T.C. Boyle Stories

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  The light from her place fell across the lawn and caught in her hair; her face was in shadow. “You want to go inside a minute?” I said, remembering the way she’d moved against me on the couch. “Have a drink or something?”

  When she said “Sure,” I felt my knees go weak. This was it: counselor, counsel thyself. I followed her into the house and led her up the dark stairs to the bedroom. We didn’t bother with the drink. Or lights. She felt good, and a little strange: she wasn’t Judy.

  I got us a drink afterward, and then another. Then I brought the bottle to bed with me and we made love again—a slow, easeful, rhythmic love, the crickets keeping time from beyond the windows. I was ecstatic. I was. drunk. I was in love. We moved together and I was tonguing her ear and serenading her in a passionate whisper, mimicking Elvis, mimicking Joey. “Well-a bless-a my soul, what’s-a wrong with me,” I murmured, “I’m itchin’ like a ma-han on a fuzzy tree … oh-oh-oh, oh, oh yeah.” She laughed, and then she got serious. We shared a cigarette and a shot of sticky liqueur afterward; then I must have drifted off.

  I don’t know what time it was when I heard the van pull in next door. Downstairs the door slammed and I went to the window to watch Cindy’s dark form hurrying across the lawn. Then I saw Joey standing in the doorway, the babysitter behind him. There was a curse, a shout, the sound of a blow, and then Joey and the babysitter were in the van, the brake lights flashed, and they were gone.

  I felt bad. I felt like a dog, a sinner, a homewrecker, and a Lothario. I felt like Fred must have felt. Naked, in the dark, I poured myself another drink and watched Cindy’s house for movement. There was none. A minute later I was asleep.

  I woke early. My throat was dry and my head throbbed. I slipped into a pair of running shorts I found in the clutter on the floor, brushed my teeth, rinsed my face, and contemplated the toilet for a long while, trying to gauge whether or not I was going to vomit.

  Half a dozen aspirin and three glasses of water later, I stepped gingerly down the stairs. I was thinking poached eggs and dry toast—and maybe, if I could take it, half a cup of coffee—when I drifted into the living room and saw her huddled there on the couch. Her eyes were red, her makeup smeared, and she was wearing the same clothes she’d had on the night before. Beside her, wrapped in a pink blanket the size of a bath towel, was the baby.

  “Cindy?”

  She shoved the hair back from her face and narrowed her eyes, studying me. “I didn’t know where else to go,” she murmured.

  “You mean, he—?”

  I should have held her, I guess, should have probed deep in my counselor’s lexicon for words of comfort and assurance, but I couldn’t. Conflicting thoughts were running through my head, acid rose in my throat, and the baby, conscious for the first time since I’d laid eyes on it, was fixing me with a steady, unblinking gaze of accusation. This wasn’t what I’d wanted, not at all.

  “Listen,” I said, “can I get you anything—a cup of coffee or some cereal or something? Milk for the baby?”

  She shook her head and began to make small sounds of grief and anguish. She bit her lip and averted her face.

  I felt like a criminal. “God,” I said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t—” I started for her, hoping she’d raise her tear-stained face to me, tell me it wasn’t my fault, rise bravely from the couch, and trudge off across the lawn and out of my life.

  At that moment there was a knock at the door. We both froze. It came again, louder, booming, the sound of rage and impatience. I crossed the room, swung open the door, and found Joey on the doorstep. He was pale, and his hair was in disarray. When the door pulled back, his eyes locked on mine with a look of hatred and contempt. I made no move to open the storm door that separated us.

  “You want her?” he said, and he ground the toe of his boot into the welcome mat like a ram pawing the earth before it charges.

  I had six inches and forty pounds on him; I could have shoved through the door and drowned my guilt in blood. But it wasn’t Joey I wanted to hurt, it was Fred. Or, no, deep down, at the root of it all, it was Judy I wanted to hurt. I glanced into his eyes through the flimsy mesh of the screen and then looked away.

  “’Cause you can have her,” he went on, dropping the Nashville twang and reverting to pure Brooklynese. “She’s a whore. I don’t need no whore. Shit,” he spat, looking beyond me to where she sat huddled on the couch with the baby. “Elvis went through a hundred just like her. A thousand.”

  Cindy was staring at the floor. I had nothing to say.

