T.C. Boyle Stories

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  “… then the tribal elders or visiting dignitaries are seated around the table,” the Doctor was saying. “The chef has previously of course located the macaque beneath the table, the exposed part of the creature’s brain protruding from the hole in its center. After the feast, the lower ranks of the village population divide up the remnants. It’s really quite efficient.”

  “How fascinating!” said Jane. “Shall we try some?”

  “By all means … but tell me, how has Konrad been coming with that Yerkish epic he’s been working up?”

  Jane turned to answer, bamboo stick poised: “Oh I’m so glad you asked—I’d almost forgotten. He’s finished his tenth book and tells me he’ll be doing two more—out of deference to the Miltonic tradition. Isn’t that a groove?”

  “Yes,” said the Doctor, gesturing toward the rosy lump in the center of the table. “Yes it is. He’s certainly—and I hope you won’t mind the pun—a brainy fellow. Ho-ho.”

  “Oh Doctor,” Jane laughed, and plunged her stick into the pink. Beneath the table, in the dark, a tiny fist clutched at my pantleg.

  I missed work again the following day. This time it took five Doriden to put me under. I had lain in bed sweating and tossing, listening to Jane’s quiet breathing, inhaling her fumes. At dawn I dozed off, dreamed briefly of elementary school cafeterias swarming with knickered chimps and weltered with trays of cherry vanilla yogurt, and woke stale-mouthed. Then I took the pills. It was three-thirty when I woke again. There was a note from Jane: Bringing Konrad home for dinner. Vacuum rug and clean toilet.

  Konrad was impeccably dressed—long pants, platform wedgies, cufflinks. He smelled of eau de cologne, Jane of used litter. They arrived during the seven o’clock news. I opened the door for them. “Hello, Jane,” I said. We stood at the door, awkward, silent. “Well?” she said. “Aren’t you going to greet our guest?” “Hello, Konrad,” I said. And then: “I believe we met in the boys’ room at the Center the other day?” He bowed deeply, straight-faced, his upper lip like a halved cantaloupe. Then he broke into a snicker, turned to Jane and juggled out an impossible series of gestures. Jane laughed. Something caught in my throat. “Is he trying to say something?” I asked. “Oh potpie,” she said, “it was nothing—just a little quote from Yeats.”

  “Yeats?”

  “Yes, you know: ‘An aged man is but a paltry thing.’”

  Jane served watercress sandwiches and animal crackers as hors d’oeuvres. She brought them into the living room on a cut-glass serving tray and set them down before Konrad and me, where we sat on the sofa, watching the news. Then she returned to the kitchen. Konrad plucked up a tiny sandwich and swallowed it like a communion wafer, sucking the tips of his fingers. Then he lifted the tray and offered it to me. I declined. “No thank you,” I said. Konrad shrugged, set the plate down in his lap and carefully stacked all the sandwiches in its center. I pretended to be absorbed with the news: actually I studied him, half-face. He was filling the gaps in his sandwich-construction with animal crackers. His lower lip protruded, his ears were rubbery, he was balding. With both hands he crushed the heap of crackers and sandwiches together and began kneading it until it took on the consistency of raw dough. Then he lifted the whole thing to his mouth and swallowed it without chewing. There were no whites to his eyes.

  Konrad’s only reaction to the newscast was a burst of excitement over a war story—the reporter stood against a wasteland of treadless tanks and recoilless guns in Thailand or Syria or Chile; huts were burning, old women weeping. “Wow-wow! Eeeeeeee! Er-er-er-er,” Konrad said. Jane appeared in the kitchen doorway, hands dripping. “What is it, Konrad?” she said. He made a series of violent gestures. “Well?” I asked. She translated: “Konrad says that ‘the pig oppressors’ genocidal tactics will lead to their mutual extermination and usher in a new golden age …’”—here she hesitated, looked up at him to continue (he was springing up and down on the couch, flailing his fists as though they held whips and scourges)—“’… of freedom and equality for all, regardless of race, creed, color—or genus.’ I wouldn’t worry,” she added, “it’s just his daily slice of revolutionary rhetoric. He’ll calm down in a minute—he likes to play Che, but he’s basically nonviolent.”

