World's End

by T. C. Boyle

  It wasn’t another woman, but she almost wished it were. At least then she would know what she was up against. As things stood now, she didn’t know what had gone wrong, but she had only to look into Truman’s eyes to know it was bad. For the past few nights he’d been “unwinding” after work at one of the local taphouses, lurching in at midnight with wild eyes and volatile breath, distant as an alien dropped from another world into the bed beside her. Unwinding. Yes. But before that—through the whole course of that blighted summer—he’d grown so strange and self-absorbed she hardly recognized him. Each night he would drag himself back from the foundry, his face set, hardened, all the sympathy driven out of it. He’d duck away from her embrace, spin Walter in the air and pour himself a drink. Then he’d sit down at the desk, pull open his notebook and lose himself until dinner. “How was work?” she’d ask. “Okay if we have green beans again for a vegetable? Have the Martians landed yet?” Nothing. No response. He was a monk of the sacred texts, he was carved of stone. After dinner he would read his bewildered son a chapter of Diedrich Knickerbocker’s History of New York, his voice toneless and dull, and then it was back to the books. Sometimes, even on work nights, she’d wake at one or two in the morning and there he’d be, reading, underlining, making notes, his whole being caught up in the page.

  “You’re working too hard,” she told him.

  He looked up at her like a beast surprised over its prey, the book spread open in his lap as if it were the thing he’d stalked and killed, the bloody meat he was gnawing in the refuge of his den. “Not hard enough,” he growled.

  At first she’d been sympathetic. She kept telling herself that there was nothing wrong, that he was under too much pressure, that was all. Working a forty-hour week, commuting to the City for his final courses in education and history, attending party meetings, maintaining the car, the yard, the house, and on top of it all trying to research and write a senior thesis in the space of ten short weeks: it was enough to put anyone off track. But as the summer progressed and he became increasingly withdrawn, unloving, single-minded and hostile, she began to realize that she was fooling herself, that the problem went deeper than she dared guess. Something outside of him, something poisonous and irrevocable, was transforming him. He was hardening himself. He was driving a wedge between them. He was slipping away from her.

  It had begun in June, when Sasha Freeman and Morton Blum announced the party’s plans for a rally in Peterskill and Truman had started on his final project at City College, the senior thesis. Truman chose an obscure episode of local history for his paper—Christina had never even heard of it—and he set to work with all the monomaniacal concentration of a Gibbon chronicling the decline of Rome. Suddenly there was no time for dinner with Hesh and Lola, no time for cards, a drive-in movie, no time to take Walter out on the river or to throw him a ball in the cool of the evening. There was no time for sex either. He’d work half the night, frowning in the puddle of light the lamp threw over his desk, and he’d come to bed like a man with an arrow through his back. The door would creak on its hinges, he’d take three steps and he’d fling himself forward, asleep before he hit the bed. On Saturdays and Sundays, all day, he was at the library. She tried to reason with him. “Truman,” she pleaded as he jotted notes or tossed one book down to snatch up another, “you’re not writing the history of Western civilization; give yourself a break, slow down. Truman!” her voice rising to a shout, “it’s only a term paper!”

  He never even bothered to answer.

  And what was he writing? What was he killing himself over, night and day, till his wife felt like a widow and his son barely recognized him? She took a look one afternoon. One flawless sunstruck afternoon when Truman was at the plant and Walter sat smearing pea soup into his shirt. She was hauling out the kitchen trash, arms laden with two bursting bags of bones and peels and coffee grounds, when suddenly there it was, the focus of the room, the house, the city, the county, the world itself: there, in the center of his desk, lay the battered manila folder that never left his sight except when he was stretched out unconscious on the bed or punching the clock for the bosses down at the foundry. It was a magnet, a ne plus ultra and a sine qua non. She picked it up.

  Inside, in a wad thick as the phone directory, were hundreds of pages of lined yellow paper covered with the jerking loops and slashes of his tiny cramped script. Manorial Revolt: The Crane/Mohonk Conspiracy, she read, by Truman H. Van Brunt. She flipped the page. “The history of Van Wart Manor is a history of oppression, betrayal and deceit, a black mark in the annals of colonial settlement. …” The style was wild, cliché-ridden, declamatory and passionate—hysterical, even. It was like no history she’d ever read. If she hadn’t known better, she would have thought the author personally involved, the victim of some terrible injustice or false accusation. She read five pages and put it down. Was this it? Was this what had taken hold of him?

