The Tortilla Curtain

by T. C. Boyle

  The car pulled slowly alongside him, and he could see that it was some sort of American car, older, a big boat of a thing with mag wheels and an elaborate metal-flake paint job. The windows were smoked and he couldn’t see inside. What did they want—directions? No face was visible. No one asked. He cursed under his breath, then picked up his pace, but the car seemed to hover there beside him, the speakers sucking up all available sound and then pumping it back out again, ka-thump, ka-thump, ka-thump. The car stayed even with him for what seemed an eternity, then it gradually accelerated, made the end of the street, wheeled round and rolled slowly back down the block again—ka-thump, ka-thump, ka-thump—and this time the lights, still on bright, glared directly into Delaney’s eyes. He kept going and the car crept past him again and finally faded to a pair of taillights swinging back onto Robles. It wasn’t till Delaney was inside, and the door locked behind him, that he thought to be afraid.

  Who would be up here at this hour in a car like that? He thought of the solemn fat man at the meeting and his litany of woes, the bringer of bad tidings, the Cassandra of Arroyo Blanco. Was it burglars, then? Muggers? Gangbangers? Is that what they were? As he crossed the kitchen and surreptitiously slipped Sacheverell’s foreleg into the freezer beneath a bag of frozen peas—he’d bury it tomorrow, after Kyra went off to work—he couldn’t help thinking about the gate. If there was a gate that car wouldn’t have been there, and who knew what he’d just escaped—a beating, robbery, murder? He poured himself a glass of orange juice, took a bite of the macaroni and cheese Jordan had left on his plate at dinner. And then he saw the light in the bedroom: Kyra was waiting up for him.

  He felt a stirring in his groin. It was nearly eleven, and normally she was in bed by nine-thirty. That meant one thing: she was propped up against the pillows in one of the sheer silk teddies he’d bought her at Christmas for just such an occasion as this, reading Anaïs Nin’s erotica or paging through one of the illustrated sex manuals she kept in a box under the bed—waiting, and eager. There was something about the little tragedies of life, the opening of the floodgates of emotion, that seemed to unleash her libido. For Kyra, sex was therapeutic, a release from sorrow, tension, worry, and she plunged into it in moments of emotional distress as others might have sunk themselves in alcohol or drugs—and who was Delaney to argue? She’d been especially passionate around the time her mother was hospitalized for her gallbladder operation, and he could remember never wanting to leave the motel room they’d rented across the street from the hospital—it was the next best thing to a second honeymoon. Smaller sorrows aroused her too—having a neighbor list her house with a rival company, discovering a dent in the door of her Lexus, seeing Jordan laid low with the flu or swollen up with the stigmata of poison oak. Delaney could only imagine what the death of a dog would do to her.

  He came into the room with his shirt unbuttoned to the waist, ready for anything. She was there, just as he’d pictured her, the pillows fluffed, the silk clinging to her breasts, her eyes moist with desire as she lifted them from the page. “How was the meeting?” she whispered.

  He watched, transfixed, as she swung her smooth tanned legs over the side of the bed, set her book down on the night table and snapped off the reading light, leaving only the sensual flicker of a scented candle to guide them. “The meeting?” he echoed, and he was whispering too, he couldn’t help himself. “It was nothing. The usual.”

  And now she was on her feet, her arms encircling his shoulders, her body straining against his. “I thought”—her voice cracked and tiny—“I thought they were ... debating the ... gate and all?”

  Her mouth was warm. He pressed himself to her like a teenager at a dance, oblivious of gates, coyotes, dogs and Mexicans. She moved against him, and then she pulled away to perch again at the edge of the bed, her fingers busy at his zipper. After a long pause, he whispered, “That’s right ... and you know how I feel about it, but—” And though his pants were down around his ankles and they were kissing again and he was caressing her through the black liquid silk, he couldn’t help thinking about that car and the low rumbling menace of it and how that modified his views vis-à-vis gated communities, public spaces and democratic access ... He lifted the silk from her thighs. “I guess I’m not sure anymore—”

  She was wet. He sank into her. The candle sent distorted shadows floating up and down the walls. “Poor Sacheverell,” she breathed, and then suddenly she froze. Her eyes, inches from his, flashed open. “He’s dead, isn’t he?”

