by T. C. Boyle
About that water. The TJC assured us it was unpolluted by human waste and uncontaminated by farm runoff, and that its rusty color—it was nearly opaque and perpetually blooming with the microscopic creatures that comprise the bottom of the food chain in a healthy and thriving aquatic ecosystem—was perfectly natural. Though the lake had been dredged out of the swampland some forty years earlier, this was the way its waters had always looked, and the creatures that lived and throve here were grateful for it—like all of us in Jubilation, they had Charles Contash to thank for that too.
Well. We drifted, the dog and the baby snoozed, Vicki kept up a happy chatter on any number of topics, all of which seemed to have a subtext of sexual innuendo, and I just wasn’t prepared for what came next, and I blame myself, I do. Maybe it was the wine or the influence of the sun and the faint sweet cleansing breeze, but I wasn’t alert to the dangers inherent in the situation—I was an American, raised in a time of prosperity and peace, and I’d been spared the tumult and horror visited on so many of the less fortunate in this world. New York and L.A. might have been nasty places, and Lauren was certainly a plague in her own right, but nobody had ever bombed my village or shot down my family in the street, and when my parents died they died quietly, in their own beds.
I was in the act of extracting the wine bottle from its cradle of ice in the cooler when the boat gave a sudden lurch and I glanced up just in time to see the broad flat grinning reptilian head emerge from the water, pluck Ethan off the gunwale and vanish in the murk. It was like an illusion in a magic show, now he’s here, now he isn’t, and I wasn’t able to respond until my brain replayed the scene and I felt the sudden horror knife at my heart. “Did you—?” I began, but Vicki was already screaming.
—
The sequence of events becomes a little confused for me at this juncture, but looking back on it, I’m fairly certain the funeral service preceded the thrashing we took from Hurricane Albert—I distinctly remember the volunteerism the community showed in dredging the lake, which would have been impossible after the hurricane hit. Sadly, no trace of little Ethan was ever found. No need to tell you how devastated I was—I was as hurt and wrung out as I’ve ever been in my life, and I’ll never give up second-guessing myself—but even more, I was angry. Angry over the Contash Corp’s failure to disclose the hazards lurking around us and furious over the way the press jumped on the story, as if the life of a child was worth no more than a crude joke or a wedge to drive between the citizens of the community and the rest of the so-called civilized world. Alligator Mom. That was what they called Vicki in headlines three inches high, and could anyone blame her for packing up and going back to her mother in Philadelphia? I took her place on the Citizens’ Committee, though I’d never been involved in community affairs in my life to this point, and I was the one who pushed through the initiative to remove all the dangerous animals from the lake, no matter what their size or species (and that was a struggle too, the environmentalists crying foul in all their puritanical fervor, and one man—I won’t name him here—even pushing to have the alligators’ teeth capped as a compromise solution).
It wasn’t all bad, though. The service at the Jubilation Non-Denominational Chapel, for all its solemnity, was a real inspiration to us all, a public demonstration of our solidarity and determination. Charles Contash himself flew in from a meeting with the Russian premier to give the eulogy, every man, woman and child in town turned out to pay their respects, and the cards and flowers poured in from all over the country. Even July Weeks turned up, despite his friction with the TJC, and we found common ground in our contempt for the reporters massed on the steps out front of the chapel. He stood tall that day, barring the door to anyone whose face he didn’t recognize, and I forgave him his curtains, for the afternoon at least.
If anything, the hurricane brought us together even more than little Ethan’s tragedy. I remember the sky taking on the deep purple-black hue of a bruise and the vanguard of the rain that lashed down in a fusillade of wind-whipped pellets and the winds that sucked the breath right out of your body. Sam and Ernesta Fills helped me board up the windows of my Casual Contempo, and together we helped Mark and Leonard and the Weekses with their places and then went looking to lend a hand wherever we could. And when the storm hit in all its intensity, just about everybody in town was bundled up safe and sound in the bastion of the movie palace, where the emergency generator allowed the TJC to lift the burden from our minds with a marathon showing of the Contash Corp’s most-beloved family films. Of course, we emerged to the devastation of what the National Weather Service was calling the single most destructive storm of the past century, and a good proportion of Jubilation had been reduced to rubble or swept away altogether. I was luckier than most. I lost the back wall that gives onto the kitchen, which in turn was knee-deep in roiling brown water and packed to the ceiling with wind-blown debris, and my wraparound porch was wrapped around the Weekses’ house, but on the plus side the offending race car and the boat were lifted right up into the sky and for all we know dropped somewhere over the Atlantic, and the Weekses’ curtains aren’t really an issue anymore.
