by T. C. Boyle
“Médecins sans Frontières,” the husband said, as if he were licking fudge from between his teeth.
From the back room came the sound of the kids’ video, some Disney thing with the seahorses and talking starfish and all the rest, music swelling, the sound of artificial waves. He was agitated, and he didn’t know why. The day had been perfect, the sort of day he could have lived through forever, the day—the days—he’d promised himself when he was inside, when everything was gray and the sun never seemed to shine and there was always some self-important officious asshole there to make you toe the line, lights out, everybody up, and the bonehead cons with their pathetic attempts to join the human race, 427, factory, I swear; Nobody changes this channel, motherfucker; and How would you like your Jell-O cooked, sir? But no, he did know why. Everything he had was balanced on the head of a pin, like the collapsible two-story brick house with the three-car garage and the bird in the cage and the yapping dog all folded up in a carpet in one of Madison’s videos, swept away in a windstorm that raked the lot where it had stood just a heartbeat before. It was people like this, like Jonas, like Kaylee, that were the problem. What was he thinking? That he could just waltz in and set himself up and think these people were his friends or something? No. That wasn’t the way it was. That wasn’t the way it would ever be.
So what did he do? He pushed himself back from the coffee table and raised one foot in his shining new ultra-cool Vans with the checkerboard pattern and set it down right beside Jonas’ drink. “Yeah,” he said, leaning back into the cushions and giving both arms a good sinew-cracking stretch, “that’s right. That’s who I’m talking about.”
When he first met Gina, things were different. He was twenty-five years old, with two years of community college behind him and stints at restaurants in Maui and Stowe, no record of any kind except for traffic infractions (tickets he tossed in the trash, because really, they were just a scam anyway, a means for local municipalities to raise cash so they could buy more cruisers and more radar guns so they could rob more people in the name of law and order), and he’d just been promoted to manager at Fiorentino’s, the youngest manager they’d ever had. Or at least that was what Jocko, the basset-faced old bartender who’d been there since the Civil War, told him. Then Gina showed up. He’d been sitting at the bar, his day off—noon—with Jocko and Frank Calabrese, the owner, and a mini-parade of girls slipped in and out applying for the cocktail waitress job advertised that morning in the local paper. They had the faintly tarnished look of cocktail waitresses, every one of them, and some had experience, some didn’t. He wasn’t looking for experience. He was focusing on one attribute only—how hot they were, on a descending scale of one to ten. None of the others even came close to Gina—facially, maybe, but her body was right out of Playboy; or better yet, Penthouse. Jocko and Frank, who could be brutal, didn’t give him any argument.
Gina-Louise Marchetti.
She’d gone to Lakeland High School, just outside Peterskill, she was twenty years old, between boyfriends, and living—temporarily, she insisted—back at her parents’ place on a twisting black road in the rural tree-hung precincts of Putnam Valley, where absolutely nothing was happening, not then or now or ever. Within a week he was sleeping with her and within the month she’d moved into his apartment. Most nights after work they’d cruise the local bars and then sleep in till noon and on their days off they took the train into Manhattan and hit the clubs. They did drugs together, but not in an excessive way, and only speed and once in a while E, and they began to enjoy some decent wines and experiment with recipes out of a cookbook when they had a night at home. For Christmas she bought him a cherrywood wine rack—“For the cellar you’re going to have”—and he gave her a case of red the liquor salesman got him wholesale; they cooked a paella for Christmas dinner, just to be different, and spent most of the night admiring the way the twelve symmetrical bottles of Valpolicella looked in the new wine rack.
That was nice. Very domestic, very tranquil. He was in love, really in love, for the first time in his life and he was making good money—and so was she—and there wasn’t a bump in the road. They moved into a bigger apartment, with a view of the Hudson from the nuclear power plant all the way up the river to where it snaked into the crotch of the mountains. He got himself a new car, a silver five-speed Mustang with some real pop to it. Nights—alone, in bed, just the two of them—were special. You’re an awesome lover, that was what she told him, awesome, and he believed her then—believed her now, for that matter. But everything in this life turns to shit, as his father used to say (until he died in his Barcalounger of an aneurysm in the brain, the cocktail glass still clutched in his hand), and Frank, the owner, proved it by getting divorced.
