by T. C. Boyle
“Hey,” she murmured. “How is it going? Looks good. Squid, yes?”
There was a saucepan on the stove, the heat up high—he was making a fish stock from the scraps of the monkfish, a little white wine, butter, garlic and green onions to flavor the squid—and his hands were full. Normally, he didn’t like to be bothered when he was cooking—cooking required your full concentration or things were apt to go wrong—but he was feeling so good he just leaned back into her to enjoy the feel of her long-fingered hands on his abdomen, up under his rib cage and where he was especially sensitive, on his chest and nipples. “Feels nice,” he said, turning his head for a kiss. “You want a glass of Champagne?”
“Fine,” she said, moving away from him now, “yes, I would like that, but I am looking for the hammer I have just bought—have you seen this hammer?”
She’d found a set of musty-looking turn-of-the-century prints in one of the local antique shops, featuring two children, a boy and a girl, in various poses—swallowed up in a maelstrom of brooding vegetation, strolling hand in hand like lost waifs, kicking their bare feet in a snarling stream, gazing up into the heavens as if for guidance—and she’d spent the last hour trying to decide where to hang them. “No,” he said, “I haven’t seen it, but would you mind—the Champagne’s in the ice bucket there and my hands…” He held up both palms, wet and slimed with the exudate of the squid, in evidence. “And that saucepan on the stove there—would you turn the heat down? To low. All the way to low.”
She was wearing a pair of capris to show off the perfect swell of her calves and her beautiful ankles and feet, open-toed sandals and a white blouse hiked up and knotted under her breasts—and she’d put her hair up too, no nonsense here, a whole house to whip into order. He crosshatched the flattened slabs of squid to tenderize them and watched her glide across the floor to the stove and then pour herself a glass of the wine. And what was he feeling—love? Lust? The quiet seep of fulfillment and domestic bliss?
“Toast?” he proposed, putting down the knife to wipe his hands on a towel and then taking up his own glass.
The sun had fingered its way through the clouds, suddenly illuminating a patch of woods beyond the window—up came the light as if wired to a rheostat—and then just as quickly it faded. A snapshot. With a very long exposure. She was watching him intently. Poised on one foot, the glass at her lips. “Toast to what?” she asked, her face changing. “To, to”—and here it came, the flush along the cheekbones, the sheets of moisture to armor her eyes—“to a man who will not even make the introduction to his mother? In his own hometown? Of his fiancée? Is that the toast you want? Is that it?”
He said her name, softly, in melioration.
“Because I cannot stand this shit, and that is what it is, shit. You hear me?”
“Please,” he said, “not now.”
“Yes, now,” she said, spreading her legs for balance and then throwing back her head to drain the flute in a single gulp as if she were back in Jaroslavl with a glass of no-name vodka. “I don’t believe you. I don’t believe anything you say. This money. Where do you get this money? Is it drugs, is that it?”
He just stared. He didn’t want to get into this.
“Will I—am I to go to prison, then? Like Sandman? And you—you have been in prison too, I know it.”
“It’s a long story,” he said.
“Yes. But you tell it to me. You tell me everything.” She poured a second glass for herself, and he could see her hand tremble at the neck of the bottle. “Because I swear, if you don’t…You are ashamed of me? Why? Because of my accent? Ashamed of me so that I can meet only Sandman and not your own mother?”
“It’s not that,” he said, and still he hadn’t moved, the squid lying there on the counter neatly prepped, his flute empty, the pan simmering on the stove. “Okay, you’re right,” he said, and he moved to cut the heat under the pan and pour himself another glass, “I guess it is time, because you’re just acting crazy now—drugs? Me? Have you ever seen me do any kind of drug, even pot—even a single toke?”
“Cocaine.”
“That’s nothing. A little toot now and again, just for fun. What, once a week—once every two weeks?” He spread his arms wide in expostulation. “You like it too.”
She gave him a tight smile. “Yes. Sometimes.”
“I’m no bad guy—you think I’m a bad guy? What happened to me is no different than what happened to you. I just hooked up with the wrong person, is all. My wife. My ex-wife. That was the beginning of it, just like you—just like you with what’s his name, Madison’s father?”
She took a seat at the table they’d just bought the day before—oak, 1890s, six matching chairs, two with hairline cracks that had been glued and varnished over—and they finished the bottle and opened another one and he told her as much as he could, because he wanted to be honest with her; he loved her, and really did believe that people in a relationship needed to be straight with each other. What he didn’t tell her was that his real name was Peck—Bridger was good, Bridger was fine for now, though he’d run the creep’s credit into the ground because he couldn’t resist putting it to him and before long he’d have to be somebody else—or that it wasn’t the investment business he was planning on running out of the big paneled aboveground basement or that he couldn’t bring her to see his mother not only because his mother was irrelevant to him but because she might call him Peck or even William and he just needed to take things step by step right now.
