by T. C. Boyle
She saw that the kids had a fire going—the only light in the place—which was why she’d walked right past it. She smelled the sharp tang of woodsmoke and something else too: marijuana. She couldn’t believe it—they were smoking marijuana after that little scene in the hallway? Jesus. And where were they? There, there they were, sprawled out on the floor in their sleeping bags though there were beds enough for them all, dark humps against the darker field of the floor and the shadowed walls. Humps. Dark humps. And so what if she was high on marijuana herself? So what?
“Corey?” she whispered.
No one stirred, no one answered. Gradually, as she stood there adjusting her eyes to the firelight, she began to distinguish one hump from the other—that was Tommy Eggers lying there in the corner, and the twins here in the middle of the floor. And that was Jackie, wasn’t it? And Suzie stretched out on the couch? She wanted to flick on the lights, rage through the room, shake them all awake—shoplifting, marijuana, what were they thinking?—but she didn’t. She just stepped around them, her arms flung out for balance, looking for her son, for Corey, because he was all that mattered.
She found him at the far end of the room, about as far from the fireplace as you could get, and he was in his sleeping bag, the down bag she’d bought him four years ago when he was in the Boy Scouts, but the thing was—and it took her a moment for it to sink in—he wasn’t alone. No, Nancy was squeezed in beside him, the two of them there in a confusion of limbs that were like the protuberant bones of some exotic two-headed creature made of nylon, and before she knew what she was doing she had hold of the thing and was shaking it like a rug and the two faces there came instantly to life and her son—her son—let out a curse, a whole string of curses, and then Nancy was shouting and clawing at her arm and the whole room erupting in chaos.
Corey wasn’t wearing a pajama top. He was naked, or at least as much of him as she could see, and she was tugging and tugging at the neck of the sleeping bag till she felt the zipper give and somebody was crying out “Who is it? What’s happening?” and her son pushed himself up to a sitting position and he was fighting her too and then the sleeping bag slipped away and she saw Nancy there naked to her little gypsy waist. Corey shoved violently away from her, scrambling to his feet now—and he wasn’t wearing shorts or pajama bottoms either—and she was slapping him, or trying to, and saying, sobbing, “What are you thinking? What are you doing? Don’t you realize, don’t you understand—?”
They were all watching, all the kids. Somebody had flicked on the overhead light so that the room flared up in her face as if it had burst into flame and she remembered thinking They can all see her, see Nancy, and Nancy doesn’t even care, and then Corey, his face twisted, was shouting, “I hate you! Get out, get out, get out!”
Then she was back out in the snow again, furious, absolutely furious—they’d actually shoved her out the door and locked it behind her!—determined to put an end to this once and for all. She was going to go get Fitz—and Nancy’s father too. And Susannah. And Tim—and everybody else. Enough was enough. She kicked through the drifts, one hand held up in front of her face to shield it from the wind-borne snow, which seemed to have changed direction, or—wait a minute, where was she? Was this right? Wasn’t that the house over there?
No, no it wasn’t . . . everything was different now. She wasn’t high, not anymore, or not that she could feel, but she’d never had much of a sense of direction and with the way the wind was blowing she could hardly see a thing and her hands—her hands were freezing. The Alte Haus wasn’t more than a couple hundred yards from the Bowling Alley, a big turreted fairy-tale palace you could see from a mile away, which no one could miss, even in a storm like this. But where was it? Usually it was ablaze with light like a ship at sea, but everybody seemed to have gone to bed by now—the guests, all the white-robed guests—and the night just held there, uniform, every which way she looked. But this was ridiculous. She kept walking, the night held, the snow kept coming. She was thinking about Fitz and what he was forever saying to her about her sense of direction: Turn around and go in exactly the opposite way because you’re always 100 percent wrong—the correct data’s in there somewhere, but you’ve got a brain glitch. Trust me. Just go the opposite way.
