Outside Looking In

by T. C. Boyle

  Before he could think, he said, “Tim rented a whole hotel down in Mexico. Right on the ocean. For the summer. The entire summer.”

  She lifted her eyebrows, held the fork suspended over the plate. “Really? A whole hotel? Isn’t that overdoing it a bit?”

  “Not just for him—for everybody. He’s calling it his summer camp, but you know Tim—he likes to make a joke out of everything. Actually, it’s going to be for conducting research without having to worry about any limitations Harvard or McClelland or anybody else might impose. Think about it: there couldn’t be any better setting and set too, no schedules, the beach, the sun? Everybody’s going.”

  “What are you saying? You’re not thinking—?”

  “It won’t cost anything—less, actually, than staying here. Peggy’s underwriting it so all we have to do is get there and the rest—room and board, three meals a day, prepared by the hotel staff—is all free. Tim says he’ll give me a scholarship. What do you think?”

  Her face, sans makeup, showed the nicks and creases of time, the fine striations at the corners of her eyes, a pale rectangular scar pressed into her cheekbone and another just under her left ear, souvenirs of her girlhood in upstate New York. She grimaced and it all flattened in the light through the kitchen window. “I think you’re nuts,” she said. “What about my job? What about the apartment? What about Corey?”

  And now he called up the lines he’d rehearsed in his head, how the experience would broaden Corey’s perspective and contribute to his language skills, how Rick Roberts was bringing his two kids and Royce Eggers too—he had three, didn’t he? And Tim’s kids, of course. It would be like a mobile classroom, really. And fun—a real summer break, for once.

  “What about my mother?”

  “We’ll see her when we get back. And we’ll go to the shore next year, okay, I promise—it’s not as if we haven’t been there every summer for as long as anybody can remember . . . but don’t you see, this is the chance of a lifetime.”

  She looked dubious. Looked the way she had when he’d applied to Harvard, when they’d pulled up their roots in New York and moved here towing a trailer behind the car, and it wasn’t as if she was trying to hold him back—she wasn’t like that, not at all—just that she was cautious. And so was he. More cautious, really, than she was. And he’d already made up his mind.

  “What about the car?” she said. “It’s a long trip, isn’t it? How many miles—thousands? And you really mean we’re going to accept charity from whoever—Peggy Hitchcock? That’s one thing we’ve always agreed on, right—never be beholden to anybody?”

  He waved her objections away. “You’re just making excuses. We could take the train, put the furniture in storage, anything—if there’s a will, there’s a way.” He was watching her, the fork poised, the eggs congealing, each successive thought sparking in her eyes till he could see Mexico taking shape there, palm trees, beaches, margaritas.

  Her voice was small, ruminative. “I don’t want to be beholden.”

  “So don’t be. We can pay our own way.” He was standing at the sink, sipping coffee, his headache dissolving on the ascent of the caffeine. “Though even at fourteen-forty a day it’d be a stretch, I admit it—but we’ll save on rent. And groceries. And what, utilities?”

  She shrugged. Gave him a smile. Then she deliberately set the fork down across the plate as if eggs didn’t matter anymore or breakfast either or work or anything else. “So maybe being beholden isn’t so bad after all, is that what you’re saying? And Tim did say it was a scholarship, right?” She paused, her lips pursed round the tip of her tongue as she worked out the fine gradations of the ethics involved. “A scholarship’s different,” she said. “It’s legitimate. It’s something you earn—and you’ve earned it, right?”

  “Oh, sí,” he said. “Sí, sí, señora. Claro que sí.”