  There’d been movement, warmth, a slow delicious friction, but now all movement ceased. What could he say? He tried to kiss her, but she fought his mouth away. He let out a sigh. “Yes.”

  “For sure?”

  “For sure.”

  “You found him, didn’t you? Tell me. Quick.”

  She was clutching him still, but there was no passion in it—at least not the sort of passion he’d anticipated. Another sigh. “A piece of him. His foreleg, actually. The left.”

  She drew in a sudden sharp breath—it was as if she’d burned herself or been pricked with a pin—and then she pushed him aside and rolled out from under him. Before he knew what was happening she was on her feet, rigid with anger. “I knew it! You lied to me!”

  “I didn’t lie, I just—”

  “Where is it?”

  The question took him by surprise. “What do you mean?”

  “The”—her voice broke—“what’s left of him.”

  He’d done all he could. He would have had to tell her in the morning anyway. “In the freezer,” he said.

  And then he was standing naked in the kitchen, watching his wife peer into the palely glowing depths of the freezer, her negligee derealized in the light of a single frigid bulb. He tried to nuzzle up against her but she pushed him impatiently away. “Where?” she demanded. “I don’t see anything.”

  Miserable, his voice pitched low: “Third shelf down, behind the peas. It’s wrapped up in a Baggie.”

  He watched her poke tentatively through the bright plastic sacks of vegetables until she found it, a nondescript lump of hair, bone, gristle and meat wrapped like a chicken leg in its transparent shroud. She held it in the palm of her hand, her eyes swollen with emotion, the heavy breath of the freezer swirling ghostlike round her bare legs. Delaney didn’t know what to say. He felt guilty somehow, culpable, as if he’d killed the dog himself, as if the whole thing were bound up in venality, lust, the shirking of responsibility and duty, and yet at the same time the scene was irresistibly erotic. Despite himself, he began to stiffen. But then, as Kyra stood there in a daze and the freezer breathed in and out and the pale wedge of light from the open door pressed their trembling shadows to the wall, there came a clacking of canine nails on the polished floorboards, and Osbert, the survivor, poked his head in the door, looking hopeful.

  It was apparently too much for Kyra. The relic disappeared into the depths of the freezer amid the peas and niblet corn and potato puffs, and the door slammed shut, taking all the light with it.

  You didn’t move property with a long face and you didn’t put deals together if you could barely drag yourself out of bed in the morning—especially in this market. Nobody had to tell Kyra. She was the consummate closer—psychic, cheerleader, seductress and psychoanalyst all rolled in one—and she never let her enthusiasm flag no matter how small the transaction or how many times she’d been through the same tired motions. Somehow, though, she just couldn’t seem to muster the energy. Not today. Not after what had happened to Sacheverell. It was only eleven in the morning and she felt as worn and depleted as she’d ever been in her life. All she could think about was that grisly paw in the freezer, and she wished now that she’d let Delaney go ahead with his deception. He would have buried the evidence in the morning and she’d never have been the wiser—but no, she had to see for herself, and that little foreleg with its perfectly aligned little toenails was a shock that kept her up half the night.

  When she did finally
manage to drift off, her dreams were haunted by wolfish shapes and images of the hunt, by bared fangs and flashing limbs and the circle of canny snouts raised to the sky in primordial triumph. She awoke to the whimpering of Osbert, and the first emotion that seized her was anger. Anger at her loss, at the vicissitudes of nature, at the Department of Fish and Game or Animal Control or whatever they were called, at the grinning stupid potbellied clown who’d put up the fence for them—why stop at six feet? Why not eight? Ten? When the anger had passed, she lay there in the washed-out light of dawn and stroked the soft familiar fluff behind the dog’s ears and let the hurt overwhelm her, and it was cleansing, cathartic, a moment of release that would strengthen and sustain her. Or so she thought.

