T.C. Boyle Stories II: The Collected Stories of T. Coraghessan Boyle, Volume II

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  The dog sniffed at my leg—or at least I hope he was sniffing, since he was so black and matted you couldn’t tell which end of him was which. “A beer sounds real nice,” I said, “but I don’t know how you and your sister are supposed to feel about it—I mean, beer’s not white.” I let it go a beat. “Or black.”

  She held her smile, not fazed in the least. “For one thing,” she said, “Moira always takes a nap after lunch, so she won’t be involved. And for another”—she was looking right into my eyes now, the smile turned up a notch—“we only serve Guinness in this house.”

  We sat in the kitchen—black-and-white tile, white cabinets, black appliances—and had three bottles each while the sun slid across the windowpanes and the plumbago withered over its hacked and naked roots. I don’t know what it was—the beer, the time of day, the fact that she was there and listening—but I really opened up to her. I told her about Janine, my second wife, and how she picked at me all the time—I was never good enough for her, no matter what I did—and I got off on a tangent about a transformative experience I’d had in Hawaii, when I first realized I wanted to work with the earth, with the whole redemptive process of digging and planting, laying out flowerbeds, running drip lines, setting trees in the ground. (I was on top of Haleakala Crater, in the garden paradise of the world, and there was nothing but volcanic debris all around me, a whole sour landscape of petrified symbols. It was dawn and I hadn’t slept and Janine and I stood there in the wind, bleary tourists gazing out on all that nullity, and suddenly I understood what I wanted in life. I wanted things to be green, that was all. It was as simple as that.)

  Caitlin was a good listener, and I liked the way she tipped the glass back in delicate increments as she drank, her eyes shining and her free hand spread flat on the tabletop, as if we were at sea and she needed to steady herself. She kept pushing the hair away from her face and then leaning forward to let it dangle loose again, and whenever I touched on anything painful or sensitive (and practically everything about Janine fell into that category), a sympathetic little crease appeared between her eyebrows and she clucked her tongue as if there were something stuck to the roof of her mouth. After the second beer, we turned to less personal topics: the weather, gardening, people we knew in common. When we cracked the third, we began reminiscing about the lame, halt and oddball teachers we’d had in junior high and some of the more memorable disasters from those days, like the time it rained day and night for the better part of a week and boulders the size of Volkswagens rolled up out of the streambeds and into the passing lane of the freeway.

  I was having a good time, and good times had been in precious short supply since my divorce. I felt luxurious and calm. The shrubs, I figured, could wait until tomorrow—and the trees and the grass and the sky too. It was nice, for a change, to let the afternoon stretch itself over the window like a thin skin and not have to worry about a thing. I was drunk. Drunk at three in the afternoon, and I didn’t care. We’d just shared a laugh over Mr. Clemens, the English teacher who wore the same suit and tie every day for two years and pronounced poem as “poim,” when I set my glass down and asked Caitlin what I’d been wanting to ask since I first left my card in her mailbox six months back. “Listen, Caitlin,” I said, riding the exhilaration of that last echoing laugh, “I hope you won’t take this the wrong way, but what is it with the black-and-white business—I mean, is it some sort of political statement? A style? A religious thing?”

  She leaned back in her chair and made an effort to hold on to her smile. The dog lay asleep in the corner, as shabby and formless as an old alpaca coat slipped from a hanger. He let out a long, heaving sigh, lifted his head briefly, and then dropped it again. “Oh, I don’t know,” she said, “it’s a long story—”

  That was when Moira appeared, right on cue. She was wearing a gauzy white pantsuit she might have picked up at a beekeepers’ convention, and she hesitated at the kitchen door when she saw me sitting there with her sister and a thick black beer, but only for an instant. “Why, Vincent,” she said, more the governess than ever, “what a nice surprise.”

  —

  The next morning, at eight, Walt Tremaine showed up with seven black men in white jeans, black T-shirts and white caps and enough heavy machinery to take down every tree within half a mile before lunch. “And how are you this fine morning, Mr. Vincent Larry,” he said, “—or is it Larry Vincent?”