  Ten minutes later Jane served dinner. Konrad, with remarkable speed and coordination, consumed four cans of fruit cocktail, thirty-two spareribs, half a dozen each of oranges, apples and pomegranates, two cheeseburgers and three quarts of chocolate malted. In the kitchen, clearing up, I commented to Jane about our guest’s prodigious appetite. He was sitting in the other room, listening to Don Giovanni, sipping brandy. Jane said that he was a big, active male and that she could attest to his need for so many calories. “How much does he weigh?” I asked. “Stripped,” she said, “one eighty-one. When he stands up straight he’s four-eight and three quarters.” I mulled over this information while I scraped away at the dishes, filed them in the dishwasher, neat ranks of blue china. A few moments later I stepped into the living room to observe Jane stroking Konrad’s ears, his head in her lap. I stand five-seven, one forty-three.

  When I returned from work the following day, Jane was gone. Her dresser drawers were bare, the closet empty. There were white rectangles on the wall where her Rousseau reproductions had hung. The top plank of the bookcase was ribbed with the dust-prints of her Edgar Rice Burroughs collection. Her girls’ softball trophy, her natural foods cookbook, her oaken cudgel, her moog, her wok: all gone. There were no notes. A pain jabbed at my sternum, tears started in my eyes. I was alone, deserted, friendless. I began to long even for the stink of her. On the pillow in the bedroom I found a fermenting chunk of pineapple. And sobbed.

  By the time I thought of the Primate Center the sun was already on the wane. It was dark when I got there. Loose gravel grated beneath my shoes in the parking lot; the flag snapped at the top of its pole; the lights grinned lickerishly from the Center’s windows. Inside the lighting was subdued, the building hushed. I began searching through the rooms, opening and slamming doors. The linoleum glowed all the way up the long corridor. At the far end I heard someone whistling “My Old Kentucky Home.” It was the janitor. “Howdedo,” he said. “Wut kin ah do fo yo at such a inauspicious hour ob de night?”

  I was candid with him. “I’m looking for Miss Good.”

  “Ohhh, she leave bout fo-turdy evy day—sartinly yo should be well apprised ob dat fack.”

  “I thought she might be working late tonight.”

  “Noooo, no chance ob dat.” He was staring at the floor.

  “Mind if I look for myself?”

  “Mah good man, ah trusts yo is not intimatin dat ah would dis-kise de troof … far be it fum me to pre-varicate jus to proteck a young lady wut run off fum a man dat doan unnerstan her needs nor ‘low her to spress de natchrul inclination ob her soul.”

  At that moment a girlish giggle sounded from down the hall. Jane’s girlish giggle. The janitor’s right hand spread itself across my chest. “Ah wooden in-sinooate mahsef in de middle ob a highly sinificant speriment if ah was yo, Jackson,” he said, hissing through the gap in his teeth. I pushed by him and started down the corridor. Jane’s laugh leaped out again. From the last door on my left. I hurried. Suddenly the Doctor and his wife stepped from the shadows to block the doorway. “Mr. Horne,” said the Doctor, arms folded against his chest, “take hold of yourself. We are conducting a series of experiments here that I simply cannot allow you to—”

  “A fig for your experiments,” I shouted. “I want to speak to my, my—roommate.” I could hear the janitor’s footsteps behind me. “Get out of my way, Doctor,” I said. Mrs. U-Hwak-Lo smiled. I felt panicky. “Is dey a problem here, Doc?” the janitor said, his breath hot on the back of my neck. I broke. Grabbed the Doctor by his elbows, wheeled around and shoved him into the janitor. They went down on the linoleum like spastic skaters. I applied my shoulder to the door and battered my way in, Mrs. U-Hwak-Lo’s shrill in my ear: “You make big missake, Misser!” Inside I
found Jane, legs and arms bare, pinching a lab smock across her chest. She looked puzzled at first, then annoyed. She stepped up to me, made some rude gestures in my face. I could hear scrambling in the hallway behind me. Then I saw Konrad—in a pair of baggy BVDs. I grabbed Jane. But Konrad was there in an instant—he hit me like the grille of a Cadillac and I spun across the room, tumbling desks and chairs as I went. I slumped against the chalkboard. The door slammed: Jane was gone. Konrad swelled his chest, swayed toward me, the fluorescent lights hissing overhead, the chalkboard cold against the back of my neck. And I looked up into the black eyes, teeth, fur, rock-ribbed arms.

