by T. C. Boyle
Walter’s face had initially registered the shock of seeing her, and then, as she came up to them, he uttered his heavy-lidded and sheepish greeting, with all its conciliatory freight, and he’d looked open, hopeful, truly and ingenuously pleased. Now, as her words sank in, his expression hardened, all the emotion chiseled away, until at last he wore the perfect unassailable mask of the outcast, the cold of eye and hard of heart, the man who feels nothing. He began to say something, but caught himself.
“It’s been so long,” Jessica said, softening. “We—Tom and I—thought about you, wondered how you were coming along”—and here she glanced down at his feet—“and we would have called, really, but I didn’t know how you felt about it, I mean, after that last time in the hospital and all. …” She trailed off, her voice catching in her throat.
Walter was silent. Tom couldn’t look him in the eye; he tried to think about pleasant things, good things, things of the earth. Like his goat, his cabbage, his bees. “You and Tom,” Walter said finally, as if trying out the words for the first time; “you and Tom,” he repeated, and his tone had turned venomous.
Tom could feel Jessica go tense beside him; she shifted her weight suddenly and he had to snatch at the cart to keep his balance. “Yeah, that’s right,” she said, cold fury in her voice. “Tom and me. You have any objections?”
A version of “Love Me Do,” for bicycle horn and chorus, droned through hidden speakers. An elderly man, guiding his cart with the broad beam of his fallen abdomen, maneuvered his way between them and began sifting through the onions as if he were panning for gold. “Hey, Ray!” the manager barked at an invisible stockboy, “get the lead out of your pants, will ya?”
As Tom feared, Walter did have objections. He vented them nonverbally at first, clutching the cart with both hands and hammering it with his invulnerable foot till it shuddered, and then he waxed sarcastic. And rhetorical. “Objections?” he sneered. “Who, me? I’m only your husband—why should I object if you’re fucking my best friend?”
The onion sifter turned to look at them. Tom felt like an interloper. Or worse: he felt like a Lothario, a snake in the grass, and envisioned Walter’s hands at his throat, Walter’s fist in his face, Walter’s hundred and ninety footless pounds hurtling at him over the basket laden with soy grits and rice. Jessica suddenly let go of him, snatching her arm from around his waist and holding up a single searing finger: “You walked out on me,” she said between her teeth, each syllable edged with an inchoate sob.
“You walked out on me,” Walter shot back. Puffed with rage, big as cueballs, his eyes swept from Jessica to Tom and back again.
Out of the corner of his eye, Tom saw the old onion sifter jam his hands to his hips as if to say “Enough, already!” The saint, agitated enough as it was, swiveled his head to give the old fart his fiercest “fuck off” look (which admittedly wasn’t all that fierce), and when he turned back to Jessica she was stamping her feet like a flamenco dancer warming up to the beat, and tears glistened on her face. “I don’t have to take this, this”—her voice went over the top in a breathy squeak—“this shit!”
Walter stepped back then, calmly, gravely, and gave them all—Tom, Jessica, the old man with the bag of onions and the half-dozen housewives who’d lingered over the Swiss chard to eavesdrop—a look of supreme contempt. Then he nodded his head fifteen or twenty times, as if to concede the point, and wobbled out behind his cart, shuffling unsteadily down the aisle till he rounded the corner by the condiments and disappeared.
Jessica didn’t take it lightly. She felt around her for a moment as if she were blind, dabbed a damp wrist to her eyes and bolted for the exit without a word. She was sobbing when Tom, who’d left the cart behind and dashed out after her, reached the car. She sobbed as he drove, sobbed as she pressed the duffel bag crammed with still-wet laundry to her chest and made her way down the steep path from the road, through the pasture, across the footbridge and up the hill to the shack. She sobbed as Tom boiled up the last of the old rice and threw together a Bibb lettuce and zucchini salad from the garden, and she sobbed as they sat in the gathering darkness sharing a forlorn joint and two jelly jars of sour wine.
