Outside Looking In

by T. C. Boyle

  “Dad?” Corey was looking over the cover of his comic—Batman, with his black mask and bat’s ears.

  “What?”

  “What’s wrong with Mom?”

  “Nothing. She’ll be fine. She just—well, I think she had maybe one beer too many and that made her sleepy. You know how that is—remember your grandpa that time?”

  Corey didn’t say anything, but he didn’t go back to his comic either. After a minute he lifted both his feet to the coffee table, which he wasn’t allowed to do, and set the comic aside. He seemed to be grinning—or maybe it was a grimace. The tightest smile, and then a pucker of the lips. “That’s not what Jackie said.”

  After Corey had gone to bed, he went in to check on her. The room was cold, unnaturally cold, and it took him a minute to realize the window was open—not just cracked, but open all the way on the night and the two-story drop to the yard below, where the moon drew shadows from the trees and silvered the lids of the garbage cans lined up against the fence. He didn’t want to turn the light on, leery of waking her (or if she was awake still, of startling her, because when he’d checked half an hour earlier she’d been lying there rigid, staring at the ceiling), so he tiptoed to the window and eased it shut. That was when he glanced over his shoulder and saw with a shock that the bed was empty. His first thought was that she must be in the bathroom, but he’d just been in the bathroom himself, brushing his teeth, and he’d gone directly from there into the bedroom, so how could that be? A tic of fear pulsed in his temple: he should have seen her through this, he realized that now, but he’d been thinking of Corey, of shielding him, of propping up the pretense that nothing was out of order.

  But where was she? He stood there dumbly, staring out into the yard and the puddles of shadow that could have been anything, Corey’s bicycle, a wheelbarrow, the sprawled form of a human being—a female human being—lying there as still as death. He called her name softly, almost involuntarily—“Joanie?”—then went to the light switch and flicked it on. The room was empty. She wasn’t in the bed, wasn’t sitting in the armchair in the corner she liked to heap with her clothes and nest in when he and Corey were in the living room watching baseball, wasn’t—he jerked open the door—in the closet either. “Joanie?” he repeated and held his breath until the faintest moan came back to him in response, as if she’d dematerialized or shrunk down and crawled into the space between the walls.

  He found her under the bed. Trembling. And when he took hold of her as gently as he could and tried to coax her out, she wouldn’t come. He was on his hands and knees, peering into the gap beneath the bed that was curtained all around with the satiny sheen of the bedspread and smelled of dust, of dust and her, crooning to her in his best imitation of Tim: “It’s all right, it’s okay, I’m here, don’t fight it, just give in, Joanie, give in . . . You hear me? Joanie?”

  It seemed to take forever, as if they were a thousand miles apart, but he kept on whispering and crooning and drawing her out of herself until finally she said, “Fitz?,” and he said, “Yes.”

  And then he slid her free and had her in his arms and he was pressing her down into the bed with the weight of his body, just holding her. He wasn’t aroused, or not at first, but she was—oh, yes, she certainly was.

  7.

  Things began to cool down after that. It was as if they’d reached some sort of meridian, halftime in the game they were playing, the game to neutralize all games, as Tim would say, the only game that wasn’t a game at all. Work had begun to pile up. There were end-of-term exams, both for Fitz and his students. Joanie was busy too. One of her coworkers came down sick with something that might or might not have been pleurisy and Joanie covered for her, picking up still more hours, which was a good thing because they were undecided about what to do for the summer—stay and pay rent or go to the Jersey shore with her parents—and the extra money would come in handy either way. They kept away from Tim’s the next two Saturdays and that was all right too because the rest of the group was feeling the same end-of-term pressures he was and because Tim had decamped with Dick and Peggy for an exploratory trip to Mexico, with the intention of finding a place where he could set up a summer research project, with or without Harvard’s blessing.