But what was the opposite way? She was so turned around she didn’t know which way she’d come, and her tracks were filling as fast as she made them. And her hands were so cold. And her feet, her feet too. She backtracked, thinking to find the Bowling Alley again, just to orient herself. Problem was, she couldn’t find that either. She must have gone off on a tangent—toward the lake? Where was the lake? She didn’t have a clue. Everything was molded of snow. There was no moon. There were no stars. And the wind never stopped, not for an instant.
How much time went by she didn’t know. But she couldn’t feel her feet and she fell repeatedly so that the snow was worked up inside her sleeves and under the waistband of her jacket, which was wrong, and stupid, that too, and she’d forgotten about Corey now—or almost; she would deal with him in the morning—and she was so wrung out and exhausted all she could think was that she might just want to lie down in the snow for a bit, right here, just to catch her breath . . . when a sound came to her. It was sharp and sudden, a crack, a thump, a clatter, and then it repeated again, and again.
She went toward it. Ten steps, twenty, and there it was, the big house, revealed through a torn curtain of wind-shattered snow, and a light there, the light of the back porch and the shadow of a figure at the chopping block, a man raising a sledgehammer to drive an iron spike into a round of wood. Somebody out there splitting wood against the dwindling of the fire, which must have burned down to coals by now. And who was it? Fitz? Tim? She came closer, all in white, just as Tim had wanted, a bride of the night. Hurrying, she shuffled across the yard and into the pool of light and saw that it was Ken there, splitting wood for the fire that would blaze up in a minute and warm her all the way through, flesh and tendons and bones and her feet that were like blocks of ice.
In the next minute she was there, in his arms, clutching him to her. “Ken,” she cried, “Jesus, Ken!”
“What is it?” he said, rocking with her. “But you’re freezing. Where’ve you been?”
The wind threw a spray of pellets in her face. She couldn’t feel her toes, her fingertips, her nose. Corey was in that house somewhere out in the darkness and he was having sex with that girl—fucking her—and he wasn’t a boy anymore, wasn’t her boy, and never would be again. Yes. All right. That was how it was. And where did that leave her? Free. Free to look after her own needs for a change, to soar and come down and soar again anytime the spirit moved her, and her own child could tell her he hated her and lock her out in the cold and it didn’t matter one iota, not anymore.
“Nowhere,” she said, shivering hard against him. Even through her jacket, even through the cold, she could feel the heat of him, and she wasn’t crying, was she? “I’m fine now,” she said. “I am. Really, I am.”
Part III
Millbrook, 1964
1.
Everything was free-form that first winter at Millbrook, people drifting in and out, chores assigned and forgotten, shrines appearing in the hallways and alcoves and at the top of each flight of stairs. People cooked, washed dishes, split wood. There wasn’t enough money, then there was. The furnace mysteriously broke down and just as mysteriously repaired itself. Mandalas flowered on the walls and Tim, Ken and Fanchon covered the downstairs ceilings in glittering gold paint by way of enhancing the view from the supine position. There were the pets. There were martinis. There was music. And above all, there was the sacrament.
Fitz tried to settle in, tried to move forward with his work, but outside the bubble of academe—outside Harvard—he was finding it increasingly difficult to focus, especially when everything seemed to revolve around group dynamics, group consciousness, group being. It was one thing to live as one big happy family in a Mexican hotel, where the hired staf
f took care of the necessities, and another when you had to divide up the responsibilities in a household that was overrun with guests on the weekends and now numbered twenty-nine full-time residents, including Lori, who’d just appeared one day and never left; Hollingshead, who never strayed far from the source of the sacrament; and Maynard and Flora Lu Ferguson and their five children, who moved in after the first of the year. With their monkey. Which, as far as he could see, wrought more destruction and chaos than all the children combined.
He had a cage, this monkey, but he was rarely in it because why should he want to be confined when he could run screeching through the corridors and smear the walls with shit? You could come across him anywhere, leering down at you from the chandelier, popping out from behind the toilet the minute you dropped your pants and settled down with the newspaper, snaking a leathery hand out from beneath the dining room table to filch your morning pancake or evening dessert. Fruit? Forget it. Nobody that winter ever ate an apple, orange, banana or grapefruit that didn’t display the impress of a set of simian teeth.
