by T. C. Boyle
—
The hall was packed, standing room only, hot and stifled with the crush of bodies and the coats and scarves and other paraphernalia that were like a second shadowy crowd gathered at the edges of the living and breathing one, students, faculty and townspeople wedged into every available space. Some of them had come from as far away as Vermont and Montreal, so I heard, and when we came through the big main double doors, scalpers were selling the $2.50 Student Activities Board–sponsored tickets for three and four times face value. I sat in the front row between my father’s vacant seat and the biographer (whose name was Mal, as in Malcolm) while my father made the rounds, pumping hands and signing books, napkins, sheets of notebook paper and whatever else the adoring crowd thrust at him. Victoria, the mass of her hair enlarged to even more stupendous proportions thanks to some mysterious chemical treatment she’d undergone in the bathroom down the hall from her room, sat sprouting beside me.
I was trying not to watch my father, plunging in and out of the jungle of Victoria to make small talk, unconcerned, unflappable, no problem at all, when Mal leaned across the vacant seat and poked my arm with the butt of his always handy Scripto pen. I turned to him, Victoria’s hand clutched tightly in mine—she hadn’t let go, not even to unwrap her scarf, since we’d climbed out of the car—and stared into the reflected blaze of his glasses. They were amazing, those glasses, like picture windows, like a scuba mask grafted to his hairless skull. “Nineteen eighty-nine,” he said, “when he wrecked the car? The BMW, I mean?” I sat there frozen, waiting for the rest of it, the man’s voice snaking into my consciousness till it felt like the voice of my innermost self. “Do you remember if he was still living at home then? Or was that after he . . . after he, uh, moved out?”
Moved out. Wrecked the car.
“Do you remember what he was like then? Were there any obvious changes? Did he seem depressed?”
He must have seen from my face how I felt about the situation because his glasses suddenly flashed light, he tugged twice at his lower lip, and murmured, “I know this isn’t the time or place, I was just curious, that’s all. But I wonder, would you mind—maybe we could set up a time to talk?”
What could I say? Victoria clutched my hand like a trophy hunter, my fellow students rumbled and chattered and stretched in their bolted-down seats and my father squatted here, sprang up there, lifted his eyebrows and laid down a layer of witty banter about half a mile thick. I shrugged. Looked away. “Sure,” I said.
Then the lights dimmed once, twice, and went all the way down, and the chairman of the English Department took the podium while my father scuttled into the seat beside me and the audience hushed. I won’t bother describing the chairman—he was generic, and he talked for a mercifully short five minutes or so about how my father needed no introduction and et cetera, et cetera, before giving the podium over to Mal, as in Malcolm, the official hagiographer. Mal bounced up onto the stage like a trained seal, and if the chairman was selfless and brief, Mal was windy, verbose, a man who really craved an audience. He softened them up with half a dozen anecdotes about the great man’s hyperinflated past, with carefully selected references to drug abuse, womanizing, unhinged driving and of course movies and movie stars. By the time he was done he’d made my father sound like a combination of James Dean, Tolstoy and Enzo Ferrari. They were thrilled, every last man, woman and drooling freshman—and me, the only one in the audience who really knew him? I wanted to puke, puke till the auditorium was filled to the balcony, puke till they were swimming in it. But I couldn’t. I was trapped, just like in some nightmare. Right there in the middle of the front row.
When Mal finally ducked his denuded head and announced my father, the applause was seismic, as if the whole auditorium had been tipped on end, and the great man, in one of his own tour T-shirts and the omnipresent leather jacket, took the stage and engaged in a little high-fiving with the departing biographer while the thunder gradually subsided and the faces round me went slack with wonder. For the next fifteen minutes he pranced and strutted across the stage, ignoring the podium and delivering a preprogrammed monologue that was the equal of anything you’d see on late-night TV. At least all the morons around me thought so. He charmed them, out-hipped them, and they laughed, snorted, sniggered and howled. Some of them, my fellow freshmen, no doubt, even stamped their feet in thunderous unison as if they were at a pep rally or something. And the jokes—the sort of thing he’d come on with at lunch—were all so self-effacing, at least on the surface, but deep down each phrase and buttressed pause was calculated to remind us we were in the presence of one of the heroes of literature. There was the drinking-with-Bukowski story, which had been reproduced in every interview he’d done in the last twenty years, the traveling-through-Russia-with-nothing-but-a-pair-of-jeans-two-socks-and-a-leather-jacket-after-his-luggage-was-stolen story, the obligatory movie star story and three or four don’t-ask-me-now references to his wild past. I sat there like a condemned man awaiting the lethal injection, a rigid smile frozen to my face. My scalp itched, both nostrils, even the crotch of my underwear. I fought for control.
