After the Plague: And Other Stories

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  And where better to do it than stretched out on the sofa in front of the fireplace, with a hurricane lamp and a book? He gave the fire a poke, spread a comforter over his legs, and settled back to read.

  “Sonia,” I cried, exasperated, “you’re behaving like a child!”

  She was dancing through the town square, riding high up off the lithe and juvenile stems of her legs, laughing in the astonished faces of the shopkeepers and making rude flatulent noises with her tongue and her pouting underlip. Even Don Pedro C_______, the younging commandant of our fair city, who was in that moment taking the air with his aging bride of twenty, had to witness this little scene. “I am a child!” Sonia shrieked, tailing the phrase with a cracked and willful schoolgirl’s laugh that mounted the walls to tremble in every fishbowl and flowerpot on the square. “And you’re an old tightwad!” And then she was off again, singing it through the side streets and right on up to the house where my mother had been twice an infant: “Don Fausto’s a tightwad, Don Fausto’s a tightwad!”

  It was my fault, actually—at least partly—because I’d denied her a bauble at the jewelry merchant’s, but still, you can imagine my consternation, not to mention my embarrassment. I bit my lip and cursed myself. I should have known better, marrying a woman going down when I was going up. But I’d always been attracted to maturity, and when I was a young, aging man of thirty, I found her fifty-year-old’s wrinkles and folds as attractive as her supple wit and her voice of authority and experience. Then she was forty-five and I was thirty-five and we were closer than ever, till we celebrated our fortieth birthdays together and I thought I had found heaven, truly and veritably.

  But now, now she’s running through the streets like a little wanton, fifteen years old and you’d think she’d never been fifteen before, her slip showing, her feet a mad dancing blur and something in her hair—chocolate, the chocolate she ate day and night and never mind the pimples sprouting in angry red constellations all over her face and pretty little chin. And there she is, just ahead of me, running her hands through all the bowls of fighting fish poor Leandro Mopa has put out on display—and worse, upsetting Benedicta Moreno’s perfectly proportioned pyramid of mangoes.

  And what am I thinking, all out of breath and my lungs heaving like things made of leather? When we get home—this is what I am thinking—when we get home, I will spank her.

  There was a sudden thump on the front porch, an ominous thump, ponderous and reverberative, and it resounded through the empty house like the clap of doom. John sat up, startled. It sounded as if someone had dropped down dead on the planks—or been murdered. But there it was again, not just a single thump now but a whole series of them, as if the local high school were staging a sack race on his front porch. He glanced at the clock on the mantel—eight-forty already, and where had the time gone?—then set the book down and rose from the couch to investigate.

  As he approached the front door, the thumping became louder and more insistent, as if someone were kicking snow from their boots—that was it, yes, of course. It was Barb, the car was stuck in a drift someplace and she’d walked the whole way, he could see it already, and she’d be annoyed, of course she would, but not too annoyed, because of the magic and romance of the storm, and she’d warm herself by the fire, share a brandy with him and something they could heat over the open flames—hot dogs, whatever—and then, then he could go back to his book. But all that, the elaborate vision called up by the sound of thumping feet, the comfort and rationalization of it, went for nothing. Because at that moment, just as he reached his hand out for the doorknob, he heard the murmur of a man’s voice and the high assaultive giggle of a female, definitely not Barb.

  And then the door stood open, the keen knife of the air, the immemorial smell of the snow and the whole world transformed and transforming still, and there was Buck, home from college in a snow-shrouded ski jacket and a girl with him, a girl with fractured blue eyes and a knit cap pulled down to her eyebrows. “Hey, Dad,” Buck breathed in passing, and then he and the vigorously stomping girl were in the hall and the old dog was wagging her tail and attempting a puppyish yip of greeting.

  “Jesus”—and Buck was shouting suddenly, his voice gone high with enthusiasm—“you ever see anything like this? Must’ve taken us twelve hours from Plattsburgh and the only thing moving on the Northway was the bus. Good old Greyhound, huh?”

