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

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  For a long moment he sat there frozen, unable to move, unable to think, the laptop like a defused bomb on the seat beside him. He wanted to look again, wanted to be sure, wanted to feel the surge of shock and fear and hate pulse through him all over again, but not now, not here. He had to get home, that was all he could think. But what of the dentist? Here he was in the parking lot, staring up at the bank of windows where Dr. Sedgwick would be bent over his current patient, finishing up with the pads and the amalgam and all the rest in anticipation of his three-thirty appointment. But he couldn’t face the dentist now, couldn’t face anybody. He was punching in the dentist’s number, the excuse already forming on his lips (food poisoning, he was right out there in the lot, but he was so sick all of a sudden he didn’t think he could, or should . . . and maybe he’d better make another appointment?), when he became aware that there was someone standing there beside the car window. A girl. In her twenties. All made up and in a pair of tight blue pants of some shiny material that caught the light and held it as she bent to the door of the car next to his while another girl clicked the remote on the far side and the locks chirped in response. She didn’t look at him, not even a glance, but she was bending over to slip something off the seat, on full display, every swell and cleft and crease—inches from him, right in his face—and all at once he was so infuriated that when the dentist’s secretary answered in her bland professional tone he all but shouted into the phone, “I can’t make it. I’m sick.”

  There was a pause. Then the secretary: “Who is this? Who’s speaking, please?”

  He pictured her, a squat woman with enormous breasts who doubled as hygienist and sometimes took over the simpler procedures when Dr. Sedgwick was busy with an emergency. “Todd,” he said. “Todd Jameson?”

  Another pause. “But you’re the three-thirty—”

  “Yeah, I know, but something’s come up. I’m sick. All of a sudden, and I—” The car beside him started up, the long gleaming tube of the chassis sliding back and away from him, and there was the lawn, there were the palm trees, but all he could see was Laurie, the way her fingers stiffened on the sheets and her eyes went on gazing into the camera but didn’t register a thing.

  “Our policy is for a twenty-four hour cancellation or else we have no choice but to charge you.”

  “I’m sick. I told you.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  The moment burst on him like one of those rogue waves at the beach and he came within a hair of shouting an obscenity into the receiver but he caught himself. “I’m sorry too,” he said.

  At home, he found he was shaking so hard he could barely get the key in the door, and though he didn’t want to, though it wasn’t even four yet, he went straight to the kitchen and poured himself a shot of the tequila they kept on hand for margaritas when people came over. He didn’t bother with salt or lime but just threw it back neat and if this was the cliché—your wife has sex with another man and you go straight for the sauce—then so be it. The tequila tasted like soap. No matter. He poured another, downed it, and still he was trembling. Then he sat down at the kitchen table, opened the laptop, clicked on Rob’s e-mail and watched the video all the way through.

  This time the blow was even harsher, a quick hot jolt that seared his eyes and shot through him from his fingertips to his groin. The whole thing lasted less than sixty seconds, in medias res, and what had preceded it—disrobing, a kiss, foreplay—remained hidden. The act itself was straightforward as far as it went, no acrobatics, no oral sex, just him behind her and the rhythmic swaying that was as earnest and inevitable as when any two mammals went at it. Dogs. Apes. Husbands and wives. At the moment of release, she looked back at the guy doing it to her and as if at a signal rolled over and here were his knees in the frame now and his torso looming as he covered her with his own body and they kissed, their two heads bobbing briefly in the foreground before the screen went dark. The second time through, details began to emerge. The setting, for one thing. Clearly, it was a dorm room—there was the generic desk to the left of the bed, a stack of books, the swivel chair with the ghosts of their uninhabited clothes thrown over it, Levi’s, a belt buckle, the silken sheen of her panties. And Laurie. This was Laurie before she’d cut her hair, before her implants, before he’d even met her. Laurie in college. Fucking.