  I blew the steam off a cup of McDonald’s coffee and worked my tongue round the remnants of an Egg McMuffin. “Just call me Larry,” I said. “It’s her,” I added, by way of explanation. “Moira, the older one. I mean, she’s . . . well, I don’t have to tell you—I’m sure you can draw your own conclusions.”

  Walt Tremaine planted his feet and wrapped his arms round his chest. “Oh, I don’t know,” he said, waxing philosophical as his crew scuttled past us with ropes, chainsaws, blowers and trimmers. “Sometimes I wish I could get a little simplicity in my life, if you know what I mean. Up in a tree half the day, sawdust in my hair, and when I come home to my wife she expects me to mow the lawn and break out the hedge clippers.” He looked down at his feet and then out across the lawn. “Hell, I’d like to pave my yard over too.”

  I was going to say I know what you mean, because that’s the sort of thing you say in a situation like that, but that would have implied agreement, and I didn’t agree, not at all. So I just shrugged noncommittally and watched Walt Tremaine’s eyes follow his climbers up the biggest, oldest and most venerable oak in the yard.

  Later, when the tree was in pieces and the guy I’d hired for the day and I had rototilled the lawn and raked the dying fragments into three top-heavy piles the size of haystacks, Moira, in her beekeeper’s regalia, appeared with a pitcher of milk and a tray of Oreo cookies. It was four in the afternoon, the yard was raw with dirt, and the air shrieked with the noise of Walt Tremaine’s shredder as his men fed it the remains of the oak’s crown. The other two oaks, smaller but no less grand, had been decapitated preparatory to taking them down, and the tea tree had been relieved of its limbs. All in all, it looked as if a bomb had hit the yard while miraculously sparing the house (white, of course, with whiter trim and a dead black roof). I watched Moira circulate among the bewildered sweating men of Walt Tremaine’s crew, pouring out milk, offering cookies.

  When she got around to me and Greg (black jeans, white T-shirt, black cap, white skin), she let her smile waver and flutter twice across her lips before settling in. We were taking a hard-earned break, stretched out in comfort on the last besieged patch of grass and trying to muster the energy to haul all that yellowing turf out to my pickup. We’d really humped it all afternoon, so caught up in the rhythm of destruction we never even stopped for a drink from the hose, but we couldn’t help but look guilty now—you always do when the client catches you on your rear end. I introduced her to Greg, who didn’t bother to get up.

  “I’m very pleased to meet you,” she said, and Greg just grunted in return, already tucking a cookie inside his cheek. I passed on the cookies myself, and the milk too—I was beginning to resent being reduced to a figure in some crazy composition. She smiled at me, though, a full-on interplanetary dreamer’s smile that really made me wonder if there was anyone home, at least for that instant, and then she turned back to Greg. “You’re, uh, how can I put this?” she murmured, studying his deeply tanned face and arms. “You’re not Mexican, by any chance, are you?”

  Greg looked surprised and maybe a bit shocked too—she might as well have asked him if he was a Zulu. He gave me a quick glance, then shifted his gaze to Moira. “My last name’s Sorenson,” he said, struggling to keep his voice under control, and he took off his cap to show her the blond highlights in his hair. He replaced the cap indignantly and held out his arms. “I’m a surfer,” he said, “every chance I get. This is what’s known as a tan.”

  I watched the sun touch her hair as she straightened up with the tray and struggl
ed with her smile. She must bleach her hair, I was thinking, because nobody under seventy has hair that white—and it was amazing hair, white right on through to the scalp, sheep-white, bone-white, paper-white—when she squared her shoulders and looked down at Greg as if he were some panting animal she’d discovered in a cage at the zoo. “Well, that’s nice,” she said finally. “Very nice. It’s a nice sport. Will you be working here long? For us, I mean?”

  “We’ll be done this time tomorrow, Moira,” I said, cutting in before Greg could say something I might wind up regretting. “We’ve just got to rake out the lawn—the dirt, that is—for the blacktop guy, and take out the rest of the pittosporum under the tea tree. Walt Tremaine and his people are going to need two more days.”