  The Yankees came to town the second week of May and he took Corey to see them play. Despite a powerful lineup featuring Mantle, Maris, Berra, Skowron and Howard, the Yankees were crushed, 14-4, and Carl Yastrzemski was the hero for Boston, with a home run and three RBIs, which seemed to suit Corey just fine. They had hot dogs, Cokes, peanuts and ice cream, and Corey, who’d brought his mitt along, almost caught a foul ball that wound up coming down in the row just behind them, where a loudmouthed clown with a beer belly reached over Corey to catch it barehanded. Not that it mattered. What mattered was that he’d gotten a chance to spend time with his son, special time without Joanie, who’d begged off on the grounds that she didn’t really care all that much about baseball and it would only be wasted on her. Which was just fine with both of them—it was a men’s thing anyway, wasn’t it? And after that night at Tim’s, he found himself trying to reach out more to his son, not that he felt guilty, or not exactly—it was just that the research was all about interiority, and interiority by its very definition was exclusive, selfish even. You could take your son to the ballpark, but you couldn’t take him inside your head.

  Tim came back with a suntan and a two-month lease on the Hotel Catalina in Zihuatanejo, an isolated spot north of Acapulco on Mexico’s west coast. Fitz had to look it up in the atlas at the library and then, wasting time when he should have been studying, he found an old National Geographic article illustrated with photos of scalloped white beaches, coconut palms and a scatter of beach huts roofed with palm fronds—palapas—running up and down the shore just above the tide line. A fishing village—that was what the article called it. Very remote, very tranquil. The fishermen came in each evening to sell their catch and people gathered there by the shore, drinking beer, strumming guitars, grilling shrimp and lobster over an open fire. He’d never been to the tropics, never even been to Florida, and he couldn’t help lingering over the pictures, wondering what it would be like to walk those beaches to the sound of monkeys and parrots in the trees, to swim, snorkel, lie there on a towel and watch the sun vanish in the sea while sipping a—what?—rum and Coke. Or no, a margarita—wasn’t that what they drank down there?

  He gave Tim exactly two days to reacclimate and then stopped by his office after classes on Tuesday, coming up the stairs to the strains of a radio playing bossa nova—Stan Getz and Charlie Byrd, the hottest thing going—and voices, the usual voices, raised in merriment. Tim, who’d missed a week of classes and should have been contrite about it or at least pretending to be, wasn’t holding office hours—he was holding a party. Fitz smelled Fanchon’s perfume before he rounded the corner and saw her sitting there cross-legged on the floor in a pair of shorts and a yellow blouse identical to the one Joanie had been wearing at the Good Friday party. Which meant Joanie must have borrowed it for some reason—dressing up? Trying on clothes as if she and Fanchon were sorority sisters? Or maybe Joanie had spilled something on her own blouse, maybe that was it. Or—and here a sudden image of Joanie and Fanchon, naked and locked together, kissing, grinding, flitted in and out of his head.

  Fanchon glanced up. She had a bottle of beer in one hand, a paper cup in the other. “It’s Fitz,” she cried out, “and not a minute too soon!” The shorts were very short. She was wearing sandals, as if it were mid-summer, and she’d painted her toenails. “Look who’s here,” she called, leaning into the interior of the office on one arm so that her near thigh rose at an angle from the linoleum, the flesh reddened where it had been pressed to the floor.

  Ken was there, as was Charlie, sans Alice, and Rick Roberts too, but no Dick and no Hollingshead, which was a surprise, but the biggest surprise was Tim. He looked, as usual, as if he’d just stepped out of an ad in a men’s fashion magazine, with one exception: he was w
earing a sombrero, a great towering elaborate thing with a brim the size of an extra-large pizza trimmed with bright blue balls of thread. The effect was—well, ridiculous—but this was a joke, this was Tim in high spirits, reveling in thumbing his nose at everything academic, everything Harvard. He was a Mexican now, and as he would soon announce, he was bored with the science game because the science game was too confining and had no place in it for pure experience.

  What else? There was a bottle of tequila on the desk, along with a cutting board, some wedges of lime and a salt shaker. A Styrofoam cooler containing ice and bristling with the amber necks of beer bottles sat on the floor beside Tim’s chair.

  “Fitz,” Tim said, “well met. We were just wondering where you were.” He gestured at the desk, tipped back his sombrero. “We’re getting acquainted with Mexico tonight, Fitz—you ever been there? No? Well, no matter. We’re having a little tequila party here in honor of the lease I signed last week on this hotel, eighteen rooms cooled by the sea breeze, and right on the ocean. Very isolated. No roads—you have to fly in, Fitz, can you imagine that? And the manager, the most admirable Swiss in the world, is letting us have it all summer because summer is his slow season in any case and he’d just as soon see us set up our research project there as have the place sit empty. You see what I’m saying?”

