really wanted was a greyhound, but he didn’t know the Spanish word for grapefruit, so he’d fallen back on the orange juice and vodka, though there’d been some confusion over the meaning of the venerable Russian term for clear distilled spirits until he hit on the inspiration of naming the brand, Smirnoff. The waitress, grinning and nodding while holding herself perfectly erect in her starched white peasant dress, repeated the brand name in a creaking singsong voice and went off to fetch his drink. Of course, by the time she set it down in front of him it was already half-gone and he immediately ordered another and then another, until for the first twenty minutes or so he had the waitress and bartender working in perfect synchronization to combat his thirst and any real or imagined pangs he might have suffered on the long trip down.
After the fifth drink he began to feel settled, any anxiety over traveling dissolved in the sweet flow of alcohol and juice. He was pleased with himself. Here he was, in a foreign country, ordering cocktails like a native and contemplating a bite to eat—guacamole and nachos, maybe—and then a stroll on the beach and a nap before cocktails and dinner. He wasn’t sweating anymore. The waitress was his favorite person in the world, and the bartender came next.
He’d just drained his glass and turned to flag down the waitress—one more, he was thinking, and then maybe the nachos or a shrimp cocktail—when he noticed that the table at the far end of the veranda was occupied. A woman had slipped in while he was gazing out to sea, and she was seated facing him, barelegged, in a rust-colored bikini and a loose black robe. She looked to be about thirty, slim, muscular, with a high tight chest and feathered hair that showed off her bleeding eyes and the puffed bow of her mouth. There was a plate of something steaming at her elbow—fish, it looked like, the specialty of the house, breaded, grilled, stuffed, baked, fried, or sautéed with peppers, onions, and cilantro—and she was drinking a margarita rocks. He watched in fascination for a minute—semidrunken fascination—until she looked up, chewing, and he turned away to stare out over the water as if he were just taking in the sights like any other calm and dignified tourist.
He was momentarily flustered when the waitress appeared on his left to ask if he wanted another drink, but he let the alcohol sing in his veins and said, “Why not?—¿Porqué no?”—and the waitress giggled and went off with her increasingly admirable rump moving at the center of that long white gown. When he stole another glance at the woman in the corner, she was still looking his way. He smiled. She smiled back. He turned away again and bided his time, but when his drink came he tossed some money on the table, rose massively from the chair and tottered across the room.
“Hi,” he said, looming over the chewing woman, the drink rigid in his hand, his teeth clenched around a defrosted smile. “I mean, Buenos tardes. Or noches.“
He watched her face for a reaction, but she just stared at him.
“Uh, ¿Cómo está Usted? Or tú. ¿Cómo estás tú?”
“Sit down, why don’t you,” she said in a voice that was as American as Hillary Clinton’s. “Take a load off.”
Suddenly he felt dizzy. His drink had somehow concentrated itself till it was as dense as a meteorite. He pulled out a chair and sat heavily. “I thought … I thought you were—?”
“I’m Italian,” she said. “From Buffalo originally. All four of my grandparents came from Tuscany. That’s where I get my exotic Latin looks.” She let out a short bark of a laugh, forked up a slab of fish and began chewing vigorously, all the while studying him out of eyes that were like two scalpels.
He finished his drink in a gulp and looked over his shoulder for the waitress. “You want another one?” he asked, though he saw she hadn’t half-f
inished her first.
Still chewing, she smiled up at him. “Sure.”
When the transaction was complete and the waitress had presented them with two fresh drinks, he thought to ask her name, but the silence had gone on too long and when they both began to speak at the same time, he deferred to her. “So what do you do for a living?” she asked.
“Biotech. I work for a company in the East Bay—Oakland, that is.”
Her eyebrows lifted. “Really? Is that like making potatoes that walk around the kitchen and peel themselves, that sort of thing? Cloning sheep? Two-headed dogs?”
Lester laughed. He was feeling good. Better than good. “Not exactly.”
“My name’s Gina,” she said, reaching out her hand, “but you might know me as ‘The Cheetah.’ Gina ‘The Cheetah’ Caramella?”