  Moira wavered on the cusp of this news, the gauzy beekeeper’s outfit inflating with a sudden breath of wind. She held the tray of milk and cookies rigidly before her, and I noticed her hands for the first time, a young woman’s hands, sleek and unlined, the fingernails heavily enameled in cake-frosting white. “Vincent,” she said after a moment, raising her voice to be heard over the dopplering whine of the shredder out on the street, “could I have a word with you in private?” She moved off then without waiting for an answer, and I was left to push myself up and tag after her, like the hired help I was.

  We’d marched forty feet across the ravaged yard before she turned to me. “This Sorenson,” she said. “Your associate?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I presume he’s just casual labor?”

  I nodded.

  She glanced up toward the house and I followed her line of sight to one of the second-story windows. Caitlin was there, in her funereal black, looking down on the wreckage of the yard with a fixed stare. “I don’t want to put you out, Vincent,” Moira was saying, and she was still staring up at the image of her sister, “but couldn’t you find someone a little less sallow for tomorrow?”

  There wouldn’t be any gardening going on around here for some time to come, and I didn’t really have to kowtow to this woman anymore—or humor her either—but I went along with her just the same. Call it a reflex. “Sure,” I said, and I had to keep myself from tipping my hat. “No problem.”

  —

  A week later the yard was an empty parking lot surrounded by a ten-foot-high clapboard fence (whitewashed, of course). From inside you couldn’t see a trace of green anywhere—or yellow, red, pink or tangerine, for that matter. I wondered how they felt, Moira and her sweet sad sister, when they stepped outside on their perfectly contoured blacktop plateau and looked up into the airy blue reaches of the sky with that persistent golden sun hanging in the middle of it. Disappointed? Frustrated? Sorry God hadn’t made us all as color-blind as dogs? Maybe they ought to just go ahead and dome the place—sure, just like a baseball stadium, and they could paint the underside of the thing Arctic white. Or avoid daylight altogether. A good starlit night wouldn’t interfere with the scheme at all.

  Do I sound bitter? I was bitter—and disgusted with myself for being party to the whole fiasco. It was so negative, so final, so life-quenching and drab. Moira was sick, and her heart and mind must have been as black as her sister’s dresses, but Caitlin—I couldn’t believe she was that far gone. Not after the day we’d spent drinking beer and reminiscing or the way she smiled at me and spoke my name, my real name, and not some bughouse invention (and who was Vincent, I’d like to know?). No, there was feeling there, I was sure of it, and sensitivity and sweetness too. And need. A whole lot of need. That was why I found myself slowing outside their fence as I came and went from one job or another, hoping to catch a glimpse of Caitlin backing her Mercedes out into the street or collecting the mail, but all I ever saw was the blank white field of the fence.

  Then, early one evening as I lay soaking in the tub, trying to scrub the deep verdigris stains of Miracle-Gro off my hands and forearms, the phone rang. I got to it, dripping, on the fifth ring. Caitlin was on the other end. “Larry,” she said, “hi. Listen,” she said, her voice soft and breathy, “I kind of miss you, I mean, not seeing you around. I’d like to offer you a beer sometime—”

  “Be right over,” I said.

  It was high summer and still light out when I got there, the streets bathed in a soft, milky luminescence, swallowtails leaping in the air, bougainvillea, hibiscus, Euryops and oleander blazing against the fall of night. I’d automatically thrown on a pair of black jeans and an unadorned white T-shirt, but as I was going out the door I reached in the coat closet and pulled out a kelly-green sport coat I’d bought for St. Patrick’s Day one year, the sort of thing you regret having spent good money on the minute the last beer is drained and the fiddler stops fiddling. But by my lights, what Caitlin needed was a little color in her life, and I was the man to give it to her. I stopped by the florist’s on my way and got her a dozen long-stemmed roses, and I didn’t look twice at the white ones. No, the roses I picked were as deep and true as everything worth living for, red roses, bright red roses, roses that flowed up out of their verdant stems like blood from an open artery.

  I punched in the code at the gate and wheeled my pickup into the vast parking lot that was their yard and parked beside the front steps (the color of my truck, incidentally, is white, albeit a beat-up, battered and very dirty shade of it). Anyway, I climbed out of my white truck in my black jeans, white shirt and kelly-green jacket and moved across the blacktop and up the white steps with the blood-red roses clutched under one arm.