  John wasn’t thinking clearly. He was still in the book, or part of him was. “You didn’t flunk out, did you?” he said, throwing his hands out, as if for balance.

  Buck gave him a look, the narrow eyes he’d inherited from his mother, the beak of the nose and the cheeks flushed with the cold—or drink, hard liquor, and that was all they did up in Plattsburgh, as far as John had heard, anyway. “No,” Buck said finally, a hurt and sorrowful expression clouding his features, “I just thought I’d come home for the weekend, you know, see how everybody was … oh, this is Bern.” He indicated the girl, who reached up to tear off the knit cap and shake out a blazing head of white-blond hair.

  John was impressed. He snatched a quick look at her breasts and her slim legs rising out of a pair of slick red boots. This was the sort of girl he’d wanted in college, lusted after, howled to the moon over, but to no avail. He’d been a nerd, a math nerd, the kind of guy who got excited over cryptography and differential equations, and he’d wound up with Barb. Thankfully. And he wasn’t complaining. But his son, look at his son: Buck was no nerd, no sir, not with a girl like—“What was your name?” he heard himself asking.

  A final shake of the hair, a soft cooed greeting for the reeking old dog. “Bern,” she said evenly, and she had a smile for him, wonderful teeth, staggering lips, pink and youthful gums.

  The door was shut now. The hallway was cold. And dark. He was smiling till his own teeth must have glowed in the dim glancing light of the fire in the other room. “Short for Bernadette?” he ventured.

  They were moving instinctively, as a group, toward the fire—even the dog. “Nope,” she said. “Just Bern.”

  Well, fine. And would she like a drink? Suddenly, for some reason, it was vitally important to John that she have a drink, crucial even. No, she said, looking to Buck, no, she didn’t drink. There was a silence. “And how’s school?” he asked finally, just to say something.

  Neither of them rushed to answer. Buck, alternately warming his hands over the fire and stroking the old dog, just shrugged, and the girl, Bern, turned to John and said, “Frankly, it sucks.”

  “That’s why we’re here,” Buck murmured.

  John was puzzled. “You mean—?”

  “Aw, shit.” Buck spoke with real vehemence, but softly, almost under his breath, and he rose tumultuously from his place by the fire. “We’re going to hang in my room for a while, okay, Dad?” His arm found Bern’s shoulder and they were gone, or almost, two shadows touching and melding and then slowly receding down the dark hall. But then Buck hung back a moment, the shadows separating, and his face was floating there in the unsteady light of the hurricane lamp. “Where’s Mom?” he said.

  When she was twelve, she began to lose her breasts. I would put my arm round her in a restaurant and feel like a child molester, and when we went to bed together I had to keep reminding myself that she was a younging twelve, which actually gave her some eighty-eight years of worldly wiles and experience, at least seventy-five of them enlivened by venereal pleasures. (I never fooled myself into thinking I was the only one, though I wanted to be. She’d been married and separated before I met her, and when she was young the first time, there had been a succession of lovers, a whole mighty tide of them.) She’d begun taking a rag doll to bed—and crunching hard candy between her dwindling molars or snapping gum in my face whenever I began to feel amorous—and this just intensified my feelings of jealousy and resentment.

  “Tell me about your first,” I would demand. “What was his name, Eduardo, wasn’t it?”

  “Don’t!” She would giggle, because I was st
roking the soft white doeskin of her belly or the silk of her upper arm, and then, blowing a pink bubble with her gum, she would correct me. “It wasn’t Eduardo, silly, it was Armando. I told you. Silly.” And it would become a chant—“Silly, silly, silly!”—till I sprang up off the bed and chased her round the room, through the apartments and past the maid’s quarters, and only then, when I was out of breath and half spent, would she give me my pleasure.

