by T. C. Boyle
For the longest time that was no time at all he just stared at her as she changed faces and shapes and coalesced with everything else in the room and everything beyond it too. Someone, somewhere, laughed. The fire snapped like human fingertips, flames were themselves, shadows became light and light shadows. He laughed aloud, he couldn’t help himself, laughed like Corey when he was four years old and they rode the Ferris wheel high into the sky together while the Fourth of July fireworks rent the night overhead, and then Tim was there, saying, You all right, Fitz? Everything good?, and he didn’t know how even to begin to answer and just laughed again, which told the whole story in itself, beginning to end. Tim dissolved. The candles exploded and fell back into themselves, over and over. There was nothing he could do but sink back into the pillows, crushed by all that sparking beauty, until he felt Joanie’s hand exploring his inner thigh like the warmest and best-adapted probe he could imagine, and then her mouth was on his and his hands were doing their own examination of her breasts that were right there front and center despite the dress, the slip, the rudely inconvenient conical lift-up bra that was alternately made of lead and silk, and they couldn’t do it here, could they, on the pillows in a dark corner of his professor’s house while everybody else was seething around them in spirit if not the flesh?
No, no they couldn’t, and Joanie grasped that before he did, rising silkily from the floor to the glassy accompaniment of Milt Jackson’s vibraphone to tug his hand as she’d tugged it when they came through the door just minutes or eons ago, so that he stood too, hard as a rock and tent-poling the fabric of his trousers, till they were flowing together in liquid grace up the dilating stairway to the first unoccupied bedroom they could find.
In the car on the way home—You sure you’re okay to drive? Tim kept asking, even following them out onto the frozen crust of the night before being waved off—he’d felt everything receding like a wave drawing back from a beach. The car was a coffin. Ice crunched under the wheels. He was moving, they were moving, and if he didn’t quite feel as if he was back in his body yet, his body knew what to do, gas pedal, brake, two hands on the wheel, navigate, stay in your lane, own the road. There were lights sparking at the margins of his eyes as if he’d been knocked unconscious and come awake again, but this was usual, explicable, nothing like the rhapsody of things that had danced through his mind all night long even as he clung fast to Joanie, his wife of thirteen years, his sweet sad beautiful fleshsack, and fucked her and fucked her as if there were no other thing in the universe but fucking. He thought about that, the streetlights the only lights now, the tires crunching, and realized he’d uncovered a universal truth, the universal truth, because if mind was everything and thought uncontainable and God a construct, then fucking—sex, reproduction, the generational reissuing of the body that allowed the mind to be—was the foundation of all there was.
A match flared. The smoke of Joanie’s cigarette rose up over the stale breath of the heater. He snatched a look at her, her profile, everything saturated in black but the glowing tip of the cigarette. “Well, that was really,” he began, the sound of his own voice strange in his ears and the words so elongated they didn’t seem to want to connect to one another in any rational way, “really, I don’t know—what did you think? You like it?”
She didn’t say anything. The night was a tunnel and they were right in the middle of it. After a moment she exhaled and brought the cigarette back to her lips. The tip of it brightened and a beat went by as the smoke circulated through her lungs and she exhaled again, then put a hand on his thigh to lean into him and pass him the cigarette, which tasted of wet tobacco and of her. “Uh-huh,” she said.
“I didn’t think it would be like that, I mean, I didn’t know, I didn’t—”
“Uh-huh,” she said.
It wasn’t till he turned into their street that he thought of Corey—saw him, saw his face the way it was when he was curled up asleep with all the animation gone out of his features and his hair splayed over the pillow and the one corner of the blanket he held gripped in his hand as if afraid somebody would take it away from him—and came back to himself. “Jesus, do you realize how late it is?”
Mrs. Pierzynski was waiting for them in the vestibule with her coat and hat on and a look of pure outrage on her face. “Do you know what time it is?” she demanded, and he did know because he’d looked at the clock on the dash when he thought of Corey and located himself in the instant. It was after twelve. Well after.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “We were . . .” He was searching for an excuse, but there was nothing he could give her short of death and dismemberment that would even begin to mollify her, and the truth of it, the essence of what they’d experienced—the trip they’d been on—would have been lost on this haggard red-faced pathetically ordinary woman who wouldn’t have known transcendence if it swooped her up on angels’ wings and sailed her high out over the glittering crest of the universe.