He had to admit he’d never cared all that much for monkeys. As an undergrad, his work-study scholarship had required him to look after twenty of them in the primate lab, which meant he’d been regularly scratched, bitten and bombarded with monkey spittle, urine and worse. Monkeys were foul, mean-spirited and far too intelligent for their own or anybody’s else’s good and they belonged in a cage—or better yet, back in the jungle they came from. He tried to speak to Flora Lu about the situation, but in the end the monkey had his way because he could never quite bring himself to mention it. The fact was, he always seemed to be tongue-tied in her presence—she was an exotic, a celebrity’s wife, and some part of him couldn’t get past that no matter how many times she sat across the table from him at dinner, sipping, chewing and plying her fork like any other woman, like Joanie or Fanchon or Paulette.
What he wanted, what he fantasized about, was to get lucky in the Saturday night drawing and wind up paired off with her in the meditation house for a week of improvised activity. The only problem with that little fantasy was that she and Maynard—who was out touring with his band half the time in any case—declined to participate in the exercise, which only emphasized their difference from everybody else. They were part of the inner circle, but in the way of electrons orbiting the nucleus of an atom, part of it and outside it at the same time. In the end, she was Flora Lu Ferguson, and for all her communion with the sacrament, she never forgot it or let anybody else forget it either.
Which went against the whole rationale of the drawing in the first place. The idea was to break through the sexual jealousy game as a way of deepening the communal bond and transitioning from the individual ego to the group mind—or that was how Tim explained it. And once he’d explained it—or actually just broached the subject—there was little debate or even hesitation because they were psychologists and this was the new frontier and they could all participate in a way that was strictly clinical and disinterested and might well have the added benefit of providing data for future papers, articles and even books. Or at least that was what they told themselves. The way it worked was that once a week Tim would draw a pair of names from the sombrero he’d brought back from Mexico, and whoever’s names came up would have to spend the next seven days in the meditation-house-cum-bowling-alley, relieved of all household duties and free to trip and engage in any activity they wanted, sexual or otherwise, without constraint. Two people, going deep.
The first drawing—Tim made a ceremony of it, as he did with everything—was held in front of the fireplace in the library at the beginning of one of their regular Saturday night sessions. There were no paying guests involved—that experiment, while profitable, had proved a nightmare, what with people’s cars mired in the snow and various fender benders that tested everybody’s equanimity and all but destroyed any meditative peace they might have found, and they’d decided to suspend the seminars till the weather improved. There were people up from the city, of course, friends, friends of friends, hangers-on and semi-regulars, but Tim had blessed them all with the sacrament they’d come for, then pulled the big doors shut on the library so that only the inner circle was gathered inside.
Everything was perfect, people’s faces lit by the glow of the fire, the odd cat or dog lying there where you could reach out a hand and stroke an ear or pat a belly, the sacrament coming on and the monkey, for once, confined upstairs in his cage. It was the sort of scene Fitz had come to embrace, to love, really, all the mad rush of the world kept at bay and the people he most cared about gathered round him. This was what they were here for. This was what life was meant to be, and if the children were excluded this weekend and he and Joanie were all but broke and his thesis—Aspects of Operant Conditioning: A Statistical Analysis of Recent Maze-Based Experiments—stalled, so be it.
Joanie was right beside him, cradling her knees and smiling faintly, a smile that was more a genetic tilt of the muscles at the corners of her mouth than a sign of amusement or even engagement (what Tim liked to call her “mysterious smile,” as in, Joanie, light up that mysterious smile for us, will you?). She was parting her hair in the middle now and had let it grow out till it trailed over her shoulders in the style of a folk singer whose music Alice had introduced her to, a woman who sang in a churchy soprano about farmers and coal miners and such, and what was her name? He couldn’t remember. And it didn’t matter. Because that sort of music meant nothing more to him than Charlie’s Beatles, except that there was only one of her, which reduced the annoyance factor by 75 percent.