  “Fuck you both,” he said finally, then turned and marched across the lawn. I watched him slam into the van, fire up the engine, and back out of the driveway. Then the boy who dared to rock was gone.

  I looked at Cindy. Her knees were drawn up under her chin and she was crying softly. I knew I should comfort her, tell her it would be all right and that everything would work out fine. But I didn’t. This was no pregnant fifteen-year-old who hated her mother or a kid who skipped cheerleading practice to smoke pot and hang out at the video arcade—this wasn’t a problem that would walk out of my office and go home by itself. No, the problem was at my doorstep, here on my couch: I was involved—I was responsible—and I wanted no part of it.

  “Patrick,” she stammered finally. “I-I don’t know what to say. I mean”—and here she was on the verge of tears again—“I feel as if … as if—”

  I didn’t get to hear how she felt. Not then, anyway. Because at that moment the phone began to ring. From upstairs, in the bedroom. Cindy paused in mid-phrase; I froze. The phone rang twice, three times. We looked at each other. On the fourth ring I turned and bounded up the stairs.

  “Hello?”

  “Pat, listen to me.” It was Judy. She sounded breathless, as if she’d been running. “Now don’t hang up. Please.”

  The blood was beating in my head. The receiver weighed six tons. I struggled to hold it to my ear.

  “I made a mistake,” she said. “I know it. Fred’s a jerk. I left him three days ago in some winery in St. Helena.” There was a pause. “I’m down in Monterey now and I’m lonely. I miss you.”

  I held my breath.

  “Pat?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m coming home, okay?”

  I thought of Joey, of Cindy downstairs with her baby. I glanced out the window at the place next door, vacant once again, and thought of Henry and Irma and the progress of the years. And then I felt something give way, as if a spell had been broken.

  “Okay,” I said.

  (1983)

  I DATED JANE AUSTEN

  Her hands were cold. She held them out for me as I stepped into the parlor. “Mr. Boyle,” announced the maid, and Jane was rising to greet me, her cold white hands like an offering. I took them, said my good evenings, and nodded at each of the pairs of eyes ranged round the room. There were brothers, smallish and large of head, whose names I didn’t quite catch; there was her father, the Reverend, and her sister, the spinster. They stared at me like sharks on the verge of a feeding frenzy. I was wearing my pink boots, my “Great Disasters” T-shirt and my Tiki medallion. My shoulders slumped under the scrutiny. My wit evaporated.

  “Have a seat, son,” said the Reverend, and I backed onto a settee between two brothers. Jane retreated to an armchair on the far side of the room. Cassandra, the spinster, plucked up her knitting. One of the brothers sighed. I could see it coming, with the certainty and illogic of an aboriginal courtship rite: a round of polite chit-chat.

  The Reverend cleared his throat. “So what do you think of Mrs. Radcliffe’s new book?”

  I balanced a glass of sherry on my knee. The Reverend, Cassandra and the brothers revolved tiny spoons around the rims of teacups. Jane nibbled at a croissant and focused her huge unblinking eyes on the side of my face. One of the brothers had just made a devastating witticism at the expense of the Lyrical Ballads and was still tittering over it. Somewhere cats were purring and clocks ticking. I glanced at my watch: only seventeen m
inutes since I’d stepped in the door.

  I stood. “Well, Reverend,” I said, “I think it’s time Jane and I hit the road.” He looked up at the doomed Hindenburg blazing across my chest and smacked his lips. “But you’ve only just arrived.”

  There really wasn’t much room for Cassandra in the Alfa Romeo, but the Reverend and his troop of sons insisted that she come along. She hefted her skirts, wedged herself into the rear compartment and flared her parasol, while Jane pulled a white cap down over her curls and attempted a joke about Phaetons and the winds of Aeolus. The Reverend stood at the curb and watched my fingers as I helped Jane fasten her seat belt, and then we were off with a crunch of gravel and a billow of exhaust.

  The film was Italian, in black and white, full of social acuity and steamy sex. I sat between the two sisters with a bucket of buttered popcorn. Jane’s lips were parted and her eyes glowed. I offered her some popcorn. “I do not think that I care for any just now, thank you,” she said. Cassandra sat stiff and erect, tireless and silent, like a mileage marker beside a country lane. She was not interested in popcorn either.