And then the final blow fell, as swift and sudden as a meteor shrieking down from outer space and against all odds blasting through the roof of the auditorium and drilling right into the back of my reeling head. My father raised a hand to indicate that the jokes were over, and the audience choked off as if he’d tightened a noose around each and every throat. Suddenly he was more professorial than the professors—there wasn’t a murmur in the house, not even a cough. He held up a book, produced a pair of wire-rim glasses—a prop if ever I saw one—and glanced down at me. “The piece I want to read tonight, from Blood Ties, is something I’ve wanted to read in public for a long time. It’s a deeply personal piece, and painful too, but I read it tonight as an act of contrition. I read it for my son.”
He spread open the book with a slow, sad deliberation I’m sure they all found very affecting, but to me he was like a terrorist opening a suitcase full of explosives, and I shrank into my seat, as miserable as I’ve ever been in my life. He can’t be doing this, I thought, he can’t. But he was. It was his show, after all.
And then he began to read. At first I didn’t hear the words, didn’t want to—I was in a daze, mesmerized by the intense weirdness of his voice, which had gone high-pitched and nasal all of a sudden, with a kind of fractured rhythm that made it seem as if he was translating from another language. It took me a moment, and then I understood: this was his reading voice, another affectation. Once I got past that, there were the words themselves, each one a little missile aimed at me, the hapless son, the victim who only wanted to be left lying in the wreckage where he’d fallen. He was reading a passage in which the guilt-racked but lusty father takes the fourteen-year-old son out to the best restaurant in town for a heart-to-heart talk about those lusts, about dreams, responsibilities and the domestic life that was dragging him down. I tried to close myself off, but I couldn’t. My eyes were burning. Nobody in the auditorium was watching him anymore—how could they be? No, they were watching me. Watching the back of my head. Watching the fiction come to life.
I did the only thing I could. When he got to the part where the son, tears streaming into his chocolate mousse, asks him why, why, Dad, why, I stood up, right there, right in the middle of the front row, all those eyes drilling into me. I tore my hand away from Victoria’s, stared down the biographer and Dr. Delpino and all the rest of them, and stalked straight out the nearest exit even as my father’s amplified voice wavered, faltered, and then came back strong again, nothing wrong, nothing the matter, nothing a little literature wouldn’t cure.
—
I don’t know what happened between him and Victoria at the muted and minimally celebratory dinner later that night, but I don’t suspect it was much, if anything. That wasn’t the problem, and both of us—she and I, that is—knew it. I spent the night hiding out in the twenty-four-hour laundr
omat wedged between Brewskies Pub and Taco Bell, and in the morning I ate breakfast in a greasy spoon only the townies frequented and then caught up on some of Hollywood’s distinguished product at the local cineplex for as long as I could stand it. By then, I was sure the great man would have gone on to his many other great appointments, all his public posturing aside. And that was just what happened: he canceled his first flight and hung around till he could hang around no longer, flying out at four-fifteen with his biographer and all the sympathy of the deeply yearning and heartbroken campus. And me? I was nobody again. Or so I thought.
I too dropped out of Dr. Delpino’s class—I couldn’t stand the thought of that glazed blue look of accusation in her eyes—and though I occasionally spotted Victoria’s hair riding the currents around campus, I avoided her. She knew where to find me if she wanted me, but all that was over, I could see that—I wasn’t his son after all. A few weeks later I noticed her in the company of this senior who played keyboards in one of the local bands, and I felt something, I don’t know what it was, but it wasn’t jealousy. And then, at the end of a lonely semester in a lonely town in the lonely hind end of nowhere, the air began to soften and a few blades of yellow grass poked up through the rotting snow and my roommate took me downtown to Brewskies to celebrate.