  The tequila burned in his stomach. There was no sound but for the hum of the refrigerator as it started up and clicked off again. Very gradually, the light began to swell round him as the sun searched through the haze to fill the kitchen and infuse the walls with color—a cheery daffodil yellow, the shade she’d picked out when they bought the condo two years ago on her twenty-ninth birthday. “This is the best birthday present I ever had,” she’d said, her voice soft and steady, and she’d leaned in to kiss him in the lifeless office where the escrow woman sat behind her block-like desk and took their signatures on one form after another as if she’d been made of steel and they’d run out of movable parts.

  They’d celebrated that night with a bottle of champagne and dinner out and sex in their old apartment on their old bed that had come from Goodwill in a time when neither of them had a steady job. He looked round the room now—the most familiar room in the world, the place where they had breakfast together and dinner most nights, sharing the cooking and the TV news and a bottle of wine—and it seemed alien to him, as if he’d been snatched out of his life and set down here in this over-bright echoing space with its view of blacktop and wires and the inescapable palm with its ascending pineapple ridges and ragged wind-blown fronds.

  The next thing he knew it was five o’clock and he heard her key turn in the lock and the faint sigh of the door as she pushed it shut behind her and then the drumbeat of her heels on the glazed Saltillo tile in the front hall. “Todd?” she called. “Todd, you home?” He felt his jaws clench. He didn’t answer. Her footsteps came down the hall, beating, beating. “Todd?”

  He liked her in heels. Had liked her in heels, that is. She was a surgical nurse, working for a pair of plastic surgeons who’d partnered to open the San Roque Aesthetics Institute five years back, and she changed to flats while assisting at surgery but otherwise wore heels to show off her legs beneath the short skirts and calibrated tops she wore when consulting with prospective patients. “Advertising,” she called it. The breast implants—about which he’d been very vocal and very pleased—had come at a discount.

  He was still at the table when she walked into the kitchen, the bottle on the counter, the shot glass beside him, the laptop just barely cracked. “What’s this?” she said, lifting the bottle from the counter and giving it a shake. “You’re drinking?” She came across the room to him, laid a hand on his shoulder and ran it up the back of his neck, then bent forward to lift the empty glass to her nose and take a theatrical sniff.

  “Yeah,” he said, but he didn’t lift his eyes.

  “That’s not like you. Tough day?”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “Well, if you’re partying”—and here her voice fluted above him, light and facetious, as if the world were still on its track and nothing had changed—“then I hope you won’t mind if I pour myself a glass of wine. Do we have any wine left?” Her hand dropped away and he felt a chill on the back of his neck where her palm had been. He heard her heels tapping like typewriter keys, then the wheeze of the vacuum seal on the refrigerator door, the cabinet working on its hinges, the sharp clink as the base of the wine glass came into contact with the granite counter, and finally the raucous celebratory splash of the wine. Still he didn’t look up. Her attitude—this sunniness, this self-possession, this blindness and blandness and business-as-usual crap—savaged him. Didn’t she know what was coming? Couldn’t she feel it the way animals do just before an earthquake strikes?

  “That guy you used to date in college,” he said, his voice choked in his throat, “what was his name?”

  He looked up now and she
was poised there at the counter, leaning back into it, the glass of wine—sauvignon blanc, filled to the top—glowing with reflected light. She let out a little laugh. “What brought that up?”

  “What color hair did he have? Was it short, long, what?”

  “Jared,” she said, her eyes gone distant a moment. “Jared Reed. From New Joisey.” She lifted the glass to her lips, took a sip, the gold chain she wore at her throat picking up the light now too. She was wearing a blue silk blouse open to the third button down. She put a hand there, to her collarbone. Sipped again. “I don’t know,” she said. “Brown. Black maybe? He wore it short, like Justin Timberlake. But why? Don’t tell me you’re jealous”—the facetious note again when all he could think of was leaping up from the table and slapping every shred of facetiousness out of her—“after all these years? Is that it? I mean, what do you care?”