“That number you gave me? The emergency number? I must’ve rung that number ten times and nobody answered, so you tell me—”
Joanie was there now, Joanie the efficient, Joanie the politic, Joanie the peacemaker. “Forgive us, Mrs. Pierzynski, but we had an emergency—it was my husband, we had to take him to the emergency room because of something he ate, bad fish the doctor said, but thank God he’s all right now, and I don’t know what to say but forgive us, please, and here”—snapping open her purse and counting out bills, too many bills, into the woman’s outthrust hand—“I hope this’ll help.”
A moment of constrained silence. The three of them there in the vestibule under the sick yellow overhead light. Outside, the grip of the night and the cold. “Some people,” the woman said, her voice tight with anger, “have to be at work first thing Monday morning—tomorrow morning if you want to know, and I’m sorry for your trouble, but I mean, you couldn’t even call?”
Then the door flung open on a fume of cold and the woman was gone and he looked at Joanie and gave a shrug, which was comical, so very comical, and they both broke down in giggles. He helped her out of her coat. She kicked off her shoes. And then he put an arm around her waist and led her off to bed.
2.
He had class all day Monday and didn’t have a chance to see Tim till the following day, which shouldn’t have been a problem, but somehow was. The need to see him, the compulsion, nagged at him from the moment he woke clear-eyed Sunday morning till he mounted the stairs to Tim’s office at half-past seven on Tuesday night after a dinner of meat loaf, instant mashed potatoes and canned string beans at the kitchen table that made him feel bloated and out of sorts and anything but transcendent. Why he needed so badly to see Tim he couldn’t have said, other than that he wanted to rehash the experience in the way people do when they’ve been profoundly moved by some event in their lives—and he had been moved. At least he thought he had. He’d seen things, visions, rippling visions shot through with color and movement, and they never stopped, even when he was deep inside Joanie, deeper than he’d ever thought it was possible to go.
They’d both filled out the questionnaire at Tim’s while they were waiting for the drug to take effect (How many people are present? How many are taking the drug? How many times have you taken this or similar drugs? How good do you feel about taking the drug today?), but it was standard psychological survey stuff that couldn’t even begin to prepare them for the intensity of what was to come. No, the key here was the report Tim required from all subjects of what was officially known as the Harvard Psilocybin Project. The idea was to individuate the experiences of as wide a sample as possible and then look for correspondences that would lead to the development of a method that could eventually be used in treatment. This was the rationale. This was why Sandoz was offering the drug gratis to qualified researchers around the country. This was why he’d taken his wife to Tim’s house, why he’d written up his impressions in a narrative that ran to six single-spaced pages, and why it seemed so vital to get it to T
im as soon as he possibly could.
Coming down the hallway to Tim’s office, he was surprised to hear voices. He knew Tim liked to keep evening hours, but up to this point he’d only been here during the day because, of course, he had obligations at night—dinner, a story for his son (they were reading A Journey to the Center of the Earth together), class preparation, bedtime—and he’d expected to find Tim alone, his feet on the desk, a book in his hand. And he wanted to find him alone, wanted to hand him his report (and Joanie’s, in a sealed envelope) and sit there and talk it all through because he had a thousand things to say and he just couldn’t keep a lid on them any longer. But Tim had a visitor—visitors—and he felt a sharp stab of disappointment even as he rounded the corner and saw Ken and Charlie there (and Ken’s wife, who wasn’t even a student), slouched against the doorframe of Tim’s office. And Tim, beyond them, his feet propped up and the desk lamp casting an annulus of golden light round his face.
“Fitz,” Ken called over one shoulder. “Hello, welcome—hey, come join the club.”