The girl’s name was Marlene, but she didn’t pronounce it like the old German actress who was probably dead before she was born, but Mar-lenna, the second syllable banged out till it sounded as if she was calling herself Lenny. I liked the way her smile showed off the gold caps on her molars. The band I didn’t want to mention earlier was playing through the big speakers over the bar, and there was a whole undercurrent of noise and excitement mixed with the smells of tap beer, Polish sausage and salt-and-vinegar chips. “I know you,” she said. “You’re, um, Tim McNeil’s son, right?”
I never looked away from her, never blinked. All that was old news now, dead and buried, like some battle in the Civil War.
“That’s right,” I said. “How did you guess?”
(1999)
The Love of My Life
They wore each other like a pair of socks. He was at her house, she was at his. Everywhere they went—to the mall, to the game, to movies and shops and the classes that structured their days like a new kind of chronology—their fingers were entwined, their shoulders touching, their hips joined in the slow triumphant sashay of love. He drove her car, slept on the couch in the family room at her parents’ house, played tennis and watched football with her father on the big thirty-six-inch TV in the kitchen. She went shopping with his mother and hers, a triumvirate of tastes, and she would have played tennis with his father, if it came to it, but his father was dead. “I love you,” he told her, because he did, because there was no feeling like this, no triumph, no high—it was like being immortal and unconquerable, like floating. And a hundred times a day she said it too: “I love you. I love you.”
They were together at his house one night when the rain froze on the streets and sheathed the trees in glass. It was her idea to take a walk and feel it in their hair and on the glistening shoulders of their parkas, an otherworldly drumming of pellets flung down out of the troposphere, alien and familiar at the same time, and they glided the length of the front walk and watched the way the power lines bellied and swayed. He built a fire when they got back, while she toweled her hair and made hot chocolate laced with Jack Daniel’s. They’d rented a pair of slasher movies for the ritualized comfort of them—“Teens have sex,” he said, “and then they pay for it in body parts”—and the maniac had just climbed out of the heating vent, with a meat hook dangling from the recesses of his empty sleeve, when the phone rang.
It was his mother, calling from the hotel room in Boston where she was curled up—shacked up?—for the weekend with the man she’d been dating. He tried to picture her, but he couldn’t. He even closed his eyes a minute, to concentrate, but there was nothing there. Was everything all right? she wanted to know. With the storm and all? No, it hadn’t hit Boston yet, but she saw on the Weather Channel that it was on its way. Two seconds after he hung up—before she could even hit the Start button on the VCR—the phone rang again, and this time it was her mother. Her mother had been drinking. She was calling from a restaurant, and China could hear a clamor of voices in the background. “Just stay put,” her mother shouted into the phone. “The streets are like a skating rink. Don’t you even think of getting in that car.”
Well, she wasn’t thinking of it. She was thinking of having Jeremy to herself, all night, in the big bed in his mother’s room. They’d been having sex ever since they started going together at the end of their junior year, but it was always sex in the car or sex on a blanket or the lawn, hurried sex, nothing like she wanted it to be. She kept thinking of the way it was in the movies, where the stars ambushed each other on beds the size of small planets and then did it again and again until they lay nestled in a heap of pillows and blankets, her head on his chest, his arm flung over her shoulder, the music fading away to individual notes plucked softly on a guitar and everything in the frame glowing as if it had been sprayed with liquid gold. That was how it was supposed to be. That was how it was going to be. At least for tonight.
She’d been wandering around the kitchen as she talked, dancing with the phone in an idle slow saraband, watching the frost sketch a design on the window over the sink, no sound but the soft hiss of the ice pellets on the roof, and now she pulled open the freezer door and extracted a pint box of ice cream. She was in her socks, socks so thick they were like slippers, and a pair of black leggings under an oversized sweater. Beneath her feet, the polished floorboards were as slick as the sidewalk outside, and she liked the feel of that, skating indoors in her big socks. “Uh-huh,” she said into the phone. “Uh-huh. Yeah, we’re watching a movie.” She dug a finger into the ice cream and stuck it in her mouth.