  “Rob sent me a video today.”

  “Rob?”

  “My brother. Remember my brother? Rob?” His voice got away from him. He hadn’t meant to shout, hadn’t meant to be accusatory or confrontational—he just wanted answers, that was all.

  She said nothing. Her face was cold, her eyes colder still.

  “Maybe”—and here he flipped open the laptop—“maybe you ought to have a look at it and then you tell me what it is.” He was up out of the chair now, the tequila pitching him forward, and he didn’t care about the look on her face or the way she cradled the wine and held out her hands to him and he didn’t touch her—wouldn’t touch her, wouldn’t touch her ever again. The kitchen door was a slab of nothing, but it slammed behind him and the whole house shook under the weight of it.

  —

  Later, as faces wheeled round him and the flat-screen TV behind the bar blinked and shifted over the game that was utterly meaningless to him now, he had the leisure to let his mind go free. School didn’t exist—lesson plans, papers to grade, none of it. Laurie didn’t exist either. And Jared Reed was just a ghost. And whether he had brown hair or black or muscles on top of muscles or a dick two feet long, it didn’t matter because he was just a ghost on a screen. Nothing. He was nothing. Less than nothing.

  But here was the bartender (thirties, with a haircut like Rob’s and dressed in a cowboy shirt with embroidery round the pockets like icing on a cake) looming over him with the Jameson bottle held aloft. “Yeah,” he said, and he would have clarified by adding, Hit me again, but that would have been too much like being in a movie, a bad movie, bad and sad and pathetic. He wasn’t a drinker, not really, and he hadn’t wanted the tequila except that it was there because they didn’t keep anything in the house beyond that and a couple bottles of wine they got when it was on sale, but when they went out, he always ordered Jameson. Jameson was all he ever drank, aside from maybe a beer chaser, which he wasn’t having tonight, definitely wasn’t having. Rob drank it too. And their father, when he was alive. It was a family tradition, and how many times had they sat at dinner when they were kids and their father would say, Just wait till old man Jameson kicks off, then we’ll be rich, and they would chime, Who’s Jameson?, and he’d say, Who’s Jameson? The Whiskey King, of course. And their mother: Don’t hold your breath.

  And then the drink was there and he was sipping it, thinking of the last thing Rob had sent him as an attachment, and when was it? A week ago? Two? It was an article he’d downloaded from some obscure Web site and he’d forwarded it under the heading Look What Our Glorious Ancestor Was Up To. The ancestor in question—if he was an ancestor, of course, and there was the joke—was James Jameson, heir to the whiskey fortune. In 1888 Jameson was thirty-one years old, same age as Todd was now, and he was a wastrel and an adventurer, and because he was limp with boredom and had done all the damage he could in the clubs and parlors of Ireland, England and the Continent, he signed on for an African expedition under Henry Morton Stanley, of Livingston fame. They were in the Congo, in the heart of the heart of darkness, stuck on some river Todd had forgotten the name of though he’d read through the article over and over with a kind of sick fascination—stuck there and going nowhere. One morning when Stanley was away from camp, Jameson got the idea that he might like to visit one of the cannibal tribes to see how they went about their business and make a record of it in his sketchbook. From the beginning of the expedition, he’d made detailed drawings of tribesmen, game animals, the erratic vegetation and crude villages scattered along the banks of the rivers, and now he was going to draw cannibals. At work. For six handkerchiefs—not a dozen or two dozen, just six—he bought a ten-year-old slave girl and gave her as a gift to the cannibals, then sat there on a stump or maybe a camp chair, one leg crossed over the other, and focused his concentration. He drew the figure of the girl as she was stripped and bound to a tree, drew her as the knife went in under the breastbone and sliced downward. She never struggled or pleaded or cried out but just stood there bearing it all till her legs gave way and he drew that too, his hand flashing and the pencil growing duller while the mosquitoes hummed and the smoke of the cookfire rose greasily through the overhanging leaves.