  At eleven-fifteen she pulled up in front of the house she was showing—the Matzoob place, big and airy, with a marble entrance hall, six bedrooms, pool, maid’s room and guesthouse, worth one-point-one two years ago and listed at eight now and lucky to move for six and a half—and the first thing she noticed was the puddle of water on the front porch. Puddle? It was a pond, a lake, and the depth of it showed all too plainly how uneven the tiles were. She silently cursed the gardener. There had to be a broken sprinkler head somewhere in the shrubbery—yes, there it was—and when the automatic timer switched on, it must have been like Niagara out here. Well, she’d have to dig around in the garage and see if she could find a broom somewhere—she couldn’t very well have the buyers wading through a pond to get in the house, not to mention noticing that the tiles were coming up and the porch listing into the shrubbery. And then she’d call the gardener. What was his name—she had it in her book somewhere, not the service she usually used, some independent the Matzoobs had been big on before they moved to San Bernardino—Gutiérrez? González? Something like that.

  Kyra had no patience with incompetence, and here it was, staring her in the face. How the gardener could come back week after week and not notice something as obvious as an inch and a half of water on the front porch was beyond her, and the pure immediate unalloyed aggravation of it allowed her to forget Sacheverell for the moment and focus on the matter at hand, on business, on the moving of property. Nothing escaped her. Not a crack in the plaster, a spot of mold on the wall behind the potted palm or an odor that wasn’t exactly what it was supposed to be.

  Odors were the key. You could tell three-quarters of everything about a house by the way it smelled—condition, upkeep, what kind of people owned it, whether the roof leaked or the basement flooded. What you didn’t want was that dead tomblike smell of a shut-up house, as if it were a funeral parlor, or anything that smelled of dry rot or chemicals or even paint. Cooking odors were anathema. Ditto the stink of animals. She’d listed one house—one of her few failures—in which an old lady had died surrounded by thirty-two cats that had pissed, crapped and sprayed on every surface available, including the ceilings. The only hope for that place was to burn it down.

  Now, stepping into the Matzoobs’, the first thing Kyra did was close the door behind her and take a good long lingering sniff. Then she exhaled and tried it again, alert to every nuance, her nose as keen as any connoisseur’s. Not bad. Not bad at all. There was maybe the faintest whiff of cooking oil from some long-forgotten meal, a trace of dog or cat, mothballs maybe, but she couldn’t be sure. It helped that the place was empty—when it first went on the market eight months ago the Matzoobs were still here, the halls, closets and bathrooms steeping in their own peculiar odor. And to call the odor “peculiar” wasn’t being judgmental, not at all—it was merely descriptive. Every family, every house, had its own aroma, as unique and individual as a thumbprint.

  The Matzoobs’ was a rich ferment of smell, ranging from the perfume of the fresh-cut flowers Sheray Matzoob favored to the pungent stab of garlic and coriander Joe Matzoob had learned to use in his gourmet cooking classes and the festering sweat socks of Matzoob Jr., the basketball star. It was a homey smell, but too complicated to do anybody any good. And the furniture was a nightmare. Big cumbersome pieces finished in an almost ebony stain that seemed to drink up what little light penetrated the thick blanket-like curtains Sheray Matzoob had inherited from her mother. And the portraits—they were something else altogether. Big, crude, cheesy things that made the Matzoobs look like ghouls, with gold-tinted frames and paint so thick it might have been applied with a butter knife.

  But now the place was empty, and that suited Kyra just fine. Once in a while you’d get a place that was so exquisitely furnished you’d ask the sellers to leave their things in place until the house was in escrow, but that was rare. Most people had no taste. No dream of it. Not a clue. And yet they all thought they had it—were smug about it even—and they’d walk right out the door because of an unfortunate lamp or a deep plush carpet in a shade they couldn’t fathom. All things considered, Kyra preferred it this way—a neutral environment, stripped to the essentials: walls, floors, ceilings and appliances. A vacant house became hers in a way—it had been abandoned, deserted, left in her hands and hers alone, and sometimes the sellers were off in another state or country even—and she couldn’t help feeling proprietorial about it. Sometimes, making the rounds of her houses—she had forty-six current listings, more than half of them unoccupied—she felt like the queen of some fanciful country, a land of high archways, open rooms and swimming pools that would have made an inland sea if stretched end-to-end across her domain.