He took her hand, which was dry and small and nearly lost in his own. He was drunk, gloriously drunk, and so far he hadn’t been ripped off by the Federales or assailed by the screaming shits or leached dry by malarial mosquitoes and vampire bats or any of the other myriad horrors he’d been warned against, and that made him feel pretty near invulnerable. “What do you mean—you’re an actress?”
She gave a little laugh. “I wish.” Ducking her head, she chased the remnants of the fish round the plate with her fork and the plane of her left index finger. “No,” she said, “I’m a boxer.”
The alcohol percolated through him. He wanted to laugh, but he fought down the urge. “A boxer? You don’t mean like boxing, do you? Fisticuffs? Pugilism?”
“Twenty-three, two, and one,” she said. She took a sip of her drink. Her eyes were bright. “What I’m doing right now is agonizing over my defeat two weeks ago at the Shrine by one of the queen bitches in the game, DeeDee DeCarlo, and my manager thought it would be nice for me to just get away for a bit, you know what I mean?”
He was electrified. He’d never met a female boxer before—hadn’t even known there was such a thing. Mud-wrestling he could see—in fact, since his wife died he’d become a big fan, Tuesday nights and sometimes on Fridays—but boxing? That wasn’t a woman’s sport. It was crazy. Drunkenly, he scrutinized her face, and it was a good face, a pretty face, but for the bridge of her nose, a telltale depression there, just the faintest misalignment—and sure, sure, how had he missed it? “But doesn’t it hurt? … I mean, when you get punched in the … body punches, I mean?”
“In the tit?”
He just nodded.
“Sure it hurts, what do you think? But I wear a padded bra, wrap ‘em up, pull ‘em flat across the rib cage so my opponent won’t have a clear target, but really, it’s the abdominal blows that take it out of you,” and she was demonstrating with her hands now, the naked slope of her belly and the slit of her navel, abs of steel, but nothing like those freakish female bodybuilders they threw at you on ESPN, nice abs, nice navel, nice, nice, nice.
“You doing anything for dinner tonight?” he heard himself say.
She looked down at the denuded plate before her, nothing left but lettuce, don’t eat the lettuce, never eat the lettuce, not in Mexico. She shrugged. “I guess I could … I guess in a couple hours.”
He lifted the slab of his arm and consulted his watch with a frown of concentration. “Nine o’clock?”
She shrugged again. “Sure.”
“By the way,” he said. “I’m Lester.”
April had been dead two years now. She’d been struck and killed by a car a block from their apartment, and though the driver was a teenage kid frozen behind the wheel of his father’s Suburban, it wasn’t entirely his fault. For one thing, April had stepped out in front of him, twenty feet from the crosswalk, and as if that wasn’t bad enough, she was blindfolded at the time. Blindfolded and feeling her way with one of those flexible fiberglass sticks the blind use to register the world at their feet. It was for a psychology course she was taking at San Francisco State—“Strategies of the Physically Challenged.” The professor had asked for two volunteers to remain blindfolded for an entire week, even at night, even in bed, no cheating, and April had been the first to raise her hand. She and Lester had been married for two years at the time—his first, her second—and now she was two years dead.
Lester had always been a drinker—and, for that matter, an abuser of recreational drugs—but after April’s death he seemed to enjoy drinking less and need it more, as if he were lowering himself hand over hand down a long tapering rope that led to some dark place reeking of vomit and vodka fumes. He knew it, and he fought it. Still, when he got back to his room, sailing on the high of his chance meeting with Gina—Gina the Cheetah—he couldn’t help digging out the bottle of Herradura he’d bought in the duty-free and taking a good long cleansing hit.
There was no TV in the room, but the air conditioner worked just fine and he stood in front of it awhile before he stripped off his sodden shirt, applied a fresh towel to his face and the swell of his gut and stepped into the shower. The water was tepid, but it did him good. He shaved, brushed his teeth, and repositioned himself in front of the air conditioner. When he saw the bottle standing there on the night table, he thought he’d have just one more hit—just one—because he didn’t want to be utterly wasted when he took Gina the Cheetah out for dinner. But then he looked at his watch and saw that it was only seven-twenty, and figured what the hell, two drinks, three, he just wanted to have a good time. Too wired to sleep, he flung himself down on the bed like a big wet dripping fish and began poking through the yellowed paperback copy of Under the Volcanco he’d brought along because he couldn’t resist the symmetry of it. What else was he going to read in Mexico—Proust?