Divorced meant time on your hands, time to pick and cavil and criticize, and Peck didn’t take criticism well. He never had—in fact, the surest way, all his life, to make him react, was to call him out on something, whether it was his chores at home when he was a kid, or the dick of a math teacher he’d had in the ninth grade trying to humiliate him at the blackboard or the succession of half-wit bosses he’d had from junior year on and every one of them thinking they were God’s gift to the world. He knew differently. No matter what, he was always right, even if he was wrong, and he could prove it with one jab of his right hand. Maybe other people—the losers of the world—could turn the other cheek, bow their heads, suck it up, but he couldn’t. He had too much pride for that. Too much—what would you call it?—self-respect, self-love. Or confidence, confidence was a better word. At any rate, Frank started living at the bar, inhaling Glenfiddich all night long and getting nastier and crankier and crazier by the day. And then—it was inevitable—there came a night when Peck couldn’t take it anymore (some shit about he wasn’t ordering the right grade of parmesan and he didn’t know real parmesan—Parmigiano-Reggiano—from his ass and he was fucking up and costing his boss money) and the youngest manager in Fiorentino’s history went down in flames. There was some name-calling, some breakage, and he wouldn’t be counting on a reference from Frank Calabrese anytime soon.
Gina was a rock, though. She threw down her apron, emptied the tip jar and stalked out to the car, and within the week she’d found a storefront on Water Street and hit her father up for a loan and Pizza Napoli was born. The place was an instant hit—you would have thought they were giving the pizzas away—and the secret was Skip Siciliano, the pizza chef with the handlebar mustache and the towering white toque he’d managed to coax away from Fiorentino’s because Frank was an asshole and Skip couldn’t have agreed more. That and the location. People wanted to look out on the broad rolling back of the Hudson and sit at nice tables with sawdust on the floor and strings of salami and garlic hanging from the racks overhead and eat pizza hot from the oven and they wanted antipasto and calzone and homemade pasta too and they wanted takeout and a nice selection of medium-priced Italian wines. By the end of the first year, he and Gina got ambitious and opened the second place—Lugano, a name they picked after closing their eyes and dropping a coin on the map of Italy. The idea behind Lugano was to make it an upscale place, full menu, osso buco, seafood, cotechino, specials every night, caponata in a cut-glass jar on every table and crostini the minute you sat down.
Then Gina got pregnant and told her father, and her father—a loudmouth and bullhead in a league of his own who’d never warmed to Peck because he wasn’t Italian and even if he had been it wouldn’t have mattered because nobody was good enough for his girl, not the right fielder for the New York Yankees or Giuliani’s favorite nephew—insisted that they get married within the month. From Peck’s point of view, the whole thing stank. He didn’t want a kid, didn’t want to be tied down at so young an age, and he resented Gina for letting it happen in the first place. But he went along, not coincidentally because her father was the controlling partner of both Pizza Napoli and Lugano, and he loved her, he did. At least then he did. They were married at the Assumption church, big reception at the cou
ntry club in Croton, no expense spared, Peck’s mother there in the front pew, drunk as usual, a buddy from high school he hadn’t seen in six years—Josh Friedman—standing in as best man, and it was a fait accompli.
The thing is, it all might have worked out, a slow upward climb into maturity and the fullness of a relationship, the kid, a dog, a house in the country, if it wasn’t for Gina. As soon as she got pregnant, she stopped sleeping with him. Just like that. She was always sick, always complaining about imaginary pains, and she got sloppy and let herself go. She never washed her hair. Never picked anything up. And sex. Did he mention sex? Sex was about as frequent—and satisfying—as the comet that comes every four hundred years and then you go out on the lawn and gape up at some poor pale pathetic streak of scum in the sky you can barely locate. Big thrill. Big, big thrill.