“Come on,” Jeremy called from the living room, where the maniac rippled menacingly over the Pause button. “You’re going to miss the best part.”
“Okay, Mom, okay,” she said into the phone, parting words, and then she hung up. “You want ice cream?” she called, licking her finger.
Jeremy’s voice came back at her, a voice in the middle range, with a congenital scratch in it, the voice of a nice guy, a very nice guy who could be the star of a TV show about nice guys: “What kind?” He had a pair of shoulders and pumped-up biceps too, a smile that jumped from his lips to his eyes, and close-cropped hair that stood up straight off the crown of his head. And he was always singing—she loved that—his voice so true he could do any song, and there was no lyric he didn’t know, even on the oldies station. She scooped ice cream and saw him in a scene from last summer, one hand draped casually over the wheel of his car, the radio throbbing, his voice raised in perfect synch with Billy Corgan’s, and the night standing still at the end of a long dark street overhung with maples.
“Chocolate. Swiss chocolate almond.”
“Okay,” he said, and then he was wondering if there was any whipped cream, or maybe hot fudge—he was sure his mother had a jar stashed away somewhere, Look behind the mayonnaise on the top row—and when she turned around he was standing in the doorway.
She kissed him—they kissed whenever they met, no matter where or when, even if one of them had just stepped out of the room, because that was love, that was the way love was—and then they took two bowls of ice cream into the living room and, with a flick of the remote, set the maniac back in motion.
—
It was an early spring that year, the world gone green overnight, the thermometer twice hitting the low eighties in the first week of March. Teachers were holding sessions outside. The whole school, even the halls and the cafeteria, smelled of fresh-mowed grass and the unfolding blossoms of the fruit trees in the development across the street, and students—especially seniors—were cutting class to go out to the quarry or the reservoir or to just drive
the back streets with the sunroof and the windows open wide. But not China. She was hitting the books, studying late, putting everything in its place like pegs in a board, even love, even that. Jeremy didn’t get it. “Look, you’ve already been accepted at your first-choice school, you’re going to wind up in the top ten G.P.A.-wise, and you’ve got four years of tests and term papers ahead of you, and grad school after that. You’ll only be a high school senior once in your life. Relax. Enjoy it. Or at least experience it.”
He’d been accepted at Brown, his father’s alma mater, and his own G.P.A. would put him in the top ten percent of their graduating class, and he was content with that, skating through his final semester, no math, no science, taking art and music, the things he’d always wanted to take but never had time for—and Lit., of course, A.P. History, and Spanish 5. “Tú eres el amor de mi vida,” he would tell her when they met at her locker or at lunch or when he picked her up for a movie on Saturday nights.
“Y tú también,” she would say, “or is it ‘yo también?’”—French was her language. “But I keep telling you it really matters to me, because I know I’ll never catch Margery Yu or Christian Davenport, I mean they’re a lock for val and salut, but it’ll kill me if people like Kerry Sharp or Jalapy Seegrand finish ahead of me—you should know that, you of all people—”
It amazed him that she actually brought her books along when they went backpacking over spring break. They’d planned the trip all winter and through the long wind tunnel that was February, packing away freeze-dried entrées, Power Bars, Gore-Tex windbreakers and matching sweatshirts, weighing each item on a handheld scale with a dangling hook at the bottom of it. They were going up into the Catskills, to a lake he’d found on a map, and they were going to be together, without interruption, without telephones, automobiles, parents, teachers, friends, relatives and pets, for five full days. They were going to cook over an open fire, they were going to read to each other and burrow into the double sleeping bag with the connubial zipper up the seam he’d found in his mother’s closet, a relic of her own time in the lap of nature. It smelled of her, of his mother, a vague scent of her perfume that had lingered there dormant all these years, and maybe there was the faintest whiff of his father too, though his father had been gone so long he didn’t even remember what he looked like, let alone what he might have smelled like. Five days. And it wasn’t going to rain, not a drop. He didn’t even bring his fishing rod, and that was love.