  Fitz was standing just inside the door, trying his best not to step on Fanchon’s white, white thigh or the place where her calf was tucked under it. He was grinning. Everybody was grinning. He gestured at Tim’s sombrero and said the first thing that came into his head. “So you’re going native now?”

  “Damn right I am.” Tim stood, a bit uncertain on his feet, and poured a double shot of the tequila into one of the waxed paper cups on his desk and handed it to him. “You know how this is done?”

  He didn’t. He’d never tasted tequila, barely knew it existed. Before he’d gotten serious about life, when he’d been living with Joanie and his infant son in a little dump of a town on the Hudson River and doing a less-than-credible imitation of a school psychologist, it had been well-brandy and a beer back, and if he felt adventurous maybe a screwdriver. He lifted the cup to his nostrils and took a tentative sniff. The odor was strangely soapy, as if this wasn’t liquor at all but a concentration of the stuff the janitors put in the dispensers in the men’s room.

  “Don’t be afraid of it, Fitz, it’s not going to bite you—but wait, here, this is how you do it.”

  He watched as Tim poured salt on the webbing of his left hand, licked it off, drained his own cup and bit into a lime wedge. “Woo!” Tim hooted, his eyes watering, “that’s the ticket!”

  Everyone was watching, loopy grins on their faces. “You ready, amigo?” Tim asked, already pouring, which mooted the question. Fitz hadn’t planned on drinking anything—it was midweek, he was behind in his work and he’d only stopped by to welcome Tim home and hear the gossip, the gist of which had already reached him in bastardized form—but he poured the salt all the same, licked it off, threw back the liquor and sucked the juice out of a wedge of lime as if he’d been doing it all his life.

  “Pancho Villa!” Rick Roberts crowed. He was perched on the filing cabinet in Hollingshead’s spot. He was drunk, his collar open and tie askew. “Remember the Alamo!” he added, then broke down in giggles.

  Ken was slumped in the chair beside the desk, a frozen grin on his face, and Charlie sat on the floor at his feet, cradling a beer. “Badges?” Charlie said. “We don’t need no stinking badges,” and then Ken lifted his eyes to the ceiling and started singing “La cucaracha, la cucaracha, / Ya no puede caminar,” and everybody—even Fitz, though he was shy about it—joined in, “Porque no tiene, porque le falta / Marijuana que fumar!”

  There was another round of tequila and then Tim hushed everybody and said, “All right, let’s get serious here a minute, because this is a commitment we’re making—we’ve already made—and I want to know who’s on for this.” He paused, looked pointedly at Fitz. “And who’s not.”

  Tim went into his spiel then, selling the place like a real estate agent, rhapsodizing over the weather, the sun, the crystalline sea that was warm as a bath and completely untouched so that the snorkeling was as good as you could find anywhere in the world. He was talking to the room, but kept breaking off to address him directly. (“Have you been snorkeling, Fitz, really snorkeling? And I don’t mean in the ice tank off Martha’s Vineyard, because the fish, the colors, the shapes, the whole thing down there is a trip in itself, believe me.”) He talked about what they could achieve too, free of constraints, free to vary dosages and just lie back and trip as often as they wanted in order to see if they could attain a kind of group consciousness like the communards in Huxley’s new novel (“Island, Fitz—have you read it? No? Read it. Now. Tonight”) who developed higher powers through the use of moksha, a kind of next-generation psychedelic.

  The sombrero shaded his face, but his teeth gleamed in the grip of his closer’s smile. After a while, it became apparent that not only had the others already heard Tim’s appeal but had come to a decision, all of them, Ken and Fanchon, Charlie and Rick—and presumably Charlie’s and Rick’s wives and kids too. They were going to Mexico for summer vacation. They were going to live an idyll right out of a Huxley novel. And further the research into the bargain.

  Ten minutes later, Tim seemed finally to run out of breath—or change tactics. He leaned into the desk, poured more tequila all around—for Fitz too, even though he tried to put a hand over his cup and say no—and then he raised his cup to propose a toast before apparently thinking better of it. “Wait, wait,” he said, the thread balls writhing and dancing under the brim of his hat. “We can’t really toast the summer camp until we have unanimity here. Right? What do you say, Fitz?”