Charlie turned round, looking surprised. “Hi, Fitz,” he said, but his voice had no animation, as if he weren’t really there, and that got the alarm bells ringing all right, even before Fanchon, her face shining and beautiful, gave him an electric smile and he heard himself fumbling over his words, “Hi, I was . . . I thought—Tim, is Tim in?”
“Who’s that?” Tim called from inside the office. “Fitz?” He made as if to draw down his legs and rise from the desk, but then seemed to think better of it. “Come on in,” he said, summoning his grin. “Good to see you. And wait, what’s that in your hand?”
What was in his hand? The question didn’t register because it was self-evident, wasn’t it, besides which, as he came to the door, he saw there were two other people in the office with Tim, and that made him hesitant. One was the blonde from the other night, Tim’s friend—girlfriend—and the other was the cadaverous Englishman Michael, who wasn’t a professor and wasn’t a student but who seemed to shadow Tim practically everywhere he went. Clumsily, he raised his hand with the two envelopes in it and murmured, “I brought the reports—from the, the session the other night? One for Joanie, my wife, that is, and one of my own, and I hope it’s not too long, or, or—”
Tim waved the objection away. “Not to worry, Fitz—the way I see it, the more detailed, the better. But come on in—you want to talk? Have a seat.”
There were two chairs in the room: Tim’s, behind the desk, and the one reserved for students in front of it. The blonde was sitting in the student chair and the Englishman was perched atop the two-tier filing cabinet, his long thin legs dangling above a pair of scuffed desert boots. They all looked at one another for a beat, then Ken, behind him in the hallway, said, “Tim, you need a bigger office,” and Tim, grinning wider, said, “Scotch. You drink scotch, Fitz?”
In the next moment everybody had a glass in hand and they were toasting to something—“The Project!”—and then Tim, the consummate host, was introducing him to the blonde, “In case you two didn’t meet the other night, or did you?” Tim shrugged his shoulders, the grin widening to show off a set of teeth that couldn’t have been whiter. “No matter. Brenda Maxxon, Fitzhugh Loney.”
He took her hand awkwardly. The moment burst over him: she was pretty in an incendiary way, with her hair teased out and a too-tight cardigan that emphasized her full breasts. “A pleasure,” she said, sipping her drink.
“And you know Michael, don’t you? No? Michael, Fitzhugh Loney. Fitz, Michael Hollingshead.”
Fanchon said something then and the group in the hall let out a laugh.
“What’s that?” Tim asked, tapping at his hearing aid. “Let’s all hear it, humor appreciated here, most appreciated, especially in this, what—dungeon?”
“I just said, I wish we could be reading Fitz’s report—and his wife’s. Aloud, I mean.” She paused, pursed her lips. “I will bet it is, what do you say, steamy, no?”
And Ken: “We couldn’t help noticing you discovered one of the side benefits of the research the other night—”
“The way you two were going at it,” Fanchon said, her voice rising high and birdlike till it twittered off the walls, “I thought maybe I ought to step in and formally introduce you to each other because I could have sworn you had just met or something—”
Everybody laughed now and if he reddened he couldn’t help that. It was just a moment and in that moment he saw that it was all in good fun, a little ribbing, his initiation into the inner circle, and he found himself laughing along with them, the scotch whiskey already rising from his stomach to his brain.
Tim swung his legs off the desk then and leaned in to scan the whole group, the pretty blonde, the Englishman with the high forehead and sunken cheeks, Ken, Fanchon, Charlie and himself. “Come on, Fanchon,” he said in a teasing lilt, “you know we’re all professionals here.”
The next night, despite the weather (mid-January, bleak as the bottom of a shoe, sleet turning to snow and back again), Fitz took the family out for dinner. Or for pizza, actually. This was in fulfillment of a pledge he’d made to his son at the beginning of the fall term—if Corey managed to get a B average or higher on his report card he could pick any restaurant he wanted, as long as it was a burger or pizza place and within a ten-mile radius. The payoff had been more than a month in coming now and Corey, who’d done better than just manage in his new school and wound up with A’s across the board tailed by a flurry of complimentary comments from his teachers on his work habits and attitude, had been nagging him about it since New Year’s. Or not nagging—it wasn’t in his nature to nag—but offering up subtle and not-so-subtle reminders like, They let us out on the playground after lunch today and all we could smell was pizza—from Scavone’s, I think it was, which is only two blocks over?—because they were like cleaning the ovens or something, I think. And you know what I dreamed about last night? No, what? Pizza.