  The story concerned the seduction of a long-legged village girl by a mustachioed adventurer who afterward refuses to marry her on the grounds that she is impure. The girl, swollen with child, bursts in upon the nuptials of her seducer and the daughter of a wealthy merchant, and demands her due. She is turned out into the street. But late that night, as the newlyweds thrash about in the bridal bed—

  It was at this point that Jane took hold of my arm and whispered that she wanted to leave. What could I do? I fumbled for her wrap, people hissed at us, great nude thighs slashed across the screen, and we headed for the glowing EXIT sign.

  I proposed a club. “Oh do let’s walk!” Jane said. “The air is so frightfully delicious after that close, odious theatre—don’t you think?” Pigeons flapped and cooed. A panhandler leaned against the fender of a car and drooled into the gutter. I took Jane’s arm. Cassandra took mine.

  At the Mooncalf we had our wrists stamped with luminescent ink and then found a table near the dance floor. The waitress’s fingernails were green daggers. She wore a butch haircut and three-inch heels. Jane wanted punch, Cassandra tea. I ordered three margaritas.

  The band was re-creating the fall of the Third Reich amid clouds of green smoke and flashing lights. We gazed out at the dancers in their jumpsuits and platform shoes as they bumped bums, heads and genitals in time to the music. I thought of Catherine Morland at Bath and decided to ask Jane for a dance. I leaned across the table. “Want to dance?” I shouted.

  “Beg your pardon?” Jane said, leaning over her margarita.

  “Dance,” I shouted, miming the actions of holding her in my arms.

  “No, I’m very sorry,” she said. “I’m afraid not.”

  Cassandra tapped my arm. “I’d love to,” she giggled.

  Jane removed her cap and fingered out her curls as Cassandra and I got up from the table. She grinned and waved as we receded into the crowd. Over the heads of the dancers I watched her sniff suspiciously at her drink and then sit back to ogle the crowd with her black satiric eyes.

  Then I turned to Cassandra. She curtsied, grabbed me in a fox-trot sort of way and began to promenade round the floor. For so small a woman (her nose kept poking at the moribund Titanic listing across my lower rib cage), she had amazing energy. We pranced through the hustlers and bumpers like kiddies round a Maypole. I was even beginning to enjoy myself when I glanced over at our table and saw that a man in fierce black sideburns and mustache had joined Jane. He was dressed in a ruffled shirt, antique tie and coattails that hung to the floor as he sat. At that moment a fellow terpsichorean flung his partner into the air, caught her by wrist and ankle and twirled her like a toreador’s cape. When I looked up again Jane was sitting alone, her eyes fixed on mine through the welter of heads.

  The band concluded with a crunching metallic shriek and Cassandra and I made our way back to the table. “Who was that?” I asked Jane.

  “Who was who?”

  “That mustachioed murderer’s apprentice you were sitting with.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Him.”

  I realized that Cassandra was still clutching my hand.

  “Just an acquaintance.”

  As we pulled in to the drive at Steventon, I observed a horse tethered to one of the palings. The horse lifted its tail, then dropped it. Jane seemed suddenly animated. She made a clucking sound and called to the horse by name. The horse flicked its ears. I asked her if she liked horses. “Hm?” she said, already looking off toward the silhouettes that played across the parlor curtains. “Oh yes, yes. Very much so,” she said, and then she released the seat belt, flung back the door and tripped up the stairs into the house. I killed the engine and stepped out into the dark drive. Crickets sawed their legs together in the bushes. Cassandra held out her hand.

  Cassandra led me into the parlor, where I was startled to see the mustachioed ne’er-do-well from the Mooncalf. He held a teacup in his hand. His boots shone as if they’d been razor-stropped. He was talking quietly with Jane.

  “Well, well,” said the Reverend, stepping out of the shadows. “Enjoy yourselves?”

  “Oh, immensely, Father,” said Cassandra.

  Jane was grinning at me again. “Mr. Boyle,” she said. “Have you met Mr. Crawford?” The brothers, with their fine bones and disproportionate heads, gathered round. Crawford’s sideburns reached nearly to the line of his jaw. His mustache was smooth and black. I held out my hand. He shifted the teacup and gave me a firm handshake. “Delighted,” he said.