  As the spring semester drew to a close, Tim was in constant motion, teaching, advising, floating a prospectus for the International Federation for Internal Freedom and planning for the summer institute in Zihuatanejo, all the while continuing to conduct weekly sessions at the house on Homer Street, which was looking the worse for wear, it seemed, every time Fitz and Joanie stepped through the door. Fanchon, apparently, wasn’t much of a housekeeper, nor was Hollingshead or Ken or anyone else living there aside from Dick, who did his best to bring order to chaos, but with the traffic and the parties and so many people seeking internal freedom at the same time, it was a thankless task. Suzie helped. She was dutiful, driven, trying her best to please her father and be accommodating to the adults, and she always seemed to be trooping through one room or another with a private smile and a tray of dirty dishes and glasses. Jackie stayed out of sight, appearing only to gaze into the refrigerator from time to time or make his way through the torrent of pizza that poured into the house most nights. He got a dog—or Tim got him a dog—a mutt with floppy ears and Airedale whiskers that just seemed to add to the confusion. It was always darting between somebody’s legs and it didn’t seem especially interested in doing its business out on the lawn when there were so many much more convenient carpets spread throughout the house.

  Tim’s plan was to fly down to Zihuatanejo a week in advance of everybody else by way of getting established and making arrangements with the staff, who would stay on through the summer, though the manager himself—the admirable Swiss—would be gone, taking a busman’s holiday at an inn in Gstaad or some such place. One morning, a few days before Tim was set to leave, Fitz came in to find a note from him in his departmental box. On a sheet of notepaper, folded once, Tim had scrawled, Pls come to my office, 4:30, need ask favor, and then added, in a looping hand, underlined twice, Mexico.

  It had been raining all day, the air dense and tropical, the sidewalks strewn with earthworms giving themselves up to ecstasy—or trying to keep from drowning. He stepped round them, careful not to track anything in on his shoes, and started up the familiar stairs of the psych building. Fitz could hear the ding and rattle of Tim’s typewriter as he came striding down the hall, rhythmically rapping his still-dripping umbrella against one calf and floating so high on the euphoria that set in each year at the end of the semester he actually found himself whistling. Summer break. Was there a happier term in the dictionary? He’d been going to school in one capacity or another since kindergarten and no matter how long the slog or how dreary the year, summer was always there before him like a shining promise.

  He remembered one year—he must have been ten or so, younger than Corey anyway—when he spent the first morning of summer vacation playing ball with a dozen kids from the development, then went off into the woods by himself to sit up in the crotch of a tree, wash down his peanut butter and jelly sandwich with a Coke from the service station and indulge in a little philosophy. The morning might have been gone, he remembered thinking, but it was just the first in a long succession that stretched so far into the future he couldn’t really wrap his mind around it. He was safe, he was free, it was summer. Right: And where had that summer gone? And all the rest of them too? He broke off in mid-whistle and laughed aloud. He’d have to tell Corey about it, because there was a lesson there, though Corey wouldn’t get it, couldn’t get it, he supposed—not till he was in his thirties too.

  The door was open, but Tim was so absorbed he didn’t even turn round when Fitz knocked. The keys tapped, a cigarette fumed in the ashtray. From down the hallway came the odd sound of a door creaking open, footsteps, indistinct voices. Fitz knocked again, a bit more sharply this time, and all at once the strangest thing happened: Tim seemed to blur into a geometric array of neon colors and then reformulate himself like a deck of shuffled cards. It took him a moment to realize he was having a flashback, as Charlie and Tim called the experience, a brief neural replay of a moment randomly selected from a previous trip, nothing to worry about, nothing more than a trompe l’oeil of the mind, and he wouldn’t even have remarked it except that it was his first. When Tim finally did turn around,
the first thing Fitz said was, “Weird.”

  The automatic smile, the laughing eyes, the hair grown ever so slightly longer so that it didn’t really qualify as a crew cut anymore but more the kind of shag Maynard Ferguson favored. Tim. In his glory. Smiling. “What’s weird?”

  “I think I just had a flashback, if that’s what you call it.”

  “Welcome to the club,” Tim said, opening his mouth in a yawn and locking his fingers to stretch his arms before him. “It’s an interesting phenomenon, isn’t it? You know what it says to me? It says it’s time to dive in again—when’s the last time you had a session?”

  “Two weeks, three, I don’t know. I’ve been so busy with school—and packing—I’ve barely had time to come up for air.”

  “Tell me about it—it’s an ordeal, isn’t it? But you’re all set, right?”