So though he really didn’t have the money or the time and the car gave him the same aggravation as usual (addicted now, it seemed, to ether, which cost a dollar twenty-five a can), they all drove across town to Corey’s favorite place—Carbone’s—which, Corey claimed, had the best crust in Boston, though to Fitz, who’d grown up on New York pizza, it all tasted like cardboard with tomato paste and shredded cheese dribbled over it.
The place was overheated and overlit, which normally would have annoyed him but felt somehow comforting on a night like this when you had to stomp the slush off your boots in the anteroom and beat your hands together just to get a little circulation going. And the smell—the scorched-oven aroma of bubbling pizza and hot calzone—brought him right back to life after a long grim day of sitting in class and the library and fielding questions from his too-clever-by-half undergrads in Psych 101. He put a handful of change on the table so Corey could wheel off to play one of the pinball machines lined up against the back wall, then went to the counter and ordered a pitcher of beer with two glasses, a Coke for Corey and a large mushroom pie with anchovies on one-third of it for Joanie, who had a taste for the super-salted, dried-out little strips of baitfish that neither he nor Corey managed to share.
He’d chosen a table by the window where they could look out on the frozen sidewalk and feel a sense of redemption. He poured out two beers. Joanie lit a cigarette. There was the ding-ding-ding of the pinball machines, the clank of the pizza oven opening and shutting, the drone of the jukebox, the red-and-yellow flash of the neon CARBONE’S sign that hung in the window just over their heads. “So what was it like?” Joanie asked, exhaling.
“What, last night?”
“You came home smelling like a brewery—or no, a distillery. Scotch or whiskey, one or the other.”
“Scotch,” he said, smiling. “You’ve got quite a nose—I mean, for a woman who was snoring when I got into bed. Maybe we can get you a job at one of the distilleries—quality control.”
“Or a cop. I’d make a good cop, wouldn’t I?”
He reached across the table and took her hand. “I don’t know,” he said, “I think I like you better as a sex object.”
She was wearing a knit hat pulled down to her eyebrows. It had a little pompon on top and he liked that because it made her look so much younger than she was, girlish even, and it brought him back to another place and time altogether. She said, “Sounds good to me. When’s the next research session?”
He shrugged, toyed with the glass Parmesan shaker in front of him. “I don’t know, pretty much every Saturday night, I think.”
“And we’re invited?”
“I don’t know—I guess. But I told you, I want to take things slow. It’s a long semester and I’ve got a lot of weight on my shoulders right now, and I don’t—I mean, experimenting once, just to see what it’s like, that’s fine, but nobody really knows what this sort of thing leads to. Even Tim.”
She was giving him her randy look, a look she’d perfected when they were undergrads and didn’t yet have the advent of a son to worry about, as if the act of coitus were free of consequences and human reproduction a kind of menu you chose from when you were established and ready and all your ducks set out in a row. “You mean out-of-body sex?”
“I mean, out of your mind and no coming back. We had a good trip, a great trip, right? But from what I gather, what I hear, it’s not always like that. And last night—at Tim’s office—it was so old-fashioned we could have gone back a hundred years, five hundred, scotch whiskey as lubricant and nothing beyond that. He’s”—he paused, searching for the adjective—“welcoming, I guess, is the word. Very warm. He really went out of his way to make me feel part of the group—”
“Which took till what, one in the morning?”
“You jealous?”
Her voice seeped through the ding and buzz of Corey’s pinball machine, soft and dubious and placatory all at once. “Not really. I’m glad for you. You’ve worked so hard and this was like the final barrier—now you’re in—but is that really the way to conduct office hours? Isn’t it, I don’t know, unorthodox—to say the least?”