Could anybody have blamed him, even the pope and his College of Cardinals, if he began staying late at the restaurant? Even now, even after the jail time and the hate and resentment and going underground and all the rest, he had no regrets. Sometimes he’d just close his eyes and see the glow of the bar at two a.m., the front door locked and two or three of those candles guttering in their yellow globes till it seemed as if the whole place had been sprayed with a fine patina of antique gold, and Caroline or Melanie or one of the other cocktail waitresses sitting there beside him having a slow smoke and a Remy, his hand on her thigh or her breast as if he were fitting her for a custom-made outfit. So casual. So slow and sure. The beauty of it: he’d fucked her the night before and he’d fuck her again tonight. Once he got around to it.
“So jazz—you dig jazz at all?” Jonas was saying, and Peck had been away for a moment there, and at first, for the smallest sliver of a second, couldn’t quite place him. “The new Diana Krall—did you know she married Elvis Costello?—it’s pretty awesome.” The man was fumbling in his jacket, the big hand moving like an animal caught in a bag, and then he flashed the CD and handed it across the table. “You might want to put this on. It’s pretty awesome. Believe me.”
Somehow, Peck’s mood had soured. The pans were dirty, the meal stewing down in their guts, the Armagnac evaporated—was the guy using a straw, or what? Plus there was this asshole Bridger, threatening everything, and the first chink in the wall: the credit card he’d laid out on the counter at the Wine Nook was invalid, or so the pencil-neck behind the counter informed him. Natalia—half-playful, half-serious—had accused him of brooding and he’d defended himself, lamely, as in “I’m not brooding—I’m just thinking, that’s all.” Now he took the CD from Jonas in its compact plastic case and stared at it absently.
“I think you’re going to like it,” Jonas said, leaning in over the table. He was drunk, sloppy, fat-faced. Peck suppressed an urge to punch him. “Isn’t that right, honey?” Jonas said, turning to his wife.
“Oh, yeah,” Kaylee crooned, “yeah, I think you’ll really like like it.” She shrugged, a long shiver that ran up one side of her torso to her shoulders and back down again; she was drunk too, and why couldn’t anybody sit down and eat a nice dinner without getting shit-faced? She gave him a wide wet-lipped smile. “Knowing you. Your soulful side, I mean—”
Natalia was nestled into the sofa like a cat, her legs drawn up, shoes off, the snifter cradled in the v of her crotch. She let her eyes rest on Jonas. “It is what, standards—is that how you say? Standards? Such a funny term.”
No one answered her. After a moment, the CD still balanced in his hand, Peck said that he’d once been to the Five Spot with a girl he was dating ten years ago or more and that the band that night—female vocalist, flute, piano, percussion, bass—was like somebody taking their clothes off in the dark because they’re ashamed of the way they look, and then he laid the disc back down on the coffee table and rose to his feet. “Listen,” he said, “I just remembered something—if you’ll all excuse me a minute. I’ve got to—got to go out. Just for a minute.”
Natalia said, “But, Da-na, it is near to one in the a.m. Where? Where do you go?”
She was laying into him in front of the guests and that rubbed him the wrong way. He wanted to say something hurtful and violent, but he held back. He was all bottled up. He was wrong, he knew it, and so he said something in melioration, something he shouldn’t have said: “I need to make a phone call.”
And now a whole shitstorm of protest and sympathy rose up, Natalia complaining in a little voice that he’d smashed her cell phone and wondering why he couldn’t use the landline and both Jonas and Kaylee whipping out their cells as if the cells were six-shooters and this was the OK Corral. What could he say? Nothing. He just waved them off and backed across the room as if he were afraid they’d chase him down, tug at his sleeves, force their phones into his hand, and he snapped a mental picture of their faces—drunken faces, puzzled faces, a little indignant even—as he slipped out the door.
Outside, the fog had grown thick, obscuring everything. It was cold suddenly, the damp reach of it getting down inside his shirt, and he wished he’d thought to bring a jacket, but no matter. He slid into Natalia’s car—Natalia’s car: the registration was in his name and he was the one making payments on it—turned over the engine and worked the button on the temperature gauge till it read 80 degrees. There weren’t many pay phones around anymore—they were a vestige of a bygone era, Frank’s era, Jocko’s, his own dead father’s, and they’d be gone entirely in a decade, he would have put money on it—but there were a couple in the lobby of the Holiday Inn, and that was where he headed.