  She had her answer three weeks later.

  It was a Saturday afternoon, a week before the concert. The course was done, the paper finished (at two hundred fifty-seven closely typed pages it was five times the length of any other submitted that semester), the degree awarded. They took the train back from the graduation ceremony and she pressed close to Truman in the gently swaying coach, thinking Now. Now we can breathe. It was late in the day when they got back to the house. Truman crossed the room and sat heavily at his desk, still dressed in cap and gown—the rented cap and gown he obstinately refused to return—the sweat seeping through the heavy black muslin in dark fists and slashing crescents. “Let’s celebrate,” she said. “We’ll pick up Walter and we’ll go out someplace for dinner—someplace nice. Just the three of us.”

  He was staring into the trees. He didn’t look like a man who’d just crowned three years of hard work with a supreme and enduring triumph—he looked like a thief about to be led off to the gallows.

  “Truman?”

  He brought his face around slowly, and his eyes were strange with that shifting vacant gaze she’d come to recognize over the past few weeks. “I’ve got to go out,” he said, glancing away again. “With Piet. I’ve got to help Piet with his car.”

  “Piet?” She threw the name back at him like a curse. “Piet?” She could see him, Piet, as pale as a hairless little grub, an ineradicable smirk on his face. “What about me? What about your son? Do you realize we haven’t done anything as a family for what—months now?”

  He only shrugged. His upper lip trembled, as if he were fighting back a wicked leering little smile that said Yes, yes, I’m guilty, I’m a shit, abuse me, hate me, divorce me. He couldn’t hold her eyes.

  They’d been married nearly four years—didn’t that mean anything to him? What was wrong? What happened to the man she’d fallen in love with, the daredevil with the quick smile who’d flown under the Bear Mountain Bridge and swept her off her feet?

  He didn’t know. He was tired, that was all. He didn’t want to argue.

  “Look at me,” she said, seizing him by the arms as he rose to go, the coarse fabric of the gown bunching under her fists. “You’re seeing someone else, aren’t you?” Her voice rose to a lacerating wail that filled her head till she thought it would burst. “Aren’t you?”

  She knew in that instant that she was wrong, and the knowledge crumpled her like a balled-up sheet of foil. It wasn’t another woman. It wasn’t the Crane/Mohonk conspiracy or the forty hours a week at the foundry either. She was looking into the depths of him and what she saw there was as final and irrevocable as the drop of a guillotine: he was already gone.

  The paper was done, and now he had the cap and gown, artifacts of his accomplishment. He slept in them through the remainder of that week, wore them to work, fluttered into Outhouse’s Tavern like the scholar-gypsy, the mortarboard raked back on his head as if it had fallen out of the sky and miraculously lighted there. She saw him in the soft light of morning as he pulled on his steel-toed boots, and she saw him silhouetted against the harsh yellow
lamp in the living room as he staggered in at night: that week, that dismal fractured week that began with his commencement and ended with the concert, he didn’t spend a single evening at home.

  She remonstrated at dawn, pleaded at midnight, spat out her fury and despair through the small hours of the morning. He was impervious. He lay in bed, drunk, the tattered gown wound around his legs, the breath whistling through his lips. At the sound of the alarm, he started up out of bed, fumbled into his boots and staggered out the door—without coffee, without cornflakes, without a hello or goodbye. And so it went until Saturday, the day of the concert. On that mild and fateful morning, Truman was up at first light, grinning wildly at her, spouting one-liners like a desperate comedian up against an immovable audience. He whipped up a batch of pancakes, fried eggs and sausages, clowned around the kitchen for Walter with a colander on his head. Could it be all right after all? she wondered. The pancakes were on the table, Walter was giggling at his silly Daddy, Christina smiled for the first time in a week, and Truman, leering like a court jester, like a zany, like a madman pressed to the bars of his cage, tore the ragged academic gown from his back and sent it hurtling across the room and into the wastebasket in a high arcing jump shot. Then, with a wink, he disappeared into the bedroom and returned a moment later in a sparkling pristine polo shirt—a shirt she’d never seen before, a miracle of a shirt—still creased with newness and striped in glorious bands of red, white and blue.