  He was. Or nearly. Since their lease was up the first of August, he and Joanie had arranged to put the furniture in storage—and they were close to settling on a new place for September. Joanie had given notice at work. He’d brought the car in for servicing—tune-up, oil change, lube, radiator flush—and sprung for four new tires, or almost new. Charlie gave him a well-worn road atlas and Joanie found an ice chest at a yard sale so they could take sandwiches and drinks with them and not have to stop if they didn’t want to. As soon as he closed out the semester and Corey finished school, they were off.

  He hadn’t let himself dwell on it—there was too much to do—but Mexico was never far from his thoughts, nirvana glowing on the horizon of the too-familiar campus and the dripping trees. Joanie was right there with him, poring over every guidebook she could find (“You realize how cheap everything is down there, Fitz? Those embroidered dresses and the cute white peasant blouses with the blue trim, the beadwork, silver, turquoise, all of it?”). And Corey—Corey was lit up like a rocket—he couldn’t stop talking about the beach, about snorkeling and diving and whether or not they’d have AquaLungs down there and all the fish he was going to spear, dorado and amberjacks and snappers and triggerfish, and who else was going, Jackie and the Roberts twins and who again?

  “Yeah,” he said, “I think so.”

  “All right,” Tim said, “good, good, good. Have a seat, why don’t you?”

  He sat, propped the umbrella up against the desk. “I’m really looking forward to this,” he said. “Mexico, I mean.”

  “You don’t know the half of it, Fitz—this is going to be the biggest adventure of your life, of all our lives, and we’re really going to have a chance to assess the potential of these chemicals, not simply for clinical use but for mind expansion. Do you believe in group consciousness—I mean, that it’s possible?”

  “Truthfully? I don’t know.”

  Tim let out a laugh. “Always the scientist, right? But we’re going to find out, Fitz, that’s for sure. Now, I wonder if you wouldn’t mind doing me a little favor?”

  A little favor? Tim could have asked him anything—sprint to Mexico and back, jump out the window, strangle McClelland, Kellard and Mortenson in their sleep—and he would have done it without question. “Sure,” he said, “what is it?”

  “It’s the house. It’s gotten a bit out of hand, really, and Professor Sokoloff’s coming back from sabbatical next week and I won’t be here to give him the key because I’ll be down in Zihuatanejo—setting things up for everybody. You understand? I’m going to need someone to deal with that. Oh, Ken and Fanchon are going to tidy up, but they’ve got to be in Connecticut for his sister’s wedding and my kids aren’t going to be there—they’ll be staying with Royce Eggers and his wife till they fly down first week of July, so you see my predicament?”

  “Sure,” he heard himself say, “sure, I’ll take care of it. No problem.”

  From the outside, the house looked fine. It really was impressive, a three-story Georgian revival mansion crowning a hill with a series of stone steps leading up from the street. The lawn was ragged and there were branches and leaves scattered across the expanse of it, but the shrubs were in bloom and the flowers in the neglected beds were pushing through the weeds to lend a little color and scent the air. Inside, it was different. The house held the chill of the night and the pervasive odor was of the cold ash that lay six inches deep in the fireplaces—that and the urine the dog had been so conscientious about depositing on the carpets. And something else too—was that marijuana or just the stale reek of cigarettes? Cigarettes, he decided as he pulled the door shut behind him, because Tim forbade marijuana on the premises, for the very good reason that marijuana was illegal and the last thing he needed—any of them needed—was to give the police a reason to come knocking at the door.

  Fitz remembered one session when Tim’s New York contingent was there, Maynard and Flora Lu and a couple of others, along with a few of the subsidiaries and hangers-on who were increasingly showing up to make the scene, as they called it, and a beatnik in beard and beret with a bota bag slung over one shoulder extracted a marijuana cigarette from his shirt pocket, casually lit it and began puffing away. Fitz had never seen Tim so angry—had never seen him angry at all, actually. In any case, Tim snatched the thing right out of the man’s mouth, flung it into the fireplace and read him the riot act. Which really didn’t help as far as mind-set was concerned, or at least not for that particular individual. But Tim was right—psilocybin was legal, LSD was legal, but marijuana was not.