As for myself, I’ve been rebuilding with the help of a low-interest loan secured through the Contash Corp, and I’ve begun, in a tentative way, to date Felicia, whose husband was one of the six fatalities we recorded once the storm had moved on. Beyond that, my committee work keeps me pretty busy, I’ve been keeping in touch with Vicki both by phone and e-mail, and every time I see Bruce chase a palmetto bug up the side of the new retaining wall, I just want to smile. And I do. I do smile. Sure, things could be better, but they could be worse too. I live in Jubilation. How bad can it be?
(2002)
Rastrow’s Island
A car radio bleats,
“Love, O careless Love. . . .”
—Robert Lowell,
“Skunk Hour”
She called and he was ready if not eager to sell, because he’d had certain reverses, the market gone sour, Ruth in bed with something nobody was prepared to call cancer, and his daughter, Charlene, waiting for his check in her dorm room with her unpacked trunk full of last year’s clothes and the grubby texts with the yellow scars of the USED stickers seared into their spines. “That’s right,” she said, her old lady’s voice like the creak of oarlocks out on the bay in the first breath of dawn, “Mrs. Rastrow, Alice Rastrow, and I used to know your mother when she was alive.” There was a sharp crackling jolt of static, as if an electrical storm were raging inside the wires, then her voice came back at him: “I never have put much confidence in realtors. Do you want to talk or not?”
“So go,” Ruth said. Her face had taken on the shine and color of the elephant-ear fungus that grew out of the sodden logs in the ravine at the foot of the park. “Don’t worry about me. Just go.”
“You know what she’s doing, don’t you?”
“I know what she’s doing.”
“I never wanted to sell the place. I wanted it for Charlene, for Charlene’s kids. To experience it the way I did, to have that, at least—” He saw the house then, a proud two-story assertion of will from the last century, four rooms down, four rooms up, the wood paintless now and worn to a weathered silver, the barn subsiding into its angles in a bed of lichen-smeared rock, the hedges gone to straw in the absence of human agency. And when was the last time—? Two summers ago? Three?
“It’s just a summer house.” She reached out a hand you could see right through and lifted the rimed water glass from the night table. He watched the hand tremble, fumble for the pills, and he looked away, out the window and down the row of townhouses and the slouching, copper-flagged maples. “Isn’t that the first thing to go when you—?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I guess it is.”
“I mean,” and she paused to draw the water down, gulp the pills, “it’s not as if we really need the place or anything.”
—
&
nbsp; The water was choppy, the wind cold, and he sat in his car with the engine running and the heater on full as the ferry slammed at the seething white roil of the waves and the island separated itself from the far shore and began to fan out across the horizon. When the rain came up, first as a spatter that might have been nothing more than the spray thrown up by the bow and then as a moving scrim that isolated him behind the wheel, he thought of switching on the windshield wipers, but he didn’t. There was something about the opaque windows and the pitch of the deck tugging at the corners of the light that relaxed him—he could have been underwater, in a submarine, working his way along the bottom of the bay through the looming tangle of spars and timbers of the ships gone to wrack a hundred years ago. He laid his hand idly on the briefcase beside him. Inside were all the relevant papers he could think of: the deed, signed in his father’s ecstatic rolling hand, termite, electrical, water rights. But what did she care about termites, about water or dry rot?—she wasn’t going to live there. She wasn’t going to live anywhere but the white-washed stone cottage she was entombed in now, the one she’d been born in, and after that she had her place reserved in the cemetery beside her husband and two drowned children. She must have been eighty, he figured. Eighty, or close to it.