  Walter went off with his grandparents to spend the day amidst the fascinating fishes of the Hudson, while Truman and Hesh loaded the sound equipment into the back of Hesh’s Plymouth and Christina made sandwiches, cookies, a thermos of iced tea. Was she humming to herself? Smiling over her private thoughts? She’d seen it in his eyes, seen that he was dead to her inside, and she didn’t want to believe it. She wanted to believe that this morning of the concert was a new beginning, radiant and propitious. He was recovering, coming back to her—it had been the pressure after all, and now it was over. He’d got his degree, worn his robe to tatters. So what if he’d been out letting off steam? It was only natural.

  Wrapping sandwiches, she thought of the concert of the year before, at the pavilion in the Colony, when they’d sat on a blanket in the grass, holding hands, Walter asleep beside them. Robeson sang “Go Down, Moses,” he sang “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” and something from Handel’s “Messiah,” and she slid into the cradle of Truman’s arms and closed her eyes to let the great deep thrumming voice quaver on the sounding board of her body. There was no Piet then, no manila folder, no Crane/Mohonk conspiracy. There was only Truman, her husband, the man with a smile for the world, the athlete, the scholar, the party acolyte and hero—only Truman, and her.

  And then the morning was gone and she was collating the pages of her pamphlets and thinking how maybe next weekend they could go up to Rhinebeck or someplace—just to get away for a couple of days. They could stay at that old inn on the river, and maybe go sailing or horseback riding. Her fingers were ink-stained. It was three o’clock, four. She was sitting by the window and listening to the radio, waiting for her husband and Hesh to get back from their last-minute conference with Sasha Freeman and Morton Blum, when she glanced up to see Hesh’s Gillette-blue Plymouth swing into the driveway. She was out the door, picnic basket in one hand, A&P bag of literature in the other, before the car rolled to a stop. “Hey,” she was about to call out, “I was beginning to think you forgot all about me,” but she caught herself. For at that moment, with fear and loathing and a sinking sense of defeat, she saw that they were not alone. There, perched between them like a ventriloquist’s dummy, his naked little hands braced against the dashboard and his face locked in a mad evil sneer of triumph, was Piet.

  When she looked back on that night, the night that broke her life in two, she saw faces. Piet’s face, as it was in the car, insinuated in some unspeakable way between her husband and herself. Truman’s face, turned away from her, hard and unsmiling. Hesh’s face: bluff, honest, opened wide to her as she slipped into the seat beside him, numb and composed for death as he lay unconscious on the scuffed pine boards of the stage while the criminals and brownshirts howled like demons in the dark. And then there were the faces of the mob itself: the rabid women thumbing their noses, eyes popping with hate; the boy who’d leaned forward to spit on the windshield; a man she recognized from the butcher shop in Peterskill who’d bared his teeth like a dog, cupped his genitals in both hands and then clasped the crook of his arm in the universal gesture of defiance and contempt. A day passed, two, three, four, a week, a month, and still she saw them. Though she struggled to escape them, though she shut her eyes fast, paced the floor, fought for sleep, those faces haunted her. They were there, ugly and undeniable, when she started up in the morning from the fitful sleep that overtook her at first light, they were there in the afternoon as she sat sobbing on the davenport, and in the maw of the night when the dark conjured its images. These were her ghosts, this her attack of history.

  It began in the deeps of that first night, when the nervous phone calls had ceased and Hesh’s blood had dried to a crust on the sleeve of her blouse, when she’d got to the end of the list of hospitals in the Westchester-Putnam phone book and found that none had admitted a bleeding athlete with hair the color of tarnished copper and a torn polo shirt, when she pictured him lying unconscious in a ditch or crawling home like a dog struck down on the highway. She sat by the phone, listless, the eyes sunk back in her head, willing him to call. He didn’t call. The night held on, tenacious, implacable. From the back room came the arhythmic click and scrape of Walter’s teeth, grinding, bone on bone. And then, caught in the window, hovering over the coleus, peering out from behind the radio console, the faces began to show themselves. Piet’s face, Truman’s, Hesh’s, the twisted feral mug of the man from the butcher shop.

  The next day Lola sat beside her through the never-ending morning, the unendurable afternoon and the starless night that fell on her like a curse. Don’t worry, Lola said, her voice dabbing at the wounds, he’ll turn up. He’s safe, I know it. For all they knew he could have gotten away to the City with a carload of concertgoers or doubled back to Piet’s place in Peterskill. He’ll call, she said, any minute now. Any minute.