  There was a broom in the garage—practically the only thing left there, if you discounted the two trash cans and a box of heavy-duty garbage bags. Kyra swept the water from the front porch and then went into the bathroom in the master suite to freshen up her face before Sally Lieberman from Sunrise arrived with her buyers. The bathroom was dated, unfortunately, by its garish ceramic tiles, each with the miniature yellow, blue and green figure of a bird emblazoned on it, and by the tarnished faux-brass fixtures and cut-glass towel racks that gave the place the feel of the ladies’ room in a Mexican restaurant. Ah, well, each to her taste, Kyra was thinking, and then she caught a good look at herself in the mirror.

  It was a shock. She looked awful. Haggard, frowsy, desperate, like some stressed-out Tupperware hostess or something. The problem was her nose. Or, actually, it was Sacheverell and the night she’d spent, but all the grief and shock and exhaustion of the ordeal was right there, consolidated in her nose. The tip of it was red—bright red, naming—and when the tip of her nose was red it seemed to pull her whole face in on itself like some freakish vortex, The Amazing Lady with the Shrinking Face. Ever since she’d had her nose modified when she was fourteen, it had a tendency to embarrass her in times of stress. Whatever the doctor had done to it—remove a sliver of bone, snip a bit here and there—it was always just a shade paler than her cheeks, chin and brow, and it took on color more quickly. It always seemed to be sunburned, for one thing. And when she had a cold or flu or felt agitated or depressed or overwrought it blazed out from the center of her face like something you’d expect to find at the top of a Christmas tree.

  You couldn’t move property with a nose like that. But why dwell on it? She took out her compact and went to work.

  Just as she was putting the finishing touches to her face she heard Sally Lieberman chiming from the front door, “We’re here!”

  Sally was mid-forties, dressed like she owned the store, worked out at the gym, a real professional. Kyra had closed six properties with her over the course of the past two years and she valued her input. The buyers, though, left something to be desired. They hung back at the door, looking sulky and hard-to-please. Sally introduced them as the Paulymans, Gerald and Sue. He was frazzle-haired and unshaven, in a pair of blue jeans gone pale with use, and she had pink and black beads braided into her hair. Kyra knew from experience not to judge from first appearances—she’d once had a woman in her seventies who dressed like a bag lady but wound up writing a check for a two-point-seven-mil estate in Cold Canyon—but they didn’t look auspicious. Maybe they were musicians or TV writers,
she thought, hoping for the best. They had to have something going for them or Sally wouldn’t have brought them around.

  “So what’s with the wet spot on the porch?” the husband wanted to know, confronting her eyes, his voice nagging and hoarse.

  You couldn’t be evasive—evasive didn’t work. Even the most complacent buyer would think you were trying to put something over on them,, and a buyer like this would eat you alive. Kyra put on her smile. “A broken sprinkler head. I’ve already called the gardener about it.”

  “That porch has a real pitch to it.”

  “We offer a one-year buyer-protection policy on every house we list, gratis.”

  “I can’t believe this carpet,” the wife said.

  “And look at this,” the husband whined, pushing past Kyra and into the living room, where he went down on his hands and knees to wet a finger and run it along the baseboard, “the paint is flaking.”

  Kyra knew the type. They were looky-loos of the first stripe, abusive, angry, despicable people who’d make you show them two hundred houses and then go out and buy a trailer. Kyra gave them her spiel—deal of the century, room to spare, old-world craftsmanship, barely been lived in—handed them each a brochure with a glossy color photo of the house reproduced on the front and left them to wander at will.

  By two, she had a headache. Nothing was moving, anywhere, there were no messages on her machine and only six people had showed up for the realtors’ open house she’d catered herself on a new listing in West Hills—all that Chardonnay, Brie and Danish soda bread gone to waste, not to mention half a platter of California roll, ebi and salmon sushi. She spent the rest of the afternoon at the office, doing busywork, writing up ad copy and making phone calls, endless phone calls. Three extra-strength Excedrin couldn’t begin to quell the throbbing in her temples, and every time she lifted a document from her desk she saw Sacheverell as a puppy chasing a wadded-up ball of paper as if it were a part of him that had gotten away. She called Delaney at five to see how Jordan was taking it—he was fine, Delaney told her, so absorbed in his Nintendo he wouldn’t have known a dog from a chicken—and then she left work early to close up her houses and head home.