  And then came the day, the inevitable day, when she was no longer a woman. Her breasts had disappeared entirely, not even the tiniest bud left, and between her legs she was as bald as an apple. Of course, I’d known all along the day was coming, and I’d tried to prepare myself as so many before me had done, watching soap operas and reading the great tragedies, but the pain and disillusionment were more than I could bear—yes, disillusionment. Here was the woman I loved, the woman who could talk all day of the books of Mangual and Garci-Crespo, make love all night to the sensual drone of Rodriguez’s Second Cello Concerto and cry out in joy at the dawn as if she’d created it herself. And now, now she sat Indian style in the middle of the bed and called out for me in a piping little singsong voice that made my blood boil. And what did she call me? Fausto, or even Faustito? No, she called me Daddy. “Daddy, Daddy,” she called, “read me a story.”

  Buck’s question was a good one: where was Barb? Though Buck hardly seemed concerned—irritated was more like it, as if he’d expected his mother to spring out of the woodwork and wash his socks or whip him up a lemon meringue pie from scratch. John had already sunk back into the couch, the book clutched like a living thing in his hand, and he just stared up at the glowing ball of his son’s face. “I don’t know,” he said, drawing up his lip and shrugging a little more elaborately than was necessary, “—she went shopping.”

  Buck’s face just hung there at the mouth of the dark hallway as if it had been sliced from his shoulders. “Shopping?” he repeated, knitting his brows and working a querulous edge into his voice. “When? When did she leave?”

  John felt guilty now—he was the accused, the accused on the witness stand and the district attorney hammering away at him—and he felt afraid suddenly too, afraid for his wife and his son and the whole withering masquerade of his second-rate engineer’s life, numbers turned vile and accusatory, job shopping, one deadening plant after another. “I don’t know,” he said. “Sometime this afternoon—or this morning, I mean. Late this morning.”

  “This morning? Jesus, Dad, are you losing your mind? That’s a blizzard out there—she could be dead for all we know.”

  And now he was standing, his son’s face shining fiercely with the reds and ambers of combustion, and he was ordering his apologies and excuses, ever rational, ever precise, till he realized that Buck was no longer there—he’d receded down the hallway to the refrigerated room, where even now the door slammed behind him in finality. That was when John struggled with himself, when it all came to the surface—his fears, his needs, his love for Barb, or respect for her, or whatever you wanted to call it—and he actually threw on his coat, muffler and hat and went to the little jade box on the mantel for the keys to the MG, before he caught himself. It was a fool’s errand. A recipe for disaster. How could he go out in this—there must have been two and a half feet of snow out there, and it was drifting—and in a car made for summer roads, no less? It was crazy. Irresponsible. And she could be anywhere—what was he supposed to do, go house to house and shop to shop?

  Finally, and it was past nine now, he convinced himself that the only rational thing was to wait out the storm. He’d been through blizzards before—he was fifty years old, after all—and they’d always come out right, aside from maybe a fender bender here or there, or a minor case of back strain from leaning into the snow shovel, running out of bread and milk and the like. But the storms always blew themselves out and the sun came back and the snow receded from the roads. No, he’d been right all along—there was nothing to do but wait, to curl up with a good book, and just, well, see what developed, and he’d shrugged off his coat, found his place on the couch and taken up the book again, when he heard the creak of the floorboards in the hall and glanced up.

  Bern was standing there, hands at her sides. The primitive light attacked her hair, hair so white it reminded him of death, and she showed him her palms in a humble gesture of submission, amicability, engagement. “Buck’s asleep,” she said.

  “Already?” The book was in his lap, his left index finger marking the place. “That was fast.”

  “It was a long trip.”

  “Yes,” he said, and he didn’t know why he was saying it, “yes.” The wind came up suddenly and twisted round the corner of the house, spraying the windowpanes with compact pellets of snow.

  She was in the room now, hovering over the couch. “I was just—I mean, I’m not sleepy at all, and I thought it would be nice, you know, just to sit by the fire … for a while, I mean.”