He stopped at the bar for a cognac and five bucks’ worth of change. He had no idea what it cost to call San Roque, and he probably shouldn’t have been doing it, anyway—there were easier ways to get what he wanted—but he couldn’t resist, not tonight, not the way he was feeling, so sour and disconnected and twisted up inside. The lobby was over-lit, blazing like some meeting hall, but it was deserted at this hour. He listened to the coins fall and the operator’s voice and then the ringing on the other end of the line.
“Hello?”
“Bridger?”
“Yeah?”
“I just wanted to confirm that your listing in our guide is correct—can you give me a spelling on your complete name?”
“Listen, if you’re selling something, I don’t want it—this is my private cell and you better, please, just remove it from your records.”
“Oh, I’m not selling anything, not that you want, anyway.” He gave it a heartbeat, just to let everything settle. “It’s me, Dana. You know, the Rick James fan.”
There was a silence, festering, the scab picked, the bandage torn from the wound. It made his heart swell to listen to it, to listen to the shithead dangle on the other end of the line, caught out at his own game. “Yeah, uh, hi.”
“Hi yourself, asshole. You think you can dick with me?”
“You’re the asshole. You’re the criminal. You think you can steal my girlfriend’s identity and get away with it? Huh? We’re going to track you down, brother, and that is a promise.”
Girlfriend? The quickest calculation. So he was a she and the fish was on the line. Keep it going, he told himself, keep it going. “I guess we’ll see about that, won’t we.”
“So you got my cell, big deal. I know where you live. I know where you’re calling from right now.”
“Really?”
“Really. You might be calling from anywhere in the 415, but you live in Marin, don’t you?”
That froze him a minute—till he realized that was the old cell number, the dead cell number, and what did it matter? A whole lot of people lived in Marin County. Yeah. Sure. But how many Dana Halters? He saw Natalia’s face then, her lips, the dark eternally disappointed pits of her eyes, heard her in his head questioning why, why, why do we have to move and what do you mean your name is not Dana? What do you mean?
The voice came back at him, a loser’s voice, but hard now, hard with the righteous authority of the new kid called out on the playground: “Don’t
you?”
“Right,” he heard himself say, and he looked up to follow a woman in heels and a tight blue dress picking her slow careful way from the bar to the elevators, “and you live in San Roque.” And then, though he wanted to tear the thing out of the wall, all of it, the black box with the shiny silver panel, the wires and cords that pinned his voice to this place and this time, he very gently put the receiver back in its cradle and walked out the door and into the fog.
Four
WORK HAD JUST BEGUN on the next project Radko had lined up—a time-travel thing in which a group of twenty-first-century scientists, including one ingenue with inflated breasts, a sexy gap between her front teeth and a coruscating pimple dead center in the middle of her nose that had to be painted out in every frame, discover a portal to Pompeii the day before Vesuvius erupts and have to go around frantically trying to communicate the imminence of the danger in a language no one understands—when Bridger felt someone hovering over his shoulder and looked up to see Radko himself standing there on the scuffed concrete with a pained expression. It was just past ten in the morning. Bridger had spent the night at Dana’s and so he’d had a relatively nutritious breakfast (Cheerios with a spoonful of brewer’s yeast and half a diced nectarine, plus toast and coffee) and he’d left her hunched over her computer, tapping away at the dimensions of the wild boy’s fate. He was feeling relaxed and benevolent, the new project—which no doubt would become as dull and deadening and soul-destroying as the last—engaging him simply because it was new, the computer-generated temples and sunblasted domiciles of Pompeii in diametrical contrast to the burnt sienna gloom of Drex III. He’d been bent over Sibyl Nachmann’s face, his mind on autopilot as he painstakingly removed the blemish, a procedure Deet-Deet had already christened a “zitectomy,” when he became aware of Radko.