  Caitlin answered the door. “Larry,” she murmured, letting her eyes stray from my face to the jacket and back again, “I’m glad you could come. Did you eat yet?”

  I had. A slime burger, death fries and a side dish of fermented slaw at the local greasy spoon. I could have lied, trying to hold the picture of her whipping up a mud pie or blackened sole with mashed potatoes or black beans, but food wasn’t what I’d come for. “Yeah,” I said, “on my way home from work. Why? You want to go out?”

  We were in the front hall now, in a black-and-white world, no shade of gray even, the checkered tiles gleaming, ebony chairs, a lacquered Japanese cabinet. She gave me her black-lipped smile. “Me?” she said. “Uh-uh. No. I don’t want to go out.” A pause. “I want to go to bed.”

  In bed, after I discovered she was black and white without her clothes on too, we sipped stout and porter and contemplated the scintillating roses, set in a white vase against a white wall like a trompe l’oeil. And we talked. Talked about love and need and loss, talked about the world and its tastes and colors, and talked round and round the one subject that stood between us. We’d become very close for the second time and were lying in each other’s arms, all the black lipstick kissed off her, when I came back to the question I’d posed in the kitchen the last time we’d talked. “So,” I said. “Okay. It’s a long story, but the night’s long too, and I tell you, I don’t feel the least bit sleepy. Come on, the black and white. Tell me.”

  It would make a better story if there was some sort of “Rose for Emily” thing going on, if Moira had been left at the altar in her white satin and veil or seduced and abandoned by some neon hippie in an iridescent pink shirt and tie-dyed jacket, but that wasn’t it at all. She was just depressed. Afraid of the world. In need of control. “But what about you?” I said, searching Caitlin’s eyes. “You feel that way too?”

  We were naked, in each other’s arms, stretched the length of the bed. She shrugged. “Sort of,” she said. “When we were girls, before we moved to New York, Moira and I used to watch TV, everything in black and white, Fred MacMurray, Donna Reed, Father Knows Best, and we had a game, a competition really, to see who could make her room like that, like the world of those shows, where everything turned out right in the end. I wanted white, but Moira was older, so I got black.”

  There was more, but the next line—“Our parents didn’t like it, of course”—didn’t come from Caitlin, but her sister. Maybe I’d closed my eyes
a minute, I don’t know, but suddenly there she was, all in white and perched at the end of the bed. Her mouth was drawn up in a little bow, as if the whole scene was distasteful to her, but she looked at me without blinking. “In New York, everything was pink, chiffon and lace, peach, champagne, the pink of little girls and blushing maidens. That was what Daddy wanted—and his wife too. Little girls. Normal, sweet, curtsying and respectfully whispering little girls who’d climb up into his lap for a bedtime story. I was sixteen at the time, Vincent; Caitlin was fourteen. Can you see? Can you?”

  I pulled the black sheets up to my hips, trying to calm the pounding in my chest. This was an unusual situation, to say the least—as I say, I’d been around, but this was out of my league altogether. I wanted to say something, but I couldn’t for the life of me guess what that might be. My right arm lay under the luxurious weight of Caitlin’s shoulders; I gave them a squeeze to reassure myself.

  “Oh, it’s nothing like that, Larry,” Caitlin said, anticipating me. “Nothing dirty. But Daddy wanted an end to black and white, and we—we didn’t. Did we, Moira?”

  Moira was staring off across the room to where the night hung in the windows, absolute and unadulterated. “No, Caitly, we didn’t. And we showed them, didn’t we?”

  I felt Caitlin tense beside me. I wanted nothing in that moment but to leap up out of the bed, pull the ridiculous green jacket over my head and sprint for my truck. But instead I heard myself asking, “How?”

  Both sisters laughed then, a low rasping laugh caught deep in their throats, and there wasn’t a whole lot of hilarity in it. “Oh, I don’t know, Vincent,” Moira said, throwing her head back to laugh again, and then coming back to me with a hand pattering at her breast. “Let’s just say that colors can get out of hand sometimes, if you know what I mean.”

  “Fire is our friend,” Caitlin said, leaving a little hiatus after the final syllable.