  The professor, who was driving up from New York, was due in the late afternoon, which really didn’t give Fitz a whole lot of time to try to make things presentable, and he kicked himself for not getting there sooner. It was a Saturday, just past noon, and he’d spent the morning dealing with his own exponentially multiplying obligations, taking Corey to Little League practice, making a run to the storage unit with a bunch of odds and ends—crap—stuffed in boxes, scrubbing stains out of the sink and toilet with an eye to getting his deposit back at the end of the month. That was something he could exert some control over, but Tim’s place was a disaster. Worst of all were the mandalas, which could only be painted over—either that or all the paneling would have to be stripped and refinished, and how could he hope to accomplish that short of waving a magic wand? As much as he owed Tim—and he owed him everything at this juncture—it really wasn’t his problem. His problem was to pitch in as best he could, haul trash, sweep up, vacuum—air the place out, for Christsake. Whatever came next was between Tim and Professor Sokoloff, who was going to be keeping the deposit no matter what, that was for sure.

  He was in the kitchen with a sponge and a can of Ajax, working on deglutinizing the burners on the stove, when he heard a dull thump behind him and turned round to see the professor himself in the doorway, jerking his fists up and down and kicking the wall with one of his heavy black brogans. The professor—he was an expert in Soviet law, as it turned out, and just off the boat after a year in Moscow—looked to be in his forties, clean-shaven, tall and fit, with a pair of Trotskyite glasses pinched over the bridge of his nose. Fitz had never laid eyes on him before. In fact, he was so far removed from all this he’d still been back in New York, in Beacon, wrapping up the school year when the professor had set sail for Leningrad. “You!” the professor snapped. “Who in hell are you?”

  “I’m, well, I’m—” Fitz began, momentarily at a loss. He had a bucket in one hand, sponge in the other, and his scalp was prickling as if he’d just stepped out of the shower. He wanted to itch it, but his hands were encased in wet rubber gloves—grease-smeared wet rubber gloves—and so he compressed his neck and rubbed the back of his head against his collar, which was dirty. Everything about him was dirty. “A student,” he said finally.

  “A student!” the professor threw back at him as if it were the most preposterous designation in the English language and a lie and a calumny to boot. “Of whom, I’d like to know—Leary? Dr. Leary? The man I—entrusted—this house to?” He kicked the wall once more with a dull booming vibration that rattled all the way down the kitchen counter
and into the cracked and mounded dishes on the drainboard. “Where is he? I demand to see him this minute!”

  “He’s not here, he’s—in Mexico. And he asked me to give you the key?” He stripped off one glove and began digging in his front pocket until he retrieved the dull brass key and held it up in evidence.

  A woman had appeared beside the professor now, elegant, mid-thirties, wearing a fur coat though it was summer. Her eyes were full, her makeup runneled with tears. “Oh, my sweet Jesus,” she wailed. “This is beyond outrageous, it’s, it’s—vandalism.” She turned to her husband, who hadn’t taken his eyes off Fitz, not for a second. “Marty, who is this, what’s going on?”

  And now the son came into the picture, a child of five or six who wore a version of his father’s face and looked as if he’d just been thrust into a lifeboat as the ship went down. He seemed to be crying too, caught up in the emotional storm of whatever he imagined was going on here, and Fitz had a fleeting vision of the room at the top of the stairs where he’d gone so deep with Joanie that first night—hadn’t there been children’s posters on the walls? A teddy bear on the shelf? Dick and Jane?

  The professor had come right up to him now. “Don’t you try to pass that off on me!” he shouted. “Don’t you dare!” And with a sudden jerk he slapped the key from Fitz’s hand so that it went clattering across the floor, the only sound in that vast reverberating echo chamber of a house.

  For a long moment, nobody said anything. The professor glared, the wife suppressed a sob, the child bowed his head as if he were the one being chastised, and they all looked to the key, where it had come to rest against the grill of the refrigerator. If Fitz was anything, he was dutiful. He paid his debts, got his work in on time, stood as a comfort and support for his wife and son and gave loyalty where loyalty was due. But this was too much—he didn’t have to take this. He stripped off the other glove, dropped the sponge in the bucket atop the stove, turned his back on the professor and strode out of the room.