  “Sure,” he said, and she squatted by the fire and threw her head back to curb her hair, and a long moment went by—five minutes, ten, he couldn’t tell—before she spoke again. He’d just folded back the page of the book when she turned round and said, in a low murmur, “Buck’s been very depressed. I mean, like clinically.”

  Her face was broad and beautiful, with a high forehead and the nose of a legislator or poet. That face stunned him, so beautiful and new and floating there like an apparition in his living room, and he couldn’t think of how to respond. The snow ticked at the windows. The old dog let out an audible fart. “He can’t—” John began, and then he faltered. “What do you mean, depressed? How? Why?”

  She’d been watching him, focusing a clear, steady gaze on him that seemed to say all sorts of things—erotic things, crazy things—but now she dropped her eyes. “He thinks he’s going to die.”

  Something clutched suddenly at him, something deep, but he ignored it. He was going to say, “Don’t be ridiculous,” but aimed for something lighter instead. “Well, he is,” he said. “I mean, it’s a rational fear. We’re all going to die.” He stared into her eyes, a pillar of strength and wisdom. “Eventually,” he added, and tried for a smile. “Look at me—I’m fifty already. But Buck—you kids, the two of you—what have you got to worry about? It’s a long way off. Forget about it, enjoy yourselves, dance to the music of life.” Dance to the music of life? The phrase had just jumped into his head, and now he felt a little silly, a little quaint, but seductive too and wise and so full of, of love and maybe fear that he was ready to get up from the couch and embrace her.

  The only problem was, she was no longer there. She’d heard something—and he’d heard it too, Buck calling out, the wind dragging its nails across the windowpane—and had risen like a ghost and silently vanished into the black hole of the hallway. John looked round him a moment, listening for the smallest sounds. The snow ticked away at the roof, the gutters, the window frame. The dog groaned in her sleep. He glanced down absently and saw the book there in his lap, turned back the page with a single autonomous sweep of his hand, and began, again, to read.

  I’d never wanted to be a father—it was enough to have been father to my own diminishing parents, and I vowed I would never repeat the experience. Sonia felt as I did, and we took precautions to avoid any chance of conception, especially as she began younging and found herself menstruating again. I’d seen my own beloved mother dwindle to the size of a doll, a glove, an acorn, to nothing recognizable except to a scientist with a high-powered microscope, and the idea of it—of parenthood, little people, babies—terrified me.

  But what could I do? I loved Sonia with all my being and I’d sworn before the Creator and Father Benitez to minister to her in sickness and health, if not in age and youth. It was my duty and my obligation to care for her when she could no longer care for herself—some would say it was my privilege, and perhaps it was, but it made me no less miserable for all that. For, you see, the inevitable had come to pass and she was an infant now, my Sonia, a
baby, a squally, colicky, wide-eyed, little niñita sucking greedily on a bottle of formula and howling through the sleepless nights with miniature tears of rage and impotence rolling down her ugly red cheeks.

  “Sonia!” I would cry. “Sonia, snap out of it! I know you’re in there, I know you understand me—now just stop that bawling, stop it right now!”

  But, of course, she didn’t. How could she? She was only a baby, eight months old, six months, two. I held her in my arms, my lover, my Sonia, and watched her shrink away from me day by day. I picked her up by her naked ankles as if she were nothing more than a skinned rabbit ready for the pan, and I laid her out on a clean diaper after swabbing her privates and the little cleft that had once been my joy and my life.

  Don’t think I didn’t resent it. Oh, I knew the rules, we all did, but this was cruel, too cruel, and I wept to see her reduced to this sucking, grasping, greedy little thing. “Sonia!” I cried. “Oh, Sonia!” And for all that she just stared at me out of her eyes the color of hazelnuts, eyes as brimming and lucid as her adult eyes, eyes that must have seen and known and felt. I lost weight. I couldn’t sleep. My boss at the Banco Nacional, an eminently reasonable man, took me aside and informed me in so many words that I was in danger of losing the position I’d held for nearly sixty years.