  (1974)

  CAVIAR

  I ought to tell you right off I didn’t go to college. I was on the wrong run of the socioeconomic ladder, if you know what I mean. My father was a commercial fisherman on the Hudson, till the PCBs got to him, my mother did typing and filing down at the lumberyard, and my grandmother crocheted doilies and comforters for sale to rich people. Me, I took over my father’s trade. I inherited the shack at thé end of the pier, the leaky fourteen-foot runabout with the thirty-five-horse Evinrude motor and the seine that’s been in the family for three generations. Also, I got to move into the old man’s house when he passed on, and he left me his stamp collection and the keys to his ‘62 Rambler, rusted through till it looked like a gill net hung out to dry.

  Anyway, it’s a living. Almost. And if I didn’t go to college I do read a lot, magazines mostly, but books on ecology and science too. Maybe it was the science part that did me in. You see, I’m the first one around here—I mean, me and Marie are the first ones—to have a baby this new way, where you can’t have it on your own. Dr. Ziss said not to worry about it, a little experiment, think of it as a gift from heaven.

  Some gift.

  But don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining. What happens happens, and I’m as guilty as anybody, I admit it. It’s just that when the guys at the Flounder Inn are sniggering in their beer and Marie starts looking at me like I’m a toad or something, you’ve got to put things in perspective, you’ve got to realize that it was her all along, she’s the one that started it.

  “I want a baby,” was how she put it.

  It was April, raw and wet. Crocuses and dead man’s fingers were poking through the dirt along the walk, and the stripers were running. I’d just stepped in the door, beat, chilled to the teeth, when she made her announcement. I went straight for the coffeepot. “Can’t afford it,” I said.

  She didn’t plead or try to reason with me. All she did was repeat herself in a matter-of-fact tone, as if she were telling me about some new drapes or a yard sale, and then she marched through the kitchen and out the back door. I sipped at my coffee and watched her through the window. She had a shovel. She was burying something. Deep. When she came back in, her nose was running a bit and her eyes were crosshatched with tiny red lines.

  “What were you doing out there?” I asked.

  Her chin was crumpled, her hair was wild. “Burying something.”

  I waited while she fussed with the teapot, my eyebrows arched like question marks. Ten seconds ticked by. “Well, what?”

  “My diaphragm.”

  I’ve known Marie since high school. We were engaged for five years while she worked for Reader’s Digest and we’d been married for three and a half when she decided she wanted some offspring. At first I wasn’t too keen on the idea, but then I had to admit she was right: the time had come. Our lovemaking had always been lusty and joyful, but after she buried the diaphragm it became tender, intense, purposeful. We tried. For months we tried. I’d come in off the river, reeking of the creamy milt and silver roe that floated two inches deep in the bottom of the boat while fifty- and sixty-pound stripers gasped their last, come in like a wild bull or something, and Marie would be waiting for me upstairs in her nightie and we’d do it before dinner, and then again after. Nothing happened.

  Somewhere around July or August, the sweet blueclaw crabs crawling up the riverbed like an army on maneuvers and the humid heat lying over the valley like a cupped hand, Marie went to Sister Eleazar of the Coptic Brotherhood of Ethiop. Sister Eleazar was a black woman, six feet tall at least, in a professor’s gown and a fez with a red tassel. Leroy Lent’s wife swore by her. Six years Leroy and his wife had been going at it, and then they went to Sister Eleazar and had a pair of twins. Marie thought it was worth a try, so I drove her down there.

  The Coptic Brotherhood of Ethiop occupied a lime-green building the size of a two-car garage with a steeple and cross pinned to the roof. Sister Eleazar answered our knock scowling, a little crescent of egg yolk on her chin. “What you want?” she said.

  Standing there in the street, a runny-eyed Chihuahua sniffing at my heels, I listened to Marie explain our problem and watched the crescent of egg on Sister Eleazar’s face fracture with her smile. “Ohhh,” she said, “well, why didn’t you say so? Come own in, come own in.”

  There was one big room inside, poorly lit. Old bottom-burnished pews stretched along three of the four walls and there was a big shiny green table in the center of the floor. The table was heaped with religious paraphernalia—silver salvers and chalices and tinted miniatures of a black man with a crown dwarfing his head. A cot and an icebox huddled against the back wall, which was decorated with magazine clippings of Africa. “Right here, sugar,” Sister Eleazar said, leading Marie up to the table. “Now, you take off your coat and your dress, and less ex-amine them wombs.”

  Marie handed me her coat, and then her tight blue dress with the little white clocks on it, while Sister Eleazar cleared the chalices and whatnot off the table. The Chihuahua had followed us in, and now it sprang up onto the cot with a sigh and buried its nose in its paws. The room stank of dog.