At some point, he’d got up and started chopping cilantro, green beans, garlic and chiles, and he deveined the shrimp and put on a pot for the rice. She didn’t have much to say. She sat there running the tip of her index finger round the rim of the glass, wearing her brooding look. He was feeling a little light-headed from the wine. The pleasure of the hour, of being alone with his thoughts while things sizzled in the pan, was lost to him and the taste of the Champagne had gone sour in the back of his throat, but at least, he thought, he’d laid the issue to rest. He’d opened up. Been as forthcoming and honest as he could be, under the circumstances. And she seemed satisfied, or at least placated.
For a long while neither of them said anything. There were the faint sounds of life in the country—birdsong, crickets, the wet rush of a lone car’s tires on the road out front. And what else? The rhythmic squeak and release of Madison’s swings, a sound as regular as breathing. Everything seemed to cohere round that rhythm, slow and sure and peaceful, even as he moved back to the stove, busy there suddenly. When the wok was good and hot he dumped in the garlic, ginger, green onions and chiles and the instant release of the flavor scented the air in a sudden burst that made his salivary glands clench. Behind him, at the table, Natalia cleared her throat, poured herself another glass of wine. Then, in her smallest voice, she said, “I still do not see why I cannot meet your mother.”
Two days later, he was in a place across the river, in Newburgh, buying a high-end color copier with a credit card in somebody else’s name, after which he intended to check out an authentic old-country German butcher shop Sandman had turned him on to—he thought he might make Wiener schnitzel, with pickled red cabbage, spätzle and butter beans, just for a change, though on second thought it was probably too heavy in this heat and he might just go with potato salad and bratwurst on the grill—when he decided on a whim to stop in at a bar down by the waterfront. He had a couple of hours to kill and that was nice. It was calming. As was the feel of the sun on his back as he loaded the copier into the trunk of the car, the underarms of his shirt already damp with sweat, the heat and humidity sustaining him in a way the refrigerated air of the Bay Area never could have. He felt like a tourist on his own home turf. A dilettante. A man of leisure taking the air before ensconcing himself on a barstool and having a cold beer or two in a conical glass beaded with moisture while the TV overhead nattered on about nothing and he spread a copy of the newspaper across the bar and mused over the little comings and goings of the Yankees and Me
ts.
Natalia was shopping. He’d dropped her off at a mall the size of Connecticut and she said she’d call him around two for lunch. They’d found a day camp for Madison, though she hadn’t wanted to go, of course, and she’d clung to her mother’s legs and shrieked till the snot ran down her nose and generally caused a monumental pain in the ass for everyone concerned, but at least they didn’t have to worry about her till five—or was it five-thirty? He thought about Sukie then, couldn’t help himself—it hurt to be so close and not see her, but he didn’t dare risk it, not yet, anyway. Her face was there, rising luminous in his mind, and then just as quickly it was gone. He checked his watch—quarter past twelve—and stepped into the bar.
Or it wasn’t a bar, actually, in the strictest sense of the word—it was a bar/restaurant, looking to go upscale, part of the interconnected complex the city fathers had built along the riverfront to attract tourists and the locals who had a little money in their pockets and thought they were getting something special because the waiters wore starched white aprons over dress shirts and ties and the Hudson was right outside the window. And he wasn’t complaining—he loved to drift into places like this, the Varathane still fresh on the pine wainscoting, the owners young and uninitiated and looking to score big. It was like a busman’s holiday for him, studying the menu, the wine list, seeing what they were getting for what they were putting out, but it was strictly for comparison. He’d never own a restaurant again. Too much shit. Too much heartache.
It took a minute for his eyes to adjust, and then he nodded at the hostess (eighteen, natural blonde, with a butterfly tattooed on the wing of her left shoulder, and he hated that, hated tattoos on women, especially when they wore them in intimate places—it just suggested traffic to him, that was all), removed his shades, swept a hand over the crown of his head to settle his hair and pulled up a stool at the bar. The place was fairly well crowded and that surprised him. The bar was full of business types in lightweight summer suits, plus a couple of secretaries and three or four of the local lowlifes—you could pick them out at a glance, despite their bright-colored shirts and the watch-me-behave-myself looks on their faces—and maybe two-thirds of the tables were filled, mostly with women, mostly drinking iced tea and picking at the crab salad served on half an avocado. What was the word he was looking for? Déclassé. It wasn’t Sausalito, that was for sure.
He’d just ordered his beer and half a dozen cherrystones, just spread out the paper on the bar and glanced up at the TV screen to see somebody somewhere hitting a home run on yesterday’s highlight reel, when he felt a hand on his shoulder and swung round on the stool as if he’d been burned, jumpy—crazed, freaked—despite himself. For a moment he didn’t know whose eyes he was staring into, some stranger’s, some jerk who wanted to just have a glance at the sports page or politely ask if he might not mind shifting down a stool so he could—
“Peck, man—don’t you recognize me?”
It was Dudley, Dudley with his hair cut short and his earring banished, dressed in a white apron over a long-sleeved shirt and tie. He didn’t know what to say. Tried to stare right through him, hello, goodbye, You talkin’ to me? But it wasn’t working, wasn’t going to work. He was William Peck Wilson, and though he hadn’t been anywhere near Peterskill in three years, he’d already been sniffed out. Newburgh. Jesus Christ. It was twenty-five miles away and on the other side of the river. Who would have thought anybody would know him here?