  He wasn’t caught by surprise because he could see all along where this was going and he didn’t draw back because what he was hearing was irresistible and so very, very right. To hell with the Jersey Shore and the way Joanie’s father looked at him as if he were a form of light entertainment (“Psychology? Don’t you have to be certifiable to study that?”). Mexico was a shining dream. The whole inner circle was going. How could he say no? How could he even think of it? But then, even as everybody’s eyes fixed on him and Tim held the cup at half-mast, he thought of finances—reality, that is. “But,” he stammered, “I’d like to—nothing I’d rather do. I’m flattered, I am, but we can’t afford—I mean, the whole summer?”

  Of course, Tim had anticipated this too. “All you have to do is get there, Fitz—the rest, room and board, three meals a day—is only fourteen-forty per diem. It’s Mexico, Fitz, cheap as dirt. And if you can’t afford that”—a wink for the room—“there’s always the IFIF scholarship.”

  “The what?”

  “The International Federation for Internal Freedom. Dick and I are founding it—for obvious reasons. The science game is falling short and we’re not going to be held back by it any longer. But the point is, Peggy’s rich—she and her twin brothers are heirs to the Mellon fortune—and if you didn’t know, Dick’s from a well-to-do family too. We’ll underwrite you, Fitz—you’ll be the first scholarship recipient, what do you say to that?”

  “Come on, Fitz,” Fanchon purred, canting her head to look up at him. “It will not be the same without you.”

  “But Joanie—her job?”

  “Fitz, Fitz, Fitz,” Tim said, shaking his head in a whirl of little blue balls, “you are just too rigid—”

  “Uptight,” Charlie put in.

  “Which is all right, I’m not criticizing,” Tim said, “but a library job? Joanie’s worth ten times more than that and I’ll bet you anything she’ll get whatever she wants in the fall, I mean whatever, so you really have no grounds to stand on here, amigo. None at all.”

  Tim lifted his cup and Charlie, Ken, Fanchon and Rick followed suit. “To Mexico!” he cried, and Fitz, riding a sudden swell of joy that sank the library, his cramped apartment and the psych bui
lding from sight as if the pellucid waves had already closed over them, raised his too.

  He was a bit foggy the next morning—and he had a headache, the first tequila headache of his life, which, he noted dully, was a novelty in itself—but he woke to a vision of frothing surf, white beaches and a sun parked overhead. Joanie was already up—he could hear her in the kitchen, rattling the pot she soft-boiled her morning eggs in, then padding across the floor to slip into Corey’s room and whisper him awake. Some mornings, depending on her mood, she rattled out, “You gotta get up, you gotta get up, you gotta get up in the morning!” as her waking anthem, but today she just whispered, as if to spare them all.

  She’d been asleep by the time he got in, so he hadn’t had a chance to broach the subject of Mexico to her, though in the car on the way back from the bar they’d all retired to after Tim shut up his office, he’d begun to marshal his arguments. He hadn’t been in much of a condition to drive, but he drove anyway, talking aloud to himself the whole way home on the dark familiar streets, foreseeing and countering Joanie’s objections in the way Tim had countered his own. The fact was, it wasn’t going to cost anything, or hardly anything, and it would be good for them all, for Corey especially—he could see a new part of the world and maybe even pick up the language, which would be a real advantage in school. Weren’t they offering Spanish now? Wasn’t it taking over from French and German? Wasn’t it the language of the future?

  She was reading the newspaper she’d propped up on the napkin holder and hovering over her eggs when he came into the room (runny eggs, with flecks of partially cooked albumen in a mucilaginous goop that very nearly made his stomach turn), but he managed to right himself, call out a soft “Good morning” and go to the stove for a cup of coffee. Her hair was damp still from the shower, her face smooth and pale without her makeup. It was a relaxed face, pretty, the most familiar face in the world to him, a face at the kitchen table at the very center of his life. To see her there like that, her ordinary self, struck him with a force that took him by surprise, and he felt a surge of sentimentality, of love, rush through him. Of course she’d want to go to Mexico—why wouldn’t she? She could see her mother anytime—and the smell of that place on the Jersey Shore, the mold, the damp, everything clammy even in August . . .