By nightfall, she’d wound down from a sporadic mewl and whimper to the regular heaving of long, stuttering, world-weary sighs. The saint of the forest was gentle, tender, awkward and clumsy. He clowned for her, joked that she should take salt tabs to replenish that vital mineral she’d extruded by the shaker-full and even (partly by design, partly by accident) fell backward over the porch railing and into the big washtub full of dirty dishwater. This last brought a rueful smile to her lips, and he poured it on, standing on his hands, balancing a broom on his nose and all the rest. She laughed. Her eyes cleared. They went to bed.
The bony saint made love to her that night, a soft, therapeutic love, and he was as careful and tentative in his lovemaking as if it were the first time. After she fell asleep, he lay there beside her in the darkness, the day’s events replaying themselves over and over in his head. He winced when he thought of his own falseness and cowardice, of the role Walter’s sudden appearance had thrust him into, but when he thought of Jessica, he was afraid.
He reached out to touch her, to stroke her sleeping arm, as if to reassure himself she was still there. It was the picture of her disconsolate eyes and tortured mouth, of her runny nose and quaking shoulders, that got him. She wasn’t his, she was Walter’s—why else would she act like that?
Sad to the core, jealous, fearful, the would-be saint lay there in the darkness with his hurt and his regret. They made such a great pair, he and Jessica—into fish, the Hudson, goats and bees and home-pressed cider. They did. Of course they did. And as he thought of all the things they had in common, he began to feel better. Certainly she had feelings for Walter—they’d been through a heavy thing together—but she had feelings for him too. He knew it, and she knew it. They fit together. They were made for each other. Theirs was such a—and the joke sprang into his head like an anodyne, like a cold compress applied to a fresh bruise—such a grand union.
A Question of Balance
Coolly, methodically, step by scrupulous step, Walter went through the motions of his biweekly trip to the supermarket as if nothing had happened. Was he out of dental floss, or no? Planter’s peanuts? Saltwater taffy? Onions? He deliberated over the pasta—linguine, vermicelli or shells?—tapped the watermelons, rejected the Pancho Villa Authentic Mexican TV dinner (enchilada, rice, beans and salsa verde, with a dollop of baked custard on the side) in favor of the I Ching (egg roll, pork fried rice, Canton strudel and fortune cookie). Never lifting his head, never peering around the corners or gazing up the aisles, he examined each product as if he’d never seen its like before, as if each individual package were a wonder on the order of bleeding statues or extraterrestrial life.
He may have looked cool, but beneath the broad-cut lapels and flared waist of his beige Bertinelli suit, he was seething. And sweating. His armpits were wet—Right Guard, was he out of Right Guard?—water coursed down his back inside the Arrow shirt and pasted it to his skin, his crotch was clammy. As he stood at the checkout stand staring hostilely at the herd of cud-chewing checkout girls, pregnant housewives, yammering children and pimply boxboys, he wanted to scream out, hit something, slam his fist into the counter till the skin opened up to reveal the naked bones of his hand, cracked and white and hurt to the marrow. Tom Crane and Jessica. It couldn’t be true. It wasn’t. They were kidding him—it was a joke, that’s what it was.
He bowed his head and tried to concentrate on a wad of soiled paper balled up beneath the candy display. He counted to twenty. Finally, when he could stand it no longer, he lifted his head and glanced furtively around him. One quick look: to the right, to the left, then face forward and out the window to scan the lot for her car.
They were gone.
Son of a bitch. He wanted to tear the place apart, wanted to kill her, kill him. “Hey, shake it up there, will you,” he heard h
imself snarl, the checker, the woman ahead of him, the stringy looking boxboy all suddenly gone white in the face, “you think I got all day here?”
Outside, the first thing he did—even before he loaded the perishables into the trunk of the MG or stripped off his damp jacket and rolled up the sleeves—was trundle angrily on up to the liquor store on the far side of the laundromat and buy himself a pint of Old Inver House. He didn’t usually drink in the afternoon—even on a Saturday afternoon—and he hadn’t been drunk, or stoned either, since New Year’s and the occasion of his second dire miscue in the face of history. But this was different. This was a situation that called for meliorative measures, for a dampening and allaying of the spirit, for loss of control. He dropped the groceries in the trunk and eased into the driver’s seat. Right then and there, though the top was down and everyone could see him, he cracked the Scotch and took a long burning hit of it. And then another. He glared at a beefy armed old woman who looked suspiciously like his grandmother, tossed the bottle cap over his shoulder, jammed the pint between his legs and took off in a smokescreen of exhaust, laying down rubber as if he were flaying flesh.