Tim waited till he was sure everyone was watching, then dipped his hand in the hat and with a flourish came up with the first slip of paper, which he carefully unfolded and smoothed flat in the palm of one hand. He made a show of squinting at the name written across the face of it as if he couldn’t quite make it out, but of course he was just toying with them. “Joanie,” he announced, glancing up at her and flashing his fluid grin. “Congratulations.”
Everyone looked to her—they all feigned indifference but in truth everyone was on edge, as you could plainly see in their faces—and then a few people clapped and the whole group broke out in nervous laughter. “No potato peeling for you this week, you lucky devil,” Paulette sang out. “And no dishes either. Queen for a day! Or no, for a week, a whole week!”
Before Fitz could even begin to sort out his feelings—Corey was the first thing he thought of, then himself, then whichever man might or might not be called next, and what if it was Hollingshead?—Tim was fishing in the hat again, and here came the strip of paper and the widening smile and in the next breath the announcement they were all waiting for. Which—and this was the nature of the game—came as a jolt of surprise because everyone had been thinking of a man, of sex, because that was the attraction here, that was the titillation, a kind of communal spin the bottle no matter the psychological rationale. Tim didn’t call Ken’s name or Royce’s or Hollingshead’s, but Fanchon’s, and after a moment of stunned silence the applause started up again, along with the laughter and catcalls. “A woman’s work is never done,” Charlie piped up, and somebody else—it was Hollingshead, seated in back—added, “Or Sappho’s either.”
No matter—from Fanchon’s reaction you would have thought she’d won the Miss America contest. She let out a squeal of delight and clapped her hands, applauding for herself. “Oh, this is so nice,” she said, springing up from where she was seated at the edge of the carpet so everyone could see her, “my best friend!” She skipped across the room to Joanie and reached down a hand to help her to her feet and then, their hands entwined, raised them high in triumph. “We will have a vacation, no?” she cried. “Bon voyage!”
He was thinking of the first time he’d made love with her—in Mexico it was, that first summer—and how she’d come to him in darkness when he was in the lifeguard tower navigating his way through his weekly session. The sea thundered against the shore and everything smelled of the f
irst life the earth had known and the three-quarters moon was making a light show of each rippling wave all the way out to infinity and suddenly there she was, Fanchon, in her two-piece, and she didn’t say a word, just eased down his swim trunks and took him in her mouth. She was shorter than Joanie, more compact in her torso, and her breasts were higher and smaller but she was warm and wet and he slipped into her—deep, so deep—and hardly knew the difference.
“All right,” Tim said, and he was on his feet too, “now that’s settled, let’s go in and join the party.”
You’re joking, right?” Corey said.
“No, not at all. Luck of the draw. I’ll probably be next.”
It was the following morning, Sunday, the house quiet—and cold, so cold you tried to stay in bed as long as you could, in Fitz’s case with the Times, which he normally shared with Joanie, but that wasn’t in the cards this morning because Joanie wasn’t in bed with him. Joanie was in the meditation house with Fanchon, in bed or not, and Corey had come in without knocking and asked where his mother was because, as it turned out, he had a paper due the next day for history and she’d been helping him with the research.
“For the whole week?”
“It’s an experiment. We all voted on it. It’s a way of bringing us all closer together—”
“One big family.”
“Right.”
Corey just stood there, his loose-leaf notebook thrust under one arm, looking puzzled and upset. As fiercely as he asserted his independence, he was still a kid—not yet sixteen—who didn’t seem to have much of an idea as to how clean underwear wound up in his dresser drawer or the food got from the supermarket to the stove to the table, and though he’d never admit it, he needed his mother. If not as his confidante—it seemed Nancy and Richard had replaced her there—then as the bête noire he could react against and at the same time test over and over with his multiplying needs. That night of the snowstorm, the night the kids had been shunted off to the Bowling Alley and Joanie had found him there with Nancy, was the turning point, though Fitz had been unaware of it at the time. Joanie hadn’t come to bed at the usual hour that night and he’d assumed she was busy with the cleanup and preparations for the next day’s meals and seminars, but when he woke at dawn there she was, sitting on the edge of the bed, still dressed in the white skirt and sweater she’d put on for the paying guests. “What’s the matter?” he’d asked. “Are you all right?”