  “All right,” Sister Eleazar said, turning back to Marie, “you climb up own the table now and stretch yourself out so Sister ‘Leazar can listen to your insides and say a prayer over them barren wombs.” Marie complied with a nervous smile, and the black woman leaned forward to press an ear to her abdomen. I watched the tassel of Sister Eleazar’s fez splay out over Marie’s rib cage and I began to get excited: the place dark and exotic, Marie in brassiere and panties, laid out on the table like a sacrificial virgin. Then the sister was mumbling something—a prayer, I guess—in a language I’d never heard before. Marie looked embarrassed. “Don’t you worry about nothin’,” Sister Eleazar said, looking up at me and winking. “I got just the thing.”

  She fumbled around underneath the cot for a minute, then came back to the table with a piece of blue chalk—the same as they use in geography class to draw rivers and lakes on the blackboard—and a big yellow can of Colman’s dry mustard. She bent over Marie like a heart surgeon, and then, after a few seconds of deliberation, made a blue X on Marie’s lower abdomen and said, “Okay, honey, you can get up now.”

  I watched Marie shrug into her dress, thinking the whole thing was just a lot of superstitious mumbo jumbo and pisantry, when I felt Sister Eleazar’s fingers on my arm; she dipped her head and led me out the front door. The sky was overcast. I could smell rain in the air. “Listen,” the black woman whispered, handing me the can of mustard, “the problem ain’t with her, it’s with you. Must be you ain’t penetratin’ deep enough.” I looked into her eyes, trying to keep my face expressionless. Her voice dropped. “What you do is this: make a plaster of this here mustard and rub it on your parts before you go into her, and it’ll force out that ‘jaculation like a torpedo coming out a submarine—know what I mean?” Then she winked. Marie was at the door. A man with a hoe was digging at his garden in the next yard over. “Oh yeah,” the sister said, holding out her hand, “you want to make a donation to the Brotherhood, that’ll be eleven dollars and fifty cent.”

  I never told Marie about the mustard—it was too crazy. All I said was that the sister had told me to give her a mustard plaster on the stomach an hour after we had intercourse—to help the seeds take. It didn’t work, of course. Nothing worke
d. But the years at Reader’s Digest had made Marie a superstitious woman, and I was willing to go along with just about anything as long as it made her feel better. One night I came to bed and she was perched naked on the edge of the footstool, wound round three times with a string of garlic. “I thought that was for vampires?” I said. She just parted her lips and held out her arms.

  In the next few weeks she must have tried every quack remedy in the book. She kept a toad in a clay pot under the bed, ate soup composed of fish eyes and roe, drank goat’s milk and cod-liver oil, and filled the medicine chest with elixirs made from nimble weed and rhinoceros horn. Once I caught her down in the basement, dancing in the nude round a live rooster. I was eating meal three meals a day to keep my strength up. Then one night I came across an article about test-tube babies in Science Digest. I studied the pictures for a long while, especially the one at the end of the article that showed this English couple, him with a bald dome and her fat as a sow, with their little test-tube son. Then I called Marie.

  Dr. Ziss took us right away. He sympathized with our plight, he said, and would do all he could to help us. First he would have to run some tests to see just what the problem was and whether it could be corrected surgically. He led us into the examining room and looked into our eyes and ears, tapped our knees, measured our blood pressure. He drew blood, squinted at my sperm under a microscope, took X rays, did a complete pelvic exam on Marie. His nurse was Irene Goddard, lived up the street from us. She was a sour, square-headed woman in her fifties with little vertical lines etched around her lips. She prodded and poked and pricked us and then had us fill out twenty or thirty pages of forms that asked about everything from bowel movements to whether my grandmother had any facial hair. Two weeks later I got a phone call. The doctor wanted to see us.

  We’d hardly got our jackets off when Mrs. Goddard, with a look on her face like she was about to pull the switch at Sing Sing, showed us into the doctor’s office. I should tell you that Dr. Ziss is a young man—about my age, I guess—with narrow shoulders, a little clipped mustache, and a woman’s head of hair that he keeps brushing back with his hand. Anyway, he was sitting behind his desk sifting through a pile of charts and lab reports when we walked in. “Sit down,” he said. “I’m afraid I have some bad news for you.” Marie went pale, like she did the time the state troopers called about her mother’s accident; her ankles swayed over her high heels and she fell back into the chair as if she’d been shoved. I thought she was going to cry, but the doctor forestalled her. He smiled, showing off all those flossed and fluoridated teeth: “I’ve got some good news too.”