  Was there a theme here? Was he missing something? Laurie had run out the door shouting, You don’t own me! as he’d backed the car out of the drive, the window up and the motor racing. And Rob had sent him the video. And the article too. Just then, a groan went up from a booth in the corner behind him and he glanced vaguely at the TV before digging out his phone and hitting Rob’s number. The referee on the screen waved his arms, music pounded, the bottles behind the bar glittered in all their facets. He got a recording. The message box was full.

  The strangest thing, the worst thing, had been those first few minutes when he had to struggle with himself to keep from bulling his way back into the kitchen to see the look on her face, to see her shame, to see tears. He’d slammed the door so hard the cheap windows vibrated in their cheap frames and one of Laurie’s pictures—the silhouette of a couple on a moonlit beach he’d always hated—crashed to the floor, glass shattering on the tiles. He didn’t stoop to clean it up. Didn’t move, not even to shift his feet. He just stood there rigid on the other side of the door, picturing her bent over the screen, her face stricken, the wine gone sour in her throat. But then the thought came to him that maybe she liked it, maybe it turned her on, maybe she was proud of it, and that froze him inside.

  When she did come through the door—and she’d had enough time to watch the thing three or four times over—she didn’t look contrite or aroused or whatever else he’d expected, only angry. “Jared is such an asshole,” she hissed, glaring at him. “And so’s your brother, so’s Rob. What was he thinking?”

  “What was he thinking? What were you thinking? You’re the one on the sex tape.”

  “So? So what? Did you think I was a virgin when we got married?”

  “You tell me—how many men did you have? Fifty? A hundred?”

  “How many women did you have?”

  “I’m not the one putting out sex tapes.”

  She stood her ground, tall on her heels, her face flushed and her arms folded defensively across her chest. “You want to know something—you’re an asshole too.”

  If ever he was going to hit her, here was the moment. He took a step toward her. She never even flinched.

  “Listen, Todd, I swear I didn’t know that creep was making a video—he must have had a hidden camera going or something, I don’t know. I was in college. He was my boyfriend.”

  “What about the lights?”

  She shrugged. An abortive smile flickered across her lips. “He always liked to do it with the lights on. He said it was sexier that way. He was an artist, I told you that, really visual—”

  Everybody had past lovers, of course they did, but they were conveniently reduced to shadows, memories, a photo or two, not this, not this hurtful flashing resurrection in the flesh, the past come home in living color. An artist. All he knew was that he hated her in that mome
nt.

  “How was I to know? Really, I’m sorry, I am. To put that online—where’s it posted, even?—I mean, it’s really disgusting and stupid. He’s a shit, a real shit.”

  “You’re the shit,” he said. “You’re disgusting.”

  “I can’t believe you. I mean, really—what does it have to do with you?”

  “You’re my wife.”

  “It’s my body.”

  “Yeah? Well you can have it. I’m out of here.”

  And that was when she chased him down the drive and put on a show for the neighbors, her voice honed to a shriek like something out of the bell of an instrument, a clarinet, an oboe, abuse of the reed, the pads: You don’t own me!

  —

  It was getting late. The game was over, long over, and he was sitting there in a kind of delirium, waiting for his phone to ring, waiting for Rob—or maybe her, maybe she’d call and pour her soul out to him and they could go back to the way they were before—when he noticed the couple sitting at the end of the bar. They were kissing, long and slow, clinging fast to each other as if they were out in a windstorm, as if all the contravening forces of the universe were trying to tear them apart, two untouched drinks standing sentinel on the bar before them and the bartender in his cowboy shirt steering round them as he poured and wiped and polished. The girl’s arms were bare, her jacket—blue suede, with a fake-fur collar—draped over the chair behind her. He couldn’t see her face, only the back of her head, her shoulders, her arms, beautiful arms, stunning actually, every muscle and tendon gently flexed to hold her lover to her, and he looked till he had to look away.