The bottle was half-gone and he was hurtling up the Mohican Parkway, concentrating on pinning the obstinate little white needle on a speck of dust mired between the 8 and the o, when he thought of Miss Egthuysen—of Laura. If he was now the very model of the disaffected hero, cut off from friends, wife and family (the last two times he’d stopped in for dinner with Hesh and Lola he’d wound up in a shouting match over his relationship with Depeyster Van Wart), cut off from feeling itself, well, at least he had Laura. As a consolation of sorts. If Meursault had his Marie (“A moment later she asked me if I loved her. I said that sort of question had no meaning, really; but I supposed I didn’t”), Walter had his Laura. And that was something. Especially at a time like this.
He might have paused to reflect on the turmoil of his feelings, to wonder why, when ostensibly he couldn’t have given a shit what Jessica, Tom Crane, Mardi or the pope in Rome himself did or didn’t do, he felt so bitter and desperate all of a sudden. But he didn’t pause. The trees beat past him, endless lashings of green, the wind tore at his hair and the image of Miss Egthuysen loomed up out of his fevered brain. He saw her stretched out naked on the black velvet couch in her living room, her lips puckered in a kissy pout, hands masking her breasts, her private hair so blonde it might have been white. Suddenly the onrushing breeze went sweet with the scent of the vanilla extract she dabbed behind her ears, on her wrists and ankles and between her breasts (extra-thick shakes, napoleons, Boston cream pie, that’s what he thought of when he closed his eyes and plunged into the creamy aromatic core of her), and he hit the brakes so hard the car fishtailed a hundred yards up the parkway. In the next instant he was humping over a grassy divider—no one coming either way, thank god—and peeling out on the far side of the road, headed south.
The bottle was two-thirds gone and the day’s second disappointment on him as he jabbed angrily at what for a moment had become the glowing little omphalos of Miss Egthuysen’s existence, the door buzzer. He listened, first with anticipation, then with impatience, and finally with despair shading into rage, as the harsh trill of the buzzer sounded in the cluttered hallway he knew so well. There was no answer. He felt defeated. Put out. Abused. The bitch, he muttered, throwing himself down heavily on the front steps and peering into the aperture of the bottle like a jeweler examining a rare stone. As luck would have it, he was sitting in a puddle of something resinous and sticky, something that was even then irreparably transforming the hue of his beige slacks, but he was too far gone to notice.
Overwhelmed with drunken gloom, Walter tilted the bottle back and drank, pausing only to level his eyes on the pinched censorious features of Laura’s landlady, Mrs. Deering, who was regarding him with loathing from behind the sunstruck front window of the apartment next door. Walter momentarily lowered the bottle to fix her with a look so vehement, so bestial, slack-jawed and irresponsible, that she backed away from the window as if from the sight of some half-wit abusing himself in the street. Keeping her eyes on him all the way, she disappeared into the fastness of her apartment, no doubt to telephone the sheriff, the state police and the local barracks of the National Guard. Okay, fine. What did Walter care? What were they going to do to him—string him up by his feet? He had a bitter laugh at the thought, but it only served to intensify his gloom. The fact was that the confectionery comforts of Miss Egthuysen were not available to him, and his bottle was nearly empty. Yes, and his wife was living with his best friend, he himself was crippled, unloved and doomed by the scourge of history, and all those letters he’d addressed to Truman Van Brunt, c/o General Delivery, Barrow, Alaska, had vanished as if into the snowy wasteland itself, pale missives overwhelmed by white.
Cursing, he took hold of the rusty wrought-iron railing and pulled himself to his feet. He stood there a moment, swaying like a sapling in a storm, glaring angrily at Mrs. Deering’s window as if challenging her to show herself again. Then he killed the bottle, dropped it in the bushes and wiped his hands on his shirt. A kid on a bicycle—eight, nine years old, red hair, freckles—came tearing down the sidewalk as he lurched for the car, and it was all Walter could do to avoid him. Unfortunately, the concentration and force of will expended in this tricky maneuver left him vulnerable to other obstacles. Like the fire hydrant. In the next instant, the kid was gone, Mrs. Deering’s head had reappeared in the window, and Walter was reclining face down on the lawn.