Ronald Rastrow—he was a violinist, or no, a violist—and his sister, Elyse. At night, in summer, above the thrum of the insects and the listless roll of the surf, you could hear his instrument tuned to some ancient sorrow and floating out across the water. He was twenty-two or -three, a student at Juilliard, and his sister must have been twenty or so. They went sailing under a full moon, rumors of a party onshore and Canadian whiskey and marijuana, the sea taut as a bedspread, a gentle breeze out of the east, and they never came back. He was twelve the summer it happened, and he used to thrill himself leaning out over the stern of the dinghy till the shadow of his head and shoulders made the sea transparent and the dense architecture of the bottom rushed up at him in a revulsion of disordered secrets. He remembered the police divers gathered in a dark clump at the end of the pier. Volunteers. Adults, kids in sailboats, Curtis Mayhew’s father in his fishing boat fitted out with a dragline, working up and down the bay as if he were plowing it for seed. It was a lobsterman who found them, both of them, tangled in his lines at the end of a long cold week that was like December in July.
He drove along the shore, past the saltbox cottages with their weathered shingles and the odd frame house that had acquired a new coat of paint, the trees stripped by the wind, nothing in the fields but pale dead stalks and the refulgent slabs of granite that bloomed in all seasons. There were a few new houses clustered around the village, leggy things, architecturally wise, but the gas station hadn’t changed or the post office/general store or Dorcas’ House of Clams (Closed for the Season). The woman behind the desk at The Seaside Rest (Sep Units Avail by Day or Week) took his money and handed him the key to the last cottage in a snaking string of them, though none of the intervening cottages seemed to be occupied. That struck him as a bit odd—she must have marked him down for a drug fiend or a prospective suicide—but it didn’t bother him, not really. She didn’t recognize him and he didn’t recognize her, because people change and places change and what once was will never be again. He entered the cottage like an acolyte taking possession of his cell, a cold little box of a room with a bed, night table and chair, no TV. He spent half an hour down on his knees worshipping the AC/heater unit, but could raise no more than the faintest stale exhalation out of it. At quarter of one he got back in the car and drove out to Mrs. Rastrow’s place.
There was a gate to be negotiated where the blacktop gave way to the dirt drive, and then there was the drive itself, unchanged in two hundred years, a pair of beaten parallel tracks with a yellow scruff of dead vegetation painted down the center of it. He parked beneath a denuded oak, went up the three stone steps and rang the bell. Standing there on the doorstep, the laden breeze in his face and the bay spread out before him in a graceful arc to Colson’s Head, where the summer house stood amidst the fortress of trees like a chromatic miscalculation on a larger canvas, he felt the anxiety let go of him, eased by the simple step-by-step progress of his day, the business at hand, the feel of the island beneath his feet. She hadn’t mentioned a price. But he had a figure in mind, a figure that would at least stanch his wounds, if not stop the bleeding altogether, and she had the kind of capital to take everything down to the essentials, everybody knew that—Mrs. Rastrow, Alice Rastrow, widow of Julius, the lumber baron. He’d prepared his opening words, and his smile, cool and at ease, because he wasn’t going to be intimidated by her or let her see his need, and he listened to the bell ring through the house that was no mansion, no showplace, no testament to riches and self-aggrandizement but just what it was, and he pictured her moving through the dimness on her old lady’s limbs like a deep-sea diver in his heavy, confining suit. A moment passed. Then another. He debated, then rang again.
His first surprise—the first in what would prove to be an unraveling skein of them—was the face at the door. The big pitted brown slab of oak pulled back and Mrs. Rastrow, ancient, crabbed, the whites of her eyes gone to yellow and her hair flown away in the white wisps of his recollection, was nowhere to be seen. A young Asian woman was standing there at the door, her eyes questioning, brow wrinkled, teeth bundled beneath the neat bow of her lips. Her hair shone as if it had been painted on. “I came to see Mrs. Rastrow,” he said. “About the house?”