Dudley was standing there grinning as if they’d just gone in together on a winning Lotto ticket. His eyes were like grappling hooks. His lips were drying out. “Yeah,” Peck said, ducking his head, “yeah. Good to see you.”
“Oh, man, I can’t believe it. So you’re back, huh?” And then, before Peck could answer, he was calling down to the bartender, “Hey, Rick—Rick, give this man anything he wants. What do you want? A little nip of that single-malt scotch—what did you used to drink?”
The name stuck in his throat like a wad of phlegm. “Laphroaig.”
“Yeah, right: Laphroaig.” He stole a glance over his shoulder. “I’m not supposed to drink while I’m working, but hey, this is special, a special occasion.” He shifted on his feet, took a step back to widen his view, then reached out a balled-up fist to rap Peck on the shoulder. “Shit!” he barked. “Shit, Peck, it’s great to see you. Balls up, man. Balls up!”
He couldn’t help himself—something just snapped at that point—but suddenly he seemed to have Dudley by the arm and he was gripping that arm in his right hand as if he wanted to crush it and he was pulling Dudley to him so that he could drop his voice to that Greenhaven register: “Don’t call me that,” he said. “Don’t call me by name. Not ever.”
The light banked in Dudley’s eyes, then came back in a soft glimmer of recognition. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I can dig it.”
Then they had the Laphroaig. Then they made some very quiet, very general conversation until Dudley had to excuse himself to go back to work. There was that moment of farewell and goodbye and see you next time, but Dudley just wasn’t ready to let it go yet. “So,” he said, already leaning toward the kitchen, “am I going to see you around, or what? Are you back?”
Peck watched two women get up from their table by the window and fuss around over their purses and shopping bags and whatever else they’d dragged into lunch with them, their backsides tight in their skirts as they bent down and came up again. Beyond them, out on the river, a lone high gull coasted on the streaming currents of the air. He stood, tucked the paper under his arm. “No,” he said, “just passing through.”
Two
THEY WERE SOMEWHERE in Utah, staring out at the salt flats that were so blanched and bleak and unrelieved he might have created them himself for the backdrop to some post-apocalyptic thriller, but he was too tired, sweat-slicked, dehydrated and vaguely feverish even to guess at the storyline or get beyond the long-distance shimmer of the (hackneyed) opening shot. Dana was driving. She’d been gazing into her laptop all day as if it were the crystal ball in The Wizard of Oz, and then they’d stopped to gas up and use the restroom and she’d taken over the wheel. For the last couple hundred miles he’d been steeling himself to call Radko, just to see how things stood, though he knew in his heart that by now somebody else would be occupying his cubicle and plying his mouse. It was hot, the car’s air conditioner barely functioning, the sun glancing off the hood, the dashboard, the buttons of the radio. His underarms were clammy and abraded and his T-shirt was stuck to his back and he kept playing with the vents to maximize the minimal airflow, without much success. He took a moment to glance at Dana, her jaw set and hands rigid on the wheel, then pulled out his phone, punched in the number and raised his eyes to the white vacancy of the horizon.
The phone picked up on the second ring. “Rad,” Radko announced, delivering his standard telephonic greeting, as if pronouncing the two syllables of “hello” were a waste of time.
“Rad?” Bridger repeated stupidly. He’d been listening to talk radio out of boredom, some reactionary demagogue of the airwaves spewing about communists and liberals and Mexicans in a high inflammatory voice, and though he’d turned down the volume, the noise was still there. The term “eco-Nazis” rose up out of the chatter and fell away.
“Who is this? Bridger? Bridger, is that you?”
“Yeah, uh—hi.”
“Where are you?”
“That was what I wanted to talk about, what I wanted to tell you—”
“You tell me nothing. You are at airport, you are in your house, you are standing in lobby of this building where I am running a business and paying the rent, and it does not matter, does not”—he paused to snatch at the word—“register. And you know why?”
“I’m in Utah.”
“Utah.” There was an infinite sadness in the way he pronounced it, as if Utah were a prison or a leper colony.
“That’s what I wanted to tell you, I’m sorry, but Dana, I mean, Milos—”
“No, do not bring my cousin’s name into this.”
“We have to go to New York, because this thief—”
“Thiff, thiff, always this thiff—give it up why don’t you? Already, enough.”
“He’s got me now—somehow he managed to get hold of my identity, taking out credit cards in my name and I don’t know what else, and if anybody comes there looking for me, creditors or collection agencies or whatever, I want you to know it’s not my fault. I’m not guilty. Don’t blame me.”
“Blame? Who is blaming? I want to tell you something, that there is a woman, very young woman, sitting in your workstation right now, a quick worker, bedder, I think, than you—if you are even here, is what I mean.” Bridger tried to cut in, but Radko had raised his voice now, hooking the words on the caps of his teeth and spitting them into the receiver. “But you are not here, are you?”
“I understand. I know where you’re coming from. I just want to say that this is all way beyond my control, and, well, I guess when I get back I’ll give you a call. Just in case—”