Back in the car, he examined the grass stains on the knees of his once-beige trousers and the suspicious smear at the base of his clocked tie. What next? he muttered angrily, jerking the tie from his neck and flinging it into the street. It took him a while to fit the key into the little silver slot of the ignition, which kept dodging away from him and bobbing back again, like a float with a nibbling fish beneath it, but at last he succeeded, firing up the car with a vibraphonic rattle of the valve lifters. He looked around him for a moment, the world gone suddenly strange, his face tingling as if a swarm of tiny hairy-legged creatures were trapped beneath the skin and struggling to get out. Then he slammed the car into gear and took off with a screech Mrs. Deering would never forget.
Before he knew it, he was on Van Wart Road. Heading west. That is, heading in the direction of several significant landmarks. Tom Crane’s hubcap, for one. Van Wart Manor, for another. And for yet another, the hellish, mysterious, realigned and reinforced historical marker that had launched him on this trail of tears in the first place.
And where was he going?
Not until he’d come within a cigarette’s length of sideswiping a van full of fist-waving teenagers at Cats’ Corners, not until he’d lumbered through the wicked S curve that followed, not until he slowed at Tom Crane’s elm to bore his eyes into the back of the car pulled up on the shoulder beneath it, did it become clear to him: he was going to Van Wart Manor. For Mardi. The MG rolled to a halt and he gazed ruefully at the hubcap leering at him from the bole of the elm I’m home, yes, it seemed to mock, and so is she—until a station wagon roared past him in the outside lane, horn blaring, and he came to his senses. He jerked the wheel and lurched away from that declamatory hubcap, intent on Van Wart Manor and the solace of Mardi, but almost as soon as he hit the gas—gravel flying, tires protesting, Jessica’s Bug falling away to his right—he was stabbing for the brake. Violently. Desperately.
There before him, strung out across the road and down the shoulder as far as he could see, was a line of people. Picnickers. The men in hats and baggy pants, the women in culottes and sandals and ankle socks, their arms laden with baskets, children, lawn chairs, newspapers to spread out on the ground. He was headed right for them, their cries of alarm terrible in his ears, people scattering like dominoes, a single woman—pamphlets tucked under her arm, a toddler at her side—frozen in his path, and his foot, his impotent alien foot, only now finding the brake. There was a scream, a blizzard of paper, his own
face, his mother’s, and then they were gone and he was wrestling with the wheel, all the way out on the far side of the road.
He wasn’t aiming for it, didn’t mean it—he was drunk, freaked out, hallucinating—but there it was. The marker. Dead ahead of him. By the time he reached it, he couldn’t have been doing more than twenty, battling to keep out of the ditch, billows of dust rocketing up behind him—on the wrong side of the road, for christ’s sake! Still, he did hit it, dead on, the bumper of the MG like the prow of an icebreaker, cryptic Cranes and unfathomable Mohonks flung to the winds, metal grinding on metal. In the next instant he was in control again, swerving back across the road just in time to thread the stone pillars and make the hard cut into the long stately sweeping drive of Van Wart Manor.
Here, peace reigned. The world was static, tranquil, timeless, bathed in the enduring glow of privilege and prosperity. There were no phantasms here, no signs of class strife, of grasping immigrants, trade unionists, workers, Communists and malcontents, no indication that the world had changed at all in the past three hundred years. Walter gazed out on the spreading maples, the flagstone paths, the spill of the lawns and the soft pastel patterns of the roses against the lush backdrop of the woods, and he felt the panic subside. Everything was all right. Really. He was just a little drunk, that was all.
As he swung around the parabola of the driveway and approached the house itself, he saw that there were three cars pulled up at the curb in front: Dipe’s Mercedes, Joanna’s station wagon and Mardi’s Fiat. He was a little sloppy with the wheel—almost nodded off while shifting into reverse, in fact—but managed to wedge himself in between the station wagon and Fiat without hitting anything. So far as he could tell, that is. He was standing woozily in front of the MG, inspecting the bumper where the sign had raked it, when he heard the front door slam and looked up to see Joanna coming down the steps toward him.