  She was wrong. Soothing, but wrong. He didn’t call. Hesh beat the bushes and Hesh found nothing. Lola wanted to know if she could get her a sleeping pill. It was 11:00 P.M. No one had seen or heard from Truman in twenty-seven hours. Scotch? Vodka? Gin?

  Then it was Monday, early—seven, eight, she didn’t know. Lola was standing behind the counter at the van der Meulen bakery and Hesh, his arms rough with scab and his face ripened like a fruit, was on his way to Sollovay’s Auto Glass and Mirror on Houston Street. That was when he walked in. She hadn’t slept in fifty hours and she was seeing faces, Walter was wound up like a dervish in his private three-year-old’s dance of denial and trauma, the trash was overflowing, the larder empty, her mother rushing back from a vacation in Vermont to be with her in that bankrupt hour, and he walked in the door.

  He was limping. He was drunk. There was a dark punished bruise beneath his left eye, his ear was bandaged and he was wearing the same clothes he’d worn to the concert, dirty now, torn, steeped in blood. What was there to say? We were worried sick, where were you, did they hurt you, I’m so glad, we’re so glad, Walter, look, look who’s come home. She was up off the davenport and rushing to him, Walter at her side, leaping to the familial embrace, tears of gratitude, Odysseus home from the wars, unfurl the banners, sound the horns, lights, camera…but he was numb to their touch. In the next moment he shoved past them, shielding his face like a gangster outside the courthouse, and then he was in the bedroom, the suitcase gaping open on the bed like a set of jaws.

  “What are you doing?” She was on him now, tugging at his arm. “Truman, what is it? Talk to me! Truman!” Beneath her, clinging to his father’s legs, Walter kept up a steady dirge, “Daddy, daddy, daddy.”

  Noth
ing could touch him. He shrugged her off as he’d shrugged off tacklers in the years of his glory, single-minded and heedless, plunging for the goal line. Books, clothes, his notes, the manuscript: the house was on fire, the woods were burning. “I’m sorry,” he whispered, his lip quivering with that sick betrayer’s grin—she didn’t exist, Walter was invisible—and then he was on his way out the door.

  Outside, the car. The Buick. They said later it was Van Wart’s car, but how would she know? It was black, long, funereal. She’d never seen it before. “Truman!” She was at the door, she was on the stoop. “Talk to me!” He wouldn’t talk, wouldn’t even look at her. He flung the suitcase in back and sprang into the driver’s seat like a hunted man, and then the car jerked into gear and lurched back down the driveway. She stood there, stricken immobile, and in that moment, through the sad slow dance of light on the windshield, she caught her final glimpse of him. Jaw set, eyes dead, he never even turned his head.

  But Truman didn’t leave her without a valediction of sorts. As the car swerved to the left on Kitchawank Road, presenting her with the long gleaming plane of the passenger side, Piet suddenly appeared at the open window, sprung up like a toadstool from the sunless depths of the interior. He turned to her, slow as clockwork, and lifted his pale cupped child’s hand in the least and smallest wave.

  Bye-bye.

  When Anna Alving swung into the driveway it was just past two in the afternoon and her hands were trembling on the wheel. She’d left the rented cottage on Lake St. Catherine at seven that morning, her husband following in the second car. They stopped for lunch somewhere outside Hudson (Magnus so preoccupied with his vanishing son-in-law he barely touched his tuna on rye, and she so wrought up she had six cups of coffee with her danish) and then set off again in tandem. The Chevrolet was a racehorse compared to Magnus’ creeping Nash, and though she tried to hang back and keep him in sight, by the time they reached Claverack the rear-view mirror showed nothing but blacktop. She thought about pulling over to wait for him, but the grip of emergency tightened on her, and her foot went to the floor. Mama, her daughter’s voice came to her as it had on the phone the night before, Mama, he’s gone, and she took the curves in a headlong rush that savaged her tires and nearly jerked the steering wheel from her hands. Now, as she pulled up to the silent bungalow, the bungalow that sat newly painted in a lattice of leaf-thrown shadow, looking placid, normal, staid, she loosened her grip on the wheel and cut the ignition. She sat there a moment, listening to the ticks and groans of the dying engine, gathering up her purse and composing her face. Then she started up the front steps.