  We found seats (Crawford shoved in next to Jane on the love seat; I wound up on the settee between Cassandra and a brother in naval uniform), and the maid served tea and cakes. Something was wrong—of that I was sure. The brothers were not their usual witty selves, the Reverend floundered in the midst of a critique of Coleridge’s cult of artifice, Cassandra dropped a stitch. In the corner, Crawford was holding a whispered colloquy with Jane. Her cheeks, which tended toward the flaccid, were now positively bloated, and flushed with color. It was then that it came to me. “Crawford,” I said, getting to my feet. “Henry Crawford?”

  He sprang up like a gunfighter summoned to the O.K. Corral. “That’s right,” he leered. His eyes were deep and cold as crevasses. He looked pretty formidable—until I realized that he couldn’t have been more than five-three or -four, give or take an inch for his heels.

  Suddenly I had hold of his elbow. The Tiki medallion trembled at my throat. “I’d like a word with you outside,” I said. “In the garden.”

  The brothers were on their feet. The Reverend spilled his tea. Crawford jerked his arm out of my grasp and stalked through the door that gave onto the garden. Nightsounds grated in my ears, the brothers murmured at my back, and Jane, as I pulled the door closed, grinned at me as if I’d just told the joke of the century.

  Crawford was waiting for me in the ragged shadows of the trees, turned to face me like a bayed animal. I felt a surge of power. I wanted to call him a son of a bitch, but, in keeping with the times, I settled for “cad.” “You cad,” I said, shoving him back a step, “how dare you come sniffing around here after what you did to Maria Bertram in Mansfield Park? It’s people like you—corrupt, arbitrary, egocentric—that foment all the lust and heartbreak of the world and challenge the very possibility of happy endings.”

  “Hah!” he said. Then he stepped forward and the moon fell across his face. His eyes were like the birth of evil. In his hand, a riding glove. He slapped my face with it. “Tomorrow morning, at dawn,” he hissed. “Beneath the bridge.”

  “Okay, wiseguy,” I said, “okay,” but I could feel the Titanic sinking into my belt.

  A moment later the night was filled with the clatter of hoofs.

  I was greeted by silence in the parlor. They stared at me, sated, as I stepped through the door. Except for Cassandra, who mooned from behind her knitting, and Jane, who was bent over a notebook, scr
ibbling away like a court reporter. The Reverend cleared his throat and Jane looked up. She scratched off another line or two and then rose to show me out. She led me through the parlor and down the hall to the front entrance. We paused at the door.

  “I’ve had a memorable evening,” she said, and then glanced back to where Cassandra had appeared at the parlor door. “Do come again.” And then she held out her hands.

  Her hands were cold.

  (1977)

  CAYE

  O mother Ida, harken ere I die.

  —Tennyson, Oenone

  Orlando’s uncle fathered thirty-two children. Fifteen by the first wife, five by the second, twelve by the third. Now he lives with a Canadian woman, postmenopausal. You can hear them after the generator shuts down. When the island is still and dark as a dreamless sleep, and the stone crabs crawl out of their holes.

  The ground here is pocked with dark craters, burrows, veins in the earth. They are beginnings and endings. Some small as coins, others big enough to swallow a softball. The crabs creep down these orifices like the functions of the body.

  Fran has a gas stove, a bed, some shelves, a battery-run tape player. She cooks. People who weren’t born here can sit on the edge of the bed and eat, sip rum with her. Then unwrinkle some bills. Fran cooks lobster, or conch, sometimes she cooks stone crab. She was not born here either, her bed is narrow, and the batteries in the tape player are getting weak.

  Orlando sets and checks lobster traps. All the men on the island set and check lobster traps. The traps are made of wooden strips, shaped like Quonset huts, a conical entranceway at one end. Bait is unnecessary. The lobster, scouting the margins of the reef, the sea chanting over him, will prowl around this trap until he finds the conical entranceway. He will scrabble into the trap, delighted, secure from attack. The lobster psyche takes solace in holes. When the traps are hauled the law requires the fishermen to release any lobster whose tail is smaller than three inches, a seeding measure. The fishermen do not release lobsters whose tails are smaller than three inches—nor do they take them to market. Instead they twist off the heads, make a welter of the sweet curled tails, black against the frayed and blanched floorboards of their boats, carry the bloodless white meat home to their pots. Orlando tells me that the lobster catch is smaller this season than it was a year ago, and that a year ago it was smaller than the preceding season. I nod my head. Like the point of a cone I say.