“’No se puede vivir sin amor,’” he read, ‘You can’t live without love,’ and he saw April stepping out into the street with her puny fiberglass stick and the black velvet sleep mask pulled tight over her eyes. But he didn’t like that picture, not at all, so he took another drink and thought of Gina. He hadn’t had a date in six months and he was ready. And who knew?—anything could happen. Especially on vacation. Especially down here. He tipped back the bottle, and then he flipped to the end of the book, where the Consul, cored and gutted and beyond all hope, tumbles dead down the ravine and they throw the bloated corpse of a dog down after him.
The first time Lester had read it, he thought it was kind of funny, in a grim sort of way. But now he wasn’t so sure.
Gina was waiting for him at the bar when he came down at quarter to nine. The place was lit with paper lanterns strung from the thatched ceiling, there was the hint of a breeze off the ocean, the sound of the surf, a smell of citrus and jasmine. All the tables were full, people leaning into the candlelight over their fish and margaritas and murmuring to each other in Spanish, French, German. It was good. It was perfect. But as Lester ascended the ten steps from the patio and crossed the room to the bar, his legs felt dead, as if they’d been shot out from under him and then magically reattached, all in the space of an instant. Food. He needed food. Just a bite, that was all. For equilibrium.
“Hey,” he said, nudging Gina with his shoulder.
“Hey,” she said, flashing a smile. She was wearing shorts and heels and a blue halter top glistening with tiny blue beads. He was amazed at how small she was—she couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred pounds. April’s size. April’s size exactly.
He ordered an Herradura and tonic, his forearms laid out like bricks on the bar. “You weren’t kidding before,” he said, turning to her, “—about boxing, I mean? Don’t take offense, but you’re so—well, small. I was just wondering, you know—?”
She looked at him a long moment, as if debating with herself. “I’m a flyweight, Les,” she said finally. “I fight other flyweights, just like in the men’s division, you know? This is how big God made me, but you come watch me some night and you’ll see it’s plenty big enough.”
She wasn’t smiling, and somewhere on the free-floating periphery of his mind he realized he’d made a blunder. “Yeah,” he said, �
�of course. Of course you are. Listen, I didn’t mean to—but why boxing? Of all the things a woman could do …”
“What? You think men have a patent on aggression? Or excellence?” She let her eyes sail out over the room, hard eyes, angry eyes, and then she came back to him. “Look, you hungry or what?”
Lester swirled the ice in his drink. It was time to defuse the situation, but quick. “Hey,” he said, smiling for all he was worth, “I’d like to tell you I’m on a diet, but I like eating too much for that—and plus, I haven’t had a thing since that crap they gave us on the plane, dehydrated chicken and rice that tasted like some sort of by-product of the vulcanizing process. So yeah, let’s go for it.”
“There’s a place up the beach,” she said, “in town. I hear it’s pretty good—Los Crotos? Want to try it?”
“Sure,” he said, but the deadness crept back into his legs. Up the beach? In town? It was dark out there and he didn’t speak the language.
She was watching him. “If you don’t want to, it’s no big deal,” she said, finishing off her drink and setting the glass down with a rattle of ice that sounded like nothing so much as loose teeth spat into a cup. “We can just eat here. The thing is, I’ve been here two days now and I’m a little bored with the menu—you know, fish, fish, and more fish. I was thinking maybe a steak would sound nice.” “Sure,” he said. “Sure, no problem.”
And then they were out on the beach, Gina barefoot at his side, her heels swinging from one hand, purse from the other. The night was dense and sustaining, the lights muted, palms working slowly in the breeze, empty palapas lined up along the high-water mark like the abandoned cities of a forgotten race. Lester shuffled through the deep sand, his outsized feet as awkward as snow-shoes, while children and dogs chased each other up and down the beach in a blur of shadow against the white frill of the surf and knots of people stood in the deeper shadows of the palms, laughing and talking till the murmur of conversation was lost in the next sequence of breakers pounding the shore. He wanted to say something, anything, but his brain was impacted and he couldn’t seem to think, so they walked in silence, taking it all in.