The woman—she looked to be in her late twenties, her body squeezed into one of those luminous silk dresses the hostess in a Chinese restaurant might wear—showed no sign of recognition.
He gave her his name. “We had an appointment today,” he said, “—for one?” Still nothing. He wondered if she spoke English. “I mean, me and Mrs. Rastrow? You know Mrs. Rastrow? Do you work for her?”
She pressed a hand to her lips in a flurry of painted nails and giggled through her fingers, and the curtain dropped. She was just a girl, pretty, casual, and she might have been standing in the middle of her own dorm room, sharing a joke with her friends. “It’s just—you look like a potato peeler salesman or something standing there like that.” Her smile opened up around even, white teeth. “I’m Rose,” she said, and held out her hand.
There was a mudroom, flagstone underfoot, firewood stacked up like breastworks on both sides, and then the main room with its bare oak floors and plaster walls. A few museum pieces, braided rug, a plush sofa with an orange cat curled up in the middle of it. Two lamps, their shades as thin as skin, glowed against the gray of the windows. Rose bent to the stove in the corner, opened the grate and laid two lengths of wood on the coals, and he stood there in the middle of the room watching the swell of her figure in the tight wrap of her dress and the silken flex and release of the muscles in her shoulders. The room was cold as a meat locker.
He was watching Rose, transfixed by the incongruity of her bent over the black stove in her golden Chinese restaurant dress that clung to her backside as if it had been sewn over her skin, and the old lady’s voice startled him, for all the pep talk he’d given himself. “You came,” she said, and there she was in the doorway, looking no different from the picture he’d held of her.
She waited for him to say something in response, and he complied, murmuring “Yes, sure, it’s my pleasure,” and then she was standing beside him and studying him out of her yellowed eyes. “Did you bring the papers?” she said.
He patted the briefcase. They were both standing, as if they’d just run into each other in a train station or the foyer at the theater, and Rose was standing too, awaiting the moment of release. “Rose,” she said then, her eyes snapping sharply to her, “fetch my reading glasses, will you?”
—
The car had developed a cough on the drive up from Boston, a consumptive wheeze that rattled the floorboards when he depressed the accelerator, and now, with the influence of the sea, it had gotten wo
rse. He turned the key in the ignition and listened to the slow seep of strangulation, then put the car in gear, backed out from beneath the oak and made his hesitant way down the drive, wondering how much they were going to take him for this time when he brought it into the shop—if he made it to the shop, that is. There was no reward in any of this—he’d tried to keep the shock and disappointment from rising to his face when the old lady named her price—but at least, for now, there was the afternoon ahead and the rudimentary animal satisfaction of lunch, food to push into his maw and distract him, and he took the blacktop road back into the village and found a seat at the counter in the diner.
There were three other customers. The light through the windows was like concrete, like shale, the whole place hardened into its sediments. He didn’t recognize anyone, and he ate his grilled cheese on white with his head down, gathering from the local newspaper that the creatures had deserted the sea en masse and left the lobstermen scrambling for government handouts and the cod fleet stranded at anchor. He’d countered the old lady’s offer, but she’d held firm. At first he thought she hadn’t even heard him. They’d moved to the sofa and she was looking through the papers, nodding her head like a battered old sea turtle fighting the pull of gravity, but she turned to him at last and said, “My offer is final. You might have known that.” He fought himself, tried to get hold of his voice. He told her he’d think about it—sleep on it, he’d sleep on it—and have an answer for her in the morning.
It was raining again, a pulsing hard-driven rain that sheathed the car and ran slick over the pavement till the parking lot gleamed like the sea beyond it. He didn’t want to go back to the cottage in the motor court, not yet anyway—the thought of it entered his mind like a closed box floating in the void, and he had to squeeze his eyes shut to make it disappear—and he wasn’t much of a drinker, so there wasn’t any solace in the lights of the bar across the street. Finally, he decided to do what he’d known he was going to do all along: drive out to the house and have a last look at it. Things would have to be sold, he told himself, things stored, winnowed, tossed into the trash.